It’s Oscars day, and it’s Lent, so in the spirit of confession, I’m going to tell you something about myself- I have terrible taste in movies. That’s not even a totally accurate way to say it- I actually love movies that are terrible. It has been an embarrassingly long time since I watched a movie that was not either a comedy or that is funny because it is very dumb. Myles is a film person, so usually I can fake knowing a little bit about smart, fancy movies when I need to, but if we are being honest, my great film accomplishment of 2021 was watching the entire Fast and Furious franchise.

That’s right, I am about to use the Fast and Furious movies as a sermon example, so hold on. To me personally, the Fast and Furious movies are amazing because they are basically a perfect soap opera interspersed with car racing. The cars don’t really interest me, except that they are an important part of advancing the plot, which is a perfect melodramatic balance of people with a lot of feelings and frequent plot twists. I mean, over 9 movies, there have been several evil siblings who have appeared to cause mischief, quite a few love triangles, and multiple people who have come back from the dead. Not to mention that Dwayne the Rock Johnson and Vin Diesel have an ongoing real life feud about respect for one another’s acting that takes place via Instagram. It’s hard to believe that none of these movies have been nominated for best picture, but here we are.

At the end of most Fast and Furious movies, all the good characters, and sometimes the evil ones, or at least the ones who were evil but now we know they had amnesia while they were doing evil stuff, gather for dinner, and Vin Diesel gives a little speech about “Family.” And here we have the other source of the appeal of the Fast and Furious movies- much of the drama originates from family troubles. And that – we’re finally getting to the point of this horrible sermon illustration- is I think what hooks us into this parable about the prodigal son.

We all have some strong feelings about someone in this parable, I think, because we can all relate to some aspect of this family and its story. It’s a simple story in some ways, but it’s a gripping one, one that we remember, one that brings up some emotions, that hooks into the drama of our own lives. Maybe we’ve been the younger son, and gone away from our home and parents and our origin, either in a good and healthy way, or in a disastrous way. Maybe we’ve been the elder son, and resented our sibling for getting away with terrible behavior while we labored faithfully. Maybe we’ve been the parent wondering if our wayward child will return, or dealing with a resentful child. Maybe we’ve been anyone in any family dynamic who has had to set boundaries on another family member and wondered where that all fit with this story.

And that’s part of the power of this parable, and lots of parables, I think- they hook us, they draw us in, sometimes like a good 9-part soap opera, and sometimes with other provocative or unusual images. They draw us in so that we will think about them and dwell on them and wrestle with them and even get angry with them sometimes, I think.

I know I read this parable and want to see a manual for how to operate in a healthy family, and when I want that, I get kind of annoyed that this doesn’t seem to include a lot of what seems to be important in families in my observation- clear communication, healthy boundaries, letting people know how they’ve hurt you. The way that the people in this story behave leads to a good story, but it also leads directly to the drama and hard feelings on the part of the elder son. And it’s unclear how it resolves, or how the younger son gets integrated back into the life of the family, how they learn to live with each other. It seems like a good recipe for ongoing drama, but not how I’d like to live my life, really.

In my own wrestling with this parable over the years, though, I’ve come to understand this parable as a story that invites us to understand God, and God’s love more fully. It’s not a moral manual for how to treat each other, exactly, but it’s a parable that invites us to see how God’s love breaks in to our world.

The father in this parable certainly doesn’t behave like an exemplary human father of the culture and society of the time would have expected, and I don’t think he behaves like an exemplary human father in most of our cultures either. The father’s love for the wayward younger son is extravagant, without bounds, even scandalous, to the point that I think it makes us a little uncomfortable. The father here doesn’t ask the son to apologize, or let him know the effect of his actions on the rest of the family, or start working on a plan to re-integrate the son into family life. The father in this story is just waiting for his son to come home, rushing to great his son when he comes back to himself and realizes that his father’s house is the good and right place for him to be. The father’s overwhelming focus is relationship- the father just wants to be with his younger son, to have him home, together, where he belongs, in his father’s house.

The focus with the elder son is also relationship. The father doesn’t seem concerned with the points that his elder son is making, about fairness or the hurt that the younger brother has caused the family. He wants to draw the elder son back into relationship- he points out only that the elder son has been in relationship, together with the father the whole time. That seems to be all that matters to the father, again- that relationship, that connection.

It’s a story that’s meant to be a little disruptive to us, I think. Jesus is inviting us to notice the way that God’s love is different than the human order of things, even the ways that good, solid, stable families might and even should order their families. God’s love is so big, so huge, so eager to embrace us in relationship that it just seems to throw the rest of it out the window. The father doesn’t go and stalk the younger son, he lets the son choose to return to him, but he’s right on the edge of that- he’s there, ready to meet the son when he returns, and even just a little more than that- he rushes to greet and embrace him.

I think in the same way, God lets us choose, God doesn’t force us to stay in God’s house, God lets us go if we want to go- but I think what this parable is sharing with us is that God’s love is bigger and more extravagant than any other consideration. God loves us so much that God will do just about anything to greet us when we want to come home, that God rejoices when we are home. God just wants to be with us, more than anything else. And because God is God, and God’s love is this enormous, extravagant force, that it just overflows the human containers of our family dynamics and our limits and our small dramas. God just wants to be with us, no matter what we’ve done, no matter what has happened. God is always ready to take us back. God is always so glad when we are together with God, in God’s house.

I heard Bishop Gene Robinson say once that one of his spiritual practices was just to sit and let God’s love pour over him, like if someone had cracked an egg on your head. So maybe that’s what we’re called to do, at the end of the day, by this parable. In all the drama and difficulty of our lives, maybe we’re just supposed to know that God’s love is this big, and this extravagant. Perhaps knowing that we are loved that way will help us as we seek to do the more complicated work of loving in this messy human soap opera that we’re living in. I suspect that at the end of the day, God just wants us to know that we are loved, regardless of the outcome, although I believe that God also wants us to flourish and live our best lives, that living in that kind of love is God’s dream for all of us together.

So, let that love sink in a little bit this week. Maybe it will give you an inkling about how to live, or someone who needs to know that kind of love is available to them too. But it doesn’t have to- it’s just there for you, whatever you do with it. God’s just glad you’re there, God’s glad when we’re here in God’s house together.