Readings:
Sermon:
I don’t know what your stories of mothering are. I expect they are mixed – stories of great love, and stories of great loss. Being a child, being a mother. It’s hard. And one of the greatest blessings you can receive, too. Or indeed being anyone who shares nurture and care with another – and let’s face it, that is all of us.
And yet, at the heart of our faith is family. The family of the Church - a tumultuous chaotic family of failure, love and grace. And at the heart of that family is the Family of God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit - an all-encompassing love that has loved us since before we were born, and will hold us well beyond the grave. Unconditional love, that doesn’t give us the love we deserve, but lavishes on us the love that we need… thank God.
There was a man, said Jesus, who had two sons.
A son demands his inheritance from his father, before his father has died, so he can hightail it over the horizon for a more exciting life. Well, that’s tantamount to saying he, and all he stands for, is dead to him. But the Father– Jesus tells us – watches, and waits, standing on the road every single day, never giving up hope that his good-for-nothing son will return.
But what about the other son? The one who has slaved night and day, who pours himself into keeping the farm on the go, who does the ‘right thing’.
Well, he is not waiting with his father. He is down the other end of the field, working… so far away that he doesn’t even realise there is anything going on, and a calf has been killed and cooked and the party well under way before he comes home. This son too, it seems, has been lost to the father – lost to a life of feeding resentment, duty and angry self-righteousness within himself, that has taken him so far away from his father he may as well be feeding… pigs… in a far country. I have been working like a slave for you, he says.. and you have given me nothing.
How often have you felt like this?
‘Well.. come on… I have done all I had to do, and more, I have slaved and worked… and they… they just get off scot-free, without doing anything… and somehow… they’re more celebrated, more special.’
And we realise.. maybe.. if we are lucky… just in time… that this is the thing that is eating away at us, stopping us joining the feast too.
Because our Father is prodigal in his love. The lost son is welcomed home, and .. even to the resentful son, he says,
“Son, you are always with me.. and all that is mine is yours!”
Always. Every day. Every fatted calf. Come, break bread, party, you are no slave, you are beloved
Here in church, as God’s family, we are called to come together with all our fragile stories – all the times we go astray, all the times we have resentment in our hearts, all the broken parts, all the glorious parts - to break the bread, and to go out and feed others – the Mother Church are called to be prodigal bearers of God’s mothering, fathering love… out, into our community.
And there in the family of God, too, is held all the story of our own hearts, our personal family. There are held the pains, and the glories, the times things break down and the times things are blessed and life-giving. The worries, the anxieties, the losses. There in the heart of the Father who paces the road, waiting. The Prodigal Father who throws the outrageous party. The Mothering God, who longs to gather us all up under her wings.
The story doesn’t tell us what happens next …. perhaps it is up to each of us to decide whether we will go inside and take our place at the table for reckless and righteous saints and sinners, in God’s family, held together by the love that will run to gather us up, and forgive us before we can get a word out of our mouth, that shares all it has with us.
The love that doesn’t dwell on the past, but bets on our future … that isn’t interested in the love we deserve, but only in the love we need ….thank God
Questions:
- Looking at the story can you identify times in your life when you have been – or perhaps are right now - like the younger son, wandering off and getting into muddles and difficulties and yearning to come home, but unsure of God’s welcome and mercy? Perhaps take some time to rest that in his welcoming heart and arms of love.
- What about the older son? Can you identify times in your life, or in your heart right now where you are eaten up by resentment or duty? Where perhaps you forget that God does not ask us for more than we freely give? And gives to us all that he has ?
- How do you feel about God’s parenting love? Perhaps it is easy sometimes to project upon God our own experiences of parenting or of being parented, especially if they have brought sorrows and pains. Is it possible to open your heart for God to reach in to heal hurts with his great mercy?
- We are church as a family together, and families are hard, sometimes. How easy is it to be honest about our difficulties in living and sharing together? Can we accept that as humans we will all get things wrong from time to time? What does it look like in the church family to reach to reconcile? How do we let God into that, in his justice, and in his mercy?