Sermon - A Good Man is Hard to Find

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Beloved 20th century author and devout Catholic Flannery O'Connor once wrote

a popular short story titled, A Good Man is Hard to Find.

In the story, a grandmother, along with her extended family,

travel through rural Georgia on their way to vacation.

Sweeping through the state is news of a murderous fugitive, referred to as the misfit.

At the grandmother's pressing, the family takes the van onto an isolated country

road where their car careens over the edge of a steep embankment.

Escaping without injury, the family collects themselves and sees another car

climbing the bend towards them and into their sight With great relief,

they wave down the car, and behind the wheel, of course,

is none other than the misfit,

along with two of his henchmen

One by one, the henchmen isolate family members Taking them into the woods where

they meet their death Until the grandmother is finally left alone before the misfit

Overcome with fear, all the grandmother is able to muster Is to softly mouth, Jesus, Jesus

The misfit hears her and remarks, Jesus was the only one who ever raised the

dead, and he shouldn't have done it.

He'd thrown everything off balance. If he did what he said, then there's nothing

for you to do but to throw everything away and follow him.

And if he didn't, then there's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes

you've got left the best way that you can, by killing somebody or burning down

his house or doing some other meanness to him.

There's no pleasure but meanness.

With her own fate now hanging in the balances before her, the grandmother offers a doubtful whisper.

Maybe he didn't raise the dead.

And her assailant replies, wailing his fist now against the ground as his voice

rises, It ain't right, because if I'd have been there, I would have known,

and I wouldn't be like I am now.

The grandmother sees this man's face twist close to that of her own,

as if he was going to start to cry.

And she exclaims, why, you're one of my babies.

You're one of my own children. And she reaches out, and she touches him on the shoulder.

At her touch, the misfit springs back, and he shoots her through the chest.

Drops his gun to the ground, takes off his glasses, and begins to clean them.

Flannery O'Connor's story is unmistakably dark.

Like so much of Southern Gothic literature, it highlights characters who appear

alienated and entirely irredeemable.

And yet in this story, we are taught about grace. For the misfit,

of course, it is about his fierce and unqualified rejection of it.

For the grandmother, it is about her remarkable gesture of grace,

her recognition of an enemy set on her destruction as a fellow child of God

in whom she sees her own face worthy of encounter and redemption.

Dark as it may be it is a story about grace's sheer force

and while you could write a thousand unique sermons on the parable of the prodigal

son I suspect that each of them might somehow be distilled down to just that

a story about humanity's relationship to grace when the younger son has finally

squandered the last of his inheritance and spent time doing undignified work,

he finally seeks to return home.

What he says is curious. How many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare?

But here I am, dying of hunger.

I will get up and go to my father and I will say to him, Father,

I have sinned against heaven and before you.

I am no longer worthy to be called your son.

Treat me like one of your hired hands.

There are layers of significance here. In a sense, we might hear the younger son's shame, of course.

As he desires not to be treated as a son, but as a mere servant.

We too might consider what propels the younger son to repentance.

It's not sorrow nor guilt, but his own material need.

He wants to eat, and he's run out of options.

We may also even hear a tinge of resentment towards his father in his own comments.

How many of my father's fired hands have bread enough to spare,

and yet here I am, dying of hunger. How is that possible?

When he does return home, he of course receives far more than he expects or deserves.

His father embraces him without a shred of reservation.

He kills the fatted calf, adorns his son in the best of his robes,

with a ring on his finger and sandals upon his feet, and makes what is maybe

one of the more touching proclamations in Scripture.

Let us eat and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again.

He was lost and is found.

This story embodies all of the things that we hold most dear about Scripture.

It demonstrates the possibility of redemption, the notion that even when all

appears lost, we can be made new again.

It shows that the supposedly irredeemable are indeed God's beloved.

It gives us hope for those who are wayward in our own lives,

offering us instruction in how we might approach those who have wronged us,

as well as the promise that God comes to us intimately in moments of reconciliation.

And yet the thing that is maybe most provocative about this parable is its open-endedness.

The parable ends, of course, with the Father's extension of grace,

with the excitement of unlimited possibility before then.

We are left only to imagine how the prodigal son responds to his father's love and generosity.

And we may certainly like to believe that when the sun rises and the festivities

end, there the son remains, penitent still, full of awe and gratitude.

We may like to think that the father's grace propels the prodigal son to instead

be loving and responsible,

That in this story here, this fractured family was again made whole for good,

redeemed by divine grace.

But what if that didn't happen?

It's quite possible that the son woke up with a filled belly,

stole all that he could find, and fled again to the hinterlands.

It's not hard for us to imagine the father waking up to greet his son the next

morning, only to find an empty bed, and his grace made to look foolish.

The fact of the matter is that grace of this measure probably burns us more

often than it rewards us.

This passage requires us to imagine the outcome, I think, so that we are forced

to wonder about the purpose and the utility of grace itself.

We are forced to ask the question, why are we called to grace?

Now, if I am honest with myself, I often fall into the trap of believing that

grace works in this very practical and transactional sort of way,

that it's a useful tool in my world.

It's not unreasonable to believe that grace pays dividends equal to that which

it's dispensed, that we are kind, perhaps, to the person who is just a real

jerk, and that if they absorb this kindness,

they one day will become, well, less of a jerk.

If we've practiced this kind of thing long enough, we realize,

of course, it doesn't work like that.

There are times when acts of grace are met with Flannery O'Connor's misfit,

with overwhelm, repulsion, rejection, even with evil.

And there are times, yes, where grace is met with miraculous reconciliation and transformation.

But the ultimate purpose of grace and its practice is not the outcome that it produces.

The purpose of grace is to proclaim a reality that already exists before us.

We are called to proclaim that reality not because it's efficient,

not because it's productive, but because it pronounces ultimate truth before the world.

We practice grace because it is the story of Jesus Christ's birth,

death, and resurrection, and we are bound to that,

a reality that is sometimes inefficient, often inconvenient to the ways of humankind.

What the misfit says in the story with disdain, we say instead with great faith,

Jesus Christ threw everything off balance.

And so then our task is clear, to do all that we may have within our power to follow him.

The great joy of this work is, of course, that we have been redeemed, too.

Not in equal measure to our deeds, not just for a few select do-gooders,

but grace for each of us, and grace for the whole of each of us.

As the Apostle Paul assured the early church in his epistle to the Romans,

For while we were still weak at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.

Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though perhaps a good

person might actually dare to die.

But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Christ died for you and for me. For the older brother, just as for the prodigal son.

For the grandmother, just as for the misfit.

For grace is not a condition, but a reality, before us eternally.

Amen. Amen.

Thanks for listening to 60 Church Street, a podcast of Trinity Episcopal Church

in Asheville, North Carolina.

Now, go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

The Homily was offered by the Rev. Mike Reardon.

Introduction and closing reflections were shared by the Rev. Amy Peterson.

Musical contributions were performed by Dr. Kevin Seal.

Sermon audio was prepared by Nanette Popa. Production was guided by Karen Marie Frederiksen