4th Sunday In Lent

Sermon provided by Rev Ben Adams of All.together Campus Ministry

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Mother of us All. Amen.

Well good morning dear people of St. George’s! What a pleasure it is to be back here with you today, and since it’s been a while since I last preached, I thought I’d reintroduce myself. So, my name is Ben Adams and I serve as the Pastor of All.together Campus Ministry, a Lutheran/Episcopal campus ministry in Dearborn and Detroit. We serve the students, staff, and faculty of Wayne State University, Henry Ford College, and the University of Michigan Dearborn. I can proudly say that in less than four years we have cultivated a vibrant community of faith from the seeds we have been sowing on each of our campuses. 

And we are doing some exciting things. This academic year in particular is culminating this coming May with a group of fourteen traveling to Holden Village, a remote retreat center deep in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state. Our prayer for our students on this trip is that by being immersed in God’s creation it will renew their sense of beauty, awe and wonder, and If you feel inspired to support our trip, I’d encourage you to take with you a post card flyer that I brought with me. I think this trip is going to be our best one yet and your support would be sincerely appreciated. 

 

But we have some great scriptures this fourth Sunday of Lent, and in particular we have the parable of the Prodigal Son, I don’t know, maybe you’ve heard this one before, but despite how many times I have heard this parable, I recently heard something that shed new light about this story. This was shared with me by a colleague, but it comes from E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien’s book, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes. They say this,

 

“Mark Allan Powell had twelve students in a seminary class read the story carefully from Luke’s Gospel, close their Bibles and then retell the story as faithfully as possible to a partner. None of the twelve American seminary students mentioned the famine in Luke 15:14, which precipitates the son’s eventual return. Powell found this omission interesting, so he organized a larger experiment in which he had one hundred people read the story and retell it, as accurately as possible, to a partner. Only six of the one hundred participants mentioned the famine. The group was ethnically, racially, socioeconomically and religiously diverse. The ‘famine-forgetters,’ as Powell calls them, had only one thing in common: they were from the United States. Later, Powell had the opportunity to try the experiment again, this time outside the United States. In St. Petersburg, Russia, he gathered fifty participants to read and retell the prodigal son story. This time an overwhelming forty-two of the fifty participants mentioned the famine. Why? Just seventy years before, 670,000 people had died of starvation after a Nazi German siege of the capital city began a three-year famine. Famine was very much a part of the history and imagination of the Russian participants in Powell’s exercise. Based solely on cultural location, people from America and Russia disagreed about what they considered the crucial details of the story. Americans tend to treat the mention of the famine as an unnecessary plot device.” 

Wow. Just consider how significant that is. How powerful place can be in our interpretation of Scripture. What we see, and how we focus on certain elements of the story can completely change how we hear or read a story.

And I was listening to another one of my friend’s podcasts when he, from his social location made a mind blowing observation about this story. He mentioned how the younger son asking for his inheritance is akin to telling his father, you’re dead to me. Yet when that Prodigal Son returns and the Father runs down the driveway to meet his son, he says exactly the opposite. He says, “this son of mine was dead and is alive again”

The grace of that Father is beyond comprehension. This son who essentially wished his father just die so he could get his inheritance, is now the one who had to die unto himself. Whether it was the squandering of money or famine that brought him to this moment is up to your interpretation, but the outcome is the same, he returns home freed from his delusions of grandeur that somehow getting his father’s inheritance would free him to finally live to the fullest! It was instead the full life was available to him all along had his ego simply let him see it and embrace it. 

And the Father makes this point abundantly clear when dealing with the older son who remained faithful to the father, and because of that, he is self righteous. So he also, needs to die unto himself and his ideas that his own obedience and loyalty to the father should have earned him more favor than his younger brother. The father says, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”

And maybe we see parts of ourself in the Prodigal Son, but the older brother is in all of us to. He’s in that voice inside all of us that wants life to be fair, and yet, the father’s grace is not fair. For many of us, true justice would be served if the father further punished the younger prodigal son upon his return. Yet all the father knows how to do is to run to the end of the driveway, throw open his arms and love his son back to life. 

Our Psalm today started with the words, “Happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven, and whose sin is put away!” But, what about the rest of us who wanted to see some real justice for those transgressions? That’s the older brother response, and so the older brother in all of us must die as well, because God’s always with us and all that is God’s is already ours.

Yet in those moments where we feel like the ones limping our way back to the end of the driveway and the Father is there to meet us with open arms, there is no happiness in the world that can compare. The old self passes away and the new self comes into being in that happy moment, and that is the resurrection power of God at work in each of us raising us to new life when we were dead in sin.  

So this Lent I wonder, which son are you? What needs to die, in order to become new? Maybe you see yourself in both the Prodigal son, and the older brother. Either way, the party is being thrown, and the father is inviting you to celebrate and rejoice here today at this communion table because each of us were dead and have come to life by the Grace of God bestowed upon us in Baptism. We might not think it’s fair that we have to share this table with some who we think have not experienced adequate justice for their sins, but the truth is that none of us have and so rather that be upset at the unfairness of God’s unconditional grace, we can instead be happy that our transgressions are forgiven, and our sin is put away. We might be wishing the father dead and yet, when inevitably squander our inheritance or experience a natural disaster beyond our control and there’s no one there to help us, our invitation is to  die to ourselves and return to the father, and you can count on this God will throw you a party. Amen.