Luke 15: 11,12,13,20; Hebrews 11: 1

Prodigal father

Perhaps we all have something of the prodigal inside of us.  We may not like to admit it, but perhaps we all fear not having been a good son or daughter.  Maybe that is even not all that bad.  Maybe it keeps us on our toes.  On the other hand, it can cause a lot of harm of families.  Think about all the millions of conversations everyday between siblings about who is the better child and who is the deadbeat child.  Anger, guilt , resentment and anxiety get pressed together.   The parable of the Prodigal Son has all those elements as the destitute party animal returns to the homestead to find a deliriously happy father and a resentful brother.  

Friends, Woody is the brother who returns to the hometown of Hawthorne NE, a farm town of retired people and adult children that kept hanging on there in the movie Nebraska (Paramount Vantage, 2013).   Woody isn’t planning to go back there but the mother and the sons agree to meet there, since one of the sons and he are already in Nebraska to try to claim the Publisher’s Clearing House prize in Lincoln.  It is not exactly clear who Woody is.  Is he just a grouchy, delusional, selfish man fixated on getting a new truck? We start out not liking him, but a complex picture emerges of a man in an unsatisfying marriage who was traumatized in Korea as a young soldier and who cannot say no to anyone who needs his help.  At the same time his family is finding a way to cash in on his imaginary prize.  The movie ends with Woody driving through his home town wearing a cap that says “prize winner” driving a new second hand truck his son has secured for him.  The son, who has his own disillusions, has great pity and compassion for his father, even to the point that, as gentle as he is, he decks the father ‘s old friend in a bar with his fist. There is triumph here for the old man: he gets to ride through town and all the people whose opinion matter to him see him: his brother who likes to sit and watch cars pass by from a plastic chair in his front yard, his old friend with the bruised face, his old girlfriend Peg Bender who still carries a torch for him after all these years.  There is also enormous sadness in how we spend so much of our lives impressing people who do not give a hoot about us anymore.   It is almost like we are imprisoned by our desire to impress people.  It is as if they determine what our lives should be like while instead we should spend time trying to please God in the service of others.  The father and son return home to Montana in the end as the son has learned to love his father more. What Woody has learned is not clear.  Yet there is a sense of redemption.

At a deep level the movie is about faith, about faith in oneself and faith in your children and faith in your father, about faith in marriage, but more so about faith in the world.  Is the world a place we can trust? Do we live in a reliable universe?  Is there meaning or are we just stumbling about trying to make the best of?  Religious faith perhaps is a deeply personal way for us to make sense of a universe that we sometimes think considers us “of no account.”  Woody for a moment feels as someone who is of “some account,” a fake prize winner driving his own truck through his childhood farm town, seen by people who will soon forget him.  “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” says Hebrews so articulately.  In the end the son winds up with a little more faith in his cranky father and Woody keeps his faith.  He never stopped believing in what people tell him, for better or for worse.  So while in one sense he is a depressing, absent and uninspiring bore who lives in his own world, in another he is the best of America, a person who keeps the faith in what people tell him.  So we don’t want to be like Woody at all, because he is so disengaged. But on the other hand we want to be like him, because he doesn’t really hurt anyone and he still has faith in the basic meaning of the people in his society.

Friends, while the film Nebraska in its somberness and its simplicity can seem depressing to us, underneath it tells a story of loyalty and redemption and hope and of the humor of human existence.  It is about life stripped down to its essentials in a grayish tone. In doesn’t have all the distractions modern life provides us.   What we learn is that the prodigal is everywhere. We all lose our way at one point or another and we forget what life is all about.  We are very good about seeing where others, especially our immediate family, go wrong, but we are not as good at recognizing our own wastefulness and lostness.  But it’s that lostness we feel on days when we don’t know what ails us and it is that lostness that draws us to God.  It is with God that the source of our faith lies.  So, friends, as Christians, God comes to us in our lostness to help us find faith,  so we can find redemption and healing in all our relationships. Thanks be to God.