Come and Dine
Joshua 4:19-5:12, 2 Cor 5:15-21, Luke 15:11-32
Family values, biblical style — two brothers and their Dad at loggerheads. Perhaps it's a theme for this Lenten season — siblings, families, the family of God. Last week Mother Edie told her story of Bearly and the Bees, a story of sibling jealousy and rivalry. That's certainly a theme we find throughout the Bible.
Wednesday evening, a call came while we were at dinner. The kind that begins…“Hi Uncle Johnny. This is Robin. Everything is O.K. but…” My older brother — he was here in December and some of you met him — was in a CCU in Texas with CHF. Like many brothers, we have not been particularly close but neither have we been so estranged as were the two brothers about whom we hear in today's Gospel.
The Bible seems to take a more realistic view of extended family relationships that do we with our “Leave it to Beaver” ideal of normalcy in nuclear families. Family relationships, family values, are often in focus in the great Bible stories. Family values indeed… Man and wife, siblings, parent and child. There is good reason why the second great commandment is to love one's neighbor as oneself rather than to love the neighbor as one would a brother or sister or father or mother. The difficulties of living in love with those nearest to us is neither glossed over nor downplayed in the text.
From the archetypal story of Cain and Abel to those of Ishmael and Isaac and of Esau and Jacob, we see sibling rivalry with disastrous consequences. But the whole Hebrew history rests on another family-in-destruction story — the rivalry between Joseph and his brothers.
In jealousy and anger Jacob's sons sell their brother Joseph into slavery and he is borne down to Egypt. Yet as God favors him, he rises not just to freedom but also to a position just below that of Pharaoh. He is there to save his family in time of famine and all of Israel removes to this land of relative plenty in a time of famine. But, for reasons we can only guess, 400 years later they are still there, slaves themselves.
Sometimes we leave home for good reason — starvation and death did the trick for Jacob, his sons, and their families. But Egypt was not their home and when Joseph died, we see him bless his family and request his bones be taken back to Canaan, the land of promise, the land God had given to his great-grandfather Abraham. Perhaps the fields in Egypt were a little better, the water a little more abundant, the winters a bit milder, the fruit somewhat sweeter – but for whatever the reason, Israel did not go back. They stayed, year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation. Then one day they woke up to find they were slaves and strangers in a foreign land and the “disgrace of Egypt” was upon them. Hard to know exactly what this disgrace was – perhaps their loss of relationship to the God of their ancestors, perhaps their failure to maintain the ritual worship of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Perhaps it was their becoming too comfortable in the world — Egypt always symbolizes the world in Bible stories. So comfortable that they found the world in them in ways they did not realize or understand.
At any rate, they cry out to the God of Abraham - the God they would scarcely recognize – and that God sought out and called a murderous, privileged outcast to return, confront Pharaoh, and lead Israel out of Egypt. Forty years later, another leader, Joshua, — Yeshua in the Hebrew — leads them back into the land of promise. Crossing the Jordan, they enter into a land of milk and honey, of hope, of life.
They come to know their God as a god of the desert and of the mountain, of war and of peace, of law and of forgiveness. As an extended family faced with the struggle to honor uniqueness and independence while being a caring and inter-dependent tribe, they would come, again and again, to meet their God as a God of reconciliation.
Paul states it rather eloquently: “Everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation…”
Jesus went about reconciling God and humanity, opening a door to the Kingdom of abundance — abundant love, abundant life — a kingdom of peace and joy. But not everyone understood or appreciated that. After all, there were clearly those who did not deserve to be a part of God’s kingdom. There is, certainly, a matter of decorum and civility that must be observed. To which Jesus replied – BS!
Let's revisit Luke 15. It begins with these words: “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ So he told them this parable…”
This parable of the father and two sons is read so frequently in Christian and secular settings that it has become an archetype — a story so deeply embedded in our consciousness we are not aware of how it shapes our thinking. The story has to do with two brothers lacking in love and a father who loves them both — but doesn't always know exactly HOW to love them or help them love each other.
In our traditional reading of the text we have perhaps too closely identified the father in the story with God without critical examination of his role in this less-than-close-knit-family. After all, the father also fails at love. With the younger son, he shows weakness and is passive in handing over the son's claim on his inheritance. With the elder son, he fails to communicate his love. Until the end of the story, neither son knows that the father values him. Notice how the distance of the sons frames their separation from each other and from their father in the story. The younger son goes away to “a far country.” The older son is “in the field,” a place from which he must “come and draw near.”
The grace of the story appears, not in the father's perfect love but in the fact that he chooses to “try again” with both sons. Having failed at love, he is not content to let past choices determine the future. The younger son comes to terms with the consequences of his choice and determines to return as a servant, though he is “yet at a distance” — both physically and psychologically. But it is at that point that the father closes the distance. He “saw him and had compassion and ran and embraced him and kissed him.” Unheard of! Blasphemous!
In the case of the older son, also at a distance both physically and psychologically, the father again chooses to move through the gaping gulf that separates them. When the older son refuses to come into the house the father comes out to him and pleads with him. In both instances, the father's efforts are prodigal, extravagant, complete, 100% overtures. “Bring the best robe… ” “All that I have is yours.” It is not human will but the power of love that enables the father to reach out through the distance and embrace his sons even in the face of his own failure and theirs.
The story is open-ended. We do not know whether the older son responds to his father's overture. We do not know if the brothers become brothers in spirit as well in flesh blood.
We do know that the love of the father — impetuous, abundant, and renewed love — has interrupted the cycles of selfishness and alienation that plagued the family.
And we do know that this story is Jesus’ defense for eating with tax collectors and sinners, an embrace of the human condition while it is “yet at a distance,” the kiss of God that interrupts the cycles of selfishness and alienation that plague the human family.
It is a story for us as individuals, members of some mother and father's family, as brothers and sisters in the community and in the Kingdom of God. Shortly we shall hear the words, “The gifts of God for the people of God…” or in the somewhat less decorous words I remember from my childhood, “Dinner's on! Come and get it!” In gathering for a meal, we honor our relationship as family.
The table is set; all are welcome: sinners and tax collectors, righteous and pure, rich, poor, old, young, joyous, sorrowing — this table is large. Let God roll away the disgrace of Egypt. No more manna but the true bread which gives life to the world. Come and dine.
The Rev. Dcn. John Burton
MArch 18, 2007
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