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Boy Scout Tr #240

Scripture: Luke 15:11-32

When my Dad was killed, I was 14 years old, and I wanted my older brother to take his place in my life. Doug was four years older than me, a senior in high school, the center of the Heppner High School football team. I thought he walked on holy ground, you know, like my Dad did. Until, one noon hour, one of my friends pointed at my brother sitting in his new Volkswagon bug, saying, “Look, there’s your brother! He’s smoking a cigarette!” I didn’t believe it. I looked out the door and my friend yanked me back out of sight, “Don’t look at him!” she said. But I had seen enough. I couldn’t believe it. It couldn’t be true. Why would MY brother be smoking? I swallowed the tears that welled up in my eyes and walked down the hall as if I hadn’t seen a thing. That’s what I did those days with my feelings. I didn’t cry. I didn’t show my disappointment. I didn’t talk about what was going on in my life. None of us did. I felt betrayed.

My older brother continued to let me down. But I still loved him with all my heart. What I really wanted was to do what he was supposed to be doing. Except for milking the cows. God saved me from having to milk the cows. It took me an hour to get a half of a bucket from Effy, the Guernsey, and she was easy to milk. But I would have gotten on the tractor and plowed or weeded or sprayed or whatever, if I had known how, if I had thought I could, if it had been my place. I would have gladly have been the responsible older brother. It was rough on all of us, after my Dad was gone.

I still have responsible older brother tendencies. I like to follow rules. I like to please people. I’m tend to be an over-achiever and hard on myself when I make mistakes. I also know the prodigal son pretty well too. He was not only part of my family in both my brothers, he was part of me. I went through my own wild, wilderness time. But I went through it responsibly, most of the time, if that makes sense. For example, getting good grades came first in my life. Keeping my job came before acting totally irresponsible. And saving money was more important to me than spending money. Now, let’s stop and take a little poll here. Raise your hand if you identify with the elder brother. Now, raise your hand if you identify with the younger brother. Raise your hand if you identify with the father. Raise your hand if you identify with all three.

Jesus tells this parable because he’s in trouble again, with the Pharisees and scribes, the keepers of organized religion, the elder brothers. Jesus is acting more like the prodigal son of his own parable. He’s associating himself with tax collectors, the scum of the earth, sinners—those repulsive and socially disruptive people who are a contradiction and a danger to order. He was rubbing elbows with the wrong crowd. They did not approve. They didn’t like it. And they said so.

What did Jesus do? Let me tell, I love Jesus. I wish I could be more like Jesus. So many times, too many to count, I have been criticized and my response has been to get defensive. Did it ever help me? No. But Jesus, he just goes on and tells a story. In this case, three of them. Jesus responded to the critical ones with three parables about the lost and found. In all the stories, everything that was lost was found. The lost sheep was returned to the other 99. The lost coin was recovered. And the lost son was restored to his father. I love these stories. I love it that God can find me no matter what my talent is for getting lost. I love thinking about Jesus as the good shepherd and the good housekeeper in my life. Lord knows I need a good housekeeper to help me find what is lost!

If it weren’t for that older brother. Three perfect stories except for that elder brother, the responsible one. Why did Jesus have to go and ruin a good story? And not only that, did you notice? There’s no nice, wrapped up ending to the story. What’s that about?

Once upon a time there was this well organized family. This family had a mission, had rules, traditions, ways of doing things, sacred things. Everyone had a role in the family. And everyone knew what that role was. It was a nice secure, safe bubble. But one member of the family got restless. “ There must be more to life than this?” He thought. “I want to see the world. I want to get out of this bubble and explore.”

So, he got what was going to be his anyway from his father and took off. Not only did he take off, he went wild in his freedom. Those from inside the bubble said he squandered his inheritance on wasteful living. From his perspective, he just ran out of money. So, he did what he could. Then he did what he would never have done in better circumstances. That brought on a crisis in his life. Some might call it a wake-up call. He came to himself—a magnificent ah-ha moment. He realized it was time to go back home to his safe bubble.

Meanwhile, the family back home wasn’t the same without the younger brother. They missed him. Most of them did anyway. They wondered what they had done or not done to make him want to leave. Would he ever want to come back?

The father especially wanted to know. So, he began hanging out with the folks at the shelters, those sleeping under bridges, and staying in migrant camps. He went to Starbucks and hung out with the crowd there. He even got brave enough to ask them, “Have you seen my son?” While he was out and about, he got to know people outside his bubble. In fact, he started to like them and realized that everyone, everyone was precious in the sight of God. Everyone. But he went home sad because he had not found his son. Yet, he was richer, because he had found some new friends.

He went home to tell his older son all about it. He went home to make some changes. But it was harder than he thought. The elder son was so judgmental. He was stuck in the sacred ways of the family. The father wondered, “How did that happen?” The elder brother was convinced that his younger brother had betrayed the family, he had abandoned the family traditions.

But that was not how the father saw it. He begged the older brother to get out more, to widen his horizons, to open up. But the older brother was not able to. “Someone has to be the responsible one,” he said, stubbornly. Someone has to do the work. He didn’t want the family system messed up any further so he held on tight to what he could, which was a lot, because he was the elder brother.

When the younger brother came his magnificent ah-ha, wake-up moment, he started home, rehearsing a little speech in his mind. He said it over and over again. As he approached home he imagined the worst. He felt like the scum of the earth. But he did not regret leaving home in the first place. He knew he would not fit in anymore. But he didn’t have anywhere else that he called home. So, he drug himself down the familiar road slowly, to face the music, the old familiar music.

What happened next was totally unexpected to everyone, even the father. The father had all but given up on seeing his son alive again. But his new ritual was to look up the road regularly to see if someone was coming. The elder brother didn’t like it. “Why do you do that? No one new ever comes to see us. It’s useless. It’s pathetic.” But the father did it anyway. Like a prayer every hour. He would stop what he was doing just for a second and look up the road.

This one time the father looked up the road and he couldn’t believe his eyes. Without a second’s hesitation, he dropped everything and sprinted down the road. He ran until he met his youngest son. And before the son could say anything, the father hugged the breath out of him. The son was speechless. The father didn’t care. And then the father did something that had never been done in that family before. He threw a party. He brought out the finest stuff, he ordered the best food. He showed such outrageous love that the youngest son was overwhelmed.

But the elder brother was angry and resentful. He had worked hard to keep the family together. He had worked hard to keep the traditions. He had worked hard to keep things the same. It was not right that the father should change everything just for one person, especially the one who had abandoned ship. It just was not right. End of the story.

I used to hang out with a lot of people who didn’t attend church. Then I went to seminary and became a pastor. I became the Pharisee, the Scribe, the elder brother. I don’t see myself that way. After all, I’m the pastor of the church with open minds, open hearts, and open doors. I’m not judgmental. I’m not afraid of change. But whether I like it or not, to people outside the church, outside my Christian bubble, that’s what I am. And the challenging and kind of scary thing about that is that Jesus came to free the people from organized religion. Jesus came for the sinners, the outcasts, the rejected, the undesirables, the unclean. Is that us? Not any more! We are not the prodigal son in this story. I’m not even sure we are the father. We are the elder brother, or we are perceived as the elder brother. Not accurately, because we are the United Methodist Church. We believe in the grace of God. We aren’t like those churches that are stuck in legalism. We don’t advocate the political agenda of the religious right. We aren’t sexist, look we ordain women and have for 50 years. We aren’t homophobic—oops. What does the Book of Discipline say? Oh yeah, something about the practice of homosexuality not being compatible with Christian living. Hmmm… What does the sign say, open hearts? Open doors? Open minds?

We live in a post-modern, post-Christian time. But you know what? Jesus is still here. Oh my gosh, is Jesus here. But not the way we want him to be. He is challenging the church (us) more than ever before. He is telling the story of the prodigal child over and over again to us because we need to hear it—as the old ones, as people who have shielded ourselves from a world out there who really does like Jesus, but is not so sure about the church. A world of people who call themselves spiritual and want to have a spiritual experience, but the experience they are looking for is hard for them to find in the church.

And I’m on a mission that I hope you all with join me on. That mission is to get to know people who like Jesus, but don’t like organized religion. And to help them get to know me. What Dan Kimball says, who has already made that his mission, is we need to start by being apologetic and relational. He says this from an evangelical perspective. The church, and by this he means the whole of us, from the most fundamental to the most liberal, all of us, we, the church, we Christians have an image problem out there. And the only way we are going to help our image is by being in relationship, by hanging out with spiritual but not religious people. I am challenging you to let people know that you are not the Christian that they think you are. You are a real person who cares about people, all people. You know that everyone is precious and is a child of God.

Dan Kimball does this by asking questions and listening and hanging out with people outside his Christian bubble. I think we need to do this too. Not as evangelists with an agenda, but as missionaries with a heart, with compassion, with genuine interest. One person at a time.

Someone asked Mother Teresa how she did it, helping all those people. And her answer was, “I started by simply helping one person, and then another, one at a time.”

My older brother, Doug, went into the Navy for 6 years, to avoid the draft and going to Vietnam. My Mom hung onto the ranch, she leased it to a couple of other farmers through those years. She could have sold it easily. But she knew. She knew that Doug would come home. And when he did, the ranch would be ready for him to farm it. She was right.

Amen.