A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent
St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church
March 6, 2016
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
Many years ago, Mary and I had the good fortune of stumbling into a quirky little restaurant in Paris where there was one seating for dinner, everyone sat at old desks, and the owner/chef told stories and jokes and sang songs after dinner. That night we were the only non French speakers among the twenty or thirty diners, so the owner drafted another patron to translate for us, and just to make us comfortable in the setting, he began by speaking to Mary and me and said he had a joke that non English speakers wouldn’t get. Why was six afraid of seven, he asked. Because seven eight nine. Doesn’t work in French, he wanted to let us know we were welcome. It was a fun evening.
Well, if you saw the advertisement for this sermon in the newsletter—and I think this is the first time I have ever advertised the theme of sermon—then you know that I plan to speak today to men about their lives and about the kinds of soul work that we have to do just because we happen to be men. But before I go there, I want to speak first about something I learned in seminary about feminist theology. It had to do with a familiar story in the gospel. Some people come to Jesus and ask him a question about marriage. They set up a problem saying that if a man dies and his wife is supposed to become the wife of his brother, and if that brother dies and the wife is passed on to the next brother, and it happens again and she becomes the wife of yet another brother, whose wife they ask, will she be when they all get to heaven? Jesus answers that in heaven marriage doesn’t work as it does in this life, things are different in heaven. For most of the almost two thousand years that story has been told, it has been used as a springboard to talk about heaven, or maybe spiritual reality as opposed to human reality. Men have told the story, preached about the story and explained its meaning. Then in our time, as women began a new effort to free themselves from the scripted roles under which they had lived for so long, they began to look at the stories with hew eyes. For women, Jesus answer in the story of the wife of many brothers was clear. Jesus was saying heaven is a place where women don’t have to put up with that stuff.
Women, having set about the business of moving out of a centuries old cultural mold approach a familiar story with a new lens, one through which the meaning of the story shifts in a startling and at the same time obvious way. We are left saying, of course, how could I have not seen that. That’s what happened to me last week as I read the familiar story of the prodigal son. I’ll get to that story in a few minutes, first I want to tell you about the lens I brought to that reading.
In the past year I have been doing some reading and asking questions about the lives of men. I began wondering about the spiritual lives of men in relation to my work as a pastor. I often see more women in church than men and I wonder what the church has to offer men in these times and how the church’s message is heard by men. I did some reading about such questions several years ago and found that there is a big discussion going on around what men are and are not finding in church. One writer noted that men used to come to church to learn the rules, but our message has shifted. Now, instead of rules and laws and how to behave we offer a loving relationship with a thirty year old middle eastern man who is still somehow portrayed often with blonde hair, blue eyes and a come hither look and we are surprised that men don’t seem that interested.
I read of several programs being suggested, all having to do with encouraging guys to “man-up for Jesus.” My favorite line about manning up for Jesus I really can’t repeat here, but I am pretty sure that whatever you imagine because I just said that you could find if you went looking. I discovered soon that if I wanted to look into what men’s spiritual work might be about, I was going to have to look beyond the conversations among church folks which always seem to end up being about how to get more people into church. Those conversations are about the church’s issues, not men’s issues.
So I kept looking and soon found a more serious line of discussion about the lives of men that led me to the writings of James Hollis. Hollis may be the leading writer and teacher in America on the work of Carl Jung. I went to hear him speak a few months ago about the inner work of men and was intrigued. In his books and I find a wisdom that resonates and descriptions of the challenges faced by men get nods from other men when I describe them. Hollis lists eight of these, I want to flag two.
First, and this where the work of moving beyond a culturally written script comes in, Hollis says that the worth of men is measured by how well we perform to some external standard of production. Down through history, men have gone out to work and provide and make money, and though women these days are often as much the breadwinners in their families as men are, we all know how long it takes for deep cultural expectations to change. Even when the old scripts don’t work, we keep running into them because they are so deeply ingrained in our lives. Women know this. In a year when we could elect the first woman president, women are still having to fight for equal pay. Old scripts don’t fade easily.
Finding our worth somewhere outside ourselves sets up a whole other line of challenges. If our worth is defined by how well we perform at our jobs, then it will be important to project the image that we are doing well at those tasks. And, if we have to look successful in the roles that establish our worth then we will be unwilling to share our own questions about how well we are doing in that environment with the men around us. Another of the challenges Hollis describes has to do with men not sharing our doubts, fears and struggles with other men. And, in addition to secrets and silence resulting from having to look good on our worldly roles, just having to fit ourselves into those roles often means we have to deny something of ourselves in the process. Who doesn’t sometimes dream of a whole other kind of life, the cabin in the woods, trekking, a very different kind of work. It is worth asking where those dreams come from. Part of our spiritual work as men is to stay in touch with our own uniques souls, even as we live and work in a world that expects us to fit in.
The second challenge I want to cite, though Hollis calls these secrets and I think that better describes this one, is that men want a better relationship with their fathers. This one is actually related to the last one. Anthropologists studying primitive cultures find that it is often the grandfathers who are responsible for teaching boys about becoming men. Fathers are often too busy hunting and providing and trying to make their way in the world of responsibility. It is true for our culture as well. Connections between fathers and sons can be difficult and we can find ourselves late into adulthood wanting to connect in some real way with our fathers. Many a man whose father has long since died takes an interest in family history, a father’s home town, stories about the wars their fathers fought, journeys they made. More than a few of us have reconciled with fathers long after they were gone because we found ourselves with what Hollis calls a “father hunger.” My father had been gone for many years when I discovered Wendell Berry’s Port William novels about a fictional small town in rural Kentucky. I devoured those books because in time and setting they seemed to capture the boyhood situation of my father’s life. Many of us still long for stronger relationships with our fathers.
Now of course, none of these things is true for all men, at least not in the same way, but they all seem to be on track. And naming them helps point us toward our own souls where our questions, fears and longings can help us find our way. Hollis’ list caught me where I live, and I might not have begun this talk so soon if I hadn’t had these thing in mind when I read the gospel for this morning.
Let’s take a look at it once more through the lenses of believing our worth lies with some outside evaluator and the desire to reconnect with our fathers. That’s what was on my mind this week when I read the story of the Prodigal Son.
I’ll start with the older brother because he is the one who is most crippled by the idea that his worth, his value, must be earned. He is undone by the idea that his father could love his little brother after what he did. The older brother is angry, but he is also fearful, and we find he has been hesitant to speak up about what he needs. He just assumed toeing the line was the only path to acceptance. His father tells him he could always have had whatever he wanted just by asking. It is so easy to think the systems we work in define us. Again, there is something to be said for standing up for our own souls.
And with that in mind the younger brother I now see as the hero of this story. He looked at the life that had been written for him and he made a break for the door. He didn’t do it well, and it didn’t end up like he intended, but it sounds like he tried to honor an inner call that was at odds with the culture that would define him. Sometimes the work of preserving our soul can get messy.
And then there is that business about wanting to connect with fathers. In this story the younger son’s relationship with his father is transformed, not by becoming the son his father wanted, but by the discovery—by the father and his young son—that their connection was deeper. The description of the homecoming reveals a longing for each other, a desire to hold each other and claim each other quite apart from anything they may or may not do to deserve that moment.
The story of the prodigal son is, for me, today, a story about men, and expectations, and about exploding the idea that our worth is somehow tied to how good we are. It is a story about love and acceptance, the kinds of things men often long for and cannot name and therefor must find in the clumsy living of our lives. It is a story about grace that somehow, in a place we don’t often talk about, we all really want the same things and have more in common than we know. We want to belong and be loved just because we are…….no other reason.
I realize it is a bit of a stretch to talk about these things. We’re not used to putting these ideas out there…..I’m not used to putting these ideas out there. But I do feel called to live a different kind of life. I think we probably all do. And I am glad today for this story of some guys discovering the possibility of being accepted, claimed and valued not just in spite of, but because of their ability to live a little beyond what those around them might expect. Amen
John Baker
