Sermon | Tonita Branan, Seminarian | March 30, 2025

Readings: Psalm 32; 2 Cor. 5:16-21; Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32

Prayer: “Holy God – let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of all our hearts, be acceptable and pleasing to You this morning. And show us again on this 4th Sunday of Lent that sin and death and separation are not what You’ve saved us for. Amen.”

“The Prodigal Son” – a parable so popular that even outside Christian culture, people know the gist of it: a younger son coming of age who’s feeling himself, who wants “away” from his dad and everything he’s grown up around -- who (some readers think) disrespectfully asks for and then [laugh] receives the financial means to run reckless – who goes to “a distant land” and promptly squanders his fortune. Maybe for the first time in his life, the young son bottoms out – in distress, he decides to try home again -- where – in another reversal of fortune – he’s welcomed back by his father. Their reconciliation can feel like the story’s conclusion – except there’s this older brother who figures in and squelches the feel-good vibe -- who’s not buying what he perceives as his baby brother’s antics and drama.

In terms of this parable and what we might call “lessons” -- as I’ve been sitting with it, “the Prodigal Son” has unraveled on me – I’ve noticed more and more where things don’t add up in ways I’ve assumed in the past. Especially after consulting several Jewish commentaries, I’ve begun to make space for questions – kind of like running my hand along a wooden plank, reading for splinters.

One thing that bothers me about this parable: how easy it is to discount the older brother. If I don’t read carefully, I only see him as a killjoy: a workaholic who begrudges the fact that he works hard (admittedly, he describes himself as “slaving away” in the presence of his father’s actual slaves – a problematic topic for longer study – Jesus’s teachings and slavery – this is important to name).[1] However, the older brother reveals cracks in the family’s relationships that are often missed. Now, what’s not obvious in today’s readings is The Prodigal Son’s context: in Luke, this is the last in a trio of parables – just verses before “The Prodigal Son” there are two other stories about the lost sheep and the lost coin – both about counting.[2] According to scholars focused on Jesus’s Judaism, Luke’s early listeners would have been primed to interpret stories grouped in 3’s as building on a theme – in other words, when they came to The Prodigal Son they would’ve wondered – well, what’s the message here about counting? And “the place” to look is where the story seems to end – the younger son’s reconciliation with his father – the music, the dancing – [BREATH INTAKE] but wait – the father forgot to keep track. He forgot to count his other son, who’s been with him the whole time – he failed to call this son in from the fields -- this son, too, longs to be acknowledged – and the father does finally seek him out, to plead with him, to try to make things right. But notably, Jesus’s parable is open-ended on the question of reconciliation. Will the older brother’s resentment be healed – both toward his father and his younger brother? Will he join the celebration? Whether these figures come home to each other – in the sense of a full homecoming? – this is left unresolved. (If we read all the way through to the end.)

In my own life, personally, I too have had relationships hang in the balance. Some failed and were swept away from me – my marriage ended badly, and as much as I tried to manage the fallout, I was unable shield my children from collateral damage – what a fool’s errand to think that I could. Other relationships have been lost – some on this side of the veil, where repentance and apology were not enough to bridge the gap (it takes mutuality, and sometimes that’s not a thing), or where there was no reckoning -- or where maybe there was forgiveness but practically, continuing along was just untenable. When Psalm 32 evokes “heaviness” and “my moisture [being] dried up” I especially think of lost relationships beyond the veil – where I have regrets and cannot amend. What can I say to you? Some things we can only give over to God – who heals, I believe, beyond the grave and who reconciles beyond our experience of time, both backwards and forwards -- I think of Jesus’s body laid in the tomb, His long execution finally done, the stone hastily set in place – the quiet – the mystery of what realms he was inhabiting before his resurrection – what reconciliation was he effecting that Good Friday night and Holy Saturday?  And in my here and now, I have learned that homecoming and repair are never cavalier and must always start with prayer -- that God might grease the wheels of my ties to loved ones and acquaintances and help me see what’s mine to own. And then help me own it. This is partly why I welcome Lent every late winter – for my personal errors: crucially, for me to stop striving and fixing – this year my Lenten invitation is Annie Lamott’s image, to take my sticky little fingers off the driver’s wheel and release, open-handed to God.[3]

The other side of Lenten prayer, what Rev. Peter last week called corporate sin – how I’m entangled in systems that benefit me and that repeatedly hurt others (at least, this is usually how it plays out for my social identity -- these equations are different for each of us) – but this corporate sin feels murkier and more like paralysis: even when I’m struck and repentant, the “heaviness” here appears fixed – the brokenness of this tormented world can feel inescapable. With death-dealing systems – regarding The Prodigal Son’s open-ended homecoming question -- I dread that we can never come home together. But friends, this is a lie. The truth underneath our world’s veneer – the truth Paul corroborates in today’s 2nd Cor passage – is that God has reconciled us to God’s Own Self through Christ – and we need to get busy meeting each other, walking each other home. “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.” The Word being made flesh hasn’t stopped – we’re being made into “the [very] righteousness of God.”  (If we yield; if we step over the edge into God’s hands.) We can stand for homecoming amid oppressive systems – God wants to change how we’re dominated by them and how we cooperate with them. (Isn’t it good to do that work here together? Where else would you want to start?)[4]

Finally, the realities of homecoming and who counts matter very much in my internship at Trinity. When I first landed here and was assigned as a point person for Chapel on the Green with Lisa Levy as my supervisor – it did feel like coming home. If you haven’t experienced CotG – it’s amazingly well curated – by Lisa, by Luk and Heidi, and James Thomas, with the steady presence of my fellow seminarian, Elishia McAllister. There’s worship for those interested (with music and the Prayers of the People led resoundingly by CotG parishioners) – and regardless of participation in the service, anyone can enjoy the free meal afterwards. We partner with other churches who want to share Trinity’s proximity to inner-city need, who want to be in relationship with struggling neighbors – because – just as many of you know, who are buoyed by values-based, community building (both within Trinity and other organizations) -- there’s JOY in it. There’s traction working and being together. Here’s the secret sauce of that Acts phenomenon, “One Body in Christ” – it’s energizing to be connected, to be for something bigger than ourselves.

I want to challenge us all – any time you witness dividing lines between Inside Trinity and Outside Trinity – take a risk and erase them. Get creative with it – make God laugh. Dividing lines aren’t what God desires for us. Let’s remember Bishop Desmond Tutu’s encouragement – that as Christians we move toward suffering – not to do good works or stack up Brownie points -- but because that’s where Christ is.[5]

Amen.

[1] This time reading Luke 15, I couldn’t get past “slaves” as stock figures in The Prodigal Son parable. The more I researched this topic, the more I noticed slavery marks many of Jesus’s teachings across the Gospels. What’s disturbing is that Jesus references slavery without seeming to critique it (even implicitly). And as scholar Jennifer Glancy observes in Slavery and Early Christianity, many slave bodies in Jesus’s stories are physically vulnerable. I feel like this is a can of worms I’m meant to explore in more detail (maybe in community) – what are we to make of this? [And contrary to popular notions, slavery in the 1st-century Roman Empire wasn’t “soft” – it was brutal – just not based on race [as we think of race], as was American chattel slavery.) On one hand, Jesus was fully human and referenced the world (and systems) around him to appeal to His followers with real-life imagery they could grasp. But on the other – what are our ethical responsibilities as readers today? One of Glancy’s later chapters points toward a possible handlebar: that the death Jesus was moving toward – an execution reserved for slaves, criminals, people who were not Roman citizens – that this death qualifies and challenges slavery in every sense.

[2] For these points about Jewish stories “in three(s),” fathers with two sons, and counting, I’m grateful to Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington III; see their commentary, The Gospel of Luke (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 410-32. Also see The Jewish Annotated New Testament, ed. by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 146.

[3] There are so many Annie Lamott nuggets teeming in my brain – I think this one is from Traveling Mercies (1999).

[4] I’m grateful to Dean McGowan of the Berkeley School for recent conversations about systemic evil/original sin and Paul’s theology in the early chapters of Romans.

[5] This paraphrases a quote from Tutu’s God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time.