March 30, 2025: No Longer Bystanders

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

No Longer Bystanders

Homily for St. John’s Episcopal Church by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn given March 30, 2025

The Fourth Sunday in Lent: Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

 

Henri Nouwen was a Dutch Catholic priest who for many years was a professor at Harvard and Yale. In 1983 he had just finished a six-week tour of the United States and Canada, publicly speaking and advocating trying to convince people to do anything at all about the violence in Central  America. When it was finished, he was so exhausted he could barely walk. He wrote about feeling devastated and lonely and shattered. And in this state, he visited a friend, who had on her wall a poster copy of the famous Rembrandt painting called the Return of the Prodigal Son.

 

 

This painting utterly captivated him, so much so that he ended up going to St. Petersburg to see the original, and he wrote a book about his experience.[1] He said that in his shattered state, the portrayal of the father compassionately embracing the son captured exactly what he needed right then. He had been making such an effort to get people to pay attention and do something about the terrible violence in Central America, and he desperately needed a place to be cared for and safe, to feel he belonged. This painting expressed everything he was so hungry for, and it is of course a rendition of today’s gospel story of the Prodigal Son. What do you notice in the painting?

 

What Henri Nouwen came to feel, over time, was that in the painting, and in the story behind it, all his life was there. All the Gospel was there. Everything he needed to understand about life and God was there. It became for him a window through which he could step into the Kingdom of God. There is the central image of a Father, compassionately holding a man on his knees who is wearing rags, who is obviously suffering, whose sandals are falling to pieces, and whose eyes are closed, leaning into his father. There is infinite compassion, an unconditionally loving embrace, full of suffering and return. And there are four bystanders in the painting: two men on the right, one standing and one seated, who seem to be the older brother and perhaps a servant. There is a woman peering around a column just behind, and far back, in the distance, the shadowy figure of another woman watching from behind something. It’s impossible to tell from their faces what they are feeling. But none of them has come to throw their eyes around the prodigal as the father has. They are bystanders to the embrace and to the compassion.

As the beginning of our gospel reading says, some Pharisees and scribes become offended because Jesus welcomes and eats with tax collectors and sinners. To be clear, tax collectors were especially hated because they were Jews who made a personal profit off oppressing other Jews, by collecting the Roman tax plus a little extra. Yet Jesus welcomed them, ate with them, loved them. It was offensive. Nowadays it’s somewhat cool to talk about loving sinners, if by sinners you mean people at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum who have done some small bad things. But do we really love sinners? What about those who are guilty of violence? What about people who are stuck in hatred? What about people who can’t comfortably fit into a polite social setting? Jesus welcomed tax collectors and sinners. And this is the story he told to explain why.

 

What you see in the painting is the image of a father compassionately holding his disheveled, destitute, broken son. No one ever wants to be in the place of being disheveled, destitute, broken. Some of us have prodigal stories. Some of us do not. We like the idea that God welcomes them, but we perhaps don’t want to be them. Perhaps we are more like one of the bystanders, watching, with varying levels of approval or disapproval. Perhaps we are like the older brother, righteously resentful because he has always followed the rules and doesn’t feel he has been celebrated by his father the way his worthless brother is being celebrated. And yet this is the heart of the gospel.

 

The story of the prodigal is a story of vulnerability and failure and infinite compassion. It is the story of Jesus that we love to tell but perhaps don’t want to live. But today is in the middle of lent, that time for deep introspection and honesty about our actual lives. Today, no matter how you’ve heard this story in the past and no matter which character you are most likely to identify with, I want to invite all of us to do one thing. I want us to stop caricaturing the prodigal story as one that involves the compassion of God for people who are truly extremely broken, like heroin addicts or prostitutes or people on death row, and instead, to see the prodigal as representing the essence of the human condition, which is the experience of desperately needing the chance to start over, to be safe and to belong, and not being able to make that happen on our own.

 

Henri Nouwen said that the prodigal experienced his utter lostness and isolation, the deepest loneliness a person can experience, and it was this that brought him to his senses. He was shocked into the awareness of his utter alienation and he suddenly understood that he had embarked on the road to death. And exactly in that place, he remembered that he was not a pig worthy only to eat slops. He was his father’s son.

 

Right now, wherever you are, I invite you to shake yourself free from whatever you did this week and whatever you have planned for the rest of the day. Just for this moment, I invite you to survey your life, and the lives of the ones you love, and allow the story of the prodigal to sink in. Where do you need a new beginning? Where have you come to the end of your own rope? Very often in life we desperately need a new beginning, but when we are higher functioning than the addict or the prodigal longing for pig slops, we get tempted to just motor through and keep trying to do everything on our own. We do this at every level of our existence. We do it on church committees and in family relationships. We do it at work and in our exercise routines. We do it in our approach to public policy and the national political crisis.

The great temptation for a place like this is to fail to recognize ourselves as prodigal, and instead to hold ourselves aloof as bystanders, believing the gospel is for other people less fortunate than ourselves. This is such a beautiful church, and you all are such incredibly impressive and gifted people. What the prodigal knows, and what each of us needs to know, is that if we can open ourselves to the love and power of God and let go of our own control, we can be caught up into the current of God’s Spirit in a way that is far beyond anything we could contrive even with the best of our own formidable skills, and resources, and intentions.

 

The way we open ourselves to the power of the living God is not by white knuckling ourselves into creating yet more beautiful programs or even well-intentioned outreach projects.  Just for today, I invite you and all of us to stop, and instead of trying to power through a difficult situation in your life, instead, try this. Try just naming what it is that you are most hungry for. What do you really want? What have you been using as a substitute for the thing you really want?

 

This lent we have been talking a lot about what is happening in the world, and that is an extremely important conversation we do need to have. What we perhaps haven’t been talking about is the essence of the gospel as being about reconciliation. Reconciliation with God, self and neighbor is the heartbeat of following the way of Jesus. Reconciliation is what the prodigal experiences when he returns home and, after his pathetic speech about no longer being worthy to be called his father’s son, he gets swept into his father’s embrace and the best robe, starving and stinking and just as he is. What we need to acknowledge in order to do the long, hard, costly work of reconciliation with our neighbors, including the great political divide, is that we ourselves are always the prodigal, always tempted to try to fix everything ourselves, always in need of the embrace of God exactly as we are. In face of the great wrongs of history and the great trouble of our time, we need a new beginning. We need God to do what the text in 2 Corinthians describes: we need the old to pass away; we need God to make everything, including us, new.

 

The eucharist is exactly the weekly fierce celebration the prodigal’s father threw when the prodigal returned home. This feast we celebrate together is exactly God’s wildly ecstatic party that you are here. Exactly as you are, in exactly the condition you are, with all of your hungers and your need for a new beginning, this feast we are about to celebrate is God putting the best robe on each of us and calling us beloved. Let us let go of control and be reconciled to God. Let us allow God to make a new beginning out of us, so that we can embark on a journey together. Let us allow God to use us for the long slow work of reconciliation with our neighbors, until all creation experiences God’s compassion and love and life, no matter how long it takes. Amen.

[1] See Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son. Discussion in this sermon of Mr. Nouwen’s thoughts come from this book.

 

 

 

10am Service