The Hospitality of Our Prodigal God (Personal 2 of 2)

September 25, 2011 -- Bethesda Presbyterian Church

Scriptures     Psalm 139:1-15     Luke 15:1-3, 11b-24

The Hospitality of Our Prodigal God

The Three Ps of Our Church’s Identity: "Personal, Passionate, Progressive"
“Personal: Our Hospitality” (2 of 2)

Dedicated to the One Who Didn’t Say a Word …
and Now, Through God’s Prodigal Love, Is Singing the Tune

“Like a father running to welcome the prodigal home,
   God is faithful still.”

The line hails from the part of our Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Constitution known as the Book of Confessions. It is from the last historic confession among the eleven: A Brief Statement of Faith from 1988, composed on the heels of the merger of U.S. Presbyterians north and south.

This line never ceases to startle me. To intrigue me. To move me …

“Like a father running to welcome the prodigal home,
God is faithful still.”

Many of us never knew a father like that. My father was a good man, but touchy-feely he was not. Especially when I did something prodigally wrong. Which to his generation meant something unrespectable … or an impropriety, at least.

Take the time my middle brother Jim – age 15 then – ran away from home rather than heed my dad’s command to cut his hair. He disappeared for a couple of days. It took a come-to-Jesus meeting with one of Jim’s friends for my father to determine where he was. Jim was no more than 100 yards from the house the whole time … hiding out in the back lot clubhouse of the neighbor next door.

When on the third day Jim, unannounced, sulked through the back door unannounced, my mother could not restrain herself. She ran up and threw both arms around all that hair.

My father is nowhere to be found in my memory of that scene. As to be expected of most fathers in most generations.

Especially of fathers in Jesus’ generation.

Yet there he stands, today’s gospel dad – the one who gave birth to that line in the confession.

Hear these words, again, from the story so familiar:

“While (his younger son) was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion …”

I can picture God seeing me while I feel far off. And loving me, even when I may not feel too near to him.

God sees me, God knows me, God loves me: at all times, and in all places. Let us embrace today’s Psalm on that one.

Trouble is, when we feel so far off and alone … can we see or know or love God, in return?

Radclyffe Hall wrote a controversial novel nearly a century ago about being lesbian in post-Victorian England. Its title, The Well of Loneliness, captures that feeling of far-offness quite well.

The well of loneliness. A maelstrom of emotions. In the well: an inviting, intoxicating swirl. We immerse ourselves, feeling very involved and self-important. And then, we remember: The well has walls. We cannot crawl out. We threaten to drown.

And then … hospitality! True hospitality! Someone – an agent of God, no doubt – throws us a rope or offers us a ladder. We emerge; all things are made new. And while we have yet dried off from it all, we are invited to dip our bucket back – back into the very source of our drowning experience. Eventually invited to draw from it deep, when we come to some trust we will not fall back in. To draw some healing waters for others … the same waters we swam in, for our very lives.

As a longtime pastor of this congregation once put it about his life of faith: “I live alongside a deep well and although my bucket is small there is much water in the well.”

Certainly, the Prodigal Son in this story lived in the middle of a well. The waters had overcome him; he could not escape.

And though, from the deeps, he could not see his father taking him back, he did the only thing he could possibly do. He cried out for help. The Prodigal Son cried out … for his equally Prodigal Father.

Equally prodigal, for they were equally what the word prodigal means …

Extravagantly wasteful.

A son who was like his old man – though he could not yet see it. An old man who saw himself in his son: He could see it. He could see in his son the spittin’ image of himself:

Prodigal. Extravagantly wasteful. Describing the son’s hubris. Describing God’s hospitality.

“But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.”

Some of us today who have passed through these church doors find ourselves looking through the wrong end of life’s telescope. All seems small, on the other end of our tall. Extravagantly wasteful, in our heroic self-obsession.

And then, far away, faaaar away, we think we see him: our Prodigal doppelganger. From far away, we approach him: our extravagantly wasteful God. Though we do not wish to see him too closely. Lest our convenient shame fall away. Lest our covered soul fall exposed.

We mutter, “Maybe”; our Prodigal God responds, “Yes!” Recognizing us as his image, he comes running to meet us. Sloshing a gift bucket fresh from life’s well. Passing it around, now that we have been found. Lest there be no hospitality to be shown. Lest there be no party to be had.

Others of us today have passed through these same doors. We are, for the moment, outside life’s well; we are, for the moment, looking around. Secretly hoping for a little peace and quiet. Secretly hoping we might encounter a down comforter of a God.

Secretly hoping we don’t encounter a running, hugging, kissing deity. One who would waste too much time on us. One we have tried to retire to a rest home, so we can comfortably be left in charge of our “show”.

Embrace a God who actually runs for us? We’ve spent too much time running away, after all. Far off, sharecropping, in land foreign to his love.

A God running for us: How dare He! What gall! What … what … compassionate gall! Not to mention putting his arms around us – and lips, as well! And … God knows what else!


And God knows … what else.

I think of the hospitality of a Methodist church in Florida I recently read about. They show each other weekly God knows what else:

A preppy-looking retired man is talking to a man covered with tattoos. Senior citizens, young families, and single people mingle in the entryway. There are several people from other ethnic backgrounds, too … Three black-clad teenage girls with pierced noses and Goth makeup approach an elderly woman in a wheelchair. One by one, they lean down, kiss the woman on the cheek, and ask her how she is doing. (1)

“But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.”

Far off though we may be – at one time or another along our life’s journeys – let’s face it. Let us simply face it: We cannot get away.

Our God of prodigal grace simply will not allow it. Hugs and kisses we may not care for. But then: what can we do?

Listen for our call: To pass it on. Pass it on.

Let us pass God’s prodigality along.

Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

(1) Diana Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), 78.