Showing Extravagant Love

Scriptures: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:11-32

Why in the world would the lectionary compilers here toward the end of Lent provide us with this, oh so familiar story of The Prodigal Son? Didn’t your ears kinda glaze over (whoops, mixed metaphor) as I read it? Even if you couldn’t recite it verbatim, most every one of you could tell it in your sleep. Haven’t we gleaned just about as many lessons as we could have out of this story? What more could it possibly have to tell us?

Well, maybe sometimes we have to hear old stories with new ears. By now, those of you who have heard me preach for awhile know that I tend to be affectionate about alliteration. (See?) Here’s a version of The Prodigal Son that I found on the Internet that tickled my fancy; the author, evidently, is unknown. It’s called “Melody in F” for reasons that will soon be obvious.

Feeling footloose and frisky,
a featherbrained fellow
Forced his fond father to fork
over the farthings.
And flew far to foreign fields
And frittered his fortune
feasting
Fabulously with faithless
friends.

Fleeced by his fellows in
folly, and facing
Famine, he found himself a
feed-flinger in a
Filthy farm yard.
Fairly famished, he fain
would have filled
His frame with foraged food
from fodder
Fragments.

“Fooey, my father’s flunkies fare far finer,”
The frazzled fugitive forlornly fumbled,
frankly
Facing facts. Frustrated by failure, and filled
with foreboding,
He fled forthwith to his family.

Falling at his father’s feet, he forlornly
fumbled,
“Father, I’ve flunked, and fruitlessly forfeited
Family fellowship & favor.”
The far-sighted father, forestalling
Further flinching, frantically flagged the flunkies to
Fetch a fatling from the flock
and fix a feast.

The fugitive’s fault-finding
brother frowned on fickle
forgiveness of former
folderol.

But the faithful father figured,
“Filial fidelity is fine, but the
fugitive is found! What
forbids fervent festivity? Let flags be unfurled!
Let fanfares flare!”

Father’s forgiveness formed
the foundation for the
former fugitive’s future fortitude!

OK. I’ll bet you’re not going to hear this Biblical story again the next time without getting a bit of a smile on your face after flinging all those “f” words around.

By the way, the term “prodigal” does not occur in the parable. The word means “wasteful” and the younger son was certainly wasteful, but the parable has a lot of other things going for it. There is the older brother’s lack of generosity; it could be called “the parable of the brother with the bad attitude” just as well. Or, for that matter, it could also be called “the parable of the loving father”. Tim Geddert suggests that it could be called “the parable of the running father”. Why? Well, we’ll come to that in a little bit.

I’d like you to think about something for a minute – really mull on it so you don’t come to too hasty a conclusion. Who do you identify with in the parable? Which of the characters in it strike you as most like yourself? (If any one tells me they identify with the prostitutes the younger son first spent his time with “in dissolute living” or with the fatted calf that is about to be killed, I’d like to set up a counseling session with you.) Do you have one of the characters in mind? Younger son who repents and returns? Older son who isn’t very charitable?

Here’s what I’d like you to consider: the character with which we are meant to identify is…..the father. I know, in most interpretations of this parable the father is understood to be God, and that’s a rather heady thought…..to think of ourselves as being like God. But to identify with a character in a story is not necessarily to say that that is what we are like now in our attitudes and behaviors. It could very well be a way of saying that that is what we would like to become.

The father is exhibiting that trait of God which is the single most important attribute of God we know: the showing forth of extravagant love. This is the trait we want to emulate. To show this kind of love does not mean we are trying to be God; it means that we are seeking to act in the way God wants us to act.

What does it mean to show extravagant love – as over against, say, any other kind? This is exactly why Jesus told this parable – quite probably the most beloved of all his parables, challenged only by the one about the Good Samaritan. Look at the ways in which the father loved: he gave his son his share of the inheritance, even though in that culture it was a faux pas of the first order to even suggest that he wanted to have his father’s inheritance before his father’s death; he accepted his wayward son back unconditionally – not asking for explanations of where all the inheritance money had gone; he prepared to kill and eat the fatted calf – a great gift in a country where such bounty was relatively rare, and thus this was an overly-generous offering; he took the time to go after the older son to try to help him understand why he was doing what he was doing for the younger son and to reassure him of his, the father’s, continuing love for him, the older brother. Any one of these things would be an act of exemplary generosity, but in their totality here is indeed a description of extravagant love. The question for us is: how can we ever hope to emulate that degree of compassion? And the answer is: God wants no less from us.

There’s one other small detail that further reflects the extravagance of the father’s love. I said before that Tim Geddert suggests that this story could be called “the parable of the running father”. He comes to that suggestion out of his experience with missionaries in Arab countries who report that in their society for a man to run out to greet his son, as Jesus relates that he does (“he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him”), would mean that he would have to lift up his robes, thereby exposing his feet and ankles – a most unseemly thing for a well-to-do man to do in that culture. Geddert goes on to say, “How far was this father willing to go, how much did it cost him, to restore the broken relationships in his family? [This story] is about a father for whom relationships are so important, he is willing to risk his honor, willing to submit to scorn, willing to break all the rules of propriety, if only relationships within the family can be rebuilt.”

What really counts in the family of God is relationships. And the two sons were both in their own ways abusing those familial relationships – the first by both asking for and then squandering an inheritance (along with an implied assumption about his relationship to his father, “You are living too long. I do not want to wait any more! I want to get something out of life now. I do not want to wait until you are dead!”), and the second by getting up on his high horse and making almost an identical implied assumption when he complains, “All these years I have been slaving for you! Look how long I have been waiting to become the boss! How much longer do you intend to live, Dad?”

And so the father must look to restore relationships within the family of God by the incredible scope of his love. He is reconciling the two of them to himself and to themselves. He is doing it by the full force of his forgiveness.

There’s a story about two fathers that illustrates that force of forgiveness. I’ve told this to you before a few years ago, but it bears repeating in this context. It appears in the documentary film, “Journey Toward Forgiveness”, which was produced by the Mennonite Church for the National Council of Churches and which aired on ABC-TV.

Bud Welch lost his daughter, Julie, in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. In the aftermath he was consumed with grief and rage, smoked and drank heavily, and saw little purpose to life. Several months later he saw a TV interview with Bill McVeigh, the father of the bomber, Timothy McVeigh. Even through the TV set he could see someone who was haunted and who, in the end, was as much of a victim as he was. Ultimately, Bud got up the courage to visit Bill McVeigh, and as they realized their common ground – literally; they both have backyard gardens – Bud was able to begin a long journey to forgiveness. The pain of Julie’s death and how it happened will never be completely taken away, but as Bud came to realize that Bill would also lose a son when Timothy was executed, he started to find a commonality of grief that allowed forgiveness to take hold. This sense of forgiveness has led Bud to help other victims and to become an advocate for the end of the death penalty.

Part of what I like about this story as it reflects that of The Prodigal Son is that pain and grief are real – the father in The Prodigal Son is pained by how his sons have abused the relationship; he grieves over a son who, it would seem, has been lost to him; and thus he rejoices all the more when he is able to offer his forgiveness and love. There is here an abundance of grace.

Rodney Clapp describes abundance thinking particularly well: “Every time God’s active, stretching, searching, healing love finds someone and calls that person back home, it does not mean there is less for the rest of us. It means there is more. More wine. More feasting. More music. More dancing. It means another, and now a bigger, party.” The real theme of this parable, as David Gushee says, is “forgiveness with music and dancing”.

I said a moment ago that the father in this story is reconciling the two of them to himself and to themselves. That’s what Paul is describing to the church at Corinth in the passage we read from Second Corinthians. I have a confession to make – or maybe it’s really just an admission: 2 Corinthians 5:19 is my favorite verse in the whole Bible: “in Christ God was reconciling the world to Godself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.” Paul has captured here in that one verse the whole message that Christ brought about God’s extravagant love. God will not count our trespasses against us. Do you hear the resonances here with The Prodigal Son? The father will not allow whatever the sons have done to cause him to reject them. Rather, he seeks for reconciliation among them – no, it’s stronger than that: he must run to them and embrace them and throw parties in order that reconciliation may take place. No matter how relationships are abused in the family of God, relationships must always be reconciled.

But Paul takes it a step further. We are the ones who have been entrusted with the message of reconciliation. We are ambassadors for Christ. We have been reconciled to God, so that in Christ “we might become the righteousness of God”. Our ambassadorship is to show forth in all our relationships that extravagant love that God, in Christ, has shown to us. As the chorus to that marvelous hymn that we’ll sing at the close of the service says it, “They’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love; Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”

How extravagant is your love? How are you being an ambassador for Christ by showing forth his love? We often get all sentimentalized about what love is and how we ought to be exhibiting it, but the father in this story is quite concrete about what he feels he must do. And he doesn’t let societal rules of propriety – like a little thing of lifting up his robes even if his ankles show – get in the way of running as fast as he can to embrace a wayward son. In so doing he gives his son the strength to get a new hold on life. Yes, it’s a bit silly with its labored alliteration, but I still like the way the end of “Melody in F” puts it: “Father’s forgiveness formed the foundation for the former fugitive’s future fortitude!”

Take that forgiveness into all your worlds, and let it help you find the way to exhibit extravagant love.

Next week we conclude our Lenten series as we strain for the finish line.

Amen.

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
March 14, 2010