Preached on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 30, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.
Joshua 5:9-12
Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
The Prodigal Son, by Miki De Goodaboom
“There was a man who had two sons.”
The father and his older son have all kinds of time to talk. They could talk before dawn, when the rooftop gardens are cool and they’re both in a reflective mood. They could connect in the hot afternoon, with the working farm up and running, people in and out of the complex, workers toiling up and down the dusty fields. Everyone is exhausted in the evening, but surely the father and his son could walk together, after dinner?
But they do not. Perhaps the older son has slowly taken on the burden of running the family operation. Maybe the servants answer to him, not the distracted and uncharacteristically quiet father, who gazes ever outward, his mind many miles away. The exhausted son may feel too strung out to even imagine a risky conversation with his father. And the preoccupied father may not even be aware of the spiraling silence between them. He is watching the road to the farm. He is focusing on someone else.
The servants, in turn, are probably worried about the broken family. If so, that would make a lot of sense: this family is their whole world. Its choices shape their future. Without this landowning family, the servants could fall out of society, outside the protections of a patron, a lord. The father is not just a CEO of a company. He shapes their identity; he creates all the security and structure they know; he extends their lifespans. But if the servants worried, they’d never say so. Best to just keep to daily tasks, and wait and see how everything turns out. Everyone is anxious in the wake of the disastrous actions of the younger son, who selfishly damaged the community’s wealth, honor, and security. But no one wants to talk about that.
Meanwhile, the surrounding community is watching. There is a gossip economy in the village, and so it caused a scandal when the younger son took so much of the family fortune and vanished. The family suffered an embarrassing, devastating setback. At minimum this gave the villagers a few exciting evenings of idle talk. But, so long as the younger son stays gone — so long as he stays dead — the gossip will fade, and the family will recover their honor.
The older son could just confront his father and ask him what’s going on. But — well, you know what that’s like, don’t you? You want to raise a concern with someone you love, with someone you depend on, but then that concern will be out there; it will be known, which means you’re in less control. “What is the matter with you?!” the son could ask his taciturn father. “What, or who, are you looking for?”
Or perhaps he could ask a more pointed question: “You’re not looking for that son of yours, are you?” (“That son of yours” — the older son may feel powerless and frustrated, but he still enjoys the power to deny his wayward sibling the dignity of the title, “my brother.”) Challenging questions thunder in the mind of the older son, but he dare not ask them. What if his father answered? What if it led to a fight, or a rejection? Things are tense and scary, but they could get even worse.
This is all so much more complicated and wretched than the grim, pathetic existence of the younger son. The younger son is in a bad way, to be sure. He’s starving. He stinks with body odor and livestock manure and the underside of life in the rough. But then he hits bottom, has a moment of clarity, and finally yields to his better self, who proposes a reasonable, workable solution: Just go home and face the music. What does he have to lose? What’s the worst outcome? He’d go home and be rejected by his father. Hey, maybe he could score a meal before being thrown back out. Or he could get a job on the farm, a humiliation to be sure, but a better deal than his current squalor.
No, the younger son is suffering, but he’s not in as much peril as the older son. The younger son even has a long-shot chance of receiving forgiveness and restoration. If he can get his act together after that, he could rebuild his life.
It’s the older son who, stable as his life may be, languishes in complicated, miserable frustration. He can’t look forward to a dramatic, powerful reconciliation with his father, because technically they are not estranged, even if they feel like strangers to one another. The older son is furious at the younger son, who compromised everyone’s future and spent some of what rightfully was coming to the eldest heir. But the younger son is gone, so that fury just rages, with no resolution. The older son suffers deeply.
And this, I assert, this is where we come in. I have a sense that many — maybe most — of us are closer to the older son in our life situations and temperaments. We may have younger-son stories in our pasts, but I suspect that church-goers are, very broadly speaking, well-behaved, reasonably ethical people prone to thorny, upsetting interpersonal conflicts. You should speak for yourself! But I’ll wager that most of us, in our spiritual lives here at church, and in our personal lives elsewhere — most of us correspond quite often with the older son in the story.
The older son is a decent person — a rule-follower — living in a scary, chaotic time, with a growing, uneasy feeling that he is going to have to take risks, to stick his neck out, to say or do frightening things if he wants to get what he needs, what the whole community needs. I believe this older son speaks to many of us today.
Have you ducked hard questions with those you love? Do you follow the rules while letting little resentments fester? Do you prefer to bide your time, avoiding a confrontation until you can stand it no longer and you burst out with anger? Are you like the Pharisees who first heard this parable and wished life in community were just a lot more simple, with the good guys on the inside and the bad guys on the outside? I’m fairly sure it’s not just me.
Looking beyond the stress and pressure of interpersonal relationships, there are a few conversations about national and world issues that we here at church have not had together. After October 7, 2023, I wanted to have a facilitated, careful conversation about Gaza and Israel here at St. Paul’s (or at least I thought I wanted that). But I sensed quickly that almost no one (myself included) really wanted to go there. It is so fraught, so difficult. We could find many points of agreement, but discussions like that are risky. It’s easier to stay on the farm, keep doing our work, and protect our relationships by carefully avoiding dangerous topics.
Later on today, after coffee hour, Liz and Becky, two of our lay leaders, are facilitating a discussion about community resistance and response during a time of unlawful immigration raids. It’s so easy to shrink from discussions like this, to curl up in anxiety. But I hope we can rise to the challenge. I hope we can go there.
These are the risky, dangerous conversations that God calls us to have. They are central to our baptismal identity. When we are baptized, we promise that we will do all kinds of things: break bread and pray together, resist evil and repent, proclaim the Good News, seek and serve Christ in all persons, strive for justice and peace, safeguard the earth and seas and all creatures. All of that sounds stirring and more than a little heartwarming.
But it is also scary. Resist evil, you say? Sometimes evil takes the form of cowardice that encourages us to run and hide, even from one another. Sometimes the Good News of Resurrection is very bad news for people (including us) who, like that anguished older son, enjoy privileges, wealth, and control. Sometimes the covenantal obligation to “seek and serve Christ in all persons” challenges us to seek and serve people who harm us, people we find repulsive, people like the younger son.
And “Strive for justice and peace?” Well that’s daunting. Injustice and war are awful, but they can feel paradoxically more reassuring. When we are surrounded by injustice and war, at least we know who the enemies are, and we can convince ourselves that we are fine, that we’re the good guys, that the dread foe is eternally outside of us, not us. And as for creation justice, in Baptism we are supposed to do a lot more than recycle plastic. We are supposed to ask hard questions, dreadful questions, about our complicity with the ‘uncreation’ of the earth.
And so I bid your prayers for all of the “older sons,” here and everywhere. May God soothe our anxious hearts and restore our fainting spirits and heal our bitter resentments. And for all our struggles, I assure you that there is Good News here, for both sons, for their father, for their servants, for their village, and for all of us.
After wasting so many hours on the farm alongside his father, the older son blurts out the truth. He goes there. He reveals his powerful resentment. He spits out a snide reference to “that son of” his father’s. He fights to control the angry lump in his throat as he laments his perceived (and, give him some credit, his real) mistreatment. He confronts the most important person in his family with the truth, the hard truth. In doing this, he is our companion, our exemplar. In doing this, he teaches us how to build this community of faith, together, even if our hearts are not always in the right place. He isn’t attractive or big-hearted in this vexing encounter with his father, but he is also not cowardly. He is being brave.
And then, look what happens. After the outburst, the older son’s father immediately turns to him, all attention on him now, and not on his brother. (And maybe, after his father looks directly into his eyes with potent love and acceptance, maybe then this poor, exhausted older son might welcome his brother back into his heart.) His father immediately turns to him and says,
“Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”