This past Sunday, Maddie preached about practicing the way of love when we mess up by looking at the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

She talked about how challenging it can be to show love to others when we mess up because we're filled with shame.

She then took a look at Henri Nouwen's best-selling book, "The Return of the Prodigal Son" and explored how Nouwen's journey with the Parable of the Prodigal Son might help us navigate situations where we mess up. Nouwen, over the course of his journey, realizes that he is both the younger son in the parable as well as the older son, but discovers that he is called to try, as best he can, to be the father. Similarly, when we mess up, it can help to remember that we are both the younger son in the parable, who God will always welcome home, as well as the older son, who needs to examine his own shame and resentment. Once we are secure in the knowledge of God's love and are able to take an honest inventory of what we might do better in the better, we can then try, like Nouwen, to be like the father in the story and extend God's grace to others who need it too.

This week's resource of the week is the sequel to Nouwen's "Return of the Prodigal Son."

In Home Tonight: Further Reflections on the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Nouwen revisits this beloved story through the lens of his own struggles with loneliness, resentment, depression, and belonging. Drawn from workshops and unpublished reflections written near the end of his life, the book is more personal and autobiographical than its predecessor. Rather than focusing primarily on Rembrandt's famous painting, Nouwen reflects on his own journey from the prestige of academia to life in the L'Arche community, and the painful realization that many of the elder brother's resentments lived within him as well.
One of the book's central insights is that gratitude is the antidote to resentment. The elder brother becomes trapped in a world of comparison, fairness, and earning, while the father invites him into a world shaped by grace. Nouwen argues that true homecoming requires not only accepting God's unconditional love for ourselves, but also learning to celebrate that same love when it is extended to others.

If Sunday's sermon resonated with you, Home Tonight offers a thoughtful companion for anyone learning how to move beyond shame, receive grace, and practice love after they've made a mistake.

Last Sunday, as part of our sermon series "Practicing 'the Way' of Love," Pastor Alison spoke about the importance of embracing truth-telling as a spiritual practice.

Alison said this:
"In this moment, when we see dominant expressions of American Christianity moving further and further away from truth-telling, with little regard for who is harmed in the process, I believe that it is more important than ever that those of us who seek to embody a more liberative expression of Christianity intentionally choose do the opposite: that we hold firm to truth-telling as an essential spiritual practice. A commitment to truth has always been part of what it means to be a person of faith. We see this clearly in the prophets of the Hebrew Bible who were tasked with speaking truth to power. . . . Many of us are familiar with the witness of the Hebrew Bible prophets and also of various contemporary truth-tellers. These exemplary individuals absolutely deserve of our admiration. But it’s also worth noting that problems emerge when a commitment to truth is delegated to the select “courageous” few. You’ve probably seen this firsthand — whether it be in a family system, a workplace, a community, or a nation. When there isn’t a collective commitment to honesty, one or a few individuals must take on the burden of truth-telling for everyone. And are these individuals rewarded for doing so? Not usually. More often than not they are viewed as disloyal irritants, as the black sheep of the group. Sometimes they are viewed as a threat and find themselves pushed out, scapegoated, or even or martyred for their efforts like Jesus was. Perhaps you’ve found yourself in this position or taking on this role before, as the one who refused to follow the script, who, in order to maintain your own integrity, couldn’t help but speak the truth as you understood it. I can tell you from my own experiences — it doesn’t feel good to be this person, to take on this role. It is far more life-giving to be part of a system where commitment to the truth is shared among many. And this is actually what God invites us into. We see this in the claims that Jesus made about himself and about the Way of Love; in the wisdom of the early church leaders around what it looks like to grow in spiritual maturity; and in the movement of the Holy Spirit in the Book of Acts."

Alison made the case that anything that helps us to “belong to the truth” as Jesus put it (in John 18:37) — anything that helps us to be more present with reality, or to more fully embody authenticity, or to create something genuine — can be considered a truth-telling practice. 

To close the sermon Alison invited us to consider and reflect upon these two questions:

• What might it look like for me to lean into truth-telling as a spiritual practice?
• Is there a next step that I am being invited into?

​As you consider next steps around truth-telling in your own life, you may want to revisit some of the possible suggestions that Pastor Alison shared in her sermon.

Perhaps you are being invited to lean into honesty with yourself around . . .

• Your life experiences — both the things that have happened to you and the ways you have responded to them. (Meeting with a therapist can be really helpful for this kind of work. If you need a referral, please reach out to the staff team.)
• What you are thinking and feeling on a day-to-day basis. (Consider setting aside dedicated time to think and feel; to practice the Daily Examen, or to use the RAIN Feelings Check-in.)
• Your likes and dislikes.
• Your needs and desires.
• Your hopes and dreams.
• Your strengths and growing edges.
• Your current capacity.
• The particularities of the season you find yourself in.

Perhaps you are being invited to lean into honesty with those around you by . . .

• Choosing to put yourself out there in new ways.
• Sharing a bit more of yourself or to allowing more of yourself to be seen and known in safe and brave contexts. (Perhaps with God. Or perhaps with people in your life.)
• Taking small steps to let people in.
• Being someone who helps others to feel seen, known, and loved for who they are.
• Becoming someone who can sit with people and help them to hold life’s complex truths — the ways that the world is both beautiful and terrible at the same time.
• Having a difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding — being honest about the ways you have been harmed or have caused harm to others.
• Speaking up more for yourself.
• Taking a step back to create space for others to share their experiences and actively listening when they do.

Perhaps you are being invited to lean into honesty in how you navigate and move through the public sphere by. . .

• Bolstering your media literacy skills.
• Strengthen your ability to fact-check and to identify reliable sources.
• Learning about an aspect of history or a current event that is unfamiliar to you — perhaps especially one of the painful ones that those in power want us to forget or to overlook.
• Intentionally seeking out the voices and perspectives of those in our world who have been silenced, erased, marginalized, or otherwise pushed aside; to learn from them and amplify their voices when you can.

Perhaps we are all being invited to lean into honesty through creativity by . . .

• Engaging in artistic practices that reconnect us to our genuine humanness and that expand our souls.
• Celebrating the ways that the arts help us to see the truths of our lives and our world in powerful ways.
• Working to support artists so that they can create without being subject to censorship or exploitation.

Perhaps, as followers of Jesus, we are collectively being invited to lean into honesty by reclaiming and reimagining the Christian practices of confession and repentance . . .

• Not in order to induce shame or self-loathing or an unhealthy fear of God;
• Or to pursue some unattainable standard of personal holiness; 
• But rather, as practices that have the power to free us up to be more fully ourselves, to connect us to one another in our shared humanity, to help us acknowledge our limitations and temptations with greater self-compassion, and to encourage us to hold onto hope that transformation and change are possible for ourselves and for our world. Because it is only by honestly naming the truth of what is that things like healing, repair, forgiveness, and reconciliation can ever become possibilities for us.

Also, the quotes and resources included below may be helpful you as you explore truth-telling as a spiritual practice. Give them a look!

Cole Arthur Riley:

• "Truth telling is a liberation practice." (@BlackLiturgies)
• “If we have any interest in representing a liberating spirituality, we must adopt a spiritual psyche whose deepest concern is not enlightenment or education but doing our best at telling the truth.” (This Here Flesh)
• "I’ve accepted that the whole of my life will be a pilgrimage toward the sound of the genuine in me. This may sound troubling to those who’ve been conditioned to believe that our journey is to God and God alone, but I say the two paths are one. My journey to the truth of God cannot be parsed from my journey to the truth of who I am. A fidelity to the true self is a fidelity to truth. I won’t apologize for this." (This Here Flesh)

James Baldwin

• “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
• “We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, is unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes one for the other.”
• “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

bell hooks

• “Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love. When we see ourselves as we truly are and accept ourselves, we build the necessary foundation for self-love.”
• “To be loving we willingly hear each other's truth and, most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.” (All About Love: New Visions)
• “The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want to be.” (All About Love: New Visions)
  

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"Truth and Reconciliation" by Desmond Tutu

"Love Speaks the Truth" by Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis for the Center for Action and Contemplation

"Why the Faithful Might Need a Complaints Department" by Kate Bowler

"On Living with Regret" by Kate Bowler

Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church
About the book:
Like millions of her millennial peers, Rachel Held Evans didn't want to go to church anymore. The hypocrisy, the politics, the gargantuan building budgets, the scandals—to her, it was beginning to feel like church culture was too far removed from Jesus. Yet, despite her cynicism and misgivings, something kept drawing Evans back to church. Evans found herself wanting to better understand the church and find her place within it, so she set out on a new adventure. Within the pages of Searching for Sunday, Evans catalogs her journey as she loves, leaves, and finds the church once again. Evans tells the story of her faith through the lens of seven sacraments of the Catholic church—baptism, confession, holy orders, communion, confirmation, the anointing of the sick, and marriage—to teach us the essential truths about what she's learned along the way, including:

• Faith isn't just meant to be believed, it's meant to be lived and shared in community
• Christianity isn't a kingdom for the worthy—it's a kingdom for the hungry, the broken, and the imperfect
• The countless and beautiful ways that God shows up in the ordinary parts of our daily lives

Searching for Sunday will help you unpack the messiness of community, teaching us that by overcoming our cynicism, we can all find hope, grace, love, and, somewhere in between, church.

About the author:
Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) was the New York Times bestselling author of Inspired, Searching for Sunday, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, and Faith Unraveled. Rachel’s words about faith, doubt, and life were featured not only on her own blog but also in numerous publications, including the Washington Post, The Guardian, and the Huffington Post. She appeared on NPR, BBC, the Today show, and The View. She served on President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. She lived with her husband and two children in Dayton, Tennessee.