Luke
15: 1-3, 11-32. When he came and approached the house, he heard music and
dancing.
When we hear this line in the Parable
of the Prodigal Son, we are deep into the story. The younger son, after many
mistakes, has “come to himself.” The father has welcomed his long lost child
with an unconditional embrace and an extravagant party. And as we watch the
elder brother approach the house after a hard day’s work, we already know the
difficult surprise that awaits him. We begin to anticipate his outrage.
But imagine you’ve never heard this
story, that you know only what the elder brother knows. You have been working
in your father’s fields, as you do every day. You are returning to a house
where an unspoken sorrow has lingered since the day your little brother ran
away. You have tried to repress it, all that family drama of yearning and loss,
rivalry and anger. You have been the good son, the one who never hurt his
father. But the absence and the hurt have soaked into the walls. It is a house
of incurable wounds, and you can no longer remember when your father laughed.
But on this day, while still far off,
you hear music and dancing. Lights blaze in the windows. Cries of happy voices
drift across the fields. What has happened? And how is your life about to be
changed?
Like the elder brother, we all live in
an environment of brokenness, in a world of inherited wrongs, hurts and
disappointments whose remedy seems beyond our powers. Even if we presume a
personal innocence, even if we ourselves have done little to contribute to the
harm of things, there is a wound pervading creation and history that precedes
us, that we are born into. The ancients called this original sin, the idea that
at birth we enter a world already gone awry. And even as we act for the good
where we can, we assume that the world was ever thus: the dead stay dead, the
lost stay lost, and some wounds just never heal.
And then we hear “music and dancing” –
new life welling up where least expected. The dead’s alive and the lost is
found. And the long Lenten journey turns out to be not so much the arduous
labor of shedding old sins as it is learning to welcome an unimaginable gift:
the feast of God.
—
The
Rev. Jim Friedrich
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