Sermon:  “Reconciling the World”

Today’s Gospel lesson, Luke’s “Parable of the Prodigal Son,” is a favorite for many of us, I know.  It’s like one of the Bible’s “Top 10 Greatest Hits.”  The story is just so timeless and true.  As today’s hymns remind us, we humans have a way of “wandering from God.” We are prone to stray like the prodigal son from his family, or like the “lost sheep” in the verses of Luke 15 that the lectionary leaves out today.  The world tempts us to claim the life God gives us as our own and invest it only for our own pleasure.  It’s all too easy to squander away God’s blessings – health and strength, time and wealth – in what the Bible here calls “dissolute living.”  But I liked better what one translator called it – “riotous” living!  It always made me think of a young Pete Townsend smashing guitars and trashing hotel rooms.  Or the church Talent Show last night – “Amen” choir?

But that’s kind of a distracting cartoon version of sin.  Many of us – highly functioning, successful, people – live under the illusion we can be happily independent not just from other people, but from God.  Many of us behave toward God a lot like the Prodigal Son did toward his father – like many adults in relationship to their parents – we think to pray, or call home, only when we really need something, or have reached the end of our rope.  It’s only in our tired moments, our weakest moments, our most fearful moments, those are the times we are most likely to actively go back in search of God – to fall to our knees to pray words like those of our closing hymn, the one the choir sung so beautifully recently, “Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, help me stand.”  I’m sure that hymn, like this parable, is popular in homeless shelters, prisons, or drug rehab facilities, where people may very well have run through all their money in “dissolute living,” like the Prodigal Son.  But there is an even more important message for those of us responsible, upstanding citizens who had our lives “together” enough to get to church today – a day when, after all, we lost a precious hour of sleep last night!

First of all, it helps us if we remember that people a lot like us were the intended audience for this parable – NOT the usual Jesus crowd of social outcasts and sinners.  The educated scribes and devout Pharisees who first heard this parable were just decent religious people like us, but Jesus was trying to tell them something with this parable.  Remember how at the beginning of Luke 15 the scribes were complaining about his eating with “tax collectors and sinners.”  But if you think about how the world was back then – with the FATHER the center of all social authority – this parable had to have been effective, at shining a spotlight on what would have seemed to them an excessively indulgent father. Remember that back in those days, it was a strict patriarchal society where children obeyed their fathers without question, under pain of death? Children just did not ask for their inheritance early, and if they did, they wouldn’t expect to get it.  Children were the only social security a father had.  Land stayed in families for generations – it was not sold off as it might be in this country, for a son to go off and seek his fortune.  The son, in Jesus’s day, was unbelievably disrespectful – and he clearly got what he deserved, ending up living with filthy Gentiles and their pigs, starving and miserable.  Our focus like theirs should be not so much on the prodigal son (who is too easy to dismiss as a kind of cartoon-like flagrant sinner) but on the amazingly generous and forgiving father. Richard Stewart said that one of his professors at Southern Seminary in Louisville (Frank Stagg) actually liked to call this parable, “The Parable of the Forgiving Father.” 

I loved that we had a baptism on this day for “The Prodigal Son” – because in all the Bible there is probably no better story to remind us of “just how much God loves” us – words we repeat to each child in our baptism words of welcome.  As we adults drift farther and farther from the simple faith of childhood, it’s easy to forget the extravagance of God’s grace – even if we do sing “Jesus Loves Me” again at every baptism.  I think Jesus was brilliant, as a teacher, to address God as his “Heavenly Father,” because it reminds us of how much we parents do love our kids – even when are foolish, disrespectful, or go wildly and stupidly astray.  Our faith teaches us that God loves us even more than the most loving parent ever could – that’s incredible!

Some of you may remember me telling a story about my friend Bob, when he became a dad.  He was a lot like many of us here.  Raised in a big Presbyterian church in the South, he had followed the usual path – baptism as a baby, years of Sunday School and Scouts, and finally Confirmation and graduation – then off to college and out of the church completely.  But he got a surprising phone call on the very day his first child was born.  As he was sitting in the hospital room, staring into the face of his infant son, the phone rang.  On the other end was the pastor of his childhood, retired but still in touch with my friend’s parents.  “Bob,” he said, “ this is Pastor So-and-So.  Remember that one day in my Confirmation Class when I asked you what the meaning of God’s Grace was, and you said, ‘I dunno’?  Do remember what I said?”  And my friend said he started to cry.  But he pulled it together enough to say, “You said one day, when I held my own son in my arms, I would understand just how much God loves me, for absolutely no good reason at all.”  “Yep,” the Pastor said.  “Congratulations,” he said. “You now have finally passed Confirmation.”  My friend laughed.  “But you let me join the church anyway, you know, Pastor.”  “Yep,” he said.  “Isn’t God’s Grace amazing?”

The God we get to know, after all, as the “forgiving Father” in the Parable of the Prodigal Son is actually not just amazing, he is completely over-the-top.  That’s why, back when I was in seminary, my worship professor and thesis advisor, Doug Adams, liked to call this story, “The Parable of the Foolish Father.”  He’s very embarrassing – like a mom dropping off her teenage son at school calling out, “I love you, honey bear.  Have a great day, and be a good boy!”  God longs for us to return the greeting, not just with good manners and respect, but with real enthusiasm and joy.

This work Christ does, reconciling the world to himself with complete self-sacrifice and humility, is not logical or practical – any more than the absurd amount of love most parents give their children. But it has the power to work miracles, to make peace and restore souls – to literally save the world.  Let us never hesitate to join Christ as ambassadors of reconciliation.  Let us call the world to a bountiful feast of grace – a life of joy and thanksgiving in covenant with one another, in the shelter of God’s forgiving love. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.