March 14, 2010
Livin’ on the Edge - Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadTiger Woods, Mark Sanford, John Edwards … I could name more… are all finished. We all know what they did, and there’s really no point in me telling you, but I will anyway minus a few details. Tiger Woods was arguably the best golf player that the world has ever seen. He was also considered a world-class person. Then we found out that he had a few other extracurricular activities, actually lots of them, and well, he’s pretty much finished. He may return to golf one day, but will never be what he once was. Mark Sanford is a joke. I have even made a joke about him from this very pulpit, promising ya’ll one day that I had returned from a vacation at Edisto Island and not on the Appalachian Trail. I think I might still have the Newsweek article written not long before that touting him as a rising star in the Republican Party, in fact maybe even a presidential candidate. Not now. He’s a joke, and he’s finished. John Edwards, of course, almost was president, which is frightening. He was a candidate for president two times and won the democratic nomination for Vice President in 2004. Then he had a few extracurricular activities, while his wife was dying of cancer, and he is now finished. I double dog dare that $400 hair cut, sappy smiled man to come by here asking for my vote. John Edwards is finished, DUN, and so is Mark Sanford, and so is Tiger Woods.
Amen to that. They deserve it. Therefore, the story of the Prodigal Son out of Luke 15 (Luke is the only Gospel that records it) gets under my skin. I have always sympathized with the older brother in this story. The older brother could have asked for his inheritance, too, but he did not, because he was faithful. He was a man of honor and duty. And yet, by the end of this story, the faithful, older brother is the one on the outside, in the same jeopardy actually that his younger brother was in earlier. We don’t know whether the older brother comes back or not. At the end of the story, he’s still thinking about it.
His little brother, on the other hand, is in. He was a spoiled rotten, inconsiderate brat. We have the perception that he was just a good-timing old country boy. Well he wasn’t. His father had been gracious with him to a fault, and the prodigal son stomped all over his father for it. He took half his father’s money, before he was dead. Could you imagine asking your father for half his estate, even though he wasn’t dead yet, because he was as good as dead to you? Can you imagine that? That’s what the prodigal son did, decimating his family. And then he blew all that money on goodness knows what. He ended up so low, that he not only had to slop pigs for a living (which was the bottom of the barrel for a 1st Century Jew), he even had to ask for some of that slop himself. So he devised a plan to come back, not to reconcile with his father, but to simply to find a better way to get by. Even his father’s slaves lived better than he was at the time, he thought, so he could go be one of them, if his father would take him, if his father would even let him darken the door.
Yet, he didn’t even have to darken the door. His father took off and met him before he even got to the door. His father simply took the boy back. No penance required, no working your way back into the family. The boy didn’t even say, “I’m sorry.” His father welcomed him home even with red carpet. This story drives my righteous self crazy. I am the older brother in this story.
In fact, I’m looking at a room full of older brothers. We have worked hard and contributed to society. We have come to Church, and we have been faithful even when it was not convenient. We could have taken the money and run, too, and it sure would have been easier if we had. Yet, we are the ones in this story who end up on the outside looking in. Jesus told this story originally to the Scribes and Pharisees. They could not accept the fact that Jesus ate with the scum of the earth and not with them. Jesus compares them to the older brother, who cannot accept a God so loving and forgiving. Most of the time that you read “Pharisee” or “Scribe” in the Bible, you can substitute us for it. We are the ones who end up on the outside here. As much as we do for the Kingdom, that ought to drive us crazy.
In fact, come to think of it, a lot of stories in Scripture ought to drive us crazy, if we pay attention to them and if we’re honest. Just four chapters after this, Jesus runs into a tax collector named Zaccheaus. Like the prodigal son, we often view tax collectors as good hearted guys who skimmed a little off the top. Children starved to death because of tax collectors. Like the prodigal son, tax collectors were the scum of the earth, and they did not deserve mercy. Yet Jesus, in Luke 19, not only gave Zacceaus mercy, he didn’t even ask him any questions. He was just in. In fact, he even hunted Zaccheaus down. It’s maddening. In Matthew 20, Jesus tells the parable of these workers who show up at a vineyard to work. Actually, the owner went out to find them. He got some on time, at 8:00 in the morning. Imagine that. Some show up at noon, and some at 3:00. Some even have the audacity to show up one hour before quitin’ time. And you know what? They all got paid the same thing. Is God really like that?
So if you want to know my personal opinion on the prodigal son, I agree with the older brother. We all do, because we are all older brothers. In verses four through seven of this very chapter, Jesus talks about a shepherd losing one sheep out of a hundred, and abandoning the other ninety nine to find that one. In verses seven through ten, he talks about a woman who lost a few coins and turned her house upside down to find them. In all of that, we’re not the lost ones, you see. We’re with the ninety nine who to followed the shepherd. So what do we, the other ninety-nine, do? What does the older brother do? That question haunts me.
I went to Army Basic Training at Fort Benning, GA, after my freshman year in college. I had more free time my Freshman year than any other year of my life. And then I went to Fort Benning, where I had ten minutes of free time every day, most days, sometimes, if I was lucky. It was called, “troop personal time,” and it was ten minutes of very limited free time. We could write letters, polish our boots, relax, whatever. It was by the far the best time of the day. I lived for that short time. It was not a right. It wasn’t even a privilege. Sometimes we got it, and sometimes we didn’t. Whenever we did get it, it was pure grace, plain and simple.
That’s what I think the older brother forgot. That’s what I think we forget. Life is a series, I have learned, of choices that we make, and choices that we don’t make but that happen anyway. That’s what this is really about, isn’t it. The prodigal son made bad choices, and the older son – we – made good choices. And choices are indeed very important. But the biggest factor in our lives is the thing that happens anyway. I’m a runner. I take a lot of pride in running. I pride myself that I choose to do things with my feet that most people can’t do. Now I may have chosen how to use my feet, but that I ever had my feet to begin with is grace. I forget that sometimes. Some people don’t have feet and some do, but they can’t move them. I’ve got good feet, and that’s grace. I chose to marry up. That was a good move on my part. But that she said yes, and that we ever met in the first place, was grace. The best example was just a few weeks ago, when my oldest daughter, Julia, brought Cindy to Church. Cindy is her little horse on a stick that she commandeered at my parents’ house last Christmas. During the passing of the peace that Sunday, Julia took Cindy up to me and wrapped her arms around me and gave me a hug. “What in the world,” asked Clint Burke (the worship assistant that day), “did you ever do to deserve that?”
I think that’s the hinge in this story that we so often forget. Maybe the prodigal son did get a free pass. But so do we. It’s called life. There’s one little tid-bit here that I have only mentioned in passing so far. That’s the father. This story really isn’t about either son as much as it’s about the father. The father gave both his boys an abundance of grace, none of which either boy earned. There were many other things that the older brother could have been that would have been far worse. But he was that father’s son, which, with this particular father, was the greatest blessing in the world. And it is with our Father, too.
If you look back on your life and if you are honest, you will clearly see that the most important things in your life were all out of your control. They are all gifts, none of which you earned. Just go back and look at it one day. But it’s not about things. It’s about who we are. And who are we? We are God’s beloved children. God has given us a stunning world. God has given us a stunning day. You know that breath that you just took? God gave it to you. God has given us life. God has given us himself. All of that is grace. Now sometimes we make bad choices in life that put us on the edge, like the prodigal son was. But the worst choice that we can make is to deceive ourselves into thinking that we have earned our most important status, and therefore others have not. This story is about the father, that’s the grace. Our story is about the Father, and that’s grace. God has given us all grace. Now if we don’t see that, we are the ones who are on the edge. So may we give thanks to and for the Father for giving us grace.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
