Good morning; we are almost to the midway point of Lent, and pray you all are enjoying our journey of courageously walking forward in our faith, reviewing, renewing, and repenting on this walk with Christ as we prepare for the Easter season.
Today, we read the parable about the prodigal son. This story in Luke follows the parable of the Lost Sheep and then the Lost Coin. One could deduce that this is about being lost and found. Fun fact, when I started this journey with my calling to the priesthood, my father, a devout Jesuit Catholic, would answer the phone, saying “my prodigal daughter”. I felt like that was a step up from what he used to answer the phone, saying my favorite daughter. Spoiler alert, not only am I his only daughter, I’m also his only child.
But this morning, let’s focus our attention on the complicated and deep relationship between Father & child in the Gospel story. This farmer, or rancher, is blessed with two sons. He is blessed with helpful hands for general operations of his farm. He knows that he can leave a legacy behind. This father is fortunate, yet one of his sons didn’t want any part of it. He demanded his inheritance, and he tried to walk away from everything he knew, go explore the world and find a new destiny.
The son ventures off to far off lands, searching high and low, for a new way of living, a new life. He didn’t make wise investments and squandered his inheritance. During the end of this journey of searching for independence, he spent all the money and needed to find work to sustain himself. He started working at a pig farm. As you may or may not know, pigs are considered unclean in some faith practices, our brothers & sisters that practice the Jewish and Muslim faith do not eat pork. This shows us that the son was at the end of his rope, the last place he’d be working was at a pig farm for Gentiles. He is probably humbled. He is humbled to the point he wants to go home, he realized that he has made a mistake. This is not who he wanted to be, not who his father raised him to be, and he is eager to be back with his community. He wants to go back home. He realizes he made a bad judgment call, running from the place where he is welcomed and loved unconditionally, and asks for forgiveness and repentance.
It wasn’t until I was discerning on this sermon that I looked up the meaning of prodigal. I just assumed it meant to come back, which is one of the definitions. However, the Hebrew word for prodigal is bazbezan, meaning extravagance, spending extravagantly, eating extravagantly, consuming extravagantly, over the top, and so it’s wasteful, glutinous behaviors. This parable reminds & encourages us, take the opportunity to repent, to change their behavior, and come back to God’s good graces.
In these current times, has there been a time where we wanted to run from the fold, to act out, or maybe, can we reflect on when we might be overconsuming. Can we think how we are living extravagantly? Can we believe that we might be consuming too much?
I can relate! In my early 20s after college, granted I was always heart centered, but was trying to live this larger than life dream in Washington, DC. (Hence why my father called me his prodigal daughter). I left the church because I saw the church being weaponized. I saw the church being stretched to its limits, and I wanted to go out and discover and seek a new way of living. To find another community.
This semester, I’m taking Anglican spirituality & ethos. One of my newfound teachers, was a woman who wrote a book on mysticism in the Victorian era. Her name is Evelyn Underhill, and she pursued a deep understanding of one’s personal relationship of faith. She might sound familiar as I realize that she is popular in Anglican tradition. I was surprised to find out that she wrote most of her books on this topic of mysticism when she was not attending church. She was out there in the world, searching for her deep connection with God outside of Church walls. She spent most of her life searching for the meaning of her spirituality in her connection with God, but she returned to the church in her 60s. She ultimately realized that after trial and error, after searching, high and low, the way that she was able to create a deep understanding of her faith and spirituality was in this community, was in the tradition of the Anglican Church. She found it in the liturgy, in the music, and in the rituals that we experience every Sunday. Yes, we can find God outside these four walls, but she cemented her understanding and faith when she came back into the fold, to practice these century old traditions in community.
What does this have to do with the prodigal son? Today’s gospel, the son that left had to go and live and experience this world extravagantly, outside of his community. Ultimately, he realized that what he was searching for and wanting was the community he had at home as well as the extravagant love of his father, the extravagant unbridled unconditional love that we experience in our relationship with our creator that we also get to experience when we come together in community.
We celebrate just as the father celebrated his son when he came back. Every time we come together, we celebrate and honor our traditions and our creator. We get to honor Jesus Christ for the life he lived, for His salvation, death, and resurrection. We get to take Holy Communion as we commune together and come collectively together at one table. We get to experience this unbridled love, no matter how far we might stray, no matter what we do that might not be a reflection of Jesus Christ’s actions within our hearts and Souls
It might be easy to forget that we are all God‘s children during these times. It might be easy for her to forget that we belong here as one, which means collectively in God‘s house as one nation, as we were reminded throughout the Old Testament that God is a savior of all nations.
I know personally that I have had to double down on my prayer practices this season because, Lord have mercy, I sometimes wanna stray; I sometimes wanna go out there and turn my face away from the unbridled love. We, as Episcopalians, as Christians, as Gods children, we get to invite God’s unbridled love to our lives.
Like the prodigal son, he tries to go out and find his own way, his own path. Like the son, we hopefully get to remember to follow The Way. As Jesus asked us to do, to follow him. Follow his way of love.
We are encouraged to turn towards the sunlight of the spirit, towards our relationship with God. Wandering outward to find that inner peace with God.
Like the prodigal son, not only have we come back to the fold, but we were never lost. Sometimes I do need a reminder, a daily reprieve to remember that God’s love is infinite. And not forget that God’s love is extravagant, that our creator has brought us together as one, as the creator of All Nations. Now it’s up to us, to go forth, and show the world what extravagant love looks like not only inside these walls, but also outside these walls.
Amen.
Christina Cernansky