Opening the Lid

Series: Lent

Speaker: The Rev'd Emily Griffin

You’d think this would be easy for me. Today’s Gospel might be the most beloved story in all of Scripture. Who hasn’t heard of the Prodigal Son? Who isn’t moved at the thought that a dead relationship can find new life, that someone who seemed lost to us forever could actually be found? It’s the best news some of us can imagine, the most precious gift we might ever receive, and yet all week this parable has been a box that I wasn’t able to get inside.

The lid was stuck. I wondered where I am in this story, and at least at first, I was off the page. I’m not a son, a brother or a father. I’m my mother’s only child, and my father and my home haven’t been in the same place since I was three. I’m not a beloved younger son. There’s a long line of beloved, younger sons in the Bible – Jacob and Absalom come to mind – and let’s be honest, I don’t fit the mold. I haven’t squandered my property in dissolute living, although the prospect sounds intriguing at times. Nor am I a dutiful older son, automatically set to receive a double portion of the inheritance by virtue of my gender and birth order.

That’s the trouble with these family stories. The words are so fraught – “father, son, brother, dead, lost, home.” They carry so much weight – it’s easy to get sidetracked and forget the original frame of the story. Jesus wasn’t telling this parable merely to good old boys and trust fund babies, all secure in what was owed them. All sorts of people on the margins, those whose accomplishments never get touted in Christmas letters, were invited to listen too. Both the inveterate rule followers and the perpetual rule breakers were there. Pharisees, scribes, tax collectors and sinners all on the same guest list, all invited to the same party.

Perhaps it’s the implications that frighten me, that keep me from blowing the lid off this story, implications that Paul spells out in our reading from 2^nd Corinthians. That’s the trouble with our friend Paul; he may get it wrong occasionally, but when he’s right, he’s really right. Or in his words: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.”

It’s one thing for God to be like the father here - to run out to meet the prodigal. It doesn’t really cost us anything. It’s not a zero-sum game, where another’s win means our loss. God has love and mercy to spare. It’s when we’re asked to hand-deliver the invitations that it gets tricky – when we’re called to be the hands and voice of God’s welcome, when we have no control over the seating chart and have to look those who’ve hurt us in the eye that it stops feeling fun and gets uncomfortably real.

Just before we pick up today’s reading, Paul sets the invitation list: “He died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.” And in case we didn’t get it the first time, he clarifies: “that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the ministry of reconciliation to us.” How dare we withhold what was so freely given to us?

Quite easily, I’m afraid. We can barely choke out the words half the time. That’s part of why we have the same lines in the liturgy week after week (especially that pesky part from the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”). We practice saying them over and over again to wear a path over time so that we’re able to mean them eventually and surrender the outcome once and for all.

Why is it so hard? If the One who knows everything doesn’t make us crawl but comes running to meet us, why do we have such a hard time giving away what we didn’t earn? Partly, I think, it’s because forgiveness doesn’t always mean reconciliation as we commonly understand it. Some abuses, even when forgiven, create a distance that can’t be overcome in our lifetime. We can’t always go home again. It may not be safe or even possible. The original offenders – be it our parents or spouses or children – may no longer be around to own up to what they’ve done.

Besides, not everyone who needs forgiveness turns around. Some never seem to reach that point, no matter how many pigsties they visit. They may never admit how they’ve wronged you. We have this convenient habit of separating our actions from our intentions; if we didn’t intend to hurt, our actions couldn’t have been that bad, right? It’s possible that the younger son in the parable didn’t mean to treat his father as if he were already dead. It’s possible that the older son didn’t see how much it hurt his father to admit a lifetime of joyless obedience, done out of obligation rather than love. Nevertheless, the hurt remains.

Forgiveness may feel dishonest, that we’re somehow sugarcoating the story at the expense of the truth. Withholding forgiveness can help us hold onto injustices that may otherwise be unspoken. It can give us an odd sense of power. It’s something we can hold onto when we feel our own pride and dignity slipping away. Or we confuse forgiveness with forgetting which – clichés to the contrary – are not the same thing. It can feel like we’re erasing the past, that somehow the good we remember will disappear with the bad if we truly let go and move on. That’s probably a good sign, though – that we’re able to remember the whole picture. One of the best descriptions of forgiveness I’ve heard came from a teen in my first youth group. He said it was “looking at someone and seeing more than what they’ve done to you.” The wounds may not heal for a while, but the hurt isn’t always in the way anymore. Forgiveness allows that all of us can be more than the worst of our choices – that God can write something new into the story, that a new creation is indeed possible – in God’s time, if not in ours.

So how do we start? Well, here we start by creating space at the table for those whose invitations we’re not quite ready to hand-deliver yet. We leave room for God to do in them and in us what we can’t even imagine. We practice trusting that what was dead can be raised to new life, that what was lost can someday be found, and that a box that may feel closed to us forever may someday open.

In the silence that follows, I invite you to search for your place in this parable today, and what the next faithful step might be. I walked into this story thinking I’m neither a son nor a brother nor a father, and it turns out I can be all three. Because we’re all the younger son in desperate need of forgiveness for a past we cannot change, and we’re the older son afraid to extend it, who’s done the right thing for the wrong reasons way too many times. Perhaps the biggest stretch is to admit that we can also be the father in this story, free to love without our fears getting in the way all the time, free to give away what we ourselves have received from God, free to release everyone involved into a new future that hasn’t been written yet. In the Name of the One who opens the lids we’d like to keep closed and who can be trusted to keep finding the lost and leading us all to new life – Amen.