Texts: Joshua 5:9-12
2 Corinthians 5:16-21 (Series C. 4th Sunday in Lent)
Ps. 32
Luke 15:1-3, 11-32
“The older son was angry and would not go in to the feast.”
The parable of the prodigal son is one of the most loved of all the parables I suspect this is so because it is so easy for us to see ourselves in it. We can identify with one or more of the characters in this divine drama. I must say.
Most people identify with the prodigal son, we see ourselves as people who have come to our senses, as people, who, while we wander away from home every now and then have, in the
last analysis, got it together, as people who are at last on the right track.
A father with two sons. The case for the older brother is a difficult one because he looked so good. He kept his room straight and his nose clean. He played by the rules and paid all his dues. His résumé ? Impeccable. His credit ? Squeaky clean. And loyalty unbeatable? While his brother was sowing wild oats, he stayed home and sowed the crops.On the outside he was everything a father could want in a son. But on the inside he was sour and shallow. Overcame by jealousy. Consumed by anger. Blinded by bitterness. The story of the prodigal son. The boy who broke his father’s heart by taking his inheritance and taking off. He trades his dignity for a whisky bottle, women, and his self-respect for a pigpen.
Things didn’t work out as he thought, then comes, his sorrow and his decision to go home. He hopes his father will give him a job on the farm and a room over the garage. What he finds is a father who has kept his absent son’s place set at the table and the porch light on every night.
The father is so excited to see his son back, you’ll never guess what he does. He throws a party, I mean a big party! But what the father did, infuriated the older brother. “The older son was angry” (v.28). It’s not hard to see why. “So, is this how a guy gets recognition around here in this family?
Get drunk, fool around, and go broke and you get a party?” So he sat outside the house and pouted. “I have served you like a slave for many years and have always obeyed your commands. But you never gave me even a young goat to have at a feast with my friends. But your other son, who wasted all your money on prostitutes, comes home, and you kill the fat calf for him!” (v.29-30). Appears that both sons spent time in the pigpen. One in the pen of rebellion the other in the pen of self-pity. The younger one has come home. The older one hasn’t. He’s still in the slop. He is saying the same thing we said when the kid down the street got a bicycle and we didn’t. It’s not fair!
Mrs. Wanda Holloway of Channelview, Texas, saw red. When her 14 year-old daughter didn’t get elected to the cheerleading squad, Wanda got angry. She decided to get even. So she hired a hit man to kill the mother of her daughter’s chief competitor, hoping to so upset the girl that Wanda’s daughter would make the squad.
Bitterness will do that to us. The sin of Bitterness will push us further than we would like to go, and will cost us more than we are willing to pay. It’ll cause you to burn down your house to kill a rat.
Fortunately, her plan failed and Wanda Holloway was caught. She was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. She didn’t have to be put behind bars to be imprisoned, however. Bitterness is its own prison. Black and cold, bitterness denies easy escape.
Victims of betrayal. Victims of abuse. Victims of the system, the military, the world. Angry. Sullen. Accusatory. Arrogant. Whiny. Put them all together in one word and spell it b-i-t-t-e-r. If you put them all in one person, that person is in the pit—the dungeon of bitterness. The dungeon of bitterness, deep and dark, is beckoning us to enter.
You know it, and I know it. We’ve all experienced enough hurt. You’ve been betrayed enough times. We all have history of rejections? Haven’t you been left out, left behind, or left out in the cold? You are a candidate for the dungeon. We can choose, like many, to chain ourselves to our hurt, pain, and disappointments.
Or we can choose, like some, to put away our hurts before they become hates. We can choose to go to the party. You have a place there. Your name is beside a plate. If you are a child of God, no one can take away your sonship / daughtership. Which is precisely what the father said to the older son. “Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours” (v.31).
And that is precisely what the Father says to you and me. How does God deal with our bitter heart? God reminds us that what we are more important than what we don’t have. We still have our relationship with God. No one can take that. NO one can touch it. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
Our health can be taken and our money stolen—but our place at God’s table is permanent. The older brother was bitter because he focused on what he didn’t have and forgot what he did have. His father reminded him—and us—that he had everything he’d always had. He had his job. He had his place. He had his name. He had his inheritance. The only thing he didn’t have was the spotlight. And because he wasn’t content to share it—he missed the party. It takes courage to set aside jealousy and rejoice with the achievements of a rival
.Finally: Once upon a time, two brothers who lived on adjoining farms fell into conflict. It was the first serious rift in 40 years of farming side-by-side, sharing machinery and trading labour and goods as needed without a hitch. Then the long collaboration fell apart.
It began with a small misunderstanding and it grew into a major difference and finally, it exploded into an exchange of bitter words followed by weeks of silence. One morning there was a knock on John's door. He opened it to find a man with a carpenter's toolbox. "I'm looking for work," he said. "Perhaps you would have a few small jobs here and there I could help with?" "Yes," said the older brother. "I do have a job for you. Look across the creek at that farm.
That's my neighbour. In fact, it is my younger brother! Last week there was a meadow between us. He recently took his bulldozer to the river levee and now there is a creek between us. Well, he may have done this to spite me, but I'll do him one better. See that pile of lumber by the barn?
I want you to build me a fence an 8-foot fence - so I won't need to see his place or his face anymore." The carpenter said, "I think I understand the situation. Show me the nails and the post-hole digger and I'll be able to do a job that pleases you. " The John had to go to town, so he helped the carpenter get all the materials needed then he was off for the day. The carpenter worked hard all that day -- measuring, sawing and nailing.
About sunset when the John returned, the carpenter had just finished his job. The John's eyes opened wide, his jaw dropped. There was no fence there at all. It was a bridge... a bridge that stretched from one side of the creek to the other! A fine piece of work!
And the neighbour, his younger brother, was coming toward them, his hand outstretched... "You are quite a fellow to build this bridge after all I've said and done." The two brothers stood at each end of the bridge, and then they met in the middle, taking each other's hand.
They turned to see the carpenter hoist his toolbox onto his shoulder. No, wait! Stay a few days. I've a lot of other projects for you," said the older brother. "I'd love to stay on," the carpenter said, but I have many more bridges to build. The Bridge: God is in the business of building Bridges.
My mother taught me to this remember: God won't ask what kind of car we drove, but He'll ask how many people we helped get where they needed to go. God won't ask the square footage of our house, but He'll ask how many people we welcomed into your home.
God won't ask about the clothes we had in our closet, but He'll ask how many we helped to clothe. God won't ask how many friends we had, but He'll ask how many people to we befriend.
God won't ask in what neighbourhood we lived, but He'll ask how we treated our neighbours. God won't ask about the colour of your skin, but He'll ask about the content of your character.
Unlike the older brother, he was present at the party, but never went in. Blessed are we if we rise above our hurts, bitterness, and disappointments. For if we do, we’ll be present at our heavenly Father’s final celebration. A party to end all parties. Celebration to end all celebrations. A party where there will be no pouters.
Why don’t you come in, and join the fun?
Come just as you are.
Amen.
Rev. Samuel King-Kabu
March 18, 2007
John Newton - who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace back in 1779 certainly identified with the younger son - the son who wasted his inheritance -in this way. As a young man he left home and went to sea - and there lived wildly and free. Like many people who abandon God, he was highly critical of the Christian faith, and spent much time tearing down the faith of the people he met as he went from place to place.
It was only in later years that he realized that he had wasted his young life, and indeed not only wasted it - but in all that time he had been offensive to God and to all God-fearing people, and like the young prodigal, he repented and sought, in humility and in submissiveness to serve God for the rest of his days.
His resulting experience of God's forgiveness, of God's grace, is not only described well in the emotion packed words of the song he wrote, it is also to be found in his epitaph, an epitaph he himself wrote shortly before his death in 1807
He describes himself and his experience of God this way:
"John Newton, clerk, once an infidel and libertine, was by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long laboured to destroy."