The Parable of the Prodigal Father - Sermon

This sermon was preached at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge on March 18, 2007.

Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
Fourth Sunday in Lent

Dedicated to the Youth Mission Tour, and always to the glory of God.

If you were to take away all but three or four pages from all the books of our holy scripture, never to be seen again, and leave me with just a few pages to tell everything about God and God’s relationship to humanity and to the world, I would choose to keep the 15th chapter of the gospel according to Luke. It was the priest Henri Nouwen who wrote that “all of the gospel is there.” All of the good news is there. If you want to boil Christianity down to its essentials, simply read these parables. Start here, and the rest will follow.

It is usually called the parable of the prodigal son, but that title is not from Jesus or from Luke. You could call it the parable of the two sons, because the older son is also important, and better yet would be to call it the parable of the loving father, because he is the character in the story who shows us the character of God. It’s called the parable of the prodigal son because prodigal means rashly or wastefully extravagant, and that’s how the younger son loses his wealth and ends up hungry in a foreign land, feeding pigs and therefore ritually unclean. But prodigal has a second meaning, which is “giving in abundance; lavish or profuse.” That’s how the father gives to his sons: in abundance. And that is how God gives love, grace, and mercy to us. God is prodigal with love, and too often the church has forgotten and has tried to set limits to God’s graciousness.

I said that the entire gospel is in this parable, and it’s also true that my life is in this parable, and probably yours as well. I see my life in the younger son and in the older son, and finally I am called to see my life in the father.

The younger son goes to his father and asks for his share of the inheritance. Even before he leaves, he has burned his bridge. Inheritance normally follows the parents’ death. He wants an advance! In effect, he’s saying “I don’t want to wait around for you to die.” Everything that follows is a further rejection of his father. He leaves his family and his people’s heritage and goes to a distant country.

Isn’t this our story as well? We receive our life, our talents, and our opportunities as gifts for us to do with as we will. But having received as a gift, we forget the giver and use them to our advantage. Our true home is with God the giver. We find our home at the center of our being where we hear the voice of God that says “you are my beloved, on you my favor rests.” But we forsake our true home and look elsewhere, every-elsewhere for the love we long for so desperately. We follow the younger son to the distant country and spend ourselves dry for love.

But the love of the world has many “ifs.” I love you if you are intelligent, attractive, and healthy. I love you if you have a good education and a good job. I love you if you are productive and buy the right things. We never measure up to the ifs, and are left like the younger son, broke and unclean. But then, with hope, we may remember our true home. We may turn back to our home in God.

The younger son returns, and as he is returning, Jesus says that he is practicing his speech: “father, I have sinned; I am not worthy to be your son; please take me as a hired hand.” Isn’t it ironic that even when we are returning to our true home in God we think that the God to whom we are returning demands an explanation and apology, and that we will be demoted as a punishment. But the prodigal father has none of his confession.

While the son is still a long way off, the father runs to him. I always remember my seminary professor who would pause at this point in the story to remind us that wealthy Jewish landowners did not pick up their robes and run. It was not the honorable thing to do, but this father is not concerned with appearance. He runs to his son, throws his arms around him, and rejoices. The son starts his speech and the father drowns him out as he begins to plan the celebration. He gives him the family ring, a robe, and sandals, all symbols that the son is restored as beloved son, and no apology needed.

At this point we need to stop and ask a few questions. Is this kind of love practical? Isn’t this forgiveness a bit risky? Isn’t all this unconditional acceptance just a way of giving permission to go and do terrible things all you want and be forgiven in the end? What about our standards? What about right and wrong – what about morality? These are the complaints of the older son, and they are the complaints of the Pharisees who prompted Jesus to tell the parable by asking what he thinks he’s doing by eating with tax collectors and sinners. Aren’t you just giving those sinners permission to go on sinning?

I have committed many sins in my life, and I never went out and asked permission ahead of time - not from God, not from anyone. I just went out and did it. Showing mercy does not give permission. God entrusts to the us the good news of grace, and God does not need us to take up the job of enforcing standards of admittance to the true home where God welcomes us all.

One of my mentor’s was serving a church where a woman came to ask about joining. She had some important questions. For starters, what is your doctrine of hell? He told her that he has seen hell in the slums of third world countries where people die of contaminated water and starvation. That didn’t impress her much, and she insisted that the church must have a strong doctrine of hell to keep people in line and to make people pay for what they had done. Finally the minister asked her “how many people need to be in hell for you to feel comfortable?” She did not join the church. It was, perhaps, not the most pastoral way to answer her. But years later, her grandson, who was not particularly religious, died, and she returned to the church because it was the one place where she had heard something of the prodigal love of God for those outside the margins.

You see, the older son is as lost as his brother. The older son thinks that he has earned his father’s love because he has been loyal and obedient. He has stayed by his father’s side and worked for him all his life, and that is why the father loves him, or so he thinks, until the day that his younger brother comes home and the father throws a party. Do we think that God loves us because we have been so good? There’s a part of us that does, and this part of us has trouble with God’s grace for those who have not paid their dues like we have. We have been good, but we are trapped by our goodness to be bitter about the people get a free ride. In his book What’s So Amazing About Grace, that many of us are reading this Lenten season, Phillip Yancey tells about the minister who played with the parable by saying that the father gave the young son a good scolding and then threw a party for the older son to celebrate all of his years of faithful service. A woman in the back row yelled out “yeah, that’s the way it should have been.” And don’t we feel the same way, especially when we have been the responsible ones, making sure that things got done while other people did as they pleased?

In this parable there are two sons who are lost, and the father - who is prodigal about love - runs out to both of them to welcome them home. He goes to the older son and reminds him “everything that I have is yours.” Sometimes we are so lost that we think we have earned what God had already given us. We have trouble with God’s non-comparing kind of love. But what a freedom it is to give up our comparing. No longer do we have to see people as less deserving than us. And we can let go our anxiety about those who seem more deserving than us.

We are both the younger son and the older son. We forget the love that is given by God, or we misinterpret God’s love as something that we have earned. But when we are welcomed home, we cease to be either son, and we become the father. That’s what this journey of faith is all about: being transformed by God into the body of Christ, so that we extend the prodigal love of God without ifs and without boundaries. We welcome the sinner and the tax collector, we welcome the criminals and the hypocrites, the slackers and the type A’s, the people who never set foot in our church until they hurt enough to come looking. Like the father in the parable, we become free to love and welcome completely, because we have been loved and welcomed by those same arms. We find ourselves in our true home, at the center of our being, where God says to us “you are my beloved, on you my favor rests.”

Note: much of the insight in this sermon is indebted to Henri Nouwen, from his wonderful book The Return of the Prodigal Son.