The Fourth Sunday in Lent Sermon

Are there people here at St. John’s that are familiar with and participating in the one-of-a-kind Lenten discipline called Lent Madness? It’s been sponsored by Forward Movement for over 15 years now and it’s beloved by me and many. If it’s new to you, look it up online: Lent Madness. It’s based on the brackets of basketball’s March Madness. 32 people are selected each year and there is daily voting through the brackets, called saintly smack-downs, until the winner is crowned with the Golden Halo on Wednesday of Holy Week. Over the years, some of the winners have been Mary Magdalene, Francis Perkins, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Harriet Tubman and Francis of Assisi.

Every year there are match-ups which are not “fair,” by any stretch of the imagination and they make people crazy, even “mad!” One year it was Martin Luther vs. Martin Luther King. Another was Benedict vs. Dorothy Day. This year, last week, it was two female Chinese teachers who were both martyred by beheading; they even share the same feast day in the church. Voters had to choose. Many abstained that day because it seemed just too “unfair!”

It’s all in good fun but also a remarkable tool for learning about the saints from far back and those who left us not so long ago (Iona liturgy). Take a look and vote! You will learn the stories of some remarkable, and sometimes legendary, people, whose lives were changed by their devotion to Jesus.

This got me to wondering what it would be like if we put these two brothers from Luke’s third parable of the lost up against each other in Lent Madness. Who would we “vote” for, the younger son, the impetuous wasteful prodigal? Or the older dutiful and responsible son who stuck it out while his brother lived it up?

Would we choose one or the other because we can see ourselves in their lives and their actions? Or would we vote “against” one by choosing the other, as so often happens in elections these days. In television lingo, who would we vote off the island?

The parable of these two brothers and their father follows last week’s parable about judgment and the landowner giving the barren fig tree another year to produce fruit. Not only more time and another chance, but the roots would be loosened and fertilized and watered.

Parables are a way that Jesus teaches us about God. The kids in Godly Play know all about parables and the treasures they can hold if we patiently and consistently approach them. When we wonder about the truth of God, Jesus says through parables, “This is how God works.” This is the extravagance of a father who gives his sons unconditional love instead of what we think they have coming to them.

Luke begins this 15th chapter with two additional parables of being lost and found in response to the Pharisees’ and scribes’ grumbling that Jesus welcomed sinners and ate with them! First one sheep is lost out of 100 and a party was thrown when the sheep was found in the wilderness. Then a single coin was lost and rejoicing began when it was swept out from a corner. And now there is another party going on because a lost son has been found.

Well, it’s one thing when a sheep and coin are lost because they themselves didn’t do the losing. And another thing entirely when the lost had done it to himself, right? It elevates our sense of injustice and may fuel our desire to vote him out of the Lent Madness bracket.

I thought God was supposed to be fair… we might say. As is generally true, our response can say much more about us than those we might wish to condemn. We see that playing out on the national and global stages…It might be possible that the 99 are incomplete without the one; that we are incomplete without the one.

It reminds me of a piece by Madeline L’Engle about Jesus which I’ll paraphrase:

It seems that there was a party going on in heaven. Jesus was there with the apostles and probably a bunch of saints, even those voted off the Lent Madness island. The tables are set, the wine has been poured and suddenly no one can find Jesus. So they search high and low, anxious to begin the festivities, and they find him standing at the Pearly Gates scanning the horizon.

Peter says, “Come on Jesus, we’re waiting for you and the fatted calf roast is getting cold.” Jesus replies, “I’m waiting for Judas. The party can’t begin until he arrives.” The 99 are incomplete without the one, irrespective of what we think is “fair.”

Sarah Shelton has written about this parable that the father is also prodigal – lavish, wasteful, extravagant, but in the ways of love and forgiveness. “His love is more excessive than either the younger brother’s loose living or the older brother’s moral rectitude. This parent is excessive in his persistence to claim a family.

“The father, too, is restored as all parents are when the children come home. He is the one who impetuously meets us when we drag in from the far country after good times go bad or who risks coming out to the lonely darkness of our righteousness or the rigidity of our judgmental ways and begs us to come to the party.” It’s a party hosted by God who is willing to waste it all in order to bring us home again.

Luke says the younger brother “came to himself.” He had lost everything, was eating with and feeding pigs and dying of hunger. We might call it “hitting bottom.” Twelve Step groups like AA know about hitting bottom and they also know that hitting bottom doesn’t necessarily trigger the climb up those slippery slopes of darkness into recovery. But it IS the beginning of recovery. In theological terms, we could call it resurrection. The missing brother has been restored; he is home. Celebration is warranted.

The older brother is someone for whom we might feel some empathy. He is ever dutiful, thoughtful, concerned; and eventually filled with resentment. This is the sibling who carries too much of the moral weight and gets tired of all of us others who never seem to shape up in their estimation.

Yet he was no less lost, having distanced himself by hardness of heart from the wastefulness of extravagant love. But this son who pitched a fit wasn’t kicked off the island to where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth. He was invited to the party. L’Engle writes that we mortals want limits, limits to what is demanded of us, limits to God’s love, limits to those God is willing to redeem, limits to those who are going to be saved. And this limitless quality applies to God’s redemption, as well.

This parable doesn’t have an ending. We’re left to wonder what happened next in this openended story so we have to finish it ourselves. William Willimon notes “that all families, including the church, have their younger brothers. They are those among and within us who are always gasping for air, threatening to leave, and sometimes leaving with their share of the inheritance.”

Kate Huey says that we fret about the younger’s sincerity, and our own. Was he really repentant or was this all a ploy to be fed and given a place to live, even if it was the wood shed? In the end, no matter his initial motivation, what matters is actions and not words; that the turning home itself was all it took for this father, coming to ourselves and into the range of God’s love which waits, incomplete until all have been found.

His father was ready to feast and feed and celebrate with no strings attached. No recrimination. No asking, “Now have you learned your lesson?” He gets unconditional love and forgiveness. It doesn’t seem like a reasonable match-up in the bracket.

It doesn’t seem fair, unless, of course, it applies to us – which it does! It is the generosity and extravagance of a prodigal God, running to meet us from wherever we have turned; ready to waste love and forgiveness because there is always more; ready to welcome us home when we have wandered away and squandered our inheritance; ready to open the party to everyone.

Jewish author Amy-Jill Levin [Short Stories by Jesus] puts this in context for us and “suggests we not read only repenting and forgiving into the parable which can become simplistic exhortations of well-known messages. Recognize that the one you have lost may be in your own household. Do whatever it takes to find the lost then celebrate with others. Don’t wait for the apology you may never receive. Don’t wait until you muster the ability to forgive; it may never come. Don’t stew in your sense of being ignored, for there is nothing that can be done to retrieve the past. Instead, go have lunch. Repenting and forgiving may come, but if not, you will have begun a process that might lead to reconciliation and a chance for wholeness. And this, of course, also counts for the world.”

The altar is our banquet table; the party’s going on right here. No fatted calf, but bread and wine for a lifetime. This is how God works: sinners and saints are met in Jesus who seeks us and waits for us with a love so extraordinary that it doesn’t compute.

Here forgiveness is extended prior to repentance, perhaps apart from it. This is reconciliation with God. It is coming to ourselves. God sees us coming from afar and welcomes us with open arms. Everyone wins in Lent Madness.