Luke 15.1-3, 11-32                                                                                     

“THE PLAYBOY AND THE PLOWBOY”

This tale of a father and his sons is the story of all families.  One son was a play-boy, the other a plowboy. The plowboy stayed near the family farm, worked long and hard, behaved himself, and settled down into the tame satisfactions of home. 

The playboy son ran blindly and headlong after what seemed “the good life”. As that quickly ran its course, as he was reduced to giving smelly beasts better food than he could buy, it was all revealed as illusion. His glamour tour suddenly lost its glitter.  And that wastrel son did the hardest thing in the world for any of us—he swallowed his pride and headed home, tail between his legs. Because of his father’s nature, he was welcomed back not as subhuman, but with great festivity. A fatted calf was killed and grilled, guests were summoned, a party was thrown.

The plowboy son was locking up the tractor in the back shed up above the barn.  It had been a hard, slow day digging up the tough, tricky back acreage for plant-ing. His had broken a hydraulic line and little had gotten done. His back ached. Shutting the door, he looked below. What was that?  The house was festooned with lights. That was odd. Lately his father had been so down he would sit quietly in darkness. Then he heard--turned way up loud--music. “Is that Kool and the Gang?  Dad must be going deaf or crazy to play music like that so loud,” he puz-zled. The dusk conducted laughter up the hillside. He realized there were guests. 

 “What’s going on?” he asked a field hand. “So, you didn’t hear?  Your kid brother came home this morning.”  “Oh, really, so the playboy is back,” said the plowboy.  “I’ll bet dad really stuck it to him.” “Actually,” said the hand, “he had us kill the calf and barbecue it.”  “The prize calf?” A vein bulged in his neck.  “The one I’ve been raising since birth for 4H?” “Yeah, Nellie bit the dust for this party,” said the hand.

Make no mistake, the overriding mood on the family farm that night was joyous.        Unbounded joy at having recovered someone who was thought forever lost. But that evening two were unhappy. One was the plowboy older son, who boycotted that festive homecoming; the other was a spoiled calf expecting to be gussied up and preened for the fair.  Of course, party attendance was mandatory for the calf.

Shifting from the implausible return of his boy forever lost to the chilly self-exile of his eldest, the father left the warm, jovial glow below and walked up to the locked shed where the plowboy big brother was now sitting and stewing in the darkness.

“Is everything ok?” asked the father, fixing his gaze on the plowboy. The trouble was that in spite of the steady plowboy’s accumulated seniority on the family farm, he’d never had so much as a measly goat barbecued for him. Taken aback, his dad implored him, “Son, everything of mine is yours.  You already know that.”

This is a parable for our time.  For it deals with how people become as blessings of the good life become commonplace among a people as blessed as we are.  How we become hardened, habituated, and unmindful of God’s goodness to us. In a word, the thousands of times the plowboy had sidled up to his father’s table had taken the edge off of its blessing.  How much do we struggle with the same?

Part of us—the fair-minded, tit-for-tat part that balks at the father’s lavish grace—wants to take up the older son’s cause. For we have felt the sting of unfairness.  We have felt like we got the raw deal.  We have been the quiet wheel that was never got the grease we wanted to keep going. But another part of us, a better part, realizes the plowboy’s self-imposed exile is one cold, proud spiritual Siberia. 

Perhaps the plowboy’s problem was that, stewing in the juices of his prize 4H calf slowly rotating upon that spit, he had forgotten about his father’s deep freeze.  He had forgotten his usual arrival at the family table, spread daily without fanfare. He had forgotten about the roof over his head and warm clothes upon his back. Also, recall early in the story, when the father gave the younger son his share of the inheritance, before he went to college and joined that beer-soaked fraternity. The older son also took his inheritance at the same time.  He didn’t refuse it.  “(The father) divided his property between them,” are the words in Luke’s Gospel.

The parable of the Forgiving Father teems with edgy tension, human and divine.  It could preach in a thousand different ways.  But today we consider the tension between invisible, daily ordinary blessings we invariably overlook and forget, and life’s dramatic, rare extraordinary blessings that leap out and grab us in special moments. The parable claims they do not contradict one another. Both will come to us in their own time, season, and special moment when they are needed most.  

The elder son teaches us about the common, routine and staple blessings of life.  The car starts. The sciatica subsides. The paycheck arrives. The oven gets fixed. We get a new tax break.  These form the foundation of life’s goodness. We often take them for granted.  Ordinary blessings tend to get measured by what is fair--you got this so then I get that--exactly the mindset of the homebody older brother

The younger son teaches us about the extraordinary blessings that God gives us. The grandkid rolls the SUV and is barely bruised.  The unnecessary X-ray shows for a sprain shows the beginning of a dangerous tumor.  The closest friend we slighted when it mattered most chooses to look beyond our failure and forgive us. Extraordinary blessings inexplicably enter our lives as undeserved acts of grace. They are like the “get out of jail for free” card when we are playing Monopoly.

This tension between ordinary and extraordinary blessing was at stake in a movie of five years ago called Family Man. Nicholas Cage plays a hard-charging young successful Manhattan executive, catapulting ahead. Suddenly, he finds his life dramatically changed.  Through an angel’s intercession, he is now living the consequences of taking a return flight back home that he actually never took.  So now he is selling tires in New Jersey so that his wife can be a lawyer for the poor.

One memorable scene and line still informs my thinking. The family treks off to the mall to buy new shoes for their needy kids.  Cage peels away to visit a haber-dasher.  He spies the $2000 suits that he used wear by the dozen in his old life.  He puts one on.  He revels in it, and says, “I have so missed what this feels like.” What was once a routine everyday blessing has become a spectacular blessing.

His wife returns to collect him and spies him in the Armani suit.  He tells her that he wants it.  She smiles wanly and inspects the price tag.  She informs him that he must not have noticed the price, “wink, wink”.  No, Cage insists, I really must have this.  “C’mon, honey,” she says.  “Take off the suit, we will go back into the mall and buy you one of those funnel cakes you like so much.”  I adore that line.

I have a close friend with whom I saw that movie. Whenever we take for granted ordinary blessings, and pine after luxury cruises to the Great Barrier Reef or an Aston-Martin DB6, we tell each other,  “C’mon, I’ll take you to the mall and get you one of the funnel cakes you like so much.”  We both know what this means, “get real, buddy”.  Of course, later in the movie, Cage’s wife actually finds that same Armani suit at deep discount through the internet.  She happily gives it to him in a big box. The message here, like the parable, is that the same God who provides us ordinary blessings is also the source of our extraordinary blessings. We must hang in there, be patient, let both of them come to us each in their time.

But we have as much trouble holding the two together as the dad did bringing his two sons together. I was thinking about those two brothers and how their mes-sages might talk within us what with the construction beginning here after Easter.

I know we will hear those brothers talking because I hear them talk within myself.

The sensible part of me that clips coupons to the car wash and returns soda bottles for a nickel says $2 million is a lot of money when things were mostly fine.  Isn’t this a lot of cost and trouble when we could have left well enough alone? The construction chaos for months may tempt some of us to sit off at a distance and sulk over such a large outlay and big to-do, like the big brother off by himself. The fairness mentality of ordinary blessing—how could we do this for ourselves when children are starving in India?—makes it seem like whimsy and indulgence.

But then in the next moment, I hear the father welcoming back the younger son.  That voice says this is a special moment of grace, a chance for new life in the mainline churches facing down a death, a-once-in-a-lifetime chance for reversal.  And the real reason we do this isn’t because members need a bigger clubhouse.  It is because we discern that God wants more light to shine forth from us, new music of God’s extraordinary blessing to play through us, till strangers enter into share the celebration, maybe those who have never been invited to such a party. 

We started with the ordinary blessing of shoring up a foundation but God’s Spirit has transported us to places of extraordinary blessing, grace, and opportunity.

Remember, the same God is the source of both of routine everyday and amazing once-in-a-lifetime blessings. Can we hold that together for a year of construction? I believe we can. And that is how the parable concludes at Dennis Union Church.  Amen.

Loving and caring Father, better to us than we could ever be to ourselves, in the darkness of our sin and the confusion of our world, we seek to correct our course and renew our faith in you this Lent. In the face of death and suffering, we long to celebrate your promise of everlasting life, not just for us, but for all who would enter in. In times of loneliness and alienation, we desire the consolation of your undying love. Touch our hearts that through the mystery of Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection, we may come to live faithfully in your kingdom, both now and forever. Help us to live fully in the moment seeing life through your big plans.

We pray not just for ourselves, but for all who yearn to enter where you dwell, warmed with light, charmed with music, emanating laughter of your reconciliation. Amid our profusion of blessings that we take for granted, let us not remain out in the cold, resentful because perhaps we would have meted them out differently.
We pray for the bereaved, the infirmed, the lonely, the forgotten, the aged, and the failing. We pray for ourselves to yield to the wisdom of your will and your way.