Andrea

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.

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.

Birth pangs are a frequently used motif in the apocalyptic imagery that was common in Jesus’s Jewish tradition. As someone who physically birthed two humans from my womb, I know a thing or two about birth pangs. One of the things I learned through my labor and delivery experiences is that fear-based resistance intensifies pain and draws out the process in dangerous and unhealthy ways.
We’ve been talking and singing about the importance of resistance, of holy resistance, in recent days.

As I’ve been prepping for Sunday, my brain keeps transporting me back to the Intermediate Hebrew class I took during seminary. Perhaps a strange place to be, since we aren’t working with any Hebrew Bible texts this week?

Have you ever had to be a bearer of bad news? How did you feel or what did you do to prepare to give someone a word that you knew was going to be hard?

Who’s been watching the Olympics this week? I confess, I’ve missed most of it so far, except for a few of the preliminary events in women’s gymnastics.