Sermon for March 31, 2019, on the parable of the Prodigal Son. The readings for this fourth Sunday in Lent, year C, are Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 and 2 Corinthians 5:16-21.
Have any of you ever run away from home?
My mom did once. She got upset about something when she was five and announced she was going to run away. Her mom said, “Ok, what do you need?” and helped her pack her suitcase. She got to the end of the drive way and sat there for a while, then went back home. Sounds a little bit like this story Jesus tells of a prodigal son.
This is a pretty realistic story, isn’t it? Lots of people grow up in a town, or a family, or a church, and then leave for a while. People go to college, move to a big city, and get disconnected for a time. Then, often after marriage and kids, they come back. Maybe that’s your story of church, or your family’s.
So if you leave the church for a decade or two and then come back, does that make you a prodigal son or prodigal daughter?
No, it doesn’t. The word prodigal is a title in some Bible translations, but it’s not in the story, not even in the King James Version. Lots of people think prodigal means someone who leaves and then comes back like this son, but that’s not what prodigal means at all. Webster’s dictionary defines “prodigal” as “characterized by profuse or wasteful expenditure; lavish; recklessly spendthrift.” It’s someone who’s “wastefully extravagant.”
The son in this parable is prodigal because he wasted his inheritance, not because he left and came back. I saw a news article this week titled “How Actor Nicholas Cage Once Blew His Entire $150 Million Dollar Fortune.” That requires some prodigal behavior. Sports Illustrated has reported 78% of NFL players are under financial stress or go bankrupt within two years of retirement. Prodigal spending.
Before we go farther into the story of the prodigal son and his return home, I want to take a step way back, all the way back to the Garden of Eden, to the beginning of history.
The basic outline of history is God creates the world and declares that it is good. Creation is in harmony with God. Then human sin—our sin—breaks the relationship God has with us.
God is still there, still loving, still longing to be with us, but we stop trusting God for life. We make idols, we put ourselves ahead of God, we stop caring for God’s creation and for each other. That’s sin.
But God doesn’t give up on us. God loves the world so much, enough to do whatever it takes to fix the brokenness our sin has caused. So instead of waiting for us to get our act together and climb our way back up to God, God comes into creation. Jesus Christ, the son of God, God in the flesh, comes and lives and dies to defeat the power of sin, to destroy the death caused by sin.
This is the story Paul tells the church in Corinth. In Christ, there is a new creation. The old has gone; the new has come. The old system of trying to be good enough for God, the old system of living and dying under the power of sin, the old way of living only for ourselves, all that has been defeated. The old has gone.
And the new has come. The new realm where Jesus is king, the new kingdom where death is defeated and the gate to eternal life is opened, the new system where the Holy Spirit empowers us to live for others and serve our neighbors, the new has come. Everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
In Christ, God is reconciling the world, Paul writes. God is working to return the world back to the way it was at creation, to restore us to the relationship God always intended to have with us. For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Martin Luther called this the “Happy Exchange.” Jesus takes your sin, my sin, the sins of the whole world into himself and puts them to death on the cross, and in exchange for our sins, Jesus gives us life. It’s the acronym for grace: God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. G.R.A.C.E.
With all that in mind, let’s go back to the prodigal son story. This boy has taken his inheritance and left town to make it on his own, and it doesn’t go well. He loses everything, and as he’s starving, he finally decides to go back home to his father’s house where there’s plenty of food.
We’ve talked a lot recently about repentance, about turning away from our sin and returning to God. It’s kind of the point of this season of Lent. If you’re reading Luke in order, he’s just told two stories in a row about the importance of repenting.
In this story, though, the word repent is never said. Verse 17 says the younger son “came to himself,” but it doesn’t actually say he repented. In fact, it almost sounds like he’s going back out of self interest – is that really what repentance is? Can repentance be selfish? Maybe it can be, I don’t know.
He comes up with this whole speech to his father about how he’s been sinful and is no longer worthy to be called a son and should be treated like a slave or servant. When he gets home, though, he doesn’t get to the part about being treated as a servant before his father cuts him off. The father doesn’t seem to care if his repentance is sincere or not, or if he’s going to relapse. He’s just so glad to have his son home.
As David Lose says, “Maybe we read this as a repentance story because the repentance formula – screw up, apologize, receive grace – makes sense to us. Whereas the foolish, extravagant, reckless – dare I say prodigal – love of the father doesn’t. Or at least it seems a little risky, a bit unsettling, perhaps even indulgent.”
We begin every worship service with a time of repentance, with confession and forgiveness. We say out loud that we have sinned. We ask for God’s forgiveness, while acknowledging we don’t deserve it. I hope we’re sincere. I hope in that moment of silence, we’re all bringing to mind the sinful things we’ve done, the secret thoughts we’ve had, the things we should have done but have left undone.
I try to be sincere in my confession. I try to sincerely repent, but sometimes in that moment of silence, I’m more worried about if my microphone is the right volume, or if I’m forgetting an announcement I should be making.
I hope we’re here at church confessing because we sincerely want to do better, but sometimes, if we’re honest, you’re just here because it’s Sunday morning and your wife said, “Get in the car, we’re going to church.” Or your mom said, “Quit complaining, because I said so, that’s why we’re going.”
Maybe you are truly sincere today. Or, maybe right now it’s really hard to repent, really hard to believe God is listening and forgiving and loving.
And maybe that’s the point of this prodigal son story.
Jesus tells us about a God who loves us so much that before we even finish our apology, God is already forgiving us, already starting to celebrate, already planning the party.
We believe in a God who has so much forgiveness to give out that it seems reckless and wasteful to us. It’s not only the son who’s prodigal; it’s God.
Quoting David Lose again, “God simply can’t hold back but lavishes grace on us so recklessly that it’s just plain hard to believe.
Until, that is, Jesus goes all the way to Jerusalem and the cross to show us just how serious God is about loving us, accepting, and forgiving us just as we are.”
The old has gone and the new has come. “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them.” Thanks be to God.
Amen