Nobody Wins Until We All Do

Readings:
Joshua 5:9-12
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Prodigal: wastefully or recklessly extravagant; profuse; lavishly abundant.

Pastor Mohn mentioned this week that the story of The Prodigal Son has been preached on as being about

The Son … perhaps wasteful in his extravagance
The Father … definitely extending a lavish abundance upon his son’s return home

… and about The Brother, who resents the profuse outpouring for his wasteful sibling.

There is a theme that runs through Pastor Mohn’s sermon, it seems to me. And it felt like this:

A brother denies a brother. As Pastor Mohn points out, the brother calls his sibling “his father’s son”, but does not call him “his brother”, a clear denial. Of the brother? Or his actions? Often as humans, we do not distinguish the two, but God calls us to. Yes, we are to be judged, perhaps by Him for our actions, but we are none of clean enough, to judge each other. As Pastor Johnson has reminded us throughout Lent, we are all imperfect and should not spend another minute pointing out the shortcomings of others. Their sin is no worse than our own, despite our rationalizations to the contrary.

So if we believe the brother is denying his brother for his actions, then what are they exactly? Pastor Mohn points the way there, as well. Very clearly. She says:

We are all selfish for our Father’s love.

I found this to be such a key recognition in this sermon. Perhaps for this reason. The Rabbi Harold Kushner, Rabbi at Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, whose other books I’ve drawn from in this blog, has written a book entitled Living A Life That Matters in which he proposes that man is constantly struggling for two often diametrically opposed goals and that God replies with Two Voices.

He draws on the psychoanalyst Carl Jung who believed that “Act One of a young person’s life is the story of their setting out to conquer the world”. In this act, they are competitive, and they seek challenge. They want to prove to the world that they matter, that the world should take us seriously. They need to feel successful and important.

Then ‘Act Two of a (less) young person’s life is the realization that the world is not about to be conquered by the likes of them”. In this act, the person comes to terms with their own limitations (as does the Prodigal Son) and has a desire to do what is right and good. Our lives are a constant “tension of opposites”, as both our Pastors have often pointed out, a struggle between wanting to matter, to be rewarded for excelling, to stand out for a job well done, and wanting to do what is good and moral. Often there is no clear way to do both simultaneously.

I recently had a great conversation with Pastor Mohn’s better half, Erik Gronberg, in which he described being asked to be a part of a consortium of civic leaders trying to make their respective communities better places in which to live. He put what the head of one company said this way:

"We are in a constant struggle between “doing it right” (implication: excelling, getting the job done) and “doing the right thing” (implication: doing the moral, just, ethical thing despite the fact that it does not feed into the bottom line)."

This says it quite nicely, I think.

Rabbi Kushner then hypothesizes that:

“God speaks to us in two Voices. One is (what Erich Fromm called “Father love”) the stern, commanding voice … summoning us to be more, reach higher, demand greater things of ourselves, forbidding us to fall upon the excuse that “We’re only human”. The other Voice is (what Fromm calls “Mother love”) the voice of compassion and forgiveness, an embracing, cleansing voice, assuring us that when we have … fallen short, we are still loved. This God knows what a complicated story a human life is and loves us despite our inevitable lapses … when we know that we have done wrong (as the Prodigal Son), we need to hear the voice of God-as-mother assuring us that nothing can alienate us from His love, but when we have worked hard to be good, honest and generous, there is something lacking in this message (as it is for the Brother of the Prodigal Son). What is missing is the voice of God-as-father saying ‘You’re good, you have earned my love’. ”

In this way … “We are all selfish for our Father’s love!!!”

Kushner “emphasizes that people of either gender are capable of both kinds of love and every one of us needs to experience both kinds”.

Pastor Mohn shared another story about Erik in which he pointed out at a recent funeral that “grace is enough” in the end, perhaps to earn the love of God-as-mother. It is our mothers that often bestow grace despite the lack of our having always earned it. But, as we have been reminded often in sermons at Mount Zion:

“We can’t earn our way into heaven with good acts.”

We go there but by the grace of God, the compassion of God-as-mother, as it were.

Someone at the funeral presided over by Pastor Gronberg pegged him as a “false prophet … (because) the promise of grace is NOT enough. She doesn’t qualify. It’s about hard work.” Sound familiar?

“I work hard and you give it to them”
”She doesn’t qualify”
“I did everything I was asked to do. Now what’s in it for me?” … Ray Kinsella in Field of Dreams!!

What is Ray told by the angels on the ball field? “Are you asking what’s in it for you, Ray? …. You’d better stay here …” and we all know what happens. He is given his bounty, his abundance. God provides to each of us according to our needs. As the Brother is told by the Father “You always have my love”. He will be provided for in a way that will suit him, in the end.

But our struggle with the tension of opposites, between “wanting our due” for having followed all the rules and watching others “get even more for having done less or for breaking the rules even” violates our sense of fairness and justice.

Pastor Mohn points out another great scenario in the C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe in which the the White Witch will make Edmund the Most Important, but she lies and uses him to get to his siblings. Sibling rivalry born of the tension between wanting to be important and being willing to call each other Brother despite our shortcomings is a tension too tempting for the devil not to use. The devil often does not do his dirty work himself, but pits us against one another, enjoying watching us fall prey to our weaker nature.

In the end, Edmund is saved and spared and brought home to repair bonds with his family. In the end, as Pastor Mohn points out:

“Everybody gets the same mercy, the same grace, the same forgiveness”

from, as it were, God-as-mother.

There’s a story told by Laurie Beth Jones in a book I have quoted often titled Jesus, CEO. It is about a race that occurred during The Special Olympics in which a runner, about to cross the finish line, noticed a fellow runner who had fallen in the road. With the finish line clearly in view (a sign that they matter and that they are important?), this runner stopped and helped the fallen runner. They opted out of “doing it right” to “do the right thing”. With the fallen runner in his arms, they limped across the finish line together! The crowd cheered. Would that the Prodigal Son acted this way upon seeing his brother return. Would that he could call him brother rather than the son of the father. Perhaps the secret known to that runner in The Special Olympics was what Laurie Beth Jones further points out:

“These runners in The Special Olympics made me think of Jesus and his set of rules. I thought about Him choosing to tell the story about the shepherd who can not rest as long as even one sheep is still missing, despite the 99 of them which aren’t … about a father who is waiting on the road, watching for his lost son to come home, even though he has one son who is serving him ably and well … about a king holding a banquet, who will not start serving dinner until every place is filled at The Great Table … and I wonder what this world would be like if we all played by that rule: that nobody wins until we all do.”