"Coming Home"
What the story of the prodigal son means to us.
Part 1: “Humanity Against Itself”
By The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, September 14, 2003
Text: Luke 15:11-21
It was early in the morning and they hurriedly filled their knapsacks full of anything they thought they would need for a long journey. They were only 12 years old at the time, but my two friends decided that they'd had it with life at home - parental constraints, whining siblings and having to eat vegetables were getting to them. They created their own survival kit with all the accoutrements that one would need for a major expedition: Coca-Cola, potato chips, canned beans, a Mars bar and a flashlight.
And so, the bold young men went out on their incredible journey. Naturally, they told their very closest friends about their expedition, and we were to tell no one where they were going. Around two o'clock in the afternoon, however, I received a rather desperate telephone call from one of them. They had already made it to a phone booth at the edge of town and were wondering if I could cycle out to the secret destination to bring them something they had forgotten - a can opener. I got on my bike and went out to the rendezvous with can opener in hand, and met two rather weary souls who found solace in what I brought them.
I left them there, for they still had a long way to go. As the day went on, I thought of my two friends and their travails, until around suppertime when my mother received a telephone call from one of their mothers. The call was punctuated with gales of laughter. I asked my mother what was so humourous and she informed me that the boys had returned home because they didn't know how to cook the beans. Gnat-bitten, sunburnt and nettle-stung, they came home to a warm bath, some Saturday night TV and a hot meal - they were glad to be home. But in the morning, they refused to talk about their sojourn.
I've thought about those two friends many times, and every time I read today's passage from Luke's Gospel my mind returns to them and their search for greener pastures and the Promised Land. Fred Craddock, the great American preacher who has graced this pulpit, in writing on this passage said: “We must remember that this story is not really just about the 'Prodigal Son,' it more aptly called a 'Father and Two Sons,' for what is important about the story is not so much the wandering of the son as it the graciousness of the father.” We tend to become fixated on the sons and forget that the message is about the father.
If you look at the context of this passage, you can see that this whole story is about a meal. Jesus, at the beginning of Luke 15, has been attacked by some of the Pharisees who accuse Him of eating with sinners and fraternizing with Gentiles. The next parables show Jesus trying to tell the Pharisees that His mission and the mission of His Father is to bring the sinners, the Gentiles and the lost to the great banquet of Israel, to participate in the great meal that God has prepared in heaven for His people. So, the whole story is about a meal. It's about accepting and receiving the grace of God and the desire of God for humanity to come back to Him. To come home for a meal and a warm bath.
If you look at this story carefully, there are clues as to what happens to you and I as human beings when we wander away from home, all the while understanding that God wants us to come back. As I've studied this story, I've asked myself a number of very important questions, particularly about the beginning.
The first question is: What was in this young man's mind? What was he thinking when he decided to leave home? Luke tells us that this young man had everything. He had servants, warm meals, a family that loved him, a prosperous farm to live on. Even though God had given him so much, he decided that he wanted to break the bonds that he felt were constraining him. It seems to me that this young man was thinking that he could have his independence without any obligations.
Notice the language that is used in the Gospel: “The young man comes to his father and he says, 'Give me my inheritance.'” Now, in the Greek it really is very forward of this young man, and yet, it was his right. Any son could at any time ask for his inheritance. As the younger son, he had the right under Jewish law to one-third of the family estate. He had the right to ask for it, but his timing was dreadful. What he wanted was all the benefits of home without the obligations of staying at home.
Very often, my friends, we are like that, even in our relationship with God. We say to God, “Give me what is rightfully mine. But don't ask me to do anything in return once I have received it. ” In other words, we sometime treat God as if He were a constant flow, an elevator of blessings that goes higher and higher and of which we are the beneficiaries. Yet when God gives us something, there is an obligation attached to it. There is an obligation to use it wisely, to use it justly, to use it for righteous means and righteous purposes. But as human beings, we often want the freedom but not the obligation.
I've thought about that many times over the years, because as this young man said “Give me these things,” he was demanding what was his right but was turning his back on God. Ever since the beginning of the Bible and the story of Adam and Eve, humanity from the biblical point of view has been characterized as manifesting that selfishness. Adam and Eve wanted independence from God, but not the obligations. They wanted the fruit of the tree of life and of wisdom but not the obedience. Ever since, it seems that humanity has grasped after those things that God wants us to have, but by turning our backs on the giver, by turning our backs on home, by not understanding the obligations that go with the blessings.
Not long ago I found something I'd been looking for for years on the Internet. You know the phrase: “We have seen the enemy and he is us?” I've often wondered where it came from. It was written by the cartoonist Walt Kelly in 1971 on Earth Day, in his comic strip, “Pogo.” Pogo Possum was looking out onto the destruction of the world and realizing its extent. He turns to his friend and says: “We have seen the enemy, (we have seen the devastation) and he is us.” We are the authors of our own demise. We want the freedom to do with the earth that God gives us, but we don't think of the obligations that go with it.
That applies to so many facets of life. We want freedom, independence to be ourselves but we turn away from home, we turn away from God as if we aren't accountable. The Prodigal Son did that. When he said to his father, “Give me my inheritance,” he was saying “Give me what I want and be damned.” Not only did he want his freedom without obligation, but he also wanted his affluence without values. He wanted all the glory and the wonder that this money would bring him, but what he didn't realize was that when we are at our most successful we are often at our most vulnerable. It is often the most dangerous time.
A very powerful American Presbyterian minister named Dr. Watermulder who preached in Watertown, New York, but became famous throughout the whole of the country once drew the analogy of humanity in its desire for success with that of the story of Shakespeare's Macbeth. In a sermon preached in 1957, he had this to say:
Shakespeare's whole story of Macbeth is the story of a man who could not stand success. He tells his wife that the witches who had tempted him to a great crime met him in the day of success. The witches could not have bothered him if he weren't going places and weren't greedy for greater success. But his ambitions were stronger than his principles and he was ready to pay any price to fulfil them. After he commits his crime he declares, 'Had I but died an hour before this chance I had lived a blessed time.'
Shakespeare was right on the money. When we are at our most successful, when we have been given what God wants us to have, we can easily be seduced into believing that we are invulnerable at that moment, when the opposite is true. The young man had received all that was his right, and he squandered it on what is known as prodigal living. He made a deliberate decision that once he had received all this, to heck with any of the values that he had learned at home - he was going to live a licentious life.
Many people get trapped in that lifestyle. They get trapped in that desire for success upon success, accumulation upon accumulation, without any values undergirding it, and they realize that that success becomes the source of their demise. This young man, the prodigal, was at his most vulnerable when he was most wealthy. There is a lesson for all of us in that truth. He had forgotten what life is like at home.
The second thing that I think is important is the location of this foreign land to which he went. Luke gives us no clue, no sign of the foreign land. We aren't told where it was. It could have been somewhere in the Gentile world or any of the nations around Israel, but it was probably more than just a physical location, because it was not only a land of Gentiles but it was also seductive, it was dangerous and it was enticing. It was the greener pastures on another hill on the other side of the fence. The place that always looks better than where you are.
Dr. Karl Menninger, a Christian psychiatrist in the 1930s, wrote a famous book titled, Man Against Himself. Menninger said that there is one thing humans very often do: When we are at our most successful and have the most, we become self-destructive. When we have things, possess things, and things are going well we somehow turn on ourselves or we turn on others. We're never satisfied, we never reach a place of peace and contentment, we're always churning, always demanding. And in so doing, we very often turn on ourselves.
It seems like that when I look at the world around us, and the conflict amongst nations. At a time when there should be the greatest peace and prosperity, there is war and internecine violence. When Israel and the Palestinians moved closer to a peace process, it was then that somehow humanity turned against itself and we see spiralling violence there. At times when we are at our most prosperous, we do the most immoral things. Menninger is right. We have this tendency to not be able to stand success, and we do terrible things to one another and to ourselves.
I stand before you this morning with a very, very heavy burden of grief on my heart. On September the 11th no less, in the middle of the afternoon, my cousin's son was murdered on a university campus in Manchester, England. For no apparent reason, a fellow student stabbed him through the heart with a knife. Over the last 48 hours in calls back and forth with my cousins and uncle, the devastation, the sheer terror of this has really been brought to bear. A 17-year-old boy, the eldest son of one of my nicest cousins, struck down at the threshold of his life. In talking about this last night with my dear uncle, who is in his 80s, he reminded me in a true Christian sense that, in fact, two lives have been ruined in all of this - the life of Simon, my cousin's son - but also that of the young man who stabbed him.
And so it is that we do things to one another and we do things to ourselves in the evil darkness of another land. We do these things when we turn our backs on home, when we turn our backs on God. The biblical message is that that foreign land is a land into which any one of us at any time can wander. It might not be as spectacular as turning to a life of drugs or prostitution or violence or anger - we might not go to the very depths - but it is so easy to do. Even when it appears that we are at our most righteous and successful, we can forget home and go into a foreign land. And we can do so very quickly. The prodigal is a reminder to all of us that that land is always out there and we must be wary.
There is also something beautiful about this story. It is the answer to the question: Why did this young man come home? What brought him back? The Bible gives us all the clues: He came home because he realized that the real blessings lay somewhere else, that as a Jew he had been eating the food of pigs in this foreign land, that he was more hungry than his father's servants, that the real blessings were not just what he could grab for himself, they were the products of a loving home, of a father and family who had provided for him. He knew that home was the source of his blessings. I love the phrase that Jesus used: “He came to himself.”
He woke up. He realized that in all his wanderings, what God had for him was infinitely better than anything he could seize for himself. The beautiful thing in this story is that before this young man could actually say, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son,” his father went to him.
Ann Landers told a beautiful, poignant story about a grandfather. He had 18 grandchildren and five married children, some of whom lived nearby, and was celebrating his 79th birthday. He got up early in the morning, shaved and made himself presentable in case they came to celebrate his birthday. Mid-morning, he decided not to go to have coffee with his cronies downtown but to stay at home, in the event that they came to celebrate his birthday. At noon he made his lunch and decided to sit on the front steps in his rocking chair so he could see his family coming to celebrate his birthday. He waited for them.
After lunch, when he normally took a nap, he decided there was no time to have a nap in case they arrived, so he stayed awake and waited for his family to come. At suppertime he prepared the meal, got the cake out of the fridge. He ate his meal but didn't touch the cake in case they came to celebrate his birthday. By nine o'clock he was getting tired, so he decided as was his custom to go to bed, but in case they were to arrive to surprise him with a party, he put a sign on the front door: “Wake me up when you arrive to celebrate my birthday.” He went to bed, slept the night and by the morning nobody had come. He was alone. The grandfather had the meal all ready. The grandfather was prepared. He was ready to celebrate the time when his family would come back home.
God is like that grandfather. He sits - He waits, for any prodigal, for any wanderer, for anyone in a foreign land, to come back home, for the meal is always waiting if we return. Amen.