Episodes
Sunday Mar 11, 2018
Bound
Sunday Mar 11, 2018
Sunday Mar 11, 2018
Sunday, March 11, 2018
Preacher: Senior Pastor Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli
Sermon: "Bound"
Texts: Psalm 107: 1-3, 17-22; Luke 15:1-2, 11-32
Dissonance is a mingling of discordant sounds, a lack of harmony among musical notes. And during this Lenten season at Foundry, we are exploring the dissonance, the lack of harmony, caused by human choices and ways of being. In the traditional language of the church, we’re talking about sin. Using the parable of the prodigal and his brother, we’ve explored things like being led astray by temptations and the destructive effects of ingratitude and resentment. The goal of our reflections through this series is not simply to name things that make us feel bad. The goal is to acknowledge that there are things we need to change—to repent of—in our lives so that we might be more free. As I said on the first Sunday of the season, “Repentance is meant not to bind us or make us shrink in fear. Repentance is the path to freedom, the path to living with courage and assurance!...To repent…is to…trust that walking in the way of God’s kin-dom will lead us not only to closer relationship with God, but will set us free to live, really live our lives and, in so doing, to love and serve other people as well.”
Confession and repentance is about liberation from those things that bind us, that keep us living smaller and less loving lives than the lives we’re made for. The past couple of weeks, we’ve looked first at the younger son in the parable and then the elder son. Today, we’ll reflect on both of them and on one of the things they seem to have in common: pride. The pride they share is not the healthy kind of pride that allows us to acknowledge our own true gifts, strengths, identity, and God-created nature. The pride they share causes dissonance; its the kind of pride that prances across the world stage and hides out in homes both simple and lavish, leading to tragedy, alienation, and senseless violence. The pride the two sons share is the pride that leads us to deceive ourselves, to mask our faults, to hide our fears. Carl Jung, said that even when this pride is most active, “deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.”[i] Dissonance…
The brash young son probably felt free as he set out for a distant land. After all, hadn’t he chosen to seek a home somewhere else? Hadn't he gotten what he wanted and wasn’t he living on his own terms now? But is he really free? What we sometimes think of as freedom—that rock & roll attitude that “I’m free to do what I want any old time”—is in truth not freedom at all, but rather a trap. Selfish pride is deceiving and leads us to make choices that are destructive to ourselves and to others. Who wants a freedom that means losing everyone and everything that really matters? When this son hits rock bottom, starving, an outsider in his current surroundings, broke, alone except for the pigs, he sees just how his perceived freedom has led him to a prison of alienation. He has gotten attention from others so long as he had something to offer, but when he is no longer useful to them, he is ignored and given even less than the pigs. From this place of isolation and suffering, any human might experience the whole world as dark and menacing and cold and untrustworthy. The son perhaps begins to think that he has never really been loved by anyone. But then he “came to his senses.” Many translations say, “He came to himself”... maybe that's who he was running away from in the beginning. We don’t really know of course. But in this moment, he remembers where he can turn; and turn he does. But his return is shrouded in ambiguity; for while he journeys back to the house of his father, he still has a long way to go to reach “home”—that is to acknowledge and trust that his father loves him.
The late priest and teacher, Henri Nouwen describes this saying, “There is repentance, but not a repentance in the light of the immense love of a forgiving God. It is a self-serving repentance that offers the possibility of survival…It is like saying: ‘Well, I couldn’t make it on my own, I have to acknowledge that God is the only resource left to me. I will go to God and ask for forgiveness in the hope that I will receive a minimal punishment and be allowed to survive on the condition of hard labor.’ God remains a harsh, judgmental God. It is this God who makes me feel guilty and worried and calls up in me all these self-serving apologies. Submission to this God does not create true inner freedom, but breeds only bitterness and resentment. One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God’s forgiveness.”[ii]
The late pastor and preacher William Sloane Coffin says that “guilt is the last stronghold of pride. ‘Guilty’ represents my opinion of myself. ‘Forgiven’ may represent yours or God’s opinion, and I’m too proud to let others do for me what I cannot do for myself.”[iii] The younger son, in his carefully crafted confession speech, reveals that he still sees himself as guilty, as someone who should be treated as a hired hand, not as someone who is loved, forgiven, and set free to live a new life. When he shows up at home, he is clinging to his pride, his sense of self-determination and self-sufficiency, his insistence that he knows what he is (guilty! unworthy!), the sense that it’s up to him to find freedom and life. He appears, too proud to let his father forgive him when he can’t figure out how to forgive himself.
The elder son, though always at his father’s house is in his own prison of alienation, a duty-bound place, a place where resentment and self-righteous pride make it easy to waste energy on constant comparisons, of sizing everyone up against his own hard work; that work evidently has become shrouded in its own ambiguity. Perhaps initially driven by a sense of healthy responsibility and good intentions, it is now described—is it a Freudian slip?—as working like a slave. In that moment, we see that this son, too, has not claimed the freedom that is his. He isn't freely choosing to work for his father out of love. Instead, he is bound by his sense of duty and a feeling of being trapped. This bondage keeps him from entering into the celebration that engulfs his household at his brother’s return.
He is outside in the dark, seemingly unaware that he needs to be forgiven anything. He’s the oppressed one here, the overlooked one, the one who deserves everything and hasn’t gotten his! The elder son holds on to self-righteousness, perhaps out of a sense that it’s not OK to trust someone else’s perspective or actions—even his father’s—since it’s really only him that gets what is real and “right” and “giving in” would be a sign of weakness. This son is held captive by his pride. He can’t see anything but himself and his grievances. He can’t see his brother. He cannot acknowledge or receive the love of his father. Like his younger brother, he doesn’t trust that his father loves him and always has.
Pride—the kind that is twisted into control and selfishness—is a primary obstacle to both the sons in the story. For both of them, their pride and their clinging to self-motivated and self-focused ways of seeing the world keep them from being able to fully receive what is so clearly offered: the love and compassion of their father. Pride bars them from really arriving home, home understood as the all-embracing love of God. Pride can hold us hostage, too.
Where does pride and an overactive, unhealthy self-sufficiency get in the way of your return “home”? Can you hear the still, small voice deep within you that points to where there is dissonance, where something is out of tune, where pride is deceptively holding you hostage?
Listen…look…real freedom awaits. The all-embracing love of God calls you home.
[i] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/pride
[ii][ii] Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 52-53.
[iii] William Sloane Coffin, Credo, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 16.
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