If we had only the stories of The Prodigal Son and The Good Samaritan we might have enough to understand the love of God and the love of neighbor. These are parables Jesus told to reveal who we are and what God is. We are neighbors, and God is love.

The set-up for The Prodigal Son story is important, the first three verses of Chapter 15. “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ So, he told them this parable.” That is his audience, eager sinners on the one hand and grumbling Pharisees on the other. He invites them, and now us, to find ourselves in the story.

And, it is a story that we know well. The younger son cashes in his inheritance and heads off to a foreign land where he squanders it all on riotous living, sinking so low as to slop pigs, a horrific predicament for a Jewish man. The text says that “he came to himself,” the little light bulb goes on in his mind, and he sees his degradation. He resolves to return home and confess to his father, and then to go to work with the hired servants of the farm. However, when he gets back, his father greets him with open arms and throws a welcome home feast.

But, the story does not end there. Jesus goes on to tell about the older son boycotting the party because his feelings are hurt. “I was the good kid who stayed home and did what you told me to do, but you never threw a party for me.” We know the humanity of this story. We have been there – perhaps as both the younger son and the older one. It is a classic tale.

But there is more going on here than settles onto our 21st Century North American ears. If we put ourselves into the audience that first heard this parable in ancient Palestine, known as a “shame culture,” we would be shocked from the very start. When the younger son asks for his inheritance it is, in effect, the murder of his father. “I am not going to wait until you die to get my portion; I consider you dead so that I can have mine now.”

And the older brother is a co-conspirator in this. The two sons may not have talked about this ahead of time, but it was the expected role of the older brother to be the reconciler, to talk some sense into his younger brother, to make peace between the younger one and their father. But, he does not act. Instead, he asks for his inheritance, too. Jesus says that the father divided it between them. They both get their portion, and the father has nothing left. Both sons figuratively kill the father, breaking their relationship with him and dishonoring him in the eyes of everyone living in the village. They publicly shame him.

The younger son wastes it all far away from home; the older son stays at home and sulks. They both are dead to the father, and he to them. And then, one day the younger son appears on the horizon, and what happens? The father runs to him and embraces him. The father must have been watching, day and night watching. And so must have the other residents of the village, keeping an eye out for this wastrel. When the father runs to the son he is bringing shame upon himself, hiking up his robe and dashing across the field, but he also is protecting his son from the townsfolk. Imagine this, the neighbors, having seen the son’s brutal disregard for his father, coming out to the road and lining both sides, ready to pounce upon the young man upon his return. They would have punished him with a kind of tar-and-feathering process if the father had not intervened on his behalf. The father makes himself vulnerable in order to save his son.

And then, the banquet – everyone is invited in order to celebrate the reconciliation of the father and son, but one stays outside the dining room, the older son. It is he, now, who publicly disgraces his father by not attending. He is no better than his younger brother. And the father? He does the same thing for his older son. He leaves the banquet with the same disregard for his neighbor’s opinion, and comes out to the older son as he earlier had run out to the younger son. The father is willing to embarrass himself, shame himself, in order to accept the son, in order to bring reconciliation to the family.

The older son says, and here we can imagine Jesus quoting the Pharisees in his audience word-for-word, “I have been the good and faithful one and have done everything right. But you make a big fuss over this sinner, and I don’t want any part of it.” The father pleads, “Come in. This is a celebration of new life, his and yours . . . and mine.” New life, life after death for these three, new life through reconciliation, new life as a family of acceptance. Will the older son join the party? We do not know.

May the sinner and Pharisee within us have ears to hear.

God’s love, God’s shameless love, has the power to create a family of acceptance. That is what the Church is supposed to be. At least, that is what our Methodist movement points to as our ideal. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement within the Anglican Church, was not trying to start a new church, a break-away church from the establishment. Instead, he wanted God to breathe new life into the existing community of faith. He saw it as dull, hidebound, and exclusive. Everyone, by definition, was a member of the Church of England, but he saw that most people were left out of the church family because they were not wealthy enough to buy a pew, not powerful enough to have a voice, not educated enough to be taken seriously. So, he started a movement within the church that he hoped would be a spiritual and sacramental renewal of the church.

What he did that turned out to be a stroke of genius was that he organized the Methodists, all of them members of the Church of England, into small groups that met not on Sunday mornings but during the week. He called them “classes” of about twelve people, each one overseen by a class leader. The idea was that they would meet as a family of acceptance and talk about things that really mattered, what Wesley called “holy conferencing,” and to collect a penny a week from each person to give to the poor.

Class meetings, where Methodists found acceptance but also were held accountable. Wesley wanted to know from the class leaders who had been publicly intoxicated during the week, who was caught pilfering a couple of potatoes from the green grocer’s stall in the market, what parent was abusing a child. If we are to grow in faith then we have to help each other, and part of that helping is holding each other to a standard of expectations. The older brother of the parable was to hold his younger brother accountable, but he did not, and so the story goes.

Holy conferencing, the Wesleyan class meetings, where the normative question was, “How is it with your soul?” Not, “How are you doing?” “Fine, what about you?” “Can’t complain.” Not, “Did you see the game on Saturday? What a finish!” Not “What are you going to do with the kids over Spring Break?” That is not “holy conferencing.”  But, “How is it with your soul?”

At the very beginning of my ministry I was assigned to serve two small Methodist congregations in Wolverhampton, England. It was a formative time for me as a minister and for Sally and me as a couple. The first thing I was handed when I arrived was a list of all 140 members divided into classes, each with a leader. Ray Baker oversaw these twelve, Bill and Mary Blocksidge were responsible for these members in their neighborhood, and so it was organized. No longer did they hold weekly meetings, but with a phone call or a quick “nip around” to see someone, the leaders kept track of the members, and they kept me informed. And then, each three months I filled out and signed 140 “class tickets” indicating that each person was a member in good standing, and the class leaders personally distributed them. People knew that they were part of a family of acceptance that also was holding them accountable.

That would be hard to do here at the Chicago Temple. We have members spread over 900 square miles of the Chicago metropolitan area. Many of us live alone or at least attend church alone, and we are unlikely to run into each other at the supermarket or the public park. We have no “grapevine.”

Now, some of us moved to the big city to get away from the “grapevine.” In the farming community where I served as the minister of the local United Methodist church, I walked to the post office one morning to get our mail (there was no delivery; each household had a box in the lobby), and I ran into Velma Gill. “How are you feeling, preacher?” she asked. “Well, fine, Velma, but why do you ask?” I saw your bathroom light on about 3:00 this morning and thought maybe you were sick.” That is a grapevine; that is why many of us live in the city.

But the church, even the church in the heart of the city, has to be more than a place to go once a week to worship God. It somehow has to approximate an extended family, a family of acceptance, but also a family to which we feel some allegiance, where we will be missed if we do not show up, where someone has expectations of us as people of faith.

That is why Katherine Raley’s call for people in the Hyde Park neighborhood to get together one Sunday afternoon last month was so important. We need to organize ourselves by neighborhoods and outlying areas so at least we know who from our places of residence are members or regular attendees at the Temple. Partly, that is a simple matter of organizing information. More importantly, it requires someone willing to take the lead to connect people, maybe even to gather them together. The Hyde Park folks, as Katherine reported, did not know each other, even though they sit in the same sanctuary on Sunday morning. By the time their afternoon had ended, they were talking about things that mattered deeply to them and talked about another meeting at which they would talk about some matters of faith. That is “holy conferencing.”

An additional way that we need to organize is around common interests. Next Sunday we plan to have an “Affinity Fair,” a time for people who like to cook to find each other, and those who attend the Lyric Opera, and the runners, and the science and religion readers, the theatergoers, the weavers and quilters, the poets – we can be a family of acceptance which gathers around common interests and common causes, as well as geography.

“Holy conferencing,” – meeting to consider things that matter. There are a lot of ways to do it, and we are held accountable by our Wesleyan tradition to do all that we can to develop a family of acceptance. But also, we have heard the story of the two estranged brothers and the shameless father. Love overcomes separation. That must be not only what we say but also what we do. Amen.