Wedgewood Baptist Church, Charlotte, North Carolina
March 12, 2006, Lent
Lesson: Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
Christianity from its inception has been a social phenomenon. Even the alleged "hermits" more often than not existed as members of groups of hermits; associated with others, even if not living and working with them. Christianity has been a social phenomenon because human beings are social by our nature. We are such that we exist within intricate webs of relationships. Humans are social animals, if you will.
Metaphysically speaking, we exist primarily in relationship to God, other people, other parts of creation. Outside of those relationships, the question of our reality becomes a matter of debate. If a tree falls in the middle of the forest where there is no one to hear it, does it make a noise?
We define ourselves in terms of how we relate to others. We are parents, children, spouses, siblings, friends, employees, employers, acquaintances, relatives, lovers, enemies. Even when we dislike others we are defined by our relationship to them: misanthrope, misogynist, bigot.
The phrase "dysfunctional relationship" has become a cliche in our time. We have dysfunctional marriages, dysfunctional families, dysfunctional relational styles. The phrase is much overused, as is all pop psych lingo. No one who is well versed and enthralled by such beliefs is able to identify health. That is to say, people who have made dysfunction their career will deny that any family might be "functional". Without other options, the words become meaningless. What does it mean to be dysfunctional if there is no such thing as functional?
To say that this overindulgence in pop psycho-analysis is ill founded, however, is not to say that there is not a great many wounded people in our world. Broken and hurting in their relationships with others. Grown children who have throbbing welts on their psyches where parents abused them or ignored them. Parents who did their best with their children only to be abandoned in their decline when their needed their children to take care of them.
Grown children whom parents have abandoned or cast out for one reason or another. Friends who have unnecessarily busied themselves so much that they have no time for friends, casting them aside out of the way of the progress of their careers. Spouses who have left and/or betrayed spouses for their own false satisfactions. The list goes on. Most of us -- all of us if we are honest with ourselves -- carry a cart load of regrets with us concerning our relationships in life. If only I had ... this that or the other.
In the parable of the loving father, Jesus describes a wide range of relational dis-ease. Surely in our day, the family described in the parable would have been deemed dysfunctional in many ways. If only the father had had some good assertiveness training, if he had been aggressive in his parenting, then perhaps the younger son would not have left. And certainly in our day, the father would not have parted with half his wealth.
The youngest son runs off to the bright lights of the big city with his gold card cocked and at the ready. He evidently completely forgets his family back on the farm. Hard at play, by the time of his financial troubles we find no evidence that he has actually developed any relationships with his new urban buddies. The youngest son spends his entire inheritance on slow horses and fast women and when the Reagan years finally hit hard, recession sends into homelessness, hunger, and to a place as bad as it could get for a Jewish boy, NYC homeless shelters not being in existence yet, the pig sty.
My how the mighty have fallen, his brother would have said. His brother would have enjoyed the view of his little brother, so pompous at his bar mitzphah, now standing amid all that foul pork on the hoof, fighting them for the putrid remains of the slop bucket. There was apparently not a lot of love lost between the two brothers. To give the older brother credit, the relational problems seem to be on both sides. We never hear the younger son even mention his brother.
The son finally realizes the ridiculousness of his predicament and returns to his father's house to try to at least get a job. He prepares his speech well, with a lot of "I'm not worthys" and that sort of thing. The father, in what today would be a classic example of over-protectiveness or co-dependency or some such thing, has been sitting on the front porch waiting for the younger son and welcomes him home. He gives him fancy new clothes, new jewelry, and throws the best spontaneous party of the whole social season.
The father does not seem caught up in his need to express any feelings he may have about the son's behavior. He seems only happy to have the son back on the ranch and under his roof. On the part of the younger son, we hear no further protestations of his unworthiness, or in fact, any other discourse at all. Having apparently gotten a much better deal than he expected, he probably didn't want to rock the boat.
The older son was a different story. Having stayed at home being responsible all that time, he seems a bit annoyed at his father's reception of the youngest son. When he returned from a hard day in the fields and heard the music and dancing and the reason for it, he was angry and refused to go in. I suppose that he just couldn't deal with his feelings. He misdirected his anger or perhaps just couldn't confront his father or some such dysfunctional thing. The father, unaided by books on family systems and birth order personality, was most likely unable to convince the older son of the rightness of his actions with his argument that the younger son had been raised from the dead.
Clearly, I don't agree that all of the behavior in this story is dysfunctional. The father loved. The younger brother was recklessly adventurous. The older brother was perhaps rightly angry. "Dysfunctional" is not the correct word for the relationships in the story, with the possible exception of the younger son's relationships in the big city. But between the family members, the relationships are functioning as we all might expect them to.
What we do see quite clearly is an incredible amount of pain, woundedness, and hurt between the three men of our story. The father must have been deeply grieved by the younger son's leaving and by the older son's anger. The younger son felt no attachment to his family in the beginning and came back feeling unworthy to even be a house slave. The older son felt used and neglected by his father. The pain of their relationships rises from the page and creates tension even when it is simply read -- because it reminds us of ourselves.
How many of us here now ache with the pain of wounded relationships? How many of us are like Moses in Midian, living somewhat comfortably only at the expense of alienation and estrangement from those with whom we have broken bonds? How many of us have painful stories hidden deep inside - of our parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers, lovers and friends pushed away or walled out, perceived neglect or abuse, betrayals and knives in our backs that leave unhealing wounds?
How many of us have felt crucified by relationships? toiling painfully up new Calvaries ever, receiving our stigmata from our relationships; finding the bonds of love often become unhealthy bondage? How many of us find that one out of twelve of our friends and family seems more like Judas than like Peter? How many of us need God's healing for our relationships? How many of us need resurrection in our dealings with family and friends? How many of us seek new life through relationship with God?
The good news is that we can return home. The good news is that Jesus told this story about the Realm of God; that even though leaving 99 sheep to find only one lost sheep is not good business, God does it anyway. That even though she may have spent a more money finding the lost coin than she saved, God did it anyway. And even though we may label it dysfunctional, or self-defeating or whatever, God still sits on the porch waiting for us to return and welcomes us with fine clothes and food and, did you notice, no punishments or recriminations for leaving or what happened while away - only celebration over the return.
The good news is that even in our pain, God offers healing; that God stands ready to enter the struggle with us. The good news is that God offers new life amid the death and decay of our wounds. The good news is that God loves us, and cares for us, and doesn't even notice our manipulations or God's own alleged unhealthy selflessness. The good news is that after we crucify each other and seal away the corpses -- God brings about resurrection, new life, new birth from withered wombs. It's good news. May God give us the grace to hear it. May God give us the grace to receive God's healing in our lives.
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