LECTIONARY 24 GLORIA DEI, ANCHORAGE
SEPTEMBER 16, 2007 PASTOR SCOTT FULLER
EXOUS 32:7-14; PSALM 51:1-12; I TIM 1:12-17; LUKE 15:1-10
Yours, Mine and Ours
Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we may believe and in believing we may obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
What a great gospel story we have for today, two parables that sing a high song of praise for God’s goodness and grace, God’s commitment to bless, God’s open-armed acceptance of all the rejected, God’s absolute eagerness to celebrate when the lost have been found.
And immediately following these stories of the Lost Sheep and Lost Coin, the gospel writer Luke includes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son, or the Prodigal Father, as some like to call it. Prodigal simply means wasteful or extravagant. Can someone give us the “Cliff Notes” version of that parable to refresh our memories?
We all agree on the son’s wastefulness, spending it on “loose living” – wine, women and song. But what might lead people to call the Father a Prodigal – in other words, how was the father extravagant?
In his book on Jesus’ parables, entitled Kingdom, Grace and Judgment, Robert Capon identifies within us a problem, a vexation with this parable: We may like the news about God’s extravagant love, heaven’s open-armed policy of forgiveness, we might like the idea of grace…but truth be told, we law-abiding, rule-obeying, God-fearing people are, almost to a person, more than a little suspicious, if not downright disapproving, of the father’s actions.
Let’s say that we’ve been asked to identify ourselves with one person in the parable…which would it be for you? The wasteful son, the extravagant father, or the responsible, yet resentful older brother?
Here’s a little test from Capon’s book that might help you decide. If you disagree with the father’s acceptance of the younger brother, and see in the pained older brother, a soul-mate – you know where you stand. If you approve of the father’s actions and would support his response even if the younger brother were to pull a loose living Part II, III or X, then you’re either with the father or the younger son.
But with whom would you be aligned, if you approved of the father’s welcome, and then fully expected the younger son to change his ways, to grow up, to admit his fault and start pulling his weight? According to Capon, that attitude would also place you firmly in the camp of…the older brother – the Law and Order, or Responsibility party…which is right where I would most often be found! We descendants of the Puritans can’t help but feel that way – hard work, and dependability flow through our veins, as, we are convinced, it should define itself in the lives of everyone else!
So what’s the heart of the issue for us today? Look at the opening two sentences of Luke 15: 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.” It appears that Jesus’ critics have something intimately in common with us Puritans. Or maybe those labels don’t really mean anything – maybe we’re all a lot more alike than we could ever imagine.
Maybe that’s the reason why Jesus told these parables about the lost being found and the need to have a party to celebrate that good news. Maybe the world is filled with un-grace, with us older sibling types who are convinced that the older brother’s complaint raises some valid points.
Take out Bibles and turn to Luke 15:29. In the blue Pew bibles, you want page 68 in the back part of the book. Listen as I read the conversation that occurs between the older brother and his father. (Read verses 29-32).
What’s the essence of the older brother’s complaint? He felt taken advantage of. Did the father address his hurt feelings? Not directly.
Yet mixed up in there is a wonderful offering of grace for the older brother. All that is mine is yours says the father to the son – an affirmation that they are blessed to take this foundational truth about their love and life together… for granted. Now, there’s a difference between taking something for granted and taking advantage of it.
At a certain level, we have to take for granted certain truths in life. I have to take for granted that everyone who is part of our congregational family is doing OK – unless I hear otherwise. It’s impossible for me to do an in-depth check-in with each person every Sunday morning. Heck, I couldn’t even do that with my wife. Imagine what Carolyn would do if I woke her up every morning and asked, So how do you think our relationship is today? And how are you going to assure me that you still love me? You who know Carolyn well, also know that her response would depend entirely on whether she’d had a cup of coffee!
So the older brother was feeling taken advantage of because he’d never been shown any such outpouring of appreciation and love. He believes that he has earned a party, that he deserves some special attention.
What he fails to realize is that his father would have done the very same for him if he’d been the one to wander off. And he also misses that incredible word of grace from his father: all that is mine is yours. All his acceptance, his love, his thanks…to say nothing of his material possessions, BELONG TO THE OLDER SON – they are his to do with as he pleases.
In other words, the father is telling his son, TAKE MY LOVE FOR GRANTED. I can’t love you any more because you do the hard work – in the same way that I can’t love your brother any less for acting like an idiot. It’s the same thing that God says to each of us: TAKE MY LOVE FOR GRANTED…then take what is yours, mine and ours and care for your brothers and sisters who are lost and waiting to be found, who have wandered away and are hoping to be welcomed home.
Yours, mine and ours – it’s true about life, it’s true about our congregation/ our community/our country/our cosmos, and it’s especially true about God’s magnificent and mystifying, accepting and aggravating, goodness-giving and question-causing gift of grace.
But at heart, it is good news – God intends for us to take for granted that we are loved AND that God intends to bless us with much that is yours, mine and ours, enough, in fact, to make sure that we can have a big party whenever a lost sister or brother are finally found. Amen.