There Is Always More to the Story
Since before I arrived here at Faith nearly three years ago, this community has been grappling with what it might mean to be “reconciling.” In this moment in the life of United Methodist congregations, to become reconciling has a specific meaning relative to the full inclusion of folks who are LGBTQ+ and those who seek to love those folks.
But the word “reconciling” has rattled around for me throughout the conversation. Because the word, the idea of “reconciliation” is so much bigger, and it embraces so much of what it means to be a human seeking to love other humans well.
And as I visited this familiar parable from Luke’s gospel this week and laid it alongside the idea of being “good enough” rather than killing ourselves striving for more, perfect, better, the word “reconciling” landed squarely in my lap.
In Luke’s 15th chapter, Jesus tells three parables, all in response to the backdrop set in verses 1 – 3. The “pharisees and the scribes,” words we should always translate to our own circumstances as “religious folk” or “church folk,” were scandalized by Jesus’ habit of dining with “tax collectors and sinners.”
Likewise, when we read “tax collectors and sinners” in Luke’s gospel, we should always translate to our own circumstances – who is it that we, folks who by nature of where we are seated and situated this morning in worship – we church folk despise and reject? Maybe it is undocumented immigrants. Maybe it is our neighbor who leaves his dog out to bark on rainy nights. Maybe it is the person who didn’t vote the same way we did. Maybe it is the one who makes us uncomfortable in our own skin, with our own possessions.
So…against that backdrop, Jesus tells the story of a son who demands his inheritance, lives large, falls hard, and finds himself in dire straits. In a repentant state, he returns home and before he is even able to speak his newly understood truth, his father wraps him in loving arms and calls for a party. Meanwhile, his dutiful, responsible brother chafes about what is fair. He’s worked hard. He’s not asked for a thing. And yet here is his no-good brother returning and embraced with celebration and not scorn.
Parables as a teaching form are intended to be complicated. They are intended to have all sorts of ways that they touch us, prod us. Maybe you hear this story and immediately assume the son who returns has made a lot of bad choices, deserves to grovel an bit, and his father is incredibly gracious. But where does that leave the other son? Or what does it actually reveal about the father? Or the slaves who are called on to make a party happen quickly.
This really ISN’T a simple story.
I wonder who you identify with in this story?
Maybe the son who asked for his inheritance and found himself in tough times. Sure, he took advantage of his father’s love and squandered resources. But he found a job. But the job didn’t pay a living wage, because sometimes that is how the world works. He tried to dig his way out of financial distress. But without a trade, without opportunities, without connections and introductions, the available jobs wouldn’t keep him alive. Did he deserve to slop hogs? And starve in the process? We kind of talked about that last week, I think.
In this society, to demand one’s inheritance would have been like wishing the father dead. It would have been a deep rejection and a complete lack of respect. In light of that, the father’s heart must have been broken by his selfish son. I wonder how much time he spent being angry? And I wonder how much time he spent worried about his son’s health, wholeness, safety? And he still had a household to lead, a household that included at least one other son and servants, all of whom depended on his keeping his wits about him to keep moving forward. His heart must have ached even as he kept all the home fires burning.
And then there is that responsible, rule following son. He had stuck it out after his brother left. He had to do more work to cover his brother’s responsibilities. I am sure there were times he wished he could walk away. And I suspect there were times he was lonely. But loving his dad meant staying. He had a responsibility to his family, an obligation – one his brother abandoned. But man….anger and resentment that get pushed down again and again festers, multiplies, and eventually explodes…or at the very least it leaks out in the world.
What about the slaves? What about those who have no choice but to work for this family, because their family’s lives depend upon it? They have watched one son flounce off in an act of deep disrespect and discover the hard knocks of life. They have watched another resentfully fulfill his duty. Meanwhile, they have lived with very little agency, very little choice. They have received what has been allotted to them in the economy of the household. And when the wandering son returns, they are called on to kill the fatted calf and supply the cozy robes.
Jesus didn’t use parables to make people feel warm and fuzzy, triumphant and perfect, whole and successful. He didn’t use parables to offer comfort.
Jesus used parables to make people think. He used parables to get inside of folks’ heads and hearts. He told parables to change their thinking, to change their hearts. There would have been folks from all walks of life hearing Jesus offer this teaching. Each person in the crowd would have to choose who they were closest to in the story. And maybe when they were thinking about it later, they would find themselves choosing someone else.
Today, as we continue to work with the theme laid out for us this Lenten season, the idea that we don’t need to keep striving and straining and climbing to be perfect (because perfection isn’t possible), that somehow it is good enough to seek to love God and one another with whatever shows up on any given day, I believe sitting with this text means taking time to find ourselves in the story. And seeing that there is no perfect protagonist and no perfect demon here.
Isn’t that a lot like life?
We are all less-than-perfect. And we all hold a piece of the truth. No goodness, no peace, no harmony comes from waiting for someone else to make the first move. No goodness, no peace, no harmony comes from blaming everyone else (the people, the systems, the circumstances) for our disunity. Because for every story there are at least as many sides as characters involved. And everyone holds a piece of the truth.
For me, this is where reconciliation comes in. This is where the work of being a community that seeks to reconcile matters. We have to be willing to see the world from different sides of the story and we have to begin to recognize that we all have a part to play in bringing the story toward some sort of peaceful outcome where there is enough love, enough provision, enough care and concern for everyone. Because that is what God’s shalom looks like. That’s what the Kin-dom of God looks like.
We have to be willing to lean in. We have to be willing to acknowledge the places where we have caused harm. Or maybe just the places where we have not actively spoken out against harm. And that is hard. Because we want to be the good one, the perfect one, the comforted one. And the reality is that just by living, breathing, making choices in the larger systems of the world, we affect people around us. It is impossible to be perfect.
But it is not impossible to be transformed.
This, to me, is the work of reconciling. Recognizing the complexity. Repenting and returning. Becoming something new because of what we see. Again and again, showing up and being willing to see the other perspective, the other experience, the other side.
We can’t climb past the prickly and hard parts. We can’t climb past the injustices in the world around us. Because whether we have really come to realize it or not, we are a character in the story that has a specific perspective and plays a specific part. We can’t erase the messiness of it, but we can gather up the hearts and parts and pieces into some jumbled, torn and crumpled beautiful oops. Not everything that is beautiful is symmetrical, expected, perfect. In fact, in general, what is beautiful is real, authentic, touched by life.
And God is in the midst of it all, waiting.
Waiting for us to set aside our striving long enough to recognize God’s presence with us.
Patiently holding us even when we can’t stop to see what is in front of us.
Standing by to love us, no matter what.
Reminding each of us…
You’re enough.
We are each of us, good enough.
Thanks be to God.
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