Exploring Our Prodigal-ness Part 2

 

The Parable of Prodigal-ness begins with the words, “A man had two sons…”  Remember in Jesus’ day that story was as old as time and a song as old as rhyme.  Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel.  Abraham had two sons (Ishmael and Isaac).  Isaac had two sons (Esau and Jacob).  Jacob…well he took the ‘be fruitful and multiply,’ to heart and had twelve sons.  We start to see that Jesus is picking up a thread and theme that has been woven throughout scripture.  He is calling people back to the truths of Genesis and our own beginnings.

“A man had two sons…” evokes and provokes connections to our own family.

Do you have siblings?  Do you have friends you’ve adopted as brothers or sisters?  Some families we choose and others we are born into.  I have one older brother, and our relationship is good.  But I know this is not the story of every person reading this morning meditation.  For some the ties that bind us through our DNA feel constraining and restraining.  For some our family has hurt and harmed us leaving woundedness that we are not sure will ever heal.  For some, we feel like we have been prodigal ~ lavish and outlandish and even wasteful ~ in trying to share love and support with our family and don’t feel appreciated/accepted.  For still others we may have insight into why the younger son wandered away, because he may have felt pushed out or unwelcome.  Maybe the older and younger brother had a relationship like Esau and Jacob ~ constantly wrestling emotionally and physically ~ and the younger brother thought, “I’m outta here!” (Jacob himself runs away after stealing Esau’s birthright blessing ~ perhaps there is an echo of Jacob’s story in the Prodigal Son). Sometimes we both wander away and other times we are nudged to go.  Sometimes we can wander away emotionally and never leave physically (this is the older son’s story).  We can live in proximity, geographically close, to family, but emotionally we are residing on Pluto! 

Today, I want you to write down the members of your family, try to use the most expansive and elastic definition.  Feel free to list people you share a roof with and those you’ve connected your heart with.  Family can be friends who have become as close as siblings or mentors who are like mothering-fathers to us.  Prayerfully ponder each relationship with each person.  If you would like to include parents or siblings or relatives who are in God’s eternal embrace, you are welcome.  You may want to put that great cloud of witnesses together at the top of the page.  To be sure, even when someone dies that relationship lives in us.  We carry the good, the bad, the ugly, the unresolved, unsaid, romanticized, idealized relationships with us, even when someone is no longer in our life.  There is also ambiguous grief that can happen with a divorce or when you get cut off in a relationship with someone who lives five states away.  Even though both people are still walking this earth, they don’t speak or acknowledge each other.  Our relationships are complex and complicated and contradictory.  And Jesus this morning steps right into this provoking and evoking the childhood/adolescent self who still lives in our soul, to wake us up.  Jesus opening words blows the dust off the cardboard boxes of emotional baggage we’ve tried to hide away in the cobwebbed corners of our soul.  Let Jesus into that space and sing to our beautiful, broken, human-size relationships this day.