Sermon, 3/30/25: Where have you (mis-)laid your thinking cap?

Lent 4

Psalm 32; Joshua 5:9–12; II Corinthians 5:16–21 ; Luke 15:1–3, 11b–32

But then he came to his senses. Luke 15:17

Last week, while reading today’s lectionary, which we have just heard, an event from my early childhood crashed through my memory barrier with a laser-sharp force which surprised me beyond belief.  When many of us can scarcely recall what we had for breakfast not yesterday, but even on the same day, how does it come to pass that I can recall an event that occurred at the age of 7 or 8?  My mishap happens in families every day.

I recalled not what the distraction may have been, but on the day in question, after pouring milk over my breakfast cereal, I failed to return the milk bottle to the refrigerator.  Yes, back in the day, milk was delivered or purchased in glass containers, not in waxed cartons or plastic.  As indicated, such a mishap, my mishap, is an everyday occurrence in most families, at one time or other.  When later in the day, my father discovered that the milk had soured, as the summer weather in St. Louis is brutal: hot, sweltering, humid, fit neither for man nor beast, to borrow a phrase, he had only one question. 

I did not seek to deny, but owned up immediately to my error.  Not with an angry tone, my father asked only one thing:  Son—I do not believe that my father knew my name, for he addressed me ever only as “son”—Where was your thinking cap?  As a literally-minded 7-year-old, I did not know that my parents had purchased a thinking cap for me, and so I inquired where he or my mother had laid it and not given it to me.  As I stand today before you, I understand that that question is the one which is put to the errant self-centered son in today’s gospel.  Moreover, that question is the one that is put to us as we try to come to terms with the political, social, moral and ethical morass that we have created in our own country.  Where had we (mis-)laid our collective thinking cap?

I should like to offer a variant of that “thinking cap” question: “What if…”  That is a simple two-word introduction.  Is that question not the nagging question that we often pose quietly to ourselves, in the privacy of our own minds?  That question, simple enough on its surface, has many variants: What if I had only…?  What if I could have…?  What if the situation had been different, would I have…?  The situations that such questions evoke and seek to clarify, are innumerable in its variations.  The situation is nuanced in its varied forms, and above all is almost always unanswerable.  It is unanswerable because the question as so posed looks to the past, which, as we know all too well, and often with much regret, cannot be retrieved.  The past cannot be changed, which means that another more important question looms before us.  And that question is: “What can/may/must I do to…?” to rectify, to amend, to effect reconciliation?

Those, good people, were the questions which raced through my mind as I read the appointed lectionary for this Fourth Sunday in Lent.  Do they pertain to you and me in the year of our Lord 2025?  “What if…?” and “What can/may I do to…?”  Your questions and your responses will be unique to you.  To think about answers for myself, I was consoled by what I found in the story read in the Old Testament lesson from Joshua and the parable set before us in the Gospel according to Luke.  They instill in me hope, but a hope that requires something of me.  Complacency is not an option.  The lectionary clarifies the riddle of wherein the sin lies, the real “sin” of the prodigal son lies.

The question “What if…?” and the question “What can/may I do to…?” stress, each in its own way, deliverance from adversity on the one hand, and reconnecting with God on the other.  They both, each in its own way, deal with the ultimate question: How does one have faith, when everything can seem so hopeless or foreign, or when one lives in a secular, or seemingly totally faithless society?

So, I began to pose a hypothetical question, first to myself, but now to you.  Suppose you had the most intelligent and empathetic medical doctor in the world as your personal physician, advising you on how to maintain your physical and emotional health.  Would you listen to your physician?  Would you follow diligently the prescribed regimen—the one that, in bold print, clearly says, “Take all the antibiotics even when you begin to feel better.”  Or would you decide that you know your body better than your physician and leave off the medication? 

Is this not what the Israelites did, not only in the forty years of wandering in the desert, but many years and generations thereafter?  They decided that they knew better than God.  Or would you, because you learned to have faith in your doctor’s care, be able to translate your doctor’s recommendations into a movement which might benefit a larger population?  Is this not what the prodigal son did when, instead of remaining in the life of stewardship, he chose to go elsewhere, only to regret his decision?

The problem with my question is that it may appear too theoretical for our real world in 2025.  But I ask you, is our “real” world so terribly different from the theoretical one posed in Luke’s gospel?  As recorded in our Book of Records, is it not in our nature to go forth, to explore, to discover?  Indeed, it would seem an inborn obligation that motivates us, a longing we must fulfill.  This being Lent, we are asked to consider what causes that mandate to be falsely implemented.  “Go forth!” we are told.  And, forth we go!  Things go awry, do they not, when self takes front and center position in our fulfillment of the mandate? There are unknowns, things that we did not enter into the calculus and over which we have no control, even if we were to speculate.  Even our diligence.  I imply not that the prodigal son was diligent, as the story demonstrates to the contrary.

Was it preordained that the Israelites, in their exodus from bondage in Egypt, had to lose faith and began to bicker among themselves and with God, when God did not wave a magic wand and transport them without any effort on their part into that land of milk and honey?  I would think not!  Did the errant younger son have to end up destitute, begging for food, eventually eating what the pigs eat, when he had only to follow the fine print of the first and fifth commandments: in all things put God first, and honor father and mother, all of which he would have learned from his childhood?  I suggest not.

We may well ask ourselves the question: Would the errant son not really have known the depth of his father’s love, had he not left home and fallen into a life-changing situation? Might I suggest a spoiler?  The father’s love had not changed, but rather the errant son had failed to recognize the depth of his father’s love because the son, being only human, had taken for granted the routine of his first life and yearned for something different, something challenging, something more exciting.  And it is through his mistake that we, you and I, are reminded of God’s willingness to redirect our paths, of God’s question “where did you mislay your thinking cap?”  Through a self-initiative or with the advice and counsel of others, his thinking cap is rediscovered and dusted off.

In that simple question of “what if,” we recognize its forward-looking companion, “What must I do, what can I do, to rectify, to correct, to better a condition, a situation, my own neglect?  At a recent meeting of clergy, a meeting call by our diocese, I may have angered a fellow cleric who insisted that we needed a reading list, the kind which my students often found on my syllabus, when I said to the group sitting at our roundtable,  “We do not always need a reading list or require a motivational speaker that challenges us to offer aid to the less fortunate, or to remind ourselves that we are all made in the image of God and that God would have us go forth and prosper.”  However, so said I then and so say I now on this fourth Sunday in Lent, should you require a motivational speaker, you look no further than to the apostle Paul, writing to those in his time who were looking for thinking caps, who raised the questions “what if” and “what must I do, in order to bring about reconciliation with God and my fellow being?”

Paul’s thinking cap is this: “We are … Christ’s ambassadors.  It is as if God were appealing to you … in Christ’s name, be reconciled to God!” (II Cor. 5:20f.) and that reconciliation can only be actualized, when we share with others what support we have found in Christ’s words and deeds on behalf of  “all the tax collectors and sinners [who] were coming near to listen to Jesus,” because they needed, as do we now, the consolation and forgiveness which are promised in God’s word.  Amen.