(Members of the BWM Board of Directors touring a home in western North Carolina damaged in last year’s floods. The BWM is helping to completely refurbish the home.)
Home Is Never Far Away
Assigned Text: 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 returning 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. With our actions, we can hurt family and friends; we turn our backs on the suffering of others; we walk away from the fellowship of the Church. We can get so far away that we think we will never get back at times. Thankfully, 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 stays home and dutifully works for his father and has no intention of asking for his share early. In today’s society, it would be unusual for a young adult to ask their parents for an advance on their inheritance, but in Jesus’ day, this request was tantamount to wishing your parents dead. It meant that you wanted to leave home with no intent to 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 with the money in his back pocket, off he goes into the sunset. It all starts out like fun as he lives high on the hog (so to speak) and spends his money frivolously on food, drink, and women. And to make matters worse, a famine hits the land. The only thing left for him is to get a job on a farm, feeding slop to pigs. He is so terribly hungry, he wishes to eat the refuse 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. 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, but could I please have a job?”
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 final steps down the road to his home. As soon as his father sees him, he runs out and holds him in an embrace of joy. 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, is seething with anger. But such is the utterly 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 out with the lepers. You can believe that he heard lots of grumbling about this.
While we could make many decisions about money, relationships, 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. Truthfully, 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.
