Returning to What?
Luke 15.11-31

We’re in a returning time together. Last week I talked a lot about my own personal transition from a time away from schedule and structure and most technology to the somewhat jarring return of zoom meetings and sitting at a desk. That’s one kind of return.

But we are returning all the time, and right now is a particularly significant return. Whether he’s correct or exaggerating, the President of the United States has declared the pandemic is over. 

For the past 2 1/2 years you’ve lived through a global pandemic. You spent months upon months in your own home or with a tiny little pod of people that you determined to be safe. Some things have changed forever, so re-turning is also about choosing how you will live in the time after what you have seen and heard and lived.

Over the past several years there has been, to say the least, lively political conversation among neighbors and friends and family. Some of you have told me that if your family members knew exactly what it is that you believed or how it is that you voted they may not ever speak to you again. For others that ship has already sailed. We’ve even experienced some of those fractures in relationship here. And while we might be able to laugh about it there is also some real pain and some real sadness to the damage or loss of those relationships. Some of us are keenly aware that people we love deeply, people who shaped us, formed us or once lived alongside us do not see the world in the same way we see it, do not see neighbors in the same way we see our neighbors.

I say all of that to remind us I am not the only one returning right now. This is a season of re-turn for all of us, and we get to decide how we do it. I’m pulling that “re” that R E far out in front of the turning on purpose. It’s a turning we do over and over again. It is that conversion experience that we read about in Scripture where we switch directions, we move 180°. Or it’s when Sharon Salzburg says, “We can always begin again.” In our gatherings here, our rituals of remembering and renewal and recommitment call us to return.

When we strive to live consciously, when we are at least seeking to be awake in our lives, we are perpetually returning to each other or returning to ourselves or returning to God all the time. You know it’s not one week at a time, one day at a time, it is sometimes minute by minute, second by second. You’re sitting in your car, you’re feeling peaceful, then somebody cuts you off and all of a sudden the shadow takes over. In that split second you have to choose to return to how is it that you want to live and move and have your being in this world. And even if the shadow takes over, as it often does in New Orleans driving, the next second is another chance to return. With each breath, return.

I’ve laid out three scripture texts before us if you count last week's sermon as part A to this week's sermon part B. We have the Luke 2 text with the shepherds who go from watching their fields to witnessing the baby Jesus and back again. Next is the I Kings text with Elijah wanting to stay hidden in a cave but being drawn out by the sheer silence of the Divine, and now we come to Luke 15: the oh-so-familiar story of the prodigal son.

I have preached from this story a whole lot and will share some links of previous prodigal son sermons in our newsletter this week for anybody who wants to revisit the parable itself. But what I want us to consider today is really in our practice of sacred imagination. What happens after the son’s return? What happens after “he comes to himself?”

The return impacts the father, the return impacts the son, the return impacts the older brother who stayed at home and resents his younger brother.

In a culture that could have demanded a banishment of this son of the village who shamed not just his father and family but all of his neighbors, too, the father takes the radical step of welcoming him home. We have learned together that this parable possibly refers to a cultural practice of quetzatah in which the community around the father could have legally cut this son off from being part of that people ever again. Father in enacting the quetzatzah–introduces a new way of thinking as a people

What happens to that community if the father has gotten ahead of them in this way and forced them all to allow the return? What happens to a community that did not want to welcome the son but is forced to do so because of his father’s loving kindness to welcome him anyway.

Re-turning sparked my imagination as I thought about all kinds of “re-” words that I am living into right now I am re-imagining, reinventing, re-creating, re-implementing, restoring, refreshing, reconsidering, renewing in addition to this re-turning. All of that is  part of our re-turning.

RE: TURNING

Conjures up images of from scripture

as in conversion
as in Saul: Paul
When he changes as a person but is not removed from his context

For people of faith, people guided by ancient stories, this kind of return requires reclaiming, reinterpreting, and reintegrating those stories and old practices that shaped the life before and the life after. How do we honor the old with integrity and welcome the new with authority?
Well, we also engage in some collective RE: INTERPRETING and RE: INTEGRATING

And sometimes what is old suddenly has new potency while other times what is old must be released and replaced with a fresher interpretation, a fresher expression of what we now know to be truer on this side of return.

Abigail and Shaun Bengson sing, “I need a new ritual, I need a new prayer”

Because I’ve been

“Moving away from the old ways

And longing for the new”

We do this in our personal lives all the time, but how can we do it in the spiritual life together? Just because you return to something doesn’t mean it’s the old you, right? The parables and stories we’re holding up from scripture are very much of people who will never be the old them ever again. What will be made new again and what is emerging and being created right now?

And so while, yes, there is part of me that is a little fried on some of our old prayers and rituals, we return to them to find out how God might be making a new word in them. We return because we believe that God is not done speaking. We return because we believe that God might be breathing into these old words like God breathes into our old bones and invites us to testify to the life we feel in our lungs. 

Well now I’m mixing up my metaphors and my Bible stories, but I think that’s also part of this return for me. I’m asking how are the stories not just in me and part of me but forming me and carrying me and laying out the path before me.

Kathy Randels began asking some of these questions so beautifully in her newest show, The road to Damascus.

When you walk in to see the set for the first time you find

Books stacked high like columns

Books as prison bars

Circled like a fire pit

And they evolve over the course of the performance to

Books as pathway

Books as platforms for standing

Thrown about 

Protected and measured

And all of the books were from the pastoral library of Pastor Dick Randels. Books that he held in his hands to return over and over again to the stories of faith to interpret and reinterpret. To turn and return. 

Kathy plays in symbols and metaphors and myths–asking what our relationship is to the stories and their characters; when our loyalty and respect is misplaced; when we are lost in them and oblivious to the roles we take on.

As the grandmother stokes the fire and talks with Little Red, she talks about a story in one of those books…the reason Saul ordered the stoning of Stephen.

Grandmother says:

[Stephen] told them they wouldn’t recognize God if he spit in their faces… And then gave them examples, from their own good book, of how [their] fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers in the past, never recognized the new voice of god until after they had already killed it. He downright told them they were stuck, in a pattern, lying to themselves, and wouldn’t recognize god if he bit them in the [rear]!

Do we ever get so stuck in the one way of doing, the one way of being, the one way of considering and approaching that we run the danger of never recognizing a new voice of God? 

Could it ever be said of us that we would feel so threatened by a new voice that we would attack and silence it?

Maybe the reason religion can feel too small

Is that we call the wrong thing sacred

And then we think we have to protect it

Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to twist and pervert meaning and story

We don’t let these stories breathe

We expect this thing…this Spirit-breathed reality…these ancient metaphors and parables that emerged in real time against real cultural and political backdrops…to now exist outside of time

Even if we don’t call them inerrant or infallible, we are still guilty of treating this religious institution as something that cannot evolve, cannot change, cannot be on the move in how it appears and emerges and expresses itself

In a conversation with author Pico Iyer, On Being host Krista Tippett “suggested that spirituality is as water but religion as a cup, the vessel that allows us to draw spirituality unto ourselves, and to offer it to others.

She added that the cup also confines it, and that the vessel is often imperfect; that it is sometimes dropped and broken, making it dangerous and incapable of holding any water at all.”

Our practices of returning must be more about the water than the vessel.

Is the vessel serving us?

Is the cup cracked?

Is our means of access serving us?

I don’t want to be such a vessel keeper that I forget to reach for the water.

I don’t want to be so wed to what I have known that I close myself off to something new. 

When we can hear new in the old, then we’re using that cup rightly

And we can hear something completely and utterly new and immediately recognize what’s ancient and true in it

That’s how I felt when I first heard Abigail and Shaun Bengson this summer as they told the story of the aching need for some sacred way to mark the life before and the life after tremendous change. You know those kind of moments: when you walk through a threshold and know that you can’t go back. 

How do you mark a turn like that?

Sharing this video in our quite staid and formal service is a bit of a departure, so shake that off, so the medium doesn’t get in the way of the message—it’s a different vessel for getting us to that water.

Queue video…New Ritual/New Prayer

How could we possibly reimagine our stories and rituals to match the growth and transformation of our lives?

Maybe Barbara Brown Taylor is right, and the party the father threw was a quetzatzah that created a bubble of protection around his boy, around his home, and around his neighbors. I’m great with that possibility.

And maybe, when faced with the reality of losing one of his children, suddenly the father saw everything in a new light. Suddenly the wealth, the land, the life he valued felt off, wrong, too much and not enough. Maybe all of his wealth felt like the hoarding of resources, maybe the empty seat at the dinner table and empty bedroom on the hall were all he could feel as he walked through his home full of so much stuff.

Maybe when that son miraculously returned, the father’s heart ran ahead of his body down that road and a new ritual emerged–cloak, ring, calf, party, celebration.

Maybe he’d never behaved this way in his entire life, but the return of his son meant the return of his heart and the return of oxygen in his lungs.

Maybe nothing could ever be the same again, and that moment needed to be MARKED with blessing and celebration.

What needs a new ritual in your life?

Literally.

I’m serious.

What transformation or moment or awakening or loss or return is calling for a marking moment that says everything has shifted. I want to honor the shifting. Let’s honor the shifting.

Just because we have some really lovely, deep-rooted rituals in our tradition for birth, baptism, marriage, death, and ordination doesn’t mean we can’t discover new ones.

Just because we have some really meaningful, reaching-way-back ways of expressing stories here doesn’t mean new ones can’t emerge.

I’ve given you some paper for writing because I want you to know how serious I am about this. Reinterpreting, Reclaiming, Reintegrating–all of this is part of the return to ourselves, the return to community, the return to God. 

What do you need for me or for us to mark with you? Write it out. Sign your name. And I want to get in touch with you to do it. Put some oil on it. Make a line of ash to cross over. Set out that light in the darkness. We can make it private and personal or public and open to all.

During our closing hymn, come to the table. There you’ll find all kinds of vessels that hold water, and so many books that hold so many of our stories. There is space for new in our return today.

Amen.