What was going on with the second son? Was he just blowing his father off? I suspect not. I suspect that something like this happened. The boy, let’s call him Bubba, thought he had time to run pick up some groceries before going to work in the vineyard. While he was at the store he ran into his old friend, Ray-Ray and they decided to go to Starbucks and get a cup of coffee to catch up. After he brought the groceries home he was ready to go to the vineyard when his girlfriend called him to come and help her put up the new curtains in her house. Later, she gave him lunch to thank him for helping. With that chore done, he was on his way to the vineyard when the cart he was driving had a broken wheel. He decided he’d better fix it now because it was only going to get worse. This, of course, took more time than he imagined since the shop was backed up. While he was at the shop he realized it was time to renew his license plate and since the DCV, Department of carted vehicles, was right there he stood in line to take care of that. It was late afternoon by then, but he thought he still had time to get to the vineyard when he heard back from the Nazareth Institute of Technology. They had an opening for the class he wanted to take if he could hustle down and sign up right away. By the time he did that it was supper time so he supposed he could get to the vineyard tomorrow. While this is raw imagination I believe it is plausible because it sounds like my life, like your life too? Bubba was not ignoring his father. He was not neglecting his responsibilities. He was not disobedient. He was busy. He was too busy to do the one thing his father asked of him. The immediacy of the different situations in this life caused him to put aside the request of his father, thinking, I’ll get to it some other time. When his Father confronted him he doubtless said, “But Dad, I was busy.” Not disobedience, busyness was the issue.
Busyness is almost a virtue for us today. If we are busy then we must be doing something right. Our lives are full of duties to do, chores to accomplish, people to meet, a check list to finish off. After a busy day we feel like Little Jack Horner pulling out his thumb and saying “what a good boy am I.” The problem comes when we are filled up by what we are doing instead of attending to what we should be doing. Look at the epistle for today, St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, which gives us a different picture of how to act. “Your attitude,” Paul says, “must be that of Christ Jesus.” And what was Christ’s attitude according to the apostle? Not filling himself up but emptying himself out. “Though he was in the form of God he emptied himself.” Paul contrasts the attitude of Adam and Eve with that of Christ. They were trying to fill themselves up. Do you remember how the serpent tempted them? If you eat the apple “You will be like gods.” So they grasped after the apple, they grabbed for the gusto. They were going to make something of themselves. The attitude of Christ is not to get something that you don’t have but to give what you do have. Not getting but giving. Not filling but emptying. What does that look like for us today?
The attitude St. Paul urges us to share with Christ is creating an empty space in ourselves in order to fill it with God. That is almost the definition of prayer. If we are full of ourselves – our plans, our activities, our dreams, our expectations – we don’t have room for God. The son we are calling Bubba didn’t make room in his life for the wishes of his father. We do something similar when we don’t ask ourselves in prayer if what we are doing is our plan or what God has planned for us. What Bubba was doing were all good things but they weren’t his father’s thing, the thing he really needed to be doing. In our prayer this week let’s see if we can empty ourselves or all those worries and concerns which ordinarily consume us and, instead, seek to understand what God hopes for us. God can’t fill us with divine grace until we are empty of ourselves. When we do create space for God we have an attitude like Christ’s.
This is not such a foreign concept for us, made only for a spiritual elite. We see examples of it every day. Parents empty themselves in caring for their children. Their time, their attention, their resources are all directed not to themselves but toward keeping the little ones warmed and watered. We see this in the food pantry. Volunteers give of themselves not so they can get anything but simply to give to their neighbors. Often family members or neighbors go out of their way to make sure that a sick person gets the care and attention they need, not thinking about themselves but about the other. We see it every time someone coaches little league, helps a fellow student with a problem they can’t solve, give extra time to a co-worker who has to finish a project. These are examples of the attitude of Christ – an attitude of service, an attitude of compassion, an attitude of love. The irony is, when we empty ourselves, it is then that we are full. And to go back to my imaginative beginning – while, according to the saying, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, God can take Bubba’s good intentions and mold them into something better… as God does with us.
