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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