Prodigal Prodigality
February 10, 2008
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

What really impresses me about people is not the big stuff, like running away from home or welcoming runaways back.  I am less impressed by 100% runaways and 100% feasts, pigsties and elder brothers, large inheritances squandered, the great robes of fancy people acting out archetypical tales and the drama they invoke than I am by credit card debt, little rebellions, depressions that linger unremarked and unremarkable.  Call me boring.  Or call me a miniaturist.  Or just call me ordinary.

What I know is that most people are a little boring, a little small, a little ordinary.  We neither have great fortunes nor do we risk them.  We neither have really exciting children nor do we welcome them back when they return after long sessions of moping on the couch or inside their video games.  Most of us could be the character in Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs, the one who both leaves Gloversville, New York, and stays there; the one who has the lead in the dullest story ever told.  Gloversville is a real town upstate where John Nelson, ordained here at Judson in 1993 after a brilliant career in Central America and at Union, ended up in his first parish.  Thank God Richard Russo has made Gloversville famous in his new novel.  Otherwise I would be morally constrained to alert all of our Union students to the real fate that awaits them after they graduate from the illustrious institution to our north.  They will end up in Gloversville, not in a heavily televised arm wrestle with General Electric over rivers and their oppression but facing a stream that has received decades of dye from the local Glove and Tannery industry (an industry now dead), so that instead of having jobs that pollute, people have no jobs at all and drink a six-pack every night, made with water from another stream in another town, probably in Ohio, which has the same stream but a different pollutant.  Thank God a fancy novelist has told an unfancy story―because otherwise we would have no bridge of sighs for ourselves to use to understand the Prodigal’s prodigality.

The hero in Russo’s novel escapes Gloversville.  He goes to Venice and lives there until he is 60 years old, when he is thrown back into all that he tried to escape.  He is both the boy who leaves town and the boy who stays in town, just as our hero in the Prodigal Son is both.  He, of course, made a dramatic escape, had a dramatic downfall, and an even more dramatic return. 

As I have said, I have a little more sympathy for the boring protagonist than the exciting protagonist.  The reason is that I have yet to rebel and leave home.  I’ve been in pretty much the same place my whole life.  Call it ordinary.  Call it church.  Call it small.  I have a lot of miles on me but haven’t really traveled very far.  I remind myself of nothing so much as a bad Catskills crooner, singing in an about-to-die resort on a living mountain.  You know you can take the band out of the Catskills, but you can’t take the Catskills out of the band.  I experience many of you in the same way: you left Ohio, but Ohio didn’t leave you.  I don’t think I am insulting either you or myself in saying these things.  Instead, I am building a bridge to this famous prodigal, one that might let us understand the extravagance of God’s forgiveness and welcome. 

You see, when you are just a two-bit sinner instead of a full-fledged dweller among pigs and scatterer of fortunes, it is hard to receive the whole feast, except vicariously.  Please forgive me if I am excluding any of you who run a gang or a mob, have murdered someone or squandered your fortune. If you are more than a two-bit sinner, Mazel Tov. Biblical dramas will be yours―and I will be left with Richard Russo novels.

What I am trying to say is just how impressed I am with the way ordinary people manage everyday life, despite dye in the stream and boredom in the classroom.  We live little lives right alongside enormous, magnificent grace.  Like me, many of you knew violence as a child. That is normal, not abnormal, in American society.  Like me, you survived it with very few pigsties, unless you call long-term, low-level depression a pig sty.  Like me, many of you have been raped.  That is normal for women, not abnormal in American society.  My best figures are two out of three women have been raped.  Most of us continue to make love, to men or women, without fear or intimidation.  This normal behavior, this normal return, this getting up ten times when you have been knocked down nine, is pretty normal behavior. Some of you have intimidating credit card debt. You still go out to brunch from time to time.  Some of you have been caught in the mortgage scam―yet another gift from people who believe in the free market’s freedom to torment people.  I have seen you laugh, still and nonetheless.  Some of you have chronic medical conditions; sometimes you dance.  Others of you have AIDS; still, you sing and create cabarets and carry on.

I think you get my point.  What is amazing about people is that we carry on.  We don’t buckle under boredom or our own bit parts in the great drama of life.  Nor do we run away.  We sort of stay put.  We refrain from big forgiving feasts because we haven’t done any major running away.  I remember one mother saying to me about her daughter, “Having her here is just a bit harder than having her gone.”  That made sense to me. It was not the big either/or of escape and return, risk and safety, homecoming and home-leaving, world exploring and world refraining.  It was more the 51/49 costume that so much of reality wears.

So what does this mean, this deep and glad impression I have when faced with the way ordinary humans return to ordinary life after they have been put out of it?  Instead of worlds traveled between escape and return, escalation and de-escalation, running away and running back, we travel blocks.  Inches.  Not miles but feet.  We come and go, we are homeless and then we are at home, but within days, not years.  So many of us are spiritually homeless and spiritually hungry so much of the time that it makes sense to have a bit of a feast every week, not once in a lifetime.  It makes sense to just about always be antagonizing the elder brother we really have and the elder brother we have internalized.  He is the one we should be bothering, not ourselves.

If the normal keeping on keeping on is our role in the great Prodigal drama, the going and coming, leaving and staying, exiling and returning are our assignments in the big musical, what do we do with the big drama of forgiveness?  How do we understand it?  Many of us find a way to forgive our fathers for their violence.  We find a way to at least understand (if not completely forgive) the person who raped us.  We get hit by a drunken driver and hope we will be able to forgive him for being a raving idiot.  But we know we can’t get stuck there.  Instead, we want to be stuck in the great story of the great father returning the son with the big scarlet ‘S’ for Sinner on his t-shirt.  We want to marvel at the Amish at Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, for feeding the children of the man who murdered their children.  We want to stand amazed at the way they refused to let their people lecture or PR about it.  They insisted on the kind of quiet that gets the prodigal story out: word of mouth, not word of PR agency.

By declaring my respect for the way normal people forgive normal atrocities, I don’t intend to demean the big stories that are out there.  This story is nothing less than a route through the cliché that tells us we can either have boring security at home or risky adventure outside.  It says that at home we can feast, and not just at the edge of the village.  It also tells us that the father represents a third way, beyond the horrifying consequentiality of immorality and evil.  The father has a surplus reality that forgives the son whatever he did.  Walter Wink calls this surplus a nonviolent way of living outside of the world of eye for eye and tooth for tooth.

We mostly live in a world of misplaced aggression followed by misplaced aggression, which was caused by misplaced aggression.  Our father beat us so we beat our kids.  The war in Iraq comes to mind as misplaced aggression and collective vengeance following misplaced aggression and collective vengeance.  Many of us fear that more is yet to come.

What both the Prodigal story and the Amish people offer us is a way out, a way to really run away from this claustrophobic home into one that is spacious and grand.

Dubbed “Jesus’ third way” by Walter Wink, nonviolence is a way of turning the tales back on to the aggressor in a manner that potentially threatens their social standing and suggests, to them and others, the limits of their power and of the systems that uphold that power.  This third way, which the father follows in the story Jesus tells, breaks the paradigm of aggression followed by misplaced aggression and provides an alternative to simply absorbing pain.  Jesus taught his followers to love their enemies and if slapped to turn the other cheek.  That’s what the father does in the story.

I think there is application here to our new experience at Judson.  For some reason, all of a sudden, we have become a two-generation congregation. Think Obama and Clinton if you want to expand the matter.  Think about how things look to a 25-year-old and how they look to a 65-year-old and imagine that there might be some differences, like those that existed between father and son in our story: the older wants to be thanked; the younger wants to explore, while insulting the father’s home. In some congregations, sometimes, never the twain meet. Of course it is possible for them to meet, at a feast in the yard, with older brother looking on.  Both father, in giving up being thanked, and son, in giving up exploration, “give up” something on behalf of the feast.

Forgiveness is not just good for your blood pressure (which it is).  It is not utilitarian as much as it is world transforming.  It is moving to a place beyond running away and going home, to a new field and a new feast.  I love the story about the women in Papua, New Guinea: when they get annoyed with their husbands, they deliver long, angry monologues for their neighbors to hear.  They scream abuse for 45 solid minutes and then they are done with it.  This ritual is another example of the third way―one not very nice to husbands, but at least it is done within 45 minutes.  Some of us want to say, “Whatever rocks your boat.”

It has come to my attention that the kids in our Sunday School used to mimic the way we do announcements and concerns as a low cost form of personal entertainment. While we are up here doing serious, life changing and life saving things in worship, they are making fun of us.  Isn’t it amazing how people learn? 

So I ask you in the name of normal people everywhere, what do you want the next generation to imitate about you?  Wanting to be thanked?  Punishment for wrongs done?

Or a third way: a way of feast, a table set in the yard at a home you truly share with someone else?

You can find me in the yard.

Ancient Testimony ~ Luke 15: 11-32
Recommended Reading ~ Amish Grace: How Forigveness Transcended Tragedy, by Donald B. Kraybell, Steven M. Nott, and David L. Weaver-Zercher