Neither Murmur Ye

There’s a sin in this morning’s lessons that never raises its voice. Scripture has a word for it, and the word is a sound. Murmur. In the Greek it’s a low noise, the kind you make with your mouth mostly closed. Not anything a man could stand up and answer. Just a hum under the room.

Set that against our first lesson. Wisdom doesn’t mutter. Doth not wisdom cry? and understanding put forth her voice? She’s out in the open, at the gates, loud enough for the whole town to hear her. Truth raises its voice. Grievance lowers it.

And that low hum is exactly what our Lord was answering when He told the parable we just heard. Saint Luke tells us so at the head of the chapter: the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them. Somebody muttered about who was at the table. The Prodigal Son is what our Lord said back.

So the sin this day has come hunting isn’t the far country. We aren’t after the boy with the harlots and the pigs. We’re after the low complaint of people standing inside the Father’s provision who dispute His right to be generous with somebody else. And the Collect told us why we can’t cure that ourselves. We prayed that God would grant us the spirit to think and do always such things as are right, and we confessed why we had to ask: we cannot do any thing that is good without thee. Not much without Him. Nothing.

The Bible learned this word in the wilderness, and learned it fast. Israel came up out of the Red Sea on dry ground, sang about it, and three days later, three days, they murmured against Moses, saying, What shall we drink? It became the settled habit of that generation, and a chapter later Moses tells them exactly what he’s been hearing all along. Your murmurings are not against us, but against the LORD. There’s the anatomy of it. A murmur is aimed sideways, at whoever’s standing closest, and it lands on God. It never goes to the one who could answer it. That isn’t an accident. That’s the design.

Saint Paul hands that history to us as our own. The fathers were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea, all fed on the same spiritual meat, all drinking of that spiritual Rock, and, Paul says, that Rock was Christ. Every privilege we have, they had. Then he lists what destroyed them anyway, and murmuring is on it, beside idolatry: Neither murmur ye, as some of them also murmured, and were destroyed of the destroyer.

Which answers a question I’ve put to myself more than once. Isn’t the elder brother’s reaction simply human? Wouldn’t anybody feel that way?

Yes. Anybody would. That’s the diagnosis, not the alibi. Scripture never treats “everybody does it” as a defense; it treats it as the whole problem. Paul doesn’t file murmuring under things that are understandable. He files it under the things that killed people.

So look at what the elder brother actually does, because the details are merciless.

He comes in from the field, hears music, and stops. He called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant. On his own father’s place, rather than walk in and ask his father what the celebrating is for, he gets his information from the staff. That’s a murmur in its habitat. Anything except a direct question to the one who could answer it.

Then out it comes. Lo, these many years do I serve thee. Serve. He’s been living as a hired man in his own father’s house the whole time, which is exactly what his brother came up the road planning to become. And then the words that give him away: this thy son. Not my brother. Yours. The father won’t have it. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again.

Be fair to him first, though, because our Lord is. His case is good. He really did stay. He really did work.

I’ve sat at enough funeral dinners to have watched this happen. Two brothers and a place outside of town. One stayed, worked it, kept the fences up, drove his mother to nine years of appointments and sat with her at the end. The other left, and came back when there was an estate to settle. At that dinner the one who stayed doesn’t shout, doesn’t make a scene, wouldn’t dream of it. He leans over and says one sentence to a cousin at his end of the table. Everybody at that end hears it. Nobody at the other end does. Then he gets up and starts clearing plates, because he’s the one who does that.

Nine faithful years, and he spent them on a single sentence, aimed at a cousin instead of at his brother, or at God.

That’s the murmur, Encouragers. It doesn’t look like rebellion. It looks like fairness. It comes with a case, and the case is usually true, and that’s what makes it so nearly impossible to repent of. Nobody repents of being right.

And it’s only gotten easier. Murmuring used to take two people standing next to each other. Now it has machinery. The group text. The comment underneath. The two trucks idling in the parking lot after everyone else has driven off. Same sentence, wider audience, permanent record, still never said to the one who could answer it.

Now I have to be careful here, because a man could hear this sermon wrong. I’m not up here sorting this room into the good sons and the bad ones. Some of you have been in a far country. A real one. You know what the husks taste like, and you know the road home because you walked it, and you could tell me the year. You aren’t the elder brother in this parable. You’re the one the party was for.

And that’s precisely why the next part has to be said.

The far country has a back door, and it opens into the house.

A man can be carried home on nothing but mercy and then, twenty years on, be standing in the yard with his arms folded, listening to the music, doing arithmetic on somebody else’s welcome. The memory of the pigsty wears off. What grows in its place is a record of attendance. And the man who once had nothing to plead now has these many years to plead, and he pleads them, and he’s back in a far country without ever leaving the property.

Augustine knew that from the inside. He’d been to the far country himself and written a book about it, and here’s what he came to: It is not by our feet, nor by change of place, that we either turn from thee or return to thee. You don’t get out there by traveling, and you don’t come back by standing still. The distance is measured in the heart. The man who never left can be a long way out, and the man who came back can drift again without packing a bag.

That’s why the Collect isn’t a formality. We, who cannot do any thing that is good without thee. The elder brother is the proof. He’d been in the house the whole time and it hadn’t made him glad once. Proximity isn’t grace. Attendance isn’t grace. You can stand inside the provision your whole life and starve, if you never let it be a gift.

And notice where this keeps happening. At the table. Israel murmured about the food. The Pharisees murmured because this man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them. The elder brother murmured over a fatted calf. This was never a wilderness sin. It’s a dinner sin. It shows up exactly where the mercy is being served.

The Church has known that a long time. Sixteen hundred years ago Saint Ambrose was writing against a party who refused to let the badly fallen come back to communion, and he took them straight to this parable. Don’t be that brother, he told them, who shut himself out of his father’s house, who grieved that his brother had been received, at whose lasting exile he was wont to rejoice. There’s the sentence that ought to stop us. The elder brother had gotten comfortable with his brother being gone.

But hear what the father does, and hear that he does it twice. He runs to the one coming up the road. And when the other won’t come in, therefore came his father out, and intreated him. Out the door twice, for both sons. He won’t let either one settle for hired-man terms. To the boy rehearsing make me as one of thy hired servants, he gives a robe and a ring. To the man counting up his years he says, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.

Son. Not hand. Not servant. Son.

That’s what’s given at this rail in a few minutes. Not wages. Not a settlement proportioned to what you’ve put in. The Psalm told us this morning what sort of Father we’re dealing with: He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our wickednesses. If He dealt with us after our sins, not one of us would be eating here. He comes out again, to people who have earned nothing, and feeds His sons and daughters on the life of His own Son. And if you’ve been carrying a sentence this week, one you’ve said to a cousin and never to God, this is the place to set it down.

If the Father came out to the son who was lost, then no history you have is too far back to come home from.

If He came out to the son who was found and sour, then the arms folded across your chest aren’t the end of you either.

If He would rather have His house full than His accounts balanced, then we can stop keeping ledgers on one another and go on in where the music is.

And if all that He has is already ours, given and not earned, then there’s nothing left to murmur about, and nothing to do but eat, and be glad, and go find our brother.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.