Rev. Dr. Les Martin

Lent 4 – The Prodigal Father
Rev. Dr. Les Martin

Luke 15

Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever.

John 8:35

• In the Name of the Living God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen

The whole of Luke chapter 15 is about lost things.  We have the Parable of the Lost Sheep, the Parable of the Lost Coin, and the story we know commonly as the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  Three very different “losts.”  What unites them is the attitude of the seeker. The word prodigal can be described as “wastefully extravagant” – which is why it is sometimes applied to the younger son in today’s reading. However, a more nuanced definition of being prodigal is “giving something on a lavish scale.”  Understood this way, I am not so sure it really applies to the son.  Who is lavish in his giving in these parables?  Well, shepherds tell me that no shepherd worth his salt would leave 99 sheep to go after one. You just take the “acceptable loss,” however  regrettable.  The woman looking for her coin is also excessive, turning house upside down, and then throwing a party over one coin.  In like manner, our parable today is perhaps better termed the parable of the Prodigal Father, as it is, he who is lavishly extravagant, and giving to his two difficult sons.

He gives them things, sure enough. But perhaps the most important thing he gives them is identity. They are sons. The father remembers that they are sons, even when they both forget. The younger son in his distress concocts a plan: he will return to his father as a servant, a laborer.   He will replace his identity as a child with a contract: laying out in legal terms what he has failed to do in his error, what he will do going forward-  and so he will secure a place for himself. The older son, when the years of simmering resentment at being a “perfect child” bubble to the surface, goes even further: in verse 29, he goes so far as to proclaim himself a slave.  He angrily berates his father about this: reminding dad of all his good behavior through the years, and how he got nothing in return. But the father remembers the truth. He names them sons.  Now, sons don’t have to do anything to be sons. They just are. While the sons are busy, negotiating contracts and complaining about their servitude, the father remembers, and reiterates to them the truth: what they are to him, they just are. It does not-  cannot– change.  The father’s restoration of the younger son is holistic: he returns to him, not just his identity as a son, but the fullness of his position: a robe, a ring, a feast.  To the older, he gives the deepest possible affirmation: you are always with me. Everything that belongs to me is yours. You are not a slave, but a son.

We, too, are sons and daughters.  Paul proclaimed today that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation,” that “in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting people‘s trespasses against them.”  He continues, “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we would become the righteousness of God.” That is the truth of the gospel. We are daughters and sons, because it is the Father’s pleasure for us to be so.

CS Lewis, in his famous sermon “The Weight of Glory” says:

To please God… to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness… to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son- it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.

Building on this thought, Dr. Curt Thompson, in his book The Soul of Shame, writes:

The defining relational motif for humankind is not that we need to work as hard as we can, or at least harder than we are. It is not to do our best or to guarantee that our children will have a better life than we had. It is not about being right or the acquisition of power. Each of those (and other visions like them) play into the hand of shame’s anxiety. No—rather, we were created for joy. Not a weak and watery concept of joy that merely dilutes our sadness and pain. Rather it is the hard deck on which all of life finds its legs, a byproduct of deeply connected relationships in which each member is consummately known.

In a sense, the sermon should end right here. But it can’t-  it doesn’t- because so often faced with the weight of this glory, we pull back. We too, abandon our identity as sons and daughters, adopting instead a “contract mentality,” a “slave mentality” in our relationship with Father God.

It’s the ongoing problem with our repentance and our Lenten disciplines, isn’t it?  Instead of turning around during this season and facing our loving father who belongs to embrace us, using our spiritual practices to clarify the matter, we view our reconciliation instead as dependent on what we do, while at the same time lamenting all the missteps we have made.  Contract mentality. Slave mentality. Forgetting our true identity, we begin to bargain: 

when I quit drinking too much or stop the Internet porn, then I will be good enough, wait and see; when I quit the chocolates, start exercising, and can fit into a size 6 dress, then I will be acceptable.  I just need to get serious about my prayer life, or be a foreign missionary, or seek ordination.  Then I’ll be a real Christian.

Beloved, we are real Christians. We are sons and daughters.  The truth is, left to ourselves, we can never be good enough for adoption.  But the truth also is that we can never be bad enough to be excluded, because it’s just not about us. It has always been about the decision of God to be prodigal.  Paul put it plainly: Christ has reconciled us to himself, not counting our sins against us – or our spiritual laziness. It is finished.  Paul continues that in fact, Christ has gone farther:  he has trusted to us the ministry of reconciliation.  It seems to me, that before we can take the ministry of reconciliation into the world, we first have to reconcile with ourselves. We have to learn self-acceptance.

Self-acceptance is not the story we tell ourselves.  Contract mentality, slave mentality- that’s the story we too often believe deep down inside.  Hebrews chapter 2, verse 11 says the following- listen to this!:

both he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified have the same father. That is why Jesus is not ashamed to call them his brothers and sisters.  

Even our sanctification is dependent on Christ.  Forgetting this, forgetting that we are daughters and sons, we place not just a distance between ourselves and God, but a distance between ourselves and the truth about ourselves, if you will.  St Ambrose says:

“After, leaving his home and country, he went abroad into a distant country.” What is farther away than to depart from oneself, and not from a place?… Surely whoever separates himself from Christ is an exile from himself, not just his country.

That’s so often how it is with us, isn’t it?  Lutheran pastor, counselor, and missionary to East Africa Walter Trobisch in his book  Love Yourself says:

Jesus Christ accepts us as we are, fully, wholly, and unconditionally. He thus makes it possible for us to accept ourselves…

Henry Cloud and John Townsend put it this way:

 The law has not been done away with; rather, in Jesus, it has been fulfilled (Matt. 5: 17). So when we break the law now, we do not lose our relationship. We are forever in a state of acceptance.

We are forever in a state of acceptance.  To “turn around” to this reality is the repentance and the reconciliation we need.  The truth is, I am accepted “Just As I Am” because of the work of Christ.  Acceptable as needy, broken, full of secrets and sins and shame. Despite being “wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked” (Rev. 3:17) I am accepted and loved, and adopted in the waters of Baptism.  Who do we think we are, to despise the selves that Christ has loved to the point of the shedding of blood? Who are we to call slave or servant those that the father named daughters and sons?  Our Baptismal story- of love, acceptance, forgiveness, and sanctification: that’s the story we need to remind ourselves of if we are to be engaged in the ministry of reconciliation. It must begin with the truth of who we are in Christ.

Never before in my life has the world so needed the church to be ambassadors of Christ, active in the ministry of reconciliation.  And that is our call, but it will only work if we understand our own acceptance and thus accept ourselves, warts and all.  Now to accept is not to give up on the hope of change.  We can hope to change without staking our identity on that change, however.  Absent this truth, we inevitably proceed to act out of our secrets, shame, anxiety, fear and self-loathing, instead of the reconciling love of God, our identity as daughters and sons. Our relationships with others become a zero-sum game: someone will win, someone will lose.  If we can learn to see ourselves through the waters of Baptism, however, we can begin to see the world through them as well.  The movement of love, the ministry of reconciliation, does not come out of our own strength, nor does it depend on our own innate holiness. There is no contract we have to fulfill first.  We are sons, not servants.  God has cleared the way by reconciling all things to Himself and inviting us into a large and lavishly generous vision of humanity and creation.  We are free to embrace our inheritance: to become the “righteousness of God” through the encounter with Christ in the stranger and sojourner, in our neighbor, in the person sitting next to us here at church, in the person standing in the street, in the beggar, in those we disagree with politically, in all those calling for help. I am convicted that it all depends on our acceptance of the truth of our adoption as daughters and sons by a Prodigal Father- and our acceptance of ourselves. Without that, our ministry of reconciliation falls apart.  Walter Trobisch again:

The mystery is this: Only when I have accepted my self can I let go of it, can I become selfless.

The Fourth Sunday of Lent, Laetare Sunday, is often known in the Anglican world as “Refreshment Sunday.” Beloved, here is your refreshment today:  You are loved and accepted. The Father names you daughters and sons. No matter what you may think, you will never- can never– be anything else. And look around you: all creation now waits, in eager anticipation, for the sons and daughters of God to be revealed. (Rom. 8:19)