Monday, March 11, 2013

Mad mercy

4 Advent C 2013
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Lent/CLent4_RCL.html


After a rainstorm and some flooding, a man walked along a riverbank to see the damage done. Rounding a bend in the river, he came upon an old man who had waded out chest-deep into the current. The old man was reaching out over and over to try and rescue a scorpion that was stranded on some snagged branches in the stream. Over and over the old man reached out his hand, and each time he did the half-drowned scorpion stung him. Watching this for a few moments, seeing the old man’s hand and arm turning blue from the venom, the man finally shouted, “Why do you keep trying? Leave that ungrateful insect alone!”

The old man turned and answered, “Don’t blame the scorpion. It is in its nature to sting. It is also in my nature to keep trying to save it.”

It is the mad nature of the merciful God that astounds us today.

We have heard today’s parable over and over. The story has many names. The most famous is “the prodigal son”, making the younger son, the party-boy, the center of the tale. He would love that. Others call it the parable of the loving father, whose parenting style is not exactly tough-love. Others call it the “resentful older son”, who often disappears in his younger brother’s shadow as, once again, the trouble child gets all the attention.

All these titles are possible. Here’s one more: the parable of the mad mercy of God.

All three of the characters are as helpless as the scorpion and the old man before their own natures. And all three are overwhelmed by the mad mercy of God.

One question to ask is, “Where am I in this story?”

Odds are that we have been the younger son at some moment in our lives. We have found ourselves far from home, or distanced from those who love us, or waking up in the middle of a mess that we ourselves have created. We “come to ourselves” as it were, come to terms with the mess we have made, and pluck up the courage to come back to where we hope we are still welcome. On the way, we rehearse the story we’ll tell anyone who will ask where we have been.

Or we have been the father, who might today be called co-dependent. We have been wounded and left behind, we have felt loss and grief and anger, but when we see the one or ones we still love, we are overwhelmed and we cast aside our resentment and our pain. Churches can be the father when we welcome someone back who has left us. We rush out, again and again, simply relieved that the one we love is still here and we can still be with them.

Or we have been the resentful older son. We have done the right thing as well as we could manage. We have shown up again and again. We have made countless meals, we have been there for partners and children and aged parents and siblings with whom we will never get along, we have dragged ourselves to work over and over on days when we wanted to be anywhere else. This is the son especially familiar to us who are faithful church-people: we’ve paid our pledges, we’ve shown up over and over, we’ve done the heavy lifting and kept things going year after year, only to see attention go to new people and new things. Where’s the justice, what’s my return?

All three characters are true to their natures. All three are caught up in the plot of this parable, which is the mad mercy of God.

The younger son does not even get to stammer out his excuses. He is caught up in the wild chaos of love beyond reason, love undeserved and unearned. I imagine him lying on his bed that night, wondering just what had happened and whether he could live with the abundant mercy he had been shown. What will life be like the morning after?

The father is left with the discomfort and the unresolvedness of his love poured out, the question of what happens the next day unanswered, and the irony that love shown one son kindles resentment in another.

The elder son is left with an array of questions and choices. Was his long faithfulness actually faithfulness to the real story, the story of the mad mercy of God? Did he ever really understand what kind of home in which he had lived all those years? Can he live with this new reality, or this new insight, that love is not earned, that his familiar home is a place of radical welcome and of care for the outcast, that quietly he too had found his own invisible pigpen built not of wasting money on wild parties but of his own assumptions about his father and his entitlement and of the limits of the mercy of love?

The plot of our own story is the mad mercy of God. This mercy is not a warm fuzzy feeling or mere personal assurance. To live the mad mercy of God is a daily discipline and a deliberate act of imagination. On this 4th Sunday in Lent, we are invited to recognize our world, as if for the first time, as the world of the God who is merciful beyond measure, whose nature is mercy. We are caught up in that mad mercy and asked how this will re-shape our lives, sharpen our sight, and change our church and our world.

1 comment:

Abuna Lar said...

Great stuff Fr. Kurt. Thanks!

Fr. Larry Hansen