This poster of Rembrandt’s powerful painting of the return of the prodigal seems all the more powerful with the sanctuary stripped for Lent. Rembrandt intended his painting to help us see more clearly what we are dying for: recognition, forgiveness, reconciliation, acceptance. It also points us to things about ourselves that aren’t exactly lovely. For instance, look at the returning son. He looks like a holocaust survivor or a prisoner. Shaved head, nearly naked, all that’s missing is the tattooed number on his wrist. What was his crime? Who put him in the concentration camp? The older brother will not look at the heart-warming reunion. He glares rigidly ahead, hands clenched, his body language saying, “Count me out of this tender family gathering!” The father looks as if he has died a thousand deaths over these two boys of his. Worn out, and only now, at the end of his own life, only now does the lost one return. The father is caught between the one who can’t forgive him for being generous and the one who threw away his generosity. There are details here that you can only see in certain light, from certain angles. Sort of like Lent—needing the light and angle to be just right, being willing to just sit in its presence, before we can see into the hidden, dark recesses of our lives.

Then there’s today’s sermon title, “Son Does Dirt to Dad.” How does that fit with Abram’s story in our first lesson? What is at stake for Abram is the reliability of God. His story is a “not dirt” story. But in the parable, there is plenty of dirt done, and getting out of that mess depends on parental reliability. On what terms will Dad receive the prodigal, given the dirt he did in leaving? Will Dad take him to work as a servant to pay off the money he essentially stole? Can he count on Dad to still think of him as his child?

“Is God reliable?” Jesus uses his parable about the Prodigals to force that question with the religious establishment—the older son in the story. The religious pros have to come to grips with that question, because they are stuck in who they think God is. Not to mention how they apply that question to people they have judged to be unworthy of being taken back. Wouldn’t “reliable” be to require payment on one’s debt to society? The question is still for us. Can we count on God? Humans are creative when it comes to this question. When God takes our advice and answers the way our prayers have directed, we think we’re powerful pray-ers. When God doesn’t answer our prayer requests the right way, we figure we did something wrong. We say we’re banking on God’s reliability, but we act like the answer is “no.” Like toddlers and teens exerting independence from parents, we test God’s limits when God fails to do what we want. What might start as self-reliance turns self-centered. What we think of as “getting ahead” slips into getting more than others. Trying to be helpful becomes needing to prove we are lovable.

Three of the world’s great faiths hold up Abram’s faithfulness, but in today’s story, Old Faithful whines in discouragement. God’s three-fold promise to him—place, posterity, presence—has not been actualized. Wandering and homeless, Abram mourns his childlessness at the normal end of a lifespan. Time is running out! Appropriately, he mourns by bringing his grief to the One who made the promise. Obviously missing the child in “posterity” and the home in “place,” Abram stakes everything on the final part of the promise—presence. This, despite a God who refuses to be a like everybody else’s gods, who at least allow statues for their followers to remember them by. Abram is a broken-hearted man in deep anguish. Not unlike some of the parents I’ve talked with lately. But when God re-states the promise, Abram carries on as if that is enough.

You’ve got to wonder if the parent in our other story would have envied Abram his lack of sons to only break his heart. One kid takes the goods and runs, the other stays home to remind him how good he is—the Gone One and the Good One. The Good One stays, protecting the old guy from any further heartache. Dirt has been done to Dad on a colossal scale. He probably wondered what his kid brother was in such a hurry to prove. Maybe the younger son didn’t think he was proving anything. Maybe he was just trying to be himself, not somebody else’s little brother. Ironically, to set off on his own, to “be his own person,” he needed to use the gifts from his parent. Succeeding on his own terms had to be bankrolled by the inheritance he takes from his father before he is even dead. What could hurt a parent more? It’s as if the younger son says to his father, “All the gifts you have ever given me, the identity you’ve poured into me by raising and training and educating me—none of that is as good as what I’m about to make of myself by leaving you.” He uses the father’s gifts as weapons against him.

When my son was here to celebrate his 30th birthday, we saw a TV show together in which a set of parents were talking about how to respond to some challenge their daughter was presenting, and one of them said, “Children are a map of their parents.” My son and I had a chance to talk about what a mixed blessing that is! The two sons in Jesus’ parable are “maps” of their Prodigal parent. As we see these two “maps,” we see two ways of answering the question about the reliability of God. One son uses his gifts as a weapon, the other refuses to use the gifts.

The Good One sees his parent as reliable, all right. In his mind, he can count on his parent to withhold from him, to take advantage of him, to take him for granted. His consolation is in knowing that he at least keeps up his end of the parent/child bargain. His end is to do all the right things. He does what good Presbyterians do. We earn an honest living, give away both time and money, raise our kids to respect others, keep our noses clean, follow the rules. But “good” isn’t an end in itself. The Good One gets so entangled in “good.” He ends up as lost as the Gone One, who had to leave home to get lost. He is lost in resentment that other people don’t follow the same rules he does—the “right” rules. He is frozen, under-appreciated, unpopular, ungrateful. The Good One is frozen by self pity, stuck in a limited answer to the question of God’s reliability. God is reliable, all right, but it’s still on my terms. My righteousness, my goodness, my pay-back.

What makes Abram’s question about God’s reliability so faithful is his attention to the God who makes the promise. God addresses Abram’s particular situation with a particular promise, and Abram acts on that. In the end, the answer to questions the Prodigal Family asks about reliability is also about particularity. To the Gone One, the answer is, “You have ripped me off, but you are back, and you don’t need to pay me back.” To the Good One the answer is, “This is not about payment. You have had my presence. There is nothing more precious than that.” Like the Parent, watching the road day after day for the return of the Gone One and like the Parent living as a family with the Good One, God’s loves us in particular.

Children are a map of the parent. We are made in the image and likeness of our “parent,” God. We are the “map” of God. Whenever we don’t trust God to keep the promises, we’re saying to God, “I may have been made in your image and likeness, but I’m remaking myself the way I want.” God’s promises to you are the same ones made to Abram. How God keeps those promises to you is particular. That the promises are kept does not depend on you. That you trust God to keep the promises does depend on you.