Hilton Head Island, SC – December 18, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 15:17-24, 25-32
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - "’It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.'" - Luke 15:20, 32 (RSV)
"Why do you hang around with sinners?" the Pharisees and scribes had asked Jesus. “Why do you give them any attention at all? Why don't you spend your time with righteous people?" What they really meant was this: "Why are you almost always with street people and welfare families and unwed mothers? Why don't you hang out exclusively with people like us? We are the crème de la crème of religion!"
So Jesus told them why, and Jesus being Jesus, he told them by means of three parables: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and the parable of the father and the two lost sons. We have now come to the last of the last of these parables, and the last character in the last parable, the most important one of all, the father. And what a father he is! As the Jewish peasants who first heard this story recognized, and as we should readily recognize two thousand years later, this is no ordinary father; this is no earthly father; this father is like no one other than our Father in heaven. We have saved the best for last, because the father in this parable is Jesus' depiction in a human shape of the immortal, invisible God only wise.
As you recall, the younger son demanded his inheritance while his father was still living, and his father gave it to him without any questions or hesitation. Then the younger brother blew all of it on “riotous living,” so that when he was starving to death and was utterly without any other option, he decided to go home. He had it all worked out in his head what would happen. "I will get up and go to my father and say to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.'" On the long road home he rehearsed it again and again; "Father, I have sinned... I am not worthy ... hired hands." He would abase himself before his father; his repentance was going to be both exceedingly unctuous and exceedingly noxious; nobody would ever repent as thoroughly as he was going to repent!
But did you catch the significance of the way Jesus told the story of the father with respect to the return of the younger son? "While he was still far off, his father saw him": while he was still far off! The father did not just happen to see him; he had constantly been looking for him to return! Day after day, week after week, month after month, however long it was that the younger son had been away (and you can make it as long as you like), the father had been searching the horizon for his son, hoping against hope to see him. He had never once tried to put his son out of his mind. He refused to ignore him and the terrible suffering he had caused him. He would not listen when people told him to forget the youthful ingrate, so every day the father looked down the road, hoping that there his son might appear, his sad, impetuous, spiritually lost son. The father longed for that moment when he would be able to welcome him back home! He was his son, this young man, and nothing would or could ever change that; NOTHING! We are His children, Christian people; we are all children of God, and there is nothing that can ever change that! Nobody is beyond His love and concern; nobody!
"His father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him." He did not wait for his son to come to him; instead he hurried out to meet him. "He ran to him.” That is nothing special to us, but to Jesus' listeners, to the peasants of the Galilee, it was an extraordinary detail, an unprecedented detail. In that society the father was the supreme figure in every family; he was the epitome of lofty majesty. No father would ever run to anyone; it was far beneath his dignity. It would be like King Charles III running to meet a Pakistani bricklayer. It would be like Charles Shumer (a.k.a. “Chuck”) running to meet a Republican mayor from Waco. It wouldn't happen, it would never happen; but in this story, in this greatest of all the parables, it happens! This father runs to meet the son who has so abused him! Not only that, he throws his arms around him, and throws a big party for him!!
He tells the servants to kill the fatted calf, which means that the whole town will be invited to the party. A lamb or baby goat the family might be able to eat, but not a whole calf, and the father, who has had to eat crow among the townspeople every day since his son left, is going to invite all of them to a feast, and the purpose of this feast is to tell everyone that everything is okay once again, that this son who was dead, is alive again, that this willful and sinful young man who has kicked over every trace of human decency and has been lost, somehow -- miraculously -- has been found.
The father's love prompts the son's repentance; the son's repentance does not prompt the father's love. Did you catch it? The father's love prompted the son to go back home; the son going back home does not prompt the father's love. The grace of God is a prevenient grace; it comes to us before we do anything to deserve it; it works in us before we repent; it is grace, and grace alone, which causes us to repent. We do not repent and therefore respond to God's grace; we respond to God's grace and therefore repent. If you think you're such a fine fellow or such a wondrous woman that your behavior and manner of living merits God's love, forget it. If you think that, you're a stiff-necked schlemiel who can't see the graceful forest for the self-righteous trees. God, who is represented in this parable by the father, loves everybody equally, and there is no one who is more beloved by Him than anyone else. The prostitutes sitting in the windows of the red-light district in Amsterdam are as dear to God as the most virtuous person in the world. Cutthroat members of street gangs are as much at the center of the heart of God as are the monks in the monastery.
And that drives the older, self-righteous son to theological distraction! That proposition, that article of faith, that conviction upon which you may base your life, sends older-brother-types straight round the bend. Whenever they hear that claim about their heavenly Father, they immediately want to start dumping on Him. "Listen! For all these years I've been working like a slave for you," they tell God, "but you never gave me a fatted calf! You never even gave me an aged ram so that I could have a feast with my friends! But when this son of yours comes home, you give him everything! You throw a party for the whole town! He doesn't deserve anything, and yet you act as though he has done nothing wrong!"
And what does the father do when his older son so hatefully berates him? What does he do to defend himself against this unwarranted and insubordinate attack? Nothing! Not one thing! He does not lambaste his son for lambasting him, he makes no apology to anyone for what he has done, he just does it. “Welcome home, my beloved younger son, who has put yourself through so much pain and sorrow. We had to celebrate and rejoice, older son, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost, and is found."
Marc Davis was a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of California in Berkley. He wrote these words about the Big Bang Theory of creation. “Our current idea is that the entire Universe we observe, and unimaginably far beyond, was created out of a single vacuum fluctuation having zero energy content at an incredibly early time. That is, our entire Universe was literally created out of nothing. This notion is taken quite seriously by the professional cosmologists. There is a famous phrase that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but according to Alan Guth, the Universe is the ultimate free lunch.”
Scientists are convinced this is how creation first began, but they do not try to explain why it happened. People of faith in every religion that ever existed have been convinced it happened because God intended it to happen. Furthermore, we believe that the God of creation is a God of unending grace for everybody.
God of grace, and God of glory.
On Thy people pour Thy power. (Harry Emerson Fosdick – 1930)
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
Like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in His justice,
Which is more than liberty. (Frederick Faber, 1854)
Amazing grace - how sweet the sound –
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see. (John Newton – 1779)
Why do you spend your time with sinners, Jesus? Why do you associate with people like that? That's why; that's the only reason, so that maybe the spiritually dead will live and the existentially lost will be found. Jesus welcomed sinners into the kingdom of God, so that they might know that God also welcomed them.
When you really stop to think about it, grace seems dreadfully unfair, and it is unfair --- thank God. Why should God continue to treat all of us as His children when we don’t act like we are? Why should He love us when we are so frequently so unlovely and so unlovable? Just where does He get the authority to love like that; where? Why should God be God; why?
Henri Nouwen was a Dutch priest who led a community for retarded adults in Toronto. He wrote a book called The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons. In it he referred to that part of the parable where the father speaks to the older son, and he tells what it means. "God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, not because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found." Then Henri Nouwen told what he thought should be our response to that profound truth. "What I am called to is to enter into that joy." (The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 107). That's all; that's what Jesus is urging upon us in this parable; rejoice with God. Yet another of his lost children has been found.
If we believe God to be an elevated, demanding, exacting Father, one who refuses to give His children self-determination and independence, then we likely will respond to Him in like measure. But if we suppose Him to be a loving Father, who wants everyone to be an independent, loving human being, to be a god-like person who never ignores any other person, no matter how wayward or willful or insignificant that person might appear to be, the kind of father who never gives up on anyone, no matter how distant or lost, then likely we will respond as generously toward our Father in heaven as He clearly has responded toward us.
Christian faith constantly asks each of us this essential question: Are we sufficiently beneficent to accept God’s grace for everyone else as we are happily grateful to accept it for ourselves? How we answer that question will determine whether we are like the younger brother, the older brother, or another type of God’s children altogether.