The exact circumstances that led us to be in a diner at such an hour will be revealed later. I'd been thinking about the Prodigal Son a lot, as it was the scripture reading on Sunday. I've wrestled with that particular parable for as long as I could remember... and finally made peace with it this week.
For those of you who are not familiar with the parable, I'll tell it here. I will do my best to mimic the colloquial way I tend to tell Bible stories when I speak them... this so amused Barbara that she insisted that I tell her MORE Bible stories.
So. There's this guy, and he has two sons. One son, the elder son, works in the fields and is awesome. Then there's the younger son. The younger son comes up to his father and says, "Yo. So, my share of the inheritance, that I'm supposed to get once you're dead? Yeah, can I have that now?" And the father give it to him, and the younger son's like, "PEACE!" and leaves. He goes off to the city and squanders his money on... well, sex and booze, basically. And then he's completely out of money, so he ends up feeding people's pigs. And like... sleeping in the pig pen. Which was a really big deal because pigs were the MOST unclean animals. And he wished he could just eat the pigs' food.
Then he was like, "Wait. My father's SERVANTS are better off than I am." And he thought and said, "Okay okay. I'll go back to my house, say, 'Dad, I messed up and am a horrible failure, will you please let me work as your servant?'" So he goes back.
As soon as he gets into eyeshot of the house, his father comes RUNNING down the path, all excited that he's back, and hugs him and is like, "OMG, you're back! We'll kill the fatted calf and have the best barbecue EVER!" And thus a huge party commences.
Meanwhile, the good old elder son comes in from working in the fields and sees that a party's going on. And he's like, "...what?" So he asks what's going on, and his father's like, "YOUR BROTHER'S BACK ISN'T THAT AWESOME?!" and the elder son's like, "...no." And the father's still excited and is like, "COME IN AND JOIN THE PARTAAAY!" and the elder son's like, "I've been working my butt off for you for YEARS, and he goes off and squanders everything and comes back because no one else will take him and you go and kill the fatted calf for him?!" And the father said, "But you've always been with me. Everything I have is yours. But your brother was dead, and now he's come back to life. Please, come celebrate." And then the elder brother goes and pouts in his room.
The narrative message of the younger son and the father's love is pretty clear. The father is all-loving and all-forgiving. However, this message causes problems for the elder sons of the world (coughTHECHURCHcough).
Often, when trying to explain forgiveness and the grace of God, we are asked, "Wait, so if someone commits horrible sins their entire lives, and then on their deathbed they repent, God forgives them and they're fine?"
And the answer is, "Yes."
And the inevitable follow up is, "But isn't that cheating?"
And generally we don't have an answer for that, because secretly, we agree with that question. The elder son represents the church, and not in a good light. (The Bible often doesn't represent the church in the nicest light. Pharisees, anyone?) The ones who have done the father's will for years, who've stayed away from sin (as compared to the younger son), who've worked hard. And when the stupid, lazy, selfish younger brother loses everything and somehow gets off scot-free, well, you can understand that the elder brother would be a bit peeved. And actually, almost every church-goer I know HATES that part of the parable and generally just pretends it's not there. That's why I've wrestled with it for so long. Garrison Keillor actually wrote a play about it, ending with the elder son being angry.
On Sunday, the sermon pointed out something that's huge about this story. It is a story trying to explain the gift that is Father's love, with two major points:
1. There is nothing you can do to lose the Father's love. Shown quite clearly in the fact that the younger son goes off and lives in sin sin sin and the Father still loves him.
2. The flip side of the coin is, there is nothing you can do to earn the Father's love. The sin that the elder son commits is the sin of entitlement. The son has been working not out of love, but out of this idea that the more he works the more right he has to claim a space in the Father's heart. However, this is not how the Father's love works. It is a gift that He freely gives, not a prize to be earned or a possession to be bought. It's silly for us to say, "I've done this this and this for you and so you must love me!" He already does. Therefore the only way to use that statement is in the destructive, "I've done this this and this for you, so you must love me more than you love this other person." But the Father does not work like that. He loves all. In Christ there is no east or west, in him no south or north, but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide Earth. In God there is no hierarchy. In addition to this, God wants us to share in the love He has for all. The father pleads with the elder son to come join in the celebration. And indeed, as has been said many times, that love is our calling, our vocation, as Christians. (And yet the Bible shows the elder son refusing to go in. Testament to how well we tend to answer that call.)
What I will add is that the elder son actually never accepts the father's love for him. I was struck by, "You are always with me, and everything I have is yours." In loving us, God offers us everything, and yet we are so blind to that love that we try to earn what is already ours. The joy of living with the Father is being able to constantly share that love and communion. That should be why the elder son stays with the Father, out of love and joy that surpasses the pleasures that the younger son finds out in the world. And yet, the elder son does not actually accept his father's love, so he stays out of a sense of obligation, duty, and advancement instead. His work is hard. Our work is hard. Learning to love is learning to suffer, and it's the hardest thing to do. What makes it worth it is the Father's love that we live in. Anyone can. The younger son comes to live in it at the end of the story, and the elder son does not. (Very very often the "sinner" in the Bible is the one who gets it "right" after all.) And the elder brother rejects it so he can be bitter against the "sinner". (Though I'll maintain that the elder brother's sin is far more heartbreaking.)
Barbara and I ended up in the diner at 2:45am because of an incident that occurred as we were leaving a Pi Day party. 3/14 is Pi Day, and we were celebrating with a couple over friends in a dorm in Chinatown. There was freshly baked pie and the movie Pi (which I'd always meant to see... but no one told me that it was my life + The Hidden Sky, only directed by Darren Aronofsky. When a shot showed that the main character had shaved his head during his effort to decode the meaning of God's name, I was like, "WHAT IS THIS?!"). We stayed past midnight until the Ides of March, and left around 1am or so.
As we were walking to the subway, we came across two girls around our age. One of them was unconscious, clearly from drinking far too much (she must have weighed 90lbs), and the other was trying to get her to the dorm we'd just come from. I hate to admit that the first instinct that hit us were our New Yorker instincts, the instincts that said, "It's not your problem, stay away." But then instead of crossing the street, we looked at each other, and immediately Barbara was calling 911 and I was talking to the conscious girl, Katie, to see what I could do. After moving around the corner, the 911 call getting disconnected, calling again, a random man driving by and showing his concern, getting the unconscious girl into recovery position in case she vomited, we found ourselves waiting for an ambulance on Walker St in the rain. I was watching her and hoping that she didn't stop breathing because she was so small, I would definitely crack her ribs if I had to do CPR. A fire truck came because it was the closest emergency vehicle in the area, so they waited with us and checked the girl out as best they could while the ambulance came. Barbara and I waited there until the fire truck, ambulance, and police car drove off, and Barbara said to me, "Well, I guess this means we're going to be friends for a long time."
Then we found a 24 hour diner and drank tea.
Because that's what you do in these situations.
(also, if you're ever in an emergency situation, hope that Barbara is there. She is calm and beautiful and helpful and doesn't stammer like I do.)
The Prodigal Son story, fresh in my mind from the service, wouldn't leave me alone. As we stood there in the rain waiting, I was praying constantly, and something that popped into my head was actually from the LOTR: FOTR movie. As Arwen works to save Frodo after he's been lethally wounded by a Morgul blade on Weathertop, she says, "What grace is given me, let it pass to him." Recognizing that I am unfathomably blessed, my prayer was that that blessing and grace would be poured out to her. She'd made some bad decisions that night. She was definitely underage. But never in a million years would I, or most people I know, wish alcohol poisoning or worse on her. There are some who might, and I bet they despicably call themselves Christians. But I'd say most people and most Christians would want her to survive... and learn how to take better care of herself so she wouldn't have to go through this again.
And yet, why don't we feel this way for the younger son?
We've all had our younger son moments. I most definitely have. And yet, we still feel cheated. That they "beat the system".
But seeing someone who is poor and hungry and wishes he could eat what the pigs eat... and wishing him to stay in pain is the least Christian thing to do... and is a sure sign that we have NOT loved the Lord our God and we have NOT loved our neighbors as ourselves... and we have not even accepted the love of God into our lives. Because when we do, how could we not want that love for everyone? I'm not speaking in an evangelical sense. I think there are many ways to experience God and I maintain that some of the most Christian people I know are firmly atheist. The sensation of the Father's love is so beautiful and profound and I think many people are searching for. And it can be found in church, in a classroom, in a theater, in music, in color, in eyes, in relationships, in sex, in deserts, in cities, in trash cans, on street corners, in subway stations, in monsoon-scale rain, in bank accounts with too little money, in cups of tea, in folding chairs, in smiles, in Starbucks, in break-ups, in movies, in tears, at the zoo, in art from the 1900's, in the people you pass every day without noticing, in the moments where you do, in you, in you, in you, in you.
And as I try to move away from being the elder son, I desperately hope that everyone finds it.
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