March 18, 2007
We Believe in Welcoming Everyone to
the Table
Joshua 5.9-12; Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians 5.16-21; Luke 15.1-3, 11b-32
I’m the oldest brother.
In the early 20th century, Alfred Adler saw a link between birth
order and personality. I’m the first-born. Therefore, I’m a
rule follower, a high achiever, and used to being the example. And I’m
stubborn. Dr. Michael Jackson has called birth order
“one of the fundamental elements in the social construction of kinship
systems.”[1]
Your place in the family can shape the attitudes you have toward challenges and
failures. If you know who you are, there’s a better chance you’ll
make healthy choices when life throws you a curve.
Adler discovered that middle
children are often overlooked and feel invisible, but they are also easy-going,
humorous, and good at mediating conflict. Youngest
children can stay the baby and expect everyone to do everything for
them, but they’re also often the best at making friends. Only children can have trouble sharing,
but they also tend to be more mature. Me? I’m the oldest brother. That makes me the Goody
two-shoes who steps on other people’s toes.
Adler may have oversimplified. But he’s not far off when it comes
to Jesus’ parable. The youngest son fits the mold: he expects everyone to
drop what they are doing to give him what he wants. When they do, he burns high
and fast, traveling far, making lots of friends, spending like there’s no
tomorrow.
It’s hard not to be judgmental. We hear his story all the time. A
14 year-old girl from Tomball steals a few hundred dollars from Dad’s
wallet, hitches a ride to Dallas, catches a bus for New York, and she gets
caught up in the drug culture, running scared, and sleeping on ventilation
grates. A family in the Woodlands finds out their 16 years-old son is gay,
kicks him out of the house, and he winds up on the street at night in
But they aren’t the only ones who are lost, just as the youngest
son is not the only one who’s lost in the story. The older brother fits
Adler’s expectations. He is rigid and judgmental about the one who has
strayed. He can’t accept his father’s generosity. He sees the party
as wasteful. How often have you forwarded an email complaining that some social
service coddles wrongdoers? I saw one that said Governor Perry’s HPV immunization
order rewards teenage sexual
activity! It’s as ridiculous as saying needle exchange programs reward IV drug users. But it’s what
we older brothers believe. “Throw a party for that reckless kid, Dad?
How’s he going to learn his lesson if you put my rings on his fingers, my
robe on his shoulders, and kill the fatted calf that ought to belong to me?”
The older brother is also lost. That’s why Jesus tells the story
in the first place: the religious leaders were asking Jesus why he ate with
sinners. I bet they were older brothers. So Jesus told them about brothers who
are spiritually lost, one in his cups and the other in his self-righteousness.
The younger brother strayed so far from God that Augustine said he became a
“wasteland” to himself, of hunger, lack, and destitution (Confessions, Book II,10). But the older
brother became a wasteland of sterile righteousness and stiff-necked morality.
Neither brother understood the father’s welcome. Neither one had the
power to forgive what the younger one has done. Each one put himself far from
God and set himself against God, and in fact attempted perversely to imitate
God (II, 6).
We’re attracted to the prodigal. We identify with the older
brother. But this isn’t their story. It’s really a story about the
father. The father is clearly the one acting the way God wants us to act. The
father willingly gives away what will be squandered. The father joyfully
welcomes the lost son’s return. The father patiently explains the justice
of it all to me, the stubborn older brother, but I can’t get my head
around being more generous than what that punk deserves. Then dear old Dad has
the audacity to invite me to Junior’s feast.
Think of it as a story with three versions: perversion, aversion, and
conversion. There is no question that the younger son is acting out of perversion, the twisting around of
God’s purposes for his life. Perversion is a distortion, an overturning.
There is also no question that the older son is acting out of aversion. Aversion is turning away from
God. What is required of the perverted is the same thing that is required of
the averted, a third kind of turning, conversion,
the turning of life back to God. Conversion is God’s way of overcoming our
gratuitous perversions and aversions by God’s gratuitous, prodigal,
wasteful, generous grace.
That’s what this story is about. Conversion begins when we see
our own twistings and turnings away and repent. It takes me, recognizing my own
sin, my own missing of the mark, my own lack of direction or misdirection or
stumbling about in the weeds and rough. My conversion begins when I repent,
either of my sinful wastefulness or my self-righteousness, and turn toward God.
But conversion doesn’t happen alone. The younger son repents
before he comes home, but his conversion cannot be complete until his father embraces
him, kills the fatted calf and orders his servants to prepare the feast. The
young son’s conversion is not complete until he comes to the feast, and
eats and drinks, and experiences the joy of a welcoming community. There is one
thing still missing, though. Junior’s conversion is not fully complete so
long as his older brother remains outside, sulking and unprepared to accept his
younger brother’s return.
That’s the radical message of Jesus’ parable. We older
brothers and sisters need conversion, too, in order for the prodigal’s
conversion to be effective. We who have been raised in the church and never left
it, we who, as Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “had a little of
everything and the God-given wit to use it right,” we who are
“accountable … for good order and common sense and respectable
behavior” (Revelation), must
repent of our aversion to the radical hospitality of God. From one older
brother to another, hear this: no sinner fully converts until the righteous also
convert and come to the table. Jesus eats with sinners. But he wants the
righteous rest of us to get down off our high horses and eat with sinners, too.
Then when we’re all at the same table, maybe we’ll stop judging
each other by the color of our sins.
First Congregational Church of Roscommon, Michigan, average age 75, is
getting younger. They’ve been praying for young families. Pastor Nancy
Bresette has been telling the church to be careful what they pray for. They recently
embraced a group of young women and their babies from a local home for unwed
mothers. Many of the women came to the home directly from jail. There they serve
out their probation, complete their high school education, and learn parenting
skills they never learned in their homes growing up. First Congregational
Church of Roscommon is now welcoming these unlikely guests by the vanload each
Sunday and rediscovering the church’s mission and purpose. One teenage
mother recently asked to be baptized. What would Jesus do?
We will not be a growing congregation until we run out on the road and wrap
our arms around lost prodigals. Then, having set them down at the table, we
have to go out again and find all those older brothers and sisters who think
we’ve done some great injustice by welcoming the wrong people, and plead
with them to come in and join the party.
You and I have a responsibility to act on behalf of the father. Yes, we
are imperfect, some younger, some older, each with faults and sins of our own.
But Christ gathers us together anyway and pours out his Spirit upon us. When we
are assembled and gathered, we become ecclesia, church, and koinonia, a mutual
sharing and fellowship in Christ. We are called to be the everlasting goodness
and generosity of God. We are called to welcome everyone to the table.
This is our God, who rejoices more over a lost sheep that has been
found than over 99 who never strayed. This is our God, who spends everything he
has left to throw a party for the one lost coin that is found. This is our God,
who gives away everything that is deserved and when that is squandered gives
not the deserved punishment but an abundant, extravagant feast. This is the God
whose responsibility we share. This is the God of Jesus Christ. This is the God
who wants you—in all your sickness, grief and despair, in all your
self-loathing inadequacy, in all your remorseful penitence, in all your
confusion, in all your sadness, in all your guilt, in all your sin—this
is the God who wants you to come to the table and sit, eat, drink, and
celebrate. God does not only give grace to
the undeserving. This isn’t about being lost and found. God raises the dead to new life. This is
about dying and being reborn. This is about resurrection.
Have you squandered your just rewards? Come on home. There’s room
for you at the table. Do you feel your faithfulness has earned you an honored
place? It hasn’t. But there’s room for you, too. Lost and now
found? Dead and now alive? Oh, let’s break some bread. I’ll pour
the wine. Now, about that younger brother, you were saying…?
[1]
Michael Jackson, “Ambivalence and the
Last-Born: Birth-Order Position in Convention and Myth,”
Man, New Series, Vol. 13,
No. 3 (Sep., 1978), pp. 341-361/
(Comments to David at revcobb@SWBELL.NET.)
© 2007 Rev. David E. Cobb, The Woodlands Christian Church (Disciples of
Christ), The Woodlands,
The Woodlands Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
The Woodlands,