A Prodigal Father Had Two Sons.....

Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time 

The tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to listen to him, but the Pharisees and scribes began to complain, saying, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them. 

So to them he addressed this parable. “A man had two sons, and the younger son said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of your estate that should come to me.’ So the father divided the property between them. 

After a few days, the younger son collected all his belongings and set off to a distant country where he squandered his inheritance on a life of dissipation. When he had freely spent everything, a severe famine struck that country, and he found himself in dire need. So he hired himself out to one of the local citizens who sent him to his farm to tend the swine.  And he longed to eat his fill of the pods on which the swine fed, but nobody gave him any. 

Coming to his senses he thought, ‘How many of my father’s hired workers have more than enough food to eat, but here am I, dying from hunger. I shall get up and go to my father and I shall say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I no longer deserve to be called your son; treat me as you would treat one of your hired workers.” 

So he got up and went back to his father. While he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him. But his father ordered his servants, ‘Quickly bring the finest robe and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet, take the fattened calf and slaughter it. Then let us celebrate with a feast, because this son of mine was dead, and has come to life again; he was lost, and has been found.’ Then the celebration began. 

Now the older son had been out in the field and, on his way back, as he neared the house, he heard the sound of music and dancing. He called one of the servants and asked what this might mean. The servant said to him, ‘Your brother has returned and your father has slaughtered the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’ 

He became angry, and when he refused to enter the house, his father came out and pleaded with him. He said to his father in reply, ‘Look, all these years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders; yet you never gave me even a young goat to feast on with my friends. But when your son returns who swallowed up your property with prostitutes, for him you slaughter the fattened calf. 

He said to him, ‘My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours. But now we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.’”
Luke 15.1-3, 11-32

Today I will tell you this story from the perspective of the older son.

Did you hear that story?  

It was my father who welcomed this Jesus to our home. I think the old man has gone a bit soft in the noggin. ‘Cause if this is where religion is going, then I’m losing mine.

But that story he told about the two sons…. Look, I’m not stupid. I’m the older brother. 

That’s me he’s talking about. No question about it.

It all started a few years ago when my younger brother came to our Father and said, “Look, Pops, I thought you’d be dead by now, and I wish you were dead, but since you’re still up and kicking, I’ve got some wild oats that need sowing; I’ve got people to see, places to go, and women to seduce. I know that you’re not dead yet, but give me what I got coming to me when you go belly-up.”

Well, I said nothing because I couldn’t wait for my father to let him have it. You know, knock his block off.

But do you know what the old man did? He did it! He divided the property between us and gave that spoiled brother of mine everything he wanted!  

Well, you can have him. Let the old man love him…. That son of… his.  Then he left and I said “Good riddance.” 

He and went off to The Palms in Egypt and spent himself at Bordellos; he squandered his money on everything else sinful you can imagine; and then went to Pharaoh’s Palace and lost his assets.

But today…oh, yes, today…that son of his comes back in tatters, nearly naked, smelling like he’s been wallowing in a pig sty, looking like fifty shades of stupid – and what’s the old man do? 

I didn’t see it, but I heard it was a pathetic sight as the old man went running down the hill out to greet him, slobbering kisses on the little loser.

If it had been me, I would have made him come crawling back to me, begging for mercy. But he wouldn’t have gotten any from me. No sir.

And do you know how I heard about the party? Oh, yeah, there’s a party!

I was out working in the field – slaving away for the old man – as usual – and I heard the sound of music and saw people dancing.

Then I smelled barbecue! It was the fatted calf that we were saving for a very special occasion. I helped fatten that calf! I fed it everyday!

But the old man had it slaughtered and served up for the loser!

It’s all wrong! And now the old man has him as the guest of honor – wearing the best robe, fancy shoes, and the family ring!

And I can hardly bring myself to say it, but the Old man wanted me to be the master of ceremonies for this “Welcome home party” for you-know-who. 

Can you believe it? I told him “no way”. I won’t even go in the house and be seen with him and those others.

Why I didn’t even get a kid goat after last year’s harvest, but when that son of his comes home, he kills the fatted calf! 

Did I mention the fatted calf?!

To be honest, now I wish the old man was dead because he’s disgraced our family name.

And if he was dead, then I would show that son of his what’s what. Our reputation is now in danger. 

Look at him in there with that Jesus  eating and laughing with all those sinners as if they’re just an important as those of us who keep the law.

The decent and righteous people will write letters to the chief priest. We’ll be put under investigation all because of the old man’s willingness to forgive so much and so freely.

No, my old man is the real prodigal here. Not my brother—he’s not smart enough to be prodigal—he probably doesn’t even know what the word means.

Wait. Here comes my father.

What about * (Cough) My brother? (pause)

He was lost; as good as dead.

I was lost? I stayed home… 

I stayed home and hated every minute of it?

Well, if you put it like that, yes, I suppose you’re right.

But look at all I do for you! I do everything I’m told.

But this son of yours— I mean my brother - look at all his sins!.....

Oh… I’m obsessing over his sins. Well someone has to!

What do you mean I sound jealous? I followed every rule religiously!

I wasn’t the one out carousing with harlots and publicans!

Look, Old Man, you never once threw me a party –

I never asked.

Yes, but the fatted calf?  We were saving it for a very –

(pause) Oh. This is that very special occasion.

But….  

I am always with you? Well, yes… (pause)

But this mercy thing has gone too far!....

What?  Not far enough?!   You’ve got to be kidding.

You’re waiting for me to offer a toast? 

For my brother!

No. I cannot. I will not join such frivolous feasting! …..

I Must?... Must celebrate?

Joy?          

Mercy?         

Compassion?  

Reconciliation?!     

Forgiveness?      

What should I do? ….. (pause)

(To the people and pause)

What should we do?....       

(pause)

Our Father is waiting for our response.

ALL SOULS DAY

All Souls Day

On November 1^st we celebrate All Saints, but November 2 we celebrate All Souls Day. But why celebrate?


“Dare we hope that all be saved?” Asked Hans Urs von Balthasar.


St. Paul wrote to Timothy, “First of all, then, I ask that supplications, prayers, petitions, and thanksgivings be offered for everyone....

“This is good and pleasing to God our savior, who wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth. For there is one God. There is also one mediator between God and the human race, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself as ransom for all.”


God our savior…wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth.

This is the good news we live and proclaim. May we continually pray for all people, our loved ones, and, yes, even our enemies.

And we pray for the living and for the dead. And the dead? Yes, even the dead. We cannot put limits on God’s love and mercy. His Mercy endures forever. The Father in Luke 15 proclaims: My son was dead but has come back to life. We must rejoice!

For what can separate us from the love of Christ? Even time and space? God is eternal, so even if a loved one died without a definitive faith, we trust that God, in his mercy, can allow for mercy outside of time and space. For there are those whose faith is known to God alone, and who are we to judge our neighbor and condemn anyone to the flames of hell.

In the words of St. James: “Merciless is the judgment on the man who has not show mercy; but mercy triumphs over judgment.”

“Who has directed the spirit of the LORD, or instructed him as his counselor? (Isaiah 40:13-14). We entrust those who have died to the mercy of God.

In Paul’s letter to the Romans, he wrote of our hope: “Hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

“For Christ, while we were still helpless, died at the appointed time for the ungodly. Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die.

“But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. How much more then, since we are now justified by his Blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath.

“Indeed, if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, how much more, once reconciled, will we be saved by his life. Not only that, but we also boast of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation” (Romans 5:5-11).

Saint Paul prays for the soul of a deceased fellow believer: "May the Lord grant mercy to the family of Onesiphorus because he often gave me new heart and was not ashamed of my chains. But when he came to Rome, he promptly searched for me and found me. May the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that day. And you know very well the services he rendered in Ephesus” (2 Tim. 1:16-18; 4:19).

Paul ends the letter by stating: "Greet…the family of Onesiphorus” (2 Tim.4:19). It is clear that Onesiphorus has died, and Paul is not only praying for him, but also wants to comfort the family.

As Saint Ambrose said: “We have loved them in this life; let us not abandon them in death.”

Let us proclaim the hope of this faith through our very lives. May we love others into the love of God.

And may God have mercy on us all.

God's Mercy is not Ours to Keep; It Must Be Given Away.

When I was a boy growing up in Vincennes I loved to throw rocks in the lazy Wabash River. I loved to find the biggest rocks and hurl them as far as I could. But that was just half the fun. I wanted to see how big of a splash they would make and then, best of all, was watching the ripple effect of the stone breaking through the water and seeing just how far the ripples would extend.

         

In today’s gospel, then Jesus told the story of the unforgiving servant. That story should disturb us. Let's look at this man. He was so quick to beg his master for mercy and forgiveness on his own behalf. And his master wiped his debt away, no questions asked, cancelled it completely. Yet as soon as the man was forgiven his debt and is set free and unburdened he finds someone who is below him and nearly chokes him to death, and demands that he pay back a small amount of money.

Who is this man? Is he not in some ways the man lurking within each of us? Have we not all played the role of hypocrite, played the double standard game? How many of us have people in our lives who we really do not want to forgive? (pause) Yes, that relative you’re thinking of, you have to forgive him or her. That neighbor who you’d wish would move, yes, you have to forgive him or her.

Mercy and Forgiveness is all part of our baptismal call!

God's mercy is not ours to keep; it must be given away.

All over the United States – and all over the world – this gospel is echoing forth from pulpits everywhere. This gospel was not picked to coincide with 9/11. No, this gospel is the gospel for the day. Indeed, this IS the Gospel Message for every day. Always. Mercy. Forgiveness. Compassion.

Just imagine the ripple of mercy and forgiveness if we were to live the gospel?!

Ten years ago 19 foreign men with a warped image of God and a grudge against our government decided to act in unison in a horrible way. Just think – if 19 men could change the world so quickly, what if only 19 of us decided to do something beautiful for God?

Soon after the 9/11 attacks all we could hear was Usama bin Laden's name. I decided that every time I heard his name, I would say the name of Jesus, and then pray for bin Laden and all our enemies. I wish I would have written about this and spoken about this following the attacks, but I did not. I regret this. But I did say Jesus every time I heard bin Laden's name.

I also prayed with my wife and sons every night that our enemies might have a change of heart.

But I also prayed that we as a nation might not regard every Muslim as a terrorist or regard every Afghani or Iraqi citizen as a member of Al-Queda. I pray that we might see them as fellow human beings, and not disregard their humanity, of which some have, regarding them as the enemy, terrorists, or worse.

Then back in May of this year I remember the night that President Obama announced that Usama bin Laden had been killed. I sat on the couch with my sons in a stunned silence. I was mortified by the giddiness of certain reporters and then I watched as hundreds and thousands of people began to celebrate in the streets of New York and Washington and other cities. I was grieved that so many people would rejoice so much in the death of one man.

If you will recall, it was a week after Easter, but did we see people dancing in the streets at the news of Christ's Resurrection from the death? It was also Mercy Sunday, yet did we find mercy in the streets that night? And Pope John Paul II had just been beatified that day as well. I wonder what Pope John Paul would have said?

Pope Benedict sent a message that we, as Christians, should never rejoice in the death of anyone, not even an enemy.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, Ezekiel writes: “God does not desire the death of the sinner, but that he turn to God and live.” No matter what bin Laden did or inspired others to do, we are called to forgive and pray for our enemies.

I cannot change the gospel. The gospel must change us.

This past week on September 9^th we celebrated the memory of a different type of foreigner who came to the Americas with a plan to bring the love and compassion of God. His name? Peter Claver.

Peter Claver was a Spanish priest who understood that love of God is expressed through love of neighbor, in the distribution of medicine and food and most of all compassion.

The young Jesuit left his homeland forever in 1610 to be a missionary in the colonies of the New World. He sailed into Cartagena (now in Colombia), a rich port city along the Caribbean. The slave trade had already been established in the Americas for nearly 100 years, and Cartagena was the chief slave market. Ten thousand slaves poured into the port each year after crossing the Atlantic from West Africa under conditions so foul and inhuman that an estimated one-third of the passengers died in transit. Although the practice of slave-trading was condemned by Pope Paul III, it continued to flourish.

When Claver arrived he declared himself "the slave of the Negroes forever."

As soon as a slave ship entered the port, Peter Claver moved into its infested hold to minister to the ill-treated and exhausted passengers. After the slaves were herded out of the ship like chained animals and shut up in nearby yards to be gazed at by the crowds and put on the auction block, Peter Claver continued to assist them. With the help of interpreters he gave basic instructions and assured his brothers and sisters of their human dignity and God's saving love. During the 40 years of his ministry, Claver instructed and baptized an estimated 300,000 slaves.

He became a moral voice against slavery and lodged with the slaves in their quarters.

He often said, "We must speak to them with our hands before we try to speak to them with our lips."

“He had a steady confidence that God would care for them and, not his least worry were the slave owners whom he did not deem beyond the mercy of God. They also had souls to be saved, no less than the slaves. To the masters and slave owners Claver appealed for physical and spiritual justice, for their own sakes no less than for that of their slaves.” (Leonard Foley, O.F.M.)

Whatever we do has a ripple effect, whether we toss a rock into the river, serve the poorest of the poor, or forgive an enemy. Everything we do has an eternal effect.

The good news is that you and I are the ones who have been forgiven … and we are to seek to not merely understand others, but accept others, while inviting them to a life of holiness. We are the ones we are waiting for... We are the ones who can bring peace to our troubled world, one person at a time, just like Peter Claver did.

Oh, would to God that we might live our faith and love, yes, love our enemies, then we would stop keeping a record of wrongs and counting how many times we have to forgive others. Can you imagine the hatred that Peter Claver could have had for the slave-traders and owners? Yes, his anger would have been justified, but he sought to win them over with his words and actions of love among the slaves and the slaveholders.

In today's gospel, Peter asks Jesus, "Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive? As many as seven times?" Forgiving someone seven times was very generous. Three times was the limit to forgiveness in Jesus’ day. So Peter figured that he’d multiply that by two and he’d be good, and just for good measure he added one more to make it a beautifully holy number of seven.

Jesus answered, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.” 

This was not what Peter was expecting to hear.

Seventy-seven times? Imagine if we began to count the times we forgave others. And once we got to 77 times, then we might try for 7 X 70 times, or 490 times. I assure you, by the time you got to 490 times forgiving others, we would have likely stopped keeping count and forgiving would have become a habitual virtue.

Forgiveness, mercy, and peace begins with each one of us and we can change the world for the better.... beginning right here. And we will not be armed with box-cutters or bombs, but we must first allow ourselves to be disarmed by the love of God, our hands ever open, not clutching bricks of bigotry, rocks of racism, grenades of grudges, pistols of prejudice, or missiles or mayhem, but opening our hands and reaching out in forgiveness and mercy, where we will lose count of who we have forgiven and how many times.

May we throw our rocks and bricks of unforgiveness into the ocean of God’s love and allow the ripples of mercy to wash over us as we learn to forgive one another 77 times over and over and over again.

God's mercy is not ours to keep; it must be given away. Amen.