Sermon Starters: The Prodigal Parent

Houghton Wesleyan Church

June 21, 2020, Father's Day

Text: Luke 15:11-32
Recording

Introduction

• Happy Father's Day. It's not technically part of the Christian calendar, but fathers are in the Bible.
• Reflected on a number of fathers... considered Eli in 1 Samuel. My son thought that would be interesting, but probably not uplifting.
• I finally felt peace about the story of the prodigal son. You'll notice I've titled the story of the Prodigal Parent. I'm not the first to notice that the father in this story may seem quite reckless in more than one way. More on that in a moment.
• A family had two sons. The daughters aren't mentioned. They must have been perfect.
• It is an ancient story, so the father had control over the property, and who inherited it.
• The elder son seemed perfect, although we will soon find not quite. He was the kind of child that you didn't have to ask if they had done their homework. You never worried about him getting a speeding ticket or getting drunk. They used to call him a "goody two-shoes" (and since I was once called that, there's nothing wrong with that :-)
• The younger son was quite different. He was the kind of child that gave you gray hairs prematurely. Notice how brown my hair is, a sign that I have perfect children. The younger son didn't do his homework. He was the kind of child that kept you up late at night worrying if he was ok. You might even get up and drive around looking for him, hoping that he was alright.

The Younger Son

• When I think of the younger son, I think of that first seed in the Parable of the Seeds, the one that falls on the path and the birds eat it up immediately. It doesn't have any time at all to take root. I call this sort of person a "spiritual Teflon head." Nothing spiritual sticks to them. They have no interest in God or spiritual things (and they're certainly not interested in the liberal arts).
• Kierkegaard considered this stage of development something like the "pleasure" stage. For those of you who grew up in the 80s as I did, you might call it the "girls just want to have fun" stage. You'll be glad to know I won't be singing it for you.
• So he comes to the father and says something like, "Dad, I noticed you're not dead. Could we pretend you are and give me my inheritance now?"
• It's quite an insolent thing to ask. I would be deeply hurt. Another father might be very angry.
• But the father in the story seems quite even-keeled about it. I was in a discussion with Houghton's Michael Jordan recently about the word confident. According to his definition, the father in the parable is a confident father who is not rattled by situations that would make other people melt in fear or blow up in anger.
• I will say that I am struck that the younger brother is receiving anything at all. You will remember the story of Jacob and Esau in the OT, where it seems pretty much all or nothing.
• This leads me to one of my first observations in this story: Our prodigal parent loves us all equally.
• By the way, I used the term "parent" in the title as a reminder that, while it is Father's Day and we are focusing on fathers, God (whisper) does not have a male anatomy. God's maleness is a picture, not literal. This story could just as well be about mothers as fathers and about two daughters as about two sons. 
• And the father gives it to him. This is quite remarkable. I don't think I would have. Somewhere we could tell another parable where the father says, "Son, it's not going to be good for you if I give this. You would later regret it if I did." Certainly the elder brother wouldn't have given it to him. 
• This brings me to another take-away from the story. Our prodigal parent doesn't always protect us from our own foolishness.
• The older brother no doubt thought this was a reckless decision. What a waste!
• You may know Cory Asbury's song that marvels at the "overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God." There are some who don't like this song (including my wife, so I have to be careful here). Mostly they don't like the idea of God's love being reckless. I've seen some heated Facebook debates about this concept (which is funny because nothing is ever heated on Facebook). The elder brother certainly didn't like that song. What kind of reckless father "leaves the 99"?
• As I reflected on the father giving him the money, a slightly different perspective did occur to me. What if the father had waited? What if the son had inherited the property and possessions after the father was gone? He would have still wasted it. But then, he would be dealing with his older brother, not his father. His older brother either would have flat out told him no or might have taken him up on his offer to become a servant. And he would have never let him forget it. By giving the inheritance now, the father leaves room for his full redemption.
• There are two reasons God lets us go. The one is the Romans 1 reason. There is nothing left to redeem in us because we have set our course and hardened our hearts. God lets us go, lets us spiral out of control, and the penalty is entailed within our own course.
• The other reason is redemptive. God wants us to wake up. This a third take-away I have from this story. Our prodigal parent is patient with our foolishness, and eagerly longs for us to wake up.
• We know the story. The younger brother goes to a far off country. He has truly left the building. I don't think we naturally get the level of offence that he does here. His world is an honor-shame world, not a world of individual guilt where it's all about being true to your principles. He insults and disgraces not only his father, not only his family, but he is an affront to his people and his God.
• The fact that he is in a place where they herd pigs is significant. I used just to think "Yuck, smelly pigs," but there is something more significant going on here. There were no pigs in ancient Israel. This is one of the ways that archaeologists can tell that an ancient site belonged to Israel and not, for example, to Philistines. There are no pig bones in ancient Israelite settlements.
• So this son has left Israel. And since the ancients lined up gods with peoples, he has left his God. He has insulted his father, his family, his village, his people, and his God.
• Finally, the son hits rock bottom. We know the story. The father takes him back, even throws him a party. What a reckless father!

The Older Son

• Most of you know the story. The older brother is not pleased at all. We might call him the "law and order" son. To him it just isn't fair. And of course it isn't.
• He seems to relate to Kierkegaard's second stage. If the younger son lived for pleasure, the younger son is oriented around duty. This is better than living for pleasure because you are living for something bigger than yourself. But because you are focused on rules rather than people, you can become oppressive to others.
• I find the Parable of the Prodigal Son deeply subversive. The father doesn't say, "Well, I'd love to take you back but first you need to find someone to pay. Maybe your older brother will do it."
• There is a kind of theology that looks at the atonement a little like this, like there is an angel accountant somewhere in heaven keeping track of the units of sin (maybe, "sin-ons") that Jesus has to mathematically atone for. Then on the cross, God calibrates the sun gun and zaps Jesus with exactly the right amount of penalty, as if Jesus has to dip his toe in Gehenna hell just long enough to pay for all that sin.
• But the parable knows nothing about this sort of necessity. The father is sovereign and has the authority simply to choose to forgive. Don't get me wrong. We need the cross even if God didn't. Perhaps C. S. Lewis gave us the best picture of Aslan's death working a deep magic. The sense that Christ's death satisfies the sense of justice God has built into the universe is also true.
• And Terry Paige would be upset with me if I didn't at some point give the original connotations of this story. It is of course a great story about how God will take us back if we leave him and how we should be happy when God forgives others we don't want to be forgiven.
• But the Prodigal Son represents the tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners of Israel. They weren't even trying to keep the covenant. They weren't even trying to follow the Old Testament. They were the spiritual cast-aways of Israel... and of no interest to religious leaders.
• There is a shorter version of the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Matthew. There was a father who had two sons that he asked to go work in the field. One said he would but didn't. The other said he wouldn't but did in the end. These relate to the reactions to Jesus. The tax collectors and prostitutes are those who weren't even trying to be righteous, they they accept Jesus and go work in the field. 
• The Pharisees, scribes, rabbis, and religious leaders were the "healthy" that Jesus shouldn't have needed to minister to. They were voted "most likely to be righteous in high school." But the funny thing is, they don't accept Jesus' reckless love, and they don't accept Jesus.
• But our prodigal parent is God and isn't accountable to his law and order children.
• The elder brother also disgraces and insults his father, because he refuses to join the party for the sheep that was lost and now found. We don't feel his shame, in part because we identify him and in part because we don't get the shame dimension of the story.
• The older brother in story story reminds me of the priest and Levite in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Some scholars say they didn't have a legitimate purity reason not to help (Amy Jill Levine), so that can't be the meaning. But since when have people not used Scripture as an excuse not to do the wrong thing. I think these two were hiding behind a purity argument not to help.
• Jesus makes a Samaritan the good guy. They certainly weren't thought to be "good." Pick the person you least want to love, the person you least want to be the good guy. That's who the Samaritan represents.
• But our prodigal parent is patient with children who think they know law and order better that our reckless father.

Kierkegaard's Third Stage

• I'm not a full blown Kierkegaardian. His third stage is a blind leap of faith. But there is a stage beyond pleasure and duty. A stage of surrender to God as our reckless parent.
• The younger son in the pleasure stage only lives for himself and eventually crashes in self-defeat.
• The older son in the duty stages does live for something bigger than himself, but it is not the person of God. It is the rules, and those rules are unforgiving and rigid. 
• Our higher calling is to be like the prodigal father. We submit ourselves to our reckless Parent, who loves even those who are foolish and stubborn.

Blessing

• Now may the God who is patient with foolish prodigals and stubborn older brothers, receive you into his kingdom of reckless love and welcome you with open arms into the eternal celebration. Amen.

Running to the Prodigal 6

... continued from yesterday.
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Of course many prodigals may want to change but be completely unable to do so in their own power. This is one of the great insights of modern psychology, to realize the extent to which people can be enslaved to self-destructive patterns of behavior. We can find models in the New Testament that are similar.  Romans 7 pictures those who cannot do the good even though they want to.  Then there are the demon possessed of the gospels. Psychology, science, and sociology have filled in a number of details on enslavement to sin.

God of course can free the prodigal enslaved to the powers of addition directly, but more often than not he uses others who come alongside those who cannot free themselves from some addiction or self-destructive pattern.  Psychologists call it an intervention, and it was the kind of thing Jesus does throughout the gospels with miraculous power. Some prodigals will destroy themselves and everything around them unless someone reaches in to them from the outside.

That leads to my second take away from the parable.  Followers of Jesus run out to them, run out to the prodigal who wants to return.  We run out to them full of grace, mercy, and forgiveness. Even beyond the parable, the spirit of Jesus would have us run out even to those who do not want to return.  We may not be successful. Perhaps failure is more often the outcome when it comes to prodigals, but that won't stop us from trying.

Who therefore was the main target of Jesus' earthly ministry? It was clearly the lost sheep of Israel. Again, these lost sheep for Jesus were not everyone, because "all have sinned." [1] Jesus' target were those who were blatantly lost, those who were most strikingly not included in the kingdom. These were the people most ignored by the righteous and the normal. These were the outcasts of Israel.

Who are our prodigal outcasts?  Who in our society have spiraled out of control?  Certainly there are countless children in our schools and youth in our towns who are on a path not only to their own destruction but to destroy many others around them in the process.  And we continue to have our share of prodigals enslaved to drugs or prescription medication, enslaved to alcohol, enslaved to poverty. There are those enslaved to sex, enslaved to gaming.

Most of these sorts of individuals do not have the power in themselves alone even to leave their "far away city." Their only hope is for someone to reach them, to penetrate their enslavement with miraculous power. Those of us in the West are privileged to live in a world where many non-Christian organizations and even governments have developed immense expertise in the human dimensions of human liberation. As Christians, we are smartest to work alongside these forces for good, realizing that God can use even a foreign king like Cyrus to do good in the world (cf. Isa. 45:1).

I want to make one final observation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son before moving on to others that Jesus included in the kingdom.  There are many pictures of what Jesus did on the cross, all of which probably give us part of the picture. One of the most popular right now is the idea that God's justice demanded a sacrifice, that someone had to suffer for the sins of the humanity.  Jesus did this for us and in our place.

There certainly seems to be some truth in this picture. Somehow Jesus' death seems to satisfy the order of things, the sense that wrongdoing calls for punishment. However, we should be careful not to assume that God had to do anything. To hear some talk about "penal substitution," the idea that Jesus took our punishment on the cross, it was almost a mathematical formula.  If the world had this much total sin, then someone had to be punished exactly that amount for anyone to be forgiven.

The God of Jesus in the gospels was not this sort of mathematician. The Father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son simply forgives his younger son.  He does not demand that someone else pay back the debt for his son. He simply has the authority to pronounce forgiveness. We should be careful not to make justice a higher authority than God himself.

[1] While the insight that we are all prodigals of a sort is a very important truth, we Protestants have so emphasized it that we have lost sight of those Jesus actually focused on--the blatantly lost.

Prodigals Today 5

... continued from yesterday
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So who are the prodigals today and how are we to treat them as Jesus followers?  Probably the most straightforward answer is to identify them with anyone who quite explicitly pursues a life he or she knows is wrong. Modern day prodigals have told the rest of the world that they do not want to "go work in the field."

Just to give perspective, there are a whole lot of us who go to church and at least try to appear to be good people.  Whether we turn out to be "older brothers" as in the parable is a discussion for a later chapter. The goal is for us to be like the father in the parable, to be a representative of our heavenly Father in our mercy and love. So I will return later to the question of hypocrisy and the more subtle sinfulness of the self-righteous.

But for now, let's just say that there are plenty of prodigals around as well. I could have said, there are plenty of people who have abandoned God, but I don't think a lot of prodigals experience their lives in such idealistic or spiritualized terms. To them, they are doing what feels good or what they want to do. They may not even believe that God exists or, if they do, he may be a fleeting thought at best.

Some prodigals know they are on the wrong path. They may be thinking they will eventually turn their lives around.  Or they may want to turn their lives around but find themselves enslaved to a pattern of self-destructive or wrong-doing behavior that they cannot extract themselves or change the pattern. And of course there are those that simply do not care. They are those who are like the seed that birds immediately snatch from the path in the Parable of the Soils in Mark 4--words of what their lives should be like go in one ear and out the other.

Again, the "older brother," the one that begrudges the prodigal, has his own subtle problems, but I want to focus here on the prodigal, the blatant wrongdoer.  Curiously, our realization that we "older brothers" have problems too has led some to accept problems as the status quo, rather than to see us as needing to fix things like the prodigal needs to fix things. But when we return to Jesus, we see that he wanted to see the problems of both individuals solved, not to create complacency with both sons as they were.

I would like to reduce our "take-away" on the prodigal to two points. First, followers of Jesus want to see prodigals redeemed. This works against our sense of justice. Justice insists that a person who does wrong receive an appropriate punishment. [1] Jesus wants to see the wrong doer reclaimed, forgiven.

This is not a "cheap grace," as if all the person who does wrong needs to do is say a few magic words. The prodigal son of Luke 15 was truly repentant. True repentance implies a real desire to change. The person who does wrong, says they're sorry, but continues to do the wrong over and over again, with continued apology, is either not truly repentant or perhaps is so enslaved that they cannot change in their own power...

[1] And of course the question of justice is its own question. One of the functions of government is to administer justice (Rom. 13:4). Systems of justice are arguably a different issue from the way we as individuals approach others.

Prodigal 4

continued from here.
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The sinners of these parable were not. They were truly "lost sheep" in a clear way. The Pharisees were actually trying to obey. The tax collectors and prostitutes were not. They are of course represented by the prodigal in the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

In the Parable, one son basically tells his father that he wishes he were dead. He wants his inheritance. The father gives it and the son goes and squanders it in a far away place. Because there are pigs there, we can be assured that this son has left Israel and thus, by implication, has left Israel's God. The elder brother later suggests that he squandered his inheritance with prostitutes. It is unclear whether Luke wants us to add this to his list of sins or if he wants us to think that the elder brother was imagining what he had done.

In Jesus' context, this prodigal son represented the sinners of Israel, those who had gone astray in a very blatant and obvious way. This was the son of the Parable of the Two Sons in Matthew 21 who initially said he would not go work in the field. They were not trying to keep the covenant God had made with Israel in the Old Testament.

These were the individuals Jesus targeted more than any else in his earthly ministry.  How amazing the focus of Jesus' mission was!  He did not focus on Gentiles but Jews (cf. Matt. 10:5-6). He did not focus on all Israel but primarily on Galilee in the north. Even there, he did not focus on everyone but on the "lost sheep," those in Israel who had lost their way. These were people like tax collectors and prostitutes.

Jesus' earthly focus was thus on redemption and reclamation, not so much in a spiritual or eternal sense but in the sense of bringing back to the Father those who had lost their way. This is the restoration of Israel like John the Baptist may have preached but with a focus on those who were particularly off track. It was a ministry of inclusion.

It is interesting to think of any ostracism or ridicule Jesus might have endured as a child, given the possible rumors that his mother had borne him out of wedlock. It would be easy enough given the birth stories of Matthew and Luke to imagine that Jesus grew up amid scandal. How well he then might identify with the outcasts of Israel.

In the rest of the chapter, I want to look at some of the marginal groups on whom Jesus seemed to focus especially. In addition to more notorious sinners like tax collectors and prostitutes, Jesus focused also on the poor and perhaps even on women. Jesus' focus on healing and exorcism were also a manifestation of this focus, which I will explore more fully in a later chapter.

Sinners 3

... continued from Saturday.
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After all, the Pharisees were actually trying to keep the covenant. Jesus never applauds the prostitutes for their sexual activities or the tax collectors for cheating the people. What he does is open the door for their restoration. Similarly, Jesus does not criticize the Pharisees for being strict. He criticizes them for having their priorities out of whack (e.g., Matt. 23:23).

I will return to the Pharisees later. For now, I mainly want to argue that we should only describe them and other Jewish teachers as "healthy" in quotation marks--implying that they were not truly healthy--in hindsight. It is not something everyone would have immediately understood at the time. In the Parable of the Two Sons in Matthew 21, they initially say they will go work in the field. It is only after they reject Jesus that it turns out they do not.  Similarly, the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15), it is only after the prodigal returns that we begin to realize that the elder brother is not as righteous as he may have appeared. As I have sometimes said, the Pharisees would have been voted "Most Likely to be Righteous" in high school.

But the Pharisees are really more a focus for a later chapter. Here, I am more interested in the sinners.  They are represented by the prodigal son in Luke 15 and by the son who initially says he will not go work in the field in Matthew 21. But the story of Jesus' ministry is a story of great reversal. By the end of his ministry, those who said they would go work in the field, the "healthy," turn out not to follow Jesus.  Meanwhile, those who initially said they would not go work, do. They repent and follow Jesus.

So we know in hindsight that the word "healthy" should be put in quotation marks, but quotation marks do not belong around the word sinners at all. These individuals really did start off sinners in a much stronger sense than the Pharisees did. It is at this point that our knowledge of Paul is prone to interfere with our hearing of Jesus--especially the way later Christians have appropriated Paul. We are prone to have Romans 3:23 ringing in our ears--"all have sinned."

To be sure, Jews did believe that no person stood self-sufficiently righteous before God. That's why there was a sacrificial system, so both the corporate and individual sins of Israel--especially unintentional sins--could find atonement. But this was not the focus of Jewish understanding like it seemingly has become in so many Christian circles. The focus was on intentional wrongdoing and on making the right choice when a person came to a conscious decision between doing right and wrong.

This is the standard of the gospels and, when we read him in focus, it is even the focus of Paul's moral understanding. The righteous in the gospels are not those who are absolutely perfect but those who consistently make the righteous choice when a moral choice comes. The concrete starting point for such choices at the time was the Jewish Law found in the Old Testament. But, as I will argue in the next chapter, Jesus was more interested in the motives behind a person's action and whether a person was acting with love and mercy.

The sinners of these parable were not. They were truly "lost sheep" in a clear way. The Pharisees were actually trying to obey. The tax collectors and prostitutes were not. They are of course represented by the prodigal in the Parable of the Prodigal Son...

Parable of the Prodigal 3

... continued from sometime.
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The Parable of the Prodigal Son is a case in point (Luke 15).  In its current form in Luke, we hardly notice anything Jewish about it.  If we know that Jews did not eat pork, then the fact that the prodigal ends up in a place where there are pigs might stand out to us (15:15).  But the story in Luke very nicely reaches out to us across time without its original overtones having to do with Israel.

So we read the story in relation to how eager God is to forgive those who have left him.  Any sinner, no matter how far he or she has strayed, can come back to God, and God will welcome them with open arms. It is absolutely true.  It is a story about a God who is more interested in seeing us healed and restored than in making sure justice is done.

Many of us barely notice the elder brother.  He might represent justice to us.  It is not fair that the sinful son should get such an easy path back.  He should have to pay.  Of course the elder brother is really more concerned about himself.  Where is his party?  He deserves one.

This way of reading the parable is perfectly legitimate.  It is perfectly Christian and fits with our values and thinking.  At the same time, this parable likely had a much more specific and concrete meaning originally, in whatever exact form Jesus told it.

We hear hints of it in Luke 15.  The Pharisees are upset that Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners (15:2).  This is the context from which the parable springs.  The sinners are the "lost sheep" (15:3-7), the "lost coin" (15:8-10), and the "lost son" (15:11-32).  The implication is thus that the Pharisees are the elder brother, the sheep that stayed, and the coins the woman had not lost.

It is hard for us to take what Jesus says here as it is.  We want to put "sinners" in quotation marks.  Are we all not sinners?  Were not the Pharisees sinners too?  We want to do that, but Jesus did not, and Luke did not.

In a similar context in Luke 5:31-32, Jesus flatly tells the Pharisees that "those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.  I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance." Jesus does not contest that the tax collector was a sinner, and he places the Pharisees on the healthy/righteous side of the equation.

This is hard for us to handle.  Surely Jesus was being sarcastic.  We know the end of the story, so aptly captured in a mini-version of this parable.  In Matthew 21:28-32, Jesus speaks of a man who had two sons.  One said he would go work in the field but did not.  Another said he would not, but did in the end.  The one who did the will of the father was the one who ended up going in the end.

This is a parable of the reaction to Jesus' ministry.  The Pharisees and others like them were like the son who said he would work, but did not in the end.  We have such a bias built up against the Pharisees that it is hard for us to see that most of them were actually trying to do God's will.

We should not criticize the Pharisees for trying to keep the Law.  Many of them were no more legalists than some of us are.  You might say you do not observe Halloween out of conviction. They did not do certain things on the Sabbath out of conviction.

Of course some of them had their priorities out of order too, just like some of us do.  Some of them were more interested in the rules than in people.  And some of us are more interested in the rules than people to.  However, as far as Matthew 21 is concerned, their problem was that they did not accept Jesus or the kingdom God was bringing through him.

But at the point of Luke 15, Jesus is still putting the Pharisees on the healthy, righteous side of the equation.  Meanwhile, the tax collectors and prostitutes really are sinners.  Jesus never accepted the sins of these individuals as okay.  What he accepted was the possibility of their repentance and their importance to God.

Jesus was decades before Paul would write, "all have sinned."  When Jesus calls them sinners, he reflects the fact that they were not even trying to keep the Scriptures.  The father asked them to work in the fields, and they said no.  What is important is that in the end they accepted Jesus and stopped sinning.

So the Parable of the Prodigal Son both speaks to us today powerfully and it had an original meaning in relation to the earthly ministry of Jesus.  The earlier meaning had to do to the focus of Jesus' ministry and its end result.  Jesus saw the "lost sheep" of Israel as the main target of his ministry.  He meant to reclaim the sinners of Israel for the kingdom.  They accepted.  But ironically, those who initially were not lost, ended up lost.

We read it as a statement of God's willingness to forgive and reclaim us no matter how far we have strayed.  It is also a warning for us not to begrudge others to whom God shows mercy.  "Mercy triumphs over judgment" (Jas. 2:13).