Sermon for the Lord’s Day

March 14, 2010

Rev. Lorelei Hillman

The Prodigal Son

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

This is one of the most well-known, dearly loved passages of the Christian Bible.  And why not – many of us can identify with the prodigal son, his gender notwithstanding.  This is the story we love to hear when we’ve really botched things up, when we’ve taken what we could get and gone off on our own only to fail and have to return empty-handed, when we have turned our backs on the people who love us most.  We want to know, need to know, that there is forgiveness in the world, and that God puts us on the short list for it.

So we identify with the younger son, and admit that we have done wrong.  The story gives us courage to ‘come home’ to God our Father in hopes of finding even the least bit of love left.

Less often, we think of ourselves as the older brother.  How forgiving are we when someone we love goes so far wrong?  The pain and the bitterness go so deep, and the damage spreads so wide, it’s hard to know where to begin.

The alternative rock musician Matthew Ryan knows what this feels like.  His brother struggled over the years with a drug addiction.  Anyone who has known someone in this situation knows how destructive that is for the person themselves – and for their family.  All the energy and love they have is poured out, hoping against hope that the addict will somehow ‘come around.’  Parents suffer in silence, then tempers flare.  The household becomes a war zone.  Money goes missing, accusations are leveled, relationships fray and are torn apart.

The addict goes in and out of rehab, yet the family dares to hope.  Ryan wrote these words about that part of the experience:

“I remember that day you had just gotten out of rehab,
and I was happy to see you, happy to hope…
and I was proud of you, and we were going home,
the complete family,
just you and me, Mom and Dad,
a complete family…”

For Ryan, the complete family he dared to hope for was never realized.  His brother was eventually convicted of a crime and sentenced to 30 years in prison.  The song “The Complete Family” was never produced, it caused Ryan’s parents too much pain.[1]

American culture today tends to ignore this truth – that one person’s choices affect all those around them.  We tend to compartmentalize, thinking, “What a shame, he/she is really ruining their life.”  What we don’t talk about, don’t seem to recognize, is the destruction that they leave in their wake.  Somehow, the family, the friends, the co-workers, are meant to just go on as if nothing had happened.

So we really judge the older brother in Jesus’ story.  We go right to the point, that he’s supposed to be glad when his brother comes home.  What’s he standing out on the patio for, sulking?

Well, for one thing, he’s the one who got to pick up the pieces when Junior headed off without looking back.  It was the older brother who stayed on, shouldering the extra workload, spending extra time with Dad and Mom, watching their suffering and picking up the pieces.  If he thought he should get any gratitude, he didn’t ask for it.  Sure, he missed his kid brother at first – but seeing what his parents went through burned a hole right through his heart.  The empty seat at the table was all it took to ruin his day every day.

Out in the field, he could forget for a while.  The hard work, the satisfaction of a job well done, lifted the cloud a bit.  It wasn’t so much that he was looking forward to the day he would inherit the remainder of his Dad’s property.  It was that, by the labor of his hands and the faithfulness of his heart, he just might restore to his parents the love that they had lost.  The good son could erase the pain of the bad son.

This is all so human.  I don’t intend to psychoanalyze Matthew Ryan, but there is a tremendous poignancy in the fact that he changed his professional name from Ryan Webb to Matthew Ryan – Matthew is his brother’s name.[2]  It was most likely an act of faith on his part, a message of love to tell his brother that there will always be home to come to.  But it can also be seen as an act of love for his parents, that the son they have lost to drugs and to prison is not gone.  We want the healing to come, and we long to be the one who brings it.

This kind of pain is nothing new.  The men and women listening to Jesus would certainly have understood.  Sometimes our children break our hearts.  Sometimes it’s our siblings.  The list of brothers in the Bible who mess up, do the wrong thing, ‘go bad,’ is extensive.  It starts with Cain and Abel, moves on to Ishmael and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his nine brothers, Moses and Aaron, Absalom and Amnon, and more.  And in all of these cases, the poison spreads beyond the brothers; whole families are bruised and torn.

And that’s exactly why Jesus’ story stunned his audience.  They knew the rules: Deuteronomy 21:18 says “If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place.  They shall say to the elders of his town, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious.  He will not obey us.  He is a glutton and a drunkard.’  Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death.  So shall you purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel will hear, and be afraid.”

They knew the father had the right of life and death over this son of his.  They were already shaking their heads at the Father – he had been watching for his younger son to return, he saw him “while he was still far off.”  He didn’t wait for the son to approach, but actually ran to meet him.  He didn’t wait for his son’s speech of apology, but “put his arms around him and kissed him.”  Disgraceful.  No wonder the boy had gone wrong; his Father was obviously no disciplinarian!

We’re supposed to side with the older brother.  We’re supposed to feel indignant that the younger brother gets welcomed at all.  We’re supposed to resent the Father for not just giving in, but actually celebrating the return of his prodigal son.  As if the older brother’s suffering counted for nothing.  As if all of his trying to help and to heal were meaningless.  We can almost hear him cry out, “Do you see me, Father – I’ve been here all along, I’m the faithful one.  Show me that what I have done has mattered to you!”

The younger son should have been chastised, should have had to apologize, should have had to pay his dues.  He hurt the very people who loved him most – there should have been a price to pay.

These kinds of wounds do not go away easily.  After all the years of pain and sorrow, in overwhelming grief at his brother’s incarceration, Matthew Ryan could not perform in public.  He tried.  His friends had to take him aside and tell him, he was coming across as angry and arrogant.  He couldn’t find his voice. 

And then one day someone explained to him that, while the words he had written about his brother came out of a very personal experience, once he put them into a song they belonged to whoever heard them.[3]  The songs became something new, took on a different purpose.  Ryan says they were “something I did for myself and for my parents as well…”[4]  Even people in his audience took up the meaning.  Some already knew what he was talking about – they had been through it themselves.

Ryan had begun to deal with what had happened to him and to his family.  But more was needed.  There is only one thing that can reach into these twisting tunnels of pain.  Forgiveness.  The kind of forgiveness Jesus is talking about – the absolutely breathtaking, completely undeserved, knock-the-air-out-of-you forgiveness of the Father.  Only this kind of forgiveness can make space for real healing.  It doesn’t – it can’t – happen overnight.  We have to face all the destruction, and open up all the anger, to begin to get through it.  But it can happen. 

There is no other hope, and you know that’s true.  Our rehab centers are full twelve months of the year with lists of people waiting to get in.  Our prisons can’t hold all the people that have done wrong, gone ‘bad,’ broken the law.  Families are broken apart and estranged.  Brothers refuse to talk to brothers, or sisters, or parents.  Judgments are made, punishments assigned, affection withheld.  We call it justice.  The suffering goes on.

Matthew Ryan went on to write another song after his brother was incarcerated, this one called “For Blue Skies.”  The lyrics tell of his sorrow, remembering the days when the brothers were close and how Matthew’s addiction had come between them.  Ryan asks the question, “Could I have saved you… Would that have betrayed you?”  Then he says something that takes your breath away: “What you couldn’t do, I will.  I’ll forgive you.”[5]

Matthew and Ryan’s story is unresolved, just as most of the Biblical stories are.  Some brothers die.  Some come to an uneasy truce.  Some are reconciled.  Jesus does not tell us – will these brothers ever be friends again?  Will they learn to laugh together, to joke and wrestle and share as brothers may do?  We do not even get to see if the older brother goes back into the house with the Father.  Neither will Matthew Webb and Matthew Ryan know the end of their story for more than 20 years.  Certainly, Ryan and his parents will continue to feel sorrow and anger over what has happened.  That won’t go away.  But through forgiveness, which Ryan has called, “the sublime in darkness,” the healing has begun.  Amen.