The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
New Creation
March 27, 2022—the Fourth Sunday in Lent
Sermon text: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 and Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
All things will be made new. This is one of the great promises of our faith. In the section of the second letter to the Corinthians that we hear today, Paul puts it this way: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.” We can play with the pronouns a little and say, “If you are in Christ, you are a new creation” or “If I am in Christ, I am a new creation.” Perhaps best of all, as a recognition of our being one body with many members, “If we are in Christ, we are a new creation.”
Still, an awful lot hangs on that one small word: if. “If” invites us into a spirit of reflection and a level of self-examination that is appropriate for Lent. We might well ask, “How do I know if I am in Christ? What does that look like?” All of us here today probably already have an inkling that there is more to this than simply calling oneself a Christian, coming to church, or reading the Bible. Those are all good things, as far as they go, but they hardly seem likely to have the cosmic significance and heft necessary to usher in a new creation. Paul fleshes it out by focusing on reconciliation: God has reconciled us to himself and given us the ministry of reconciliation. He also calls us ambassadors for Christ, the ones to whom the message of reconciliation has been entrusted.
And if this still feels a little abstract, fear not. Today’s Gospel offer us, in parable form, an illustration to work with. There are multiple levels of estrangement in this story and therefore multiple opportunities for reconciliation and new life. The younger son is estranged from his father, from his community, and from his whole way of life, and it turns out that the older son is suffering from estrangement as well. The younger son has chosen a scandalously public way to break from his family—taking too soon the inheritance that would have been his when his father died and squandering it all on dissolute living.
By contrast, the older son has done everything right, continuing to conscientiously fulfill all his duties. And yet, when the moment comes for his brother to be forgiven and welcomed back into the fold, he can’t do it. His estrangement becomes clear. On the outside he is blameless, but his insides are tied up in knots. He clearly believes that both his brother and his father have betrayed him, and he has become so mired in bitterness and resentment that he can’t find it in his heart to forgive either of them.
The turning point in the story, the instant that shows us most clearly what is required for us to be ambassadors of reconciliation, is the moment when Jesus says that the younger son “came to himself.” You might think that this is the same as saying he had hit rock bottom, but it’s more than that. It’s not just that he had nothing left to lose, so he goes slinking back to see if his father is ready to forgive and forget. He doesn’t want his father to forget anything. He’s not even expecting forgiveness, really, and certainly not to be restored to his old place of belonging within the family. He has come back to himself. He can see both how very far he has fallen, how wrong and hurtful his actions have been, but he can also see that he is still a human being, valuable in his own right, worthy of more than this debasing situation he has created for himself. He realizes with piercing clarity that he doesn’t have to live this way anymore. He can’t undo all that he has done, but he can take responsibility for his own actions and try to create a new and better life.
This parable shows us what new life in Christ can look like, and it also shows us how much resistance to new life there is in our world and possibly in our own hearts. A new life in Christ is all about coming to ourselves, becoming again—or for the first time—the people we were created to be. It is about seeing ourselves clearly and lovingly, about practicing humility but not humiliation, about truth-telling and responsibility, about welcome and unexpected generosity. Being “in Christ” means all of that and more. It does not mean, however, that everything will be easy-peasy after that, or that everyone in our lives will be on board with us doing things differently. Th older son in this story is an important reminder that we can’t control other people or how they respond to even our most genuine efforts at reconciliation and new life.
Let’s not be too hard on the older son, though. He is not entirely wrong about being treated unfairly. His father behaves as scandalously as his brother, given the social norms of the time. Not only that, but when his father lavishes all this extravagance on his brother, he is using up resources that would have been his. His inheritance is what is being eaten into now, with the fatted calf and the fancy clothes and jewelry. This actually isn’t fair. Maybe you’ve been in a situation like this with your family or the church or some other community—where you really have been wronged, and the wounds are very raw, and it’s hard to find your way to forgiveness and reconciliation. I think this parable ends without resolution for just this reason. We don’t know what decision the older son makes, whether he too has a moment of coming to himself. This allows those of us who have been in his shoes to ponder our own need for healing and reconciliation, and to ask God to pour out his grace upon the situation.
Grace is the key word here. We need to recognize that God does the reconciling, not us. God’s grace is what makes it possible to even want to be reconciled; it is only by grace that we will ever have that experience of coming to ourselves. We can’t make it happen through our own efforts—we are not in charge. It can be helpful to our journey of healing and reconciliation to remember that our primary job is not to get in the way of God’s actions, not to cling to our own desires and devices.
The necessity for grace does not mean that we are without agency, though. Our tradition offers us structure and support for these moments of grace to happen. Prayer is one of those resources. The sacramental rite of reconciliation, which we often call confession, is another important resource. Perhaps most fundamental of all, our life in community with one another is a place to learn and practice reconciliation. Whether we are talking about a family, a monastery, or a parish, community is one of the messiest and hardest things there is, and also the most fundamental to our becoming fully human. We come together week after week to worship God in a church made up of imperfect people. If bumping up against our own fallibility, foolishness, and limitations in the midst of our life as a parish doesn’t teach us the value humility, of reconciliation, and of starting over, then I don’t know what will!
And yet God has entrusted to us the ministry of reconciliation—it’s literally why we as a church are here, and it’s a sacred duty. And when we are open to them, those moments of grace are everywhere in evidence.
The great Irish mystic John O’Donohue wrote words that might help us on our journey to become more open to grace and reconciliation. He wrote, “What you encounter, recognize, or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach…”[i]
The disciplines of Lent—prayer, almsgiving, self-examination, and so on—are meant to help us improve the quality of our approach. Most of us do not remember to approach every encounter with another living being with a quality of compassion and connection, let alone reverence. But we can work on it. We can look to the younger son and see that after he came to himself, he approached his family with respect and humility, and was met with overwhelming love. We can look to the father, who went out of his house to meet his son, reversing all social expectations, and fearlessly stepping into a new creation, a new way of being. And we can look to a world where so much needs to be made new, so much healing and reconciliation is needed, and approach it with compassion, reverence, and awe. And then see what new life begins. We are in Christ. We are a new creation. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 23-24.
