Prodigal Daughter

Why would God go to all the trouble to endure our bad choices and our flagrant sinning in order to have relationship with us? Hear the story of the lost son from the modern setting as told by Philip Yancey in his book What’s so Amazing about Grace.

Yancey tells the story of a prodigal daughter who grows up in Traverse City, Michigan. Disgusted with her old fashioned parents who overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, the length of her skirts, she runs away. She ends up in Detroit where she meets a man who drives the biggest car she’s ever seen. The man with the big car – she calls him “Boss” – recognizes that since she’s underage, men would pay premium for her. So she goes to work for him. Things are good for a while. Life is good. But she gets sick for a few days, and it amazes her how quickly the boss turns mean. Before she knows it, she’s out on the street without a penny to her name. She still turns a couple of tricks a night, and all the money goes to support her drug habit.

One night while sleeping on the metal grates of the city, she began to feel less like a woman of the world and more like a little girl. She begins to whimper. “God, why did I leave. My dog back home eats better than I do now.” She knows that more than anything in the world, she wants to go home. Three straight calls home get three straight connections with the answering machine. Finally she leaves a message. “Mom, dad, its me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m catching a bus up your way, and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there, I‘ll understand.” During the seven hour bus ride, she’s preparing a speech for her father. And when the bus comes to a stop in the Traverse City station, the driver announces the fifteen-minute stop. Fifteen minutes to decide her life.

She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect. But not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepares her for what she sees. There in the bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and a great-grandmother to boot. They’re all wearing goofy party hats and blowing noise-makers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner that reads – Welcome Home!

Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She stares out through the tears quivering in her eyes and begins her memorized speech. He interrupts her. “Hush, child. We’ve got no time for that. No time for apologies. We’ll be late. A big party is waiting for you at home.”

Family Values

Last week I was reading a newspaper article on family values. The gist of the article was that everyone wants strong family values but few can agree on what they are. Then I heard Roger Rosenblatt on public radio being cynical about family values. Rosenblatt said that there are plenty of perfect families around like yours and mine. But, there are so many others that fall short, families like the Walker spy family or the Medicis in Italy or the Macbeths of Scotland or the Oedipus Rexes of Greece. Rosenblatt's point was that there is no perfect family and that family values have become so generalized they are meaningless. He said what is valuable in families is that they are normal people struggling to do good and be good, strengthening themselves by listening to each other, paying attention to other families, and encouraging each other to be fair, honest, and kind. Sounds like a decent list of family values to me, and even a single parent can do those things.

Some of us, when we think of family, think of more ordinary things, like clusters of dog hair on clothes and hot dogs with everything smushed in the glove compartment and peanut butter on the television screen and aging grease on the hood over the stove. Whatever your view of the family and its values might be, Jesus wrecks it all. Jesus' words are like answering the doorbell and getting a bucket of ice water in the face.

Kristin Borsgard Wee, Sermons for Sundays after Pentecost (First Third): Do You Love Me?, CSS Publishing Company, Inc.

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