Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to [Jesus]. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
Luke 15:1-3,11b-32
Then Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”’ So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate. “Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’”
My sermon from the Fourth Sunday in Lent (March 27, 2022) on uke 15:1-3,11b-32.
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There’s a brain teaser, a kind of probability puzzle, known as the Monty Hall problem. It’s named after the former host of the old game show Let’s Make a Deal. The puzzle begins by imagining there’s three doors in front of you. Behind one of the doors is a new car and behind the others are goats. You don’t know where the car or the goats are but a game show host does. The first thing you get to do is pick a door you think the car is behind. The host then opens a different door to reveal a goat behind it. You’re left with two doors – one you picked and one you didn’t. The host then asks you a question: do you want to stick with the door you’ve picked or do you want to switch?
I was thinking about this puzzle while reflecting on our reading today from the gospel according to Luke. It’s a story you might have heard before and it’s usually known as the parable of the prodigal son. Prodigal is one of those words we don’t use very often. It means “to be wasteful and recklessly extravagant.” That’s a pretty good description for the younger son because he’s reckless throughout the story. At the very beginning, he asked his very alive father to pretend he was dead and give the younger son an inheritance. The younger son then traveled to a far off country and spent every penny they had. We get the sense the younger son didn’t care about their future or, at least, chose not to be prepared for whatever might come next. And so, when the money ran out during a crisis he couldn’t control, he survived by working with animals the Jewish community considered unclean. This is a kind of parable that invites us to add our own personal motivations into the story because we can be just as reckless. The dopamine hit we receive through pleasure, entertainment, and what we think success looks like, is often easier to deal with than the sadness, struggle, anger, and frustration that comes through the relationships that make up everyday life. The more we chase after the things we think will make us happy, the more we lose touch with what might actually bring us joy. We soon find ourselves trying to fill a kind of emptiness that no amount of recklessness can ever truly fill.
But the prodigal son isn’t the only person in the story. There’s also two other main characters we could focus on. There is, for example, the generous parent who kept looking towards the horizon, waiting for their child to return. In fact, Jesus sort of makes this the title of the story by opening it with the line “there was a man who had two sons.” We know nothing about his relationship with his children before the story began. Yet it’s not hard to realize how difficult it must have been when his child asked for him to be dead. The father didn’t have to honor his request but he chose to do so, which isn’t typically how the story goes. Usually, the first born son was the one who received most of everything for their inheritance since it was their responsibility to maintain the family’s story into the future. But our Bible has a habit of making the unexpected child favored. Younger siblings such as Jacob, Joseph, David, and those who weren’t even sons, like the daughters of Zelophehad, help us expand our vision of what God’s kingdom is all about. Maybe the father knew these stories and that’s why he fulfilled the unexpected request from his son. Yet I wonder if there’s more to the story because there’s a moment in it when the father wasn’t really as loving as they could have possibly been. When the younger son returned, the father didn’t immediately send someone to tell his older brother what happened. Instead, the older son found out when he came home to a party he wasn’t originally invited to. This older brother is the third character we could focus on. And his response to everything is very relatable because it’s full of anger, frustration, and a kind of exhaustion that comes when you’re the responsible one while everyone else acts up. When the younger son returned, the father organized a giant wedding feast that caused everyone else’s work to stop. But the older brother only learned of it when he came to the other side of the door. I imagine his mind raced through all the things he had already picked as part of his life story. He had never acted like his father was dead and he had lived with his family as they dealt with the emotional, spiritual, and financial consequences that came with a brother who decided their family wasn’t family anymore. These three characters give us three choices on what we could focus on. But for me, at least, I’m drawn to the older brother who ends the story standing outside that door. He has the opportunity to switch away from his previous choice and do the one thing he hasn’t yet done in the story. He could open the door, see his brother, interact with them, and enter into a new future big enough to transform all of them into something more.
Now the solution to the Monty Hall problem can be full of math but, at its simplest form, the answer is a bit counterintuitive. Our instinct is that, once the host revealed a goat, we have a 1 in 2 chance of finding the car because there’s two doors unopened. Switching, we think, won’t improve our odds. But the truth is that we should switch because, by revealing a goat, the host has changed the story. When we first picked a door, we created two subsets with one holding the door we picked and the other the doors we didn’t pick. There’s a 1 in 3 chance the car is in the subset of doors we picked but there’s a 2 in 3 chance it’s in the other group. When the host revealed a goat, they added new information into the subset of doors we didn’t pick. The 2 in 3 chance for those 2 doors didn’t change but we suddenly know which one of them doesn’t hold the car. Your best bet is to switch because a new story has already begun. We can choose to be like the older brother – sticking with the choices we’ve already made because that’s how we want our life to be. But when he got to that door, the party was already raging. That party didn’t come into being because the family was perfect with a father who always knew how to love in every possible situation. The family in our story is a bit dysfunctional which means they couldn’t have pulled this off on their own. What they needed was a gift of grace that would remind them of the generosity at the heart of love. This grace is a gift given to us through baptism and through faith. It helps us do basic things like waking up in the morning and worshiping in any way that we can. This grace brings us through the everyday bits of our everyday lives. And it also welcomes us back even when we, through recklessness or apathy, ignore the God who has already claimed us as God’s own. The story of the prodigal son is a story of embracing grace. This grace is big enough to help us confess our sins, seek forgiveness, and keep us ready to welcome the unexpected people God will bring into our midst. This grace helps us get over ourselves even when we feel we’ve done everything right. And this grace is what helps us grow in love because generosity isn’t for us alone. We get to make a choice to switch away from acting as if grace is only for those we deem worthy and we can, instead, open a new door where the grace we’re given becomes the grace we share.
Amen.