March 27, 2022
Hope Lutheran Church
Rev. Mary Erickson
2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
Invitation to the Banquet
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
The Pharisees were grumbling again. They weren’t pleased with Jesus. “He’s welcoming sinners and eating with them!” Jesus wasn’t supposed to WELCOME them – he should be CORRECTING them! And sitting down to eat with them is just off the charts wrong. It sends the message that he’s condoning their behavior. And their uncleanness will rub off on him as they dine together.
So Jesus tells the peevish Pharisees a series of three parables. In the first one, a shepherd with 100 sheep loses one of them. He leaves the 99 until he can find the one missing sheep.
In the second story, a woman with 10 silver coins loses one of them. She searches the house from stem to stern until she finds the lost coin.
And finally he tells them this story we hear today of a man with two sons. From one of 100, to one of ten, and now one of two. Jesus narrows down the field from the many to the very few. The stakes grow higher with each story. And the loss in the third story is the dearest: a son.
The first two stories involve thorough searching until the lost object is found. Then a celebration breaks out. “Rejoice with me! I’ve found my lost item!” There is joy and celebration.
But the third story takes it a step further. There’s still celebration when the lost son returns, but there’s also this gut-wrenching division and hostility with the elder son. As the story unfolds, we realize this father hasn’t lost just one son; both of his sons become lost.
The story: this certain man has two sons. One of them, the younger one, has a rebellious and selfish streak in him. The older son is the typical eldest child: responsible and obedient.
The younger son demands to receive his promised inheritance immediately. He doesn’t want to wait years and years until his father dies. His father complies, amazingly. He liquidates half his possessions and hands over the funds to his son. Within a few days, the son left home.
Now it was just the eldest son and his father. He was a hard working and obedient son. He did whatever his father asked. He was a hard worker. Part of him wanted to prove his worthiness to his father through his dedication and effort.
If he had any desires, he kept them to himself. He didn’t make requests of his father, partly because his brother had asked for so much. Oh, he would have enjoyed a little celebration with his friends as much as the next young man. Nothing too extravagant, but maybe the occasional roasted young goat to share with his pals. That would have made his heart glad. But he didn’t ask and his father never offered.
And although now it was just him and his father, it seems like part of his father also left that day when the ungrateful, selfish brother left home. When he’d see his dad absently gazing at the horizon, he knew his dad was off somewhere – somewhere in that distant land where his brother was squandering the family inheritance like a playboy.
It went on like that for years, this hard working but quietly resentful son who had loyally stayed home. He couldn’t help it, but he was resentful. He resented that he worked like a common field hand; he resented that he was all nose to the grindstone and no celebration; he resented that distant part of his father yearning for his no-good son. He buried his resentments and rewarded himself with the knowledge that he was the good son.
So when the day came that his younger brother returned and his father pulled out all the stops in celebration, something inside of him snapped. He’d just clocked a long day in the fields. As he approached the house, he could hear music and laughter. He asked someone what was going on. “It’s your brother!” they said, “He’s finally returned home and your father is throwing a feast to celebrate.”
That was it! All of his years of silent resentments erupted. He stomped off to the barn. He refused to go in the house and celebrate his brother’s return.
And here is where this third story reveals its common thread with the stories about the lost sheep and the lost coin. Here is where the father searches for his lost son.
With the younger son, the father never went after him. He merely waited. But now, with his resentful, older son, the father goes in search. Like the shepherd leaving behind the 99 sheep, the father leaves the celebration. He leaves to go find his son. And this is how we know that the older son is also truly lost: his father searches for him.
Jesus tells three stories to the grumbling Pharisees. In terms of the two brothers in the third story, these perfectly righteous men have much more in common with the elder son. They work hard in their exacting observance, they shy away from fun, and they harbor all kinds of angry judgments.
Jesus has come for the lost – and this includes the Pharisees. He’s come for the tax collectors and prostitutes and the demon possessed. But he also comes for the perfectly observant, for those driven by duty and performance. He seeks out the ones who are lost in their own right living, tone ones prideful in their outward decency, and he invites them to come to life. He invites them to come into the banquet of his abundant life.
It’s possible to never have left home and still be lost. Like the Pharisees, we can perfectly observe all the religious rites. We can immerse ourselves in proper actions and decency, we can be held in high esteem as a paragon of righteous living. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t be lost. We can be as far removed from God’s compassionate way as the so-called sinner.
In fact, if we think that nothing in us ever broke, if we believe that we never strayed or erred, then we are indeed lost. If it’s quite simple for us to see the splinter in our neighbor’s eye, but we’re oblivious to the log in our own, then we are very lost.
Jesus encourages the Pharisees to recognize their own blind spots and errors. What they have lost is the loving path. They may understand all mysteries and possess all knowledge, but without love, they are nothing. They may give away all their possessions, they may hand over their body to self-denial, but if they don’t dwell in the love of God, they have nothing.
In our reading today from 2 Corinthians, Paul wrote:
“From now on we regard no one from a human point of view…So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation! Everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”
Christ wants to be at work within you, to make you a new creation. He wants to refresh your heart and soul with the Spirit’s new life of compassion and reconciliation. That’s what Jesus’ mission was all about. In his ministry he’s shown us the way of divine compassion. And through his death, he has searched out to the loneliest of all places. He’s sought his lost ones in the godforsaken abyss; he’s reached to the furthest point of isolation and despair, to the lonely cross, to the stifling grave, and even to the far reaches of Hell. He searches for us, he seeks us until we are found. There is no place that he won’t go to find us and bring us home.
Wherever our lost place is, however we’ve strayed from God’s loving center, Christ seeks us out. And when he finds us he says, celebrate with me! Come into my banquet. Come, your siblings are here, all of them! Come and live in the abundance of my love.
