The Great Still Are Born Among the Humble

I.

Joan of Arc was born a peasant. Her place of birth was a small town in France, Domrémy. Looking back on her growing up years, she said, “As long as I lived at home, I worked at common tasks around the house, going but seldom afield with our sheep and cattle. I learned to sew and spin and was as good as any woman in our town.” This was a way of saying that she grew up as any peasant girl of her time and place would have grown up--nothing unusual, nothing to predict greatness.

In the year 1425, she began to have visions. Later in her life she described these unusual visions.

When I was thirteen, I had a voice from God to help me govern myself. It was St. Michael’s voice, who, along with St. Catherine and St. Margaret, told me of the pitiful state of my country, France, and told me that I must go to assist the King of France in saving our nation.

Twice, Joan tried to acquire a suit of armor and a horse as well as an audience with King Charles VII. Both attempts were denied. The visions, however, had been powerful, and, in terms of her personality, she was persistent. Her third effort to be suited up in armor, borrow a horse, and get an audience with her King was the charm; all three requests were honored by authorities. In 1429, she found herself standing before the King of France; she thought of herself at that time as possessing both stereotypically feminine as well as masculine personal traits. On the feminine side, in her mind--so don’t get mad at me for being a chauvinist, she had a pretty feminine voice, ate and drank little, had a cheerful face, and cried a lot. On the masculine side of her personal traits as she saw them were: a “virile bearing”--whatever that is exactly, an enjoyment of weapons, and a love for riding horses. Again, if you have a beef with what she saw as masculine or feminine, I can tell you how to get in touch with her.

Charles was in trouble at home, in that not all of France accepted him as its King, and in terms of national security as English forces were beating the pulp out of every group of French soldiers they encountered. Charles was desperate, and he took Joan to be a kind of sign from God to him that he must fight on for the sake of his country. Joan impressed him in many ways--most notably with her profound connection to God; this was so pronounced that Charles VII regarded her a saint, and that was the assessment of her that spread through his troops.

In April of 1429, Charles appointed Joan of Arc captain over a troop of men; I assume all the soldiers fighting for Charles were men. They, with Joan as their commander, won a decisive battle for Charles, for France. This boosted the public view of him, and he was able to celebrate his coronation as King of France, a ceremony after which he had the full allegiance of all the French people--well, at least as much as Barack Obama has the full allegiance of all the American people. Joan had become a trusted military advisor to Charles, and she stood in a prominent place as he was crowned King.

In 1430, the English captured her and charged her with heresy. Charles could do nothing to help her or protect her from an ecclesiastical tif, a run-in with papal authority as it were, and while there were certainly heretical issues at hand, this was an underhanded way of, for the most part, of keeping politics and, thus, French troops out of picture.

Joan never had much of a chance at a fair trial. She was declared a heretic for several reasons, but the climax of this tense exchange came when Joan renounced her Roman Catholic faith because of some personal religious experiences she had had that caused her to believe differently than the Pope believed. Formally, she was charged with being a witch and violating the Church’s standards for Christian women by wearing men’s clothing. The relatively small civil issue that came into play got her charged with

fraud; they said she was a woman pretending to be a man, but that wasn’t the case. Charles knew she was female, and so did the troops she led, troops who followed her with enthusiasm because they, like Charles, believed she was a saint. As her punishment for tthese “grievous” offenses, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by the English in the marketplace of Rouen on May 30, 1431. Ironically, and I mean sick irony here, the same Church that found her heretical later named her a saint. That would be like having the KKK, still hating all people of color only because of their color, suddenly finding some honor to bestow on Clarence Thomas.

His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama is the head of state as well as the spiritual leader of Tibet; his government has been in exile since 1959 when his Holiness escaped into India after a harrowing fifteen-day secretive journey on foot after which the Chinese government took charge of Tibet and remain its captor to this day. His given name as the Dalai Lama is Tenzin Gyatso, He is one of the great religious leaders in our world today--regardless of what anyone may believe about each of his points of philosophy and theology.

His birth name was Lhamo Dhondup, and he was born on July 6, 1935, to farming family in a small village in Taktser, Amdo, which is in northeast Tibet. Very humble surroundings, wouldn’t you say?

A small group of men was charged with the responsibility of locating the successor to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama who had died. Tibetan Buddhists believe that each successive Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of the First Dalai Lama. In addition, all Dalai Lamas are believed to be manifestations of Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion and patron saint of Tibet. Bodhisattvas are enlightened beings who have postponed their own nirvanas and chosen rebirth, which--having reached Nirvana--they are no longer required to do; but they do so willingly in order to serve humanity.

The search party found its way to Lhamo Dhondup by a number of signs. One of these concerned the embalmed body of his predecessor, Thupten Gyatso, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who had died aged fifty-seven in 1933. During its period of lying in state, the head was discovered to have turned from facing south to northeast. Shortly after that a highly respect Tibetan leader had a vision. Looking into the waters of the sacred lake, Lhamo Lhatso, in southern Tibet, he clearly saw three letters of the Tibetan alphabet float into view. These were followed by the image of a three-storied monastery with a turquoise and gold roof and a path running from the monastery to a hill. Finally, he saw a small house with strangely shaped guttering. He was sure that one of the three letters referred them to Amdo, the northeastern province, so it was there that the search party began its search.

Another letter, the believed, pointed to the monastery at Kumbum, which was indeed three-storied and turquoise-roofed. They now only needed to locate a hill and a house with peculiar guttering, which the third letter should guide them to. So they began to search the neighboring villages. When they saw the gnarled branches of juniper wood framing the roof of a small farm house, they were certain that the new Dalai Lama would not be far away. Nevertheless, when they knocked on the door of this house, they did not tell the family there who they were; they pretended to be travelers in search of a place to sleep for the night. The family welcomed them.

The leader of the party, pretended to be a servant to his fellow travelers so that he would not be expected to sleep in the room or rooms of those whom he supposedly served. This gave him a greater opportunity that night to observe the youngest child in the family and to play with the little boy.

Amazingly, the little boy recognized him and called out, “Sera lama, Sera lama.” Sera was the location of the monastery at which he had studied. The next day the search party, but returned several days later and told the family who they really were. On this second visit to the home, they brought several items that had belonged to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, and they spread these out, mixed in with several items that had not been owned by the late Lama. In every case, the boy correctly identified those items that once had belonged to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama saying, “It's mine. It's mine.” This confirmed for the search party that they had found the one who was to become the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

II.

“Greatness” is a relative term. What is seen as great in one person’s eye is not greatness at all in someone else’s eye. In modern American cultures, we tend to associate greatness with power, prestige, and financial holdings. Not everyone in our country, and certainly not many people around the world, agree with that. Historically, there has often been a whole smattering of ways of determining what “greatness” is all about.

One of the examples I used earlier in the sermon was a young woman who was martyred for her faith--at least, in part for her faith. Typically, we do not accord greatness to someone who dies unless she or he is already prominent before death comes. Death, as a rule, is not a part of what makes someone great as many people see it; an exception would be someone who loses her or his life in warfare, serving her or his country. President Obama recently presented a serviceman with the Medal of Honor--the first living servicepersons to have received our nation’s highest honor for valor since the Vietnam War. All others since Vietnam, sadly, received their Medals posthumously.

Joan of Arc, as I said, was an exception, and so were many in the early Jesus movement who lost their lives because of their faith in God as Jesus portrayed God through his teachings. At one point, there was no higher honor, no mark of greatness more pronounced than being a martyr for the faith; in the extreme, some of the faithful were forcing their enemy to kill them so that they could be martyrs and, thus, achieve greatness in this world as well as the next--according to their beliefs of what the next world or realm held. Ironically, it was not terribly unlike what radical Muslims promise those who are willing to be suicide bombers becoming, according to what their religious leaders teach them, martyrs for the faith by killing off enemies of the faith, which most or all of those radical leaders identify as non-Muslim Westerners.

The evident difference between the early Christian martyrs and the modern Muslim martyrs is that the Christians didn’t hurt anyone; they simply put themselves in positions in which they were highly likely to lose their lives. Some would later question whether the term “martyr” applied to those who brought death upon themselves--those who didn’t have to die, but who forced an enemy to do them in.

By the time the Apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Church at Philippi, this martyrdom-as-ultimate-greatness idea was at its peak. As far as I know, German Christian Scripture scholar, Ernest Lohmeyer, was the first to notice this theme in Paul’s brief letter to the Philippians and run with it.

Philippians 2:5-11:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God (NRSV, adapted).

Instead, then, of being preoccupied with the suggestion in this hymn that Paul quoted in his letter to the Philippians that Jesus existed in God’s realm before being born into the human realm, the real message of this hymn, which Paul borrowed and did not write himself, is that Jesus’ greatness resided in his willingness to let go of all the prominence he had as someone preaching divine love, all the accolades bestowed upon him as someone more closely connected to God than the average human and die at the hands of enemies of a God of love about whom Jesus would not stop preaching. Jesus’ tragic and unnecessary death was not the last word about this man. Instead, God Godself exalted him and named him great. God Godself said, in those subtle ways God communicates, that everyone should honor this man who had come from virtual anonymity, without power and possessing none of the positions or possessions typically used to measure greatness.

Another example is in the third chapter of Philippians, verses 18-19:

For many live as enemies of the cross of Jesus; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things (NRSV).

Using martyrdom as the interpretive key to the book of Philippians, when we read this passage we are pressed to interpret “the cross of Jesus” both as Jesus’ own martyrdom AND the goal of all true followers of his--to be martyred like their Master. Those who are “enemies of the cross” of Jesus are those who are unwilling to be faithful to Jesus’ teachings if the price for such loyalty is death. Making one’s belly one’s god means that my own self-preservation matters more than the principles for which I have said I would stand; when push comes to shove, however, “Who is Jesus? Jesus who? Never heard of him. You have me mixed up with someone else.” The greatness or glory these traitors can look forward to rises no higher than shame for their pretense and their cowardice; in other words, there is no greatness at all in what they have done.

Martyrdom is excessive, and there’s no reason to push for it. If one dies for a great cause--on a battlefield or on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee--her or his death is no less tragic than any death, but we see greatness in a life snuffed out because the person was living for a cause greater than herself or himself. Have you heard Palin’s latest repulsive criticism of President Kennedy’s failure to hold strong to his faith?

So, anyway, martyrdom isn’t the only basis of greatness, thank goodness! But getting rich and selfish, regardless of who is willing to kiss your backside, has nothing at all to do with greatness. People of means who share their wealth for the betterment or the wellbeing of others--they may become great, even if no one ever knows whose benefactors they have become.

Jesus had a really odd take on greatness. Jesus said, in his way, that the circumstances of someone’s birth has nothing at all to do with the potential for greatness. Jesus said that the truly great people in the world are those who aren’t required by economy or circumstance to serve others, but, instead, are those who can afford to be served--by position or pocketbook--but who refuse the service of others in order to be servants themselves. Jesus was Rabbi--teacher and master--to those who followed him; few people in any Jewish society were more highly regarded than one’s teacher, especially one’s religious teacher, one’s Rabbi. Still, it was Jesus who at his last earthly supper with the women and men closest to him, bowed down with towel and basin before each of them and washed their feet--clearly the job of a slave or servant in any household or at any social gathering.

In the oldest of the four scriptural Gospels available to us so far, the Gospel of Mark, we find two very important excerpts on greatness from Jesus’ point of view. Here’s the first one:

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared” (Mark 10:35-40 NRSV, adapted).

These guys had gall. Probably thinking that Jesus would rule over an earthly and ultimately a heavenly empire, they wanted to make sure they got top slots in his cabinet, and Jesus says to them, in essence, “Those who serve others the way I try to serve others will be up for those positions, and the ones who get them will be obvious choices because of how well their philosophies of service match mine. No one will hold any position of importance because of appointment or political payback.”

Here’s the second of the two especially important passages on greatness from Jesus’ point of view.

So Jesus called [some of his followers] and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; instead, whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Child of Humanity [one of the ways Jesus referred to himself] came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10 42-45 NRSV, adapted).

III.

Nearly everything about the Gospel of Luke’s retelling of the the events surrounding the birth of Jesus, one of only two birth narratives that made it down to us, stresses the humble circumstances of Jesus’ birth. The angels in heaven take note of the birth and break out in joyous musical rejoicing, but on earth no one takes note of the birth of Jesus except a handful of shepherds who get a tip from an angel that someone born to be great had just been birthed not far from where they were tending to the sheep of their employer.

The shepherds were shocked for a number of reasons--most significantly that anybody born who’d be destined for greatness wouldn’t be born anywhere near their pastures. Further, if news needed to be spread that a baby destined for greatness had just been born, the shepherds would have been near the bottom of the notification list. All the social higher-ups and uppity-ups would be notified first, and then, eventually, the news would circulate, and people at the periphery of society like shepherds and tanners and fishermen would hear third and fourth hand--perhaps from an employer or a customer.

Of course, the writer of this Gospel, presumably Luke, is putting the oral versions of the story he’d heard for years on parchment or papyrus about eighty years after the birth of Jesus. That’s a long time away from the event itself. If you stop to think about how differently each of us recalls the Christmas Eve celebration at Silverside two years ago, some not remembering it at all in particular because in their memory banks that service blended in with the ten or twenty or thirty other Christmas Eve services they attended at this suburban location of the church. Many of the details presumably remembered would be vivid in someone’s mind, and she or he could tell about that service with great precision and reliable detail. Others, with good memories, couldn’t tell you a thing about that particular service, but could give a gist of what most Silverside Christmas Eve services have been like across the years.

Things that stand out in people’s minds across the years are tied to an event with particular emotional attachment to it or a service with something in it that the person trying to remember especially loved such as a magnificent musical piece or a service that the person sorting through memories especially disliked. Several years ago, in place of scripture readings on that Christmas Eve, I asked several readers to read news clips about places in the world where, at Christmas time, life was especially bleak--war zones, poverty, bereavement, and so on. My effort was to make the point that Christmas is far more than the warm, fuzzy feelings many us privileged people in the world associate with the holiday. Baby Jesus, after all, would grow up to take a special interest in the sad and the struggling. Even so, I think that was the most hated of all the Christmas Eve services I planned here--a decade’s worth. At the following Deacons’ meeting, I got the message from the Deacons themselves as well as other members who’d complained to them that Silverside people didn’t want to hear about sad stuff at Christmas time, and so we let that experimental approach go by the wayside even though I think it has merit.

I like the idea that if Jesus were around today he’d be telling military personnel on the front lines that God loves them. He’d be trying to gather up food for the hungry, and he’d be trying to find shelter for the homeless. Jesus would find a seat next to someone who lost a loved one to this world and who misses that person all the time, but especially at holidays, and he’d whisper, “You know, that the grief-pain that won’t go away is proof you loved your dear one with intensity; it by no means suggests that God is absent or that God is ignoring you in your ongoing loss.” Jesus would be trying to knock some sense into the heads of those who spend and over-extend to buy fancy gifts for those who already have more than they need by saying, “If you have money to spend, to spare, remember first those who have nothing.” Even so, to prove that I can be flexible and compromise--now a widely known and accepted fact--I let it go of that approach to Christmas Eve.

Mary, very pregnant Mary, is required by law to travel with her betrothed, Joseph, to be registered in a national census. She shouldn’t have had to do that, and Joseph shouldn’t have had to leave her to register right at that time. They were subject to Roman law, however; and the Emperor had ordered the census so everyone had to comply--the ill and the elderly included.

Poor Mary, nine months plus, on a mule--every step causing her pain of some sort. Her water broke while she was atop the mule who thought someone had poured a bucket of water on him instead of giving him something to drink.

All of the inns were full because of the others who also had to travel to the city most closely associated with the Hebrew tribe of their ancestors. Joseph, was where his ancestors, descended from the tribe of Judah, had to report: their key city, Bethlehem--a not-so-great place whose only claim to fame was that King David had been born there.

A kindly innkeeper did make his stable available to them since he recognized the duress they were in so Jesus was born in a stable. His first bed was a food trough for barnyard animals. Mary must have considered the possibility that the birth could take place on this trip so she had brought along the strips of cloth that would be wound around the baby soon after birth to keep her or him warm, to keep bones straight from the get go, and to hold a little salt near the baby’s body to protect the baby from disease; these strips of cloth were known as “swaddling clothes.”

Not grand birth circumstances, huh? Nothing about how he was born or how he lived signaled greatness--although his preaching, teaching, and healing did attract crowds from time to time. He was a bivocational carpenter/preacher whose life was cut short when he was unjustly sentenced to death by a lazy, good-for-nothing Roman governor named Pontius Pilate, and he died a high-level criminal’s death.

He was a faithful, committed Jew who had no intention of starting a new religion, and he never knew that that is what eventuated. There was no such thing as Christianity until long after his execution; yet, today more people in the world today who associate themselves with any organized religion name themselves Christians more than any other religion. A full one-third of the world’s population today say they are Christians; plus, there are a few of us who aren’t so pleased with what many Christians are doing with Jesus’ name who still consider ourselves devotees of the God about whom Jesus taught.

Many acts of justice are done in his name and according to his example. A large percentage of hospitals and nursing homes in this country are built largely on the contributions of people seeking to honor the concerns of Jesus for the sick and the suffering and those can’t take care of themselves. Peace is waged in his name despite the tragic fact that war and terror are also waged in his name. His place of birth and his place of death have become holy ground for those who would want to put their feet anywhere he had been.

When he was dead
He was laid in a borrowed grave
Through the pity of a friend

[Twenty] centuries have come and gone
And today Jesus is the central figure of the human race
And the leader of [hu]mankind's progress
All the armies that have ever marched
All the navies that have ever sailed
All the parliaments that have ever sat
All the kings that ever reigned put together
Have not affected the life of [hu]mankind on earth
As powerfully as that one solitary life (Dr. James Allan).

Amen.

Rudyard Kipling and "Late Came the God"

I.

Some folks are serious about falling in love. If you have your love in your life right now, and some of you have had that special love in your life for decades, then this is not something you think much about for yourself. You may get caught up in someone else’s search for the love of her or his life when your child is making that great search or when one of your friends gets divorced and begins to try again at love or in your favorite genre of reading material. Otherwise, you are happily settled and in love.

Not everyone is concerned about love and falling in love, but it is a major theme in the history of humanity. Most people have been or are concerned about finding true love, falling in love, staying in love. It’s the theme of untold numbers of books, films, and poems.

For the person who has trouble finding Ms. or Mr. Right, there’s an abundance of help. There are well-meaning busybodies who double as your friends. There are fretting parents. Today, it’s mechanized on the internet, and before that there were introduction services. Before those, in some cultures, there were those, mostly women, whose job it was in a village or community to provide matchmaking services; they were called “matchmakers.”

My favorite matchmaker is not someone who, in real life, has tried to fix me up with someone they thought could be my true love; rather, she is Yenta, the matchmaker, in the marvelous musical, “Fiddler on the Roof.” The role was originated on Broadway by the late Bea Arthur, the great comic actor most remembered for her trailblazing television show, “Maude,” and for her long stint as Dorothy on “The Golden Girls.”

In “Fiddler,” the daughters of even a poor milkman like Tevya will get their husbands through the work of Yenta, and they are encouraged not even to think about trying to match themselves up with a love interest through their own efforts. The daughters sing one of the three or so most memorable songs from the musical, “Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match.”

Matchmaker, Matchmaker,

Make me a match,

Find me a find,

catch me a catch

Matchmaker, Matchmaker

Look through your book,

And make me a perfect match

Matchmaker, Matchmaker,

I'll bring the veil,

You bring the groom,

Slender and pale.

Bring me a ring for I'm longing to be,

The envy of all I see.

For Papa,

Make him a scholar.

For mama,

Make him rich as a king.

For me, well,

I wouldn't holler

If he were as handsome as anything.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker,

Make me a match,

Find me a find,

Catch me a catch,

Night after night in the dark I'm alone

So find me a match,

Of my own.

Some people who can’t find love become desperate. They pick out the person they want, even if they’ve never met that person, and seek out all sorts of ways to be noticed by the person with whom they’ve decided to share love. In the extreme, the person on the prowl for love may become a stalker. Movie stars and other famous people are often the love interests of lonely fans who cross the line, trying to establish intimacy.

There are also those who are jilted in a relationship or an affair who simply can’t take, “No,” for an answer. Simon and Garfunkel furthered their tremendous popularity singing, “There Must Be Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” but none of those could ensure that the left lover would agree to the new arrangement. If you ever saw the chilling film, “Fatal Attraction,” you’ll never forget Glenn Close’s creepy character who will not stand for Michael Douglas’s rejection.

Some jilted lovers have killed the one whom they said they loved with all their hearts. Some jilted lovers, as is also the case with some lonely lovers, take their own lives because they cannot share love with the one they want or because they feel that there is no one in all the world who loves them.

Anyone who has ever had to struggle for the cause of love, for the sake of love, whether that meant dealing with the pitfalls of a long distance relationship or having to wait patiently for one’s beloved to let go of heavy baggage certainly understands, heart to heart, Diana’s song in “A Chorus Line,” “...won’t forget, can’t regret, what I did for love.”

It interests me that in societies where arranged marriages are the norm, and there are several places in the world this is still the case, love isn’t taken to be a requirement in the arranged relationship. Matters of functionality take the lead. Who does this chore, and who does that chore in the maintaining of the household? If love evolves, that’s a wonderful extra, but it’s not a requirement for a successful marriage.

Almost every couple we come upon in Hebrew and Christian scripture came together because their relationship was arranged, and this applies to men who had more than one wife. We see a few instances of inspiring love that has grown between them, but this wasn’t the norm; and again it wasn’t the expectation. Adam and Eve are mythological characters, not historical people, but their relationship was of utmost importance to the ancient Hebrews and later the Christians who included Hebrew scripture as a part of their Bible. There is no indication that Adam and Eve loved each other unless the writer’s assertion that the two of them became one flesh is meant to point to love; I think that is not the case. There IS evidence that Adam preferred the company of Eve to the company of a donkey, and there is evidence that Eve and Adam relied on each other and were helpmeets; but love isn’t required for that.

Literalists want to make Eve’s and Adam’s relationship the paradigm for all successive relationships in history. Those who interpret the creation stories in such a way as to make the relationship of Eve and Adam exemplary for all relationships in all generations after them miss a lot of key points. One is, Eve and Adam were not married. Their creation predated the establishment of marriage. Today, the judgmental folk call such an arrangement, “living in sin.” Oops!

Furthermore, all of Eve’s and Adam’s children were born to unwed parents. Are these the kinds of “family values” that James Dobson has in mind for his “Focus on the Family” principles? No, not at all, but the stories of creation can’t be twisted around to accommodate modern, Christian, fundamentalist views on just what marriage is.

Adam and Eve were never married--though they were monogamous, which was pretty easy considering the fact that for the longest time there were no other humans with whom they could have cheated; and when there were other humans, they were the children and grandchildren of Adam and Eve. There is no indication whatsoever that Adam and Eve loved each other; in fact, Eve didn’t mind encouraging Adam to get involved in her ploy to disobey God. Adam, for his part, to rationalize his inappropriate behavior blames Eve for luring him into the act that displeased God, and he blames God for creating Eve to begin with. They were companions by default, but there is no indication of love.

Things were good in the sex department, but hot sex doesn’t have to have love as an ingredient.

It’s worth throwing in here, too, that the fact the ancient storytellers envisioned God as creating one man and one woman at the dawn of creation is not a condemnation of homosexuality. The human race had to propagate so a woman and a man were required to get things rolling. This did not presume that all Eve’s and Adam’s progeny would be straight and would be child bearers. This silly slogan, “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” is based on homophobic biblical illiteracy.

II.

Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “Late Came the God,” on which we focus today, is about a man who desperately wanted the love of a woman who didn’t return his love, and the god to whom the poem refers isn’t the God of the ancient Hebrew matriarchs and patriarchs; he is instead one of the polytheistic gods of love, such as the Greek god, Eros. It is a complicated poem, nothing at all like the straightforward poem, “If,” for which many people know Kipling as a poet.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master;
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run--
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man my son!

Rudyard Kipling won the 1907 Nobel Prize for literature. He was born in Bombay, today called Mumbai, in 1865; he was educated in England. He returned to India in 1882 where he became a newspaperman. Though he would become most known for his short stories, his literary career began in 1886 with a collection of poems titled Departmental Ditties.

He was a prolific writer; he obviously loved to write, and he achieved fame as a writer very quickly--a rare experience for a writer, some of whom never receive any fame at all. One of his biographers has said, “Kipling was the poet of the British Empire and its yeoman, the common soldier, whom he glorified in many of his works, in particular Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) and Soldiers Three (1888), collections of short stories with roughly and affectionately drawn soldier portraits.”

His 1894 release, Jungle Book, took the children of the world by storm. Many of us first heard or read the unusual name “Rudyard” when we read the book or saw the Disney animated version of the unforgettable Kipling characters.

It is not surprising that he won many awards and had honorary degree after honorary degree conferred on him. In addition to the Nobel Prize, which I mentioned earlier, he also received the Royal Society of Literature’s Gold Medal. Kipling was the recipient of many honorary degrees and other awards. At the time he was named a recipient of this most prestigious award, only three others had received it: Sir Walter Scott, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy. Interestingly he turned down the offer of several honors--most notably, perhaps, knighthood.

Behind many great works of art--whether visual art or writing or music--are artists who endured great pain on their way to producing their masterpieces. Kipling falls into that category. Another of his biographers said that he lived a “largely tragic and unhappy life.” Howso? Well, said this Kipling biographer,

He was starved of love and attention and sent away by his parents; beaten and abused by his foster mother; and a failure at a public school which sought to develop qualities that were completely alien to Kipling. In later life the deaths of two of his children also affected Kipling deeply.

“...starved of love and attention....” I assume that means as a child. Sadly, this area of his life didn’t improve so much in adulthood. His marriage wasn’t a particularly happy one. His wife, Caroline Starr Balestier, was a domineering wife who didn’t like a lot about the man she married. There are several reasons, perhaps, to ponder love frequently; the top two of those reasons, I’d guess, would be because someone is so loved that she or he is continually overjoyed or, in contrast, because someone wants love desperately and can’t find it. Kipling, evidently, fell into the latter category.

With that in mind, hear again our poem for today--which, by the way, closes out this brief sermon series, “God through Poets’ Pens.”

Late came the God, having sent his forerunners who were

not regarded--

Late, but in wrath;

Saying: “The wrong shall be paid, the contempt be rewarded

On all that she hath.”

He poisoned the blade and struck home, the full bosom receiving

The wound and the venom in one, past cure or relieving.

He made treaty with Time to stand still that the grief might

be fresh--

Daily renewed and nightly pursued through her soul to her

flesh--

Mornings of memory, noontides of agony, midnights unslaked for her,

Till the stones of the streets of her Hells and her Paradise ached for her.

So she lived while her body corrupted upon her.

And she called on the Night for a sign, and a Sign was allowed,

And she builded an Altar and served by the light of her Vision--

Alone, without hope of regard or reward, but uncowed,

Resolute, selfless, divine.

These things she did in Love's honour...

What is a God beside Woman? Dust and derision!

III.

In Kipling’s poem, “Late Came the God,” the God is clearly not Yahweh and must be one of the gods of mythology. A good candidate is Eros, the Greek god of love. Evidently, Eros is very angry with this unnamed woman for not falling in love with the narrator of the poem who could be Kipling or any unlucky-in-love man, wanting a woman who doesn’t return his love and may not even acknowledge him. Eros, through his minions, had made many efforts to cause the woman to become bedazzled with this man, but nothing worked. Eros read her refusal to respond to his will as arrogance, and one thing we learn quickly when we read Greek or Roman mythology is that human arrogance is what the goddesses and gods detested most about humans and what they were quick to punish.

For example, in Homer’s “Odyssey,” Odysseus’ troubles are compounded when, after a small victory of some sort, he has the gall to yell out, “I did this without the gods! I do not need the gods.” Already separated from his family for seven years, if I recall correctly Aeolus, Poseidon, and Zeus saw to it that he wouldn’t see his wife or son again for another seven years as a result of his arrogance.

The woman in the Kipling poem did not love the man Eros chose for her; she loved another man, and Eros saw to it that she suffered for her choice. She appeals to a god for help with the pain that had been inflicted upon her; sadly, ironically, without realizing that Eros was the cause of her pain, she probably appealed to him. Of course, he did not relieve her pain.

Given these poetic circumstances, I’m thrown trying to figure out what the final line of the poem could mean: “What is a God beside Woman? Dust and derision!” This seems to be the opposite of what the poem has been getting at--that Eros is powerful enough to make the woman miserable. Yet, Kipling says that next to this woman, Eros is powerless; he is nothing more than dust and derision--meaning, perhaps, that the woman won out after all. She bore her pain yet stood her ground. She would not pretend to love a man she did not love, and, conversely, she refused to pretend not to love the man she DID love. In the end, therefore, she was more powerful than the god.

Romantic love is a mysterious force; it can’t be quantified, manufactured, or predicted. These matchmaking services that claim to be able to match you up with your ideal match find out your likes and dislikes in a romantic partner and rely on a computer to find an applicant based on a pairing of preferences, but a perfect pairing of preferences will not guarantee that love will grow. It might guarantee a decent dinner conversation, but someone can be with the person whose traits on paper would seem to make the person the woman or man of the seeker’s dreams with no fireworks; face to face, nothing at all may happen in the love department. It’s all about chemistry, which means that people often find themselves in love with someone their stated preferences on paper would have ruled out absolutely.

As a woman I barely know who friended me on Facebook said to her friends, automatically copying me, “Prince Charming may not have a 32-inch waist.” I hear the odds for straight men in nursing homes are really strong; there are so many more women than men still living in those higher age brackets.

The great rhetorician Aristotle, who obviously had a way with words, said: “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” The gifted Lebanese American writer, Kahlil Gibran, saw love as the basis for making life anything more than life at its barest: “Life without love,” he wrote, “is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.” And John Keats’s poem has stirred many a lover:

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for their religion--

I have shudder'd at it.

I shudder no more.

I could be martyr'd for my religion

Love is my religion

And I could die for that.

I could die for you.

Here’s a bad news/good news twist. The bad news is, very often love felt and expressed isn’t reciprocated. It doesn’t have to be reciprocated to be true love. It feels a whole lot better if it is reciprocated, but if you really love someone with all your heart, then you love her or him whether or not that love is returned. That’s the bad news. The good news is, we humans are capable of loving more than one person. When it comes to romantic love, I think it’s much more tidy to let that love extend to only one person at a time, and I wonder if those people who are carrying on loving romantic relationships with more than one person at a time aren’t diluting the true intensity of love for themselves as well as for those whom they love. But if I told you that you shouldn’t love more than one person at a time, that is if you are male, I’d be advising you to defy holy scripture. Women, however, are biblically limited to one husband at a time.

So, again, love doesn’t have to be reciprocated to be true love, and often it will not be. If it is not being reciprocated, the healthy thing to do is to acknowledge your emotions and move on. Someone will tell you, “There’s more than one fish in the sea,” which is no consolation whatsoever, but the good news is, it is possible to love someone else who may well love you in return; that’s the goal.

If you do head out in search of love when someone you love stops loving you in return or never has been able to love you in return, here is some really sound, solid pastoral advice, which also happens to be common sense: never settle. Never settle. I say that knowing that after facing rejection even by someone who is very kind about the rejection, saying that she or he just doesn’t feel what you feel, the easiest thing in the world to do is to take the very next halfway decent candidate who has limited baggage and no criminal background.

Love on the rebound rarely happens. Lust on the rebound happens all the time.

Waylon Jennings sang it this way:

I've spent a lifetime looking for you

Single bars and good time lovers, never true

Playing a fools game, hoping to win

Telling those sweet lies and losing again.

I was looking for love in all the wrong places

Looking for love in too many faces

Searching your eyes, looking for traces

Of what I'm dreaming of...

Hopin’ to find a friend and a lover

God bless the day I discover

Another heart, lookin’ for love

Sometimes, love, real love, happens at first sight; there is no question about it. It absolutely can happen that way, but often like evolves into love. Mariah Carey wrote and sung on her debut album, “Love Takes Time.” She was signing about something entirely different from we’re talking about right now, but the title to her song is, nonetheless, something someone searching for love should keep in mind. We’re so programmed, by having seen countless films where true love begins and blossoms in the duration of a typical movie that we let ourselves think a couple of hours should be enough time to see if true love is going to grow or not. Remember how well things worked out for Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in “Sleepless in Seattle” in about two hours? That’s how many of us think.

There are plenty of couples who begin as friends and find themselves together more and more as the years pass, and only after a long time does the epiphany hit them: what they’re sharing is love. The real thing.

When love happens, you’d better be alert enough to grab it and nourish it if that is what you want; if not, don’t play with someone else’s emotions. It doesn’t come to everyone, or if it does, not everyone notices. One of the lovers speaking or singing to the other in the most erotic book in the Bible says this:

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.

Amen.

James Weldon Johnson and the Prodigal Son

I.

One of James Weldon Johnson’s biographers said he was was “an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist.” Oh, is that all? He was one of the first African American professors at NYU, and later in his life he moved south and became professor of creative literature at Fisk University.

We are most interested in Professor Johnson today because of his poetry. He wrote his own poetry, of course, but he also edited, in 1922, The Book of American Negro Poetry, which was called a major contribution to the history of African American literature by the Academy of American Poets.

Since “Mammy” was my favorite character in “Gone with the Wind,” James Weldon Johnson’s poem, “The Black Mammy,” catches my eye:

O whitened head entwined in turban gay,

O kind black face, O crude, but tender hand,

O foster-mother in whose arms there lay

The race whose sons are masters of the land!

It was thine arms that sheltered in their fold,

It was thine eyes that followed through the length

Of infant days these sons. In times of old

It was thy breast that nourished them to strength.

So often hast thou to thy bosom pressed

The golden head, the face and brow of snow;

So often has it ‘gainst thy broad, dark breast

Lain, set off like a quickened cameo.

Thou simple soul, as cuddling down that babe

With thy sweet croon, so plaintive and so wild,

Came ne'er the thought to thee, swift like a stab,

That it some day might crush thine own black child?

Here’s another: “Prayer at Sunrise.”

O mighty, powerful, dark-dispelling sun,

Now thou art risen, and thy day begun.

How shrink the shrouding mists before thy face,

As up thou spring'st to thy diurnal race!

How darkness chases darkness to the west,

As shades of light on light rise radiant from thy crest!

For thee, great source of strength, emblem of might,

In hours of darkest gloom there is no night.

Thou shinest on though clouds hide thee from sight,

And through each break thou sendest down thy light.

O greater Maker of this Thy great sun,

Give me the strength this one day's race to run,

Fill me with light, fill me with sun-like strength,

Fill me with joy to rob the day its length.

Light from within, light that will outward shine,

Strength to make strong some weaker heart than mine,

Joy to make glad each soul that feels its touch;

Great Father of the sun, I ask this much.

Johnson penned the words to a poem set to music that came to be called “The Negro National Anthem.” It has the title, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a magnificent piece that must feel very different to a person of color singing it than to a caucasian.

Professor Johnson may be most remembered in the literary world for his composition, “God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse.” These poem/sermons are “patterned after traditional African-American religious oratory.” Johnson considered the voice of the black preacher to be a musical instrument. He is said to have described the black preacher’s voice not as a piano or a trumpet, but rather a trombone. Eventually, these amazing poems were set to music; the soloist portrayed a preacher singing her or his sermon. I believe the first effort to set Johnson’s poems to music was done by his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson.

So, these seven folk sermons that comprise “God’s Trombones” originally were intended to be read. By and by, someone said, “Those ought to be sung.” Indeed, many preachers in the Black preaching tradition have sung parts of their sermons or have sung their sermons in full--though singing the whole sermon was more rare.

The Prodigal Son is one of the seven sermons that make up “God’s Trombones.” It has already been read beautifully for us, but now I want you to hear it sung--part of it, anyway. I’m not going to sing it, but we have a recording to share with you.

[clip]

So most of you know the broad outline of the story. A son asks his father for his share of what he would normally have inherited from his father’s estate upon the death of the father. Broken hearted the father grants the wish. In the parable, this father represents God. The son, the younger of the two sons the man had, represents all who would take the good gifts of God and use them selfishly and thoughtlessly.

The young man goes to a far country. Jesus doesn’t name it, but James Weldon Johnson calls it Babylon, which had been one of widely known evil cities in the ancient world. The young man has a grand old time as long as the money holds out; when he runs out of money, he’s a nobody. The friends he thought he’d made were no where to be found; none of them answered their cell phones or responded to his texts.

To survive, this Jewish man had to take a job tending to a Gentile’s hogs on a hog farm. In order to do the job well, you can just live with the hogs and share their food too, his boss had told him. Mercy, mercy how lowly he had fallen, a financially comfortable Jewish man now broke and tending hogs, one of the high offenses in the Jewish mind.

Let’s recap using the poetic words of James Weldon Johnson:

And the young man went with his new-found friend,
And bought himself some brand-new clothes,
And he spent his days in the drinking-dens,
Swallowing the fires of hell.
And he spent his nights in the gambling-dens,
Throwing dice with the devil for his soul.
And he met up with the women of Babylon.
Oh, the women of Babylon!

Dressed in yellow and purple and scarlet,
Loaded with rings and earrings and bracelets,
Their lips like honeycomb dripping with honey,
Perfumed and sweet-smelling like a jasmine flower;
And the jasmine smell of the Babylon women
Got in his nostrils and went to his head,
And he wasted his substance in riotous living,
In the evening, in the black and dark of night,
With the sweet-sinning women of Babylon.
And they stripped him of his money,
And they stripped him of his clothes,
And they left him broke and ragged
In the streets of Babylon.

Then the young man joined another crowd—
The beggars and lepers of Babylon.
And he went to feeding swine,
And he was hungrier than the hogs;
He got down on his belly in the mire and mud
And ate the husks with the hogs.
And not a hog was too low to turn up his nose
At the man in the mire of Babylon.

II.

The parable from Jesus, typically referred to as “The Prodigal Son,” but which should be called “The Lost Son” or “The Loving Father,” as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, is immensely stirring to me. The son is “lost” not in the sense that many fundamentalist interpreters insist on using the word--meaning, for them, LOST TO GOD. There’s no such thing as being lost to God. A person may choose to live as if God is not her or his life-force and as if divine love skipped over her or him when deciding where to reside, but that line of thinking doesn’t change reality. God is the life-force keeping all living beings and things alive in this world, and divine love is at the core of this life-force whether acknowledged or affirmed or not.

The son in this parable that has captivated the minds and hearts of “Jesus devotees” as well as “Jesus samplers” for centuries is lost for a while, but he is not lost to God; he is lost to himself, or--another way of saying that would be--he loses himself. No one in this world is lost to God; again, that’s an impossibility, but, my dear friends and fellow seekers, there are hoards of people who have lost themselves. Some of them know it; some of them don’t. Some of those who don’t know it, know something is wrong, but they are clueless about what it is. They are listless and forlorn, but they don’t know that they’ve lost themselves.

I’ve only known one person who mentally, cognitively didn’t know who she was--aside from a handful of Alzheimer’s patients who knew enough, as the disease progressed, to know that they no longer realized who they were. The person to whom I referred who didn’t know who she was for a reason other than Alzheimer’s Disease was an early middle-aged woman in my home church who was in a terrible car accident in which she sustained massive head injuries. As her body healed internally and externally and she, finally, regained consciousness she didn’t remember anything about her life before the accident--nothing. She didn’t know anyone she’d known before the accident--no one, and most poignantly to me as a teen-aged kid, she didn’t know who she was. In the accident, she lost herself.

Eventually, with medication and therapy and an amazingly patient and attentive husband, from what I understood, she re-learned who she was, but as far as I know she never did find the person she was before the wreck. The person she came to be after the accident was a combination of what her loved ones told her about who she had been as well as photographs, diplomas, her home, and her clothes closet. Coming back to church was especially difficult and frightening for her because all of us whom she had known for years were, initially, strangers. Not only did she have to be taught who she had been, but also she had to re-learn the history of each of her church friends along with her family members, neighbors, and professional associates. It was a years-long process, but Sharon finally learned to function like the self she’d lost.

There are many ways to analyze and interpret Jesus’ parable of the Lost Son. I want to try my hand today at doing that in a way I’ve never done before; nor have I seen anyone else try it this way, which is always my preference.

This would be a little more fun if you didn’t already know that the son finds himself and that, for him, the story has a happy ending. It would be a much better narrative experience if you felt the tension and doubt he felt about ever finding himself, but, alas, the wide familiarity of the story is a spoiler in that sense. I can only ask you to move along with me and not to jump ahead to the ending; live through the experience of the son to get the full impact of this oft retold tale from a man who spent his adult life telling people who had lost themselves that there was a way to get back, that there was a way to find and reclaim the lost self.

This is how I think it happened, which I must tell you was a secondary concern for Jesus; Jesus was concerned with the process of resolution, but I think it’s fair to look at the secondary details since they were a part of how the carefully crafted parable came together. Had the son not lost himself, there would have been no story of how he found himself.

First, an overview of the process of how he came to lose himself and then a closer look at each part of that process. See if you can relate to or, at least, understand what was going on with the son. By the way, it’s important to remember that while most preachers who have preached on this parable have made the son a rebellious teen-ager, the fact is the story doesn’t give us any hint whatsoever about his age. If his father were old enough to have amassed enough money to leave his sons a financial inheritance (which most fathers to whom Jesus preached would not have been able to do because they were so poor), the father could have been on up there in years, and his sons (he had two) could easily have been middle-aged.

Teen-agers aren’t the only ones who rebel, as some of you know who once were married to a spouse who left you to try to live a second childhood. As a matter of fact, the son in this story might easily have been doing just that; no wife is mentioned, but he, just the same, might have had a wife who knew something was up when he started going out after work several nights a week, losing weight, and buying tailored, more tightly-fitting togas. Then, the tell-tale sign, he bought a young, fast-moving camel and outfitted him in red trim.

So, the process of losing oneself whether teen or middle-ager begins with a dissatisfaction with oneself and/or with one’s circumstances. Isolated from the rest of the process I’ll be describing, there’s nothing wrong with that. A hint that something needs to change can be a very good thing.

The next step along the way of losing oneself is when someone, and this is certainly not limited to men, decides that the best way to deal with this mounting dissatisfaction is not to try to change anything as it is, but, rather, to get away from it--for a while or for good.

These first two steps or levels may be entirely rational realizations; there is nothing necessarily irrational about feeling deep dissatisfaction with one’s present circumstances and a hunch that life could be better elsewhere with a fresh start, a new job, new friends, and a shedding of what in the present is making the person feel trapped in her or his dissatisfaction with life. At step three, however, the person on the way to losing herself or himself begins to lose touch with reality in some kind of way--mildly at first and then, most likely, dramatically. There are several ways this can happen. The person can convince herself or himself that she or he can be, will be a fundamentally different person in a different context; sometimes, that may be true, but most of the time we are who we are no matter where we are. Our fears may follow us wherever we live. Our irritating habits will almost certainly travel with us and bother the new people we meet as much as they did the people we are leaving behind. If you’re a nutcase where you presently are and manage to get yourself elected to public office, you’ll be a nutcase when you get to Washington--only, now, more people will know it and be disadvantaged or hurt by your shortcomings.

The next phase of losing oneself is a break with one’s present. It may or may not involve a physical move, but there is some kind of cutting off and getting away from life as you have known it with the thought that the break will bring the solution, will relieve you of your dissatisfaction, will cause you to love life as you’ve always dreamed you could if only you weren’t held back by what has been holding you back, as you perceive it. With this comes the illusion that a new set of life circumstances will fix everything. I have to say here that there are evil or destructive people and/or situations that we have to away from in order to be well; I’m thinking of someone who suffers physical abuse from a significant other, for example. The most sane thing you can do in that kind of situation is get out of there ASAP. I’m not addressing that kind of situation in this sermon.

Someone may cash in life savings to create the dreamed of new life. The money or something bought with the money is seen as the solution to all the person’s problems. Unless you were hungry and homeless in your situation of dissatisfaction, money and materialism will not solve your problems and will not bring you happiness. That’s part of the illusion, though, and that’s the major part of the process leading to losing oneself. Something else, someone else, some place else can make me happy, can give me the fulfillment I don’t have now; therefore, I will submerge myself in that “else” and let the old life go completely.

When that happens, you’ve lost yourself. I’ve lost myself. The longer we live in that place, in that illusion, the more difficult it will be ever to find ourselves when the illusion has run its course, and we find ourselves in what we just knew was our dream place or our dream circumstances as unhappy or significantly unhappier than we were before we lost ourselves. Yes, indeed, it’s possible to wake up one morning far, far away physically or psychically from where we began and have no idea who we really are or who we were.

Some people who lose themselves never find themselves again. Some make some effort to find themselves, and some of them will succeed; others won’t. Those who try to find themselves may well, on the way back, do something disgusting or distasteful for a while because finding a lost self isn’t an instantaneous process.

The road back may be tough, and there is absolutely no assurance that when we get back to where we began we will still have a place or will be able to experience life precisely as we experienced it before. We can find ourselves in spite of that, however. The thing is, there are absolutely no guarantees.

III.

In Jesus’ parable, the son leaves, and the father has no reasonable choice, really, but to let him go. In the companion parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin, God as the shepherd and God as the woman who lost one of her ten coins, all the money she had in the world, looks diligently for what is lost. In this parable of the Lost Son, however, the loving father can’t go out looking for his son. He knows that under these circumstances, all he can do, as heartbreaking as it is, is wait to see if his son will ever come back home or not. This is an insight into the God who loves without coercion. God will not force any of us to acknowledge God in us or receive the love God extends to all parts of the created order.

This parable has a happy ending for the Father and his lost son; the other son is as frustrated as he can be, but that’s another sermon. The son who had lost himself begins to have glimpses of the self he’d lost while he slops the hogs and sobers up enough to take in the fact that he is satisfying his hunger with the same cuisine thrown out to the hogs. He remembers the man he had been back then--a person of dignity and responsibility, even if his older brother didn’t think so.

James Weldon Johnson again:

Young man, come away from Babylon,
That hell-border city of Babylon.
Leave the dancing and gambling of Babylon,
The wine and whisky of Babylon,
The hot-mouthed women of Babylon;
Fall down on your knees,
And say in your heart:
I will arise and go to my Father.

The prodigal son has plenty of time to think there in the pig sty, and who he was, “the real him,” comes back to him completely. The self he lost is found. Many people aren’t nearly so fortunate. What he can’t control is how others whom he hurt in his determination to become someone else will feel about him, how understanding or forgiving they will be.

His big brother is entirely unforgiving, but he hit the jackpot with his father. Remember, in the parable, the father represents God, the God who couldn’t go out in search of someone who thought that he wanted to distance himself from God. Jesus tells the story of the reunion with such poignance that it’s hard to keep from feeling a tear in your eye. The father, probably an older man, as explained earlier, is sitting on the porch of his big old farm house--looking constantly down the road that the son would have to use to get back home if he were still alive and ever decided to come back.

We realize he has found himself when he decides that he can’t just prance back into his father’s house and pick up where he left off, as if all were well, and he had just taken a little vacation. In fact, the only way that he would give himself permission to dare to speak to the father whose heart he had broken in more ways than one was to ask for a job as a hired hand, living in shelters with them, and eating the food prepared for them, which were hardly delicacies from the big house, but a hell of a lot better than hog slop.

One day what he saw was too good to be true. He saw his son walking up the road toward home, the road some years ago he had hurried down to get away from who had been and those who had loved him as he was. Fathers, especially older men, didn’t run to meet their children, but this one did. He ran as best he could with creaky hips and arthritic knees to get to his baby boy whatever the son’s age. He threw his arms around his son and kissed him.

He told his indoor servants to put on a big bash, “...for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he lost himself, but found himself again. What greater thing is there to celebrate?”

Every Monday night a sizable number of people gather to use part of our facility; they are people who have lost themselves in alcohol, and the twelve steps in the Alcoholics’ Anonymous program are helping them find themselves again. Not all do, but many do. Their “Higher Power” is running to greet them when they do. They had begun using alcohol to help them deal with the people they were with whom they were dissatisfied; the alcohol changed them alright, but they had to keep it coming in order to be the new person they could be with the constant help of the alcohol. Eventually, they lost themselves in those bottles and tried living a full and meaningful life as the people they became with the help of alcohol. Didn’t work, not for a single one of them. The twelve step program helped them leave the false self behind and seek the old self, the real self.

There are hosts of reasons you might have lost the real you; sometimes bad theology tells you that you are fundamentally bad and must change in order to be right with God. The parable of the Lost Son helps us find out how we lost ourselves and how we may, nonetheless, find ourselves in the embrace of the God who loves and the God who waits patiently and expectantly while we look for the self we lost. We can never be lost to God.