A Reflection for IV Lent All
Saints Church, Southern Shores, NC March 10, 2011 Thomas
E Wilson, Rector
I had a situation come up this past week at the
Forum Concert of the Vienna Boys Choir.
Pat and I are season ticket holders, and we have wonderful seats which
we got after the Stricklands left town. They really are wonderful seats! Before
the show began, Pat and I were doing volunteer usher duty helping people find
their seats. Pat had put her wrap over the seats to indicate that they were
taken so that we could fulfill our ushering obligations. Did I mention these are wonderful seats? The place was sold out, and extra seats had
been set up for the overflow. We finally had everybody seated and headed back
to our seats, our season ticket seats, our numbered season ticket seats - I did
tell you they were wonderful seats? The lights start to go down. And we find there are two women sitting in
our seats - our wonderful seats! Pat’s wrap had been moved and set aside as it
was in their way - in our seats. We
asked them to move and they responded that they had been sitting there since
they had come in. We told them that, yes, that may have been true since the
reason we were not sitting in our seats, Our
Seats, was that we were helping other people find their own seats, but
these were our seats. They ignored us
as the show began.
For a few moments, your Rector entertained enjoyable
fantasies about doing grievous bodily harm to these two women who were stealing
our seats. Heck, we were ushers! I was
totally within my rights to lay my hands on them and escort them out of the
building. They were old and bent over, so I was pretty sure I could take them,
these thieves, without breaking a sweat. I briefly wondered if tossing them
into the aisle would break any bones in their hips when the show began, and if
their screams of pain would get in the way of the Vienna Boys Choir hitting the
right notes. I figured that, even though I was right, as right as right could
be, and they were wonderful seats, it would not be a good career decision for a
Priest to drop kick two little old ladies in public at the beginning of the
performance of the Vienna Boys Choir. I
could picture the headlines: “Local Father Kicks Out Two (Not One, But Two) Prodigals! He proclaims he was
doing God’s will, enforcing the sanctity of private property, and that thieves
need to be punished!”
We saw the performance from another venue, and it
took me almost all the way through the choir’s singing of Buxtehude’s setting of Cantate Domino (“Sing to the Lord a New Song”) before I stopped grinding my teeth. The
choir kept singing, and my sense of ugly entitlement faded in the light of
beauty. There is something about the pure sound of a group of innocents singing
about God that tends to take the resentment out of you. But it did put me in
mind of the lesson for today, about the story we call the Prodigal Son. The
point of Jesus’ parable is not to focus on the Prodigal but on his Father, who
represents God in the Kingdom of the Heavens.
The setting for the telling of this story is Jesus
being criticized by the Pharisees for eating with the outcasts. The Pharisees
understood that there were good and necessary reasons for the maintenance of a
civil society based on respect for God’s law. The Pharisees understood that if
one ate with sinners, one took the sin of the sinners into themselves, as one
was seen to condone the sin being an accessory after the fact, an enabler, of
sin. The Pharisees were right in condemning Jesus; he was taking on the sins of
the sinners. Jesus does not account the Pharisees position as baseless, but instead,
willingly takes the condemnation on himself in order that the lost might be
found. This is what one does in
forgiveness - to pay the price for the one who is in the wrong as a way of
showing love and desire for reconciliation.
I would have been a better preacher of the Gospel if
I had made a gift of those seats to the people who did not deserve them, paying
the cost myself out of love. The problem was that, out of my cowardice that
making a scene might reflect badly on me, I chose to sulk. I wanted to revel in
being “right” and unappreciated by my Father in heaven since I did not have the
better seats which were my due. In essence I became the resentful older brother
in the story, the one who thought he was right. But I was more than that for in
my self-pity, I was also the Prodigal who had wandered far from my Father in
Heaven’s example of life.
Jesus told parables, not fables. Parables have
surprise punch lines while Fables have expected morals. Fables have as their
moral some timeless truth for action in a civil society. If this had been a
fable, the Prodigal son would have been kicked out, with the moral, “You reap
what you sow!” Jesus tells parables to show what God is doing here and now, and
the punch line is that God pays the price for what I have done so that I might
be reconciled to God and neighbor.
I listened to the boys singing and,
in my mind, God’s Holy Spirit called to my memory the Rembrandt painting of the
Return of the Prodigal Son which he
did in the last two years before his death. Henri Nowen wrote a book of reflections on
that painting before his own death and he said, “Rembrandt is as much
the elder son of the parable as he is the younger. When, during the last years
of his life, he painted both sons in Return of the Prodigal Son, he had
lived a life in which neither the lostness of the younger son nor the lostness
of the elder son was alien to him. Both needed healing and forgiveness. Both
needed to come home. Both needed the embrace of a forgiving father. But from
the story itself, as well as from Rembrandt's painting, it is clear that the
hardest conversion to go through is the conversion of the one who stayed home.”
One of these days when I get rich and famous from
this preaching gig, I will go to St. Petersburg, Russia to the Hermitage Museum
and stand in front of that painting for hours and look at the riches of the
father’s vestments sheltering the threadbare, tattered dignity of the prodigal,
those strong loving hands clutching the weak back of the son who does not
deserve forgiveness. The truth is that forgiveness is precisely for those who
do not deserve it. I want to look at the
mouth of the father as he is speaking the words of love and forgiveness to the one
in his arms. I want to feel the tears of the father who paid the price for my
redemption. I want to look at the older
brother whose crossed arms speak of his resentment and the weariness of not
being the only center of love of the father whose love knows no barriers - and I
will ask God to open my arms to receive the blessing given to the one who is willing
to let go of being right.
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