March 27, 2022 + Fourth Sunday in Lent + Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32 + Rev. Dr. Brooke Petersen
Last week we heard a parable with three characters- a vineyard owner, a gardener and his fig tree. It was supposed to surprise us, wake us up, cause us to scratch our heads and ask, is that what Jesus was trying to say? This morning is no different, but perhaps a little harder. Because today we confront one of the most well-known and beloved parables found in our holy texts. The parable of the prodigal son.
It is a parable of grace, a parable of forgiveness, a parable of joy. It is a parable of homecoming, where fathers hike up their robes and run down the block in order to wrap their arms around their children. We’ve seen it in pictures, most of us have heard it or even taught it in a Sunday School lesson. Which, I must tell you, makes this quite a parable to preach. I’ve heard more than a few sermons on it, and some preachers have gotten a little caught up in presenting this parable as something bright shiny and new, because we just know it too well. They preach it from every angle, from the older brother’s perspective, from the younger brother, from the father, from the other hired hands. One writer even suggested preaching from the perspective of the fatted calf! And I really have no idea how that would go.
I’m not going to try and be that creative with you today. I’m just going to tell you some stories, because what I am most struck by is the way this parable lives among us. So today, we will begin with some modern day parables.
Several years ago I was called jury duty. I spent most of a Monday cramped up in a chair waiting to be called to a courtroom. It was tedious. I was bored. And then, they called panel 21. Along with many others, we filed through the criminal court building and into a courtroom. It was there I saw him. The defendant. He looked like he could be a child. Young. Too young, really. His suit didn’t fit well. It was too big, just like his crime. Accused of murder with a deadly weapon. I made an audible gasp when the judge read the charges. What happened to you, I thought? What happened to you that brought you here, in a suit that is too big, accused of murdering someone? Don’t you just want to go home? Do you feel so lost, sitting there? Can you even imagine that someone might run down the road, hike up their skirts and flat out run to envelope you in their arms?
Then a clergy friend of mine called me this week, shook up by something that had happened in their church community. It was the case of a young man, only our age, who had struggled with depression his whole life, who couldn’t go on even one more day. So he left a handwritten note on his bedroom door to make sure that the hospital knew he had a do not resuscitate order when he took his own life. But what he couldn’t see in the midst of his pain was who was going to be left behind, that his own father would find him and would hold his hand as he lay in a coma and beg him to open his eyes and come home. Perhaps there was no one to help him come to himself, no one to remind him that there was one more place to go as he sat in the midst of the muck and the mire that was all he could see in this life.
I think this is why this parable sticks with us. We can see ourselves and our neighbors in everyone in the text. So many of us know intimately the feeling of being lost. Lost like all of these characters. We have been lost in giving everything away, in being extravagant and lavish in our love and our trust only to face the disappointment of someone we love squandering all we have given away in dissolute living. Or we have woken up one day only to find ourselves living among the pigs, so far gone that we don’t know what happened to the grand lives we had planned, filled with shame that we are beyond help, beyond love, beyond repair. And, so many of us have all been standing outside the door, watching the feast and celebration wondering if there really was a place for us, or if the party was always going to be about someone else. We have seen joy somewhere off in the distance but it has felt like the wrong time, not right given the circumstances, not deserved. Coming into joy has been lost to us.
What is supposed to surprise us about this parable? Perhaps that it lives among us, even now. We know what is like to see ourselves and each other lost in the midst of this world, and, yet when we are quiet, we also so often know what it means to be found and captured by grace and mercy. Sometimes I am utterly overwhelmed by how much is lost in this world, how many people walk around like the living dead, wishing that someone would even offer them even the pods that the pigs were eating in order to help them feel alive again. Sometimes I am utterly overwhelmed by how often we are so sure that we have gotten where we are all on our own, and the idea of helping one another, of trying to offer a hand to someone in need seems like it somehow throws off the balance of the world, it is just too unfair. But most of all, I am utterly overwhelmed that the father keeps on running down the road, keeps on sharing his inheritance, keeps on giving us the means to try it all on our own, knowing full well that the deepest life is always at home, in relationship with him and with one another.
When we open our eyes to see God’s word living among us, it makes it even harder to remember the beginning of this story. Because our text for today begins as the answer to a question. Jesus is welcoming and eating with some sinners, and so the gathered crowd of religious leaders starts to grumble. And so he tells them three parables- one about a lost sheep, that the shepherd cares so deeply for he is willing to leave all the other 99 sheep out in the pasture in order to find this one, because the 99 are incomplete if one is missing. And then he tells the parable of a lost coin, one woman’s tiny coin when she already has nine others, a little coin that she turns her entire household upside down to find. And finally, he tells this story, our parable for today, about three people, and I think more than just one brother who is lost.
And, I wonder, if Jesus sat among us now, if he would tell us other stories. Perhaps a story about how somewhere in this city there sits a young person who is facing the possibility of a conviction for murder. Or perhaps the story of somewhere in this city where a father is leaning over the bed of his son, wishing that he had the chance to come home again. But it doesn’t end with just the lostness of this life, in our biblical parables or in the world around us.
Because each one of these stories ends with a celebration, a shepherd that rejoices when he finds his sheep, a woman who throws a party for all her neighbors when she shakes out the cushions and finds her coin, a father who kills the fatted calf, invites his hired hands and his friends to celebrate because life has come out of death, what was lost has been found.
We don’t know how this story ends, the best parables never tell us. We don’t know if that older brother waits outside with a scowl on his face and envy in his heart. We don’t know if that younger son becomes a different man because he has been wrapped in this kind of lavish love. I don’t know what will happen to a boy on trial or a family who has lost a son. I don’t know if they will be surprised when even if there is grief, even if there is shame, there is also the possibility that they will know laughter again. But I do know that God is a God who searches diligently for us, who will find us no matter how far away we have gone, who will find us even when we believe all we are is dead in order that we might have life. And we know that our God keeps on throwing parties, keeps on running down the road even when we are far off, keeps on inviting us to the table, because there is always room, there is always a place, there is always abundant grace and mercy to be shared. We had to celebrate and rejoice, he says, because the one who once was dead has found life, the one who was lost, has been found. Amen, and thanks be to God.