Prodigal Son

What comes in between being lost and being found?

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

What scripture means is not reducible to what it once meant.

A counting book that retells Jesus’ parables and a Reformation-themed alphabet book are among my favorite new children’s books. 

Two refreshing new books place the storyteller within the story he tells.

As I kid, I was scared of monsters. Specifically, the Star Trek Salt-Vampire and Hans Christian Anderson’s Death, sitting on the Emperor’s chest. (I slept on my side for years after reading “The Nightingale.” Death couldn’t get you, I reasoned, if you declined him a seat.) But I was never afraid of the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are, the best-known book by Maurice Sendak, who died on Tuesday.

Salvation requires repentance. But of what do the righteous repent?

The parable of the prodigal son came to have new meaning for me after I preached on the passage in a small Christian church in Turkey. My congregants could read meaning, for example, into the famine that the younger son experienced because our city is in the throes of a serious water shortage. We have gone without running water for days at a time. The reaction of the Turkish mayor was to call for public prayers for rain in the traditional Muslim fashion, and Turkish churches followed suit by praying for rain. It was a similar shortage that drove the prodigal son to desperation and created an occasion for repentance.

As we move deeper into Lent and its emphasis on repentance, spiritual introspection, self-examination and self-denial, many of us choose to practice Lenten disciplines. If we have become involved in the season’s imagery and expectations, we may find ourselves reading biblical texts from a spare and minimalist perspective.

"A man had two sons . . .” was a common way to begin a parable, especially one comparing good and bad sons. Matthew uses it to contrast one son, who promises to work in the vineyard but never shows up, with another, who at first adamantly refuses to go to the vineyard but later repents and goes (21:28-32). Which one did the will of his father, asks Jesus? Not the one who talked a good game, but the one who actually followed through with obedient actions.