Ninth Sunday after Trinity, 2011

Text: St. Luke 15:11-32

The Rev. Jerry Kistler

St. Stephen’s Reformed Episcopal Church

Montrose, Colorado

“The Prodigal Grace of God”

“It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for you brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.”

It’s the story of how grace has to be earned. It’s the story of how grace has to be earned by living a life worthy of the sacrifice made by a band of brothers to find and save one of their own. Private James Ryan is lost somewhere in Normandy after his paratrooper unit was forced to jump well away from their planned drop zone. On D-day two of his brothers were killed in action as they fought their way ashore to secure the beachhead. Earlier a third brother was killed in New Guinea. When Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall learns that their mother will receive all three telegrams the same day, he orders a rescue mission to find the last of the brothers and bring him safely back home. Command of the mission is given to veteran Army Ranger Capt. John H. Miller, who leads a squad of eight men into an area of Normandy known to be occupied by the enemy. Needless to say, each of the men has serious reservations about risking their lives to save Private Ryan. At one point, even Captain Miller is heard to say, “Ryan? I don’t know anything about Ryan. I don’t care. The man means nothing to me; he’s just a name. But if…going to Ramelle and finding him so he can go home—if that earns me the right to get back to my wife—well, that’s my mission.” And one by one, each of the men is being picked off as they continue their wild goose-chase across the French countryside, until finally they find Private Ryan with another tiny group of soldiers defending a bridge from the imminent attack of a huge force of Germans. But now Ryan won’t leave. He’s committed to staying to fulfill his mission. And so, forced with no other option, Capt. Miller takes command of the hopeless situation, blends what remains of his squad with the others, and prepares for the attack. And in the subsequent battle, three more of the original eight men are killed, until finally Capt. Miller himself is shot as he runs out onto the bridge to try to blow it up. At the same moment allied air and ground forces arrive and drive off the German attack. But as Capt. Miller lays dying there in the middle of the bridge, he pulls the young Private Ryan close to him, and with his dying breath says, “James, earn this. Earn it.”

The scene shifts to some 50 years into the future, where now and old James Ryan stands in front of the grave of Capt. Miller in the cemetery overlooking the Normandy beaches. And he kneels down before the cross-shaped headstone and whispers, “Every day I think of what you said to me that day on the bridge. I’ve tried to live my life the best I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that at least in your eyes I’ve earned what all of you have done for me.”

It’s an incredibly powerful film, and we feel the appropriateness of the message: that the sacrifice of others is something we should try to live to be deserving of; that unexpected, freely-given grace is something we need to try to sort of retroactively earn back by living worthy of the gift. That strikes a cord with us, because the world has taught us to believe, and our own fallen human nature has taught us to believe, that grace isn’t really grace; that there can’t really be such a thing as a sacrificial gift from man or God that is totally unearned or undeserved, and that never needs to be earned or deserved. That kind of idea of grace is completely suspect to the world’s way of thinking, and often to our own way of thinking even as Christians, because it is so contrary to what seems like a basic law of natural: you get what you pay for; you get what you deserve. You know, that’s the concept of Karma, not the Christian doctrine of grace which makes Christianity different from any other religion.

Several months back, Bono, the lead singer for the band U2, who is himself a Christian, gave an interview in which he spoke very profoundly, I think, on this distinction between Karma and Grace. At one point in the interview, the interviewer said,

“I think I am beginning to understand religion because I have started acting and thinking like a father. What do you make of that?

Bono answered, “Yes, I think that's normal. It's a mind-blowing concept that the God who created the universe might be looking for company, a real relationship with people, but the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between Grace and Karma…You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics; in physical laws every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It's clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I'm absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that "as you reap, so you will sow" stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I've done a lot of stupid stuff.

The interviewer said he’d be very interested to hear about all that. And Bono responded that that was between him and God. “But,” he went on to say, “I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep s---. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity.

Now that’s a person who understands what grace is. And as such, he is following the One he says he’s depending on to receive Grace and not Karma, for Jesus, aware of our inbuilt resistance to grace, made it the central element of His teaching. In fact, if you don’t “get” grace, you can’t “get” Jesus’ teaching. It’s not just a take-it-or-leave-it part of His teaching; it’s the sine qua non—the “that-without-which-there-is-no” teaching of Jesus. As Philip Yancey has written in his book, What’s So Amazing About Grace?

“[Jesus described a world suffused with God’s grace: where the sun shines on people good and bad; where birds gather seeds gratis, neither plowing nor harvesting to earn them; where untended wildflowers burst into bloom on the rocky hillsides. Like a visitor from a foreign country who notices what the natives overlook, Jesus saw grace everywhere. Yet he never analyzed or defined grace, and almost never used the word. Instead, he communicated grace through stories we know as parables.”

And, of course, one of the most familiar and best-loved of Jesus’ parables, and the one that perhaps more than any other communicates the depth of God’s grace to sinful people like you and me, is the parable Deacon Alan read just a few minutes ago. It’s the parable we’ve come to know as The Parable of the Prodigal Son.

Now in a sermon a few years ago, I suggested to you that we should call it The Parable of the Two Prodigal Sons, because in truth the older son is just as far away, and squanders his portion of the inheritance just as much, as the younger son. But today I want you to consider that perhaps we still haven’t arrived at the best title for this parable; that maybe the best title we could give it is The Parable of the Prodigal Grace of the Father. For really it’s the father who is the central character of the parable. The sons are just the supporting actors in the play. And it’s the father who is the true prodigal, for look up the word “prodigal” in the dictionary. It means extravagant, lavish, luxuriant, and unrestrained. Doesn’t that describe the grace and mercy and love of the father towards his sons? It’s extravagant, lavish, luxurious, even excessive, beyond what anyone would have ever expected. And that’s exactly Jesus’ point as He tries to teach us the way God acts towards sinners: that He is prodigal in the way He pours out His grace and mercy upon those who are totally undeserving of it. For, of course, the father in the parable is God the Father.

So how do we see this prodigal grace of the father played out in the story? Well, first, we see it in what we might label “the benevolent approachability” of the father. Let me ask you: do you think the younger son would ever have asked for his share of the inheritance if was uncertain about his father’s response? You pretty much know how your dad is going to respond even before you ask the question, don’t you? Did the father know why his son wanted the money? Almost certainly. A father knows his son as well. And yet the father’s magnanimous response is immediate. No argument. No lecture. No sage-like advice from someone who was so much more experienced in things of the world. No. Just, “Here you go. It’s yours.”

So the real question is, Why would the younger son ever want to leave a father like that? Is there any sense that the father is some kind of tyrant or rigid dictator? Absolutely not. He only wants his sons to enjoy the fruits of his labors in a relationship with him. And that’s all our heavenly Father wants for His sons and daughters: that we enjoy our inheritance—all the resources of life that He’s given us: intelligence, emotion, will; healthy bodies and a beautiful world; relationships with other people, family and friends; profitable labor, good food, and wine that makes glad our hearts—all He wants is that we enjoy these things as His good gifts, to be used as the means of our communion and fellowship with Him, not as things that take us away from Him. The Father doesn’t grudge giving us our inheritance. It makes glad His heart. The problem is, in our sin we want use everything God has given us for ourselves, by ourselves, and without any reference to God at all. That’s really the nature of sin. And that’s what the younger son does with his portion of the inheritance. He takes it and runs, for no good reason. Again, there’s no sense in which the father was treating his sons harshly. It’s just the nature of sin to have to do everything our own way, to be the god of our own lives. The great cry that will go up from Hell for all eternity will be, “I did it my way!”, or as Jesus described the heart of man, “We will not have that man reign over us!” no matter how benevolent “that man” has been.

But the second way we see the prodigal grace of the father is his willingness to let his son go. The father loved his son too much to constrain his love and loyalty in return. And in that we feel the father’s heart break. As he allows his son to go away to a far country, there to squander his inheritance with reckless abandon, only to lose every ounce of dignity and honor and joy that his father so wanted him to have, we know and can feel the agony of soul the father experiences at the loss of his son—perhaps a worse loss than if his son had simply died. And although it may be hard for us to comprehend that that’s what our sins do to God, we are admonished by the apostle Paul not to grieve the Holy Spirit of God by drifting away from faith and back into the ways of the world—back to our “far away country” from which we’ve been redeemed. The Father will draw us with the cords of His love, and He will lavish upon His grace and blessing, but He will not constrain us to stay. We can go, and that will grieve His heart. That’s why there’s the constant call from Scripture to persevere in the faith and to continue in that holy fellowship to which He has called us.

But third, we see the prodigal grace of the father in that fact that he’s not sitting in the house somewhere aloof from the situation; he hasn’t written his son off, as if he were content to have the one remaining son. But, no, we see him standing, looking down the road, watching, and waiting, and longing after his son. This is our God, who sees His sons and daughters a long way off, and doesn’t sit down and wait for them to come the whole way to Him, or to get their lives totally straightened out first before He counts them worthy of His grace, or make them pay some sort of restitution before He absolves them of their sins, but who runs to meet them at the point of their intention to return to Him. As a matter of fact, in the parable Jesus doesn’t really describe just how far God was willing to run to bring us back into fellowship with Him. But I like the way Soren Kiekegaard put it. He said,

“When it is a question of a sinner [God] does not merely stand still, open his arms and say, ‘Come hither’; no, He stands there and waits, as the father of the lost son waited, rather He does not stand and wait, He goes forth to seek, as the shepherd sough the lost sheep, as the woman sought the lost coin. He goes—yet no, He has gone, but infinitely farther than any shepherd or woman. He went, [in fact], the infinitely long way from being God to becoming man, and that way He went in search of sinners.”

And so fourth, when the father finally finds his son, his prodigal grace explodes in celebration of his return. His embrace and kiss of reconciliation are followed by lavish, symbolic assurance of his love. “Bring out the best robe and put it on him.” That was either the father’s own robe, or the robe kept for an honored guest. “Put a ring on his finger.” That was the signet ring that was symbolic of the bonds of sonship no one could break. “Put sandals on his feet.” “He’s no slave, but my free son.” “And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” Prodigal grace!

Is this your God? Is this the way you would write a parable about God? Is our God really a God of prodigal grace? Could we even say that His grace is wasteful, so extravagant that it’s even excessive? Yes! “For God so loved world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” God gave His only-begotten Son not to buy back not just his erring children, but His very enemies. That’s how Scripture describes who we were when we were still in our sinful rebellion against God: enemies. But Paul says that while we His enemies, God reconciled us to Himself by the death of His Son (Rom. 5:10). Excessive? Extravagant? Wasteful? You bet! What did we do to deserve it? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! But you see, that’s grace. That’s grace. +