Can You Go Home, Again?

A Sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds

Point Reyes (CA) Community Presbyterian Church

October 6, 2024

 

Audio Sermon linked here

"What’s really made a mess of the world? Grace? Forgiveness? Turning the other cheek? Or is it guilt, punishment, vengeance, and retribution?" --Robert F. Capon.

READINGS

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Psalm 18:20-30

The LORD rewarded me according to my righteousness;

    according to the cleanness of my hands he recompensed me.

    21For I have kept the ways of the LORD,

    and have not wickedly departed from my God.

    22For all his ordinances were before me,

    and his statutes I did not put away from me.

    23I was blameless before him,

    and I kept myself from guilt.

    24Therefore the LORD has recompensed me according to my righteousness,

    according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight.

 

    25With the loyal you show yourself loyal;

    with the blameless you show yourself blameless;

    26with the pure you show yourself pure;

    and with the crooked you show yourself perverse.

    27For you deliver a humble people,

    but the haughty eyes you bring down.

    28It is you who light my lamp;

    the LORD, my God, lights up my darkness.

    29By you I can crush a troop,

    and by my God I can leap over a wall.

    30This God—his way is perfect;

    the promise of the LORD proves true;

    he is a shield for all who take refuge in him.

 

Luke 15: 11-32

11 Then Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. 12 The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them. 13 A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. 14 When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. 15 So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. 16 He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. 17 But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! 18 I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” ’ 20 So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. 21 Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’22 But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23 And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; 24 for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate.

25 “Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. 26 He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. 27 He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ 28 Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. 29 But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ 31 Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’ ”

 

 

Can You Go Home, Again? [Sermon Notes:]

Audio Sermon linked here

 

Psalm 18 notes the life journey of two sons realized in the parable: what the Psalm calls the loyal and blameless, who at the end reveals himself as self-righteously indignant at the father’s merciful welcome of the prodigal, and the prodigal, who has underwent the trials of exploration and misadventures.

The context of the prodigal story is the historical situation in Palestine at the time. People who considered themselves “true Israel” felt in exile by the illegitimate priesthood and temple establishment collaborating with the Roman occupiers.

messianic expectations were running high during the time of Herod the Awful through another two generations

In this time of political expectation and chaos, there were models of a virtuous king: Dt. 17. But also there were ideals of kingly virtue imparted from pagan neighbors who might be necessary to defeat these romans.

Homeric epic to render, mythically,

the metaphysics of behavioral mirroring in Psalm 18 that is behind what is being revealed existentially in the parable:

That “26with the pure you show yourself pure;

    and with the crooked you show yourself perverse.”

How then can our “identity” be based in a physical place?

 As I preached last time, any authenticity tied to that physical identity whereby we deign to speak for collectives frankensteined together and cobbled to create partisan rage as the path to ultimate and crowning victory upon victory?

 

All cultures were aware of a metaphysics of trial and homecoming, and the poet Homer wrote an epic of the cyclical mirroring of injustice begun with a war: the Iliad and Odyssey.

I think that the concluding epic character Odysseus gives us an entry, alongside Psalm 18, to understanding the parable:

the way to end exile and come home to the truth of God.

I. “complicated,” like a disease.

2. Just suffered a tough month with COVID: progressive and looping complications, twisted, much turned

3. Anthony Esolen

Virtue of nostalgia? An-algesiac

 

[Liddell, H. G., Scott, R., Jones, H. S., & McKenzie, R. (1996). In A Greek-English Lexicon. Clarendon Press, loc. cit., excerpts]:

πολυτροπία, Ion. -ίη, ἡ, versatility [of] craft, Hdt.2.121.ε ́.

II. multifariousness, variety, Hp.Acut.3 (pl.), D.H.Amm.2.3, Corn.ND25, M.Ant.12.24.

 

✪ πολύτροπος, ον, (τρέπω) much-turned, i.e. much-travelled, much-wandering, epith. of Odysseus, Od.1.1, 10.330.

II.       turning many ways: metaph., shifty, versatile, wily, of Hermes, h.Merc.13, 439; τοῖς ἀσθενέσι καὶ π. θηρίοις and in this sense Plato took the word as applied to Odysseus,

III.      τὸ π. τῆς γνώμης their versatility of mind, Th.3.83; τὸ π., of Alcibiades, Plu.Alc.24.

  2. fickle, ὅμιλος Ps.-Phoc.95.

  3. of diseases, changeful, complicated,

 

Anything to get home.

Odysseus is who we celebrate for his wily, twisting, loopy craft as the excellence of this chaotic and turbulent age.

 

Except that he abandons his followers in his quest of coming home to his former hearth and wife and child. He is a Kinist who operates by wile to get himself.

 

Nostalgia means homesickness, and to me is the political disease of our rabid, partisan age,

grounded in a chaos-inducing manipulation of a certain view of

of Human nature and its home there in in biological agon as ontological and historically necessary:

Trying to conjure up the past anew by any means necessary only births monsters.

Refusing the future to push its prospects out of cradles is the jackdaw of nostalgia.

Nostalgia is NO virtue.

Nostalgia is a fixed, tended and watered memory of place and social order seems more solid and real than lived experience.

A denial of the neighbor in the present to restore those of the past brings false sense of transcendence which exists between memory, the present, and the future,

along with the transition between them.

An emotion of wistfulness comes from living with the disjunction between a past fondly remembered and a present filled with loss and guilty conscience.

In such a case, the memory can only be opposed to that transition and the repentance necessary to move into it.

Like Abraham, to Kum Lech!

To be born again in and through the heart with authentic, living neighbors.

We prodigals who recollect and experience the gap between high ideal and imperfect reality as painful precisely because its aspirations are set so much higher than what came before.

We are coming to be accountable to conscience and to the virtues that align with grace’s progress,

what we call the Kingdom of God with Christ becoming all in all.

This accountability is the foundation of the virtue of recollection.

By contrast, beneath the false virtue of nostalgia is an insistence that we can only be content by reconciling ourselves to far lower ethical ideals—to an ontological human nature of agon kept at bay by guardians on our chosen team.

Alain de Benoist, a political right thinker aware of fascism’s allure, described state of nature reactionaries as clothed in visceral atavisms of "bitterness, sneering, derision, regret, nostalgia—showing [fascism’s] ideal [of a home] is always foregone, always spent,” always trite but menacing.

Such characterized that change in political vocabulary after 9/11 when the “homeland” was under attack. America neighborhood morally pulled back into “homeland,”

a word that made many us queasily recollect the Nazi’s use of “heimat.” Homewardness. Homeward bound, like a return that Abraham was not allowed.

 The subsequent politicization of homeland into an ideology,

And those flag lapel pins started popping up everywhere,

changing the meaning of the flag from the expansion of ideals to a retreat into an ancestral “home.”

And while beginning the 1930s rich business men strategize to marry capitalism to Christianity, now these lapel pins are married to celebrities wearing crosses:  

the meaning of patriotism moved from the high ideals of our political language as ever outreaching national spirit

 to a kin tie to a homeland..

 

To this state-led intention to build security on human-kin nature, state power says this:

 

 if something is complex, simplify it, which is the propagandistic power of simple, homey past; stories that people tell — or avoid telling — to reshape and distort the past.

The causes of imperialistic American war and slavery is complex, they say.

The representatives of these nostalgiac powers step in to train by military-industrial indoctrination of youth that

framed choices as intrinsically complicated and hard--maturation involved nuance, tradeoffs& the weighing of "lesser evils" to bring in the better world framed by the manipulations of nostalgia.

That "realist" logic, of course, is nonsensical...Either there is an unalloyed option for the good, or the system is driving by the flaws and driven by the flawed toward instituting flaws.

Frankensteining Odysseus for the State, the state’s idea of human nature as at home in nature, not spirit.

To walk away is the righteous path sure to be calumnied as "cowardice"or betrayal.

As I said, nostalgia offers the promise of a simpler life when we weren’t yet immobilized by anxieties of conscience from the misuse of our gifts and liberties.

 It’s a place where form leads function. You’ve heard “form follows function?” That’s recollection.

Recollection has a function, to repair nostalgia’s form from memory rather than its repaired and repairing function.

I know this is abstract, so let me quote TS Eliot’s nostalgia:

“What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits, and customs, from the most significant religious rites to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of the same people living in the same place…” T.S. Eliot

This focus on forms as blood-tied traditions is actually etiquette as religion-- that by our recognition of manners we recognize our kin and their inner lives.

 This is coffee-hour church of the past, bound to the way things have always been done and are expected to continue.

 The seeking for the timeless, the unchanging, participating in God’s being as immutable, as if we finite creature can possibly understand this infinite being in time—even understanding time by couterposing in with history.

Calling out some idea of timeless or traditional manners—back when our parents were lions in this community-- is not  now what I mean boldness for the gospel’s sake:

 

I know the word “gospel” offends many, so let’s unpack it.

Because the prodigal sons and daughters are your neighbors and they are afraid of the father and of the older brother. We are the older brothers: we see ourselves the custodians of the father’s love and the traditions of belief and the language.

So boldness for gospel’s repairing the peaceful community includes hospitality—yes welcome at the door and coffee—

but speaking a language that makes sense to our neighbors in time and space, what we call context.

The context of the prodigal children church is an earned mistrust of the self-righteousness of churchy language and the bastardization of grace that refuses to speak of the Golden Rule in virtue instead to speak the partisan language of rage and guns and demonized manners and identities based on physical origin and victimization.

 

This is what makes our prodigal neighbors uneasy to walk in this door. What kind of manipulative partisan rage and preachy old fashioned judgmental language will they find,

what kind of abstruse and obscure theologoical language and mannerist rituals will make them feel they come up short?

Yet boldness with the gospel proclaims the message of God’s forgiving and merciful grace is the primary and necessary step of the repair the human cosmos.

Are any of allowed to silence ourselves because we afraid of being misunderstood as being on of “those kind” of Christians?

Are we not instead responsible to try—to be bold, to deliberate the best way to invite people in to hear the “gospel,” which is THE message of hope and certainty that speaks truth about the ineffective and futile prospects of “those kind” of holy postures, those kind we found more in the past?

Our prodigal neighbors are watching power in church and society say that if something is simple, complicate it, taking it out of the hands of citizens and endowing its solution with “complicated political theologians and financiers” who understand the past and rule machines and codes to gin us back there.

We can, they say, Disney-fy the past, make it even better. There’s no place like home. Ever home!

Where the steeple towered over the town square signifying a sense of order and cosmic connection for human beings.

A Disney church nostalgia matter-of-factly hierarchical served by priesthoods to painted and beautified stone, with a settled social order signified by animal before man, man before God, woman before man, serf before lord, and worker before owner.

Little Gidding

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration. A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

TS Elliot connects the decay of his traditions to a more significant history of England while projecting (diming) hopes for the future because he sees less and less of these patterns recurring. But may be  we can resurrect them by resurrecting the

Elliot’s is a fantastic but wistful nationalist nostalgia of whatever we Englanders were doing was right.

What our spirit had handled—

"that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil.”

The idea that the USA has a divine mission. That our energy and depth and spirit would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. [Once AngloAmericanism] had all the momentum; they had ridden the crest of a high and beautiful wave.” –Hunter s. Thompson.

Yet  This wave breaks for all nationalisms every generation.

 No nostalgia can unlock a tide or generational force contrary to the coming of Christ all in all.

Is this Christian—a people riding the wave of nostalgia back into a past to begin eternity again in a static being—in a static cradle??

Abraham was called from this cradle of civilization in the fertile crescent of what later became Babylon.

He was given a promise in a spiritual place, and as he journeyed across a continent, he was ever tempted to settle down under a rock he constructed celebrating his relationship with the One God, his father. But that Father repeatedly told him, Qum, Lech.

We are Abraham’s children too.

We are becoming. We are not frozen inside a home space. The Prodigal Son church does not journey backward into Babylon or called into Egypt’s pyramids and pentagons of power.

We are children of eternity coming.

We are the Prodigal Son Church, a church that reaches out to the self-righteous and the ashamed alike, bringing them the truer way to understand how this world is broken and how to become repairers.

Our prodigals want to come home to what is real, and not what is false. And that requires repentance from traditions and institutions that create hierarchical orders by crafty language and the insistence on norms of manners and arguments over words./

 

The virtue of accountability leading to repentence create the conditions where we can break free of egoistic self-interestedness and form meaningful neighborhoods in the father’s love. There is no other path than Christ’s vitures grounded in the GR. And this follows from the parable of the prodigal son.

It is the virtue of recollection that replaces the false virtue of nostalgia

Recollection reflects on why coercive and enslaving power, in each specific instance, has its way designating some things as complex and some things as simple and restorative.

The Gospel of Grace is the ultimate solution. It creates a legacy of virtue and peace, countering the divisiveness of identity politics.

The sermon calls for the rejection of nostalgia, running away from the goads of conscience and refusing to repent instead

Recollection of the past—running memory through experience of repentance and grace,

is necessary to meet current challenges.

The solution lies in peacebuilding, reconciliation, and the restoration of narratives of meaning.

It’s not nostalgia. Let us repent from nostalgia and its ghosts of distorted memories

Trying to live again by inhibiting the future’s energies of betterment from arriving: the kingdom of God.

  

How do we escape from nostalgia?

By adopting the virtue of Recollection to stimulate repentance AND accoountabilty by asking "What’s really made a mess of the world? Grace? Forgiveness? Turning the other cheek? Or is it guilt, punishment, vengeance, and retribution?" (Robert F. Capon).

Recollection asks, where is our real home, where memory has not been shaped by ignorance, propaganda, cooptation, and self-deceit?

 We recollect that God is the father of all wandering prodigals. He forgives. He is merciful. He welcomes us to our true home, after our odysseys, our experimentations of getting ahead by our natural wits and like Ps. 18, being led into the pit by our wiles.

 Like Moses, prodigals were born nesting in nested pyramids of power, and like Moses we are born again in the ear, by hearing the proclamation that Jesus is our Lord by virtue of his grace of forgiveness extended to us on the Cross. He reveals the essence of God the father in mercy—in grace alone.

 Can the complicated one go home again? Not the way Odysseus does—back to the wolf-fold home.

 But more like the journeys of Abraham where

Home is where language means something, has a stable meaning grounded peacemaking not in complications to bring in something else. Coming home not to maintained and static insitution but a site of promise through activity of REPAIR by peace not wiles and violence.

The journey of repentance brings the prodigal home. There is none of that in sight of the blind Homer.

If we think through out these sources of unrepented stability, has our home endured only in a frozen nostalgia of human nature—

a human ego caught between self-aggrandizing urges and conscience?

This is where nature never changes: always ready to kill and coerce.

 By contrast

Peacemaking is the real excellence of polytropos. It is ousia (essence) the human essence of which shares with the divine accompaniment and shared action, guided by grace, not by ego.

 

Peacemaking is prophetic, shaped by virtue and wisdom, and not by strategic power. It is kinesthetic as it learns the soul’s full range of empathy in order to begin to comply with the GR duty.

 

•        Peacemaking reads the full context of conflict and through experience and wisdom,

•        anticipates how to keep the peace through virtue and

•        bides and observes to offer positive solutions.

•        These require travels and experiences at least as varied and ranging as Odysseus’, with a far broader range of soul training through the arts and kinesthetic processing of beauty,

•        poignancy, awe, and the sublime

•        that has gentled our inner boxer,

•        our inner pugilist,

•        where we have learned to take off our inner boxing gloves

•        and have learned to tap our hearts to connect our heels with a partner,

•        not an identity of homelands

But true meaning-making is rooted in accountability, empathy, and ethical growth.

Kipling writes of prodigals:

the Stranger within my gate,

He may be true or kind,

But he does not talk my talk—

I cannot feel his mind.

I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,

But not the soul behind…

We need to risk for these. And if the risk of trying new words or explaining old doesn’t pay off, then how we in this congregation any worse off? Can we afford not to risk for the gospel to renew our place here? To bring in new life, new energies, new crafts that unify and build wholeness?

--

Attendance to Grace is the solution, whereby we recognize every moment is created by God to allow us to create a legacy that endures—eternally endures—by virtues flowing from the GR. Recollection, not nostalgia of retrieval, where the past is contextualized and adopted to meet current challenges of pacification, shalom-building, and repair of created unities of the loved children of God.

 

Recollection is the virtue We dance with memory to tame our inner boxer of nostalgia,

To tame our inner dog guarding fences of our idealized pasts,

 our inner calculations of

situational tactics of polytropos

 

 and bring all into the repairing ethical structure of the sheepfold home, speaking its language and commitment to peac. May it be so for you and me: AMEN