Sermon of the Week:
Status? What Status?.
An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on July 19, 2020.
Week three of a four part sermon series:
Good Vibes: Finding Joy
Keywords: Frequent Flier. Prodigal Son. Status. Philippians. Realm of God #pcusa
Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Psalm 19:1-2, 7-14
and Philippians 3:4b-14
Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469. All rights reserved.
In my experience, one of the hardest things to practice
about reading the Bible with eyes of faith
is remembering that where you place yourself in the story matters.
Take, for instance, one of the most beloved stories in the Bible
the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
If you know the story, you know it goes something like this:
a man had two sons, and one day he had sort of a falling out with the younger one
who told him he was leaving town,
and demanded of his father
his half of his inheritance right then and there.
Yes, while his father was still alive,
and yes, that’s sorta like telling your dad to drop dead.
Buy me out. Give me my cut, and I’m on my way.
The father complies, and the younger son scoots out of town, to a far-off country
where he promptly loses all the money on what our standard translation calls “dissolute living,”
and then there’s a famine, of course,
and not only does he not have any savings
but he’s hungry, and everyone’s hungry
and he resorts to eating animal feed to survive.
(To make matters worse: its pig slop,
which sounds awful,
but worse when you remember that kosher dietary requirements meant you didn’t eat pigs
so that’s sort of salt on the wound, insult to injury, a nice little extra cherry on top of that story)
Things aren’t going very well for him.
It feels like he’s almost hit rock bottom.
He’s desperate.
And he says, you know, maybe….
just maybe I can go back home
back to the guy I used to call daddy
the one whom I basically wished was dead,
who gave me half his wealth that I squandered
and maybe
he’s a good enough man
that he would hire me.
I can clean his stables.
I can wash his floors.
I can take out the chamber pots.
Anything. Because I have nowhere else to go.
Meanwhile, back home, things seem to be fine.
The father is doing his thing.
The older son doing his thing,
a little ticked off that his brother pulled off this little stunt
but since then things have been quiet, there’s been no more drama
he can put his nose to the grindstone and help his father’s estate grow
and be the honorable son that such a good man like his daddy deserves.
And the younger son appears in the distance,
and the father, who hadn’t stopped thinking about that boy, sees him,
and he weeps with joy…this one that was lost…is found!
And he tells his servants: go, go, get him, clean him up, put a good robe on him, kill the fatted calf
get the champagne out of the fridge, lets party!
My boy is alive! He is going to be ok.
And, as you might remember, the older boy sees all this
and is, well, insulted, and incredulous, that his father is so daft
and that his contributions are not given the due credit he thinks they deserve.
The father comes to console him
and tells him that he is so grateful for all that he does, and who he is, that he loves him,
and that everything that he has, in the end, will be his,
but that these are not his decisions to make
and for him, what matters is this lost son is back again.
The parable of the prodigal son,
or maybe it is the parable of prodigal father…
the word prodigal meaning generous, wastefully extravagant.
These parables of Jesus are meant to share with us a glimpse into how the realm of God works.
There’s a lot that we can say about this particular parable,
but it is clear that, if this story is true,
then God’s values are somewhat different than what we might expect.
Those who are lost, might always have a way to come back home.
Things of material value are maybe not as important as people.
God has a different sense of what fair means than we do.
God will bend over backward to welcome the one who is outcast
whether they are exiled by the expectations and judgment of conventional wisdom
or whether they are self-banished, sure that they are not lovable, not worthy, not welcome.
I remember working on this story in a class I took somewhere along the line
college maybe, or seminary,
and having the professor run a little experiment.
She had us jot down on a piece of paper an answer to this question:
“who do most you identify with in this passage?”
We took a few moments, and then she had us fold the paper in half and she collected them
and then tallied the results.
Most people in the class (and, we should be clear, this was a group of fairly self-sufficient,
academically successful,
rarely-gone-without-a-meal-in-our life sort of students)
saw themselves in the younger son…the one who was on the rocks with a parent
(and maybe for some of them, that was truthfully the closest, most spot on place
to see themselves in the story…)
Some others answered, well, how about the father?
sure, they were, that the sort of generosity and gentleness and counter-culturalism they see in him
was exactly how they had committed to living their lives.
No one said “I am more like the older son
seeking to do everything right
wanting to be seen as the dutiful one, and be rewarded for it,
expecting that by walking the narrow path,
these “sacrifices” I make will one day pay off.
Certainly, no one said “I am more like the servants,
the ones that almost always go unmentioned here,
the people who clean the floors and kill the fatted calf and do the hard, physical labor.”
And as we spent some time reflecting about that as a class
we realized how often it was that each of us really are more like that older son,
you know, placing so much on the status of propriety, that, sometimes,
it blinds us to the human dimension,
much like, if I can offer a personal example,
I can see a protest on the country club plaza, say,
and hone in on the fact that a few aggressive instigators damage windows and paint graffiti
and that allows me to take my focus off
the throngs of peaceful others who are inconsolable because of
George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and Rayshard Brooks and so many more.
///
You don’t need to have a single answer here.
Sometime we carry bits of multiple characters with us.
But where you place yourself in the story, matters,
certainly for how you understand it,
and for how it works within you.
Seeing yourself as the broken and battered younger son,
welcomed by a generous, Graceful Father
might well be what you need, if you are broken and battered, yearning for change,
or it might be a powerful motivation for you to gloss over how, well, that’s not exactly you,
and God loves you, certainly, but let’s not uncritically lump ourselves in with those suffering injustice.
Seeing yourself as the father, as trying to be more Godly, and adopting a spirit of welcome
might well be just what you need, what I need, affirming the values of God’s world…
so long as I don’t let that blind me to where I need to grow,
and how, if I’m honest, I find it so hard to turn the other cheek like that.
I know people that I hold grudges with for saying something petty, years ago,
and I think that I’m like the father here, the one the son told to drop dead,
who THEN ran to welcome him home, no questions asked?
And perhaps you can see my point.
The parables of Jesus are so powerful, in part,
because they convict us of how deeply imbued we are in the values of this world,
and how much translation we need
to begin to understand how transformative
is the world that God is here to build
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
///
I mention all of that, because I’ve been thinking about airline miles.
Ever since I told that story, a few weeks ago,
about my putting my daughters to bed one night
back when they were four years old
knowing that I was going to leave the next morning for a trip to Guatemala
and how excited they were that I was going to get on a real airplane…
I’ve been thinking about flying.
I love to fly. I always have.
In some ways, I’ve always resonated with the sort of excitement my daughters had that night
knowing that I’d be on a plane flying somewhere new and different and therefore exhilarating.
Ask my mother, and she’ll tell you that, as a kid, I dreamt of becoming a pilot.
Well, maybe she’ll admit that. I can’t remember if I shared that secret with her or not
but it is true.
And over my life, I’ve flown a fair amount
more than some, less than others.
On vacations with my parents and brothers.
A honeymoon to Europe.
Later, as I started working, trips for conferences or the occasional meeting.
Flying became much less glamorous, the older I got,
particularly when we had kids and started a family and it was hard to be away,
but even so, to this day, I enjoy it.
I marvel at how God-given human ingenuity and science led the wright brothers
to propel something heavier than air off the ground…
and how that means I can sit
in a seat at 30,000 feet
drinking a ginger ale and watching cloud formations gently breeze by.
So I love that part of it, and I always will.
And it might be months before I ever fly again, if I ever do, these pandemic days,
but what had me pondering all this, as I was reading this part of Paul’s letter to the Philippians
was how often I used to think about those airline miles.
I don’t want to suggest that I used to fly A LOT, in the grand scheme of things.
Both my brothers, for instance, do the sorts of work where they are away from home
much more than I ever was,
but I’m still amazed that, one year, I attained GOLD STATUS on a major US airline.
What that meant was that I flew 60 flight segments in a single year,
which is how the airline measured such things.
GOLD STATUS is amazing. [Read more…]
