"Unfinished World, Unfinished Calling

"Unfinished World; Unfinished Calling"
  

The gospel lesson today is my favorite in the New Testament. I love its complexity and structure, it lyric quality, its power as a story.  Luke’s version of Jesus’ story has been told and re-told in myriad ways. If you don’t believe me, see the new movie In Her Shoes. It is great story for a great day like today.

And it is an unfinished story.

“The Prodigal Son” is embedded in three stories of Lost and Found – stories with male and female characters.  A lost sheep, a lost coin, a lost child.

People get lost, sometimes, whole peoples. One of the great tenets of our faith is that the God who created the heaven and earth, seeks out the lost and finds them. Today, that same God is still creating a creation that is a mixture of quantum leaps and the unfolding process of redemption that those events push forward. Creation and redemption are not static events of the past – they are happening here and now!

The founding of MCC in 1968 was just such an event. Rev. Troy Perry is the Founder who had been found by God in a moment of great awakening. Rev. Perry made the incredible quantum leap of consciousness that said “If  God loves me, as a gay man, and I hadn’t known that, then God must love all GLBT people; and many of them must not know it either.” From that moment of consciousness, and many other ones like it, this moment was made possible. That first event, the founding of MCC, was fundamentally an act of gospel grace and generosity – lostness turned around as a vocation to a lost people.

And now, we have this church, this inheritance, still in its young, formative life, still being shaped; with just under 20,000 tithing members, tens of thousands of other followers, and with an impact on 1 million people a year. We are a church of the de-churched and the un-churched – exiles, refugees, suspicious of institutions – which makes building a new one an “interesting” challenge at times!  And we have had the audacity to claim “global calling” in a world some think is flattening, and others think is on the verge of apocalyptic destruction.

The younger son, in the story thought he knew what was best for his life and future. Unprepared, immature, gullible, perhaps, he threw away his inheritance. As we would say today, he hit “bottom.” Addictions and bad choices, things we do not know, caused him to become destitute, even starving. And, as can happen in those moments, he had a spiritual awakening. He thought of home and his father, and remembered that even his father’s servants had a decent life. He wondered if his father would take him back just as a servant. Overriding his fear and shame, he started the journey homeward.

I remember that time, at age 22, when, overriding fear and guilt and shame, I leapt at the opportunity MCC offered me to work for nothing for Jesus, freedom and justice!  Some might have thought I was throwing away my inheritance – but a new inheritance was waiting for me, as the old Meg Christian song says, “The way back home to me, was the road I took to you!”

The Prodigal rehearsed his speech over and over, until he began to see the family farm in the distance.  Then, the most wonderful moment, of grace and surprise in the story –  Jesus said “While he was yet afar off the father ran to greet him.”  While the son tries in vain to stammer out his groveling speech, the father ignores it, and instead embraces him fully as a child, restores him completely and throws a big party.  The family’s prayers had been answered. Nothing else mattered. The son had “repented” – literally turned around, came home but, as Marsha Stevens says, he was, “Someone new, not someone else.” In this unfinished story, we are left wonder how this son will navigate continuing to be himself while also becoming healthy, safe and connected.

Today in Boston, Massachusetts, where I first got “found” at MCC, pastor Michael Cooper, says this: “while our denomination is gathered in Washington DC today, unveiling “Focus on the Human Family,” several of us from MCC Boston are joining with others to hold a prayer vigil outside Focus on the Family’s program “ Love Won Out” – an ex-gay conference here in Boston. . .please remember us today as we continue the struggle here in Boston against religious homophobia and discrimination.” How many here tried becoming an “ex-gay?” Welcome home!

Some of us, women or men, come back to God with litanies of victimization, of excuses, of tales of failure and desperation – all that matters to God is our willingness to accept daughtership or sonship. That is the founding narrative of MCC, it is the gospel. 

But it is only part of the story which, is really, after all an unfinished story. In a quantum world, only unfinished stories are interesting. Because they insist that we enter in.

Family systems theory would say that the Prodigal, the youngest son, was the “identified patient.” He was the one whose behavior was analyzed and questioned.  But, really it is the whole family that holds the “dysfunction.” Often the identified patient, the one who is acting out, may be doing that as a cry for help not just for themselves, but for the whole family system.  For the fortunate family, that is willing to work on it together, the identified patient can really be the one who leads the family back to authentic relationship.

Is MCC the identified patient in the family of God? Can it be our vocation to lead the church and the world into a new, authentic appreciation of the grace of God?  Is that too grandiose?

I have always thought that the difference between MCC  (and other more open, progressive churches) and fundamentalism is not what we preach or believe about sexuality, but what we preach and believe and know about the nature of God and grace.  We know it because we learned it “while we were yet far off.. .”  We who were surprised by grace learned something powerful about God’s unfinished world, unfinished work.

In Luke’s account, we too come to know this parent in the story in a new way. In Jesus situation, he saw people who were often discounted, outcast, at the margins, experience God with a kind of freshness and authenticity that those who were supposedly in the “know” missed. 

But that is only half the story told in Luke 15. There is the older son, working out in the field. As he comes home, hears the music starting, smells the barbecue. . .and is filled with rage!! He sees his father as indulgent, weak-willed; and he surely believes that he is not the favored son. . .though he deserves to be!

He is just as lost as the younger son.  He is lost in jealousy and bitterness.  He fears that the father is being taken in by the “loser” of a brother, and imagines that the father’s love is in limited supply.

This is a story of two who are lost, not one. Jesus’ original audience for this story immediately “got” what he was talking about – the Pharisees and scribes, teachers of the law, were lost and stuck in their view of God. They were resentful of God’s grace.  Some Christians have tried to make this a story about a false, artificial difference between Jews and Christians.  The truth is that all religions, especially Christianity these days, have their “eldest sons.”  In the name of Jesus some espouse hate or fear. Like the one on television recently, who floated the idea of the assassinating the President of Venezuela. 

The father points out to the son that “All I have is yours” – but the older son does not know his father any more than the younger son did.  This oldest son reminds me of Auntie Mame’s famous line, “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving.” The older son is starving in his lostness, just as was the younger son had been starving in that far away country.

American Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church are acting like eldest sons, covering up their own lostness, blaming it on others, like gay priests. Missing opportunities for repentance and grace. Digging in their heels.  Offering only cover up and betrayal.  Do they not know the nature of God?  That only the truth will set up free? Do they not know that all their stonewalling and hiding behind lawyers under the guise of risk management is salt in the wounds of the victims, the faithful? 

Is it possible that GLBT people are not the only ones who have been lost.   Funny, isn’t it - the eldest brother is not necessarily so upset when the younger is lost – but he is upset when the younger one is found!  Gene Robinson had to wear a bullet proof vest at his consecration as a Bishop not because he was lost, and hopeless, but because he was “found” – found to be  competent, compassionate, qualified.  A redeemed and gifted gay man! The Roman Catholic Church, or any church for that matter, could only hope to have bishops, leaders as Christ-centered and anointed as Gene Robinson. Or Diane Fisher, or Cindi Love.

I knew a church bureaucrat who was lost. He was a high-ranking person in the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA around the time MCC had applied for membership, more than twenty years ago. When we applied for membership, he was annoyed, more than anything. But he had an awakening, and came to believe that MCC was in every way eligible for membership in the NCC – in fact, that our participation might enliven and bless the NCC.  Unfortunately, those in leadership did not share his view.

The day we were essentially rejected for membership in 1983 it was reported in the NY Times – along with another story, which illuminated it!  On that same day, Pope John Paul II asked forgiveness for how the church had treated Galileo – I loved seeing those stories side by side.  It was God’s private joke with me that day. . . Patience, Nancy, patience.