Brent Ness

Lent and Holy Week and Easter came and went. Here we are, in Eastertide, a season of 50 days where we continue to celebrate the hope found in that glimpse of the possibility of resurrection that Easter offers, and where we face the challenge of what that means for our lives, for the everydayness that once again takes over when the celebration of the extraordinary ends and the world itself doesn’t feel any different at all. When evil remains real and tangible and visible.

Easter 2025. What can we say about the rising of Christ, when everything that’s happening seems designed to bring us down? It’s a difficult time to be wrestling with resurrection. All around us we see instances of people betrayed. Of people arrested, sometimes even, like Jesus, in the midst of prayer. We hear of others, their humanity denied, their bodies and lives, their belongingness and being-ness called into question. God forgive us.

Today’s text is the famous story from Luke 15, the ‘parable of the prodigal parent’.

We usually call this parable the ‘prodigal son’, but I like to focus on the father’s prodigality: extravagantly generous, he shows excessive liberality to both his children. Prodigal, indeed.

Martin Luther King used to say, “The time is always right to do right.” I don’t know whether Dr. King had this story in mind, but he’d certainly have gone along with Jesus. 

This week’s Gospel text shows us some strange bedfellows. The Pharisees, who are often depicted as enemies of Jesus – or at least antagonists – show up to warn Jesus about Herod Antipas’s murderous intent towards him. But of course, there were Pharisees and there were Pharisees. Just as today there are Christians and there are Christians.

Happy Birthday! 

On the first Sunday of March back in 1835, our congregation officially began, dedicated as the “Second Wesleyan Chapel”. A church building was soon under construction, down on Mulberry Street.  

Barely 23 years later, the congregation moved uptown to a brand-new place on Park Ave S. & 22nd St. – a soaring ediface, clothed in marble, with a 210-foot steeple, largely the gift of church trustee Daniel Drew. It was truly a glorious building, but lasted only 40 years.