The crucial point of our Gospel story
isn’t the
prodigal son’s return.
Jesus isn’t telling this story to the sinners.
He’s talking to the righteous folks who are grumbling
about
his friendship with sinners.
No, the point is the good dutiful son’s
reaction
-- boycotting
the welcome party.
It’s about Communion – both our Sunday morning
ritual;
and
the lived reality of Communion in the world.
If we are just doing the ritual and not
living out what it means,
then
we desecrate the sacrament
and derive no benefit from it.
The story of the dutiful son’s boycott of the
dinner party
Is
our jumping off place to reflect on Communion.
I will be going to our House of Bishops
meeting this week.
I like going to House of Bishops.
I like the people. I learn from them. I enjoy
them.
And our worship makes my heart sing.
But it wasn’t always like that.
There was a time when the bishops used to make
angry speeches
at
each other.
They used to act like some of our politicians
these days,
judging,
condemning, and mocking each other.
When it came time to worship, some of the
bishops
would go off
separately and hold their own communion,
with the people they approved of and agreed with.
We don’t do that anymore.
When Bishop Katharine was first Presiding
Bishop.
she would go to
the meetings of the Primates
– that’s the top
bishop of each of the 39 Anglican Churches.
But when it came time to worship,
some
archbishops refused to receive communion with her.
They chose to cut themselves off from Christ
rather than be
in communion with a woman bishop.
So let’s look at the dilemma of the dutiful
son.
He has worked like a slave for his father,
while
his no-count brother was off squandering
the
family fortune.
Then the brother returns and dad is throwing
him
a
welcome home party.
The dutiful son wants justice.
He wants to see dad slam the door in his
brother’s face.
But his father is not that kind of a man.
His father is like God.
Remember what Jesus said in the Sermon on the
Mount?
“Be like your father who causes the sun to
shine and the rain to fall
on
the just and the unjust alike.”
God is not judging but forgiving,
not
punishing but embracing.
Paul says that Jesus paid the price to
reconcile
all
people to God in himself.
Sinners are in Christ right along with the relatively
righteous.
According to Paul, none of us is good enough
to
stand on his own righteousness.
“For all have sinned and fallen short of the
glory of God,”
he
told the Romans.
We all got our problems.
We all live in glass houses.
Our very right to exist depends on what Paul
calls “being in Christ.”
That doesn’t mean having the right theological
opinions.
It isn’t something we do.
We can accept it or fight against it.
But we don’t do it. Jesus already did it.
He did it on the cross.
He died to reconcile us to our source, our
destiny,
and
the meaning of our life.
Once Jesus dies for us, we are in Christ.
He has reconciled us to God.
Now what does that mean for where we stand
with each other?
Back when I was a priest in Georgia,
there
were some antagonistic factions
in
the Church.
So people would ask our Bishop, Neil
Alexander,
how
he would go about how he’d deal
with
this group or that group.
Bishop Alexander would answer,
“I
never met anyone yet that Jesus didn’t die for his sins.”
Paul says in today’s lesson,
“
God reconciled us to himself through Christ,
and
has given us the ministry of reconciliation.”
He says it twice back to back to make sure we
got it.
God didn’t make peace with one of us or a few
of us.
God made peace with all of us.
The way for us to live in that peace
is
to be at peace with each other.
But there is something that sets us against each
other,
something
that makes us build an edifice of pride
on
something that we have and someone else doesn’t.
I am alright because I am smart or spiritual
or left wing or right wing.
I’ve been born again or baptized in the Sprit
or reached mystical union.
I am the right race, the right religion, and
the right political party.
I pack a gun or I don’t pack a gun.
The problem isn’t our opinions.
The problem is that we identify with them,
stake
our human worth on being right about them
and
that requires someone else to be wrong.
Paul says that when we invest our human worth
in something
that separates us from others,
we’re investing in the wrong stock.
None of us are fully right about anything –
ever!
We are not capable of it.
If our human worth depends on any of that, we
are lost.
But by the grace of God, our human worth depends
on Jesus.
Your worth and my worth are the same worth.
That puts our different opinions at a
considerably lower level
of
importance.
Trusting our souls to Jesus creates a space
in
which we can have respectful, caring, curious conversations
where
we might even learn something.
That is what we mean by love.
But, as Phil Collins said, “love don’t come
easy
when
it’s a game of give and take.”
It takes time and effort.
It takes practice.
That’s why God has given us each other
and
given us the common life.
When I say “the common life,”
I
mean the stuff we do together.
-- church life,
work life, political life, and social life
including traffic and social media --
how we drive and what we post.
The common life is where we learn how to live
with difference.
As Phil Collins said, “It’s a game of give
and take.”
It’s where sacrifice, compromise, patience,
forbearance, courtesy,
civility,
and understanding different viewpoints are all essential.
And that brings us back to Communion
– both the
ritual and the lived reality.
Communion is about difference united in love.
Communion isn’t sameness. It isn’t thinking
alike.
It’s difference coming together.
That’s where the energy comes from.
The common life keeps us humble.
It frustrates our willfulness,
offers
us a chance to practice patience and forgiveness,
evokes
our compassion and tests our integrity.
So what’s all this for?
If God has already reconciled us to himself
in Christ,
why
must we undergo the ordeal of each other,
or
as Paul puts it, why has God given us
“the
ministry of reconciliation?”
St. Augustine answers that God
is preparing us
for something
that we are not yet ready for.
Praying, meditating, doing yoga, eating
groats
and
all of that are fine spiritual practices.
But the essential spiritual practice is
Communion,
including
participating in the messy frustrating
common
life of church and community.
We practice Communion while we are being changed
by it.
Through Communion, we are transformed from
glory
unto
glory into the likeness of Christ.
Augustine said we have to undergo this hard
process
of
Communion in a broken bleeding world
in
order that we might someday be able “to bear the weight of glory.”
We long for God now, but we are not ready for
God yet.
Dealing with each other is what prepares us
for the nearer presence
of Our Lord.
Or as William Blake put it,
“We are put on
earth a little space
that
we might learn to bear the beams of love.”
That’s what this altar is here to teach us.
That’s what the common life is here to teach us
-- “to bear the
beams of love.”
