Sheila is seventeen – just turned seventeen in January. There was no birthday party to celebrate the occasion, however; Sheila has lived on the city streets since she ran away from her middle class suburban home seven months ago, and they don’t have birthday parties on the street.

If you were to ask Sheila why she ran away from home, she would readily tell you: it was because of her parents; they were too freaking strict (to clean up her language). They wouldn’t let her do anything, wouldn’t let her go out with her friends, said they were a wild group and a bad influence on her. Like she was going to let them choose who her friends were. It was stifling in that house, she says; she was absolutely suffocating, going stir crazy. She couldn’t take their pious morality and religious platitudes another second, so she just left.

Her parents don’t know where she is, of course. She does phone one friend, Michelle, from time to time, but only because Michelle has sworn she won’t tell a soul. But even Michelle doesn’t really know where she is, except she’s still in town and on the street.

Sheila’s not alone on the street; she hangs out with a street family – a group of ten or twelve (there’s some coming and going), most of them in their teens and twenties, headed up by a man and woman in their mid-thirties. And if you press her, she’ll admit that yes, Mom and Pop (that’s what they’re called) do have rules for the group – Hey, you’ve got to have some structure! she protests – and those rules are enforced very strictly. One girl about Sheila’s age was severely beaten by the group when she broke the rules and ratted on a member of the group to the cops. She ended up in the hospital, and now she’s home. Her parents found out she was in the hospital – she must have told the people at the hospital who she was – and they came and stayed with her at the hospital, night and day, until she recovered, then took her home. Michelle has talked with her, and the girl says she’s glad she’s home. Things seem to have changed between her and her parents.

Sheila knows that her own parents have gone on TV a couple of times, pleading with her to come home. She hasn’t seen them herself – the street family doesn’t have TV – but Michelle has told her. And every once in a while, she thinks about what it would be like if she went home, whether things would be different between her and her parents, whether they could find some way to get along, whether she could find some way to make them understand the way she looks at things, and whether she could find some way to understand them. She misses her friends, she misses the comforts of home – it’s pretty rough on the streets. But she doesn’t know what would happen if she did go home, and she hasn’t got to the point where she’s willing to risk it – not just yet, anyway.

It’s tough to go home sometimes.

Bob has lived on the street much longer. He’s sixty-one, now, and stays to himself, pushing his grocery cart full of what belongings he does have everywhere he goes, sleeping on the sidewalk and getting by on handouts, plus an occasional meal at the Gospel Mission.

Bob doesn’t know exactly why he left home back in Illinois all those years ago. Part of it, of course, was Mary Ann telling him she was leaving him, after eleven years of marriage – leaving him for another man he had thought was his best friend. When that happened, there were just too many painful memories haunting the only town he’d ever lived in, so he left. He drifted for a while, doing odd jobs, living wherever he could find a place to live, but eventually it all fell apart, and he ended up on the street.

It wasn’t just Mary Ann and his failed marriage, though. The job he’d had back there wasn’t at all satisfying; the only reason he’d kept it – other than inertia – was to put bread on the table at home. He didn’t have any close friends of his own. Mary Ann and he had some friends, but they all seemed to side with her after the breakup. It was the same with the people at the church they attended; they all seemed to think it was his fault she’d left him – why, he’d never figured out.

Bob still has family back home, including a daughter he hasn’t seen since she was three – he gets an ache in his heart whenever he thinks about her; she’s grown now, of course. He’s got a younger brother and two sisters, all still happily married, he supposes – or maybe unhappily married, he doesn’t know which. He was always pretty close with his brother and sisters when they were growing up, and he thinks they would welcome him back – they were the only ones who didn’t think he was to blame for the failure of his marriage – and help him to get on his feet again. And he’d like to see his daughter, and find out how her life has been. But it’s been a long, long time since he left home. Maybe his daughter would just as soon he didn’t come back. Maybe his brother and sisters would just as soon he stayed gone, too.

It’s tough to go home sometimes.

And then there’s Jacob – God’s favorite scoundrel. Jacob is going home, but to say he’s apprehensive about it is a monumental understatement: he is flat scared out of his tree. Because going home again means meeting up with his brother Esau – his older twin brother Esau – again.

• Esau, whom Jacob had finagled out his birthright as the older brother for a bowl of lentil stew;
• Esau, whom he had outright cheated out of his father’s blessing by that scurrilous trick he played on his blind old father Isaac, pretending to be Esau – with the connivance and plotting of his mother Rebekah, I might add. She was the one who dressed him in Esau’s clothes so he would smell like Esau and put goatskins on his arms so they would feel hairy, like Esau’s arms, and fixed Jacob’s meal with spices so it would taste like game that Esau had brought home from his hunting; but he was the one who carried out the charade.

And when Esau found out what had happened, he swore to kill Jacob as soon as their ailing father had died and the time of mourning had passed. And Jacob knew he meant it, and so did Rebekah, which is why Jacob had left home – fled home – all those years ago.

And now it’s twenty years later, and Jacob is going home – not because he necessarily wanted to, but because he has burned his bridges with his father-in-law Laban and all that clan, with more trickery – Jacob’s good at burning bridges – and also because, in a dream, he’d been commanded by an angel of God to do so. Which one of those reasons was the more powerful one incentive – well, with Jacob you’re never sure.

But he’s going home, and as far as he is concerned, he’s sure Esau hasn’t forgotten his threat to kill Jacob, or given up on it. So he sends messengers ahead of him saying that he hopes to find favor in Esau’s sight – he wants to be reconciled. And the messengers return, saying that Esau is coming to meet them – with four hundred men with him! Oh, man, now he’s really scared.

So he splits all his retinue into two companies, so that if one is destroyed by Esau and his men, maybe the other one might be able to escape. He makes a fervent prayer to Yahweh for protection and deliverance. And he sends a huge present ahead of them to curry favor with Esau – cattle and camels and sheep and goats and donkeys. And we’re not talking a little petting zoo here: we’re talking two hundred female goats and ten male goats, two hundred ewes and twenty rams, thirty nursing camels and their colts, forty cows and ten bulls, twenty female donkeys and ten male donkeys. And the servants who are herding this menagerie are supposed to say to Esau, “They’re all for you, my lord Esau, as a present from your brother Jacob. Oh, yes, and he’s coming along after us.”

But not just yet. First Jacob sends his wives and his maids and his eleven children ahead of him, not to meet up with Esau, but just so they’re not in the target zone if Esau and his troops spurn the gifts and come charging. And Jacob spends the night alone.

Or almost alone. Because this is the night Jacob encounters God – or more accurately, is assaulted by God. Or someone. Or something. The story calls it “wrestling” – a man wrestled with him until daybreak.” But this is not just playful wrestling – not just friendly horsing. This is much more grim than that; it’s deadly serious combat.

But who is this stranger, Jacob’s adversary? The story simply says, “a man wrestled with him until daybreak.” But it’s clear from the story that this is more than just a man contending with Jacob; this is something more than just human. Whoever or whatever it is, it can only wrestle in the dark, and must leave at daybreak. Jacob himself has no doubt who it is he’s fought with, however; “I have seen God face to face,” he says, “and yet my life is preserved.”

And not only is his life preserved, but for Jacob, this nocturnal struggle results in – a blessing. (And I’d love to say more about that, but that’s another sermon.) Suffice it to say that it is through this night of striving against God that the wily trickster Jacob now receives a new name and a new existence. He becomes Israel, the one who has striven with God – and with humans – and has prevailed.

But there’s still the meeting with Esau. And as Jacob rejoins his wives and maids and children, he looks up and sees his brother approaching with his four hundred men. And Jacob – Israel – may have been blessed, but he’s still as scared as he can be. So he tells the maids and their children, “Here, you stand in front,” and Leah and her children, “You get behind them,” and Rachel and her son Joseph – clearly the most precious – at the rear. But Jacob doesn’t hide behind the women and the children; he goes out in front to meet this man who had sworn to kill him years ago, and as he approaches Esau, he bows to the ground seven times.

And Esau – Katherine Patterson somewhat uncharitably but not totally in accurately describes him as “Esau, the ruffian, the dumb jock, the stupid, easily-duped, hot-tempered, fearsome adversary” – Esau surprises everybody. He runs forward to meet Jacob, and gives him a big bear hug, and kisses him – Jacob just standing there, stunned – and then they both break down and weep.

Whoa! This is not what Jacob expected! Maybe not even what Esau expected. But it’s what happens in this incredible, unbelievable homecoming. Jacob is received by the brother he had hoodwinked and cheated, not with hostility, or anger, or resentment, or anything like that, but with an effusive welcome he could not have imagined in his wildest dreams.

And then Jacob introduces his family – the two maids and their children, and they bow; and Leah and her children, and they bow; and Rachel and Joseph, and they bow.

And Esau says, “What’s all this stuff, Jacob? What’s all this livestock about – the cattle and goats and sheep and camels and donkeys?” And Jacob says, “It’s a present, brother; I want to find favor in your sight.”

But Esau says, “I’ve got enough, brother; keep what you have for yourself.” “I’ve got enough, brother; keep what you have for yourself.”

Now I suppose you could interpret that as just typical Middle Eastern repartee – “I want to make you a present, brother”; “Oh, no, I can’t take that from you”; “Yes, please, take it”; “No, no, I can’t accept such a generous gift”; “Yes, yes, I insist”; “Well, if you insist….”

But I don’t think so, if for no other reason than the extraordinary thing that Jacob says as he urges his gift on his brother: “For truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” “For truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” And this from someone who had exclaimed only hours before that, in his nighttime struggle with the stranger, he had seen the face of God. “For truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” I don’t think even Jacob could have been that duplicitous. It is a sincere response to the welcome he has received from Esau.

There’s a bit more to the story – the brothers end up actually not going with each other, but going their separate ways – but we’ll end this story here, because this exclamation of Jacob’s – “For truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God” – is as good a segue as one could ask for to our fourth story.

Which is, of course, Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son – or the Parable of the Loving Father, as some prefer to call it. This story is so familiar that it hardly needs telling, but it would be a shame to skip it. A man had two sons – one older, one younger; not twins like Esau and Jacob – and the younger son asks his father to divide the family estate between them and let him have his share now.

What might not be apparent is that the younger son is, in effect, asking his father to drop dead. “I’m getting tired of waiting for you to die, Pops. I want to have what’s coming to me now, so I can live it up a bit before I get too old – like my boring older brother, for example – to enjoy it.” That’s essentially what he’s saying: “If you can’t die when you’re supposed to, at least pretend you’re dead so we can split up the estate.” This younger son is a sorry excuse for a human being from the beginning of the story, long before he gets into the muck with the pigs in a foreign country.

But go he does, cashing out his share of the property, and travels abroad to live it up. Live it up? What he does is to live it down. Jesus doesn’t say exactly what he did in that foreign country – he probably didn’t have to – but whatever he did, the kid “squandered his property in dissolute living.” Some of the older translations – the King James Version, for example – say “riotous” living, but what the Greek word in the parable actually means is “self-destructive” living. “Self-destructive” living. Which is certainly what it was, because the prodigal son ends up in a pigsty, “sent out” by the farmer who hired him – “sent out”; he no longer controls his life – to feed the pigs. To feed pigs! Jesus absolutely could not have described a more degrading, disgusting situation for his Jewish hearers.

And then comes the turning point: “He came to himself.” I looked that up, to see if there was some special word Luke uses. Nope: “he came to himself,” as simple in the Greek as it is in English. I’m not sure exactly what Jesus intended for it to mean. Traditionally, it has been interpreted as a movement toward repentance, and certainly the speech he rehearses to say to his father, and the shortened version he is actually able to get out, says, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.” So maybe it was a true feeling of repentance that turned him around. But I can’t help but remember that it was when he was starving, in the midst of a famine in that nameless foreign land, and “no one gave him anything” to eat – not even what he was slopping the pigs with; animal food, not human food – it’s then that he begins to think about how he might go back home. It’s when he was starving that he decided that even one of his father’s hired hands had it better than he had. It was his empty stomach that got him thinking about going back.

Well, maybe there is something more genuine in his trying to turn his life around. Clearly he has reached rock bottom in the new life he had tried to fashion for himself in a new place – that hadn’t worked out – and he realizes that he had by his own decision ended the life he had as his father’s son. So, as Robert Capon puts it, “he formulates a bright new plan of his own for faking out a quasi-life for himself: a life as a hired hand.”

So that’s what he has in mind as this particular homeless individual decides that, in the end, he has no option but to go back home. He’ll try to get his father to accept him as a hired hand on the farm where he had once been a son.

But as we know, the father will have none of that: He sees his lost son coming from a distance (had he been scanning the road every day since the son left?), and throws his fatherly dignity away and runs to meet him in the road. He grabs his son in a bear hug and plants a welcoming kiss on the young man’s cheek. But the father goes well beyond that welcoming gesture: as the prodigal starts his little speech – “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son” – the father interrupts him and calls out to his servants, “Quick, bring out the best robe in the house; put a ring on his finger”(a signet ring, probably, a sign of authority) “and sandals on his feet” (servants go barefoot, but not sons) and get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

Jesus doesn’t describe the son’s reaction – not the younger son, anyway – but I can sort of picture him standing there with his face hanging out – kind of like Jacob, as I picture it – stupefied and utterly shocked by this turn of events.

Well, that’s the story – at least the first part of it; the reaction of the older brother when he hears the festivities going on is something else that will have to wait for another sermon.

Four stories; four individuals for whom going home is, in one way or another, an issue. --- But where do these stories touch us, and our lives? As I look out over you folks, I don’t see any homeless people like Sheila or Ben – not recognizably so. I don’t know whether there is anyone here who has led a life of ruinous self-destruction and degradation, like the prodigal son; I kind of doubt it. I don’t recall there being anyone like that in this church family when I was here, although admittedly, that was a long time ago. I don’t even remember any real rascals, any wily tricksters like Jacob. I won’t speculate whether any of you fit that model.

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