Thomas J Parlette
“Coming to Our Selves”
Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32
3/30/25
When the Arab Spring uprisings exploded in Egypt in late January 2011, 24 students from Middlebury College in Vermont, were caught in the crossfire. They were in Alexandria for a study-abroad program. It quickly became clear that they needed to leave the country – the sooner the better.
The school’s insurance provider was supposed to take care of such things as emergency evacuations – but they fumbled the ball. So the College contacted an agency called Global Rescue, which specializes in getting people home from difficult situations. Within 2 hours, Global Rescue had personnel on the ground, and shortly thereafter, the agency brought in a plane from Prague and the students were on their way home. (1)
We’ve all seen movies about emergency extractions. Netflix has made two of them – Extraction and Extraction 2 – starring Chris Hemsworth, with a third on the way sometime in 2025.
But agencies like Global Rescue are not just Hollywood creations – they’re real and sometimes necessary organizations. According to testimonials on its website, Global Rescue’s people have successfully saved clients from all sorts of life-threatening situations all over the world. National Geographic even recommends them, advising travelers to join Global Rescue, and describing the agency as “a well-tested provider of medical services and evacuation.” (2)
Too bad Global rescue wasn’t around in Jesus’ day. Had it been, the father in Jesus’ well-known parable could have called upon them to extract his wayward son from the “far country” where he was squandering his inheritance in “dissolute living.” This young man was at rock bottom and living on pig slop. He really needed an extraction. An evacuation. This was an emergency.
But as we read the whole parable, maybe it’s just as well that Global Rescue wasn’t around yet. Perhaps eating with the hogs was necessary for this prodigal son to “come to himself,” and make his way home with a needed change in perspective and attitude.
What’s more, the parable tells us something about God, who seems to be represented by the faithful father. In the story, this father can’t wait to welcome his son unconditionally – but he doesn’t really seem interested in rescuing his youngest son.
You could make a case that that runs contrary to what we hear in other places in the Bible – like Psalm 46: “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” – which sounds like we can have God on speed dial and call in the cavalry whenever we need an emergency extraction from our troubles.
The father in this parable seems more like the God we meet in Psalms of Lament, like Psalm 10 – “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” or Psalm 44, “Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?”
There is, of course, something to be said about the possible benefit of us extracting ourselves from our problems and heading home under our own steam.
In psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s classic book, The Road Less Traveled, he tells about a time when he was serving in the Army, stationed in Okinawa, Japan. He was called to an emergency room one day to talk with a soldier’s young wife who had lightly cut her wrists with a razor blade. The dialogue went like this:
Peck asked her why she had done it.
“To kill myself, of course”
Why do you want to kill yourself?
“Because I can’t stand it on this dumb island. You have to send me back to the States. I’m going to kill myself if I have to stay here any longer.”
What is it about living on Okinawa that’s so painful for you?
She began to cry, “I don’t have any friends here, and I’m alone all the time.”
That’s too bad. How come you haven’t been able to make any friends?
“Because I have to live in a stupid Okinawan housing area, and none of my neighbors speak English.”
Why don’t you drive over to the American housing area or to the wives’ club so you can make some friends?
“Because my husband has to drive the car to work.”
Can’t you drive him to work, since you’re alone and bored all day?
“No. It’s a stick shift car, and I don’t know how to drive a stick-shift car, only an automatic.”
Why don’t you learn how to drive a stick-shift car?
She glared at Peck – “On these roads? You must be crazy.” (3)
Peck doesn’t tell how or if the woman resolved her dilemma, but it’s clear from her responses that she wasn’t interested in solving her problem – only in escaping it. She was looking for a “go-back-to-the-States” order from Peck, and extraction, if you will, from her situation.
On the other hand, the prodigal, for all his self-inflicted problems, “came to himself,” the parable says. That’s a great phrase, which was already an idiom in several languages before Jesus used it in the parable. We use a form of it in English when we say that a person is not herself today or that a person came to his senses.
When the prodigal came to himself, he was in effect acknowledging, “What a fool I’ve been!” He recognized that no one was going to be riding to his rescue, so if things were to be changed, he had to make it happen.
So, he formulated a plan: “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.” Then he started for home, where his father gladly welcomed him back, not as a hired hand, but as his well-loved son – the “himself” the father intended for him to be all along.
Of course, there are circumstances from which we cannot extract ourselves, and where, if we are to be rescued, someone else, or maybe God directly, will have to intervene. But sometimes that doesn’t happen, and God appears to be absent or hiding from us.
The fact that God does not usually seem to rescue us on request is a great challenge to our faith. The French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote about God’s non-intervention in our lives, suggesting that the silence of God is one of God’s most essential features, and that God can be present to us only in the form of his absence. (4)
Most of us have trouble making sense of that or taking any hope from it. But the experience of a man named Arie Brouwer probably connects better for us.
Prior to his death in 1993, Brouwer was a leader in the Reformed Church of America. He was a spiritual man who remained faithful to God throughout his struggle with cancer, the illness that eventually took his life. His struggle to apply his faith to the experience of dying helped him see the help of the Lord as something between the extremes of total solution and no help at all.
During that final battle with the disease, Brouwer gave a talk in which he discussed his illness. He explained that while he was coming back from a doctor’s appointment following surgery, one of his sons, Steve, who was with him, said, “Dad, you said something about living by faith. What does that mean under these circumstances?”
Brouwer said, “It means whatever happens, I still believe that in some way, God and I are together in this and that’s the way I need to live my life because that is what I believe. My whole life has been a love affair with God. I am not about to give that up because I have cancer.”
Then his son said, “But what does it mean to have faith in God? It doesn’t seem right to me. You, and Mom, too, have spent a lot of your life trying to make this a better world for people to live in. This is a very strange was to be paid back.”
And Brouwer said, “Steve, I don’t believe that God wants me to have cancer, but what I have come to believe during these days is that God can’t do anything about it. That raises some very fundamental questions for me about what I’ve been taught and believed over the years about the almightiness of God. Because if God can’t stop this, then I have to come to some new understanding of God’s almightiness, or perhaps reject it altogether. I haven’t had time to think about that yet because I am too busy dealing with all sorts of survival questions, but I am going to work on it for that Lenten sermon…”
Brouwer began to study what the Bible said about the almightiness of God, and that led to a breakthrough in his thinking. Here is what he discovered; “I found that God’s almightiness is spoken of 10 times in the New Testament, and get this – All but one of those times are in the Book of Revelation, the end of history. I looked at those texts and the one exception in Corinthians, and I found that every one of them has to do with God’s ultimate triumph in history. That at the end of history, God’s love and justice and peace and well-being will prevail, and that God will prevail in the struggle and that God is with us in the struggle. And I said to myself, “Arie, why in the world haven’t you always understood it that way before?” (5)
Frankly, believing God won’t work things out until the end of history is not much comfort when we are in the pigsties of life, and some of us have indeed experienced the help of the Lord in the present time. We also have the Bible’s witness that God is with us.
But the prodigal son parable helps us to see the merit of “coming to our selves” and taking responsibility for the direction of our lives and the solutions to the messes in which we find ourselves. In fact – “coming to our selves”, coming back to our true selves, as God wishes us to be – that is the whole point of the season of Lent.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. “Testimonials: Middlebury College – Egypt.” globalrescue.com.
2. Ibid… globalrescue.com.
3. Scott M. Peck, The Road Less Traveled, New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1978, p 34.
4. Susan Anima, “The Absent God,” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 35, No. 1, Jan 1955, p 6-16. Journals.uchicago.edu.
5. Perspectives, March 1994, quoted in Context, May 15th, 1994
