One of the most famous stories of all time is the story that we typically refer to as the story of the Prodigal Son. We have all heard it so many times that we are tempted to tune it out as soon as we start hearing it for the umpteenth time, and so we were blessed just now to hear Tom Oberjat sing it for us. And you may be tempted to tune out this sermon—if you haven’t already—because you already know how the story goes. But before you do that, let me just tell you one little fact about the story of the Prodigal Son that you may not know: it’s not about the Prodigal Son. And I’ll tell you more about that later.

We do need to look at this young man who is so famous. And here I’m tempted to ask how many of you can personally identify with him because you were prodigals yourselves. But I won’t ask that, because all of us have at least a little bit of the prodigal in us. And I could ask how many of you have prodigal children in your families, but I won’t ask that either, because any parent of human children has experienced a little of the prodigal in our kids. And so maybe that’s why we focus so readily on the Prodigal: that’s what is most familiar to us. We know what it means to have that burning desire to get out from under our parent’s control. We know what it means to think that we can do a much better job running our lives once we are freed from someone else’s system. We know what it means to want to just bust loose and have a good time without regard to the long-term consequences. And we know what it means to find ourselves in a terrible mess that we have made of our own free will. Beyond knowing the prodigal story in our own lives, we also recognize it in others. And, frankly, we sometimes like to wallow in it. We like to point out the prodigal in other people. The famous fictional preacher Elmer Gantry made a career of preaching about other people’s sin, entertaining his congregations with all the sordid details, because he knew that people especially like hearing about other’s people’s failings, and hearing about the shady side of life that we know is wrong and bad for us but also oh so enticing.

There are other characters in this story, most notably the Elder Brother. For purposes of disclosure and full accountability, you need to know that in my family I am the younger brother, and I have an older brother. So I have some good stuff to work with here, too! Actually, just like with the Prodigal, there is much in the Elder Brother that we can appreciate because we know the same dynamics in our own lives. We know what it means to toe the line and play everything by the rules, only to see someone else get away with murder, don’t we? And we know what it is to feel that someone else in the family is getting way too much attention. And we know what it is to want someone else to have to pay the full penalty for their transgressions. Maybe we can go so far as to say that we know what it is to want to see our enemies destroyed rather than restored.

There is one other major character in this story: the Father. Let’s put ourselves in his place for a moment. Good fathers give an awful lot to their children. They work hard so their children will have food and shelter and clothing and, they hope, a whole lot more than that. They teach their kids how to throw baseballs and how to put worms on fishing hooks. They let them borrow the family car and they take out loans for college. They go without, usually, so their child can have more. When your child comes to you and demands it all, now, that hurts. And when he wastes it away that hurts all the more. And when he throws away your love, your protection, your companionship, and your values, the pain becomes almost unbearable. But it gets worse. When your child disappears, won’t talk to you, won’t let you know where he is, and will let you believe that he might be dead, the word unbearable doesn’t even begin to cover it. Not only does your child destroy himself, but he destroys you, and your wife, and perhaps the brothers and sisters. Losing the money is only the beginning. Some of us here may have been this Father, or perhaps we’ve been the Son. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of such unkind, uncaring, unloving behavior, after a while you begin to harden, to hurt so much you can become very angry. Most of us, when we are hurt, tend to inflict a little pain of our own, or a lot. Think about the grief, the disappointment, the confusion, the anger that must be in any parent’s heart when a child goes so far off track. What would you do to a son like that?

As Luke tells it, Jesus told the story that we call the story of the Prodigal Son as a response to an accusation against him. Luke writes, “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to [Jesus]. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” (15:1-2) As far as the most respectable, most religious, most socially upright folks in Jesus’ day were concerned, for anyone to welcome the least respectable, least religious, least socially upright folks was the wrong thing to do. The tax collectors and sinners had totally blown it in their relationship to God. But here was Jesus, supposedly a teacher and messenger from God, treating them like his friends. And so Jesus told his story. There was a custom in Jesus’ day that when a child had done what the Prodigal Son had done that child would be banished from the community for good. That is the way Jesus’ story should have ended. But it didn’t. The story ended very differently because of what the Father did. “While [the son] was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” Then the Father commanded that the Prodigal Son be given a robe, a sign of honor, and a ring, the signet ring of the family crest that was a sign of authority, and sandals, something given only to children and not to slaves. And then, they had a party.

We all know Prodigal Sons, like the one in Jesus’ story. Nothing new there. And we all know Elder Brothers, nothing new there, either. The Father is another matter. In Jesus’ day and even in our own, we can understand a father who might say, “You’ve blown it, son. You spent your money. You made your bed. Now lie in it.” Or we might understand a father who would say, “It’s nice having you back, but you’re going to have to prove that you’ve grown up, and you’re going to have to repay all you misspent, and it’ll be a long time—if ever—before I totally trust you again.” But the Father in Jesus’ story does something new, something unexpected. He runs to his son.

This past Friday, the San Diego Union-Tribune ran a wonderful picture front and center on the first page that showed a young sailor standing in front of his pregnant wife, with his hands on her belly and huge smiles on their faces. The sailor is Petty Officer 3rd Class Thomas Hohlman with his wife Heather. Thomas is just back from a 4-month humanitarian aid mission. And they are expecting their first child, a boy, on Christmas Day. They plan to name him “Jack.”ⁱ Here is a good father who has come home to his son. God bless them all. In Jesus’ story, though, the son has left the father, and the son has decided to come home. In Jesus’ story, the father has lots of options available to him, but he takes the most kind, the most forgiving, the most risky, the most loving. As the son comes to the father, the father comes also to the son. Jesus’ meaning cannot be more clear: God is like that.

Two weeks ago we thought about the most important question we could ask God, and we learned of a scribe’s question to Jesus, about what is the most important commandment, the most important word from God. We learned Jesus’ answer: that we are to love God and to love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves. Last week we learned not about God’s word to us but about our words that we need to say back to God, the words of prayer that show that we are loving God and loving our neighbor. Both weeks, we learned that in order to love God and neighbor, and to learn how we can talk to God, we must follow Jesus, who alone is the final authority when it comes to teaching us about God. And today, we come to another question and another answer. If the most important thing we can do is love God, then who is this God we are called to love? That’s the question. The answer: this God is the one who loves you.

When Jesus’ tells the parable, there are two vitally important messages embedded in what he says. He is trying to tell the Pharisees and the scribes what God is really like, who God really is. God is the one who loves us, no matter how unloving we have been toward him. And, furthermore, Jesus is acting just like God as he welcomes tax collectors and sinners into his friendship. Jesus is acting just like God because he, in fact, is God, in flesh and blood. When we follow Jesus into his understanding of God we follow him into the knowledge that he expressed in his word and in his very person, that God is the one who welcomes us back home to him no matter what we have done.

God loves us like a loving father loves his son. Scot McKnight, whose book The Jesus Creed is guiding our thoughts this year, is one of many who points out that our understanding of God as a loving father is much easier when we have had loving fathers ourselves, and conversely, much more difficult when we have not had loving fathers. The principle expands, of course, to include our mothers, our whole families. From the beginning of life, we learn, for better or worse, about the reality and character of God from the context of our families. And that’s an imperfect system. Because the best human parents do not love perfectly. And less than the best parents can do great harm to their children by their inability to love. A psychiatrist once received a postcard from one of his vacationing patients. It read, “Having a wonderful time. Why?”ⁱi The fact is that God loves us even though we may not have learned the fact of that reality from our parents. God gives us wonderful times, his blessings. But we lose sight of that fact, or we never see it in the first place, when we have not been loved as children. We do great harm to our children when we do not love them and we have great harm done to us when we have not been loved. But that makes it all the more amazing, all the more important, all the more necessary, that God is a God who loves us.

The story of the Prodigal Son is really better understood as the story of the Loving Father. He is the one surprising figure in the story. Without his love, the wayward son and the judgmental son would have been left in their sorry states. But because of the Father’s love, both sons are offered a way back into grace, a way back into relationship with each other, a way back into being who they are meant to be in the first place. Notice how Jesus tells it, that when the Prodigal Son “came to himself,” he repented of his sin, and he went back to ask for mercy and forgiveness from the Father. God wants more than anything else for us to come back to ourselves, to become ourselves, to become who he created us to be in the first place. We can see ourselves in both the Prodigal and the Elder sons, and we can see that the way back to ourselves is through the love of the Father. And when we come back, we can begin to love like the Father. We can begin to love the Father himself and to love each other as well.

Some of you, like me, have been following the Funky Winkerbean comic strip for years. It’s not just a funny strip though. Recently, cartoonist Tom Batiuk has been telling the story of Les and Lisa, and of Lisa’s losing battle with breast cancer. In a recent episode, Les and a nurse are talking quietly next to Lisa’s bed where she is dying. The nurse says to Les, “Lisa’s systems are beginning to slowly shut down as the cancer spreads through her body. Our main job now is to try to keep her pain-free.” Les asks, “From your experience, what’s the last thing to go?” And the nurse answers, “Love.” In Tom Batiuk’s blog on the Funky Winkerbean website, he writes this: “For those of you who want a miracle, here’s the real miracle in this story. At its core, this is a love story. Grief is the price we pay for love, and this is a story about how you do that. We live in a Match.com world where most love stories focus on the initial burst of emotion, and not so much on how that emotion endures after time and fate have had their say. In a rather cold and indifferent universe, the triumph this sort of loving relationship is [is] to me one of the great miracles of our existence. Lisa’s Story is celebration of that miracle and how even death can’t diminish it.”ⁱⁱⁱ

I agree that the universe can be cold and indifferent. But God came to us in Jesus to tell us that there is a different reality, a higher reality, a fundamental reality that is, to us, miraculous, the reality that the Creator of this universe is, after all, a God who loves us. Because God loves us, we need to learn to love: to love God and to love each other. In the past two Sundays I have challenged you to walk with Jesus and to walk with each other along the pathway of spiritual transformation, into full maturity in Christ, into who God means us to be. I have challenged you to repeat to yourself many times each day, the Word from God that Jesus gave us, to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. And I have challenged you to shape your prayers to God each day, many times each day, according to the prayer that Jesus taught us. And today I am going to challenge you to take this truth into your heart and mind and soul: that God loves you. Above and beyond the Prodigal Son and the Elder Brother, remember the Loving Father. Every day, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, remind yourself that when you want to come to yourself, all you need to do is come back to the Father, and he will come running to you. Every day, practice the love that the Father has taught you. In every day of your life, and even when you come to death, practice the love that the Father has taught you. Let God love you and let God’s love love through you.

Amen.

ⁱ September 21, 2007
ⁱⁱ John Leith
ⁱⁱⁱ Funky Winkerbean website, July 11, 2007.