We’ve talked a lot about journeys so far this Lent in our Sunday readings. We’ve heard of Abraham’s journey from Ur of the Chaldeans into Shechem. We’ve read how Jesus himself is travelling through the villages and towns teaching the people and preparing his disciples for what lies ahead when his journey reaches its culmination in Jerusalem.
And today we find ourselves with another couple of journeys to consider. In our reading from Joshua, the people of Israel have come to the culmination of their journey out of slavery in Egypt into freedom in the Land of Canaan. They have crossed the Jordan into the land promised to their ancestor Abraham. A new homeland and a new future awaits them, a land flowing (one of the biblical commentaries says that a better translation of the Hebrew would be ‘oozing’), a land oozing with milk and honey. And after nearly 40 years of eating manna from heaven in order to survive, for the first time the Israelites eat of the fruit of the land that God has promised to them.
The crossing of the Jordan into this new homeland is a crossing that reminds the Israelites of part of their past. In the verses just before our reading this morning, Joshua and the Israelites are poised on the banks of the Jordan opposite Jericho – with no way across the river. Joshua commands the priests to take up the Ark of the Covenant and to carry it into the river. When they do so, the waters of the River Jordan cease to flow and the river is dried up. The twelve tribes of Israel are able to cross the Jordan on dry land just as they crossed the Red Sea – on miraculously dry land.
Joshua orders representatives from each of the twelve tribes to take up stones from the dry riverbed and to bring them ashore. They are set up at Gilgal as a memorial to the miraculous crossing – twelve stones, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, stones from the deep bed of the River Jordan that the Lord God halted in its courses as once he had done to the Red Sea.
Joshua says to the Israelites, these stones are here so that your children will ask about them, and so that you can tell them the story of what happened here at Gilgal, and you can tell them of God’s salvation here and at the Red Sea. The stones are a memorial, an aide-memoire, a thing that is supposed to cause us to remember, to provoke us to remember, to make us remember and honor our past.
And remembering, returning is what religion is all about. Modern scholars believe the very word religion to be derived from the Latin root ligare which means to bind or connect. Re-ligare is to reconnect, to re-bind ourselves to that which gone before.
Joshua is leading the children of Israel into their future. In a sense, a new era is beginning as a very long, 40 year journey draws to a close. And even in the midst of all that is new for them, he reminds the Israelites to remember what has gone before, and to make plans today to remember in the future, so that every generation will hear the stories of all that God has done. So that the story of salvation will be told and told again, down through the years. Seems to have worked doesn’t it, for here we are, telling the story once more.
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In our gospel lesson today, another journey takes place. Jesus tells a story of a father with two sons. And right there, we might pick up on the fact that there’s trouble ahead. Because it can seem like in the Bible that two sons are nothing but trouble. Remember Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Jacob and Esau. Pity the biblical father with two sons! Now, this time, a younger son decides to leave his father’s house and to make his own way in the world. He asks his father for his inheritance. And here already is our trouble.
The younger sons request is both highly irregular and intensely disrespectful. He is the younger son, after all, and due a smaller portion. The father might have elected to make a distribution of his estate were his son to marry and begin to carry on the family line. But that is not the case here. The younger son is cutting his ties to the father and to his family. Asking for his inheritance in advance is the same as treating the father as if he was already dead. We get a greater sense of this in the original Greek – it reads, “So the father divided his bios (his life) between them.”
The younger son heads out into the world and it isn’t long before his squanders his untimely inheritance and falls destitute. He has sunk so low that he wishes for the food that is being given to the pigs, a particularly shameful fate for a Jew. Then comes that wonderful moment in this parable. I’ve mentioned it to you before. Luke tells us that in his poverty and hunger, the younger son ‘comes to himself’. He ‘comes to himself’… He remembers. He remembers that his father is a generous man and he remembers that he has sinned against him.
If this story were set in the Land of Cotton rather than the Land of Canaan, folks would say about the younger son that he ‘got religion’. And that’s just what happened. He remembered. He reconnected to his past. He sought to re-bind himself to his father, to his identity as his father’s son. The younger son has re-bounded, quite literally. He has decided to seek again the salvation that his father offers to everyone, even the least of his household.
In both of our readings from Joshua and Luke this morning, there are journeys. And in the midst of those journeys, the travelers re-experience the saving grace of God, and they remember who they are as God’s beloved children. And the Israelites set up a small sanctuary, a circle of stones to help them remember in future what has come to pass before and what has come to pass even now. Also in both our readings, the journeys made by the Israel and the younger son result in a great meal, in a Passover feast of the fruits of the promised land and a celebratory feast comprised of the choicest dish, the fatted calf.
In just a moment we too will remember. We’ll recall all that God has done for us, in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, and we’ll remember a meal he commanded us to eat – a meal he commanded us to take in remembrance of him. And we’ll eat that meal again, and we’ll remember. We will bind ourselves back to the God who created us, who saved us, who saves us still. We’ll remember that though we have sinned and will doubtless sin again, our God has plenteous redemption for us. We need never hunger for God’s love and forgiveness – it is there for us, spread before us like a feast.
Sometimes it can seem as if the feast of love and mercy God offers us is more than we deserve, more than is rightly ours. That’s certainly how the elder brother feels in our gospel story today. Why should such riches be squandered on a feast for an ungrateful child who has squandered the riches already given him?
The answer to the question is quite simple. That's just how God is. Such is the nature of God’s mercy. Such is the nature of the redemption offered us in Jesus Christ. It is boundless and ever available to us.
As some of you know, I live above All Souls Episcopal Church in Harlem. They’ve got some extra housing in their church building and they are generous enough to rent it to Denton and me. I live in a sanctified place – you can smell the incense in the hallway outside my apartment on Sundays. And it’s a sanctified neighborhood as well. My Episcopal apartment is within a block or two of three Baptist churches and three Mosques. When I walk the dogs in the evening, I often pass a car that belongs to one of my neighbors and is always parked on the block. It has a bumper sticker that reads, “Allah gives and forgives. Man gets and forgets.”
Allah gives and forgives. Much more than we deserve. And what should we do in return? We should remember. We should not forget. We should remember who we are, which is God’s children, and we should remember all that was done for us: the cross, the tomb… the resurrection and the ascension. We should remember it in the meal we are about to partake of, and we should remember it in all we do, in every action and in every interaction.
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I’d like to say just one thing more about the journeys we heard about today. Setting off on a journey can be anxiety provoking. I’m quite sure that the Israelites knew much anxiety in the desert. In fact, Scripture tells us so. The children of Israel knew great fear for their survival; they worried that they would have adequate food and water on their journey. They could get a little cranky about it at times; they could get a little stiff-necked, as Moses would remind them. And though, our text doesn’t tell us so specifically, I’ll bet the younger son in our parable today knew some anxiety of his own, as he set out from the only home he’d ever known to find his fortune, or rather we should say, to squander his fortune in the world. Both of these journeys and indeed every journey comes with some anxiety, some fear for the future. Anxiety is something we all know. And it can frighten us, it can stop us in our tracks. And sometimes it should.
Though there is much in common in the journeys in today’s Scripture, there is a primary difference in them. The Israelites’ anxiety comes from the fact that they are undertaking something new. The younger son’s anxiety comes from the fact that his is doing something wrong. Learning to discern the difference, when what we’re doing is new or what we’re doing is wrong, is one of life’s most important lessons. Because God calls us to renew ourselves, especially in Lent. We are called forward into a future that is unknown but should not make us anxious, for God’s future is a feast, God’s future is oozing with milk and honey. God calls us toward the renewed and the redeemed and away from the evil and the wrong. The next time you feel anxious, ask yourself, “What is it that I see ahead of me, that which I know to be wrong, or that which is merely new?” You’ll make better choices about when to keep heading forward, and when to turn back and return to the Lord. Amen +
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