Day 91 – Faith and Family Fights

A sermon given at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy-Daisy, TN, March 10, 2013

scripture references: Gen. 4:1-16; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

In my reflections of Day 57, 61 and 77,  we explored the meaning and source of faith. Paul eloquently claims (in Romans 10) that faith is found in two things, (1) the true confession,  and (2) understanding that Jesus is Lord and his resurrection is our resurrection. Faith is felt in the heart and voiced in words. Paul says faith does not come from our internal willful intent but from external sources. It is a heartfelt certainty that God’s promises are trustworthy which demand our action.

We read in the Gospel of Isaiah, (Day 57) and the parable of the fig tree that faith is not only felt and voiced, it causes us to act in a new way. It is the embrace of repentance and fruit that sustains us. It compels us to realize that our relationship to God and Christ demands a wholesale change in our way of living. A faithful person experiences heartfelt understanding of God and Christ, proclaims the Good News and seeks a new way of living.

But we still have a lingering question, how do we gain faith if we clearly do not earn it through our good work? So far, we have uncovered the signs and feelings of faith not its origin.  Today’s sermon uses Cain and Abel and the prodigal son and his brother to put a final exclamation point what we have learned about the connection of repentance, grace and faith. We won’t get to a complete answer of how faith comes about until a later sermon.

As I reread the parable of the prodigal son and the story of Cain and Abel to prepare this sermon, I realized I have always shortchanged both stories by not paying close enough attention to conversation between God and Cain before he slew Abel, and not enough attention to the interaction of the older brother of the prodigal son and their father. The similarity and difference of the two stories immediately struck me. I realized they are part of many epic tragedies of siblings and parents in the Bible.

The torn love between father and son, and between brothers and sisters is the subject of numerous biblical and artistic writings. They are so woven throughout our Bible that they suggest a common human problem.

There is this elder Cain and younger Abel. We have the founding story of faith in the story of God, Abraham Isaac and Ishmael (Gen 22). We have the story of David, his elder son Amnon who raped his sister Tamar. His younger brother Absalom slew Amnon because of Tamar and then through his own death at the hands of his father’s troops caused the collapse of the kingdom into the ten tribes of Israel and 2 of Judah (2 Samuel 14-19).

Even the unpleasant stories show faith is tied up in the idea of family. So it makes sense for Christian congregations who are the church family to look to these family stories for the positive characteristics of family that come with faith in God.

Furthermore, remember Jesus was first the Jewish Messiah. His experience and teachings are strongly connected to Jewish history.  When Jesus spoke this parable of the prodigal son his Jewish listeners that read their Scriptures well likely recollected the stories of Cain and Abel, and Amnon and Absalom.  Appreciating this Jewish history and his conflict with Jewish authority adds new flavor to our parable.

Our lectionary reading skips over two other sayings or parables by Jesus about the shepherd who does not rest until he finds the one lost sheep and the one about the lost coin to read only the parable of the prodigal son. But true to Jesus’ parables this jump points to more disguised meanings to vex us.

 Normally we read this story as the homecoming of the dissolute son to the grace of his father. Given the way the Greek is written this is a very reasonable reading.

(NRVS) For example, in verse 20 reads:  “²⁰So 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.”  This Greek word translated as compassion is a very powerful word; it means extreme compassion.  In fact, it deserves an explanation. It is literally an intense, gut-wrenching compassion. We may say it is an intense heartfelt compassion, though I believe even that understates its power. It is the compassion of unconstrained love perhaps tinged with grief over another human’s suffering that evokes compassionate pain such as felt over our adult child who has an untimely death of their own child.

It is a powerful word that is used in the NT only a few times. With two exceptions, it is reserved to describe the compassion felt by Christ when he looked upon a destitute person. Those two exceptions are the compassion the Samaritan felt towards the injured man on the roadside from Jerusalem and here, the compassion of the father towards his son who returns after being lost to him. The true power of this reconciliation of father and son is lost without understanding this meaning. It is unavoidable to conclude the father in our parable must symbolize God.

Given that symbolism, we are pointed towards another part of this story, the older son’s reaction to the good grace of the father:  (NRSV)

²⁵“Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. ²⁶He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. ²⁷He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ ²⁸Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. ²⁹But 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. ³⁰But when this son of yours (not my brother) came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ ³¹Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. ³²But 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.’”

The father celebrates the joy of finding a lost sheep, the repentance and resurrection of a son presumed lost, but the older brother stews in brotherly jealousy and grapples with the futility of earning grace.

The prodigal son came back after squandering his inheritance and crashing into rock bottom destitution (a Jew willing to eat with pigs!) but seems to have gotten a free pass from dad. Have you wondered why the prodigal son had the confidence or faith to come back to his father, knowing how much he had abused their relationship? As I said earlier, he was at rock bottom and had wasted his early inheritance. He only option short of death was repentance. In spite of all this he was certain his father would forgive him, even though he had no reason to expect that forgiveness and this compassion was possible from his father.

The disguised meaning within this story of repentance and grace of the father rests in the reaction of the brother and counsel of the father in contrast to the Cain and Abel story. By the way, another layer of this parable may well be the older brother symbolizes the Jews, the Pharisees, tax collectors and teachers of the law to whom Jesus told this parable and the younger brother the Gentile people. Parables!

Could Jesus also have intended this parable to contrast the story of Cain and Abel, or Jew and Gentile/Samaritan? For God’s own reason God was pleased with younger Abel’s gift of the fatted lamb but not so pleased with older Cain’s gift from the ground.  God first counseled the angry Cain, “⁷If you do well, will you not be accepted?”  Although this does foretell the conditional nature of the covenant of the Law (do well and you will be accepted), God is also making a promise to Cain to be believed on faith alone. The promise is, “ even though I preferred Abel’s gift I love you both if you do well.”  Cain was blind to faith in God’s promise. Perhaps his anger and resentment was the barrier to hearing God’s word. Cain only got the message after God cursed the ground of Cain’s livelihood bringing him to his knees.

 Listen how the father of the prodigal son counsels his angry older son, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” We will never know if the older son heard this promise and understood on faith that it was a trustworthy promise.

The father does not follow with a warning as Cain received, but with a twist. He speaks joyfully of the resurrection of the dead brother, “³²But 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.”  Parables are tricky, I wonder, did the older son get the message of his inheritance and reconcile with his father?

I heard a story last week that puts faith, family and these two brothers in our modern context. Some of you know I work with homeless men at a Shelter in urban Chattanooga.

Thursday we were talking to a broken shell of a 50+ year old man who said he has been doing drugs for practically his whole life. He sat at the table the whole time we talked on the verge of tears, putting his hands on his head then on the table and then on his face repetitively as he talked, totally restless from the aftermath of drugs and his sense of complete helplessness and avoiding eye contact.

 He has lost his wife and a child to diabetes, a teen-aged (grand?)son to gun violence. Most of his family "helped" him deal with those deaths and all his other troubles by providing access to alcohol and drugs that are as available as water. He spent time in prison twice, suffering much violence there. 

He is physically and emotionally damaged and under medicated. He has not talked to the side of his family who can actually help him in over 20 years. He asked us to find one of those sisters for him.  He said he knows his life has to change, he knows who in his family are working against him and wants to change and never go back to that life.  He wants prayer and the family of the church. He needs to find the peace of the Holy Spirit to ease his grief.  If ever a statement of desire to repent is heard, it was Thursday night. His blood cries from the ground. 

Will he make it? I do not know. Everything is stacked against him. The only thing he has is our compassion and willingness to help him find his own way out of this mess to grace. His only way out is to understand the faith in the father’s promise to the older son. It is God’s promise to all the faithful, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”

Do we have the faith and compassion in our Christian family to act to make the promise to stand by a broken child of God like this 50 year old man, and to the young parents facing the same end? May God grant us that Christian faith. Amen.