NOVEL
SERMONS:
The Gospel in Literature and Life
5.
“Home”
Luke
15:11-32
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
July
26, 2009
Sacrament
of Holy Communion
Well, you know that
parable, right? You’ve heard it a
time or two before? It is no secret
that I love the prodigal son, Mary Oliver, and John Calvin, though the order of
my devotion varies at various times. My
affection for the Bible’s best parable is one of the reasons I enjoyed so much
Marilynne Robinson’s novel called Home.
Home is a prodigal son
story, too, with one major difference from scripture’s version.
While Luke in his gospel tells the story of the circumstances leading up
to that prodigal’s homecoming, Robinson anchors her story in what happens to
her prodigal and his family following his return home.
While one can get the sense from the Bible that that
prodigal lived a fairy tale “happily-ever-after life,” what happens to
Robinson’s prodigal led one reviewer to write that Home was “one of the saddest books I ever have loved.”
Home
is a companion novel to Robinson’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel entitled
Without explanation,
Jack returns home after a twenty year absence.
Jack drinks too much, spent time in prison, fathered a daughter out of
wedlock, and, worst of all for his father, is a non-believer, though Jack knows
the scripture better than most and plays hymns by ear on the piano for his
father. He also has a broken heart
over a woman who did him nothing but good but with whom he cannot sustain a
relationship because he drinks too much, spent time in prison… Jack comes home
seeking reconciliation, though that is easier wished for than accomplished.
While Jack is at home he gardens, fixes the old DeSoto, visits the
neighbors, and goes to church a couple of times.
The father, the Reverend Boughton, is tired and sad.
He falls asleep at dinner, falls deeper and deeper into dementia, and is
tormented at how and why Jack has fallen into his sorry state.
Glory is the peacekeeper who moves between accepting people as they are,
trying to fix them, and enabling them. Each
of them has secrets that define them, roles that have been assigned to them for
decades, memories both pleasant and painful, all come together in a house full
of family ghosts.
Robinson knows and
does not fear to tell us what a messy thing a family can be and has Glory sigh
and say, “This life on earth is a
strange business.” And
she prays, “Dear God in heaven, please help us.
Dear God, please help everyone we love.”
Robinson writes movingly of old age as she pictures the old man, the
father, looking back on being young, saying, “It’s like remembering that I used to be the sun and the wind.”
Now, his hair “brushed into a soft white cloud, like harmless aspiration, like a
mist given off by the endless work of dreaming,” he mostly naps and
sleeps. And, finally, he knows
something like peacefulness with “the
extinction of that last hope, like a perfect humility undistracted by the
possible.”
It is Jack, however,
who most touches our hearts, or at least he did mine.
Though he was loved by his family in the ways that it could love him, he
somehow never felt himself really to be a part of it, never felt as though he
was fully understood even as he could not fully understand.
Even after returning home and staying for a while, trying to work on and
figure things out, he left again, the narrator explaining that he has “fallen
back on estrangement, his oldest habit.”
I read an interview
with Marilynne Robinson and, in it, the questioner asked her if it is hard to
write a “bad” character like Jack? To
which she says, “Calvin (Calvin!
Robinson loves Calvin, too!) says that God takes an aesthetic pleasure in
people. There’s no reason to
imagine that God would choose to surround himself into infinite time with people
whose only distinction is that they fail to transgress.
King David, for example, was up to a lot of no good.
To think that only faultless people are worthwhile seems like an
incredible exclusion of almost everything of deep value in the human saga.
Sometimes I can’t believe the narrowness that has been attributed to
God in terms of what God would approve and disapprove.”
Amen to that!
All through the story, his trouble, travail, turmoil, and torture
notwithstanding, Jack seems to me the most interesting and human of all the
characters, the one, in the words of David’s confessional psalm, “whose
sin is always before him” and yet who is “a
man after God’s own heart” even if Jack never quite knew it or never
really could believe it. It strikes
me that in the novels I have read this summer for this sermon series, it is the
deeply flawed character with whom I most identify.
In The Bird Artist, it was Fabian Vos, the young painter of
birds who in a flare up of simmering anger killed Botho August, the lighthouse
keeper who had had dalliances with his mother and his girlfriend, who most
appreciated the beauty of life, who seemed to me the most full of it.
Last week in A River Runs Through It, it was Paul, Norman Maclean’s
younger brother who was a Rembrandt with a fly-rod but who otherwise had a hard
time of it before he was murdered, who seemed to me most passionately and fully
alive. And now Jack who knows that
life is deeper and more profound than most people admit or allow.
How to say this? Jack’s
acting out over the years might just be his exasperation with a world that
prefers moralisms to love and conventions to passion.
How often do we fail
to live at home with ourselves because to do so would invite disparagement by
others whose own sense of “home” would be upset by our doing so, and that is
more than we think we can bear?
The gospel of Jesus
Christ proclaims that in God we always have a home, and in that home, we may
without fear dare to become and to be who we really are, to learn what we have
to learn, and to do what we have to do in order finally to honor the unique
humanity that has been entrusted to us. In
the Bible’s parable, the turning point for the prodigal arrives when he, in
Luke’s language, “comes to himself.”
Authenticity seems to be the holy grail that God sets out for each of
us to find in our lives and not until we find it shall we be free.
So to find ourselves – so often lost in “shoulds” and “oughts”
and “conventions” and “customs” and “others’ expectations” –
is also to find God and then we shall know ourselves to be at home. As
John Calvin rightly said – “The knowledge of God and the knowledge of
ourselves is inextricably intertwined.”
That is the gospel
word that the novel Home suggests to me that I pass on to you.
I hope Jack gets that word. Come
to think of it, maybe he did, and that is why he felt he had to leave again.
Augustine said that “our hearts
are restless until they find their rest in God.”
We find God in finding ourselves and in finding ourselves we find
God.
Where your heart is is
where your home is. Listen to your
heart and let it lead you to your truest self, and thus also to God.
Amen.