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| Running Out to Meet Him |
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(Feel free to email questions or responses) March 14, 2010 Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen. This story of the Prodigal Son is such a familiar story, such a powerful story, that I imagine each of us carry images from it that touch us in special ways. There’s a brief movie that I saw several years ago that is the most vivid image for me. I was a father of teens at the time, so I suppose the way the story was told in that movie had special resonance for me. The movie was done for a middle school religious ed class. It started with a young teen arguing with his parents. You could tell this was not the first argument. It was not going well. Finally, the teen gathered some of his things and snuck out of the house, on his way to make a life of his own. I did not have a hard time imagining the sense of panic his parents must have felt. My older daughter ran away overnight when she was a freshman in high school and I knew full well the sense of dread and anxiety and yes, anger, that swirled through me on that long night. At the end of it, she was fine. It marked a turning point for her in high school, and Ellen and I will be off this afternoon to spend a couple of days with her family in Kansas – and meet our newest granddaughter. So for those of you moving through those years of teen parenting, there is hope! Back to the movie. The teen is out on his own, trying to make it on the streets. But he is not a streetwise kid. He came from nice suburban home. He runs through his meager savings pretty quickly and has to start begging for food, for a place to stay. The characters he runs into are pretty menacing. You can see the battle within him. He would have to swallow his pride to go back home. He would have to agree to live by his parents’ rules. And his parents were pretty mad at him. Maybe they wouldn’t even want him back. He had not heard form them, after all. No cops had found him on the street. Maybe his parents never even called the cops. Maybe they were just glad he was gone. It’s night a few days later when he finally decides he needs to try to go home. This movie was made before cell phones were ubiquitous, so he finds a pay phone and calls home. No answer. But it was not in the days before answering machines, so he leaves a message. “Mom, dad, I don’t know if you want me back, but I want to come home. If you want to let me come in, could you just leave the porch light on for me?” He gets a cab to take him back home. It’s a long ride down dark streets. You see him sitting in the back of the cab, lost in his thoughts, a worried look on his face. He stares out the window at the passing houses. Then the cab turns a corner. “Would you look at that?” the cab driver mutters. “What?” the boy asks. “That house at the end of the street. Every light in that house must be on.” And indeed they were. And indeed, it was the boy’s house. Those lights were the equivalent of the father running out to meet his son. They were an extravagant gesture of welcome to one who was not so sure he had a home any more. One of the beautiful things about the Prodigal Son story is how any one of us can step into any of the roles in the story. We know what it’s like to struggle with a parent or a child. We know what’s it’s like to be the good one who gets overlooked. We know what it’s like to feel presumptuous, to feel remorseful, to feel forgiving, to feel jealous. I’d like to give the story just a little different twist this morning. We are honoring people here today who have made a huge difference in the life of this congregation. They have done that in many ways, but one of those ways has been the role they have played in helping Memorial go out to meet others, to let our light shine with abundant welcome. You heard how both Chris and Wendy have been leaders on our membership committee, sparking efforts to serve coffee to cold parents on fall mornings as they watch their kids play football and handout bags of goldfish crackers to families at Fitchburg Days. You have heard about Ted’s work on creating and improving our web site. These are just a One of the things that is crucial about this congregation is how we let that light shine not just for those who fit into a traditional church mold. Just like the son – whether in the original story or in the movie – there are lots of folks who wonder if they would be welcome in a church. They may have felt rejected by a church in the past. They may have formed images of Christians from what they see in the news. They may know their life is anything but perfect and they may think those church folks will be judging them as soon as they come through the door. Part of what Memorial strives to do – what it has done for so many years – is keep its doors open and its lights on for people wherever they are on life’s journey. All of us here have enough flaws that we don’t need to spend much energy judging others. All of us here understand that we share a common quest to understand the message of Jesus but we also understand that we don’t all come to the same conclusions. If that’s true on the big things, so is it true on the more mundane matters of our life together. Many of you have been part of the discussion about what we can do to build on our good programs that offer education to adults and children. Lots of good suggestions have bubbled up in the survey we did a few weeks ago and in the conversations we have been having. One of the notable things about this process is the effort folks are making to understand that not every idea is going to work for everyone and that we as a community need to find the best approaches we can, recognizing that no approach is perfect and that we will continue to develop and adapt how we do things. That willingness to work together with respect is one of the hallmarks of this congregation. I think it may be one of the things that visitors get a sense of when they join us here. I hope they sense that we are not a place that judges them or demands tests of their beliefs. I hope they also sense that we are a place where we all will do the best we can and that where we do not waste a lot of energy judging each other’s motives. We may feel like the older child sometimes, the good one who gets taken for granted. But then we remember that the parent’s love was wide enough for everyone, just as God’s love is wide enough for all of us – and our love can be wide enough for one another. Some of you may have heard a bit of controversy in the news this week when talk show host Glenn Beck urged people to look for the words “social justice” or “economic justice” in what their churches talk about – and then to run the other way if they see or hear those words. While I would think of myself as a “social justice Christian” and the United Church of Christ as a “social justice denomination” and Memorial as a congregation filled with people who care deeply about social justice, I recognize that within our traditions, there are a variety of ways one might choose to faithfully fulfill the Bible’s overwhelming imperative to care for the poor and oppressed. But the solution Beck initially offered – he’s been backing away a bit since then – to bail out rather than to engage in respectful conversation – seems to me just the opposite of the message of this story today. Yes, the younger son left home in a fit of selfishness. Yes, the older son was livid with envy. But the invitation to both of them was to come back around the table. In the song we heard about this story, a recurring line was this: “All will be well and all be one.” That invitation is there for each of us as well. We can know that God’s love is there for us, no matter who we are. We can reflect that love in the way we treat one another within this congregation. And the reflection of that love can shine through our doors and windows so that anyone passing by might know that in this place, they are welcome. Amen. |