Century Christian Church
(Disciples of Christ)

1301 Tamarack Road, Owensboro, KY 42301, (270) 684-0286, Pastor:  Rev. Jim Westmoreland

The Maturing of a Nation
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-24
by Jim Westmoreland

Whoever said that growing up was easy? For most of us, this life-long process is not exactly smooth sailing. Whether it is from infancy to childhood, or childhood to adolescence, or adolescence to adulthood, there are many bumps and bruises along the way. Each stage of life gets more challenging, but I think the most difficult time of life is the passage from adolescence into mature adulthood. The issues of "who am I? Do I like myself? Do I like or trust others? What will I do with my gifts and abilities as a person?" all continue to play out as we live our lives as adults. Will I reach for too much or settle for too little? We need all the help we can get, and this is why the parable of the prodigal son is such a powerful story.

In 1986 Henri Newman, a French theologian and writer, toured St. Petersburg, Russia, the former Leningrad. While there he visited the famous Hermitage where he saw, among other things, Rembrandt's painting of the Prodigal Son. The painting was in a hallway and received the natural light of a nearby window. Newman stood for two hours, mesmerized by this remarkable painting. As he stood there the sun changed, and at every change of the light's angle he saw a different aspect of the painting revealed. He would later write: "There were as many paintings in the Prodigal Son as there were changes in the day."

It is difficult for us to see something new in the parable of the Prodigal son. We have heard the story so many times we believe that we have squeezed it dry of meaning. Not only that, but, as the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. When we hear the opening words of the parable once again, "And there was a Father who had two sons," we greet the words with ho-hum. Heard it. Heard it. Heard it.

Yet, I would suggest that just as Henri Newman saw a half dozen different facets to Rembrandt's painting of the Prodigal Son, so too are there many different angles to the story itself.⁽¹⁾

James W. Hatley, my mentor in the ministry, was pastor of Second Baptist Church in Memphis, TN, for 25 years. The parable of the prodigal son was so special for him that he easily had 30 sermons on it, each with a unique insight and application. He understood what it meant to study this painting in words and to see it in the many facets of God's light and love. One of those sermons, preached over 20 years ago, is the basis for much of my sermon this morning.⁽²⁾

In this not so simple story we have a classic portrait of a young person dealing with some of the issues of moving from adolescence to adulthood. Jesus takes us inside the dynamics of this family to see a glimpse of what is involved in this young man's journey to maturity and how he negotiates the "turbulent rapids that separate adolescence from adulthood." For most of us, our hardest struggles for maturity are linked directly to issues we struggled with in adolescence as we reached toward adulthood.

The younger son had little idea of who he was or what the world was really like around him. He saw the world as alive and full of promise, and he wanted to experience it without any delays for thoughtful planning or listening to others to test his ideas before acting. He was bored, impatient and ready to be one his own. He would be held back no longer. If his plans don't seem clear, I don't think they were clear to him either. He was in a hurry to find himself, to find out where his family left off and his own personhood began, and the only way he could think of doing this was taking his inheritance and his freedom and separating himself from his family that had given him his life and had sustained him up until then.

Whether he left out of ego to show them back home what he could do on his own, or because he wanted to show himself what he could do or whether he was just bored living in the same place doing the same things year after year, when he demanded his share of the inheritance, it was like saying to his father, "I wish you were dead and this was your funeral day and the estate was being divided." That's pretty insensitive, but in addition to that, he was taking significant capital out of an ongoing family business with no thought to how it would affect anyone else. God help us when adults suddenly have that adolescent crisis to "find themselves" because ,then, no one else or nothing else matters. They get themselves fixed on a blind course to sacrifice everything on an ill-conceived altar of self-discovery and self-fulfillment.

This is exactly what the prodigal did as he lost no time going to a place called simply a "foreign country." There he collided head-on with the realities of the world about which he knew very little. His life of freedom without responsibility was full of bad choices, and he was still responsible, like it or not. He had not beaten the system, but the system had beaten him.

With all of his inheritance now gone, he became a laborer taking care of pigs. A Jew taking care of pigs would be like one of us living at the garbage dump, not a very respectable place to be. Now, stripped of all of his fantasies, he had to face himself. Admitting the limits and ugly weaknesses he had kept hidden from others and had minimized and denied to himself is a terrifying discovery. Why do we have to hit bottom or go right to the very edge of destroying all of our relationships before we "come to ourselves?" I don't really know. Maybe it is a combination of pride, stubbornness and fear.

The Prodigal decided to go back home and try to get on as one his father's hired servants. He was doing an about-face on his road to maturity. He would just go back to the "dependency of childhood, rather than forward to responsible adulthood. Having discovered he was not everything, he concluded he was not anything and beat a hasty retreat."⁽³⁾

How would the father handle him now? Would he turn his back on him? Would he have to continually hear, "How could you do this to me?" and "I told you . . ." Or would the father grudgingly hire him and tell him to go clean out the stables? No, this father knew what maturity was all about. He had been wise enough to let the prodigal go at the height of his rebellion. When he could no longer teach him, he had to let him go to learn for himself, most probably through suffering, what the son had refused to be taught, namely that he was limited and imperfect and not superman. Yet, as he came limping home that day, the father quickly realized that the son had learned this lesson, and with great skill he proceeded to finish the delicate process by which the prodigal would come to his true self.

Draw closely to the scene that day as the father ran to meet this lost and self-willed son. He embraces him and hears him blurt out the words of confession as he pleads with his father to allow him to become a little child again and live as a simple, hired servant. But the father would hear nothing of this. By calling for the robe, the ring and the shoes, he not only showed his love and forgiveness to this repentant son, but he spun him completely around and faced him again toward adulthood rather than childhood. The robe, ring and shoes were all symbols of sonship and partnership in the family enterprise. He was saying to take what you've learned and put away the simplistic notions of childhood, whatever they may be, and become an adult, my son.

Right here is the crucial "right of passage" between adolescence and maturity, and it consists of two things: 1) coming to terms with our limits and weaknesses as persons, and 2) within those limits, exercising our strengths and abilities in responsible freedom. Both of these steps were involved in the prodigal's coming to himself. It started back in the pigsty, when he faced up to and accepted the true boundaries of his being; but it was not completed until there, with his father, he also accepted his strengths within those limits and resolved to begin to live responsibly and not as a hired servant.

This is what the prodigal had to go through in putting away childish things and becoming an adult, and this is why this story speaks so much to all of us. It is a story that tells us about this whole tricky process of growing up and moving into maturity. Living full of vim and vigor, exerting our ideas and personhood within our limits, neither over-reaching nor under-reaching, is a quest that never ends in this life.

I think this story speaks to us strongly and personally as individuals, but I also think that this story speaks to our struggle to live together as a society and function as a nation. How do we as a nation deal with our difficulty of understanding other cultures and value systems? How do we deal with our limitations and mistakes? How do we deal with people outside our country and inside our country who are always trying to work things to their own financial advantage? And what do we do with our strengths to provide aid, security and leadership? How do we express ourselves in a fearful world of terrorists and do it responsibly within limits?

Jim Hatley thought about these kinds of issues for our country 30 years ago. Hatley was a Kentucky boy who graduated from Madisonville High School. He was an army colonel during WWII assigned to the intelligence unit that broke the Japanese code. And he was a biblical scholar who was part of the Lockman Foundation team that produced the NASV translation of the bible.⁽⁴⁾

Like the prodigal, he sees the United States as having been gradually stripped of its illusions, and it is struggling with what it means to be a strong and consistent leader among the nations. Hatley writes, "I grew up in the 1930's believing that America had no faults. Our nation was depicted to me as having been founded by God-fearing, freedom-loving people and that we had developed from virtue to virtue, never harming anyone, always siding with the right, never having started a war and never having lost one. . . . what a collision it was to have the myth of innocence shattered. I think it began with the dropping of a bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even though elaborate rationalization was given for this action, the fact remains that we ushered in the Nuclear Age and are still the only nation to have dropped an atomic bomb on whole cities. Such an action was hard to reconcile with those childish images of pure goodness.

A second area where illusions were stripped away was the Civil Rights Movement of the 50's. This one hit me right between the eyes, for suddenly I had to face up to the fact that all of the idealism about the American dream was empty rhetoric when it came to African Americans. We really had not tried to include them in the ideal. I still remember how shocked I was to find that at the moment Thomas Jefferson wrote the famous words of the Declaration of Independence about all men being created equal and having inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that he was himself a slave-owner, denying in practice the very precepts he professed so eloquently. After that came the Vietnamese struggle. More than anything else, it made us aware of our limits."⁽⁵⁾ It caused us to question and wonder.

Now the crucial questions become, "Where do we go from here as a nation? How do we respond to these crises of coming to ourselves nationally and being stripped of our illusions" Like the prodigal, we have three alternatives. First, we could ignore the things we have learned about us over the last five decades and go on living with the childish fantasies that we are perfect and have no weaknesses. This is the attitude that the very right-wing forces in the country are encouraging. They tend to label as treason any criticism of America or acknowledgment of limitations. The second alternative is the other extreme, and that is to be so cynical about our faults that we timidly pull back into ourselves. The extreme left-wing encourages us in this direction with their negativism and charges that America is absolutely corrupt. The third alternative is to do what the prodigal did, namely, to accept our limits and then, within those limits, to begin to exercise our strengths of freedom and responsibility.

All the political surveys reveal that our country is deeply divided, not about who will win in basketball, but we are divided philosophically about who we are and who we want to be as a nation. The war of words and images has begun in earnest, and it is not yet April. Throughout history God has used a few, a remnant, to accomplish His purposes. It seems to me that the ministry of the church is needed. How can we act as the father in the parable and help to lead our nation to maturity? It would be self-destructive to ignore our limits as a nation, and it would also be tragic to retreat into isolationism and deprive the world of the strengths that we have to offer.

One way that we in the church can help is to speak out against the extremes and point rather to the two-fold secret of maturity-the understanding of one's limits and, within those limits, the exercise of one's power. We are called to help our nation move on to full maturity. This is exactly what the prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah tried to do for Israel, to keep her from over-reaching or under-reaching, so that she might truly reach her real maturity, which was the identity that God had given her and wanted realized. This is what we are called to do in our day, to be to America what the prophets were to Israel and what the father was to the prodigal.

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1. C Staff, www.eSermons.com, March, 2001

2. James W. Hatley, You Can Go Home Again, Second Baptist Church, Memphis, TN, 1998, p. 115ff.

3. Ibid, p. 118.

4. Based on personal conversations with Jim Hatley during my ministry with him at Second Baptist Church from 1976-1981.

5. Hatley, p. 122-3.