Not long ago, I read a story online about a man who, after one too many nights of one too many drinks, finally got banned from a local bar in his hometown. 

It was somewhere in North Dakota, I think.  

“Get out of here, Kenny, and don’t come back,” said the bartender.  

Apparently, maybe a little surprisingly, Kenny listened. 

In fact, shortly after that, he left town for good. 

He stayed away for more than thirty years.  Grew up.  Got his act together.  

Finally, after all that time, Kenny was back in town for a visit and was checking out some of his old haunts. 

He walks back into the bar all these years later. 

And as soon as he comes in, someone says, “Kenny, for the last time, I told you not to come back here.” 

People who grew up in small towns will tell you that, in those communities, memories can be long. 

This may well have been true of the community that the Prodigal Son called home.  

We know the story of his warm reception.  

The father who sees him at the edge of town and runs to greet him….who instacarts a whole party from his cell phone as they’re walking back to the house, arm in arm. 

Running like that was considered somewhat undignified for a man at that time. 

We tend to interpret as a heart-warming signal of love’s little indignities, directed here toward the son who has been given up for dead, only to turn back up, alive after all.  

Could be.  

There is also another possibility.  

As we said, in small towns, memories can be long. 

And there is some indication that, at the time of Jesus, the Prodigal Son might have received a very different kind of reception. 

Known as a gesasah, in this ceremony (if we can call it that), local townspeople would encounter a returning ne’er do well, particularly one who had married an immoral woman or lost money to gentiles and run off.  

They would stop him at the edge of town, then break clay jars with burned corn or nuts (I don’t get why it would have been those, specifically), and excommunicate him from the village once and for all. 

I couldn’t find very much about gesasah, so it’s hard to say how widespread the practice would have been, or how it really went.  

But I know that memories can be long.  

That makes me wonder if part of the reason that the father starts running the moment he sees the Prodigal Son return, then whips together a party for the whole town, is that he’s trying to head off this angry, threatening ritual of permanent excommunication. 

That kind of gesture would have come at little cost to the people of the town, who would have morphed from neighbors and extended kin into mob at that point—and felt all the closer to one another for it.  

But it would have left the Prodigal and his family unable to move toward actual reconciliation among themselves.  

The gates of the village might as well have been the Berlin Wall for them at that point.  

II.

I say that because we often read this parable as an account of the endless forgiveness and patience of God. 

This is problematic for us because it seems to be saying that God simply and unilaterally forgives, no matter what, which doesn’t fully square with our commitment to fairness.  

How can the world hope to get better if learning from our mistakes is not a value that matters? 

And so we often find ourselves quite sympathetic to the older brother in the parable, who nobody has apparently even thought to alert about the younger brother’s return.  

It all happens so fast that the first the older brother learns about it is when he’s coiling up the hoses out in the fields with a work crew, and he hears the bass thumping from back in the house, playing—ominously—his brother’s favorite song.

As if his father, who likes Puccini, is suddenly going to crank it in the living room for “I Like To Move It.” 

In that moment, out of nowhere, the older brother knows.

He just knows.  

Most of us would, too.  

We understand the anger that he feels. 

And so when he sits outside on the fence, disgusted, arms folded, not sure if he’s more mad at his father the doormat or at his neighbors for just falling for a fatted calf and a vaguely humbled brother, we get it. 

Yet again, this younger brother and his travails, his challenges, his tiniest little signs of accepting accountability have taken over the day.  The month.  The year. 

What’s getting in the Christmas letter? This.  Articulated in the most diplomatic of ways, so as not to offend the sensibilities of the Prodigal Son, on the offhand chance he should read it, which he never does. 

Please.

The story almost seems to suggest that, for the umpteenth time, the only story that matters in this family is the Prodigal’s. 

III.

Say what you want about this parable, it’s not pretending as if forgiveness is easy to offer or even deserved.  

When the Prodigal is first heading home, rehearsing the speech he will offer his father when he gets there, it’s not clear that he has actually changed.  

There is a world of difference between the anguished, “What can I tell my parents?” and the calculating, “What can I tell my parents?”

The story leaves it up to us to decide which one it is. 

It puts us in the father’s position. 

In light of that, although we call this story the “Parable of the Prodigal Son,” as if the growth is only his, I’m not sure that’s really the best name for it.  

It might be more true to say that the story is the Parable of the Hopeful Father—the father who must decide so many things, almost at once.  

He must decide what to do even before he hears what the Prodigal has to say for himself.  

He must decide what make of these words—this carefully rehearsed speech.  

Perhaps most of all, he must decide what will happen tomorrow…what will happen when the dawn brings another day in fields that need tending, among neighbors who need greeting, for a future that needs building.  

In that sense, I wonder if, most of all, it’s a story about the father…and if maybe it’s about how challenging it is to persevere in love. 

Because the risk isn’t deciding to go home and face the music.  

If the son was facing gesasah, certain rejection, he’d probably just stay there in the mud with the pigs. 

The risk is the father’s. 

The risk is in deciding not to cut off this child who, up to this point, has done everything to cut him off—and who has pretty much deserved everything he’s brought upon himself.  

It would have been so easy to let the neighbors handle the formalities of excommunication, to hide behind the ways of the village. 

He doesn’t do that.  

Instead, he decides to love this prodigal boy, even with everything that he’s done.  

IV.

With that in mind, what the story leaves powerfully ambiguous is what happens next.  

Because what happens next is the moment when truth intervenes…or doesn’t. 

It’s the moment when what love requires will ask something new of them all, or when they’ll all just settle back into their customary chairs and wait for the inevitable moment when Prodigal nonchalantly asks if he can borrow the car.  

Faith doesn’t call us to persevere in our commitment to sentimentality or our preferred narratives of what our lives should be.  

It understands love to be much deeper—and frankly, much more active—because we need each other far more than we may care to admit.  

Figuring out how to balance those needs isn’t a one-and-done proposition.  

It’s the work of our lives. 

And it’s hard work.  

Which is why we can only hope to do it with God’s help.  

When Jesus looks down from the cross and says, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he says it so that we might learn to see ourselves more clearly—so that we might be different than those people.  

He calls us to be people who can offer forgiveness in the light of truth, because it is only in the light of truth that forgiveness has the power of redemption.

The prayer of our life together is that we will find in one another and in God the strength to life truthfully, and so, redemptively, not just once, but “through all the chances and changes of this life.” 

Like the father in the parable, we must learn to persevere.  

When the father throws that party for the Prodigal Son, much of the truth remains unspoken.  

Forgiveness and redemption remain poised to happen, but they have not happened yet. 

It is for us to decide what happens next—I think because, so often, it is for us to decide what happens next, and Jesus wants us to handle that with care.   

Loving one another can be hard work.  

As so many of us know, memories can be awfully long.  

Yet in God there is always the promise of a new day, and the terror and bewilderment of being lost recede before the grace and peace of being found.  

May we always be on the lookout for the ones appearing on the horizon, and always humbled by the wisdom of learning to love them well.   AMEN. 

The Monday after the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012, three days after, I went to a big clergy meeting at the Newtown Congregational Church to pray for the community and to learn how we might help. 

Only a few folks will remember, but in the next couple of weeks after that, our church supplied lunch on two different days for disaster relief workers and others who were hands on helpers in the community, which was greatly appreciated.  

I think Chip Evans prepared a hot meal here in the church kitchen, and Barbara did a pasta salad.  

Tony Izzi drove it up in the church van.  

We were blessed in some ways that we knew how to do that.  

In addition to Chip, who was a professional chef, it turned out that our years of doing monthly meals at Pacific House—the scale of that kind of meal prep and transport, having the right equipment to transport it—had trained us well.

Even if that hadn’t been the case, I’m sure we would have figured it out. 

We were honored to do it—glad, really, that there was something concrete, some form of showing our care, that we were in a position to offer. 

From what I read later, not all the help that the Newtown church received turned out to be helpful. 

For example, in the next few weeks, they would receive no fewer than 65,000 teddy bears—1000 of them life sized.  

That sort of thing often happens in disasters.  

After Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017, one national retailer with the best of intentions donated 40,000 ladies’ belts; and in Haiti after the earthquake, another company donated 10 entire shipping containers of refrigerators, which depend on electricity, which they didn’t have, and which had the wrong style plug even if they had.  

In some cases, our deep desire to help people—to get things moving—outpaces our understanding of what is actually most helpful, or what a community’s needs truly are.  

Our desire to do something – to do anything – can be almost a kind of panic, and perhaps, if we’re honest, it may be more about us than about them.

There can be such a world of difference between reacting to something that happens and truly responding to it, can’t there? 

II.

It bears mention this morning because in our Gospel passage, it seems like the Devil is hoping to push Jesus into reacting.  

He seems to arrive well into the 40 days, when Jesus has been out there for a while.  

The hunger, the loneliness, the boredom, the full range of emotions we encounter when we are well and truly by ourselves for a bit—all these have had their say.  

Maybe other things have had their say, too.  

I wonder if Jesus heard the voices of his past as he was out there, ostensibly to prepare for his future. 

Mark and Matthew’s gospels both describe a moment sometime after these 40 days, when Jesus would return home and preach in the synagogue in Nazareth, only to have his neighbors audibly whispering things like, “Who is this?  Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?”

Their disbelief speaks volumes, and surely this is not for the very first time.  

And so perhaps before he encounters the presence of the Tempter, Jesus has had an extended period to hear the voices of his old neighbors, and it has taken almost everything in him to claim the strength to love them as himself.  

He’s worn out. 

I’m told that in AA, they teach you to be particularly attentive to, and careful with yourself when you are hungry, angry, lonely or tired. 

They use the acronym HALT to keep it close at hand.  HALT—hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.  

These are important to keep track of because they are so often behind the temptation to throw away sobriety.  

They are so often a precursor to our own reactivity.  

Jesus is not on the program, of course, but it seems likely that after so long in the wilderness, he is all of those things, hungry, angry, lonely, and tired, and so perhaps it is no surprise that the Devil arrives.  

“Wouldn’t you like to show them all, Jesus?”

“Wouldn’t people change their tune if they knew who they were really dealing with?”

“Wouldn’t it be great to get somewhere with changing the world?”

For a moment, it seems as if the very power of God to transform the world might be turned Satanic—or at least, so Satan seems to be hoping.  

Satan seems to put great faith in reactivity.  

III.

But to no avail.  

Jesus may be worn thin as an old sandal, but he doesn’t react. 

Instead, he responds.  

The Devil makes him an offer, and then another, and then another, and each time, Jesus refuses, always quoting Scripture.  

There’s nothing especially remarkable about the texts he chooses to do that, although they are a propos.  

But it’s not as if he pulls out the Ten Commandments, or Genesis 1, or something really juicy from the Prophets.  

You know, the big guns.  

Jesus isn’t out to clobber anybody, not even Satan, at least in this instance.  

He doesn’t have to.  

Because even in this moment when he’s run ragged and stretched so thin, Jesus remains rooted in God.  

He knows he is still living a life under God—even in God—which is just to say that he is capable of remembering that who he is and what he does are playing out on a much bigger stage than just some abandoned corner of the wilderness. 

That, of course, is just what the Tempter wants him to forget. 

Temptation usually isn’t some sort of deliberate choice to do evil. 

More often, it’s what happens when someone decides that doing good—and being good—no longer matter and maybe never did.

Nobody cares.  

It’s a kind of myopia.      

In the hard moments when we ask ourselves, “who cares?” temptation in some form can seem like an answer.  

But that’s not where Jesus is. 

Instead, for all the challenges of the wilderness, he finds strength and sustenance, hope and new horizons.

He knows that even when he struggles, he remains in the sight of God, and this strengthens him to live beyond his immediate moment.

He remembers that God cares, and in that, he can rise to the occasion rather than sink to Satan’s level.  

It gives him the capacity to respond rather than react.  

IV.

The churches of our tradition did not used to observe Lent. 

There are many reasons, some of them more about being purposefully un-Catholic than intentionally Protestant. 

A somewhat better line of thinking was simply that prayer, self-discipline, and spiritual groundedness, not to mention avoiding temptation, were how Christians are called to live for 365 days a year, not just 40.  

And yet, I think it’s been good for us to embrace this particular season.  

It’s good because we still struggle with moments when it seems as if nobody cares. 

There are still so many occasions when it seems as if being good and doing good no longer matter and maybe never did.  

Even our best and most generous intentions can be misdirected, like those 65,000 teddy bears descending on Newtown, which were testament to a nation’s immediate grief rather than its commitment to journey with that community and to pursue the longer, harder work of healing.  

Lent calls us to look within ourselves so that we can learn to see beyond ourselves.  

It reminds us that God cares about what we do and about who we are, and in that, it makes it possible for us to be people who face temptation and rise again.  

Amen.  

Ash Wednesday has ancient roots for us as Christians.  

It means we are 40 days out from Easter. 

It also remembers that Jesus began his ministry with 40 days in the wilderness, which provides some direction for how we might spend these next 40 days.  

For Jesus in the wilderness, they were 40 days of self-purification, which is to say, 40 days of wrestling with temptation. 

The church in its history has tended to see this as good for us, too. 

Accordingly, that’s something you hear a lot about in church during Lent—our own temptations.  

But that’s not all that Jesus was wrestling with. 

It’s also important to remember that not all wrestling is the same thing as fighting or resisting. 

There’s also the kind of wrestling that is better described as “grappling,” which is to say, it’s the kind of wrestling that is “coming to terms” with something—about finding a way to accept it.  

I wonder if that is also some of what might be going on for Jesus in the wilderness. 

What might he have been grappling with? 

We sometimes forget that when Jesus went out into the wilderness, it was also an act of memory.  

In doing so, he remembers the 40 years that the Hebrew people wandered as they escaped slavery in Egypt and went in search of the promised land.  

That is its own story, of course, as told in the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus.  

But one part of it is especially helpful for us tonight. 

Because one question that faithful people have had about those 40 years in the wilderness is fairly straightforward: why did it have to be so long? 

One answer I have found especially poignant over the years is that it took 40 years for two things to happen: first, for the next generation to be born, and second, for the generation of those who had escaped to pass away.  

That was sadly necessary, not because God was punishing them, but because they were unable to come to terms with their past. 

Even with all that God had done and was doing, they were unable to escape it emotionally and spiritually.  

Hard as it may be to believe, the Book of Exodus records that as God’s people wandered in the wilderness, there were moments when they even missed aspects of their old lives. 

It’s misunderstood as an expression of their stubbornness, but what it truly suggests is something much more tragic.  

The trauma of life under Pharoah had been that profound…that permanent.  

There was nobody to teach them how to move forward.  To regain their purpose. Literally, their sense of direction. 

God is sustaining them, feeding them manna – daily bread – and they have no sense of God in their midst.  

And so they wandered. 

It is important for us to remember that. 

In that same spirit, when Jesus goes into the wilderness for his own 40 days of temptation and self-purification, it is an act of honoring the history of God’s people.  His people.  

It is remembering those who had been too wounded…too traumatized…to claim the freedom to which God was trying to lead them. 

This is what he’s grappling with. 

Jesus would commit his own ministry to seeing and trying to bring healing to the wounded of his own time and place. 

He wanted them to claim the freedom…the hope…the notion of a future in God that life had seemed to deny them.  

And he wanted them to know that God was sustaining them…that once again, God was in their very midst.  

That’s also what God wants for us as we begin this odd and sort of antiquated 40 day season of Lent.  

It is a season of reflection and, in some ways, also of regret.  

But it’s not about making a point of feeling guilt or shame or sadness—it’s not trying to make us feel those things.  

It is simply acknowledging that we do, in ways that are obvious and hidden, known and unknown, and that with God’s help, we don’t have to, because God is here with us in the midst of them, working to heal us and show us a different and better future.  

Lent is about following the example of Jesus, and about being willing to ask ourselves about our own wounds, and how we’ve learned to walk with them.  

Have we truly found a way to heal, or are we just adept at using things to dull the pain? 

To put it in more traditionally theological language: are we really open to the promise of new and abundant life—the liberation God offers? 

Do we want Easter for ourselves? 

Or do we know ourselves only in reciting the familiar pains and resentments of the old life, whatever they may be?

Lent is about finding a way to learn from them and let go.  

Not everyone can.  

In the novel Great Expectations, Charles Dickens includes the haunting character of Miss Havisham, a wealthy woman, now old, who was left at the altar on her wedding day decades earlier. 

And money, pride and pain then collaborate to make the rest of her life into a dramatic performance of her wounds. 

She sits alone in her house, still in her wedding dress, with the decaying remains of an uneaten wedding banquet all around her, and the clocks throughout the house are stopped at the exact time when she first learned of her rejection.  

This is not to say that she does not deserve compassion.  

Rather, it is to note that she has become her own jailor. 

She has become a prisoner to the moment at which she decided time itself had stopped, and now she is beyond the reach of hope or help.  

Along those lines, Ash Wednesday urges us to name for ourselves the many ways we might be doing something like that, too. 

It offers a way forward by inviting us to live in ways that practice the presence of Jesus.    

It’s saying that we must not let the bad things, the painful things, become our whole story—not by ignoring them, which usually just ends up giving them more power—but by acknowledging them and then taking our cue from a very different story: the ongoing story of God’s redeeming love. 

God’s love can transform suffering into compassion, connection, and new life.  

It can set us free, if we are willing to receive it.  

Tonight, God signals the presence of Christ even in the ashes of our lives. 

It promises that even there, amid all our Good Fridays, God is at work to make us into an Easter people, teaching to receive our daily bread and to remember that wherever we may go, we do not walk alone. 

Amen.