shared together in Communion, rededicated the Guild, and continued our series on the Lord's Prayer...
READING: Ephesians 1:2-14READING: Luke 15:11-32
SERMON ‘To whom shall we pray?’
Let’s pray:
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts,
be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer, amen.
To whom do we pray?
The opening of the Lord’s Prayer not only helps us to begin
to frame the way we pray, it helps us to understand a little
of the nature of the one we’re praying to:
‘Our Father, who art in heaven,hallowed be thy name...’
And our gospel reading this morning helps to tease out
an understanding of the very first two words of the prayer:
‘Our Father’ -
‘There was once a man who had two sons’
and then, he had just one.
There is at least one point, in his day,
when the old man finds himself walking absently
towards the boundary gate of the farm.
There, he stands, sometimes just for a minute,
but sometimes, longer,
looking down the road that both leads away from home,
but which is also the way to home.
Many months have passed since the boy left.
There had been a hard conversation.
A conversation in which his youngest son had virtually wished him dead:
‘give me my share of the property now.’
A shocking request, offensive in the extreme.
The son was in such a hurry to get away from home - from him -
that he couldn’t even wait for his father to die.
Insult and injury combine in the son’s demand.
Word has got out around the district, as it always does:
old friends and neighbours are horrified: first, at the son’s request,
and then, that the old man has acquiesced.
In an honour culture, such as this was,
it’s not an easy thing to lose the respect of friends and neighbours.
It’s not an easy thing to lose land that’s been tended for generations.
And, it is not an easy thing to lose a son into the bargain.
The son’s request to have his entitlement of a third of the land
has been at great financial cost to the father;
but his plan to leave everyone and everything he’s known,
has broken the old man’s heart.
The land sold, the son gone,
the father waits by the gate wondering if he’ll ever see the boy again.
The older son, and the neighbours, shake their heads:
perhaps muttering under their breath:
‘good riddance to bad rubbish.’
We know the story.
We know that somewhere,
in a land far away -
a place a long way away from the prying eyes of family and of neighbours,
the younger son lives the high life, which all too soon comes to an end.
He faces hardship and humiliation.
In desperation, he hatches a plan.
He rehearses a speech as he finds himself
placing one foot in front of the other,
returning back along the road that leads to home.
Is he actually sorry for what he’s done?
Sorry that he’s hurt his father?
Is he more sorry for himself and how his dreams of escape
have gone so horribly wrong?
...We don’t really know.
All we do know, is that he knows
that the only logical thing to do is to head home and see if the old man will
at least let him come back and work as a labourer.
Is the parable misnamed, I wonder?
Certainly, the younger son has been a prodigal -
wasteful, profligate, foolish.
But, to the listeners of the parable,
the father’s behaviour has also been foolish.
You don’t divide the long-tended land
at the whim of an upstart, disrespectful son.
Instead, you put the boy in his place and maintain the land,
as generations of your family have done before you -
and, as future generations will do, long after you’ve gone.
To the hearers of the parable, the story could also be named:
‘the prodigal father’ for, in their tradition and culture,
his actions would also be deemed as
wasteful, profligate, foolish.
The foolishness is further aggravated by the fact that
the father yearns for the wastrel son,
and can be seen each day waiting at the gate wondering if he’ll return.
In the minds of some of the listeners, such a son would be dead to them:
once he’d gone, they would have had a symbolic funeral.
There would be no wistful waiting at the gate,
...no return,
no second chance.
In an honour culture such as theirs,
the great dishonour shown by the son to the father
would be like nails in a coffin.
But this is not what happens.
Which is exactly the point of the parable:
it’s totally counter-cultural.
It’s not about keeping tally, keeping score.
It’s not about holding on to wrongs,
to insults, to injuries...
it’s not about keeping your honour and status intact.
What it is about,
is relationship and reconciliation -
and love in the most outrageous of circumstances.
Which is why the hearers of this particular parable about a father and a son
are in for a shock when the ending of the story happens.
For what they hear is even more astonishing:
upon seeing his beloved child return,
the old man casts all dignity to the wind -
he ...runs.
In order to run, he’d have had to hitch up his clothing:
an old man, in unseemly haste,
showing bare legs as he races to meet the son.
It’s just not the done thing.
This astonishing behaviour is further compounded when he embraces his son -
the son who left,
but who came back.
Rather than immediately berating him, the father is overjoyed.
There’s a celebration.
This child of his is not dead.
He’s alive.
He’s come home.
Regardless of the behaviour of this son,
the father has never stopped loving him.
I wonder if the son is as astonished
as the neighbours,
as his brother,
as the hearers of the parable very probably are?
As he’s embraced, and welcomed back in,
by the deep love and compassion of his father,
I wonder, does he see things differently?
Before, his father had been a means to an end.
Even on his way home, perhaps it had been a calculated risk
that at least he might have somewhere to lay his head.
A series of negotiations.
But here, the son encounters a father much less concerned with negotiations,
and much more concerned about relationship.
In the embrace of grace,
in the face of unexpected and undeserved love,
will the son be moved to love in return?
‘Our Father’...
What is this ‘father’ like, the One we approach in prayer?
There’s an expression I’ve come across occasionally,
over the time I’ve lived in Scotland - it goes along the lines of:
‘Mind yersel’ or ye’ll end up in the book of nae rubbin oot’
Behind that expression is an understanding
of a God who does keep tally,
who does keep count -
which goes completely against the God of grace and mercy
exemplified by the father within the parable that Jesus told.
The One we address in prayer is the same who embraces us no matter
how far from home we’ve travelled;
who rejoices when we come back and who longs for us to keep company with him -
in our lives and through our prayers.
The Almighty Creator of the universe invites us to call him ‘Father’ -
as he, in turn, calls us his sons, his daughters.
He is ‘Our’ Father - not just ‘my’ Father:
he calls us into a relationship that is communal.
As Jesus calls us his brothers and sisters,
so we are brothers and sisters to one another.
To pray the Lord’s Prayer is to pray the prayer that we share in common -
just as, shortly, we will share our common meal of bread and wine,
and be in communion with both God, and one another.
This is why being a Christian is not about
‘me and my God’ -
it is about ‘us, and our Father’.
‘Our Father, who art in heaven’
whose name is holy.
Who loves us deeply, faithfully, patiently ... graciously.
Who desires that we, who have experienced his all-embracing love,
go out into the world, and share that love with others -
to have hearts that don’t build up an account of hurt,
but rather, to have hearts filled with compassion.
In this week, faced with images and stories of human tragedy on a grand scale,
let us move out into our Father’s world:
let us seek ways in which to heal hurts,
to comfort the afflicted,
to feed the hungry,
to stand at the gate looking for those to whom we can offer sanctuary
and a taste of our Father’s extravagant love.
Doing all this,
knowing whose we are, and whom we serve, [*Guild motto]
and, in the knowledge of how deep the Father’s love for us. [*referencing the final hymn]
Amen.
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