The Sunday of the Prodigal is always a hard one for me: not because I am a failure, but because I need nearly every day – to “come to myself” as the Son does in the story, and realise that life in my Father’s house is so much better than here, in my own place.

How many times must I repent?

A Christian Bookstore is full of easy answers:

Praying the “sinners prayer” is supposed to make you “once saved, always safe”. Some Christian communities opine that Jesus paid the price once and for all and that once you “come under the precious blood” you’ll be fine for all eternity.

I think they miss the point: making “salvation to be about paying debts for sins imagined or real. They make God out to be angry and duped – angry at us for our petty offenses and duped by his son into thinking that, even though we continue to commit them they do not matter any more, look, here’s some blood.

The Orthodox Tradition – ancient, Historic Christianity – is rather focused on God as the Father in this parable. The God who – like many parents in our world – loves his children almost to error. When we want to go, he gives us his blessing. When we come back, he’s weeping.

My own life is one of constant conversion – each turn, each new thing, is a blessing for a while, but then I know I have to go further on. Does that mean that I’m getting closer or getting further away?

Each of our paths is different, even within the Christian tradition. Some of us don’t get to walk “inside” for very long and yet our goal is the same: the Father from a long way off running towards us faster than we’re getting to him.

In some readings of this Parable, the younger son is the Gentiles, whilst the older, jealous son is the Jews. I don’t want to imagine that’s what Jesus was saying here. But how many times are we, each of us, in the roll of the eldest son? How many times do we look and see someone having it easy whilst our road is hard? How many times do we look and imagine that they are getting all the blessings and yet we, here, have all the struggles?

So even now, at the end of the sermon, I’ll loop back to the beginning. How do we deal with those Christian communities that are offering the whole “once saved always safe” idea?

The traditional answer is for pious Orthodox Christians to pretend those folks – Lutherans, Church of Christ, Evangelicals, Charismatics, etc – are not even Christian at all. They’re heretics and schismatics. And we are right.

“Once saved always safe” has a parallel, liberal teaching, a mirror image: never not saved. Liberal Episcopalians, Catholics, etc offer this. And Orthodox Christians – many ex-Episcopalians, etc – come back again with “not even Christian at all.

Ah, the joys of being the elder brother.

And the standard reply: “It’s not pride and arrogance to simply state the Truth. We’re right and they are wrong. When they come to their senses, God will throw them a party, too”

When do we get to be the younger brother? Our sins are surely not as big as theirs. We do not wallow in heresy or schism, here in the arms of Mother Church.

Have you nothing that weighs heavily on your heart? Paul says all things are lawful – but not all things are beneficial. Here is a place where we need to look.

I know that there are ways in a man’s heart that sex and lust can take hold and dominate. Perhaps it is true, also, of a woman’s heart. I know there are ways in times of abundance, when feasting and gluttony can take hold in my heart and even my own desire to loose weight for health’s sake can not overcome my desire to eat one more bon bon.

Did the prodigal come straight home, or did he have some turnings?

When Paul speaks of prostitutes, I think he is, in fact, speaking in the first person. He’s been widowed and without a wife for sometime now. Traveling on the road, seeing homes where happy families cavort. He is, after all, a man. What should he do?

Perhaps for you or me, the prostitute is not sexual: I’m getting older now where a warm coat and a gourmet meal are more important than another warm body in bed…

But I can still find myself downstairs chatting with an attractive someone, even as time for Church draws near.

Once the prodigal got home, did he never stumble again?

Time to repent again and come to my self.

That is, God. My true self – not the false self image I craft for my ego’s sake.

Lent is the time to make this journey. To find God before us weeping for Joy. To realise how far we’ve yet to go and how much more we’ve yet to overcome by his Grace in our lives.

The only thing that is once for all is our life in him.

What things hold you back?

• Proverbs 1:20-33
• Wisdom of Solomon 7:26 – 8:1
• Isaiah 50:4-9a
• Psalm 116:1-9
• James 3:1-12
• Mark 8:27-38

God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.

Whenever we start to read the Wisdom passages of the Bible we cross a gender line. I use that word here in its correct, linguistic meaning. The Hebrew word for wisdom, Hochmah, and its Greek analogue, Sophia, are both feminine words. Therefore the Bible’s authors and translators put in female pronouns. This is true of every available resource I have. Sophia/Wisdom/Hochma is a female.

This is picked up in the newage movement, insisting that Sophia/Wisdom is a Goddess oppressed by patriarchy. Oddly enough many of the same people who would go looking for the Goddess Sophia based on her pronouns are quick to point out that the use of Male Pronouns for God the Father are, simply, cultural baggage. (In my own neo-pagan past, a group to which I belonged taught Sophia was the Bride of the Logos. This creates an interesting transgendered image of Jesus, I think: marrying himself!) The Canadian Anglicans even have a hymn that praises Holy Wisdom. That it is sung to the ancient “Salve Regina” tune (Hail Holy Queen enthroned above, O, Maria) makes it a very funny pun.

We get into ever deeper symbolic problems when, in the East, at least, Sophia is seen at once as a sign of the Pre-incarnate Son of God and, in some ways, as a sign of the Theotokos. But also the Holy Spirit.

The problem, of course, goes back to the issue of gendered language. I am one with the Saints who offer us inclusive images of God, Father/Mother (as in Gregory of Nyssa). In a very real way they also offer us gender-inclusive images of God the Son, as Sophia/Logos (as in Julian of Norwich).

Again, I don’t think Wisdom/Sophia is a Goddess. Neither is Wisdom/Sophia a different hypostasis of the Trinity, a fourth lef, if you will, to a three legged stool. She does all the things that Jesus is reported to have done. She is with God, the Father, a reflection of his light, the fullness of him. She is, I think, rather clearly, only female because of language and culture (just as God the Father is so only because of language and culture). Certainly Jesus was a male but I think – as with so much of our theological language – what we say about the Gender of God says more about us than about God.

God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.
If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

What are we to make of these two passages together, since the one can not contradict the other? Mindful that “wisdom” is not “book learning” but rather God, himself, how does “denying self and taking up our cross” (note, it’s not Jesus’ cross – but each has her own cross to take) parallel with “Living with wisdom”?

What does it mean to equate “living with wisdom” with “taking up your cross?”

Although it’s called “Transfiguration” (and the Greek uses the word closest to “Metamorphosis”) the reality the Church sees here is that Jesus was revealing who he really is as both God and Man. There’s a lot of theology that arrises for no other reason than this very feast. What our idea of “salvation” is in the eastern tradition, how it is we are saved, who saves us and how we cooperate in that salvation is all sketched back to this mountaintop revelation of the mystery.

In this revelation, Jesus, as God and Man, is not just showing us his power… he’s showing us how we are to be. Because of who he is, we may become like him. Not in some spiritual paradise of harps and clouds, but in our very bodies, transfigured – metamorphosed – to be like his. Jesus the God-Man brings us humans back to integral unity with God in our spirit and in our flesh. And that happens for us to one degree or another here, on this Earth.

The problem with us – the reason we need the help – is because long ago (and continually) we get distracted by this world, either in a negative or positive way. We either get hung up on thinking the world is totally evil and/or illusory, or else we decide there’s nothing wrong with it or, equally bad, that we can fix it on our own. The clearest example of this is the other thing that gets commemorated on this day, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: humanity arrogantly unleashing the inner fire of creation on ourselves. I’ve seen the math, justifying the lesser evil. I don’t presume to judge those who make such decisions with nearly 60 years of perfect hindsight. But in the same situation now, I’d be profoundly protesting. There are peaceful means of unleashing that fire, that fall under other rubrics, but in terms of warfare, we seem to make our choices as if the enemy doesn’t matter, was not himself the living Ikon of God. Instead of reconciliation, we’re left with shadows on walls to venerate in awe.

Jesus light doesn’t burn us into nothingness. Instead it burns away the useless things. Our goal is to live always in that light – and though the daily purgation to have a more-pure life until we, too, become that light. This is the Christian teaching on salvation: to follow the light until we become the light. That is our work here, that is our work in other times and places as well, as we move from Glory to Glory.

Jesus as God-Man did not seek to make us, as some would have it, Godly Men. By this they mean, usually, good citizens who are moral and trustworthy and mow their lawns properly. WHen I hear “Godly Men” mentioned in a sermon, it usually means some sort of Eisenhower-era image of Apple Pie and a Flag. In other cultures the totems will change, but the position is the same. It’s easy to reject this – as so many in the world rightly do – not because we fail as often as we do, but because it is shallow. This largely protestant, largely American (based on solid European roots) idea is sipped by millions the world over and found wanting. They can be prim and proper (and terribly boring) on their own, thank you.

Jesus did not come to make us “Godly Men”, but rather to infuse humanity with God. The God we had exiled came among us as one of us in order that the same God might dwell within us and make us – body and soul – one with him. This is far more exciting, far more dangerous, far more salvific. The path is just there.

The purpose of Transfiguration is to give us a goal to shoot for and to light the path before us.