Sermon on Luke 15:1-32
Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS
March 7, 2021
As we’ve been studying the parables of Jesus these past few weeks in adult Sunday School, I keep coming back to this image I have of a matryoshka. What appears to be one thing at first glance reveals itself to be more...and more...and more as we peel back the layers. Dr. Amy-Jill Levine has been helping us peel back the layers on what she calls “short stories by Jesus” by helping us understand more about the original context of Jesus’s parables. By helping us see these familiar stories in new ways she is also inviting us to know new truths that might shape our lives.
Today we engage with three short stories by Jesus that come to us as a set. The first story is about a lost sheep, the second about a lost coin, and the third lost sons. If we think of these stories like a matryoshka, we have at least three layers to play with.
We have the short stories as they may have originally been told by Jesus.
We have the way Luke chose to frame them for his hearers.
And we have all the centuries of interpretation and our own experiences learning these stories thousands of years later.
Let’s start with this outside layer. I’d be willing to bet many of you have heard these stories before. Do you remember when you first learned them? Or a particular interpretation of them that really stuck with you? I’d love it if you shared in the chat about either of those things.
I can recite parts of the story about the lost sons by heart because when I was in middle school we acted out this parable and I played the part of a pig. My main job was to sit around and wait for the prodigal son to come hang out with us. Since I didn’t have any speaking lines, I spent a lot of time listening to other people tell the story again and again and again.
I remember being troubled by the story. It seemed quite unfair to me that the elder son played by the rules but wasn’t rewarded. I didn’t understand how the father could so easily welcome the younger son back after all his shenanigans. Over the years, I’ve talked to lots of people about this text and I know I’m not the only one who’s been troubled by it. Henri Nouwen even wrote an entire book about how Rembrandt’s painting of this story transformed his life. It’s a fantastic book.
How can we begin to understand the extravagance of the father’s forgiveness? How to wrestle with the way we feel when we recall the times in our lives when we’ve wandered so far from the ones we love….and the times when we’ve done our duty but allowed ourselves to be eaten away with the resentment? This story brings all of our own complicated family relationships, estrangements, losses up close to the surface. And that’s before we even start to wrestle with the common interpretation that says the father plays the part of God in this story, which opens a whole new realm for exploration. Parables truly contain multitudes.
If we peel back a layer and try to set aside our own relationship with these stories, we are invited to see how Luke told them in the first place. Luke sets these up as stories about sin and repentance. Someone or something gets lost and is brought back to the fold. But the strange thing about this is that sheep and coins don’t really sin or repent, now, do they? Sheep are just...sheep. They wander if you don’t keep an eye on them. The coin did not grow legs and run away. It must have been lost by its owner.
Second Testament scholar Craig Koester says that when we keep this in mind, the emphasis shifts from thinking about repentance as something WE do alone. Instead, we shift our focus to the one who is seeking. Koester says, “Can you see the driven desire of the One who is seeking to form relationship with us again?” [1] Repentance doesn’t start with us, he says. It starts with God, who cares for us so very much. God is always seeking to bring us back into community and right relationship. God rejoices when ALL of her sheep are safely tucked in for the night. God throws a party when ALL of his coins are back together. Not because the coin did something wrong and wants to be found….coins don’t work like that. But because just as the woman wanted all her coins because SHE wanted them, God desperately wants to be with us. Koester says that repentance begins with God’s deep and abiding desire to hold us in love...and our response to that great love is to turn towards it.
With this image of God’s great party in our minds, let’s peel back that final layer now and try as best we can to strip away our own interpretations, all the interpretations we’ve heard over the years, AND Luke’s interpretation...and see what we have if we try very hard to just hear Jesus’s words. I want to note that I don’t necessarily think this inner layer of the matryoshka doll is better or more important than the others, by the way. The beauty of scripture is that we can hold all of these things together - our best guess at what may have originally been told, the way it was written down in the Bible, and the way it was taught to us - we can hold all of that together and listen for God’s Stillspeaking voice in the midst of it all.
Amy-Jill Levine and others remind us that all this emphasis on sin and repentance is a layer that may have been added on to Jesus’s original parables. If we take them at face value, they are also simply stories about losing and finding. When we remember that the sheep and the coin didn’t bear any fault for being lost, we focus more on their owners who lost them. And when we carefully read the parable that’s sometimes called the “parable of the prodigal son” or the “parable of the lost son” we can actually see that TWO sons were lost. The father quite obviously loses his younger son when he takes his inheritance early and skips town. But the older son is lost in important ways, too. He says he feels like he’s enslaved - not a son at all - and when his brother returns no one even thinks to invite him to the party. It’s almost as if the father’s forgotten he has a second son at all. And the story ends without a feel-good resolution. The older son airs his grievances and the father begs him to understand why it’s important to celebrate the return of his brother...but we don’t actually find out if the older son agrees.
When we shift the emphasis to those who lost what they loved, we start to notice that these stories are also about joy and celebration. Each person who lost something or someone throws a party when all is reconciled. These are party stories. In fact, the Common English Bible gives this title to these stories: “occasions for celebration.” Instead of focusing on the loss, they chose to focus on the joy of the finding.
Do you remember the first time you did something “normal” after the lockdown last spring? After all the loss, all the fear, all the pain….you were able to reclaim something you had lost? I remember so clearly the first time I took my kids to the zoo last summer. It was the first time we’d done anything like that in months. After we finished visiting the animals, the kids asked if we could get Dippin Dots Ice Cream in the gift store. Normally I’d say, “Heavens, no, that stuff is so expensive!” But this time I said yes. And we sat on the bench outside the zoo in the hot, hot summer son and that ice cream tasted so good. Just to be there, with my kids, doing something normal like having ice cream. I almost wept with joy.
I had a similar feeling the first time we had friends over in our backyard, the first time my kids got to play at the playground again, the first time we drove out of town, the first time we all got together and had communion on the lawn.
Just all these moments of finding what had been lost. And realizing the sweetness of joy that bubbles up when we’ve lost something that really matters to us and had the good fortune of being reunited. It’s enough to make us want to throw a party. It’s enough to make us really remember what matters most to us after all. It’s enough to make us shout from the rooftops with gratitude for the absolute gift of simply being alive each and every day.
Living, loving, enjoying, struggling, losing, finding, reconciling, making new….what was lost is often found again. And we are invited into celebration and joy.
I hope we never get so busy or distracted with other things that we forget to notice these occasions for celebration. May it be so.
[1] Narrative Lectionary podcast for March 7, 2021.
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