Sermon Archive

This morning’s Second Lesson is one of Jesus’s most famous parables. Yet, whether well-known or not, every parable of Jesus is difficult to understand, so let me preface my sermon with some introductory remarks about what a parable is and how best to read it.

1 A parable is a short story describing some commonplace situation in everyday life. However, it points beyond its common setting to some much larger truth about God, or about Jesus, or about our moral selves. So a parable is a brief narrative that’s also a religious metaphor.

2 There’s no single interpretation of a parable that captures all of its possible meanings. A parable is like a diamond. It takes on a new appearance whenever it’s viewed from a different angle, as it refracts a different spectrum of light. Each fresh reading of a parable can reveal some new dimension of meaning.

3 A parable contains something shocking—something that strikes us as being “wrong” or “skewed” or “paradoxical” or “counterintuitive.”

4 Finally, in a parable, Jesus is always inviting us readers to situate ourselves within the story. He’s inviting us to view the parable not as a message aimed at others but rather as a message aimed at ourselves—at you, at me. Therefore, our reading of a parable is a lot like an infant’s looking into a mirror—she looks at what’s reflected in the mirror and plays with it. And sooner or later, she comes to a moment of recognition—“Hey, that’s me in there!”

So here’s an important question I want us to consider today. When we in this congregation take a look into this morning’s parable, which of the images found there best mirrors us? Is there any one character about whom most of us say, “Hey, that’s me”?

Now, I’ve entitled this sermon “The Parable of the Presbyterian Son,” and by using that title I mean to raise in your minds this question: “Which of the two sons is the ‘Presbyterian’?” And I’m going to register your answers to that question. So, how many of you, having heard this parable and reflected on it a bit—how many of you think that, of the two, the Presbyterian sonis the younger one, the prodigal who wound up slopping the hogs? Please raise your hands! And how many of you think that the Presbyterian is the elder son, the obedient one who stayed at home but now resents his father’s treatment of the wayward son? Please raise your hands! And finally, how many of you think you don’t know enough about Presbyterians to figure this question out?

[Results: about 14%, the younger son; 8% don't know enough; 78%, the elder son.]

OK. Well, I see that most of you, being good people with a sufficiently high motivation to come to church even today, after such a dismal week of winter weather—I see that most of you agree with my own feeling about this parable, namely that I can see much more of myself mirrored in the elder son than in the younger.

Furthermore, all of you who love to play around with languages will surely recall, once I’ve reminded you, that the Greek adjective “presbyteros, –a, –on” as in “Presbyterian,” means “elder” or “older”! So, through the obscure two-language play on words included in my title, I’ve played a bit of a trick on you, for it turns out that the “Presbyterian” son is by definition the “elder.” So I’m going to focus today’s sermon on this figure of the elder son.

Besides, the part of Jesus’s parable about this elder son has always intrigued me more than the part about the younger. Why is that? Well, primarily because it’s the story of the elder son that Jesus leaves open-ended and unfinished at the end of his parable, as a kind of invitation to you and me, to your imagination and mine—as a kind of invitation to finish Jesus’s parable ourselves through the way we respond in our own lives to the father’s concluding words. Yes, it’s the elder son’s response that’s the thread left dangling when Jesus brings his parable to a stop.

For at the end, the younger son’s story is complete. He’s taken his share of the inheritance and blown it, wasting everything. He’s recognized the sinfulness of his actions and the desperateness of his situation. He’s come to his senses. He’s returned home, hoping at best to be treated as some kind of hired hand. And there he’s experienced, to his utter astonishment, the bountiful love of a forgiving father who’s run out to embrace and kiss him and to bestow upon him the robe, ring, and sandals that declare him to be not a servant but a son. And now at the conclusion of the parable he’s in the midst of being honored at a party-to-end-all-parties, a coming-home banquet prepared for him by his father, complete with fatted calf, festive music, and joyous dancing.

Yes, what a happy ending the younger son’s story has! His is a tale that culminates in forgiveness and love and joy abounding.

So, if earlier this morning you were one of those who raised your hand in identification with the younger son, your story has quite a happy ending!

For you, O son or daughter of God, Jesus’s parable offers the joy-imparting message that God loves you while you are yet a sinner and welcomes you home to the family as a beloved child.

But many of us indicated a moment ago that we identify more with the elder son than with the younger.

This child of the family, upon learning, secondhand mind you, that the prodigal has returned and that in his honor his father is throwing a homecoming banquet—this elder son does not feel glad. He feels mad. And if you identify with this son, as I do, your shock is not one of joy, but one of dismay, perhaps even of outrage. After all, parents should be providing banquets for obedient children, not for ones who’ve wasted a fortune.

Indeed, so angry is this elder son that he’s unable even to go in to the party, let alone to offer this “better-forgotten” sibling of his an embrace and a kiss of welcome.

But just as the father has previously come from the house to greet his younger son, so, too, he now comes from the house to greet his elder son and to plead with him to come inside and join the festivities. But the elder son, filled with rage, replies caustically that this wildly disobedient son is being treated far better by his father than he, the fully obedient son, has ever been treated.

By the way, did you notice when you heard this lesson earlier that the elder son is so shocked and upset that he can’t even bring himself to refer to the returned prodigal as his “brother.” To his father he speaks of his long-lost sibling only as “this son of yours.”

Yes, there’s plenty of shock in this parable. The younger brother’s shock has been: “I’m accepted; I’m loved.” And now the elder brother’s shock is: “I’m totally unappreciated and disvalued, and I’m being totally taken advantage of. For my father’s prodigal generosity toward this wastrel is being paid for out of the inheritance that’s rightfully mine.”

Well, in response to this elder son’s anger, the father speaks kindly, saying, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. You are appreciated and valued; you have not been ‘had’; you are loved. And this is a time for you to join with me in the joy of reconciliation, for your brother, whom we thought to be dead, is in fact alive. Your brother who was lost has indeed been found.”

But after Jesus has recounted these wonderful words of the father, he doesn’t tell us how the elder son responds. He doesn’t tell us whether or not a reconciliation occurs, whether or not the broken relationship of love between these two brothers is ever restored. Jesus stops the story of the elder son without telling us which of the ways he chooses—the doorway in, or the highway out.

Yes, Jesus leaves it totally up to your imagination and mine as to how to finish this story of broken relationship. So, what do you think? (a) Did the elder son stay outside, sulking and feeling sorry for himself? (b) Did he go off angrily, maybe even leaving home? (c) Did he go inside in yet one more act of dutiful obedience to his father, but without feeling any joy or love in doing it? Or (d) did he go inside to share the joy of his father and younger brother, having a changed heart full of love and embracing a genuine reconciliation?

As you imagine it, how does the elder son respond?

Let’s take another poll.

Raise your hands if you think: (a) that he stayed outside, sulking and feeling sorry for himself; (b) that he went off angrily, and maybe even left home; (c) that he went inside, but out of a sense of dutiful obedience rather than any feeling of joy or any desire for reconciliation; (d) that he did go inside rejoicing because his changed heart had truly embraced becoming reconciled with his brother.

[Results: (a) 6%; (b) 2%; (c) 80%; (d) 12%.]

Now, if there’s one thing out of all this that I’m quite sure about, it’s this. For those of us who have identified with the elder son, how we choose to end his story can tell us a whole lot about ourselves. And don’t you think the way we voted is fascinating?

And what are we to make of the way we voted? Why do we think that the elder son did not seek wholehearted reconciliation with his brother? Are those of us who identified with the elder brother, and I’m one of you, are we really the kind of persons whose religious faith makes us grumpy, rather than warm and happy? What is our problem with reconciliation, anyway?

Well, several possibilities come to mind for just what our elder-son-like problems with reconciliation might be.

The great 20th-century Jesuit thinker Henri Nouwen once observed that the sin that lies in the heart of the elder son is the sin of feeling morally superior to others and wanting to stay that way, a sin we often mistake for righteousness, a sin that harbors within itself a buried resentment at God’s all-forgiving love toward others. And often this buried resentment expresses itself in the sin of rejecting reconciliation with those who’ve hurt us, rejecting reconciliation in the name of the so-called “virtue” of maintaining the moral high ground. So for some of us, “feeling morally superior” may be the sin we need to be working on this Lent.

But then, too, perhaps the sin that lies in the heart of the elder son is the sin of welcoming reconciliation only if our own position of advantage and privilege can somehow be preserved. It’s especially easy to be guilty of this sin when we see our position of privilege as one that’s ours by entitlement—because we are white, or male, or heterosexual, or wealthy, or older, or whatever. Perhaps it’s this sense of entitlement that hinders us from embracing any reconciliation that might involve a loss of privilege for ourselves. So for some of us, “measuring the value of a reconciliation by whether it will add to our personal advantage or subtract from it”—may be that’s the sin we need to be working on this Lent.

You see, at the end of Jesus’s parable, the father offers his elder son a vision of how to be reconciled to his brother, a vision that has nothing to do with maintaining a position of “moral superiority” or a stance of “personal privilege.” It’s a vision that lets all the hurt feelings and resentments born of the past ebb away, a vision that lets the joy of recovering a love that’s been lost displace all one’s hurt feelings and resentments and lead one through that “doorway in” with a genuine desire to offer our brother or sister a kiss and a joyous embrace.

Now this is the happy ending we’ve just voted “least likely to occur.” Yet this is the ending we Christians most need to let happen, which is why I added to our Second Lesson that one last verse from Paul.

For in II Corinthians 5:17, Paul tells us that through the grace of Christ received in the sacrament of Baptism, nurtured in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and activated within us through the power of the Holy Spirit—through that grace of Christ, our old ways of behaving, our old ways of clinging tenaciously to claims of moral superiority and personal privilege, our old ways of not taking the steps toward reconciliation that can make for restored relationships of love—yes, through the grace of Christ, these old ways can pass away, our hearts can be changed and re-created, and lost love can be regained.

This Lent, by opening ourselves to receiving the grace of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, it is within our grasp to give the story of the elder son a happy ending in our own lives. For the grace of Christ can enable us to respond positively to God’s invitation to allow our broken relationships of love to be created anew as we let the past be past and as we joyously embrace each fresh opportunity for reconciliation.

So whether that “younger brother” in our life happens to be a spouse, a partner, a child, a parent, a sibling, a friend, a co-worker, a neighbor—there are broken relationships of love in our life that are just waiting to be made whole through the grace of Christ. This Lent, let us heed the invitation of Christ. Let us pass through the doorway of reconciliation so that we may enjoy the embrace of rekindled love.

Let us pray: