The Prodigal Son of God and His lost church

The prodigal son.  Luke 15. It’s a story about broken family.  It’s a story about the difference between elders and youth.  It’s a story about resentments and bitterness and anger.  And it is an open-ended story because we’re meant to complete it in our own stories.  The end begs questions.  Does the elder son come home?  Does he ever embrace the younger brother?  Does he come to appreciate his father’s faithfulness, vigilance, and indiscriminate love?  Does the younger son find a new place in the household? Does he repeat his offense?  Does he really change his ways or is he flawed? Is it in the DNA, or in family birth position, that predetermines one’s family behavior? Does the Father, insanely gracious to both of his sons, ever get the family relationships he has tried to forge? Will the sons be his sons, so that he can be their father?  And will they be brothers?  Will they actually love each other or go their separate ways?  And what would be better?  Can this family come together or are the differences too great?    What a human story. We don’t need to stretch our imaginations very far to connect to this one. But this is also a story about God.  It is Jesus’ final answer in Luke’s gospel to the question, Who is GOD? What is God like?  And that is where some people get off the bus.   Hard to swallow a God like this God, this Father.  Unconditionally gracious.  Welcoming and loving cast offs.  Reclaiming the dispossessed, disowned, discarded.  We imagine a different God.  One who blesses the deserving and curses the undeserving.  One whose favor is conditioned upon one’s behavior.  We look around and we see the difference between those who have been blessed and those who have not.  And we begin to imagine why, too.  This God respects duty, loyalty, religion, good, law-abiding citizenship.  This God chooses some and rejects others outright and what they get is what they deserve.  This is a wrathful god.  

This parable in many ways calls to mind the story of Jacob and Esau in Genesis 27-33.  Jacob is the younger twin who steals his brother’s birthright and blessing. Basically he gets the attention from his mother and father, claiming a relationship reserved for the elder son. Esau hates Jacob and seeks to kill him. So begins Jacob’s exile.   Eventually, Jacob and Esau reconcile, but it is Jacob who is chosen by God to renew and live out the family covenant promises.  Jacob becomes Israel and the head of the 12 tribes.   Jacob is the favored one.  But Esau is able to reconcile that in his heart and mind, accept his own relationship with God, and embrace his brother.  In so doing, Esau and Jacob experience God by facing each other.  

Jesus is claiming again that the younger son has a special place in the heart of the Father.  And that the elder son, though loved, has not understood the relationship that the father desires with his children.  It is not obedience that the Father values, but repentance.  It’s as if this father is more excited that the younger son returned than that the elder son remained.  This is a Father who favors the return of the exiled one.  What does it mean that the Father values one lost son who returns over all the ones who remained obedient?  Jesus was speaking to Pharisees and scribes who were accusing him of living a life unbecoming of a righteous Jew and a teacher of the law.  He was eating with tax collectors and sinners.  He was a stinking gentile lover who broke the holiness laws.  He was no friend of theirs.  But a lot of people were following him.  This parable is as much about the relationship between Jesus and the religious leaders, his elder brothers, as it is about the Father who loves them.  Jesus is the Prodigal son of God and he has wandered off to join the sinners and the outcasts, the diseased and the demonized.  He has abandoned the law in favor of a mission of compassionate justice and friendship with the world.  As a result he will die, and be made alive again!  He has reimagined God as a lover of the unlovable and a welcomer of the unwelcome.  And he has done so squarely within the biblical tradition because interwoven in the old testament story of law and holiness is the story of a God who rescues a sinful people from bondage and slavery and sets them free. It is the story of a God who smiles on the Jacobs---the sneaky little brothers who steal their older brothers’ stuff.   Moses and Jonah and David are all stories of God choosing flawed men to bear the message, how they reject their divine callings, and how God gives them all a second chance. 

What is it about redemption and reconciliation that is so much more compelling than willful obedience?  And what does it mean for the mission of the church to recognize that our religious obedience to the rules is not valued as much by God as the hope and possibility that someone who is not yet in the family of faith might be someday welcomed home?  It means, as it meant to the elder son and the religious leaders of the day, that God’s mission does not end with you and me.  We are not the exclusive apples of God’s eyes.  God is a lover of prodigal children.  And there will always be prodigal children in need of a way to get back home, in need of God’s forgiveness. 

In Christ, though we be of different generations, we are brothers and sisters.  We might see this story play out generationally for Lutherans.  20 and 30 somethings have left the church home.  Will we find a gracious welcome or a cold shoulder?  I identify with the prodigal because I believe life is an adventure to be lived outside the comfortable boxes prescribed by our parents.   I have been wondering if I have a home and a family among my Lutheran elders.  That story is unfinished.

Where are you in the journey?  Have you wandered off into a distant land?  Are you searching to make your way back to love, back to the family, back to life?    Have you remained so close to home that you fail to even be thankful for the blessing it is? Who is God the father inviting you to embrace and forgive and welcome?