Transcript
From Luke’s Gospel: “There was a man who had two sons.” May I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son we have a young man going out into the world and the pain of the old man when his son decided to leave home and strike out on his own. If you consider how the old man rejoiced when his son finally came home, you can imagine something of what it must have cost to have let him go in the first place, and how much he would have given to have had him stay.
We get lost, you and I, every one of us. And in so many ways the darkness of our world is a darkness we have made for ourselves, as in a thousand ways and every day each of us flees God into places as far away as the one where the prodigal went to try his luck until finally his luck ran out and his hunger drove him back home again.
But even at his worst the prodigal remembers the life he once had — we have God’s breath in our lungs and the memory of God deep in our blood, and unless we know God’s presence as a blessing, we are doomed to feel God’s absence as a reproach, an emptiness, a hunger. Unless we live with God we are destined to die without him as in so many ways we have died already.
It was when the prodigal sees he’s wasted everything that he sees there was only one chance left to take, and that was to take his chances going back home. Having squandered his inheritance, he can’t go back as a son, but maybe he can get back as a hired hand. He’s tried his luck only to find that his luck didn’t hold and he stinks of the sty, and on his way home, with the pathetic cunning of the panhandler, he works out a rather mealy-mouthed little speech about how sorry he is for what he’s done, and how he’s willing to be treated as one of the servants if the father will just take him back again.
Only it’s a speech he never gets to make because the old man is making a fool of himself running down the street in his nightgown to greet him. Before the boy can get a word out, the father all but knocks him off his feet with the tears and whiskers, and throws his arms around him, and to the scandal of all who prefer justice to mercy, speaks the great words, “Bring quickly the best robe and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry for this my son was dead and is alive again.”
The boy is back; that’s all that matters. There’s no finger-wagging from the father; no, I told you so. The old man doesn’t say, You’d better find a way to make it up to your mother.
When the boy finally manages to get to his speech, the old man is so beside himself with gladness that he doesn’t hear it. All he can say is, “This my son was dead and is alive again! He was lost, and is found!” And as Jesus tells the story, “They began to make merry” (Luke 15. 23). Merry. They break out the best wine, turn on the stereo, throw open all the doors, and ring up the neighbors.
To love another — a child, a friend, a neighbor — is to place yourself at the mercy of the other and as a self sufficient unto yourself to die. So it is with God and all the prodigals who are all of us, and whom in love and at unspeakable cost the Most High gave life to, and whom in love and at unspeakable cost the Most High leaves free, because though in freedom we can forsake God, only in freedom can we really love God.
The old man knew that a part of him would have to die if his son was to have the chance for a life on his own. The father, self-sufficient in his own right, we might say, crucified himself in an act of love and let the boy go. And you might think twice about life on your own, just as you might think twice about that word crucified.
If you’re lost, come home. This church exists for the Father to welcome you home, to come running down the street, and kneel at your feet and kiss them with his tears.
“There was a man who had two sons.” So, what about the older one? Some scholars say the last eight verses about the older brother are an add-on, that they’re extraneous. Until this month, I would have agreed with them. Not anymore.
Luke writes, “And Jesus told this parable.” The lectionary obscures this, skipping verses 4 – 10. Not three parables, this parable. This parable is like a concerto; it consists of three movements. The shepherd who loses one sheep leaves ninety-nine to rescue and bring home the lost one. The woman who loses one of ten coins goes nuts until she finds and secures the lost drachma. The older brother who loses his younger brother? What was he supposed to do?
Contemplating this, I remembered a man named Donald Dawson, so I asked my friend Peter Arnett (the Pulitzer Prize-winning battlefield reporter) to tell me about his interview of Dawson. Here’s what Peter told me this week. I quote him in full:
Thank you for your note about Donald Dawson and asking about his adventures in South Vietnam in 1965 seeking information about his brother Daniel, the pilot of a US Army observation plane shot down in jungles north of Saigon late in 1964.
I was an Associated Press reporter in my third year covering the Vietnam conflict early in 1965 when Donald found his way to our AP office in Saigon, seeking our help. The young American told me he had come to Saigon to begin seeking information on the fate of his brother Daniel, and he was frustrated that, because of his civilian status, he was getting little to no help from the growing American military establishment in Saigon.
At that time our small AP bureau was fully engaged in covering the political story following the overthrow of the South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, and the rapidly growing American military presence in the country. But I was impressed with the determination of the slim young American visitor who was convinced that he needed to do all he could to determine his missing brother's fate.
I met with Donald many times in the next weeks as he plotted with friendly Vietnamese a course of action that would take him into the jungled war zones where his brother had been shot down. When I felt the time was right, and that publication of his human-interest story would be most helpful for his mission, I wrote a 2,000-word story for the AP with pictures, that was widely published in the United States and in the military newspaper seen in Saigon, The Stars and Stripes.
Later that year Donald re-emerged from the jungles after surviving capture by the Viet Cong, and with confirmation of the death of his brother. By now other competitive news organizations in Saigon were interested in his dramatic story, but because of our earlier relationship he gave me his first interview. In retrospect, I see Donald Dawson's search for his lost brother by defying great odds was one of the more inspirational stories I wrote in the early years of the war.
At the height of the Vietnam war, his brother missing in action, a civilian, Donald Dawson, who could have stayed home and played it safe, left everything and got himself to Vietnam. And handing out photographs of his brother, he moved among the Viet Cong looking for his brother Daniel. “This is my brother. Have you seen this man?” In fact, the Viet Cong started calling him “the man with the brother.”
God's been good to you. How do you respond? How do I? You’re like Andrew, you want to go get Peter! You want to get your brothers and sisters and bring them to Jesus. That’s what my older sister Vicki did for me. That’s what you and I can do for our lost brothers and sisters. May we follow in the example of our older brother, our Lord Jesus. He left his Father’s house to seek and to save that which was lost. That's what your older brother Jesus does for you. Let’s be like him, Good Sam. God helping us, let’s Go, and Do Likewise. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
