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The Fourth Sunday in Lent, 03/10/2013
Sermon on Luke 15:1-3,11b-32, by Frank C. Senn
Reconciliation is hard work, whether it's reconciling your bank statement, reconciling a marriage or a family that has come apart, reconciling factions in a war-torn country, or reconciling sinful humanity and a holy God. Reconciliation is a process that brings peace, whether it is peace between us and the Lord, peace between nations, peace in a family or marriage, or peace of mind in having a correct check register.
Lent is about the work of reconciliation and its object is peace (shalom, wellbeing). The origins of the season are found in the simultaneous institutions of the order of catechumens, and their preparation for Baptism at the Easter Vigil, and the order of penitents, and their preparation for reconciliation with the Church on Maundy Thursday. The processes of both the catechumenate and public penance had to do with reconciliation: forgiveness and reconciliation with God in both cases, but also reconciliation with the community of faith in the case of the penitents. A sign that reconciliation has been effected is the sharing of the peace - for the first time between the catechumens and the faithful (they didn't just glad hand everyone in the old days!) and peace restored with the penitents. The peace is the prelude to the eucharistic meal and the meal itself is an act of reconciliation since the risen Lord shares table fellowship with his failed disciples.
The catechumenate has been in the process of being restored in recent years, and with much success in the Roman Catholic Church. I'm not aware of any churches restoring the ancient order of public penitents. Good luck with that! So we all, in a sense, become catechumens and penitents during Lent, marked by wearing the ashes and engaged in the ancient penitential disciplines of almsgiving and fasting. It's a season that is relevant to our human situation. It's not as if we don't need reconciliation and peace in our lives and in our world.
So today, midway through Lent, we hear in the reading from St. Paul's letter to the Corinthian Christians that God has been engaged in the arduous process of reconciling a sinful world to himself in order to make peace. He has hammered out a peace agreement with the world, and has made some astonishingly big concessions in the process.
Indeed God has made exactly the sort of concessions that often cause anxiety in peace processes. In fact, if you put the agreement God offers on the table next to some of the convoluted cease-fires and treaties that are painstakingly negotiated between hostile nations, you might start to wonder what was in it for God. It might look to you like an almost complete capitulation by God. God seems to give up everything, offer everything, and demand almost nothing in return. In particular God promises to wipe clean the record of everything we've ever done wrong and hold nothing against us. And as if such a complete immunity from prosecution for war crimes was not enough, God also offers us high-ranking jobs as his ambassadors to represent him in the ongoing task of promoting the agreement.
I don't think any of us could imagine any of the world's nations ever making such a monumental capitulation. I think Abraham Lincoln's offer to the Confederacy came close. Lay down your weapons and swear allegiance to union. Officers can keep their swords. Soldiers can keep their horses for riding home and plowing their fields. Only Jefferson Davis was prosecuted and imprisoned. But all the slaves would be freed. That's why Lincoln felt such an urgency about getting the thirteenth amendment passed before a peace treaty was signed, which was the plot of the film Lincoln. But with Lincoln assassinated, the graciousness of the intended process fell apart in Reconstruction as the North became vindictive and the South resentful.
In the case of the reconciliation deal which God offers to the world, the one who clearly holds the moral high ground is the conceding everything. We are the ones who took God's gift of a beautiful planet and set about polluting it. We're tearing apart the world by war, hatred and injustice. We're the ones who were invited to live in peaceful communion with one another and who instead hardened our hearts and succumbed to the demons of selfishness, greed and cynicism. We're the ones who squandered our gifts, blew our inheritance, and dragged our own names and God's through the mud. So why is God making such big concessions to secure a peace agreement with us?
On the micro scale, you can hear this same scenario being played out in the story Jesus told about the prodigal son. The prodigal knows he's got no bargaining power. He has blown his father's trust and money, and dragged his father's name through the mud of the pig sty. And he is desperate. He's ready and willing to give up everything for whatever shreds of his father's care might be forthcoming. But instead it almost becomes a competition to see who can give up the most. The aging father bounds down the street in a most undignified manner, throws himself on his errant son, forgives him everything, and then wraps him in glory and throws a huge welcome-home party for him.
What more could God give? Well actually, says the Apostle Paul, there is more. Reputation. God was in Christ, trading reputations with us. Christ, who was not implicated in any wrongdoing, accepted guilt by association with us. Christ put his hand up and implicated himself in our callousness, injustice and hostility. He put his reputation on the table along with everything else to secure the deal. And in doing so he paved the way for us to be associated with his goodness, for us to be covered with his righteousness. This is the "extreme makeover" par excellence! Christ offers to be seen as ugly as us in order that we might become as perfectly beautiful as him.
No wonder Paul says we'd be crazy to turn our backs on this deal. It's a take it or leave it deal, but why on earth would you leave it? We've got everything to gain and almost nothing to lose. The deal is completely stacked in our favor. We are offered complete forgiveness of sin, reconciliation with God, a new identity, a fresh start, mercy and healing and life and love beyond our wildest imaginings.
And what are we asked in return? What do we have to put on the table to complete the deal?
Well, there's a paradox here, because the answer is both nothing and everything. God actually demands nothing of us except our willingness to accept the deal, to sign our names on the line. Everything else is completely voluntary. God signs off on the deal regardless of our response. It is sheer gift. There is nothing you can do about God's gracious acceptance of you except to reject it. God will be all over you like the prodigal's father, lavishing love and generous gifts on you.
And yet the paradox is that if you give nothing in return you will probably fail to appreciate and enjoy even the lavish gifts you are given. You can end up as sad and twisted as the prodigal's older brother who is now the sole heir to all his father owns, but stumbles around weighed down by yesterday's angers and resentments. You can be forgiven and still feel burdened by guilt. You can be accepted and still exclude yourself. You can be loved and still feel yourself unlovable.
In this season of Lent we are reminded again and again of the discipline and commitment required to experience the full fruits of life's greatest gifts. They are gifts, and our response is purely voluntary, but unless we do volunteer and respond in full, the gift may again be squandered.
So here's how you can volunteer. God calls us to become ambassadors for Christ, to be the ones who take the good news of God's gracious reconciliation and proclaim it and live it out to the full so that the full dimensions of God's gracious love might be readily apparent for all the world to see.
God's offer of reconciliation and peace is not dependent on our acceptance of that call to be his ambassadors, but those of us who don't accept the appointment will probably find that we are cutting off our noses to spite our faces. We're depriving ourselves of the benefits of that gracious and healing love. They will still be there for us - as they were for the crabby older brother - , but we may make ourselves the last to know it. We'll be standing outside the banquet hall complaining while everyone else is inside having a good time.
Yet the father still reaches out to his oldest son. "My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. Everything." If the old man had been somewhat less gracious and conciliatory he would have said, "What do you mean, I never gave you a goat for a party? Listen son, they're your bloody goats. If you never got a goat for a party with your friends it's because you're too stingy to invite them over. So we killed the fatted calf for your brother. Hey, we'll fatten another one. Everything here is yours, but you're such a miser you don't know how to enjoy it anymore!"
The father doesn't say that. Maybe he thought that, but he didn't say it. He made the offer - "everything is yours" - and dropped he subject. The father is always gracious - just like God.
There's no way to effect reconciliation and bring about peace without being gracious. But graciousness requires putting yourself down, keeping yourself off your high horse, as we might say. Giving in when you'd rather hold the other party accountable. Perhaps that's precisely the method in God's madness. Perhaps that's the secret God is enjoying and trying to let us in on: that only in putting everything we are and everything we have on the table and letting it go can we know and enjoy the fullness of life for which we were created. It's like how Christ humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross, so that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Amen.