I don’t want to walk past

Yesterday, I told of a connection made between King of Peace and the Melanesian Brotherhood in a time of crisis and death in the Solomon Islands.

Today, I want to share what the Rev. Richard Carter has been up to more recently. He has returned to England and serves as an Assistant Priest at St. Martin in the Fields Church in London.

On March 18, he preached a sermon Exploring God's Parable of the Lost and Found on the parable usually referred to as The Prodigal Son. He wrote in part:

When I toured many secondary schools performing this parable in 2005 our prodigal became a black migrant in the UK with all the temptations facing a newly arrived youth in a modern city. The dissolute living for those who performed the story became the unremitting message of a consumerist society that “to be is to have” - have money, have instant gratification, have mobile, have ipod, have alcohol, have drugs, have who you want, have what you want 24/7. And it left our prodigal like the original without anyone or anything, alone on the streets.

In the drama I told the kids to walk past our prodigal. He was lying on the ground without anything, like the homeless people we often see on our city pavements. “Walk past him” I said, “like we do.” Walk past him like when someone wants to sell you The Big Issue. And in our drama we did. And then in one school where we were performing the drama in Merseyside one young boy aged eleven confronted me:

“I don’t want to walk past”.

“What?” I asked.

“I don’t want to walk past him, I want to help him.”

“You can’t do that, it’s not in the script” I told him.

“But I want to help him” he said.

“Well then I suppose you better had.” I replied.

He went over and put his hand on the Prodigal sons shoulder and knelt down beside him.

“Look if your hungry I can ask my Mum to get you something to eat.”

Mothers are like that.

I saw that Christ’s parable had made its journey across time and culture. And the story was being inhabited by this young boy who had had the courage to stand up to the pressure of group conformity and make his response his own. Christ’s parable was alive and continuing its work in Merseyside and there was hope in that.

The full text of the sermon is online in PDF format here: Exploring God's Parable of the Lost and Found.

The Forgiving Father

In tomorrow's Gospel reading Jesus tells one of his best known parables, The Prodigal Son. The Rev. Ken Kesselus has preached on this passage saying,

The fine point of interpretation obviously hinges on whether the younger son was restored to his former hereditary position after he wasted his share and then returned, or whether he received no further inheritance. Contrary to the legal view, many assume that the younger son was completely taken back into full and total relationship with his father when he returned. The older son would not have been so upset simply about his brother being given a party. He must have understood that the younger son was back in the inheritance picture, and would one day receive a half of what the older brother had come to expect as the full remaining inheritance.

In fact, the story would carry no real weight if the legal view is correct -- if Jesus' point was simply that the younger son was given a party by his father and allowed to become a worker on the farm. It is too conventional, too ordinary, too human to imagine a father welcoming a prodigal's return, throwing a party for him, and yet protecting the older son's investment by not letting the prodigal again become an heir.

Of course, such a view affirms our natural idea of fairness. But that's just the point. That is where the argument breaks down. It is simply too legalistic, places too much emphasis on the unfairness of the prodigal getting an additional portion of inheritance, and relies too much on the concept of rewards and punishments.

Those who choose to call this the "Parable of the Forgiving Father" view the prodigal, younger son as forgiven and accepted by the father, and also brought back fully into the family and eventually given an additional share of the inheritance-unfair as that may seem....

When Jesus had the father say to the older son, "Everything I have is yours," he described the treasure chest of God's mercy and love that is inexhaustible. God makes each of us equal heirs of God's kingdom. God gives each of us an equal share, whether we come to the kingdom early or late. Jesus illustrated the same thing by having the father say to the younger son, after his return from a season of sin, "you remain my son, and you share equally with you older brother."

The full text of his sermon is online here: Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year C