Reconciliation

II Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

March 18, 2007

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

 

            The daytime book group has been reading a wonderful book called In the Spirit of Happiness written by the Orthodox Monks of New Skete in New York State. We were reading a chapter about God in which this line occurs, “God is absolutely, without doubt, the happiest being around. You can’t find a happier one.” The group had some trouble with this, as members considered God looking at our world where people kill each other in ever more inventive ways, where people hate each other for such odd reasons, where families are broken apart and children abused, where the earth God created is also abused and exploited. How could God, looking at this, be happy? Wouldn’t God instead most of the time be in tears?

 

            When I read this familiar story that we call the Prodigal Son, I thought again about that conversation. You know, the story is not really primarily about the son, either son. It’s about this crazy father. It’s about this father who doesn’t seem to think that his son needs to confess before he receives forgiveness. It’s about this father who doesn’t seem to think the son has to prove he has changed before receiving him back into the family. It’s about this wasteful father who throws a huge party, killing the fatted calf, for heaven’s sake, which could have been sold to make money for the farm, all just because his son became so desperate that he had to come home. It’s about this father whose joy at just seeing the son he thought had left him forever is so palpable that we can almost feel the bearhug with which he greeted his child, the kind of hug that seems to go on forever, where the hugger can’t let go and the one being hugged doesn’t want him to. We don’t hear from this father anger or indignation or scorn or self-righteousness or punishment. We hear and see pure joy, so much so that he can’t understand why his elder son doesn’t feel the same joy.

 

            Like the monks, I believe God is full of joy into eternity because God, like this father, lives in a perpetual state of forgiveness, a continuous quest for reconciliation with everyone on this planet, those who are living just and good lives as well as those who seem to work very hard at breaking relationships. Jesus, like Paul in his letter to Corinth, is trying to tell us that a central part of the nature of God is to be eternally forgiving. That is why God is so full of joy.

 

            Most human beings have trouble with this, because, in Paul’s language, we see people from a human point of view. We lift up the importance of justice and accountability. We make our kids say they’re sorry. We make criminals go to jail and pay for their crimes. We say things like “how can I make it up to you?” when we have done something wrong. And there are terrible things that happen to us that we may never feel able to forgive: rape, murder, betrayal, abuse. So many people live lives defined by brokenness and pain because of what others have done to them or what they have done to others. Reconciliation seems difficult at best.

 

            Now it would be easy for me to stand up here and say that you all could live happily ever after if you could just forgive those folk and take up your ministry of reconciliation and stop regarding them from a human point of view and see them as God sees them. And some of you would feel free to ignore me. But I’m not going to because I think that is moving too quickly through this story. As I said earlier, this story is not primarily about either brother (that would be us), but rather about the father. Remember the context of this parable. The good and righteous and law-abiding Pharisees (read older brothers) were upset because Jesus was spending most of his time hanging out with sinners (read younger brothers), with people who had done some really bad things, with people who had been kicked out of the synagogues because they broke commandments, were adulterers or thieves or prostitutes or collaborated with the Romans. These sinners had not done anything, or enough, in the eyes of the good people to make up for what they had done wrong. Until they proved themselves, Jesus shouldn’t be hanging around with them. Don’t go to a dinner party with Zaccheus until he’s stopped being a corrupt tax collector.

 

            So Jesus tells this story to help them understand who God is and what is at the center of God’s deepest desires for us, what gives God constant joy: having people who have broken their relationship with God come back home into God’s loving embrace and start over. God doesn’t get joy out of assigning long lists of penances or meting out punishment. Elsewhere Jesus says God doesn’t rejoice in the death of a sinner, but that a sinner turns around and lives. And God will run and greet anyone who even seems to be turning a little in God’s direction and pull them into the celebration of love. In the words of Martin Luther, for God, “forgiveness is not an occasional art; it is a permanent attitude.”

 

            It begins with our relationship with God, as Jesus knew so well. When his disciples asked him how to pray, his prayer, words we repeat every Sunday, included the words “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” We don’t need to ask God to forgive us after we have made up for what we did wrong, just to forgive us. If we live into the understanding that this is how God treats us, then, the prayer continues, we are not only called but empowered to forgive those who have harmed us. It doesn’t say that God’s forgiveness of us is contingent on our ability to forgive others, just that our forgiveness can flow naturally from living ourselves in a state of perpetual forgiveness. When we live fully into having been forgiven, then we can become ministers of reconciliation.

 

            One of the poet Robert Frost’s most famous lines is “home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Sadly for many people, that is not true. But it is true for our home with God, and I’m not talking about heaven, but our relationship with God now, on earth. O my friends, can you understand the depth of God’s grace to you and to me? How God rushes to meet us when we turn toward God even after we have so excelled at turning away? How God celebrates when we are one and whole? How in God we always have a home? If we can know that, as the New Skete monks say, “forgiveness is a state of being we live in, not something we earn,” then we can create homes open to all those who need to become whole. Then we can mean the words of that prayer and not only be forgiven, but, like the father in the parable, be joyful, energetic forgivers. Begin by believing that God rushes to meet you with great hugs and throws a party in your honor and forgives, forgives, forgives. Amen.