3-14-10
Bulletin Listen Watch Video

Dear Friends,

Every one of us, I am convinced, keeps a scorebook in our minds, carefully tracking who plays the game of life fairly, and who does not – the winners, and the losers.  Our assumption is that God always sides with those who walk the straight and narrow, who do not stray too far from the fold, who dutifully follow the rules, even when they do not always agree with them.  These, we believe, are the winners.  But for those losers who cannot seem to stay the course, who either drift away and gradually become lost or run away so defiantly that they cannot be stopped – for these, we assume, there will be a reckoning.  What goes around comes around, we say.  Everyone must eventually have to sleep in the bed they have made.  In the end, the winners will prevail.  Or so we think.

The parable of the Prodigal Son, for all its familiarity, never ceases to surprise, shock, and infuriate those of us who think we know a thing or two about God’s justice.   At first glance, it seems like a story about a loser becoming an unlikely winner, and a self-identified winner who learns the hard way that the scorebook he has kept for so long is useless because, by all appearances, everyone wins in the end, regardless of how they have lived their lives, or how much damage they have caused.  

But this summary is not entirely true, because the story is not about winners and losers, but the lost and the found; it’s not about God’s justice, but God’s mercy; it’s not about two sons, but one father, who will do anything and everything necessary to keep his household together, even if means that, in the end, he’s the one who comes off looking like the loser. 

I hope you’ll join us this Sunday as we look once again at this familiar, yet subversive parable.  Wherever you are in your life right now, there’s a place for you in the story, and a place in the household of God.

See you Sunday,

Rev. Mark