“Wild Currant,” by Ronda Broatch. This image was chosen for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, Laetare Sunday, a day when our Lenten fast eases a bit. Ronda’s photos have been used in our materials throughout Lent this year, and this is the only image in color.
I honestly do not think that anyone in this room or online could do anything that would truly break our bond as human beings in relationship with one another.
There is nothing you can do that would break your bond with me.
I have thought about this a lot. I really think our bond is unbreakable, even if you don’t think so, even if you think that you or I could definitely do something to break it.
Even if you think that, and even if I did do some unspeakable, terrible thing that would cross a line for you – even then, I would hold out hope that we could reconcile. I would pray for you, and keep the bond alive that way. I would apply what I learned from our connection – and from our awful struggle – in my other relationships. I would work to remain available to you if you changed your heart and mind. I would hold out hope that even if reconciliation is not possible, some sort of guarded peace will develop between us.
There are a few people in my life with whom I have a deeply troubled connection. Someone I knew in college is on this list. I long to receive his forgiveness, thirty years later. A co-worker from several years ago is on it. I long to engage her in a healing conversation. And there is someone in western Washington even now who I think would agree that our bond, whatever it might have been in years past, is not healthy or lifegiving right now. Not even a little.
I have my own ambivalent feelings about these people, but I truly believe that if any of those three people connected with me to repair what is broken, I would respond positively, even enthusiastically. I would want that very much. I would work hard to own my part in the conflict.
Now, none of this makes me special. None of it. I say all this not to flatter myself! This is just the ordinary stance of someone who was raised by parents with unconditional love, parents who taught their children that reconciliation is the Way: the Way of Jesus, the Way of our faith. the Way of life.
“There was a man who had two sons,” Luke intones, and I suspect nearly all of us know what’s coming. Many of us know this story well. Many of us can easily identify with nearly everyone in the story: if not the wayward younger son, then the resentful older one; if not the sons, then perhaps the father whose heart is forever broken open in awful vulnerability to his children; if not the father, then perhaps the servants who are just there to do their jobs but can feel the tension flowing through the family. Jesus himself may be the fatted calf: the One who is slaughtered so that reconciliation and life can rise up.
The first people to hear this story immediately understood the foolishness of the father: that by bringing his younger son back into the family in that honor/shame culture, he was taking on that son’s shame, and by doing so, he was jeopardizing the whole family’s future. Other families would not want to do business with the father. The whole estate could break apart.
But how could the father reject his younger son? He “had” him; he was bonded to him; even when the son was Who Knows Where, feeding pigs (pigs: a symbol of gentile foreigners, a way for Luke to signal to us that the younger son was far, far, far from home) – even then, father and son were bonded; they were caught up in each other; they were tangled and tied up, heart to heart, bone to bone.
Nothing his sons said or did would put off this father. Nothing would persuade him to cut them loose. But maybe it’s that he couldn’t cut them loose even if he wanted to. President Lincoln’s great belief during the Civil War (a belief that likely saved the nation) was that it was impossible for the Union to be broken: whatever they said or did, the rebels were never not in the United States. Once you join us, you can’t leave. It seems that, Christian or not, devout or not, Lincoln understood the kind of relationship Jesus describes in this story of a father and his two sons. They will never, ever, ever come apart, no matter what happens. They can’t come apart.
And all of this is the response Jesus gives to the grumbling insiders who are scandalized that he “welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Jesus didn’t respond to their snark by saying that his mission is to aid the disadvantaged, to do acts of charity, to help his neighbor. No, Jesus goes much further than that: he is bonded with so-called “sinners” beyond anyone’s ability to separate them. Jesus says that when God becomes incarnate in humanity, God is enmeshed. God is here with us, no matter what. We are forgiven, no matter what. None of this is open to dispute. The bond can never be dissolved. Even if we reject the relationship with God entirely, closing ourselves into a hell of our own making, even then God will wait for us to return.
In my days as a therapist I worked with parents whose children found much more terrifying ways to go astray than the younger son in this parable. They would be consumed by drugs and engage in extremely dangerous behaviors. They would disappear for days, then come back demanding money. They would traumatize their parents with their behavior. Often people would encourage the parents to practice “tough love,” and that is not automatically a bad idea. It’s about basic healthy boundaries. But even that is hard for many parents, because if they refuse to help their child and the child is injured or killed, they will be torn in half by grief and guilt. Other times, parents cut themselves off from their children, but that too is a terrible struggle. Like the father of the two sons, they find it nearly impossible to break the bond.
I imagine that these parents might identify most often with the father, then, so often have they been looking anxiously down the dusty road because maybe this time they will spot their child on the horizon, coming toward them, and they will run to them with hands held out. But maybe they feel more like Jesus himself, the fatted calf, torn apart by all this pain. Or they nod their heads in recognition when the older son makes some very fine points.
Speaking only for myself, I believe I have entered this story through all three of the major characters, at one point or another. My sobriety story is one of walking back up the road, hoping that I might be able to make amends. But other times my sobriety story has me feeling a bit like the pompous older sibling, and I catch myself shaking my head in judgment of those who are still struggling. This is not attractive. I confess it as the sin that it is, and receive forgiveness from God.
But I can also be that father, all too aware how bound up I am with all my loved ones, now and forever, no matter what happens, no matter how heartbroken I may be, no matter how hard it all is. And that, my forever-friends, that is today’s Good News, rough and bracing as it is: we are stuck with each other, forever. We are baptizing four of our members three weeks from today, and when we do so we are saying to them, “You are stuck with us, forever.” There is nothing they can do that would cost them our love. There is nothing any of us can do to break the bond we have with one another in Jesus Christ.
Always, today and forever, always we will sing the song of the elated parent, his face still salty with tear tracks, his heart still badly broken: Always we will sing to one another this song:
“‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’”
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Preached on the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Year C), March 27, 2022, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Joshua 5:9-12
Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32