[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the Collective Table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties Scripture with into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation and even the podcast.
So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: Good morning.
For those of you who don't know, my name is Jason. I'm one of the co pastors here at the Oceanside Sanctuary.
We are just towards the beginning of a new teaching series on the Parables of Jesus. This is sort of Parables of Jesus Part two because we did the parables last summer, sort of Part one, centering mostly on sort of the kingdom Parables of Jesus.
This summer we're going through sort of part two of that. And don't ask me if we're going to finish them next summer or not, because we don't plan that fall far ahead. But we'll see. It's my honor to be able to bring to you the story of the Unfair Father, which you might know as the Parable of the Prodigal Son. But I really don't like the titles of sections and parables in the Bible, so I like to rename things as much as possible. So today we're going to read about the Unfair Father in Luke, chapter 15, verses 1132. So if you have a Bible, feel free to turn there. If not, we'll go ahead and put the words up on the screen. It's a little bit longer, so settle in. And I want to encourage you as I read through this as you follow along, really imagine what this might be like in your own family dynamic if this sort of tale unfolded in your own. And for some of you, maybe it has verse 11 says this. Then Jesus said, there was a man who had two sons, and the younger of them said to his father, father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.
So he divided his property between them.
A few days later, the younger son gathered all that he had and traveled to a distant country.
And there he squandered his property in dissolute living.
And when he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. And so he went, he hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs.
He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating, and no one gave him anything. But when he came to Himself, he. He said, how many of my father's hired hands have bread enough to spare? But here I am, dying of hunger.
I'll get up and I'll go to my father and I'll say to him, father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me like one of your hired hands.
So he set off, went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion. And he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. And then the son said to him, father, I've sinned against heaven and before you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son.
But the father said to his slaves, quickly, bring out a robe, the best one, and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger, sandals on his feet. Get the fatted calf and kill it. Let us eat and celebrate.
For this son of mine was dead and is alive again.
He was lost and is found.
And they began to celebrate.
Now his elder son was in the field. And when he came and he approached the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called on one of the slaves and said, what's going on? And he replied, your brother has come and your father has killed the fatted calf. Because he got him back safe and sound. And then he, being the elder son, became angry and refused to go in.
His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, listen, for all these years I've been working like a slave for you.
I've never disobeyed your command. And yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him.
Then the father said to him, son, you're always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice. Because this brother of yours was dead and has come back to life.
He was lost and has been found.
Would you pray with me, God? It's our prayer this morning that you would meet us in some way through this story, through these words, through this teaching that Jesus bring before the leaders and the scribes and the chief priests, the Pharisees and his disciples, that all who were gathered before him wondered what was God like?
It feels very much like that's what we are doing as well, wondering what God is like. And so we pray that you would stretch us today.
That whatever in this story causes us to think might become an occasion for us to grow a bit more like you, a bit more like people of compassion and mercy and love.
I pray this in Jesus name, Amen.
Okay, so I know I tell too many stories about my grandson. You're just going to have to live with it.
But one of my favorite things about Otis right now, Otis is a little over two and a half years old and he's starting to gain a sense of fairness, right? Like everything has to be fair now. He doesn't use that word. He hasn't like grasped the concept of fairness in the abstract yet. But that day is coming. And if you've had children or grandchildren or have been around children, you know that fairness becomes like a point of contention at a certain point in their lives. And Otis is beginning to understand this in little ways that are a little bit more subtle. For example, Otis narrates his entire life.
Whatever happens to him, whatever is about to happen to him, he has to turn and tell everybody about it one at a time without skipping anyone.
And I think this is sort of the beginnings of his glimmer of fairness. So the other day, his parents, my daughter, our son in law over at the house, along with a few other people were sitting on our deck in our backyard and Otis was itching to get away from the table where we were eating. He wanted to go down to the lower part where like the fake grass is, and play.
And so he was like, can we go down? Can we go down? Can we go down? His grandmother Janelle is Birdie, and I'm Poppy. And he's like, birdie, can we go down and play? Birdie, can we go down and play? Birdie, can we go down and play? Poppy, can we go down and play? Finally, somebody's like, okay, Otis, go ahead. I think it was his dad decided he's going to take Otis down to play on his little slide in our backyard.
Great.
But now he has to tell everybody before he can go.
So he's like, birdie, my dad is going to take me down to play on the slide. Oh, that's great, buddy. Then he turns to me, poppy, my dad is going to take me down to play on the slide. Hey, that's great, buddy. Mom, my dad is going to take me down to play on the slide. Hey, that's great, buddy. Nana, his aunt, my dad is going to take me down to play on the slide. I'm convinced that he thinks it's fundamentally unfair if anybody in the vicinity has not been informed that he is going down to play. In the backyard. I could tell his dad is starting to get a little bit tired of the litany of Otis explaining to every single person there that he's going to go down and play on the slide in the backyard. So me being who I am, I decide to say, Otis, did you tell Zeke, our dog and his dad, who's the nicest guy in the world, shot me daggers because Otis had to go tell Zeke that he was going down to play in the backyard.
Yes, I am the kind of grandfather who will weaponize fairness against his own grandson in order to just mildly entertain myself from time to time.
This is very much the kind of father I was, too. This explains all the therapy.
I think this story is fundamentally about fairness. It's why it made me think a little bit about Otis and how he's discovering fairness at this time in his life.
It's really important, I think, that we not hear this story the way many of us are socialized to hear it, if we are raised in more controlling versions of church. So there are two ways that you might hear the story of the unfair father that I think are very unhelpful. The first is an allegory where some character in the story represents God, some character in the story represents you, probably the sinner, and some character in the story represents another kind of sinner that you should probably avoid being right. And that, I think, is really unhelpful. The parables of Jesus, the parables of rabbinic literature from the ancient world really are not allegories. They're stories that are meant to say something important about how to live and be in the world now.
So if you are inclined, like a lot of sort of, you know, former members of a high control church, to hear this story and try to figure out where the formula for salvation that will get you into heaven is, please, you have my permission to just let that go.
There is no code to crack in this story that will unlock for you the guarantee that when you close your eyes and fall into an eternal sleep, that you're going to wake up in heaven.
That's not how these stories work.
Another way that's sort of notoriously unhelpful for reading the Scripture is to see it also as an allegory, but a kind of allegory where Jesus is telling his followers why Judaism is bad.
And in this kind of allegory, which there's a long tradition in Christian history of sort of identifying the youngest son with sort of gentile followers of Jesus and the elder son with Jews, and because Jews are so judgmental and bad and terrible. Of course, God has to bring his purposes through Gentiles. That's a deeply anti Semitic reading of this story.
The truth is, is that this story is very much about grace and mercy and love, of course, all things that are highly esteemed in Judaism.
So please don't hear it that way either.
But let's revisit the story a little bit to perhaps appreciate the depths of what's going on here. First, I think the story makes it very clear that the sun has caused real harm, the prodigal son has caused real harm by his actions.
For his time in his place, to go to his father, who's clearly a wealthy man, to go to his father before his father has died and say, give me my inheritance, a lump sum of money that would have been his due as the eldest son, which would not have come to him until his father passed away, at which point it would have been custom, normal custom for the son to receive sort of a double portion after his father died.
Instead of that, the son says, can I just have that money now?
This is equivalent to saying to his father, you know, I really wish you were dead, because when I die, I'm going to get all this money.
But I don't want to wait.
I'd really not rather just not wait for you to be dead. Can we just pretend that you're dead now?
And I think the evidence that what's happening here really does sort of descend to that level of rejection is that the son doesn't just take the inheritance that the father grants him and like, hang around, the son takes the inheritance and leaves.
So there's a real rupture to their family. There's a real disruption of the community, really. The son not only rejects the father, but rejects his entire family, moves out of the country to a foreign land, rejects really his entire tradition.
One of the really obvious coded things in this story is that the son goes and wallows with pigs in a pig pen, which of course is really just symbolic of gentiles, because non Jews would have been equated in these sorts of stories with pigs, right? Pigs are a non kosher animal. If you're a good Jewish person, you don't eat pork.
And so the whole story very powerfully, very clearly states that the son wishes his father was dead, abandons his family, leaves his entire community, his entire culture, and goes and lives among a foreign group of people.
And then he takes that money, that money that was a part of his family's security, his family's Subsistence. And he squanders it on these very people who would have been deeply offensive to the Jewish community.
This is what it means when it says in the story that he squandered it among those pigs.
And so I think it's probably not like it would be hard to overstate the depths of the betrayal here.
And I think that's hard for us because in our culture we're like deeply individualistic. Like when our kids grow up, we want them to leave almost as bad.
Almost.
Elyon is a lovely human being, by the way, but we want them to leave almost as badly as they want to leave.
We're a highly individualistic culture in the United States. We highly value sort of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, being independent, living on our own, taking care of ourselves. We want our kids to live somewhere in the vicinity, especially if they have grandchildren, you know, for us. But. But we really want that sort of separation. And in this culture, it would have been very unusual for families to not live in multi generational households as a part of their sort of communal existence.
And so this is a deep betrayal of everything that the Father and this community stands for.
Despite that, the Son is welcomed back with incredible grace and mercy.
When the Son returns. The Father sees him from a distance. And much has been made of this. The Father sees him from a distance and runs to him to meet him from afar off. This, of course, I think, is meant obviously in the story for Jesus to illustrate that there is tremendous joy that this son that was considered dead is now returned to life. This is the occasion for the story. The scribes and the Pharisees, the religious elites in Jesus Day, they asked Jesus, why do you hang out with these people who have been ostracized and rejected from our community because they stand for everything that we're against. And Jesus tells this story in response to that question.
He tells parables like the parable of the Lost sheep and the parable of the Lost coin and the parable of the Prodigal Son. He tells these stories to answer the question, why in the world do you hang out with the dregs of our society? And he says, well, because there's great joy in returning those who were lost to the goodness of our community.
We're happy about that.
And so the Father is happy, he's joyful, he runs to meet the Son. But in addition to the joy, I think there's also a kind of protection because it would have been utterly normal and completely acceptable for the Son to have returned, but have been ostracized and rejected by his community because of what he had done.
And so by running to meet him, the father is not just expressing his joy, he's also very likely expressing his protection, signaling to everybody around, no, no, no. Don't reject my son. I accept him. Do not ostracize my son. I am receiving him with love and mercy and grace.
And in this way, this parable resonates very much with the point Janelle made in her sermon last week about the lost sheep, where, you know, the shepherd leaves the 99 to go after the 1. I think she rightly points out to us that. That'. Crazy.
You don't leave the 99 in order to go after one dumb sheep, one sick sheep, one wayward sheep.
Janelle makes the point that it's. It's not just the sheep that is transformed, but the whole group of sheep are transformed by this act of mercy. And I think the same thing is happening here.
The father isn't just transforming. The prodigal son, the wayward son, the lost son, the. The father isn't just saying to that, so you are accepted. The father is saying to everybody, he is accepted.
And in that way, the whole family, the whole community is transformed by this father's love.
The whole community has changed.
But.
But I think we're just not being honest with ourselves if we don't say, doesn't that older son kind of have a point?
I mean, the father's reception of the son is deeply unfair. He doesn't just say, oh, yeah, thanks for apologizing. We're glad to have you.
No, no. The father lavishes the son with riches. The father kills the fatted calf. The. The father gives him an expensive ring. The father drapes him with an expensive robe. This is like rewarding bad behavior.
I mean, any good parent or grandparent knows you don't reward bad behavior.
This, I think, is where fairness enters into the story.
Now, for reasons that I will not bore you with, I know entirely too much about moral psychology.
I'm not a psychologist. Some would say I'm not terribly moral, but I know a lot about. Stop. Tina. Moral psychology.
Yeah, that's true.
So there are sort of two prevailing theories in moral psychology. One was made famous by Jonathan Haidt, who gave a TED Talk that some of you maybe have seen. He has something that he's cracked open called Moral Foundations Theory. Moral Foundations theory basically teaches the idea that across cultures there are like five or six. He can't decide, by the way, five or six channels of morality. And this is actually deeply helpful. It's really helpful to think about morality in this way. He says that those channels of morality are harm.
Fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, or purity is probably a better word.
And then later, he adds a sixth one, which is agency or liberty.
Right? Because a lot of people were like, this is America. And he was like, oh, yeah, right, liberty. So this is helpful because what he says is that across cultures, you can identify that different cultures express their morality in lots of different ways. You've probably noticed this, right? Like if you go to other countries, different cultures have different sort of expressions of what they consider right and wrong. Jonathan Haidt says, yeah, but they're all expressions of harm or fairness or loyalty or purity or liberty. You can find those channels in everything.
Now, that's super helpful because it helps us to understand why people care so much about things like whether or not we're hurting others, whether or not we're being fair, whether or not we're adhering to purity rules, and why people care so much about all of that.
It's a little bit unhelpful because he's fundamentally wrong, in my opinion. I think the guy who gets it right is Kurt Gray, who says, yeah, all of Jonathan Haidt's categories are helpful, but the problem is he doesn't recognize that they're all about harm.
And this, I think, is really true and really helpful because it helps you to understand why people care about purity, for example, or sanctity.
When you realize that when you act in ways that they consider to be impure or unsanctified, that they think you're doing real harm to yourselves or to others, you might disagree with whether or not real harm is being done. But if you know, oh, this person is angry with me because they think I'm doing harm, at least it helps bridge that divide a little bit. And this is what fairness is.
Fairness is so fundamentally ingrained in us from a very young age because we intuitively receive the lesson that to be unfair is to hurt people.
Our whole model of justice is built on this, right? Literally, the symbol of justice is the scales.
Fairness means that if one person gets too much and the other person gets too little, this person is being harmed. That is un.
Fair.
This is, I think, ultimately a logic that is deeply ingrained in our culture too. This is the logic of the law and the police and prisons and ice.
This is why people will vehemently argue to you that people who cross the border without documentation deserve to be ripped from their families and their communities and separated from Their children, even if they've been living here for 40 years and paying taxes because they think they broke the law.
Even though to cross the border without documentation is literally not a crime, it's a civil infraction.
And so for every one of you who ever have received a speeding ticket, you also deserve, according to this logic, to be ripped from your families and your communities and sent to a country that you did not come from, or worse, put into a prison camp.
The reason people will justify that is because they think that the people who cross the border without documentation are contributing real harm to our communities.
And you might think that is absurd, but to them it's very real.
Their perception is that real harm is being done.
This is the elder son's complaint.
This is deeply unfair. The Father is being deeply unfair.
Not just to him, the elder son, although definitely to him, the elder son. He's got a lot to say about how hard he's worked and how loyal he has been and how carefully he's preserved the sanctity or the purity of, of their family and how much he has respected the Father's authority. All of this is coded moral language that has to do with the idea that the elder son has been harmed.
But beyond that, the elder son's complaint is also that the younger son hasn't just harmed him, the younger son has harmed his father.
Because of that deep betrayal. The younger son has harmed their whole family by squandering their inheritance.
The younger son has harmed their entire tribe, their ethnicity, by leaving the country, by leaving the Jewish community and residing with Gentiles. The youngest son has committed the deepest betrayal possible, and that is deeply harmful.
When I have felt betrayed by people, family or friends or co workers, I have been surprised to discover the rage that rises up in me.
And boy, were they surprised too.
There's something really visceral, something really human about responding in anger when you feel like you have been hurt because it is unfair.
Now, those are the two sides of this story.
The Father is merciful, the Father is gracious, the Father is loving.
And the eldest son is like, hey, what gives? This is completely unfair. He's completely tearing apart our family, our community, our entire identity.
Jesus point in the story, the moral of the story is that the Father's mercy is better than the elder son's judgment.
That's it.
Jesus would agree with James 2:13 that says mercy triumphs over judgment.
The question, I think for you, for me, for any of us who consider ourselves people who maybe take Jesus seriously, or at least are minimally interested in what Jesus has to say is, do you believe him?
Do you believe that mercy triumphs over judgments?
And this is an important question for you to reflect on, because what Jesus is essentially saying, and I want you to sit with this for just a half a second, is that love can be deeply unfair.
Now I'm with Tina.
I'd much rather mercy from you, definitely from Tina, and certainly from God, than judgment.
But that's a tough sell when you have been hurt, when you have been harmed, when unfairness has visited you in some way.
I don't think love is always unfair. I think that the beauty of love, the brilliance of love, the genius of love, is that it is not bound by the social rules of fairness or loyalty or authority or purity. That love does not always just break the rules for the sake of breaking the rules, but love reserves the right to break the rules because it recognizes that the rules can be weaponized.
Love knows the difference between when fairness is good, when fairness does good, when fairness provides healing and hope and goodness, versus when fairness has been manipulated or has aggregated with the privileged or the wealthy to the point where there is no fairness anymore, or to the point where the law, which is meant to be fair, remember the scales of justice is always one sided because of those who are in charge of it. And when that happens, you better believe that love breaks the law.
There is, I think, in this recognition also the lesson that I think isn't Jesus's main point here, but it is, I think, implicit that love, as powerful as it is, as good as it is, as able as it is to make things right, love has limits.
And this, I think, is the problem with love.
So, yes, the father's love transforms and impacts everybody in this, not just the youngest son. But love in this story does not transform everyone.
It doesn't transform the eldest son.
The eldest son says, no, thank you.
I'd rather judgment.
No, thank you. I would rather fairness across the board every time.
No, thank you. I'm enjoying my bitterness a little too much to push away from the table.
And this, I think, is the problem with love. The problem with love is that it is a weak form of power.
I love that Jen, in her reflection last week at communion, shared that she'd been reading Dorothy Zola, who's the great, you know, cigarette smoking, punk rock, Lutheran, mystical theologian I've been telling you guys about.
I love that she'd been reading Zola and she said that she had read that Dorothy Zola said that love was the only power that Jesus had at his disposal.
Because I think in a lot of ways this parable, or Janelle's parable of the lost sheep essentially is inviting us to believe that it would be good if love was the only power at our disposal as Christians.
Would you be willing to give up other forms of power because you believe love really is that good?
Would you be willing to give up your judgment? Would you be willing to give up your condemnation of others? Would you be willing to give up your tendency to ostracize people who have betrayed you?
Are we as Christians courageous enough to say, yes, we believe Jesus was right and we will have the courage to raise families of love and not violence or coercion, to build communities of love, not shame, to press for politics and policies of love, not violence, not war, not the indiscriminate rounding up of our neighbors and the violent separation of them from our communities. What if we believed this so much that we were willing to go all in, that love was the only power available to us?
Amen.
[00:33:26] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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