HOME FOR THE FIRST TIME

oS SS OBIE

March 29, 1992

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian ‘Church, Chicago

Scripture
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

"...But while he was Still far off, his father saw him and was
filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and
kissed him." > ~Luke 15:20 (NRSV)

"You can't go home again," Thomas Wolfe assured us. And
he was right. You know that, if you've tried to do it,
because once you leave, home is no longer home for you in the way
it once was. You are no longer part of it, What was home goes
on without you, and while you may try, your homecomings are
visits. You have become a tourist. "You can't go home again."

But in another sense Thomas Wolfe was wrong. There is a
sense in which home is always with you and in you and about you,

family and old friends you are occasionally able to take up right
where you left off twenty years ago. No matter who you are and
what you have accomplished - home is where you are known, as you.
are, the raw material, unrefined. That is why we experience the
allure of home an@ sometimes dread it. People at home know us.
In fact, it is important to go home, to claim and affirm and
celebrate who we were and who we are.

Thomas Wolfe, I have never thought was as close to real
truth on this topic as was T. S. Eliot, who wrote an alternate
word, a good and Suggestive word:

"The end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
~. And to know the place for the first time."
So - home, for the first time.

Jim Forbes, preaching minister at Riverside Church “in New
York City, told a group of us that after he preached on the

prodigal son recently, an elderly pillar of the congregation
greeted him at the door and said:

"I've heard so many sermons on the prodigal:son,
sometimes I wish that boy had not come home...
had stayed away."

That sent me to my card file and, sure enough, there were
eleven 3 x 5 cards, with the exception of Christmas and Easter,
when choosing a text does not require much imagination, I've
spent more time on this story than anything else in the Bible.
The reason is simple. It's a great story. A second reason is
that it is really good news and we all need a little of that on
occasion. And another reason, the more life you live the truer
this story becomes.

A young friend of mine, graduate student, good athlete,
handsome, a polite, considerate person, just started therapy.

"I'm almost thirty," he said, "and I'm finally
realizing that my parents are not going to love
me for who I am. I've felt like I failed them
all my life. I was never smart enough, never got
good enough grades, never tough enough, never
good enough at sports."

Familiar story.

The original is about a father and two sons. But the power
of the story and its timelessness could today be cast in terms of
a mother and her daughters, or sons, or a woman and man and their
family.

The youngest one day says,

"Dad, I want my part of your estate now. I know
I'm in the will for half. But I can't wait.
You're pretty healthy after all. You could be
around for ten or twenty years, I could be an-old
man before I get it. So how about you giving me
my half now?"

Kenneth Bailey is a fine New Testament scholar who has spent
his life researching and teaching in the Middle East, on site, as
it were. And Bailey says, "There is no law or custom among the
. Jews or Arabs which entitles a.son to a share of his father's
. wealth..while;the father.is still.alive." The prodigal is actual-
ly saying, "I cannot wait for you to die." [Poet and Peasant, p.
162} So when the father grants him his request - actually gives
the son his share, the deed to half the property, the title to
half the flocks, the contracts and outstanding assets - he is
‘doing something outrageous. The people who heard this story
first were stunned. This is no ordinary father. A normal father

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would have put that boy straight in no uncertain terms! But that
isn't all. This father gives his older son the other half. Now
he is dependent on his children, totally.

When the younger son sells the property and livestock and
the debt - liquidates it all, takes the cash and runs as far away
as he can get - he has pretty much:severed his relationship with
his father, his family, the village, his culture. That's what
the distant or "far country" means. He's done with parents and
brothers and always doing what he's told to do. He's free. He
has left home for good... he thinks.

So he lives it up, and spends it all. This is not an
attractive young man. "Dissolute living" is the way the New
Revised Standard Version translates. I rather preferred the

"riotous living" of the older translation. In any event, you are
allowed to use your creative imagination to decide how he spent
all that money. Later on, his brother either can't resist tell-
ing on him, or else is engaging in some jealous fantasizing when
he complains about the boy devouring all the money with prosti-
tutes. That's the first time anybody mentioned that! older
brothers can be like that. I know. I am one. You always wonder
why your younger brother or sister gets away with so much.

In the far country the young son is broke, hungry, miserable

and takes a job slopping hogs. "He comes to himself...,"
sees that alienation from father and family and home is, in
actuality, alienation from his very self. He is also hungry,

cold and lonely, and he remembers where there is food on the
table and maybe even a warm bed.

So, he practices a speech. "Father I have sinned. I'm not
worthy to be your son. I'11 work as a hired hand." This boy is
good! If there ever was a speech generated to get to a father,
this is it. I know. I'm one of those too.

So he heads for home. What he doesn't know is that although
he has done every despicable, ungrateful and disrespectful thing
possible to break the relationship with father and home, it
hasn't worked. It was Fred Buechner, I believe, who describes
that father watching the road; every morning and evening, walking
out to the end of the lot and standing there watching, waiting;
several times during the day, finding some reason to be where he
can keep an eye on the road; never stops, doesn't talk about it,
but never gives up on his child.

ccsre ve And:then,one day, .he-sees a -ragged,..forlorn..figure-in the

distance; recognizes the gait, knows instantly - "It's my son."
And then, Bailey tells us, he does something else outrageous,
something embarrassing. So he runs, robes flying behind hin,
down the road to meet his son. Men of substance don't run ever,
Bailey says. There are, of course, witnesses. This is all
happening outside, where everyone can-see - older brother,- maybe.

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some cousins, villagers, hired hands - all of whom, it is safe to
- assume, are pretty angry at this young boy, very happy to see him
returning in rags, eager not so much to welcome him as to say
that most delicious refrain, "I told you so," and to enjoy that
lovely moment of self-righteousness. The father is protecting
the son from that, humbling himself. by running down the road,
throwing his arms around the boy, kissing -him’ repeatedly, and in
this dramatic gesture of unmerited, overwhelming grace the son is
restored to his home, to his community and family.

I love the fact that he never quite gets his rehearsed
Speech out. The father, who in his imagination the boy saw
standing in his study, arms folded, brow furrowed, imperially
waiting to hear what the prodigal says, willing to listen to a
proposal about Signing on as a hired hand - his father instead
runs down the road and embraces the boy. And when he tries the
Speech, he never even gets to the hired hand part because his
father is barking out orders to bring a robe and ring and kill
the fatted calf.

Had this father done what he was Supposed to do, frankly
what most of us would do and have done, had he waited in the
house, and listened to the confession and made the boy experience
his degradation a little more fully, he would have gotten another
hired hand. But what he wanted was a son - home again - home
perhaps for the first time.

Jesus told this story, by the way,..because:.the religious
officials, scribes and pharisees, were complaining about the fact
that he was associating with some unsavory characters, welcoming
apparently, those the religious establishment was sure were
unfit, unclean, Sinful, immoral. So Jesus said the boy "came to
himself" when he was broke, hungry, cold and Standing in the mud,
which does suggest that when you are alienated from home, from
your family, from your God, either because you have broken the
relationship yourself, or because others won't let you in, you
are, at the same time Seriously alienated from yourself; and
you need nothing so much as a welcome, an acceptance, a homecom-
ing which reminds you of a fundamental truth - namely that you
are a child of God. ,

And at this point the story invites us to go in deeper and
to ask to what degree that may describe the whole human condition
generally, and in particular you and me.

In the February issue of The Atlantic Monthiy, there was a
. Much .discussed major -article- on the. topic of "shame"~ by *Robert
Karen. The therapeutic community is telling us that "shame is the
preeminent cause of emotional distress in our time." That's
pretty important.

Shame is an unconscious feeling of unworthiness; shame is
-crippling because it implies that a person is unlovable, unwor--

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thy. It is the self regarding the self, with the withering and
unforgiving eye of contempt.

"It's like there's a hunter over your shoulder, and the
hunter is always coming," one man described it. "And
they're going to find out that. I'm. flawed and defec-
tive. They're going to find out:that I'm not-what TI
look like I am." [John Bradshaw]

Parents know its power to control and enforce conformity.
"You ought to be ashamed," we say on occasion and to say it
psychologists observe, is to cause it to happen.

"Who can emerge from childhood without some susceptibility
to feelings of defect?" The Atlantic article asked.

The implications are serious. The best current thinking is
that the narcissism about which we've been talking for more than
a decade is not only selfishness and greed, but may have its
roots in shame; in that familiar need which in some people be-
comes obsessive, the need to succeed, to get ahead and stay
ahead, to act out on the Stage of life one's worthiness and
value. No success is big enough to satisfy that hunger. Success
seems only to breed the need for more and so life is lived hard
and fast in the grimly determined struggle to affirm one's
value, or to compensate for the nagging, negative shame deep
inside us that Says - You are defective: you are not good
enough, strong enough, smart enough.

Tragically religion often plays directly into that, using
guilt, fear and shame to enforce conformity, creating rules for
this and that, acceptable modes of behavior necessary to please
God or.convince God to deal kindly with us; usually a- stern
father, a God who is judge and jury, a spirituality based on fear
of punishment, and sometimes a vivid dread of the fires of hell
itself. Jesus! most severe critics were not the bad people, the
ne'er-do-wells, but religious people who could not understand and
therefore would not tolerate the notion of a God of grace not
judgment, a God who loves, not condemns: a God who includes not
excludes, a God with open arms for anyone, a God who goes out on
the road to welcome home anyone who has been living in any far
country.

The best defense against a debilitating, emotionally crip-
pling shame is the steady love of parents which accepts the child

....for who he/she is.:. . The Atlantic Monthly article said religion

is about feeling guilty for who you are, and then trying to make
amends to make yourself acceptable to God. The Gospel of Jesus
Christ is about the love of God which, incredibly, outrageously,
accepts you as you are and gives you the freedom to change -— out
of sheer gratitude for the miracle of your acceptance,

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Repentance, religiously defined, is identifying your fail-
ures, naming then, feeling properly guilty about them. Repent-
ance, defined by the Gospel of Christ, is turning toward this
amazing grace, opening one's life to it, allowing the love of God
where it can recreate and renew. Repentance defined by Jesus, is
turning toward home - going out on the.road.and.cheading in the
» Girection of the one:who is waiting-with: open :-arms:-to welcome.

The father in the story made no effort to prevent his son
from going to the far country. Sometimes we have to go. ‘In some
way every one of us must leave home in order to be ourselves
fully, autonomously. You have to leave the nest in order to fly.
«ou have to leave your parents in order to be you. You may even
have to leave your religion for a while in order to reclaim it.
You may have to leave home in order to go home.

Novelist, Eudora Welty, reflects:

"Had it (home) meant nothing to us, any place
thereafter would have meant less, and we would
Carry no compass inside ourselves to find home,
ever, anywhere at all. We would not even guess
what we missed..." ["Place in Fiction," cited by
Dan Wakefield, Returnin , BP. 220, 221]

The story invites each of us to reflect on the home we have
left and the far countries in which we are living. For some of
us it may be a place, a home we had to .leave in. order to discover
who we were. For some it may have been an aggressive leaving in

conflict, still unresolved. [It may be a symbolic home and a
metaphorical far country. It may have to do with church or a
relationship or vocation. Far country may mean loneliness and

isolation to which you have gone intentionally, or in which you
.£ind. yourself unintentionally. -Far country may be your~fear that
if you don't get the job you will be exposed as worthless, so
there is nothing you will not do, no work too hard, no task too
ambitious, no day too long for you not to invest everything you
are in it. That is a familiar but hostile and very lonely coun-
try.

The people who were criticizing Jesus were so caught up ina
religion which documented their worth and value on the basis of
the rules they kept and their belonging to the select circle of
the truly righteous... They missed entirely the amazing grace of
the God whose love they were desperately trying to earn. They
didn't get it. The story was for them. The invitation was for
them. Come Home. oo

There was, of course, something working in the young boy's
life when he was in the far country... It.had.nothing to do with
him. In fact, he had tried to be rid of it. But there in his
memory, in the recesses of his Spirit, maybe in the exhausted
dreaming of restless nights, something was moving, prodding,

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pushing. It was, of course, his father's love. St. Augustine
called it restlessness until we rest in God. Gerald May calls it
"God's love song in our soul."

Judy Collins, tells about it. She recorded "Amazing Grace"
in 1970 at a time which was.very difficult. personally: loneli-
ness, aicohol, demons and -monsters. She had Left -church years
before.

"I had become very sophisticated" she said. "I needed
Sunday morning to recover from Saturday night." "Amazing Grace"
was added to an album as an afterthought. It probably saved her
life. It also came to be a kind of anthem for our culture, deep
in the anguish and shame of Vietnam, civil rights, sung at every
folk song concert. It's about a precious national dream of going
home to a time of justice ana compassion: and kindness. And the
vision may have saved the nation from caving in on itself.

Something impinges on us in the far country ~ something that
will not let us alone.

"Where shall I go from your spirit?" we sang
earlier. "If I ascend to heaven, you are there.
If I make my bed in hell, you are there."

Judy Collins recorded "Amazing Grace" again three years
ago for a PBS special. She confessed that in concert she rarely
sings the third verse, "in order to keep its _promise-personal and
universal."

"Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already
come;

Tis grace that brought me safe thus far,

And grace will lead me home."

To every prodigal, alone in a far country, prodigal sons
and daughters separated from people they love and not happy
about it, prodigals in self-imposed exile because of stubborn
anger and resentment, captives in theological or ecclesiastical

exile, there is for each one of us a word - a word of Amazing
Grace, .

It's God in that story, waiting, watching, never giving up,
running down the road, arms open to welcome...

And on that road, somewhere, perhaps off in the distance,
* and--perhaps not so very far away - you and me. = ,

"The end of all our exploring

will be to arrive where we started,
And to know the place for the first time."

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