4 Lent C
Text: Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood
March 27, 2022
Prodigal
The younger son heads out to the distant country and there, says Jesus, he engages in “dissolute living.” I liked the old King James translation better: “riotous living;” that sounds to me like even more fun! There are times when only the old King James will do. Riotous living! Whee!
As good as all that sounds, though, you know that the attraction of riotous living wears thin after not too long. Maybe you know that because you have experienced it for yourself; dipped into the riotous living and found it wanting. Certainly the young man in our story quickly comes to that and so, in that most marvelous of Scriptural phrases, he comes to himself. He comes back, comes to himself, saying, “Wait a minute. I don’t have to starve out here. I do have a father. I have a home.”
So he heads home, and he’s taken back in. And that is where we first might become a little uncomfortable with this familiar old story, so uncomfortable as to be a little offended, really. Admit it: you think of Jesus as someone who has come to jack up ethical standards, to put muscle back into our moral fiber, to make America great again. To let the kid back home after what he’s done, that’s a little morally lax and flabby, don’t you think? “One of the things that’s wrong with modern American society is overly permissive parenting.” But that’s Dad for you! He opens the door and opens his arms, and the younger son is welcomed, the fatted calf is killed, somebody loads the Spotify playlist with every Kool and the Gang song that they play at wedding receptions and, says verse 24, “they began to celebrate” good times! There’s a party goin’ on right here, a celebration to last throughout the years! End of scene one.
But now, to open scene two, the music suddenly shifts from Kool and the Gang to the Darth Vader theme. In comes the other character in the story, the older brother.
“Music!” the older brother exclaims. “Dancing! On a weeknight? I find your playing of Kool and the Gang … disturbing. How is it that my father blows big money on a party, to welcome home this ‘son’ of his who blew his bankroll on prostitutes?” he says.
Ah, ah! Now stop the story right there. Prostitutes? Who said anything about prostitutes? Jesus did not, not even in the King James Version! All Jesus said was the younger son blew his money in the distant country on riotous living, remember? No specifics about prostitutes at all; I mean, riotous living at my house these days means nothing more than when I over-indulge in high-cholesterol snacks. Whee!
But see? The converse of the older brother’s “See what a good boy am I” must always be a “See what a bad boy is he.” Somehow the righteousness that is mine – self-righteousness, indeed! – must come at the cost of the other. “He musta been spending it on – prostitutes!”
So the older brother is mad and he won’t go in. Hmph! The father comes out into the darkness and begs him – note that the father goes out to meet this guy, just as he ran out to meet the younger son – but the older brother will have none of it. “Listen! For all these years I’ve been working like a slave for you! I’m the one who turned this old farm around, put our books into the black! (He’s big into bookkeeping, this brother.) And you never gave me a party!”
“Seriously?” asks dad. “Are any of those things as important as all that, when your lost brother has come home? Dude: all that is mine is yours; you know that. Come on in,” he says. “Come on in.”
The Scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann says that the real prodigal in this story, the one who is really extravagant and excessive in his spending, is not the son, but the father. It is the father’s love that is extravagant, more spendthrift and more excessive than the younger brother’s wild living; more excessive even than the older brother’s moral rectitude, which is excessive indeed.
This is a story about a parent who is excessive in his persistence to have a family, an old man who meets us when we drag in from the distant country after good times go bad, or who comes out to the darkness of our own virtue and begs us to come in and be part of a life that is not self-righteous, not self-ruled, but is lived in celebration with him.
Notice that the father is so extravagant that he gives both sons whatever they need. The younger son needs to come home, and the father takes him back into the family. And the father gives to the older son what he needs: reassurance. “You are always with me; relax! Nothing about this depends on your performance; lay all that achievement anxiety aside. Everything I’ve got, is already yours.”
But did you notice that the father gives neither son what he wants? The younger son asks, “Make me one of your hired hands.” “No, I’m not going to do that. You’re going to have to take the responsibility of family membership, for you are my son.” The older son wants a party for himself. “No, you’re not going to get a party. What you are going to get, is everything, including your brother back. As with your younger brother, then, so also with you: welcome back to family membership.”
The paradox is, this is what true freedom means: not to be given what you want – the way we so often, and with such bad consequences, define “freedom” – but to be blessed with what you need. And the thing that you need most of all is to know who owns you, who claims you. If you don’t know to whom you belong, you just might give yourself over to any old riotous, hellish way into which others tempt you. If you don’t know to whom you belong, you just might give yourself over to the living hell of your own self-righteousness. When you find yourself standing before the powers of the corporation or the conformist pressures of the group or the powerful temptation to self-rule or any other of the totalitarian tendencies of modern life, it is freedom to know that they don’t own you. They don’t own you. It is freedom to remember who does.
I don’t know which of these brotherly paths has led you here this morning, the path of the wild-living younger brother or the sensible, resentful older one. But I do know that this story says, you journey not alone. There is One who claims you, and I’m betting that this One sooner or later is gonna have you in the house.