SERMON SERIES: MEETING JESUS AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME

SERMON FIVE: Jesus’ One-liners and Catchy Stories

TEXT: Luke 15: 11-32 (The Message)

Then he said, "There was once a man who had two sons. The younger said to his father, 'Father, I want right now what's coming to me.' "So the father divided the property between them. It wasn't long before the younger son packed his bags and left for a distant country. There, undisciplined and dissipated, he wasted everything he had. After he had gone through all his money, there was a bad famine all through that country and he began to hurt. He signed on with a citizen there who assigned him to his fields to slop the pigs. He was so hungry he would have eaten the corncobs in the pig slop, but no one would give him any. "That brought him to his senses. He said, 'All those farmhands working for my father sit down to three meals a day, and here I am starving to death.  I'm going back to my father. I'll say to him, Father, I've sinned against God, I've sinned before you; I don't deserve to be called your son. Take me on as a hired hand.' He got right up and went home to his father. "When he was still a long way off, his father saw him. His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him. The son started his speech: 'Father, I've sinned against God, I've sinned before you; I don't deserve to be called your son ever again.' "But the father wasn't listening. He was calling to the servants, 'Quick. Bring a clean set of clothes and dress him. Put the family ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Then get a grain-fed heifer and roast it. We're going to feast! We're going to have a wonderful time! My son is here - given up for dead and now alive! Given up for lost and now found!' And they began to have a wonderful time. "All this time his older son was out in the field. When the day's work was done he came in. As he approached the house, he heard the music and dancing. Calling over one of the houseboys, he asked what was going on. He told him, 'Your brother came home. Your father has ordered a feast -barbecued beef! - because he has him home safe and sound.' "The older brother stalked off in an angry sulk and refused to join in. His father came out and tried to talk to him, but he wouldn't listen. The son said, 'Look how many years I've stayed here serving you, never giving you one moment of grief, but have you ever thrown a party for me and my friends?  Then this son of yours who has thrown away your money on whores shows up and you go all out with a feast!' "His father said, 'Son, you don't understand. You're with me all the time, and everything that is mine is yours - but this is a wonderful time, and we had to celebrate. This brother of yours was dead, and he's alive! He was lost, and he's found!'"

RESOURCE: Borg, Marcus J., Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus & The Heart of Contemporary Faith: New York: HarperCollins Paperback, 1994, Chapter Four.

Preached by the Rev. Caroline B. Edge at Carter Memorial United Methodist Church, Needham, MA, October 22, 2006.

Jesus was a teacher of wisdom – not your everyday conventional wisdom that people already knew, but wisdom that was subversive. Jesus taught an alternative wisdom that invited people to see in a new and different way, a way their culture had not taught them. Jesus was a sage who invited people to be in relationship with God rather than just obeying the laws of conventional wisdom. He taught a way – a different way to live. In the tradition of the Buddha, he described a path less taken that would lead to the presence of God. In the tradition of Socrates, Jesus taught a subversive wisdom that encouraged folk to question the conventions that shaped their lives.

Jesus basically had two techniques for his wisdom teaching. He was a master at one-liners and he could tell stories – we call them parables – that showed the alternative route.

In this political season we are familiar with the power of the one-liners – or phrases in this 30-second sound byte society. "Cut and run" is the term coined the last election cycle by the present administration to label those who advocate for a plan of withdrawal from Iraq. On the other side Senator Barack Obama recently described the Bush administration as "tough and dumb". "Cut and run", "tough and dumb" these are one-liners that people can remember, that can be repeated, that stick.

Jesus’ one-liners seemed to be whole sentences since he did not have to face the TV crew. "Let the dead bury the dead." "You strain out a gnat and swallow a camel." "No one can serve two masters." The Gospels have preserved about 100 of Jesus’ one-liners; he obviously repeated them so many times that his followers were able to remember them and pass them on until somebody wrote them down.

Unlike the movie scenes of Jesus giving the Sermon on the Mount as one one-liner after another, he probably did not string them together into the Beatitudes, but used them to clinch a story or to respond to something that happened. A would be disciple invited by Jesus to follow him responds, "Master, I must go and bury my father." I think this story makes us picture his dead father laid out in the front room who needs to be buried by sunset. However, I suspect the man was talking about the purity code of an adult child’s responsibility to his father – his father may have had many years yet to live – the would be disciple was saying, "When I am free from my responsibilities, I will follow you." Jesus said to him "Let the dead bury the dead." Those who are so bound up in duty can not see the alternative way in which Jesus is inviting them to participate.

Another of Jesus’ one-liners was "Can a blind person lead a blind person? Will they not both fall into a pit?" Jesus is inviting his listeners to see in a different way. What is blinding you as you try to lead? Maybe you are no better off that those whom you would lead. What do you need to see to be a leader that avoids the pit? Jesus’ one-liners get us thinking. They invite us into a deeper relationship with God. What can God help us see that we are missing?

"No one can serve two masters." Are we being pulled in two different ways – the conventional way and the way of Jesus that is the alternative way? Are we letting the demands of our jobs subvert our family life? Are we letting week-end activities take precedence over gathering with the community of the faithful in worship? Are we letting the culture decide that soccer is more important than Sunday School for our children? Following the alternative path that Jesus leads us down means making choices that are subversive to conventional wisdom. Jesus knew it for he invited, "Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few."

Besides these pithy one-liners, Jesus taught in parables. He told stories. He used everyday experiences and turned them so that people would feel invited into relationship with God. Many in his day – as in our day – thought that the way to God was through obedience – keeping the commandments, the laws, the religious rules. Jesus wanted people to experience God as a gracious, loving One who forgave and welcomed all. Thus he told that parable that is such a favorite for good reason – The Prodigal Son.

Marcus Borg, whose book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, has been our guide through this sermon series, describes the Prodigal Son parable in this way, "In act one, the prodigal’s life is described in considerable detail. It is a picture of going into exile and becoming an outcast. He journeys to a far country (a Gentile country, and therefore an impure land), and there he not only squanders his money on loose living but, reduced to poverty, becomes an employee of a Gentile pig farmer. As a swineherd, he has become (if such is possible) worse than an untouchable. It is difficult to imagine a more abject picture of dereliction in a first-century Jewish context. Act one ends with the prodigal’s decision to return home.

In act two, the focus is upon the father. Seeing his son at a great distance, he (significantly) "has compassion" and rushes out to meet him. Before the prodigal can even speak, the father embraces and kisses him. Brushing aside his son’s carefully prepared confession, the father joyfully clothes his son with his best robe and puts a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet – all symbols of acceptance and restoration. Then he orders that a banquet be prepared.

The parable could have ended here, and it would have been a powerful statement about the compassion of God and the acceptance of the untouchables. But it doesn’t. In act three, which begins with the sound of music and dancing floating into the nearby field, the focus shifts to yet a third character, the older son. Hearing the sounds of celebration and finding out what is going on from a servant, he adamantly refuses to join the banquet. Instead, he complains: all these years he has been a dutiful and obedient son, and he was never so wondrously treated. The father implores him to join the celebration, and the parable ends with a question hanging in the air: will the older son’s sense of the way things ought to be keep him out of the banquet?

The parable represents a systematic subversion of the world of conventional wisdom. The elder son’s voice is the voice of conventional wisdom itself; it is his voice that hearers are invited to hear as perhaps their own – and then to reject. " It does not take a rocket scientist to know that the Father in this story is like God "compassionate, yearning for his son lost in exile, rejoicing at his return. Moreover, the story of the prodigal images the religious life very differently from how it is seen within the world of conventional wisdom: as a life of exile "in a far country" and a journey of return – not as a life of duty, requirements, and rewards. Between the two there is an enormous gap," Borg observes.

Jesus in his one-liners and in his parables invites us to take the path less traveled. Borg describes it this way, "The narrow way, the way less traveled, is the alternative wisdom of Jesus. It has two closely related dimensions. First, it is an invitation to see God as gracious and womblike rather than as the source and enforcer of the requirements, boundaries, and divisions of conventional wisdom (whether Jewish, Christian, or secular). Second, it is an invitation to a path that leads away from the life of conventional wisdom to a life that is more and more centered in God. The alternative wisdom of Jesus sees the religious life as a deepening relationship with the Spirit of God, not as a life of requirements and reward."

This message of Jesus taught so long ago has some very contemporary challenges to both the secular and Christian conventional wisdom of our time. Borg observes, "Our culture’s secular wisdom does not affirm the reality of the Spirit; the only reality about which it is certain is the visible world of our ordinary experience. Accordingly, it looks to the material world for satisfaction and meaning. Its dominant values are what [Borg] calls the three A’s – achievement, affluence, and appearance. [Here this Needham, Wellesley, Dover.] We live our lives in accord with these values, with both our self-worth and level of satisfaction dependent upon how well we measure up to these cultural messages. Not only is the effort to measure up burdensome, but even when we are reasonably successful at doing so, we often find the rewards unsatisfying. We may have the experience of being satiated and yet still hungry….Augustine…[calls it] the appetite for the infinite."

Jesus also challenges many common forms of Christianity. Borg says, "In particular, it invites us to move from ‘secondhand religion’ to firsthand religion. Secondhand religion is a way of being religious based on believing what one has heard from others. It consists of thinking that the Christian life is about believing what the Bible says or what the doctrines of the church say. Firsthand religion, on the other hand, consists of a relationship to that to which the Bible and the teachings of the church point – namely,. The reality that we call God or the Spirit of God. "

"…The path of transformation of which Jesus spoke leads from a life of requirements and measuring up (whether to culture or to God) to a life of relationship with God. It leads from a life of anxiety to a life of peace and trust. It leads from the bondage of self-preoccupation to the freedom of self-forgetfulness. It leads from life centered in culture to a life centered in God."

This is the Jesus I invite you to meet again for the first time. Amen.