I've lost my voice. All right. Let me set this over here. Have you all ever seen such an ugly flannel shirt? You're probably wondering what a respectable pastor like myself is doing with a flannel like this. At some point it became my goal in life to buy flannel shirts that were ugly enough that my daughters would not steal them out of my closet. I'll let you know this winter if it worked. I mean, I used to have enough flannels that if this pasturing thing didn't work out, I could become a truck driver really easily. And my closet's empty now. I don't know what happened. What's that? And I got the boots to go with it. Yeah, that's right, too. Yeah, exactly. Maybe I'm in the wrong calling. There are some Saturday nights where being a truck driver seems really attractive. I want to start tonight with a few stories. Now, I have to tell you, I don't tell a lot of stories, so y'all are a very special group. I'm kind of a private person. Don't like to share a lot about myself. Certainly don't like to tell stories. I never tell stories about my own family. My kids will not allow that. But even other kinds of stories, I generally don't tell. But tonight I'm going to tell you a few stories. Names are going to be changed to protect various people, but these are all stories out of my own experience. We're going to be looking at Luke 15 tonight, and just as in Luke 15 Jesus tells three stories, three parables, I've got three stories to tell you. First story comes from my high school days. I grew up in Chicago. I went to a large public school. My public school was filled with nominal Orthodox and Roman Catholic folks. Not, you know, really no evangelicals to speak of, but lots and lots of Roman Catholic and Orthodox families in the area where I lived. In fact, we had so many Roman Catholic families, the public school I went to offered not only Latin, which is probably not that unusual for a public school, but even offered Koine Greek as a way of trying to keep the Roman Catholic families from sending their kids to the parochial schools. They would say, hey, look, you can send your kid to the public system, keep them in the public system, and we'll even give them Koine Greek here. But very, very few of those families were faithful. Very few of the kids that I knew were faithful in any meaningful way in terms of the practice of their faith. In my class, and again I went to a big high school and I played sports, I did extracurriculars, I was involved in all kinds of stuff. I did not know a single guy, okay, a single male who was a faithful Christian in my grade, a faithful evangelical Christian in my grade. I knew girls in my grade, I knew guys in the grade above me, in the grade below me, but I did not know anybody in my grade. There just weren't any. So I certainly felt very isolated. Now I was involved in my youth group at church, and there I knew people from other schools in my grade, guys from other schools who were in my same grade who were faithful Christians. I was involved in Young Life in my high school. And what's interesting to me, looking back on it, is occasionally I would invite friends to my church youth group or to Young Life with the hope that somehow they'd come with me and somehow they'd hear something that would spark some kind of interest in the gospel. And maybe they convert and maybe I'd have that Christian friend in my grade at school that I was longing for. But when I did that, you know, when I invited people to come to these things, usually just nothing happened. They just were not interested at all until the very end of my senior year. I invited a friend to Young Life and he tagged along with me. I'm not going to give you his real name, again, to protect identities here. I'll give you the nickname that we used for him. His nickname was Wombo. Wombo was an offensive lineman on our football team. He was a good friend of mine. He was not a believer. But I invited him to come to Young Life and he came. And Wombo was fascinated and intrigued with what he heard. And the Young Life leader followed up with him, and to make a rather long story short, Wombo became a Christian right at the tail end of our senior year. But Wombo had a problem. how would he let his family, a very typical family that I was around, how would he let his very secular family know that he had become a Christian? I said, Wambo, you just have to tell them. And he said, but they're going to think I've joined some kind of cult or something. It's very interesting what happened. That summer before we went our separate ways for college, there was a very interesting incident. His younger sister had just turned 16, and in the first week that she had her driver's license, she managed to wreck the family car. And so, of course, her parents were very upset by this. And her parents were going to make her pay the $500 deductible. And she could not drive until she had paid that $500 deductible. And she didn't have $500. So she couldn't pay the money. She couldn't drive. Well, Wambo figured this was the perfect opportunity for what he wanted to do. And so one night after dinner, he told the family he had an announcement to make. He called an impromptu family meeting. He told the family that he had become a Christian. And that this meant that he realized that he was a sinner before God. He had done wrong and he deserved punishment by God. And he realized that Jesus died on the cross to pay his debt. And then Wombo pulled out $500 in cash. and laid it down on the table and he said, I want to, just to show what I have learned this summer becoming Christian, I want to pay Sally's deductible for the car she's wrecked so she will be able to drive again. Well, again, to make a rather long story short, his whole family was amazed at this act of grace, this act of generosity, and they all converted to the Christian faith. His mom started attending a Bible study that my mom taught. They all joined a church. They all started walking faithfully with the Lord, all because of Wombo's act of grace. Wombo's act of grace transformed his family. His act of grace was multiplied in their lives. One act of grace produced countless other acts of grace. Incredible story, one that was very encouraging to me as I was leaving home for college. Now, fast forward to my college days, let me tell you another story. That story is a parable of grace. This one is the opposite. When I was an undergrad at Auburn in Alabama, I used to go to this little donut shop to study. But as, you know, we know what happens whenever college students go somewhere to study, right? Very little studying actually takes place, and that's how it was. There was this guy that hung out there in the donut shop, and I got to know him a good bit. He was a young black man. And so I started conversing with this young black man. We had a lot of conversations about a lot of different things, but in our conversations it came out that he was a Jehovah's Witness. Well, as a young college student and away from home for the first time, I was a very eager Christian apologist. I could not wait to share my faith and to defend my faith. I had studied my Bible, I'd read all kinds of apologetics books, and I knew how to argue, at least I thought I knew how to argue. And I would get into conversations with this young man in the donut store, and we'd go back and forth. And I'd make arguments for the deity of Christ, and he'd make arguments against them. And we would discuss Bible translations, and we would talk about the way of salvation, and we would talk about sin, and just all those good topics you get into if you start to discuss the gospel with cult members, as this man was, a Jehovah's Witness. I had no doubt that my arguments were a whole lot better than his arguments. In fact, after we would have a conversation, I'd go home and study some more so that next time I was at the donut shop saying I was going there to study, but actually getting into conversations with this young man, I'd be ready. I'd be ready to present arguments that he just couldn't answer. Again, I had no doubt that my arguments were better. And every time I met with them, I was ready. But what was really odd to me and frustrating to me was that after a few months of this, it did not seem I was making any progress. You know, it was really frustrating because I knew I had the better arguments. You know, when we had our conversations, I felt like I won every time, but it felt like our conversations were just going in circles. And so finally, I just asked him one night, out of frustration, I said, so how did you become a Jehovah's Witness anyway? What convinced you of this stuff? And so he told me a story. He said he had been raised in a Baptist church, a very faithful Baptist church. He'd been brought up in the faith by his parents. He'd been baptized at an early age. When he was in high school, he got tangled up with the wrong crowd, got mixed in with the wrong people, and he ended up stealing a car one Friday night. Well, because of that car theft, he did a little bit of jail time. But when he was in jail, he had the opportunity to do a lot of soul searching. And he realized that his choices had been really bad. And he had a lot of remorse. And he had a lot of regret over the choices he had made. He realized he had strayed from the things he had been taught. And so when he got out of jail, he went back to the Baptist church he had been raised in. And he tried to plug himself back into that church. But when he tried to do so, he found that all of his old friends and even his family members shunned him. They rejected him. They had stigmatized him as a thug and as a criminal because he had done jail time because of his theft. So he was not welcomed back. And he told me, he went on to tell me the story. He said that he had met some Jehovah's Witness missionaries not too long after that, and they had embraced him. They had befriended him. They didn't care about the fact that he had done jail time. They welcomed him into their community. And so he joined the Jehovah's Witnesses, and that's why he was so loyal to their group. It wasn't really an intellectual thing. It's because they had befriended him in a time of great loneliness. And suddenly I realized what a fool I had been to have all these conversations with him without ever giving him a chance to tell his story. His objections to the Christian faith really were not intellectual, they were really experiential. His attraction to his new faith, to the cultic faith of the Jehovah's Witnesses, had very little to do with arguments and much more to do with relationships. He went to the place where he found a welcome. He went to the place where he could have a sense of belonging. He had wanted to reintegrate into his Baptist community, but when they wouldn't take him back because of what he had done, he had found that kind of welcome among the Jehovah's Witnesses. Let me tell you a third story, this one from my time pastoring in Birmingham. When I first got to Birmingham, we had a family that I don't know how exactly to describe them. I could say that they were very TR-ish. Does that mean anything to you if I call them TRs, you know, the totally reformed type? I'm not going to get into the specifics of the kind of things that they believed or the kind of things they had very strong convictions about, but they had very definite ideas about all kinds of things in terms of family life and church life, and they had a very, obvious tendency to look down upon people who did not agree with them on these particular convictions that they had about specific things in church life and family life. They were really the most hardcore family that we had in the church. They were really excited when I first moved to town. They were, you know, one of those families that, you know, they're there to greet you when you move into town and they're so excited to have you as the new pastor of the church. when you get there, but within a matter of a few months it was obvious they were very disappointed with me because I didn't do things the way they expected them to be done. I was too soft in their eyes. They were frustrated with the kind of ministry emphases and the kind of church culture that I was seeking to form. It was not exactly what they were expecting to see. It was particularly our mercy ministry emphasis. that frustrated them because of the kind of people it put us in contact with. From the very start, when I got there in Birmingham, we started to do a lot of mercy ministry. And of course, this put us in contact with people from broken families, people who had their kids in the public school system, people who didn't necessarily have very good manners or very good hygiene, just people who were very difficult to deal with. And this particular family in the church had a really hard time with that. Well, a few years go by and they have a daughter. We'll call her Kelly. And Kelly started to drift from the faith. And Kelly got involved with a guy who was bad news. And, you know, in the church, in the leadership, we could tell there were problems. There were problems in the family and problems going on with Kelly. But as we sought to address these problems, the family really stonewalled us. The parents stonewalled any attempts that myself or the other elders made to try to reach out and help in this situation and minister in this situation. To put it bluntly, they made themselves virtually impossible to shepherd. Well, Kelly ended up running away with this guy who was not a Christian, who was a very bad guy. And she ended up getting pregnant. Now our session was about to move towards formal discipline as was a necessity in this kind of situation. But we wanted to have all the facts and so we were moving very slowly. We wanted to make sure we understood everything that had happened so we did things just right. And as we were putting together our formal discipline case, Kelly decided she had made a huge mistake and came back home. She realized what she had done. She realized what a disaster this was, getting pregnant by this man. She was distraught over the whole thing and she was repentant and she came back home. And when she came back home, I ended up meeting several times with Kelly and with her mom. And it was obvious that she was repentant. We talked a lot about what she had done wrong and what she needed to do going forward. We talked about how she needed to, you know, address this situation that she was in and what we would do moving forward. And, of course, we let the congregation know what had happened. But at the end of one of these meetings that I had with Kelly and her mom, her mom said real meekly, kind of real sheepishly, she said to me, Would it be okay if we did a real small baby shower for Kelly, if I just invited a few of the ladies from the church? And I said, look, we're gonna have the biggest baby shower this church has ever had. Because the prodigal daughter has returned home and we're gonna celebrate that. The prodigal daughter has repented and returned and we're gonna celebrate that and we did. And the ladies in the church threw her a huge baby shower and it was a great celebration. And when that baby was born, there was a great celebration. Now, not too long after Kelly returned home pregnant, we had another single female church member in the church who got pregnant. One of my interns actually joked that we led the CREC in illegitimate pregnancies that year. I don't know if I should mention that or not. Too late, yes, too late. This was a young black woman. This was a woman that had come to our church already having two boys out of wedlock with other men. The only husband she had, the only man, I should say, the only father, not husband, the only father she had any kind of contact with was in prison. We'll call her Jayla. So Jayla was in a very hard situation when she came to us. Two boys. And now, you know, she gets pregnant out of wedlock again. She had come and joined our church, and she was, you know, in poverty. She was on welfare. What happened was she had ended up getting involved with another black man who would occasionally visit our church. He was a pretty regular attender, but not a member. And as we saw them spending time together, we actually warned both of them. about their relationship and some concerns we had about their relationship. And they told us that they would heed those warnings, but as it turned out, they didn't. And Jayla ended up getting pregnant by this guy. And of course, she was immediately repentant, immediately admitted her mistake, as did he. And she realized that, you know, she had put herself in this situation, a very bad situation, and basically just pled for mercy, which we were happy to show her mercy. because she was asking for it. She was professing repentance. Now, Jayla's situation could not be more different than Kelly's. You know, you have one who's black, one who's white. You have one who's from a wealthy, upper class, suburban family. One who's from, you know, an urban, inner city, welfare, you know, poverty kind of environment. But they had both sinned in similar ways. And they had both repented. And this is what's interesting. After Jayla got pregnant, Kelly's dad came to me. His daughter was pregnant. She had not yet given birth. He was the kind of man who, you know, just a few months earlier, you know, before his own daughter had gotten into this kind of trouble, he's the kind of man who would have rolled his eyes and dismissed the Jaylas of the world as hopeless. before this and would have looked down on the jailers of the world. But now that he had been through a hard time with his own daughter, and now that his family had realized their need for grace and had experienced real grace from the church community and from God, he was beginning to see things differently. Just before he came and talked to me, I had actually had a conversation with our deacons. And I talked with our deacons about, and I actually talked also with the hospital about how we would pay for Jayla's delivery and how we could work things out to make it an affordable delivery. Kelly's dad didn't know anything about that, but he came to me and he said to me, he said, look, he said, with Kelly having a baby without maternity insurance, I have realized just how expensive this can be. And so whatever jailor's expenses are, I want to cover. Whatever expenses there are, just give me the bill and I want to cover it. Kelly's dad, indeed her whole family, had come to see grace in a whole new way. They had been shown grace by God and had been shown grace by the church in a new and deeper way they had not experienced before. And now having experienced that grace, they wanted to extend that grace to someone else who was in a similar situation, a similar, very difficult situation. It was a situation in which you saw grace begetting grace. One family sees their need for grace, and they receive grace, and then they want to extend that same kind of grace to others. Okay, three stories here I've told you. Each one of these stories demonstrates something vital. When we see our need for grace, and when we receive that grace, that grace multiplies as we extend that grace to others. Those who receive grace, those who see their need for grace, pass grace on to others. At the same time, those who minimize their need for grace become ungracious. in their lives. They can't extend grace to others. They don't think they've received grace, don't think they need grace, and so they don't show grace to others. The truth is grace begets grace, grace multiplies grace, grace produces grace. But when we don't see our need for grace, we become very ungracious. Now turn to Luke 15 with me, and I've given you three stories. In Luke 15, there are three stories about grace, three stories that show us what happens when sin meets I'm just going to read the last story for us, just for the sake of time. Let me read the parable of the prodigal son. Then Jesus said, A certain man had two sons, and the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me. So he divided to them his livelihood. And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with prodigal living. But when he had spent all, there arose a severe famine in the land, and he began to be in want. Then he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself, he said, how many of my father's servants have bread enough and to spare and I perish with hunger, I will arise and go to my father and I will say to him, father, I have sinned against heaven and before you and I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants. And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion on him and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. And the son said to his father, father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. But the father said to his servants, bring out the best robe and put it on him, put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet and bring the fatted calf here and kill it and let us eat and be merry. For this, my son was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found. And they began to be married. Now the older son was in the field and he came and drew near to the house. He heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, your brother has come home and because he has received him safe and sound, your father has killed the fatted calf. But he was very angry and would not go in. Therefore his father came out and pleaded with him. So he answered and said to his father, Lo, these many years I've been serving you, I've never transgressed your commandments at any time, and yet you never gave me a young goat that I might make merry with my friends. But as soon as the son of yours came, who has devoured your livelihood with harlots, you killed the fatted calf for him. And he said to him, Son, you're always with me. and all that I have is yours. It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found." This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray. Father, we do thank you for this great word, this parable of Jesus that shows us your grace your amazing grace, the unfathomable depths of your grace, the grace that begets grace, the grace that multiplies in our lives again and again and again. Show us this grace tonight, that we might live by this grace and share this grace with others, that we might know this grace, know that we are saved by this grace, and share this grace and proclaim this grace to others. We ask this in Christ's name. Amen. The parable of the prodigal son is a real problem for us. Charles Dickens called it the greatest story ever told. Dickens was something of a storyteller himself. He knew a good story when he saw one and he said this is the greatest. This is the best story. You can't even try to top it. This is a story that forever changed the way stories are told. But if you look at this story closely, if you really consider it, it is a very disturbing story. There is something deeply disturbing about this story. It is so contrary to common sense. It seems so impractical and unrealistic. Indeed, it seems dangerous. You know, like you could read this story and just really get the wrong idea. Because this is not a balanced story at all. This is a story that seems to lack balance. You may not know this, but there's actually a rather similar story in the Buddhist scriptures. I don't know if any of you have read the Lotus Sutra lately, but if you have, you've read a story rather similar to this, a story that has some similarities. Now, the similarities are not due to Jesus borrowing. In fact, the Lotus Sutra actually comes later, so if there is any kind of relationship between the two stories, the Lotus Sutra would have been borrowing from the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but most likely the connections are purely coincidental, the connections between the story in the Lotus Sutra and Luke 15. But there are some very interesting parallels here. Let me tell you about the story in the Lotus Sutra. It involves a teenage son who lives in his father's house. His father is a very wealthy merchant and he decides he will steal money from his father. So he takes a great sum of money from his father and he runs away. And he lives a very riotous, prodigal life, a very extravagant lifestyle. But then when the money runs out, as the money always runs out, he is reduced to begging for a living. Meanwhile, his father has continued, despite his losses, the father has continued to excel in business and increase in prosperity despite what his son had taken. And one day, the father is out on a business trip, as he was a merchant. He would often go on trips. He's out on a business trip. He's out on a caravan with all his wagons and he sees his son. It's unmistakable. He recognizes his son by the side of the road begging. He sees him and he knows, that's my boy. Well, the father secretly reaches out to his son and invites his son to come back home, and he actually hires his son as a janitor, so to speak, in the family business. In other words, he does what, in Jesus' version of the prodigal son parable, it's what the prodigal son suggests, it's what he's thinking. He'll come back as a slave. Well, that's actually what this father does. He brings his son back into the house as a slave, kind of the low man on the totem pole. So he sees his son, he reaches out to his son, he brings his son back into the household, but he puts him in the lowest position. There's certainly not any kind of party like what you have in Luke 15. In fact, he keeps his son's identity hidden. He disguises his son. Well, over the years, his son, still keeping his identity concealed, continues to work and works rather hard and works his way up the ladder of the family business, so to speak. And finally the father reaches old age, he gets sick, he is about to die, but before he dies he gathers the rest of the family, the rest of the workers to himself and he reads aloud his will. And in his will he reveals that years ago his lost son had indeed returned and his son had come back home and his son had started off as the low man in the family business and had worked his way up, but now this son would inherit the family estate. He had worked his way up from the bottom to the top. Now hear a story like that and you think, you know, now that's a story that makes sense, doesn't it? That's a story that seems pretty realistic, that seems practical. That's a common sense version of the story, isn't it? The father doesn't just receive his son back and restore him right away as if nothing ever happened. The father makes his son prove himself. He doesn't throw a party right away. He makes his son work for it. That's a practical story, isn't it? That's a common sense. version of the story. That's the kind of thing a real life dad would do, right? In the Lotus Sutra version of the story, the father is sensible. In fact, you know, one of the striking things about the three stories in Luke 15, we didn't read all three, but I'll refer to them here. I'm just going to assume that you're familiar with them. The really striking thing about the three stories Jesus tells in Luke 15 is how unrealistic they are, how counter they are to common sense. You know, Jesus tells three parables in Luke 15. He's really telling the same parable in three different ways. Each one of them is contradictory to practical reason, contradicting common sense. Indeed, each version of the story he tells is shocking. He starts off with the parable of the lost sheep. There are 100 sheep, one gets lost, and then Jesus says, which one of you shepherds would not leave the 99 sheep and go looking for that one? Okay, well, what shepherd would actually do that? No shepherd in his right mind would actually leave the 99 to go find the one missing sheep. No shepherd does that. It would be crazy to do that. In fact, it's really interesting. If you go back and look at 1 Samuel chapter 17, when David is sent out, you know, he's tending the sheep and then he's sent out by his father Jesse to go bring some supplies to his brothers and check on them. One of his brothers says to them, hey, who'd you leave the sheep with? Because you would never leave your sheep unattended. You just wouldn't do that. No shepherd leaves his sheep all alone. So when Jesus says, which shepherd would leave the 99 and go after the one, the answer is no shepherd would do that. The next story Jesus tells is the parable of the lost coin. The woman has 10 coins. She loses one. Certainly, we can say it makes sense for her to light a lamp and sweep the house to look for that missing coin. But what does she do when she finds that missing coin? She invites all her friends and neighbors over to celebrate. Now, who would throw a party to celebrate the recovery of a lost coin? Who would invite over friends and neighbors to celebrate the recovery of a lost coin? The party that she throws costs more than the coin she found. It's just not worth it. It doesn't make any sense. Nobody who's smart would do that. It just doesn't make sense. No woman in her right mind would do this, having lost one coin, then finding it, throwing a party. Why would you throw a party when you find the lost coin and spend more money to celebrate the recovery of the lost coin than the coin itself is worth? The story of the prodigal son is just as shocking. What dad would do this? What dad, in his right mind, would welcome his son back this way with a party like this? After all, at the beginning of the story, the son had wished his father dead when he asked for the inheritance, when he said, Dad, I want my inheritance now. And then the son went and wasted all of that money on wild living. And then he returns home after hitting rock bottom But you know, as the son comes home, the father doesn't even let the son finish his pre-rehearsed repentance speech. You know, he's got his speech all worked out. The father doesn't even let him finish the speech. And the father treats him like he's some kind of war hero coming back victoriously from battle, like he had never done anything wrong, like he had done everything right. Why does Jesus tell this story? Why does he tell this story three different ways? Why? It's because he wants us to see something. He wants us to see what he is like. He wants us to see what God is like. He wants us to see how astonishing and shocking and scandalous grace really is. He wants us to see how radical and how free grace is. He wants us to see the graciousness of grace. God is the seeking shepherd. God is the searching woman. God is the welcoming father. In real life, nobody behaves this way. But God does. Jesus tells this story so we can see what God is really like. He wants us to see how prodigal we are and how gracious God is. But here's the thing about the story. Here's the other really troubling thing about the story of the prodigal son. There's really not just one prodigal son in this story. There are really two prodigal sons. Both sons go astray, but they do so in different ways. Sometimes we read over this story and we think, well, this is a father who had one good son and one bad son. He's got one righteous son and one rebellious son. He's got an older son who is a good boy and this younger son who is a bad boy. But that's not the way the parable actually works. As it turns out, both sons are bad. Both sons are alienated from their father. The younger son's alienation, of course, is obvious. The ways in which he sins are obvious. He wishes his father was dead. That's what it means when he asks for the inheritance early. He basically says, drop dead, dad. I want the stuff that's coming to me now. Now it is true that sons in that time and culture would sometimes ask for their inheritance early so that they could get an early start in building up their estate. But that's not what this son is interested in. This son takes the property and he liquidates it so he can go spend the money living the way he wants to live. So he can spend the money partying. He's a sinner. He's an open and obvious and notorious sinner. He wastes his money. He wastes his inheritance on wicked living. He's alienated from his father. But the older brother is also alienated. While appearing to be a son, he is actually a slave. It's more subtle. the ways in which the older brother sins, the ways in which he is alienated from his father. It's more subtle, but he too is estranged from his father. He says in anger in verse 29, I have been slaving for you all these years. I never transgressed your commandment, yet you never gave me a go to make Mary with my friend. He relates to his father not as a son, but as a slave. He doesn't see his father as a father, but as a slave master. He doesn't have the kind of freedom and love and assurance that a father-son relationship should produce. Instead, he has the kind of fear and anxiety that comes with a master-servant relationship. He claims to be righteous. He claims that he doesn't need to repent. He has nothing to repent of. And indeed, he accuses his father of shortchanging him. He's alienated from his father. See, there's not one prodigal son in this story. There are two. There are two lost sons. But when you come to the end of the story, one of these prodigal sons has been restored to sonship and the other has not. And the one who is restored is not the son we would have expected. It's the wild and reckless son who is restored to the fellowship of his father. This prim and proper older son, the son who claims to be righteous, the son who never left his father's house, he's still a slave. He's the one who is alienated from his father. He's the one who is standing outside the party in anger. In this parable, Jesus wants to show us a third way, not like the prodigal son and not like the slave son, but the way of true sonship, the way of true sonship. See, unlike the slaving older brother, true sons obey out of love. A son obeys not to earn the father's favor, but to continue enjoying his father's fellowship. He knows the father's gifts are his. He knows all that the father has is his. The younger son was willing to be made a slave, but he gets the full status of a son when he returns home. The older son looked like a son, He looked like a son because he had never left home, but he'd actually been living like a slave. The younger son wasted everything partying, and then the father says when he comes home, let's have one more party. A forgiveness party, a repentance party, a restoration party. The older son never had a party. Oh, he could have had a party. But he refuses. He refuses to receive and enjoy the love and grace of his father. He refuses to use his father's gifts. And so instead of enjoying his father's love and his father's gifts, he slaves away and then he accuses his father of being parsimonious and being overly stern and strict. Here's our problem with this story. The problem we have with the way Jesus tells the story is this. It seems like the older brother has a pretty good point. The older brother has a pretty good point, doesn't he? Isn't there something unfair about this story? After all the partying that this younger brother has done, did he really need one more party, one more celebration? His father thought so. But would you have thought so? Would you have thrown this son one more party? The father doesn't shame his son. The father doesn't punish his son. He doesn't make his son earn his way back in. The father doesn't say to the son, I told you so. He welcomes his son back and immediately throws him a party. He gives him the robe and the ring and sandals. After the prodigal has been welcomed in and has been given the ring and the feast in his honor, the older brother protests. The older brother says to his father, I've slaved away obediently all these years. You know, here your younger son has been involved in all this wild living and you throw him a party. You don't punish him. You throw him a party. It's hard to read this story, if we're really honest with ourselves, it's hard to read this story and not think that the older brother has a point. I mean, isn't the older brother the reasonable voice in the story? Isn't he the voice of reason in this story? Isn't he the voice of common sense? Indeed, didn't the Pharisees have a point when they complained about Jesus eating and drinking with sinners? Isn't it possible that Jesus would somehow send the wrong message by eating and drinking with sinners? Have any of y'all seen the play Wicked? Okay, I haven't seen it, so I don't really know the story, but my daughters have seen it and they've told me about it. Basically, it tells the story of Oz. It's based on the Wizard of Oz myth. It tells the story of Oz, but from the witch's perspective. Okay, from the perspective of the witch. Wouldn't it be interesting to rewrite this parable, to retell this parable from the perspective of the older brother? or indeed to rewrite the Gospels from the perspective of the Pharisees. I would guess if we could rewrite the Gospels from the perspective of the Pharisees, we would find a lot of things there that make a lot of sense to us. If you were in the older brother's shoes, wouldn't you raise the same objection? I mean, how would you like it, you know, especially those of you who are, you know, older siblings, who have a younger sibling, how would you like it if your younger sibling took his share of the inheritance and wasted it and then came home and had a party thrown in his honor? And you know, all the expense, you know, this is a no expense spared party. You know, the father's going all out lavishing his son with all kinds of gifts, the younger son. And you know, everything that's left now is yours. So all of this that's being spent on a party for the younger brother is actually coming out of your share of the inheritance. Because that's all that's left is your stuff. You would be thinking, where is the rebuke? Where is the punishment? Shouldn't this younger brother at least have to work his way back into dad's favor? What is Jesus doing as he tells this story? He's showing us what grace looks like. And the reality is grace is always offensive. Grace is always going to offend somebody. It's always offensive to those who don't think they have a need for it, who don't see their need for grace, or those who minimize their need for it. Grace offends because grace rips our notions of fairness to shreds. Grace rips our notions of justice to shreds. How dare the Father welcome this younger son back? How could that possibly be fair to the older brother? To really get what this story is about, you have to sympathize with the older brother at least a little bit. Again, let's go a little deeper in this. Consider with me the triangle of relationships here between the father and the sons and between the brothers. How do they all relate to one another? This younger son is alienated from his father because of his overt sin, his open and obvious sin. His rebellion is inexcusable. He is wicked and wasteful. But when he comes home, the father restores the relationship immediately. Indeed, the father runs out to meet him. Now, I really shouldn't have to tell you this, but you know, ancient Middle Eastern fathers didn't do a whole lot of running. That's just not the kind of thing you do, you know, where you'd hike up your robes and you'd run out to meet somebody. That's not the kind of thing you do. It's not respectable. But you see here this father throwing all social conventions aside in order to run out and meet his son because he delights in his son. And he's so eager to restore the relationship. He's so eager to have this reunion with his younger son. Then you've got the older son who stays home. He lives at home, but his heart's not at home. He's alienated from his father because he lives like a slave in his father's house. He's obedient, but it's the obedience of a slave, not a son. And indeed, he's also alienated from his brother, so he won't join his father in welcoming home the prodigal. Indeed, if you look at the parable, when he describes the son who has come home, he doesn't say, my brother has come home, but he says, your son. He's disowned his brother. He won't call him his brother any longer. He's removed him from the family. The grace of the father offends the older brother's sense of fairness. The grace of the father offends his sense of justice. He has not experienced that grace himself, and so he can't extend that grace to another. He doesn't see all the Father has freely given him, and so he can't welcome back his younger brother. The Father says to him, all that I have is yours. The Father says, I have lavished grace upon you. I have lavished grace and gifts upon you. This older son has received grace. This older son shares everything the father has. But this older son doesn't see it that way. He condemns his brother rather than welcoming him because he doesn't see all the father has already given to him freely and graciously. And so the older brother holds his younger brother in disdain and contempt. He despises him. He doesn't see that he is every bit as dependent as his younger brother upon the grace and goodwill and generosity of the father. There's a great line in Herman Melville's Moby Dick where the character Ishmael cries out, he says, Heaven have mercy on us all, Presbyterians and pagans alike, for we are all dreadfully cracked in the head and in need of mending. Now, I don't at all endorse the religious pluralism that is at the heart of Melville's novel, Moby Dick. But that line, that particular line by Ishmael sounds like something that could have come straight out of Luke's gospel. Because Presbyterians and pagans really are both cracked in the head and in need of mending. See, the reality is we are all in the same boat, sinking, indeed drowning under the weight of our sin unless Jesus in his grace chooses to rescue us. The only thing that distinguishes the true son from the prodigal son, or the only thing that distinguishes a Presbyterian from a pagan is grace. And that's why there's never any room in the father's family for self-righteousness. There's never any kind of room for pride or boasting. There's never any room for self-righteousness. Now, you know, there are a lot of interpreters of this story in Luke 15 who I think rightly point out that in its original context, this story in Luke 15 probably refers to the history of Israel. The prodigal son represents apostate Jews, people like the various tax collectors and prostitutes who come to Jesus, perhaps even represent Gentiles who have been estranged from God the Father, God their creator, but who now, we see in the Gospels, but especially in the book of Acts, are going to respond to the grace of Jesus and come into the kingdom family. And of course, on this reading, the older son represents the Jews who were righteous, but who were living as slaves rather than sons, and who despised the sinners who were flocking to Jesus, and so who really are self-righteous, and who have become estranged from their father. All that's true, and I think that's a very fruitful line of interpretation, to read it in that kind of biblical theological way. But quite frankly, when I read this parable and think about how we should use this parable. I am much more interested in how it should shape the life of the church in the present moment, how we can use this parable in our own context. So let me apply this parable to the life of the church in a few different ways. Some of you perhaps are younger brother types, you have younger brother tendencies, you've made a real mess out of things. Some of you perhaps are older brothers, you have older brother tendencies, you tend to be self-righteous and prideful. The reality is nobody but Jesus is perfectly balanced. Nobody but Jesus perfectly obeyed as a son at all times. No one has ever been as inclusive of sinners as Jesus, and no one has ever been as intolerant of sin as Jesus. So Jesus represents perfect balance. But I think this parable has lessons for those of us, you know, wherever we fall on the spectrum, this parable has lessons for us, whether we're more like the younger brother or more like the older brother. You know, Jesus, of course, represents to us the welcome of the father and the joy of the father. He's the welcome of the father and the joy of the father in flesh. And he offers himself to us all, younger brothers and older brothers alike, and welcomes us to his feast, to his table. And of course, we all should strive to be like Jesus, to show grace like Jesus shows grace. You know, we want to be like Jesus, obeying as sons rather than slaves. And we want to be like Jesus, inviting sinners into God's kingdom, welcoming prodigals home without even a hint of self-righteousness. But because none of us are balanced like Jesus, none of us have that perfect balance like Jesus, we all err in one way or the other. We're all either more like the younger brother or more like the older brother. Let me talk to these two groups. Some of you may be like the younger brother, and you've made a mess of things through unwise decisions, through bad habits, through sinful patterns. You have wrecked your life. And you don't see how you could ever be worthy of the father's fellowship. You don't see how you could ever call yourself a son of God. At most, you hope to be a slave. Maybe the father would welcome you back as a slave into his household. This story is good news for you. Flannery O'Connor. Do any of you all in California read Flannery O'Connor or is she just a Southern thing? Okay, Flannery O'Connor. If you read her novels and you live in the South, you can really identify with them because you think she's writing about your family members. But she also wrote some nonfiction that's really interesting, and in one of her letters she says, the whole operation of the church is entirely set up for the sinner, which creates great misunderstanding amongst the smug. Let me read that to you again. She says, the operation of the church is entirely set up for the sinner, which creates great misunderstanding amongst the smug. Okay, you got that? This is what the younger brother needs to hear. The whole operation of the church, the whole ministry of the church is geared towards forgiving people like you. It's geared towards forgiving younger brothers. It's geared towards forgiving sinners, washing sinners, and assuring sinners, and cleansing sinners. When she says the operation of the church, she's talking about the means of grace. She's talking about baptism, and the Lord's Supper, and the preaching of the gospel, the word of God. Baptism and the Lord's Supper and the Word are all for sinners. Baptism is obviously for sinners. The whole point of baptism is to get cleansed, is to get washed. Well, the very fact that we have a washing presupposes that we are dirty. If you're going to have a washing, that presupposes dirt. Paul says in baptism we are clothed with Christ. That presupposes that we are naked. that apart from Christ, we are naked and full of shame. See, just as this younger brother, when he comes home, he's clothed with the robe and with the ring. In baptism, we are clothed with Christ. We receive Christ as a robe, and we receive Christ as our ring. Baptism is for sinners. The Word is for sinners, too. We confess our sins every Sunday, every Lord's Day in the liturgy. and that a word of absolution is pronounced, a promise of forgiveness. The word is spoken to sinners to assure us of forgiveness, to bring us comfort, to assure us that God forgives our sins, that God will work in us to renew us. The word is for sinners. It's to comfort us. And of course, communion is for sinners too. It's the father's weekly party for prodigals who are returning home. But we don't feast on the fattened calf. We feast on the sacrificed son. We feast on the Passover lamb who is slain for the forgiveness of our sins. We feast on the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so every Lord's Day we sing and make music and, and we do the dance of the liturgy because the father has invited us home to feast with him. Every Sunday we get to join in the father's party for returning prodigals. And so don't ever say I'm not worthy. Yeah, I've crossed that line and the father now won't have me back. It's not about your worthiness and it never will be. It's about the love and the grace of the father shown to you in Jesus Christ. If you're on that younger brother spectrum, that's where you've erred. You need to remember no good deeds are going to save you and no sins will damn you. If you will only trust in Christ, Jesus can handle all of your failures. However big your sins are, Jesus is a bigger savior and your sins are no match for his grace. And so even if the Christian life seems like, you know, three steps forward and two steps back for you, or three steps forward and four steps back, as it sometimes does. No, Jesus is patient. And Jesus keeps pursuing you. He keeps running out to greet you and to meet you. He keeps welcoming you back into his family. What about those of you who have done things right? Those of you who have older brother tendencies. You need to make sure you are not scandalized by the grace of God given to sinners. One theologian asked the question, he says, if you acknowledge that the grace of God is your only hope, how can you then throw condemnation on those in the church who struggle? The church has to have room in her midst for those who struggle. If you're an older brother type, you've got to guard against your inner Pharisee. You can't let your inner Pharisee come out and play. You can't let your inner Pharisee come out and do his thing. In fact, it's really interesting. Luke 15 opens, the chapter opens with Pharisees grumbling because Jesus is eating and drinking with sinners. Luke 15 ends with the older brother grumbling because the father eats and drinks with a sinner. Draw the connections for yourself. Luke 15 is actually a story about the story of Luke's Gospel. It's a story that shows us what's happening in the story of Luke's Gospel. It's a story inside a story. A story that tells us what's happening in the story. Another pastor has said, You know, we really like having Psalm 51 in our Bibles. We just don't want sinners who need it in our congregations. That's the older brother tendency. Older brothers tend to live like Pharisees. They are scandalized by the radical and free grace of God that welcomes sinners to come as they are. See, the Pharisees looked for excuses to not love people, and those excuses were very easy to find. If you don't want to love somebody, you can always find an excuse to not do so. The Pharisees condemned others as a way of justifying themselves. And many of us do this in our own lives. We condemn others so that we can feel more righteous. We look down on others so we can prop ourselves up. Pharisees had this holier-than-thou attitude. And actually, you know where that language, holier-than-thou, comes from? It comes from the book of Isaiah, from the very end of Isaiah. If you read it, you find that holier-than-thou attitude is described as demonic. That posture is demonic. The Father says to older brother types, come and join the party. Join Jesus in rolling out the red carpet to welcome sinners into God's kingdom. Join in this extravagant welcome. Join in this kingdom feast. Join in celebrating the astonishing grace of God. Join in befriending prodigals. God says to the older brother types, look, all that I have, I'm your father, all that I have is yours. All that I have is my gift to you. Rejoice in my grace. Rejoice in the mercy I have lavished on you. Make your life and indeed make your dinner table a reflection of the welcoming grace of the gospel. Now, the reality and I think this is why this is so important. The reality is traditional churches, Churches like my church in Birmingham, your church in Sacramento, churches that are committed to biblical standards of morality, traditional standards of morality, often have a very hard time welcoming sinners. The ethos and the culture of our church can make it very difficult for prodigals to find a welcome. Our churches can become places that are institutionally inhospitable. We might not even intend it, but in all kinds of ways that we may not intend and may not even be aware of, we are creating an environment that is unwelcoming to prodigals, that is unwelcoming and inhospitable to sinners. You know, when new Christians come into the church, what do they do? They inevitably track in dirt. You know, new Christians don't, this is a news flash, new Christians don't reach Christian maturity instantaneously. And older brothers have a hard time with that. They have a problem with that. You know, when prodigals come home, they bring a lot of baggage with them. That whole history of mistakes that they have made comes with them. All those bad decisions they've made come with them. That whole history comes with them. Older brothers, have a problem with that. The reality is while we can never be indifferent to sin, we should share the father's welcome to sinners. We should share in his patient and gracious love for sinners. Indeed, the church should be a safe place for sinners, not because we're okay with sin. We can never be okay with sin, but because we know how to deal with sin. We know how to offer forgiveness for sin. We sympathize with the sinner. We never sympathize with sin. We condemn the sin. But we can sympathize with the sinner because we know, but for the grace of God, that would be me. What does it mean to welcome sinners without welcoming sin? How can we be hard on sin but gracious to sinners? I think the father in this parable shows us how. No doubt the father agreed with his older son that what the younger son had done was indeed wrong. It was indeed wicked. But he disagreed with the older son, that that meant the younger son could never be restored, that he was beyond the pale, that he couldn't be forgiven. The father forgives. Being right and being self-righteous, oh, they seem so, so close in our experience. But they are two different things. Being holy and being holier than thou, they seem so close. They're so similar, and yet they're so difference. Older brothers have to learn to recognize the difference. Being righteous is not the same as being self-righteous. Being holy is not the same as being holier than thou. Older brothers need to recognize the father forgives the unrighteousness of the younger brother and he forgives the self-righteousness of the older brother. Now let me give you a quick caveat as I wrap this up. I preached on this passage not too long ago in my own church and I didn't do this and I realized afterwards I should have because I think this is important. Sometimes you may try to graciously receive a younger brother. But in receiving the younger brother, of course, you also seek to gently correct him. If you've got a younger brother type coming into your midst, into your family or your church context, certainly you want to correct him. And you want to do so in a Galatians 6, 1 and 2 style where Paul says, you know, that those who are gentle and filled with the Spirit, those who are spiritual, correct those who have gone astray. That's what you want to do. But sometimes you will seek to correct one who has gone astray. And when you seek to provide that correction, the one who has gone astray will accuse you of wrongly judging him. In other words, he will accuse you of being an older brother. So hear me on this. Just because someone feels judged by you, does not mean you have been an older brother type. Just because someone does not feel loved by you does not mean you have failed to love them. There is a difference between loving people and people feeling loved. A child who disobeys gets a spanking, and while he's getting the spanking, in the midst of it, he may not feel loved in that very moment, but he is being loved. And it's the same kind of thing here. So while the church should be a place that welcomes younger brothers back home and to the table, it must not allow emotional blackmail to take place. In fact, I saw something recently where John Piper talked about emotional blackmail and how often he had seen it in his ministry. Piper says emotional blackmail is when a person equates his emotional pain with another's failure to love. And those are not the same thing. A person could be loved well and still feel hurt or alienated. And in those situations, blame should not be passed on towards those who have sought to show love. If you do that, you create a false guilt. You're accusing somebody then of being an older brother when they haven't been. They've tried to be the father. Loving the sinner but hating the sin. But because they've hated the sin, that's been taken in a judgmental kind of way. Just to give you one example, I've seen this happen several times with those who are practicing homosexuals. Certainly we can make a place in our churches for those who are repentant of homosexual practice or same-sex attraction. We can seek to love them, we can show them kindness. But the reality is there are a lot of folks out there who, so long as you say that same-sex sexual activity is wrong, that it is contrary to God's design, they're going to accuse you of being unloving. They're going to say you're judgmental. In other words, they're going to say you are an older brother. That's not the case. That's not the case. So I throw that out as a caveat. The bottom line here is God the Father invites younger brothers and older brothers alike to his table. He calls us to repent of our unrighteousness and our self-righteousness, and he welcomes us to come and feast in his kingdom. He forgives the unrighteousness of younger sons. He forgives the self-righteousness of older sons. And the bottom line here is we should truly strive to be like the Father in the parable, showing love. to all different kinds of sinners, condemning the sin, but welcoming sinners into our fellowship. For we are all desperately in need of the grace of God. And when we know we have received that grace, we are eager to share it with others. Let's pray together. Father, we do thank you for the grace and the love that you have shown us in Christ Jesus. We thank you that Jesus is the embodiment of your welcome, the embodiment of your love, the embodiment of your grace. And Father, even as he has shown us grace and shown us mercy, I pray we'd show grace and mercy to others. Not that we would condone sin in any way. We must always despise sin and reject sin and hate sin. But that we would love sinners and we would welcome sinners into your kingdom. And we'd be willing to eat and drink with sinners because we know you sent Jesus to seek and save the lost. Jesus delights to receive sinners. who turn from their sinful ways and embrace his love. Father, we pray that you would do this, that you might be glorified in us and through us. In Christ's name, amen. Thank you.