God is no captious sophister eager to trip us up whenever we say amiss, but a courteous tutor ready to amend what, in our weakness or our ignorance, we say ill, and to make the most of what we say aright.

— Richard Hooker, Anglican priest, March 1554 – 3 November 1600

It was a hot summer day twelve years ago. We were in Central Park at the Conservatory Water. My six-year-old daughter Gillian was sitting on my shoulders. Standing next to us was a mother whose son was piloting a remote-controlled sailboat. The mother looked up at Gillian and said, “My, aren’t you tall!” A diffident Gillian leaned over and as if she were telling a secret whispered to her, “This isn’t all me.”

Of the prophets Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the one easiest to identify is Jeremiah. If you’re thinking of going to Rome, let me tell you where this Jeremiah is. Were our ceiling at Saint Francis like that of the Sistine Chapel, the weeping prophet would be up here directly above the pulpit. It is a potent psychological portrait of weakness, weariness and despair. His sitting posture, his crossed legs, his downcast eyes, his right hand covering his mouth, Jeremiah is a picture of anguish and inner suffering. Michelangelo uses every angle to convey his pain. Everything in the scene points down; his head, the fingers of his left hand. His right hand covers his mouth as if he’s weary of his own complaints, a prophet who has nothing more to say.

The book of Jeremiah is about the crisis of the last days of Judah, a crisis culminating with the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 587 BC. We read about it in the last chapter of Jeremiah (52: 12 – 14): “Now in the fifth month, on the tenth day of the month — that was the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon — Nebuzaradan the captain of the bodyguard who served the king of Babylon, entered Jerusalem. And he burned the house of the LORD, and the king’s house; and all the houses of Jerusalem; every great house he burned down. And all the army of the Chaldeans, who were with the captain of the guard, broke down all the walls around Jerusalem.”

Jeremiah was the son of a priest named Hilkiah. He was raised about three miles northeast of Jerusalem in Anata, a town halfway from Jerusalem to Jericho. He spent much of his life denouncing things which is why denunciations are called jeremiads. Recreational sex. The rich for exploiting the poor. The poor for having it coming to them. His own people for batting her eyelashes and winking at every new god who came riding in someone’s saddlebags into town. He stood at the gate of the Temple and told people as they walked in that if they believed God was touched by the highjinks that went on in there they should have their heads examined. When some took to indulging in a little human sacrifice on the side, Jeremiah showed up with a clay pot which he smashed to smithereens to show them what God was going to do to them when the time came.

At the beginning of the book we hear the voice of the Lord say to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” It sounds like a nice appointment but it isn’t long before the work of being God’s mouth, of trying to reform Judah, makes Jeremiah more pitiable and exasperated than any curate in the novels of Anthony Trollope, so that by the fifteenth chapter Jeremiah laments not just the work but the One who saddled him with it. Taking his complaint directly to God he asks him, “Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Will you be to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail?” To this last question there isn’t any doubt that Jeremiah thinks the answer is Yes. A little later he says, “Cursed be the day I was born. Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, ‘A son is born to you,’ making him glad. Let that man be like the cities that the Lord overthrew without pity. Why did I come out from the womb to see toil and sorrow and spend my days in shame?”

To understand his anguish, you have to remember that in the Jerusalem of Jeremiah the heart of the city was the Temple, and the heart of the Temple was the kapporeth or mercy seat — the empty space above the Ark of the Covenant between the two golden cherubim. It was the most potent sign of Israel’s repudiation of idols, the great speaking absence between the images. What the people of Israel lost above all when Jerusalem fell was the empty space between the cherubim, the place that was the center of their life as the covenant people, the space behind the curtained holy place where God is, the place where all the mercy comes from, what the psalmist refers to as “help from the sanctuary” and the “answer from heaven”.

The crisis that the burning of the Temple presented for Jeremiah was about the destruction of that empty space between the cherubim. If that seems strange to you just think of the crisis of having someone you cherish taken away. If you’ve lost someone you love you know a bit of what it is to live as Jeremiah had to, in exile. You have to live every day with what’s missing. When Jeremiah and the people of Israel lost the empty space between the cherubim, the place where all the mercy comes from, they lost everything. God himself was in the empty space, and the empty space was gone.

Today’s Gospel story takes place six miles up the road from Jeremiah’s hometown and six centuries after the destruction of the Temple. The silence between the cherubim, the silence from that empty space where God speaks becomes a God who has stepped into the world, becomes for a little while a physical hand outstretched as it were to Bartimaeus. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” he says. It’s the first time Jesus is called the Son of David in Mark’s gospel. Jesus stood still, and Bartimaeus came to him. “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus said, “Let me see again.” Jesus said, “Go; your faith has made you well.” He could see again but Bartimaeus didn’t go. Instead he followed Jesus.

The way Mark tells the story, here’s the next thing he writes: “Now when they drew near to Jerusalem, Jesus sent two of his disciples and said to them, “Go into the village of Bethany and you will find a colt tied….” And riding that colt Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the Temple.

I picture Bartimaeus watching Jesus ride into Jerusalem where he’s brought to trial, following Jesus as he is led by the Praetorian guard outside the walls of Jerusalem to Golgotha, named for the skull of Goliath whom David defeated to win victory on behalf of all the people of God. It was at Golgotha that they crucified him. According to Mark, Jesus’ last words were, “’My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ … And with a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.”

There is that silence again, the silence between the cherubim from which God spoke becomes the silence culminating in the death of the Beloved Son; the silence where God has nothing more to say.

You and I live between the Old Jerusalem and the New. Jesus is our altar and our sanctuary, our kapporeth or mercy seat. He’s the One I trust, the One you trust. He knows what it is to experience God’s absence, the empty space, the empty space being gone. And when he breathed his last the curtain of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. Why? Because the God of Jeremiah, the God of the Temple, the God of that empty space between the golden cherubim had come out from behind the curtain to hang between two thieves.

Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob,
and raise shouts for the chief of the nations;
proclaim, give praise, and say,
“Save, O LORD, your people,
the remnant of Israel.”
See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north,
and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth,
among them the blind and the lame, those with child and
those in labor, together;
a great company, they shall return here.
With weeping they shall come,
and with consolations I will lead them back,
I will let them walk by brooks of water,
in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.

— Jeremiah 31: 7 – 9

When King David brought the ark of God up to the shrine he had prepared for it in Jerusalem, we read that the procession was enlivened with songs and dancing. I want to speak to you about David and how to the horror of his young wife and in a blare of strange, wild music the ancient king got the rhythm of God under his skin and danced away himself with all his might and became what he became.

I want to set David dancing before you now, and in your mind’s eye I want you to try to see him dancing way off through the dimness of three thousand years. The music he’s dancing to, if we could hear it, would be an offense to our ears I suppose — the harps and castanets, the tambourines and cymbals — but we can’t hear it, of course. We can only see that he hears it, or hears something through it, beyond it, because it is plain even at the distance of thirty centuries that more than just his body is caught up in more than just the music, his whole being is caught up and he abandons himself to the dancing. That is why his wife, who is the daughter of a king as well as the wife of a king, is so horrified, because the king her husband has forgotten himself. He has forgotten himself and his kingly dignity, and to make matters worse he has done it in the presence of the servants. That is why the queen, who in no sense forgets herself, despises him in her heart.

She wants him to be a king not so much for his sake as for her own sake, so she can be a queen. But instead he becomes a dancer, and his body glistens with the fury and the joy of it, and his bare feet beat the wild rhythms of it into the earth in front of the Holy Ark where Yahweh the King of Glory dwells. David is not interested in being what Michal wants him to be, and when she berates him afterwards he answers her out of the fury that is still upon him with, “I will make myself more contemptible than this and I will be abased in your eyes.” David isn’t primarily interested in the music the musicians are playing. What really interests him, what he is really dancing to, comes out when he says, “I will make merry before the Lord.”

He is not dancing simply to the music that comes from without. He is dancing to the music of his wild gladness that wells up from within him in the presence of the ark. He is dancing his religion. He forgets himself, forgets to be a king, forgets to live up to the image that his wife has of him or his servants have of him. But in forgetting himself, he happens also to become himself.

I don’t know what it’s like to be inside your skin, but I am the world’s leading authority on what it’s like to be inside my skin, so let me generalize from my experience and if it doesn’t match yours there’s no great harm done.

I think that for people like us, it can be hard to forget ourselves and to be ourselves at a dance. And of course it’s especially hard to be yourself if you’re not quite sure who you are. This explains why you and I were uncomfortable at the middle school dances and at the prom. A young person, and to some extent, every person, is a person who is still looking for a self to be. When you are looking for a self to be, the temptation is always very great to be a self that you think other people are going to like.

David had his Queen Michal with her own ideas of what a king should be and at a dance you have someone like her too, the partner you’re dancing with and the friends who are there dancing, and they all have their ideas of the kind of person you should be. So very often that’s the person you try to be. You put on the face you think they will find admissible and dance their way not only because you want their approval and want to be popular with them but because in a real way you need their approval as something to give you security in a world where God knows there is much cause to be insecure, just as they need your approval and are wearing a face to please you.

When I say you I mean me too because to some degree for all of us life is a masked ball. To some degree for all of us life consists of trying on many masks until at last, by God’s grace, we find the one that fits who we really are and it becomes our face so that the whole process turns out to have been a process of self-discovery. But unfortunately it can also be a process of self-concealment and self-deceit and eventual self-loss whereby in our efforts to endear ourselves to each other we wear masks so foreign to our natures that when we meet, we meet not on the basis of who we are but instead we meet solely on the basis of who we want others to think that we are. And when that is true we don’t really meet each other at all.

The sound of a dance, the sound of our society in general, is often the sound not of human beings meeting other human beings, but the sound of masks clattering up against masks. And this is so because just as we were afraid at dances when we were young, we’re afraid still. You’re afraid to open yourself to another’s knowing for fear that in knowing you the other will reject you. You don’t speak your mind truly for fear that you’ll sound like a fool, and beneath that fear is the darker fear that maybe you are a fool. You’re afraid the world will dish out more to you than you are able to take. You’re afraid that someone very important will ask more of you than you feel you have in you to give.

Not all of the truth, thank God, and not all of the time, but part of the truth at least part of the time is that we are afraid of each other, you and I, and afraid of our lives. A sadder truth still is that the way this world works, part of the time our fears are not unwarranted. So it is that the dance we end up going to with our lives is not really a dance after all, but a masquerade.

But Christ calls us to the Dance, as the poet T. S. Eliot called it. At the still point of the turning world / There the Dance is / And there is only the Dance. It is why Saint John’s has been here for 126 years, and why you are here this morning. You believe it. Some Christians do not associate Christ with dancing, but the primitive Christians, Christians of the earliest Christian centuries, in the clumsy art of the catacombs, depicted Christ as Orpheus, the fabulous musician of Greek mythology whose rhythm none could resist, who danced the fawns out of the forest and the fir trees down from the hills. And they had warrant for it, after all, for what else did Jesus say of himself? Speaking of the unresponsiveness of the Jews to his mission, and to that of John the Baptist before him, “You are like children,” he said, “sitting in the street complaining to one another: we have piped to you and you have not danced, we have mourned and you have not lamented.” Mourned, that was John calling to repentance. Piped, that was Jesus dancing them into the kingdom of God with the music of everlasting joy.

A little over a year ago at the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles, there was great merriment and dancing for the wedding reception of Evan and Kristin Ellsworth. What is it that released us — that set us off? Music played by The Cowling Band, one of the best bands in the City of Angels. That is what released us: songs to dance to. But what was it that controlled us? The same thing: we danced to the music. The control is the release. The music held us. The music let us go.

This is why the lyres and cymbals that David dances to in our text and writes about in the Psalms are illuminating parables of true religion. For the whole mystery of Christian faith comes down to a phrase of one of the great collects in the Book of Common Prayer: “whose service is perfect freedom.” God our control and God our release. Listen to what John Milton says of his Lycidas in heaven: “There entertain him all the saints above / in solemn troops and sweet societies / that sing, and singing in their glory move / and wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.”

Let me end where I began, with the young King David dancing. For as long at least as the moment lasted he was not afraid to be himself no matter what the queen might think or the servants or all Israel. The reason he wasn’t afraid to be himself was that he was dancing in the presence of the Most High by whom he found himself not rejected but accepted, not threatened but blessed. David wasn’t afraid to be himself because he found himself in the presence of the King of Glory with whom he felt not fear finally but a gladness and oneness that rose up in him like music. He wasn’t afraid of life because the source of life itself had gotten under his skin, calling forth his true self in all its nakedness, setting it free to be made whole and real.

When you come right down to it, what I stand here in the name of the King of Glory to do is to invite you to join this strange dance, to invite you to listen to the music that Jesus of Nazareth heard who in this sense was indeed the Son of David. In the rhythm and pattern of Jesus’ life you can see what human life was made to be, a life where we meet one another not as strangers of whom we are afraid, but as friends in whom we delight. A life where we meet God not as an unappeasable tyrant but as the leader of the Dance, the Lord in whose service is the freedom to become fully human and fully alive. Amen.

When you’re a priest and you say the word ‘stewardship’ people start edging toward the door. Like a family story told too often, it can elicit groans. Soon after I came to Saint Francis, I remember being at a stewardship committee meeting where themes were considered for the upcoming campaign. I cheekily proposed this one: Either life is holy with meaning or life doesn’t mean a damn thing. You pay your money and you take your choice.

Blank stares and furtive glances. I kept a straight face until a committee member said it seemed a little wordy. We ended up that year with Charting Our Future Together in Christ. This lacked punch, I said, but Carol Tutera and Brenda Bell assured me with a knowing wink that it meant the same thing.

Stewardship asks where we are going and how we plan to get there if we get there at all, and what we are going to find if we finally do. Vestries are responsible for that planning, and the only reason for asking yourself what your role — and your checkbook’s role — will be in the life and mission of Saint Francis is that you want to be part of where we’re going and how we plan to get there. Period.

We pay our money every day, to one thing or another. By the way we use what we earn and what we’re given, we show what really matters to us. If you’re a member of my parish then four or five months from now in your mail you’ll receive an envelope from Saint Francis with a pledge card in it. Hmm. You’ll ask: What to do with this? What numbers to scratch there? How much of what I work so blessedly hard for should I give gladly away? If you believe in what we say and do at Saint Francis — if you believe that God is busy in your life here — then when the pledge card comes do this: say your prayers, take your pen, and surprise yourself.

The struggle we have with money is really with Jesus himself. And the truth about Jesus is that if indeed he is everybody’s friend the way the old Jesus hymns proclaim, he is at the same time everybody’s worst enemy. He is the enemy at least of everything in us that keeps us from giving him what he is really after. And what he is really after is our heart’s blood, our treasure, our selves.

On the twenty-third of June, 1993, Victoria, Evan, Gabriel, Gillian and I took a train from Seekonk, Massachusetts to Boston to visit the New England Aquarium. I remember the sea lions as we call them (it would be interesting to know what they call us) racing around in their tank, leaping through hoops, balancing beach balls on their whiskered snouts and delighting us all.

On the train ride home that night, Gabriel and Evan were sitting in front of us on opposite sides of the aisle. At one stop, I looked up and noticed Gabriel patting people on the arm as they passed by him. Victoria saw it, too. She leaned forward and said to him, “Gabriel. What are you doing?” “I’m petting them, Mom,” he said. “What?” she said. You shouldn’t do that, Gabriel.” “I’m only petting them, Mom.”

At the next stop, I overheard Evan encourage Gabriel to pet a steward whom Gabe must have mistaken for the conductor. Gabriel said, “No.” “Why not?” Evan asked. “Because I don’t pet abductors [sic].”

There’s a steward in this story but that’s not why I tell it. I tell it because I ask myself: Why would a boy barely four pat on the arm people he did not know from Adam? And why do I love him for doing it? It was a crazy thing to do. It was a risky thing to do. It ran counter to all standards of New England practicality and prudence. It was debonair. He did it because he saw the people on that train not as strangers but as compagnons de voyage. It was not a level-headed, play-your-cards-close-to-the-vest thing to do, just as giving away your hard-earned cash is not level-headed, not playing your cards close to the vest. But to live this way is to make visible who we are and where we are going together, you and I. It is to see the world lit up as if by lightning on a dark night.

A woman I know described to me once an experience she had in the process of giving birth to her first child. It was not too difficult a birth as births go, but at the point where the labor became most painful and difficult the doctor gave her an anesthetic to help her through the actual delivery itself, and in the few minutes that she was unconscious she had a kind of dream or vision that haunted her for months afterwards. She didn’t see anything in her dream, and that was part of the strangeness, just the darkness with nothing to get her bearings by, but she said that she heard a voice which in a very even-toned and relentless way kept telling her the same thing over and over again, and what the voice told her was to push and to keep on pushing harder and harder even though, the anesthetic notwithstanding, the pain was considerable and she believed that the pain and the pushing were going to kill her, the straining of her whole body, but she also believed that she was going to have to die in order for the child to be born.

And then the dream opened up or deepened into a kind of dream within a dream, and this was the dimension of it that haunted her for so long afterward. Because within that inner dream she came to believe that it was not just that she was going to have to push the baby out of her womb and die herself, not just that the birth of this one new life was going to cost her her own death, but that this was the way the universe itself had been born. The vision she had was of God laboring in cosmic agony in order to give the world life, and therefore the darkness of her dream was the unfathomable darkness of a world where God had long since ceased to exist.

The child was born and lived and the woman didn’t actually die in the process, but the vision she had under anesthesia is a vision which many people have had before her, to the point where forty years ago a theology became known by its name. This dream of life coming out of death, particularly this dream of life itself coming out of the death of God, like all the great recurring dreams of humankind, seems in some way to be the bearer of a truth, and it must be taken seriously and must be allowed to haunt us as it did this woman. She did not physically die that day; but there are more ways than one of dying, and there’s much that can die quite apart from the flesh.

The phrase ‘self-centered’ has come to have an unpleasant meaning in our day, and we use it to describe people who are self-contained the way someone is contained in their own house when the door is locked and the phone is off the hook — safe from the demands and intrusions of other people yet also in a way cut off like a prisoner from the companionship of other people. But in another sense, the phrase ‘self-centered’ describes us all, not so much that we’re selfish in these ways but simply that we make ourselves the center of our own lives.

We look at the world with our own two eyes from the place where we ourselves are standing, which is right in the center, and we see the good things and the bad things of the world, out there on the circumference, primarily in terms of the way they affect us. We may deeply sympathize with other people when bad things happen to them, but very often the bad things that happen that are entirely real to us are the things that happen to us. We may be glad when good things happen to other people, but very often the good things that really make the heart sing are the good things that happen to us. All of this gives us as selves a kind of partial invulnerability.

For instance, the 230 thousand people killed in the Indonesian tsunami or the discovery of a cure for a terrible disease, even the horrors and the marvels that happen to people known to us, may move us very deeply for a while but they don’t really hit us where we live for the reason precisely that where we live is not out there on the circumference where such things happen, but right here on dead center, so that the only way life can really get at us is by scoring a bullseye.

To that extent the self-centered person is invulnerable, and with invulnerability comes a measure of independence because you can move around through the world not very much or for very long weighed down by anybody’s problems but your own. And make no mistake, there’s much to be said for such a life and you don’t give it up easily, and you do well to think twice before you do, and there are many worse selves that a person can be than self-centered in this way. However. When the woman bore her child that was just the part of her self that died as surely as her body might have. I mean that quite literally. The person she had been before simply and quite literally ceased to exist.

It’s not sentimental claptrap to say that when you bear a child as this woman did, or when as a man you become the father of a child, you just cannot be the center of your own life in the same old way any longer because now there is your child at the center with you. No longer is it true that the only things that can hit you where you live are the things that happen to you directly because you live also in the child now and whatever hits her for good or ill hits you also, so you’re vulnerable on not just one front any more but on two. And by the same token, it’s not just your own welfare that’s at stake any more as you blunder your way around the world, but it’s also the welfare of this other self, too.

In this sense, then, the woman’s dream was true because her self as the center of her own life did die and not without pain, as she brought her child into the world. From that time onward it became her destiny to die again each time the child moved out into new worlds of its own to risk dangers and defeats which would also be in some way hers.

In Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son we have not a baby coming into the world but a young man going out into the world, not the pain of the mother in her labor but the pain of the old man when his son decided to leave home and strike out on his own. If you consider how the old man rejoiced when his son finally came back, you can imagine something of what it must have cost to let him go in the first place, and how much he would have given to have had him stay. But just as in her dream the woman knew that she would have to die in order to give her baby life, the old man also knew that a part of him would have to die if his son was to have the chance for a life on his own. For the father it was the self-centered self that crucified itself in an act of love and let the boy go. And you might think twice about life on your own just as you might think twice about that word crucified.

The deepest and darkest part of the woman’s dream had to do with God’s dying in the act of creation. This was the part that haunted her for so long afterward. It’s this same idea that haunts the world still in what was called the Death of God theology. It’s a vision with a lot of terror in it and a lot of loneliness in it, and to try to fathom this vision’s meaning if it has any meaning at all is to move out beyond the reach of human thought. But I can’t help wondering if the same idea I’ve been trying to express in terms of the woman herself and Jesus’s tale of the prodigal doesn’t perhaps provide a kind of possible clue.

The ancient Hebrews spoke of God in God’s ineffability or holiness — God as the deus absconditus, the hidden God to look upon whom is to die and before whom even the angels veil their faces, the God who existed before existence itself existed, before the great “Let there be light” was ever spoken and before time and space themselves were brought into being. The Greek philosophers spoke of the Unmoved Mover, perfect and unchanging, whose nature it was to contemplate itself eternally. The Hindus have their idea of Brahman-Atman or the Void or Pure Being which can be described only by the Sanskrit phrase “neti … neti” which means “neither this nor that” — in other words that this Pure Being so far transcends our understanding that nothing we can say of it can be true.

In other words, it would appear that nearly every age and every culture has pointed with its own symbols to something like a God centered in and totally sufficient unto Godself. And then as widespread as that idea is the idea of creation, of the Ultimate Reality however you want to name it, as stirring in something like the labor of childbirth and bringing forth … light, water, earth, human beings, as another reality over against itself. This extraordinary vision of a God who exists beyond all pain and all joy sacrificing perfect invulnerability for the sake of giving life to a world and then leaving that world free even to deny him as the source of its life — a God who leaves the world free to suffer the consequences of its own actions and then suffers with it and for it.

To love another — a child, a friend, a neighbor — is to place your self at the mercy of the other and as a self sufficient unto yourself to die. So it is with God and all the prodigals who are all of us, and whom in love and at unspeakable cost the Most High gave life to, and whom in love and at unspeakable cost the Most High leaves free because though in freedom we can forsake God, only in freedom can we really love Him.

It was G. K. Chesterton who wrote, “There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to say there,” but there are few if any of us in this age of revolt from the past who choose that way. Even if we do, even if like the elder brother we stay at home and play it safe, going about our business at God’s house, it can happen even there of all places that we’re far from God because we don’t notice how smug and self-serving we are, how loveless and cynical. If God is someone we can find anywhere, God is also someone we have learned to lose track of anywhere.

If God is dead in the sense that he has willingly died, if God is far away because he has drawn far away so we can have room to be ourselves — then God is also dead and far away because we have so willed him to be, and the darkness of our world is a darkness we have made for ourselves as in a thousand ways and every day each of us flees God into countries just as far as the one where the prodigal went to try his luck until finally his hunger drove him back home again. God is dead for us because we’ve shaken the dust of him off our feet and have struck out on our own with faith in ourselves.

But even at his worst the prodigal remembers the life he once had — we have God’s breath in our lungs and the memory of God somewhere deep in our bowels, and unless we know God’s presence as a blessing we are doomed to feel God’s absence as a reproach, an emptiness, a hunger. Unless we live with God we are destined to die without him as in so many ways we have died already, a death of the spirit, a death of the heart. In so many ways we have died already that if I thought I could, I’d try to start a Death of Us theology to replace the Death of God one. It is just when the prodigal sees that he’s wasted everything not least himself, that he sees there is only one risk left to take, and that was to take his chances back home. Having squandered his inheritance, he can’t go back as a child but maybe he can get back in business as a hired hand.

This is the part of the story that is as moving as anything in any literature. He’s tried his luck only to find that his luck didn’t hold very long and he stinks of the sty and he’s lost everything, so finally he decides to go back home. And with the pathetic cunning of the panhandler he figures out that the best way to do it is by crawling back on his belly like a worm. So he works out ahead of time a rather mealy-mouthed little speech about how sorry he is for what he’s done and how he’s willing to be treated as one of the hired servants if the father will only take him back again. Only it’s a speech he never gets to make the way he planned to because before he finds a chance to make it the old man sees him coming up the road and rushes out to meet him and throws his arms around him, and to the scandal of all who prefer justice to mercy, speaks the great words, “Bring quickly the best robe and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry for this my son was dead and is alive again.”

The whole truth of it is even more than that, for it isn’t just the son but the father too who comes alive again because he has the son back home. The real truth is not that God is dead but that to turn to God in whatever half-hearted and half-baked way we choose — a confession, a clumsy prayer, one little act of compassion done for Christ’s sake and in his name — is to find what at its richest and most profound life really is, both God’s life and our own. The very source of life chooses to enter into death in order to give us life as we were meant to live it. Jesus’s death calls on us to die to our own self-centeredness that we would live not for ourselves any longer but for him who dies and for those God dies to welcome and give life to, with tears and embracing and gladness and a Feast.

No Spring, nor Summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnal face.

— John Donne, The Autumnal

Autumn is the most poetic of all seasons because it speaks with a double voice. With one voice it says that everything is ripe. With the other it says that everything is dying.

In Peculiar Treasures, Frederick Buechner writes:

“Sermonettes make Christianettes,” the saying goes, so Saint Paul kept talking till midnight to make sure they all got the word. Then he thought of a few things he’d left out and went on a while longer. He was so caught up in his own eloquence that he didn’t hear the bumblebee sounds that were emerging from a young man with his eyes more or less closed and his mouth more or less open who sat slumped over in the third story window. It was only a woman’s scream that alerted him to the fact that the boy had fallen asleep, and out, more or less simultaneously. When Paul asked his name, they told him it was Eutychus.

Everybody thought Eutychus was dead, but Paul said he’d see about that. Then he went back upstairs where, after a snack, he ran over his major points once more just to make sure. When he finally left on the early bus, they found Eutychus sitting up in bed asking for two over light and a toasted English.

This miraculous recovery, plus the fact that by then the saint was already well on his way to the next county, made them decide to throw a double celebration. Presumably somebody had the sense to suggest that this time they use the ground floor.

(Acts 20: 9 – 12)