Never Far From Home
By the Rt. Rev. Chris Giesler
Assigned Texts:
- Joshua 5:9-12
- 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
- Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
“I’ll Be Home For Christmas” is a popular secular Christmas song played a lot during the holiday season. We all have that longing to be in that familiar place for this important event, but the song also realizes that perhaps we will only make it in our dreams. Life can take us far from home, and getting back for Christmas is not always possible. Nonetheless, we can always make that trip in our dreams.
Our lives, with decisions often made with selfish intentions, can also lead us far from the path of God’s will in our lives. We can hurt family and friends; we turn our backs on the suffering of others; we can walk away from the fellowship of the Church. We can get so far away that we think we will never get back at times. However, our text from Luke this week tells us a different story.
Last week we read the parable of the fig tree (Luke 13:1-9), that even though the tree was not bearing fruit, it was not cut down and given a second chance to bear fruit. This week that parable is given a human dimension in the parable of the Prodigal Son.
This very familiar story has three characters: the father and two sons. One day, the younger son demands from his father the inheritance that would be due him upon his father’s death. He wants it now. The older son is the one who stays home and dutifully works for his father and has no intention of asking for his share early. Even in today’s society, it would be frowned upon for a child to ask their parents for their inheritance ahead of their deaths. In Jesus’ day, this request was tantamount to wishing your parents dead, wanting to leave home with no intent on return. Any parent would have been devastated by such a request, and they would have been shamed in their circle of friends.
Even so, the father grants the younger son his request, and off he goes into the sunset. Life, however, quickly unravels for the young man. He lives high on the hog (so to speak) and spends his money frivolously on partying and women, and then a famine hits the land. The only thing left for him is to get a job feeding slop to pigs that he would have most recently been living high on. So hungry does he get that he wishes to eat what is being fed to the pigs. In Jewish society, where pork is considered unclean, this would have been an insult on top of injury. The troubled young man hits bottom and decides that his only recourse now is to try and get hired back as an employee at his father’s farm. And on his way home, he rehearses his speech: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy of being called your son.”
The father, of course, has been camped out on his porch, waiting for any sign of his son’s return. Finally, one day, the boy begins those finals steps down the road to his home. As soon as his father sees him, he runs and throws his arms around him. There are no “I told you so’s.” There are no “this is your last chance” speeches. The son can’t even get into his rehearsed confession before the father orders a feast with the fatted calf at the center of the table. Steak dinner and all the trimmings!
The older son, much as we would, grumbles. But such is the utter amazing quality of God’s grace towards each of us. It is beyond our ability to understand and accept, most especially when it is extended to those we feel are beyond grace.
But thanks be to God, we are never far from home, the place of God’s grace. The world would be a better place for us all to live if we could only see our way to view others with the same eyes that this father has. Remember this is Jesus’ definition of God’s love for the world and why Jesus was therefore found dining with tax collectors, prostitutes, and hanging around lepers. You can believe that he heard lots of grumbling about this.
While we could make many decisions about money, relationships, sex, drugs, and who knows what else, that can take us far from God’s love; perhaps no decision is worse than the inability to forgive others. Truth be told, we are never far from God’s love; it is always there waiting for us. All we need to do is orient ourselves towards that grace, and as soon as we do, the embrace is there, and we are home.
