Zoom Photography

The Rev. Sandy Selby – St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Akron Ohio

4th Sunday in Lent, Year C – March 18, 2007

Text: 2 Cor 5:16-21 and Luke 15: 11-32

In my picture album there’s a close-up photograph of a sub-tropical plant. I took the picture with a zoom lens, standing some distance from the plant and then zooming in with my camera so that the plant’s stem and flowers consume the entire photograph. If you looked at this picture in isolation you would assume that I took it during a visit to the Caribbean. But in the photo album there’s another picture, alongside the one of the flowers, of a coastline of water and rocks with bare rocky hills in the background. It’s a sparse landscape, beautiful in its rugged wildness, yet out of sync with the lush flowers of the close-up.

If I could show you a bird’s-eye view the sight would seem stranger still. For this beautiful sub-tropical plant lies not in a lush garden beside a Caribbean beach but in a garden on a remote coastline in the Highlands of Scotland. On the same latitude as Labrador lie gardens teeming with sub-tropical plants, a most unexpected landscape thousands of miles from the tropics. The surprise of a sub-tropical plant in this incongruous landscape has been preserved for my photo album by my zoom lens. It’s only by seeing the scene from a distance that one can see what is really going on.

He’s standing outside his house squinting against the morning sun, looking out across his fields. He can see the laborers struggling to till the dry ground. It’s hot work, thankless work. Off in the distance he sees a dark speck against the dry landscape. Over time he can see that the speck is moving, growing gradually larger, coming toward him. He stares, transfixed. Minutes later he breaks into a run—not a graceful run, mind you. He’s an old man, and old men rarely run. But his heart is leaping, and his running becomes a gallop. And then here it is: what he has been watching and waiting for, all those years. He takes his son into his arms, holds him, and kisses him. “You’re home, my son, you’re home.”

“The Prodigal Son” is one of our most familiar and most beloved parables. The younger son convinces his father to give him his share of his inheritance early, and when he gets it he leaves town and fritters it away on hard living. Destitute, starving and desperate, he becomes a laborer in the land of the Gentiles, feeding the pigs in the field and living on pig food. For a Jew, this is as low as it gets. He hits bottom, comes to himself, and returns to his father.

His father has every reason to reject his younger son. To take his inheritance early, leave town, and then lose his share of the property to non-Israelites is an offense not only against his family but against his entire village. The son has brought dishonor to his family and to all around them. But the father accepts his younger son in the most stunning and public way possible. He runs to meet him, greets him effusively, and then holds a party for the entire village, complete with a fatted calf. He has signaled to all around him that this prodigal son is to be welcomed home. And everyone gets on the program--everyone except the elder son, who is furious.

All those years he has been obediently “working like a slave” for his father, and he hasn’t gotten as much as a young goat to celebrate with his friends. And the younger son, who wasted everything in his disobedience, gets the prize. It’s not fair! He refuses to join the party. His father comes outside and pleads with him to join the celebration. Son, he says, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.

This parable is a study in contrasts. The elder son wants the contrast to be between his brother and him. But if we take our camera and zoom out a bit to the story before this one, we see the parable from a different perspective.

A woman with ten coins loses one and searches all over the house until she finds it. It isn’t a huge amount of money that she has lost—about a day’s wage, maybe, but it’s important to her. Important enough that when she finds it she calls all of her friends over to celebrate.

If we zoom out a little more we see a shepherd looking all over the wilderness for one lost sheep, leaving his other ninety-nine behind. When he finds it he lays it across his shoulders and carries it home, then calls his friends and neighbors together to celebrate. Rejoice with me, he says, for I have found my sheep that was lost.

Zoom back two more verses and we get the context: Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘this fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’

Jesus answers their grumbling with three stories of losing, finding, and rejoicing over one lost sheep, one lost coin, and one lost son. The tax collectors and sinners in the crowd get it. When Jesus says, Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance, they shout, “Amen!” In the story of the lost coin, when Jesus says, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents, the sinners in the crowd beam, for they share that joy.

But the Pharisees and scribes are stone-faced because for them the gospel of repentance and joyful acceptance that Jesus preaches to tax collectors and sinners is not “good news.” Like the elder son, they haven’t wandered off but have stayed within the covenant. They have never broken the commandments, and they resent Jesus accepting this riff-raff free of charge. The three stories in this 15^th chapter of Luke are for the Pharisees and scribes, the righteous ones who can’t bear the thought that God gives people what they don’t deserve.

These stories about the lost and found tell us of a God who seeks after us sinners and rejoices when we are found. Before he set out on his journey home, the prodigal son rehearsed his words of repentance to his father. But seeing him off in the distance, his father ran to him and embraced him before a word had been spoken. His son had repented—turned around to come home—and that was enough for him.

What does this say to us today, in Lent? Quoting Jesus, the gospel reading for Ash Wednesday warns us not to be like the Pharisees: Beware of practicing your piety before others…give alms in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you (Mt 6:1,4). Lenten discipline is important not for its externalities but for the way in which it creates a space within us for the God who seeks us at every moment. Our times of prayer and reflection are important, because when we open ourselves to God we may come to see ourselves as we really are. Then God will draw us to repent and claim new life. As Paul says, So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

Lent is about new beginnings for those who “are lost and now are found,” as the hymn Amazing Grace puts it. We are children of a gracious God who gives us what we don’t deserve. It is amazing. After all, the reason the father could see his prodigal son way off in the distance was that, for all those years, he had been watching and waiting for him to come home.