Village Church Worship - September 8, 2024

Luke 15:11-32 (New Revised Standard Edition)

Then Jesus said, "There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, 'Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.' So he divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, 'How many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands."' So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' But the father said to his slaves, 'Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!' And they began to celebrate. "Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, 'Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.' Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, 'Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!' Then the father said to him, 'Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.'"

"At Home in the Heart of God: When a Child Runs Away"
The Rev. Dr. Jack Baca, Senior Pastor

(Transcription of spoken word)

One of the one of the greatest joys I have. One of the fun things about my job is engaging in the conversations that we have with each other. Pretty much any time, any place. Whenever I'm with people who know that I'm a pastor, we start talking theology in some way or other. But one of the ways that we do that with each other a little bit more of an organized fashion is through your responses to me, when you get the Friday email message, that gives you just a little hint, a little bit of a taste of what we're going to be talking about on Sunday mornings. Sometimes some of you write me a response several pages long, and I have to confess, I simply don't have the time to write several pages back to you. But I love hearing I love reading what you have to say. So please continue doing that, whether short or long. This last Friday's message elicited some fascinating responses. All valuable, all that go into my thinking about what it is that we're going to talk about then on Sunday morning.

You see, I know as much as we think that you simply sit here on Sunday and have to absorb what I say, actually, there's a conversation going on among us. And so I encourage your response. And what I talk about is what I've heard you talk about and what I've heard you say to me in this ongoing dialog now.

It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. One of the responses that I got to the Friday message was actually in the form of of a painting that was sent or, you know, copied in the email, a very famous painting, I think that I want to describe to you for a moment. I thought about making copies of it and handing it to you, but you can Google it later on and look at it.

https://www.wikiart.org/en/norman-rockwell/the-runaway-1958

I think you at least many of you will know what this painting actually is. The painting is is a scene in a typical diner or lunch counter from maybe the 1930s or forties or fifties or so. And as you look at this painting, you see several things. You see the lunch counter itself and it's a very traditional counter.

I've eaten at thousands of these places before and I frankly, I wish there were more of them around these days. But you have the lunch counter and there's a there's a shelf on the back wall. And sitting on that shelf is an old fashioned radio okay. A radio now called a radio is a is a it's a it's this big honkin' piece of machinery that that says, I know, isn't it?

You ought to try listening to a radio sometime. Yeah. Also on the back wall, there is a glass case that has several shelves in it and the cases enclosed with doors and sitting on the shelves in the case are pies. yes, yes. How many of you remember walking into a place like that and seeing four or five or ten different kinds of pie?

And right then a spiritual struggle ensued. Right. You know, do I forego the vegetables and go straight to the lemon cream and the banana cream and the pecan? And I'm making myself hungry here. Standing at the lunch counter with his face towards us is a guy who's probably the cook and also the waiter at the same time. Okay.

He's got on a white shirt, sleeves are rolled up and and spoiler alert or something or other. This is politically incorrect, but there's a cigaret dangling out of his mouth. Okay. That that's just the way it used to be. So he's facing us and he's looking at down at one of the two customers that are sitting there and the cook slash waiter has kind of a of a kind little smile on his face.

Okay. So that's what we see facing us at the lunch counter. We also see the backs of the two customers who are and on. Do any of you know yet what painting I'm talking about? I think some of you do. I think some of you do. So on the left side, one of the customers sitting there has on a blue uniform with this hat and a pistol strapped to his side and a radio there.

It's a cop. It's a policeman, right? Right. A typical a typical cop, a typical policeman. He and the other customer are sitting on these shiny, bright chrome stools. Yes, they are. They're attached to the floor and the stool comes up and they're round there. They're about, yeah, so big around. And they have green leather covers on them.

They're the kind that when you're a kid you sit down and you start spending and spending and spending and mom and Dad say, Stop that and you keep spinning. And that's another story. The cop is sitting on a stool and then sitting on the other stool. Sitting on the other stool. The cop's looking down at the customer who's sitting on the other stool, just like the waiter cook who's standing behind the counter.

Sitting on the other stool is a little boy. He's seven years, four months, and three days old. He has to be maybe he's older, who knows? He has on a yellow t shirt, blue jeans, brown shoes. This is long before the days of tennis shoes or sneakers or Air Jordans or whatever you want to call them that is on brown shoes, white socks.

And he's looking up at the cop. What's interesting about the painting is what sits on the floor underneath the little boy. What sits on the floor underneath the little boy is a stick that clearly has been cut from a tree somewhere about about so long, let's call it four feet long and tied at the end of the stick.

On one. End of the stick is a red kerchief. It's been gathered up all around, something that's inside and tied on the end of the stick. You don't know what's in the bundle. I don't know if the painter ever told us what he envisioned being in the bundle, but there's something in that bundle. The painting was done by Norman Rockwell, of course, in 1958, and the title of the painting is, The Runaway.

The Runaway. It's one of those classic iconic pictures of America, of family of a couple of older guys that are taking care of the little boy who's clearly run away from home. Now, we can create all kinds of back story into that picture, right? Why did the little kid run away that his mother refused to give him a popsicle when they lost the baseball game?

We don't know. Maybe Dad yelled at him for taking out his pocket knife and fiddling with it in the wrong direction. We just don't know. But we do know that that scene evokes in us all kinds of feelings, all kinds of memories. Perhaps you do not have to answer this question, but I would love to know how many of you ever ran away from home.

Anybody here? Okay, good. There's a couple of honest people. I write a few more. Yeah. I think the 9:00 crowd is more honest than you folks. There are a lot of folks that raise their hand, right? Yeah. Yeah. How many of you how many of you would like to run away from home today? Okay. Okay. Last week in worship, we started together thinking about a series of messages that I enjoy.

And we'll have the privilege to preach before you for the next few weeks talking about the fact that we are at home in the heart of God. And when you think about a little boy who's run away from home, that gets you thinking even more about about what home is all about. Last week, we drug out the twenty-thirds Psalm, another in a sense, iconic scripture, just like this story that Luke tells us.

And from the 23rd Psalm, we remembered that we are we are like God sheep. Or another way of saying it, God's children. We are God's children for whom God cares all the time, giving us food, giving us shelter, giving us all the blessings of life, being with us, even when life gets really, really, really hard. We are like children at home with God.

You and I are meant to understand you and are meant to accept you and are meant to believe that despite how difficult this life sometimes can be, that the fundamental reality of life is a reality that is established by God. And that reality is that God is the eternal care giver, the eternal provider, the eternal protector, the one who always has us in the palm of his hand, taking care of us.

And that's very comforting. That's very encouraging. We are at home in the heart of the Lord. Well, today I want to bring out another classic scripture, another passage, one that we know so very well, but perhaps one that we don't know enough about. And so let's take a look, a close look at it. The story that Luke tells of a parable that Jesus told is entitled.

And you know, the title The Prodigal Son. The Prodigal Son. Well, let's look at the story and see if that title holds up. Let's look first at the younger son. He's the one that usually gets the most attention and all this, right, Because he's the one who does what. Truth be told, all of us have been tempted to do and might still be tempted to do, and maybe some of us have done it right.

Who among us hasn't at one time wished that we would get our inheritance now and then we get to go away somewhere and just do with it whatever we wanted to have. You never wanted that before. If you have never wanted that before, I have now planted that seed in your mind and you're starting to think to yourself, there's an idea.

There's an idea. Well, we focus on the younger son, right? We focus on the younger son. Let's take a look at him for a moment. And let's do this by by putting ourselves back into the culture of Jesus day. Because there are some things that are said here that you and I cannot totally understand unless we understand what was going on in the lives and minds and the culture of Jesus time.

First of all, it was the Jewish custom, especially in Jesus day, when you had a couple of sons for the younger son to receive one third of the estate of the father, one third, not not 5050. I am a younger son with an older brother, and I pray that my parents are focusing more on the 5050 thing rather than the 66 and two thirds and 33 and one third thing.

But back then, the younger son got a third, the older son got two thirds so that the older son could take care of the rest of the family. Back then, there was a lot of thought in in the Jewish culture, of course, about about what what was good to eat and what was bad to eat, what was clean and unclean, what was acceptable to God and what was not acceptable to God.

And so when we hear the story that the younger son wants, he's gotten an inheritance and gone off and blown it all and he ends up among the pigs, there's a couple of things going on there. One thing going on tells us that he has left Israel. He's in a place where they grow bacon and and and that's not where God is as far as the people.

And in Jesus culture, who would would believe and accept. So he's among the pigs. He's in an unclean place. He is outside of the place where God is. He's completely rejected. God, the pigs are eating pods. They're called pods here. That's probably the seed of the carob tree. Carob trees produce kind of long and narrow brown colored seeds.

And those seeds, those seed pods were given to animals to eat. Occasionally, it would be known that if someone were starving, extremely poor at very extreme circumstances, they might eat the seed pods of the carob tree, but it's not something that you would normally eat, only the extremely poor. Now those three things are helpful for us to get a sense of just how drastic are the circumstances of the younger son after he has forsaken his father and his family and his upbringing and everything that he was taught to be true and good and right and gone away, we understand, I would hope, why the younger son did what he did.

We could say maybe maybe he's a teenager, he's immature, He just doesn't understand life. Maybe he wants to enjoy life a little bit more. Right? Hey, Dad, give me everything and and I want to go out and I want to buy the Mustang and I want to go on a cruise and I want to just live. Live the good life, the fast life.

Right? Maybe inside him was this idea that that life was better somewhere else. How many of you grew up thinking that other kids in other had it better than you? Anybody here have that? Okay, Again, just a handful of honest people, but that's okay. That's okay. I know I'm preaching to sinners when I preach. That's just the way it is.

Right? Of course, you know the story. I don't need to tell you how the story goes. And we want to think about what the story means as the story goes. Of course, the this young, immature adolescent brat loses it all and he finds himself sitting with the pigs, maybe eating what the pigs are eating. And he says, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe if I go home and apologize to Dad and say, I've blown it, maybe Dad will hire me on as one of his helpers and I'll at least have something to eat.

Now, in Jewish culture as it was and still is, of course, it's possible to be forgiven. It's possible you can go and say I'm sorry and you can be forgiven. So what the little boy was thinking about was was not out of the realm of possibility. And so it was okay for him to do that. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment, though.

Let's go to the older son for a moment. Okay. Let's go to the older son. We don't really hear as much about the older son. We can picture him as the responsible child. That's kind of the way we look at birth order these days, Right? The oldest is the responsible, mature one. If there are middle children, they don't count, so we don't need to talk about them.

And then there's babies like me. I'm the baby we're worth talking about, right? The older son. The older son is the responsible child. He follows the rules. He stays with dad. He probably had to put up with his baby brother and he is not happy when the little twerp comes home. That's it. That's it. That's what goes on with the older brother.

And then. And then finally we come to the father. We come to the father and we have some questions we should ask. We have some questions. You know what? What the father said to the son was actually almost unintelligible. And and unreasonable. Son, you're back. You just took a third of everything that I had, and you blew it.

Let's have a party. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Think about what you would actually do. I am a father. I do have children who misspent some of my money. I never did that to my folks. All right. What should the father do? Maybe the father should sit there and say, Son, grovel a while. Son, you're going to have to work it off.

You're going to have to pay me back. Or maybe, son, you blew it. Too bad. So sad. See you later. That's what we would expect of the father. And we can understand all of these things. We can relate to the younger son, the so-called prodigal son. We can relate to the older son, the one who always followed the rules and was ticked off when someone who didn't follow the rules got what he didn't deserve.

And we can relate to the father. At least we can relate to the father in so much as we know what it is to love a child and to have that love rejected and abused. But let me propose to you that this story of the prodigal son is not about the so-called prodigal son, and it's not about the fine, upstanding religious older brother.

The story is actually about the father, and Jesus says as much when he starts. The parable there once was a father who had two sons. Yes, it is about the two sons, and we could be either one of them. We are both of them. Actually, it's really a story about the father. Tim Keller, the late Tim Keller, wrote a book about just this parable.

He called it The Prodigal God. The Prodigal God. What is prodigal? Prodigal is about is about being lavish, about being overflowing, even in a sense about being wasteful. How could God be wasteful? But God is. Hold that thought. We'll bring this all together.

There is a theological conversation that ensued from the very moment that Jesus preached and taught. And when he spoke of this story, it is a theological conversation that we now talk about as being the offense of the gospel, the offense of the gospel. You see fine, upstanding religious people, like the scribes of the Pharisees who were listening to this story, were offended that Jesus would suggest that the younger son should be received and welcomed into the love of his father's home because they believed that you should earn God's love.

They believe that you should act in such and such a certain way that then God would love you. And truth be told, we can sit there and say the scribes and the Pharisees didn't know what they were talking about. But we all have that inside of us, don't we? Every single one of us looks at someone else and says, You know, I think there's no way God can possibly forgive you for that.

We don't like to address that same standard to ourselves, but we do sometimes. Sometimes we say, I don't think God can forgive me what I have done or what I have not done is so egregious an error. I can't see how God can love me. And certainly you have done some things. If God forgives you, then that I need to have a visit with God.

We call it the offense of the gospel. This idea that God can forgive anything, that God will forgive, anything that God will receive us back into His family and treat us as the child that we are. It's called the offense of the gospel. Now, we maybe can say the younger kids should get to come home and be one of the fathers workers.

Okay, he is blood after all. But we are offended when we think that this younger son who blew half of the family, a state gets to just come back and join the family again. And that's especially an issue for religious folks who come to church on Sunday mornings, especially when it's 182 degrees outside. Right. We think, no, he should have been going to church.

He should have been paying his tithe, but he hadn't been doing any of those things. And still God loved him. We call it the offense of the gospel. The idea that God would not pronounce justice upon this kid, the idea that God would let him get off scot free. And yet maybe God does not let him get off scot free.

Where is the justice in this? Is there not a consequence to our sin? Is there not a consequence to our sin? I would propose that there are consequences to our sin and they primarily are things that we live with, things that we are involved with. When we choose to go away from God that are about the business of living outside of God's love, that's what we call hell.

Yeah. We like to think that a wild and crazy life answering to all of the appetites that we might have, that that's a beautiful, magnificent, wonderful way to live. But actually it's not. It's just the opposite. It is being controlled by something that is less than God. There is a consequence to sin. There is suffering that happens because of sin, your own suffering and the suffering that you might cause in others.

And God has already paid for that with his very own life. We might ask whether or not it's fair of God to give to someone who doesn't deserve God's love and not give to someone who does deserve it. Right? Let's put ourselves in the place of the older brother. The older brother looked at at the kid and he said, It's not fair, Dad, that you have simply welcomed him back into the family.

I should get more than he gets. It's not fair. It's not fair in this world. It's not fair if God only has so much to give. Yes, in this world, I don't care how rich you are, there's only so much. And if some of it's wasted away, it is gone. But that's not the way it is with God.

God has everything God can give to you everything. But that doesn't mean there's nothing left over for someone else. Because God has everything to give to everyone else. That's the nature of who God is and the human way of thinking. God only has a little bit of love to pass out and he's going to choose who deserves that and who doesn't.

But God is a God of unlimited love. Unlimited grace, undeserved grace, but grace nevertheless, yes, we can put this in concrete terms perhaps. I've had so many conversations with folks and so many conversations in my own mind about what my accommodations are going to be in heaven. If you ever thought about this, Yeah. What are your accommodations going to be?

You know, are you going to get a hard bed with a bathroom that hasn't been cleaned and no free breakfast in the morning? Is that what your accommodations are going to be, or are you going to be in the presidential suite at the Waldorf in heaven? There are no different grades of accommodations. There's only presidential suites at the Waldorf.

Heaven is a place where God is either God is there or God is not. Even as a place where we will be. Either we're there or we're not. There's no tier structure. There's no first class business class, upgraded economy class, downgraded economy class. There's only on the plane or not. The story that Jesus tells is tough for us.

If we tend to think that we're the religious types that are following the rules. Therefore, we deserve God's love. This is a tough story. It's a tough story. If we're the type that have gone so far away from God that we're not sure that God can actually forgive us. And maybe we don't even want to come back to church because we're afraid to church that we're going to hear that God cannot love us because of what we've done.

But at this church, what you will hear from this preacher is that God is a God of unconditional love. You cannot earn God's love because you because you cannot earn something that you already have. You cannot throw away God's love, never to receive it again, because God's love is perfect love and perfect love never stops loving you. And I have to live with the profound complexity and mystery of that.

But that's who Jesus says God is. And I'm glad because that's the gospel. The Gospel tells us that we have a place in God's heart, period. We have a room at home that's no better and no worse than any of our other siblings rooms. We have a home in God's heart that waits for us that we can enter now as we God's love.

It's a home in which we can invite everybody else to come because it's big enough for everybody. This is the gospel truth. Amen.