William H. Willimon - "Homecoming" (April 23, 2000)
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| Woman | It's from the Gospel according to | 0:03 |
| Saint Mark, the sixteenth chapter. | 0:05 | |
| When the Sabbath was over Mary Magdalene | 0:10 | |
| and Mary the mother of James and Salome brought spices, | 0:13 | |
| so that they might go and anoint Him. | 0:18 | |
| And very early on the first day of the week | 0:22 | |
| when the sun had risen they went to the tomb. | 0:26 | |
| They had been saying to one another | 0:31 | |
| who will roll away the stone for us | 0:33 | |
| from the entrance to the tomb. | 0:35 | |
| When they looked up they saw that the stone | 0:39 | |
| which was very large had already been rolled back. | 0:42 | |
| As they entered the tomb they saw a young man | 0:48 | |
| dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side. | 0:52 | |
| And they were alarmed. But he said to them, | 0:56 | |
| "Do not be alarmed. You are looking for | 1:00 | |
| "Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. | 1:04 | |
| "He has been raised. He is not here. | 1:08 | |
| "Look there is the place they laid Him. | 1:13 | |
| "But go, tell His disciples and Peter, | 1:17 | |
| "that He is going ahead of you to Galilee. | 1:21 | |
| "There you will see Him, just as He told you. | 1:25 | |
| "This is the word of the Lord." | 1:30 | |
| Congregation | Thanks be to God. | 1:33 |
| Pastor | I want to speak to those of you who are going | 1:43 |
| through grief like the death of someone you love. | 1:48 | |
| Which by my reckoning includes just about everybody here. | 1:55 | |
| For some, your pain is still acute. | 2:03 | |
| Others found that the ache of your loss gradually receded. | 2:08 | |
| You got up, you went on, but still often when you | 2:15 | |
| least expect grief still grips you. | 2:22 | |
| And again you realize that there are not many | 2:28 | |
| days in this life where there is not loss. | 2:31 | |
| Those whom we love keep leaving. | 2:38 | |
| Keep journeying into that land from | 2:42 | |
| which no traveler ever returns. | 2:46 | |
| Emily Dickinson spoke of that hour | 2:51 | |
| of lead when grief drags down, | 2:54 | |
| despite our determined efforts to rise. | 3:00 | |
| My friend Stuart, for whom I still grieve. | 3:06 | |
| Once showed me a photograph of his parents. | 3:10 | |
| By this time they had been gone at least two decades. | 3:14 | |
| And he said, "And I miss them every day." | 3:18 | |
| Stuart told me of once opening a book | 3:25 | |
| and discovering there a mere grocery list | 3:28 | |
| written in his mothers hand and he said, | 3:32 | |
| "Twenty years later, just seeing that, | 3:36 | |
| I was still utterly undone." | 3:40 | |
| When Virgil shows Dante down to the Land of the Dead | 3:45 | |
| Dante says, he marveled at the magnitude of those departed. | 3:51 | |
| He said, "I had not known that death had undone so many." | 3:58 | |
| When tragedy struck Littleton, a gaggle of grief counselors | 4:06 | |
| descended upon Columbine High, urging grievers to talk | 4:11 | |
| it out, to express the hurt, to weep. | 4:15 | |
| Reassuring the bereaved this was therapeutic. | 4:17 | |
| Really? | 4:23 | |
| After the tears, after the rage, after the complaint. | 4:27 | |
| What do you do with grief? | 4:33 | |
| What, what is there to be said to the grief? | 4:35 | |
| Something more is needed than just expressing the grief. | 4:40 | |
| After the rage, after the trite that well meaning | 4:47 | |
| consolations of friends, after the therapeutic tears. | 4:51 | |
| Great deaths still sits enthroned saying, "I won." | 4:58 | |
| Paul says, "Christians do not grieve as those who | 5:08 | |
| "have no hope. We still grieve, yes, but not with out hope." | 5:13 | |
| And what hope when those who we love keep | 5:22 | |
| slipping from our loving grasp and journeying | 5:26 | |
| into that land from which no traveler ever returned. | 5:30 | |
| Jesus told a story about a father who had two sons. | 5:36 | |
| The youngest son demanded an inheritance | 5:45 | |
| that he may leave home and go out into, | 5:48 | |
| in Jesus' evocative phrase, the far country. | 5:53 | |
| The imputant little wretch as youngest son he had no claim | 5:59 | |
| to anything that his father owned. | 6:03 | |
| But surprise! | 6:07 | |
| The father, Jesus said, divided his entire living, | 6:09 | |
| his whole life, and the boy promptly slipped | 6:14 | |
| out into the far country where he wasted every | 6:19 | |
| cent of his inheritance on booze and bad women. | 6:22 | |
| Eventually, in hunger and want, Jesus says, | 6:28 | |
| the boy came to himself, he said, " I die hear. | 6:34 | |
| "And yet I have a home and I have a father | 6:42 | |
| "who's servants have it better than I. | 6:46 | |
| "I will rise, I will go home." | 6:52 | |
| And when he was a long way off, Jesus said, | 6:57 | |
| the father saw and ran and embraced him. | 7:00 | |
| That father who must have been waiting a long time | 7:07 | |
| for his wastrel son to return, grieving for him. | 7:09 | |
| Now the father cried, "Come celebrate with me, | 7:15 | |
| my son who was dead is alive!" | 7:20 | |
| You've probably heard this story before, | 7:27 | |
| you know that when the stuff-shirted high SAT scoring | 7:29 | |
| older brother refused to come in and party with | 7:31 | |
| his prodigal, the jubilant father replied, | 7:35 | |
| "Your brother who was dead is a live." | 7:42 | |
| You wonder how long the father had been waiting | 7:48 | |
| for the dead son to rise and come home. | 7:50 | |
| You wonder how the father waited. | 7:55 | |
| For all he knew his son was dead. | 7:59 | |
| You can just hear helpful friends saying, | 8:04 | |
| "Well you've got to face facts. | 8:10 | |
| "You've got to get up, you've got to go on. | 8:12 | |
| "You need to focus on your older boy | 8:16 | |
| "who is still here with you." | 8:18 | |
| And yet Jesus said, still the father waited. | 8:20 | |
| I can tell you that being a Pastor around here, | 8:26 | |
| there is just about no worse duty than telling | 8:31 | |
| a parent about the loss of a child. | 8:36 | |
| When their student, son, or daughter has died. | 8:40 | |
| I expect that the prodigal son was | 8:44 | |
| about the age of Duke sophomores. | 8:47 | |
| Such grief the father must have felt. | 8:51 | |
| The son was still alive in the far country, | 8:55 | |
| but the father didn't know that, | 8:58 | |
| and still the father waited and he looked down | 9:00 | |
| that road in front of the house, | 9:04 | |
| still straining to see, hoping for sight of his son. | 9:06 | |
| Now we call this story, The Story of the Prodigal Son, | 9:13 | |
| but Jesus doesn't call it anything. | 9:17 | |
| We might just as well call it, | 9:22 | |
| The Story of the Prodigal Father, that is the | 9:23 | |
| prodigal that is reckless, extravagant father. | 9:27 | |
| And he is, when the boy left home the father | 9:33 | |
| extravagantly gave him his entire living. | 9:36 | |
| And when his lost son finally returned | 9:40 | |
| the father even more recklessly gave him a party. | 9:43 | |
| He loved his son extravagantly upon leaving | 9:50 | |
| and loved him even more prodigally upon return. | 9:53 | |
| I think it's a parable about the love of God | 10:01 | |
| that reckless, effusive, extravagant love. | 10:06 | |
| It is told by the Savior, who when the wine ran low at the | 10:11 | |
| wedding at Cana made a 150 gallons more. | 10:18 | |
| I'm a Methodist, I don't know, but still | 10:23 | |
| that's got to be a lot of wine. | 10:24 | |
| When the bread and the fish gave out in the wilderness, | 10:28 | |
| Jesus said, "Look the baskets are full, | 10:33 | |
| "it's got to be enough to serve at least five thousand." | 10:35 | |
| You will note that love tends toward | 10:40 | |
| prodigality, abundance, excess. | 10:42 | |
| I respect grief, that's excessive, | 10:49 | |
| at prodigal screaming and flailing grievers. | 10:55 | |
| Those grievers do just seem to get over, | 10:59 | |
| get through grief the fastest. | 11:03 | |
| When Jesus heard that his friend Lazarus had died, | 11:08 | |
| Jesus wept bitterly and the crowd seeing | 11:11 | |
| Jesus weep said, "See how he loved him." | 11:14 | |
| Great grief accompanies great loss. | 11:22 | |
| That poor uptight, do right older brother | 11:28 | |
| in Jesus' story was such a miser, | 11:31 | |
| when he got word of this awesome party going on at the | 11:34 | |
| big house to welcome his wayward little brother home, | 11:37 | |
| "A party and on a Sunday!" | 11:41 | |
| In our worst moments we've got | 11:46 | |
| this kind of miserly view of life. | 11:48 | |
| Life is measured, it is finite, it is terminal, | 11:51 | |
| three score and ten says the Bible. | 11:54 | |
| Life begins with such potential and then it waste. | 11:58 | |
| Waste away to nearly nothing just a few faded memories, | 12:02 | |
| a photograph or two and then the hour of lead. | 12:07 | |
| The journey into the far country from | 12:14 | |
| whence no traveler ever returns. | 12:18 | |
| And friends tell us to face facts, admit defeat, | 12:24 | |
| let go, stiff upper lip, life goes on. | 12:26 | |
| What they mean is grief goes on. | 12:32 | |
| But, but what if the story that Jesus told is true? | 12:37 | |
| What if God is a prodigal? | 12:44 | |
| A father who when it comes to life holds nothing back. | 12:48 | |
| Well what then? | 12:52 | |
| The father loved the absent son abundantly, | 12:54 | |
| when he was away as when he was back home. | 12:57 | |
| The father waited in confident expectation | 13:00 | |
| that the good-as-dead son would return, would be home, | 13:03 | |
| and then the party could begin. | 13:08 | |
| With my son who was dead is alive. | 13:11 | |
| This is talk of resurrection. It's time to put | 13:20 | |
| our grief in context, we grieve yes. | 13:24 | |
| And our grief is testimonial to what | 13:29 | |
| a good gift life is that God has given. | 13:32 | |
| There is grief because death is real. | 13:36 | |
| And yet our grief is framed by the conviction | 13:41 | |
| that the same God who so recklessly, | 13:47 | |
| extravagantly over flowed in giving life shall | 13:50 | |
| continue to give life even in death. | 13:55 | |
| The father waits, confident that the far | 13:59 | |
| country of death shall not have the last word. | 14:05 | |
| The father waits ready to give life | 14:08 | |
| abundantly more than we deserve life. | 14:11 | |
| Not because of who we are but because it is | 14:15 | |
| the nature of this God to love extravagantly. | 14:19 | |
| Listen to the story, those whom we have loved and died. | 14:26 | |
| And have left us, have left us to come home. | 14:32 | |
| The God who gave them now embraces them in eternity. | 14:39 | |
| And they await us to join the party. | 14:44 | |
| Grief is not the last word, the last word is home. | 14:49 | |
| And then we find what we thought was home | 14:57 | |
| namely here wasn't home, this was only a weigh station. | 15:01 | |
| And what we thought was the end, namely death, | 15:08 | |
| was in Christ the beginning. | 15:12 | |
| And what we thought was unredeemable loss, | 15:16 | |
| death, is in Christ homecoming. | 15:19 | |
| Would you note that The Story of | 15:26 | |
| the Prodigal Son has no ending. | 15:29 | |
| We wonder, did the older brother ever let go | 15:33 | |
| of his sniveling logic, relax, relent, join the party. | 15:37 | |
| We wonder if the younger son ever learned from his mistakes | 15:43 | |
| and got more mature and responsible. | 15:47 | |
| We don't know, Jesus doesn't let us peak inside the party. | 15:50 | |
| All we know is that both boys are finally safe at home. | 15:57 | |
| All we know is that the father has at last got himself | 16:02 | |
| what he always wanted, a family at home. | 16:06 | |
| Maybe the story doesn't end because it's eternal? | 16:12 | |
| We know when the party began but | 16:16 | |
| for all we know it never ends. | 16:18 | |
| The end is depicted by Jesus as an eternal party. | 16:23 | |
| For those sons and daughters who once were dead | 16:28 | |
| but now alive, lost but now found. | 16:32 | |
| The ones we love and whom death seems so cruelly to have | 16:37 | |
| snatched are not lost but found, not dead but alive. | 16:40 | |
| In a God who shall not let miserly | 16:47 | |
| death defeat divine extravagance. | 16:50 | |
| What we experience is the pain of giving them up to that | 16:53 | |
| dark country is through the eyes of faith homecoming. | 16:57 | |
| Look at all that God has gone through for us | 17:04 | |
| down through the ages, to find us and embrace us. | 17:08 | |
| Shall death defeat the purposes of such an extravagant God? | 17:14 | |
| In the darkness of grief, women came to the | 17:22 | |
| tomb for the dead body of Jesus. | 17:25 | |
| Hear the words spoken, "Do not be alarmed. | 17:31 | |
| You're looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was | 17:34 | |
| crucified, well he's not here. | 17:36 | |
| He's raised, he's going on ahead of you." | 17:39 | |
| Going on ahead of you...where? | 17:42 | |
| Towards the end of John's Gospel Jesus told his disciples | 17:48 | |
| he was leaving them and they were sad. | 17:53 | |
| And then Jesus said, "I'm going to prepare a place for you | 17:56 | |
| "that one day you may come too." | 18:02 | |
| Our hope in life, in death is that the same God who | 18:07 | |
| raised Jesus may condescend to raise us as well. | 18:13 | |
| Beginning the week after my mother died | 18:21 | |
| I had this recurring dream and in my dream, I was back home. | 18:26 | |
| It was a home designed and built by my mother | 18:32 | |
| whose every inch she cherished, whose every corner spoke | 18:37 | |
| to her of creativity and her love of beauty. | 18:41 | |
| I remember being pleased that I was dreaming of home. | 18:46 | |
| Because I expected she would be there. | 18:52 | |
| And I would move from room to room in my dream | 18:55 | |
| and I would be surprised to see every detail, every book on | 18:58 | |
| the shelf just as I remembered it from childhood. | 19:02 | |
| But then I would wake up and I would realize | 19:07 | |
| that my mother had never appeared in the dream. | 19:10 | |
| Night after night, this dream. | 19:14 | |
| I kept thinking she would eventually reappear | 19:16 | |
| in this place that she loved but she never did. | 19:20 | |
| Finally, it dawned on me, it wasn't a dream about my | 19:26 | |
| being back home again, it was a dream about her being home. | 19:32 | |
| Not at our home but at God's. | 19:40 | |
| She was now safe, embraced, at home with the God | 19:46 | |
| who had loved her in life now forever. | 19:52 | |
| She was at home in a place prepared for her. | 19:57 | |
| It wasn't a dream about my misty long forgotten past, | 20:04 | |
| it was a dream about a still unfolding, | 20:11 | |
| unconstrained, extravagant future. | 20:14 | |
| From this far country of grief and death. | 20:19 | |
| She was home and by God's grace so shall we. | 20:25 | |
| Christ is not here, he is gone on | 20:33 | |
| to prepare a place for us, | 20:39 | |
| home. | 20:43 |
