Saturday, March 5, 2016

“Coming to Yourself Again” - March 6, 2016



Luke 15:1-3, 11-32


            It isn’t easy to make a radical change in your life, but it does happen. 

            Sometimes a change is forced on someone.  An accident of some sort can lead to incapacity, and either you adapt or you just give up.  A layoff can mean that someone has to move far away sometimes to find work or, if they cannot move, they may have to go into an entirely different field.  World events push people from place to place.  I remember the grandparents of one of my childhood friends.  To me they were those two old people with funny accents sitting at the kitchen table who used to have the appliance store on Saxer Avenue.  Later on I learned that their accent was Polish, and that they had somehow landed in Delaware County in the 1930’s because they saw the handwriting on the wall in Poland and left – the only members of their family to survive the pogroms against Jews that came even before the Nazis invaded.  In that light, living over the store on a busy road doesn’t sound so bad.

            All those are changes that are forced on someone.  The person who makes the change is reacting to external events.  Yet what about those other times when you have to revise everything and totally reorder your life because what you have been doing, maybe what a whole people has been doing, has become destructive and toxic?

            The obvious example of that is what often happens with addictions.  Someone goes through, often, a period of denial.  What they are doing is not really harming anyone, they will say.  Next comes the argument that if they are harming anyone it is only themselves.  Then something happens, whatever it might be, and they realize that they have just gambled away the next three months’ mortgage payments or crashed their car into someone else’s and the other driver is in an ambulance and the passenger is dead.  Maybe they realize that they have just taken their cousin’s grocery money to buy heroin, or that their child has just gone to bed without food so that they can feed their habit.

            It is a gift in a way if something happens that opens their eyes before it gets to that, or if it is nothing irreversible that says, “Hey!  This can’t go on!”

            There are less obvious moments, though.  There are problems that are harder to see that can still twist somebody’s life into something sad.  Often they are disguised in shapes that are culturally acceptable.  Hard work and diligence are something that people like me have praised so long and so sincerely that it has come to be called “the Protestant work ethic” – and I still want to encourage and honor that.  Taken to an extreme, though, it can ruin marriages and steal precious time from children or parents or friends.  It can also mean that there is no room left in a person’s life for God.

            Maybe there’s some kind of ingrown character trait that is causing problems.  When I was little, there was a man who lived down the street named Mr. Miller.  He was frugal.  He saved.  That is good, mind you.  On the other hand, there was one day not long after his wife died that he had a fire in his kitchen and when it was out, my father and some of the other neighbors helped him clean up and when my father came home he told us about how Mr. Miller had saved so many jars and containers and bags and so forth that there had been trouble getting to the stove where the fire started.  To this day, when I find myself setting aside a take-out soup container, I find myself asking if I shouldn’t just recycle it right away. 

            There are wake-up calls all the time if you listen for them.  The Prodigal Son probably had many along the way.  What finally got to him was hunger.  You remember how

“he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything.” [Luke 15:14-16]
That did it for him.  He saw that the pigs ate better than he did.  It was an extreme experience – remember that for a devout Jew it was humiliating even to be around pigs, let alone take care of them.  Then imagine becoming jealous of them.  He had hit rock bottom.

            Then, Jesus said, “he came to himself.” [Luke 15:17]

            Think about that expression for a moment.  It was as if he was waking up from a nightmare.  His situation hadn’t changed – not yet, at least – but he came to the realization that he didn’t belong there.  That was not who he was, or whom he was meant to be.  He would have to get out of there.  That was the turning point.

            Mind you, it didn’t have to go that way.  He could have looked at himself and said, “I must deserve this.  Look how I treated my father.  Look how I wasted my inheritance.  Look at what a total fool I have been, and all the stupid things I have done along the way.  How could I do that?  What kind of worthless slime am I?”  On some level, he might even have been right about some of that. 

            And yet.  And yet.  And yet when he came to himself he remembered not only what he had done.  He remembered that he was also the son of a father who was far and away better than anybody else in his life, and who remained part of his life even when he was living in a far country.  The friends he had had when he had money weren’t around, or didn’t care.  “Nobody gave him anything.” [Luke 15:16]  But his father, he knew, wasn’t like them.

“‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”’  So he set off and went to his father.” [Luke 15:17-20]

His little canned speech didn’t really get at it fully.  He would deliver it, of course, but before it even came to that, “while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” [Luke 15:20] 

           The son may have forgotten who he was, and acted as he never should.  His father had never forgotten him, though.  He knew exactly who he was, and loved him.  A song by Robert Espindola called “The Prodigal” opens with a father singing,

“Are you listening?  Can you hear me?
Far across the lonely silence
where you lie sleeping?
I have left a light on the porch turned on,
and placed a key beneath the mat,
should you ever find your way back home.
I’ll be waiting up tonight, sitting by the light.
He is mine!  And I am his!”

            That’s the love that lets someone rebuild when they need to rebuild.  That’s the love that gives someone a new start.  That’s the love that doesn’t look at the past in a way that lets it determine the future.  That’s a love that trusts us and helps us to come to ourselves whenever we have wandered off, and even when wandering off doesn’t mean going as far as the Prodigal Son.

            When we come to ourselves it pushes us to seek and then to receive the grace that runs to meet us.  Life changes.  We become alive. 


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