1 Corinthians 6:12-20
Troparion
Luke 15:11-32
Today, the Russian Orthodox Church marks the third week in our spiritual preparation for Great Lent — a Pre-Lenten season of five Sundays. As you can see, I am wearing the violet vestments of the season. The Roman Church enters Pre-Lent today, called Septuagesima Sunday.
On the first Sunday of our Pre-Lent, we pictured a young man, Zaccaeus, at a crossroads. Which path will he choose — secular pleasures and wealth at cost of his soul or godly life leading to the Kingdom of Heaven? Having experienced the fullness of worldly success, he discovers its spiritual desolation and, upon encountering God, he goes back to that place where he took a wrong turn and reclaims his blameless innocence.
On the Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee, we reflected on two young men who also had stood at a crossroads — one choosing affluence and worldly honors and the other choosing religious life, but both arriving, sadly, to the same destination, which is worldly competitiveness and upward mobility. As they are both sons of Abraham, we may call them brothers. One, having chosen for the world, becoming a Pubican, now grieving his loss of godliness and longing for restoration to God's blessing and friendship. We might say that the longtime callous upon his heart has cracked open. The other man, always shunning worldly pleasures as a Pharisee, has grown vain and prideful. He has developed a far more dangerous callous on his heart, for he does not perceive how far he has drifted from God, Whose element is tender compassion.
This morning, on Prodigal Son Sunday, we revisit this theme. Again the Lord Jesus asks us to reflect on two brothers at a crossroads. As we all do, they both begin in sinless innocence. Each in his own way shares intimacy with God the Father. They honor His commands and statutes, the older brother tells us (Lu 15:29), and they are blessed with His attention and love. In having done this, they have inherited the Kingdom of God. It is theirs from the beginning. They need only retain it. As the Father says, "You are always with Me," and all that is Mine is yours" (Lu 15:31). Being faithful, each is destined to become the Father in some sense. They are made in His Image, and there is nothing that the Father has which will not become the inheritance of the sons.
Like the Publican in last week's Gospel lesson, though, the younger son chooses to violate the Father's commandments. Moreover, he decides to reject the Father's ordering of the world. He will not wait to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. He wants its riches now: "Father," give me the share of property that falls to me," he says (Lu 15:12).
I have heard it said that this allegory sets before us the path toward Heaven that most of us are destined to follow. In this interpretation we begin as the younger son — allured by worldly pleasures, departing from our innocence, choosing forbidden things, and then arriving to the heartbreak of a poisoned soul ... perhaps perceiving that we have become the habitation of demons, compulsive with loss of control, possessed. They drive us about like cars without title or ownership. And then we long for God, alienated from ourselves, alienated from others. And with a contrite heart, we long to be restored to communion with the Father and to intimacy and to all that is right and good.
The next stage is more dangerous: the temptations that come with religious life. We are tempted to become distant, disdaining the world. Like the proud Pharisee, we are tempted to feel superior to other people having no heart or empathy for their struggles and problems: "Well, they made their bed! Let them sleep in it!" Here, reflection, in communion with the Father, will lead us to mature understanding and due compunction. As the old son feels his Father's hand on his shoulder, he hears his tender words, "Son, son, remember yourself and who you are. All that I have is yours. And you are Mine."
In the final stage of spiritual development, we become the Father. After all, is this not the goal of theosis and our journey toward Heaven? We understand the rebellion of the younger son. We realize that he must make his own mistakes. We cannot bless his decisions and dissipated life but we continue to love him at a distance. The Father does not follow him to bar rooms, casinos, or brothels.
In this we must remember that a great many of us who live in this hook-up culture believe that are "fine with God" or, more egregiously, "I have my needs ... God understands me ... Jesus has my back. We recall that St. Paul in our Epistle lesson this morning, in which he repeatedly uses the term fornication (meaning intercourse outside of marriage), warns us that joining ourselves to the unholy makes us united with the unholy. Any intercourse outside marriage joins us to the unholy. "They shall be one," the Old Testament teaches us.
I read in the headlines this past week that Virginia is repealing its law prohibiting fornication. They treat this law with a kind of mockery blaspheming God. "How absurd!" they say. "Isn't 'Virginia for Lovers?'" .... as if, somehow, fornication with our friends can stand in for marital love. When we live this way, our angels depart from us. They cannot stand the stench. When we live this way, God departs from us. The Holy Spirit will not dwell in a defiled temple, as St. Paul reminded us this morning. Many people in this neighborhood like to use the term, "When I get to Heaven," knowing full well that they have sex partner after partner after partner.
Nonetheless, Father God does stand at a roadside, at a distance, watching for our return to Him. Seeing our contrite heart, He runs to us, kissing and embracing us (Lu 15:20). For God is slow to anger but swift to bless (Ps 103:8-17). He also haves a heart for the resentful son realizing that the human sense of "fairness" falls short of the standard of Heaven, where we must love our enemies for the sake of their imperishable souls.
As the younger son is the subject of today's Gospel, though, let us try to focus on his inner life. Let us exercise our own compassion and focus on the inner life that brings him to rupture with God the Father. Let us try to enter his world, stand in his shoes, live in his skin, and come to know his struggles and cares.
As a teenager, I worked as a farmhand in Vermont and then in Upstate New York. In winter, you get up. It's dark. It's cold, cold right down to your bones. You build the fire, start coffee, and then you sit in the almost-frozen mudroom and pull on the stiff boots, still muddy from yesterday, almost like block of concrete. The chores that you do never end. The world you live in just repeats over and over in its little circle.
In mud season, the sky is grey every day for months sometimes. You begin to feel like you're turning grey: first on the inside and then on the out. Brattleboro, VT for years was a leading locale for suicides in late February and early March. Then there's the smell of mud and manure stinging the nostrils. After that,the black flies come. Now, they don't just land like mosquitoes and take a sip; they're on a search-and-destroy mission.
In autumn, it's mostly the same, but on an Indian Summer day — with its soft air, its blue skies, and its pleasant warmth — there's an intimation of something more. Some beauty and grace that's both in and beyond daily life. The older brother takes them to be tokens of God's grace and stands in the warmth of the sun feeling a divine blessing laid on his head. He surveys the fields around him and is filled with wonder. "How can the soil give birth to so much life?" And he sees that he is surrounded by nurture and providence: the merciful waters streaming down from the heavens, the invisible life-giving rays of the sun. "Why even the manure endows each growing thing with robust size and health!" And he sees blowing around him myriad seeds. "Why it's just raining life!" Capturing one in his hand, he studies it. "Who could have made this? Within each seed is hidden the wonder of a tree: each leaf, every color, every limb and stem and all the parts of the plumbing forming the engine of the living, breathing plant. And each plant will produce hundreds and thousands of more seeds! Who could have done this?! Who?!" Then he thought of all the smells and tastes of all manner of food. And in that moment, he gives thanks to the God for giving him everything that he and his family needs: the sun, the rain, and the apple seed.
Meantime, the blue skies and white clouds reminded the younger brother of a powder-blue Thunderbird with white bucket seats with the top down barreling the county highway that cut through their farm. He's seen it several times with the radio blasting. Sometimes, there'd be a girl sitting in the passenger seat. But they never took notice of him.
"If I could only get my hands on a car like that," he thought, "I'd just drive away from all this mud. I'd drive clear through to summer, to endless summer. And I'd never come back! Why wasn't I given a life like this?!"
Over time these thoughts got under his skin. They became a burr under his saddle. They haunted him every day and dogged him every night. In the cold seasons, he complained and resented everyone around him. The warm seasons only served to remind him that a sunnier day laying somewhere else. Finally, at the end of the work-week, he asked to talk to his father. When they were alone, he said, "Father, you always told me that someday all of this would be mine, mine and my brother's. Well, I want my half now."
His father had been expecting something like this. He'd watched his son over the past year. He also knew what his son could hear just now and what he couldn't hear. So he said, "Consider carefully what you've asked of me, and then ask again once you know God's will as your own heart and mind."
The next week the younger son returned and reaffirmed his request. So, the father sat down and wrote him a large check, the largest check he had ever seen. And he left, hurriedly and without goodbyes and headed to a nearby city. He bought new clothes and a new car and met people who all drove new cars. He never had to be anywhere. He never had to do anything. And he met people who also had nowhere in particular to be and nothing in particular to do.
One day, in the middle of the day, waking up with a terrible hangover, he sat slumped in a chair at his kitchen table. In the middle of the table sat a large glass bowl full of unopened mail. He noticed that one letter appeared several times. In fact there were many of this same letter. He opened one. It was an overdraft notice. His money was gone. And as a fast-moving storm suddenly changes a sunny day, his whole disposition turned to panic. He began opening other pieces of mail. Creditors wanted their money. The men's clothing store. The people at Visa and American Express, they wanted their money!
He didn't know what to do, so he gathered up some clothes, threw them in the backseat of his car and drove fast. Where would he go? What what he do? How would he eat? His mind was racing. He drove out into the agricultural valleys and tried to find work. You see, fruit pickers were hired without any need of applications or questions or background checks. They showed him the bunkhouse at the edge of a crop-field where he saw men who weren't interested in introductions or smalltalk. He went to a nearby town where he managed to sell his car. But without ID, he had nowhere to deposit his money. Soon it was stolen. After weeks of picking, bent over in the heat, and without decent food or water, he wore down becoming sick and exhausted. After each long day he just threw himself onto the bunk, ignoring the insects that lived in his mattress, and tried to fall asleep before the other men arrived.
One evening, he lay in his bunk just staring. He remembered a party he'd been to. The lights were low and twinkling, gentle music filled the air, the laughter of a girl he was with echoed down inside him like distant chimes. He seemed to float on a summer breeze, carried along on a wave of soft, gauzy light ... Then, the next thing he knew he woke up under a big buffet table. His body felt heavy and sick. The air stunk of cigarette butts and spilled liquor. The sharp light pierced his eyes. He looked around and saw other people who had passed out, some like animals lying in their own filth.
What had happened to the soft light and its magic? Why, it was here in this very room just a minute ago! It was so real. Where could it have gone? And in that bunk in one, crushing moment he realized a horrible certainty, a cold, immovable fact: he had traded his entire life, all his future, and his eternal soul for thin tissues of nothing. And he wept.
He remembered the kindness and patience of his father and brother, their goodness, their fairness, their rock-solid steadiness, and he looked around him to behold what had become of his life — his cruel, unscrupulous boss who cheated him; the hard and brooding men he worked with; the filth that had invaded and now controlled his life. Even the lowliest hired hand on his father's farm lived better than this. Far better! And he came to a decision: "I will go and beg for one of those jobs. I will beg my father for one of those jobs. At least I have a shred of cleanliness and dignity."
He began the long trip hitchhiking back to his father's farm. And when he glimpsed his father standing out front, watching for him, and saw that constant love ... and the father's long-suffering, he ran to him and fell to his knees and begged for his father's forgiveness.
The father's blessing was swift, and he declared that there would be a party to honor his son who was lost but now was found. The older brother, who had watched his father grieve over the many months, resented what his brother had done. But his father's response showed him another way, a higher way — to love and to be loved.
Where are we on our journey?
Which path at the crossroads did we choose?
Wherever we are,
we may be confident of one very great truth.
The Father stands at a roadside
watching for us with abiding love,
no matter how far we have strayed,
no matter how ashamed we are of what we have done.
He stands there looking at the far bend in the road,
watching for the appearance of small figure.
He longs to bless us with all that He has,
and He assures us,
it is ours.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.