SERMON
The Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 10, 2013

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


[Richard Rohr quotations are from Immortal Diamond, p. 61 ff.]

    “All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’"
    – Luke 15.1-3

   Because of their grumbling Jesus told them this familiar story that we know as the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
    So what’s with the Pharisees and the scribes? They are the pillars of their community. They hold respectable positions and respectable opinions and they lead respectable lives, doing what their religion and their national duty require of them. They are in so many ways the average, hard-working, law-abiding, church-going citizens of Jesus’s homeland.
    And they do not know what to make of Jesus. He is a smart guy. He knows the Bible; he radiates a kindness and concern for others that you can’t help but notice if you are lucky enough to get near him, lucky enough to hear him teach and tell those curious stories he likes to tell. But they do not know what to make of him. He doesn’t follow the rules they way they do. He hangs out with tax collector and sinners. Tax collectors were turncoats and collaborators with the occupying Roman enemy. No one is supposed to give them the time of day even though they are fellow citizens just like the Pharisees and the scribes. The difference is they are working for the bad guys; so they are to be avoided and looked down on. They are to be avoided because the rules say that to deal with them makes you unclean. Their nastiness will rub of on you if you get too close to them.
    That’s the tax collectors. What about the sinners? Who are they? Well, that isn’t as clear. Maybe its just one category, “the tax collectors who, of course, are sinners.” Or maybe it is a separate category. We do read else where of “Gentile sinners,” that is to say non-citizens who aren’t part of Jesus’s people, not part of the Pharisees’ and scribes’ circle of acceptable folks. Whoever they are, they are people who are contaminated and to whom it is not good to give the time of day.
    But Jesus does give them the time of day. He gives them his time, his attention, so the Pharisees and the scribes grumble about him. How could this otherwise good teacher spoil it all by being seen with shady financiers and dirty immigrants?
    Jesus knows about their grumbling, and – when he knows that they can hear him – he tells this story, so familiar to us, of the man who had two sons, one of whom was dutiful and respectable and played by the rules, the kind of child who never gave a father any trouble. The other son we have come to call “prodigal” – a word the dictionary defines as “wastefully or recklessly extravagant.” That’s him alright, having the chutzpah to ask for his inheritance before his father dies and then spending it all wastefully, recklessly extravagantly.”
    But the story is not so much about him as it is about his father. His father forgives him before he can even ask to be forgiven. His father is genuinely over-joyed that this profligate runaway has come home.
    Now you can just bet that all the neighbors’s tongues are wagging, wondering what kind of cold reception this bad boy will receive, what kind of punishment and penance he must now do, what kind of humiliation he must undergo to prove he is sorry. They probably even laid bets on how stern a rebuke he will get. Oh, how surprised they are to be invited to a party where the father can show them that he has received his lost child back with great joy and total forgiveness. It is the father who is the extravagant one. He gives away what most people would have expected the runaway son should have to earn.
    The father, of course, is a stand-in for us – the way the father behaves is the way Jesus behaves and the way we who are his followers are expected to behave. We are to forgive even before it is asked for. Let’s not pretend that is easy. It is not easy; but that’s the assignment.
    We naturally rebel at such prodigal, profligate, some might say irresponsible handing out of forgiveness and acceptance. You and I want a little payback from those who have offended us. We want a little justice. A little fairness. A little chance to be told by the offending party they we were right all along and they were wrong. We want those things when we have been hurt or offended, don’t we?
    That makes us a lot like the older brother. And the older brother is a lot like the Pharisees and scribes for whose benefit, remember, Jesus is telling this story. If we are like the older brother, and he is like the Pharisees and scribes, then we are like the Pharisees and scribes; and we, therefore, are the ones for whom Jesus first told this story and is telling it now, still and again this morning.
    The trouble is: being proper and following the rules and doing what is expected will not automatically make you kind and forgiving. And here is a sad truth: being a regular church person will not necessarily make you kind and forgiving either. Churches are great places to hide and to soothe your conscience by telling yourself and others that you must be a good person because you show up in church so regularly. You may even be very active in your faith community – the Pharisees and the scribes were famous for being deeply involved in the religion of their community. It didn’t stop Jesus from calling them out when they didn’t have room in their hearts for people of dubious reputation and proven unacceptability.
    Remember that religious practice, even and including all that one might do for one’s church, doesn’t guarantee a thing. Whatever you do and whatever you say you believe – is it making you kinder, less proud, less judgmental, less needy to be right all the time, less willing to criticize others and point out the speck in their eyes before taking a good, long look at the log in your own eye? Is it? Do you jump to judgment? Why do you need to judge at all? “Judgment is mine,” says the Lord. “Do not judge, lest ye be judged,” says Jesus.
    Again it is Richard Rohr who helps me understand all this and who puts it so starkly and clearly”
        “The True Self,” that is the person we really are meant by God to be, “never knows with absolute surety that it is right or ‘good,’ but in fact it does not even need to, which is what we mean by ‘faith.’ The True Self has knocked on the hard bottom and the high ceiling of reality and has less and less need for mere verbal certitudes or answers that always fit. It has found certainty elsewhere and now lives inside a YES that is so big that it can absorb most of the little noes. The False self,” that is the petty, judgmental, gotta-be-right self, “fears and denies all seeming contradictions, probably because it unconsciously knows that it itself is a mass of contradictions and is searching for some external order or control. You can forgive the outer world only if and when you have first forgiven you own inner world.
        “The religious False Self is the is the best and most defended self of all  . . . The Ego has found it cover, so be quite careful about being religious. If your religion does not transform your consciousness to one of compassion, it is more a part of the problem than [a] [book reads “any”] solution . . . anything less than the death of the False Self is useless religion.”

    Perhaps this all sound dreary and difficult – and indeed, killing off the False Self is a serious and a life-long project – but it is all just difficulty and dreariness.
    It can all be summed up by returning the Jesus’s story. The older brother, the Pharisees and the scribes, and, that means us if we choose to side with them, are refusing to come to a  party. God is throwing a party to welcome us all home. No strings attached. No questions asked. We can accept the invitation anytime we like. Oh, yeah, the younger brother, scoundrel that he is will be there too and we will have to leave our disposition to criticize, our fondness for judging others outside by the door before we can let ourselves in.
    But friends, it is the only party there is – and it is going on now and it will go on forever.