Not without reason has this been called
the greatest short story in the world.[i]
Whether or not it actually happened,
for me this is a real story,
about a real family,
with real difficulties.
Many of us know that loving our brother or sister
or mother or father can often be very hard.
The saying “familiarity breeds contempt” is all too true.
The story has three characters:
There are two brothers,
each lacking in love in their own way.
And there is the father—the main character—
who loves them both,
but who doesn’t always know how to love them
or to help them love each other.
The grace of this story,
and the grace we are offered through it,
is the father’s willingness to try again.
He may have failed at love, but he is not content
to let his past choices determine the future.
It is the father, not the younger son,
who closes the gap between them.
He runs to meet him, embraces him,
and won’t even hear his repentance.
How long had he been waiting,
looking down the road for the son he had lost?
But now he is found!
His “disgrace” has been rolled away.
It is also the father who closes the gap
between himself and the older son.
He goes out to the field, and implores him to join the feast.
We are left hanging—
does he come or not?
But we know that the father has made the first step into the reconciliation he longs for.
Like the Pharisees,
we may judge the other guests at the feast.
Like the Pharisees,
we may rather starve than feast with “those” people.
Like the younger son,
we may find a famine
when we think we are going to a feast.
Like the younger son,
we may see ourselves as unworthy to join the feast.
Like the younger son,
we may try to bargain our way into the feast.
Like the older son,
we may regard the feast we are at already as a famine.
Like the older son,
we may want our own feast
rather than the one to which we are invited.
Like the older son,
we may envy those who enter the feast before us.
Like the Father,
we have a feast of love to offer,
Like the older son,
our hesitation often may turn the Father’s feast into
a famine of distance and coldness.
Like the Father,
we are to invite and welcome all to the feast.
Like the younger son, and the older son, and the Pharisees, and all those “other people,”
we are invited to the feast without condition.
Like the guests, we are to rejoice at the Father’s grace,
singing and dancing at his table.
Like Paul, we are called to be ministers of God’s reconciliation with the world in Christ.
We can not be ministers of reconciliation if we are not reconciled to our brothers and sisters.
Like every family,
we are offered a feast of love and acceptance.
Like too many families,
we may turn it into a famine of bitterness and rejection.
Where do we need to find reconciliation?
Where is our famine?
As individuals…
As families…
As a church…
Part of the liturgy is meant as a ritual sign of reconciliation.
We call it “The Peace.”
It is an opportunity to express—prayerfully and joyfully—
our need and desire for reconciliation,
to make real what God has already done for us.
Sometimes it seems like a foretaste of coffee hour.
For some people it just seems an unwelcome intrusion
into “personal space.”
It should be neither, but rather a foretaste of God’s Kingdom, where all are reconciled,
an act of prayer for each other.
Before we exchange the Peace today,
I invite us all to take a moment to reflect on our own needs for reconciliation.
And I invite us to give thanks for the love of God
which has made this reconciliation possible.
And then let us greet our neighbours,
as the Father greeted his lost son—
joyfully and unconditionally,
And let us come to the feast together—
reconciled in God’s love.
