Sermon for Lent 4 year C Prodigal son (2)

All that I have is yours – words spoken by the father to the elder brother

A certain man…The story doesn’t give the father a name because this isn’t a story about ONE family but every family.

Kipling wrote a poem about it. Britten and Debussy set it to music. Rembrandt painted it. Andre Gide wrote a story based on it. John Piper designed a window on its theme. Scott Joplin turned it into a ballet.

So it’s a story which has spoken to many. What does it say to us? Do we identify with the younger brother, sitting around thinking ‘There must be something more to life than this….’? We want a bit of excitement. But there’s an elder brother sitting inside our conscience censuring us. You’ve got responsibilities – that elderly dependant relative

We tend to think of puritans as kill joys; more like the elder brother than the younger one, but their 17th Century Westminster Confession stated: ‘The chief end of man is to praise God and to enjoy him for ever.’ – not sitting on a cloud twanging harps but enjoying our life on earth, now. “All that I have is yours.” – not just the bit you have in your hands at this moment.

The chief end – purpose. How will we ever know what that purpose is if we simply stay conventional, go into the job our parents and teachers map out for us, marry the sort of person who fits in with their expectations and bring up kids the way we were brought up?

But we don’t belong to our parents but to God, so it is God’s purpose for us which matters, not our parents. If we believe in the doctrine of original sin, then all our human conventions are flawed; so our parents’ hopes aren’t necessarily right for us.

“Our youth have no manners, they don’t respect authority, they bolt their food.” wrote Plato in 400 BC. It seems as if youthful rebellion is written into our DNA – by God?

Each generation has an inbuilt urge to leave the familiar and explore. To deny that urge is to fail to live up to what those puritans called ‘our chief end’. Sin is not a naughty act; it is to live a restricted life and to restrict others’ to limit ‘All that I have is yours’ to – you can have some of it. So we’ve got a drive put to find our true self and not to be a mere echo of our parents.

Caroline was a music student. Her ambition was to play in an orchestra. She got a teaching qualification as back up but longed for the day when she could leave teaching. She had an audition for an orchestra and was rejected. Alone in her flat, with her violin, she lost her nerve and couldn’t bear to practice. Teaching became a chore. She became bitter. It could have been different. She could have continued practicing. She might have joined an amateur orchestra. She might have gained a buzz from that which gave her day to day teaching a lift but to do that she would have had to face up to reality, like the prodigal son when he came to himself. The ambition had to be followed and then given up or at least modified. What he wanted didn’t bring the happiness he expected.

He found himself in a strange land. No man gave anything to him. The ambition fulfilled does not give what he thought it would give.

So, when we come to our self, our true self, we realise that material things aren’t really what we were looking for after all. Our ambition was a drive for something else. All our yearning is, at heart, a yearning after God according to St. Augustine.

We can get stuck in trying to fulfil our yearning with substitutes, desperately thrashing around for a fix: workaholism, alcoholism, drug addiction, possessions, fame. But, sooner or later we end up in the gutter. Either dramatically, literally, on the edge of the street, or, more often, stuck in a rut, living a life of quiet desperation. In that gutter or that rut we take a long hard look, face up to who we are. Then we realise that it was God we were seeking all along but we had to travel a long way to discover that. Then we come home to him.

But the elder brother is not best pleased. If we identify with him then we like a predictable life. We are good, dutiful people. People depend on us and we don’t let them down. Yet we probably sit there, like the prodigal, thinking ‘There must be something more to life’.

If we don’t lighten up and welcome the prodigal brother we shall end up resenting him. Instead of embracing people who are different, realising ‘All that I have is yours’, being amused at the foibles of human nature, seeing good in the most unlikely of people, we shall dry up inside, lock ourself into a self-made prison where we are both warder and prisoner An inner censor will stop us from paying attention to our feelings and the price for repressing feelings is an ever deepening depression, a numbness, a loss of the sense of being fully alive.

Stephen hated the story of the Prodigal Son, especially on his fortieth birthday when it was read in church. Life was supposed to begin at forty but here he was hearing about someone else’s life which seemed to have begun much earlier. There was a prodigal son in his own family, Frank. Frank had always had his parents’ attention while Stephen was the sensible one. That night Stephen had a dream: in the place of his wife beside him in bed was his brother Frank. Facing Changes, Changing Faces A. Marcetti & S. Linn (DLT 1995) p. 6f & 67f It was as if he had to embrace, literally in the dream, the shadow side, the adventurous bit of himself which he’d always rejected, to accept ‘All that I have is yours’

The story doesn’t tell us what happened to the elder brother in the end. It is open-ended, like our lives. We are, each of us, a mixture of prodigal son and elder brother, longing to grow yet fearing to grow, wanting to risk yet being cautious. We need to hear what each side of us is saying. Each of the sons was a child of his father.

Both sides of us are made by God for a purpose. ‘All that I have is yours’ the elder brother was told but he is too restricted in his vision. When we listen too much to one side, God usually sends someone else into our life who is a bit unbalanced in the opposite direction from us. Opposites attract – or repel. Many people end up marrying the exact opposite and that relationship enriches both, or they find their children turn out the exact opposite.

The prodigal side of us can discover that what we really yearn for is God and sooner or later we can make our way home to him. The cautious side of us can discover that what we really want, behind our quest for security, is also God but to come home to him requires a leap of faith, a risk that God will turn out to be different from the rather restricted picture we have had of him up till now.

ALL that I have is yours.

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