Pilgrim's Tales: Lent 4

Like Chaucer's travelers to Canterbury, a company of folks are heading to Jerusalem with Jesus in the 40 day pilgrimage Christians call Lent. Each week during Sunday worship, Crescent Fort Rouge United will meet one of that company in a monologue. This Sunday, we hear from a mother.

His father got it wrong.

It wasn’t just our younger son who was lost, the one who skidded off the rails so dramatically, the one who got us to sell half our land so he could have cold, hard cash, only to waste every last coin on intoxicants and bad company. He was lost to us, yes, treating us like human vending machines instead of parents with a bit of wisdom about the world and a lot of love for him. He’s the famous one in the story, the younger son. Everybody likes a bad boy.

But my husband got it wrong.

Our elder son was lost, too.

If the younger treated us as human vending machines so he could squander it all on a way of life I don’t care to think about, our elder son also didn’t see us as parents. He never could just lean back into the love we have for him, but always was trudging around trying to please us. I often wished he would show a bit more spirit. He was so worried about earning his place in our family that he built a wall around himself with bricks of resentment and the mortar of bitterness, imagining nothing he did was ever good enough. He was trying to earn his place in a family he was already part of. It’s as if he thought, “If I work really hard, they will like me.” Not “If I work really hard, they will love me” – he was so lost he was content with like from his own family. He was so lost he couldn’t see the love that was already there.

I don’t know how both our boys got so lost. Being family is the hardest work in the world. 

Pilgrims' Tales: Lent 3

Like Chaucer's travellers to Canterbury, a company of folks are heading to Jerusalem with Jesus in the 40 day pilgrimage Christians call Lent. Each week during Sunday worship, Crescent Fort Rouge United will meet one of that company in a monologue. This Sunday, we hear from a gardener.
                                                                                     

I like to stay put. In fact, this journey with Jesus is the first time I’ve ever been on the move like this. Gardening takes a long, long time in the same space. You till and dig and compost and manure and dig and weed and till and compost and manure. You invest the sweat of your brow into a piece of land. It’s not like having a dairy cow that you can lead down the road to another location. If you’re a gardener, you have to stay put to see the fruit of your effort.

Which is why no one could believe it when I walked away from my fruit trees to take to the road with Jesus and the others. See, Jesus gets it, gets it – he gets it. Sure, others celebrate the harvest, the goodness of the earth, all that stuff. But that’s about what the earth can do for us, how the earth feeds us with grain and grape, gives us timber to build tables and temples. But Jesus sees something more, something that good gardeners know: nothing is ever lost. Nothing is ever lost.

You can prune a grapevine or a fig tree, cut off the dead branch that is sapping the life of the plant so the plant can use its inner resources to blossom and bear fruit. And most folks focus on the fruit – grapes, figs, what’s not to like?

But those dead branches aren’t ever lost. They go into the compost, take years to break down in the company of other dead branches, orange peels, apple cores, kitchen scraps, all that stuff nobody wants. All that stuff people think is useless just takes more time to do it differently. It’s a holy mystery how it breaks down, changes into rich dense compost. And the gardener uses that compost to enrich the earth, to help other things grow. Nothing is ever lost, just changed.

Jesus treats people that way. Those who are dead to us, those who are lost to us: the lepers, the collaborators, the sick, the sinful, the ones we turn away from – they are not lost to Jesus. No one is ever lost to him. And here’s the miracle: when Jesus finds them, he finds us, too. We are changed by that holy mystery of insistent belonging. Like a good gardener, Jesus helps us grow. Nothing is ever lost, but things can change.