And his odd benefactor, an escaped prisoner, living in a cemetery like one of the demon possessed Jesus has so much to do with in the gospels.

Pip is sent to play with a little girl named, Estelle who lives with a strange woman, the rich and cruel Miss Havisham, who was jilted on her wedding day decades before.

An old woman now, she sits in her parlor with the colossal wreck of a wedding cake still there on the table. It is covered in mold and spider webs and dust. And looks something like the Titanic sitting on the bottom of the North Sea.

The clock in the room is stopped at the moment she knew her groom was not going to show up.

Pip is led in to meet her for the first time and he takes in this Gothic looking woman, seated, in her now yellow wedding dress.

“Look there,” she says, to little Pip, “What do you see?”
“ Your heart,” he says.
And she rushes to say, almost gleefully, “Broken.”

Like much in Dickens it seems a caricature, except that there really are people like her.

I remember a friend .. He missed getting a commission in the military around the age of twenty . He never recovered from it. He worked in his father’s hardware store for years, but that single failure turned him into the saddest creature on earth. He was always stuck in regret.

Poem "In The Desert" by Stephen Crane who wrote THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE. Few know he also wrote poems.

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who was squatting upon the ground,
He held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
" It is bitter -- bitter," he answered;
" But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart

It has been said before -- other people can hurt us, hurt us terribly, but no one can do violence to us the way we can do violence to ourselves.

Satan, the "father of lies," whispers in our ears from time to time, saying,
" You are worth nothing. You've never been worth anything. You will never BE worth anything. You can't be forgiven -- you are beyond that, you know.”

A couple of seasons ago there was a wonderful production of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus her at Oregon Shakespeare.

In it, the scholar, narcissist, Faustus, strikes a bargain with the devil selling his soul for a life of extraordinary knowledge and experience.

2 angels one from heaven and one from hell visit Faustus several times in the play. The angel from heaven says repeatedly, “God’s mercy is great. Repent -- it is not too late."

But hell's angel scoffs at the other saying, "Of course it's too late."
In doing so, it panders to Faustus' pride.

To commit a sin that is beyond even God's forgiving – that is impossible, argues Jesus.

The greatest temptation of the Prodigal son was not wine or women. The greatest temptation he faced was to believe that he was unforgivable. That he is worthless. That he is everything his very proper elder brother thinks he is.

My temptation with this text is to race forward to the elder brother, or to focus on God as the father. No, it is best to desist and meditate on the boy.

Elizabeth Bishop does just that in her poem, A Prodigal. In it she opens up and shows us pictures of the boy while he is at work feeding pigs. The only job he can get in this foreign land.

The brown enormous odor he lived by
was too close, with its breathing and thick hair,
for him to judge. The floor was rotten; the sty
was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung.
Light-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts,
the pigs' eyes followed him, a cheerful stare--
even to the sow that always ate her young--
till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head.
But sometimes mornings after drinking bouts
(he hid the pints behind the two-by-fours),
the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red
the burning puddles seemed to reassure.
And then he thought he almost might endure
his exile yet another year or more.

But evenings the first star came to warn.
The farmer whom he worked for came at dark
to shut the cows and horses in the barn
beneath their overhanging clouds of hay,
with pitchforks, faint forked lightning’s, catching light,
safe and companionable as in the Ark.
The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
The lantern--like the sun, going away--
laid on the mud a pacing aureole.

Carrying a bucket along a slimy board,
he felt the bats' uncertain staggering flight,
his shuddering insights, beyond his control,
touching him. But it took him a long time
finally to make up his mind to go home.

The prodigal has a great psychological insight. While he is feeding the refuse from the farmer’s kitchen to the pigs it says,

" He came to himself.”

I am NOT a pig" he must have said internally.

This scripture's first message to us is simply, "Don't allow such a lie to
control your life. “ Don’t buy the devil’s line that you are beyond all hope.

In Psalm 139 of the old Revised Standard Version of 1952 the Psalmist says, “You are fearfully and wonderfully made,” speaking of God. But it made no sense. God is not “made.” In 1990 we got a new translation. The New Revised Standard version and there the line reads, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made." And we are. Even with all our foibles.

The apostle Paul wrote, "God shows his love for us that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." Had God waited until we were perfect, nothing would ever have happened

So remember, "No one can do violence to us the way we can do violence to ourselves."

Steven Covey in his book, 7 Habits of an Effective Family, speaks of the Airplane metaphor. The metaphor goes this way:

Every airplane is off course 90% of the time. They require constant attention. Tending. The pilot must always be working to turn it back on course.

In the same manner, no family is perfect, he writes. All families are dysfunctional.
The families that work are those where the players intentionally make choices to get back in the game.

But we can only do that when we go easy on ourselves.

Kathleen Norris, in her book, Dakota, speaks of finding a handwritten prayer in her Grandmother's Bible: "Keep me gentle with myself Keep me easy in disappointment" I like that. A ,lot.

And many of you will remember me quoting the French saint, St. Therese who lived in the early part of the 20th century. She wrote: "If you can serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter."

The converse of this is true, too. If you continue forever beating yourself down, there is no way that Jesus, or any bit of grace, can take shelter in you.

The Prodigal son would have known this very well.

Hear this marvelous word of encouragement from Fr. Richard Rohr:

"When you can trust that there is a part of you that has always said yes to God, that you can trust your soul, even if you've gone down a lot of dead ends. Even those dead ends will be turned around. That's the providence of God. Trust that even your dead ends, your mistakes, your sins were still misguided attempts to find love. Don't hate yourself, just be honest with yourself! Even your sexual forays, your drug problems, your alcoholism -- they were all misguided attempts to find the Great Love. Your heart of hearts says, 'I know the foundation of reality is love'.. .It's written in your soul, you came forth from it . Religion reminds us of what we've all forgotten and what our soul already knows. When we see God it will not be a new discovery. It will be a profound recognition of that heart and soul of yourself that is already in union with God."

The prodigal son came to himself after having been away a long time. He went back home and his father welcomed him. Welcomed him.
?The Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, has written a lovely poem about the kind of welcome home the Prodigal son gets.

Welcome Back

There were times you did not succeed.
Walking on the empty path, you were floating in the air,
lost in the cycle of birth and death
and drawn into the world of illusion.
But the beautiful path is patient,
always waiting for you to come back,
that path that is so familiar to you,
and so faithful.
It knows you will come back one day.
And it will welcome you back.
The path will be as fresh and as beautiful as the first
time.
Love never says that this is the last time.

I don’t imagine it was at all easy for him, even with the father’s welcome. The son continued to meet the judging eyes of his older brother. His own self-judgment continued to haunt him though his father had blunted it. But in a short time the healing begins and over years it can transform us. Transform us into what we can truly be in the minefield that is the life we walk in.

Let me conclude this sermon with one of my favorite poems. It is full of hope.

The Healing Time by Pesha Joyce Gertler

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.

Amen