Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch....

August 23, 1987

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Scripture: Luke 15:25-32

A few Sundays have elapsed now since the first half of this sermon. Maybe you remember. Back then we talked about the parable generally known as the Parable of the Prodigal Son. It’s the greatest story Jesus or anybody ever told. The only thing wrong with it is the title, which, of course, is a later addition, tacked on by some subsequent editorial hand, not a part of the original manuscript. A better name for it would be the Parable of the Prodigal Father, because the Father really is the central character. It’s less a story about a boy than about God, about a relationship.....

It’s a story about God’s prodigious grace....the overflowing, expansive, abundant, and unmerited love of the Father for His own, His flesh and blood, which means you and me. That’s what’s prodigious.

I tried last time to liken the Father’s House, HOME, in the Christian sense, the place where God’s will is perfectly done, to the Ponderosa in the old television series “Bonanza”...asking you not to press the analogy too tightly for obvious reasons, but suggesting that the very word “ponderosa”, a Spanish word, literally means essentially the same thing as prodigal---overflowing, extravagant, weighty, heavy, in exactly the same sense young people like to use that word today....[1] You want something heavy--THIS is heavy, this thing we’re talking about---that the Lord God Jehovah Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, the Alpha and Omega of EVERYTHING, should not merely accept us, let us in, tolerate us when we want to come home---that would be something in itself----but should be out there on the road, LOOKING FOR US, to clasp us with prodigal affection to His fatherly bosom. Now that’s heavy! It’s more than we deserve, Jesus is telling us in this parable, but it’s true, and don’t ever forget it.

One member of the household in the story did forget it...or maybe even more tragically, never realized it. That’s the rest of the story, and that’s the part we didn’t get to last time.

Will you look with me this morning at the other guy in this brilliant parable Jesus told? While all the rest was going on, the arguing, the leave taking, the lavish apartment, the pig pen, the homecoming.... meanwhile, back at the rand.... there’s the elder brother.

He’s not as colorful a character as the hell-raising one..... His part in the story is much less dramatic. You’re more apt to gloss over him.... He’s not memorable, or as appealing, or as exotic as that younger sibling, who in spite of all his faults, sort of grips us by his very panache.

It’s easy to identity with him, even fun.

We may secretly sort of envy him, at least during his days of wine and roses...That’s the sort of stuff religious drama is made of.

BUT NOBODY IN HIS RIGHT MIND LIKES THAT GOODY TWO-SHOES ELDER BROTHER....and for good reason.

HE’S CONTEMPTIBLE. What else can you say? He was right there in the middle of everything, and never grasped what was really going on....He was there throughout it all, AND MISSED THE POINT. What’s more, he did it with a churlish, arrogant kind of spirit that puts us off from the very start.

I think it would be next to impossible to try to organize an Elder Brother’s Fan Club. I sure wouldn’t want that assignment. Who would join? It would be easier to organize one in Managua for Ollie North.[2]

And yet, isn’t it strange? As much as we dislike him, if we’re honest we have to admit that he’s one of us. Hold him up to a mirror and shudder at the resemblance. Don’t kid yourself. Maybe our distaste is partly because we’re so much like him, and in our hearts we know it. It’s not all comfortable to contemplate, but more Church people, I suspect, have more in common with the elder brother than they do with the kid. We see in him some things we don’t like about ourselves, and we hate him all the more. Indeed, maybe that’s partly why Jesus told the story in the first place, so we could see ourselves and be prodded to do something about it.

But I’m getting ahead..... Who is this guy, anyway, this elder brother in the family? What makes him tick? Don’t oversimplify. The elder brother was a good man at heart....No, I didn’t say that right. He was a good man EXCEPT at heart. He was what Mark Twain, I think, once called “a good man in the worst sense of the word.”

That he was good externally is unarguable. That’s what makes it so complex. Give him his due. He really did have some admirable qualities, super-admirable qualities...Look at it from the outside----dependable, hard working, thrifty, loyal.....disciplined, punctual, organized, consistent.... it’s all there. If the local United Methodist Church didn’t have him on its Board of Trustees, the Nominating Committee should have been impeached. He’s that good, an absolute paragon of middle class, conventional virtue.

What’s more, our first look at him is not negative. Can’t you see him, plodding in from the grove at dusk that evening, tired and sweaty after pruning orange trees all day long in 98 degree temperature...HE’S POOPED....All he wants is a big glass of Gatorade before he catches the news.

But what does he find? There’s a ruckus going on in the house like he’s never heard before..... music, dancing, shouting, bar-b-cue....a PARTY, FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE...and I guess I mean that literally....a wild, swinging party, with a 5 piece combo and strobe lights.

 What is this, anyway?, he asks one of the servants, a perfectly normal, natural kind of question.

IT’S AT THAT POINT THAT WE BEGIN TO SEE HIM AS HE REALLY IS. Our first peek inside the exterior. The servant tells him what has happened. As he listens, he seethes. The more he hears, the more it builds up. Then, out it comes. All the poverty, all the destitution of his inner life is spilled across the floor.....

That scoundrel....That little pipsqueak...That no good clown.... Who does he think he is, crawling home like this in disgrace, after blowing it, to be treated like a king?

By his very reaction he shows he’s an out of synch with the spirit of the Father’s House as the younger brother had ever been. It’s not fair.... I sweated, and he sang. I labored, and he lolled. I grubbed and he gambled, I sacrificed and he celebrated. I drudged and he drank, I plugged and he played, I clawed and he cavorted....I knocked myself out building up the inheritance, and he flitted all over the place and squandered it..... WHAT KIND OF JUSTICE IS THAT!

And now the Old Man acts like he’s the only child in the house. When did I ever have a party given for me? He hasn’t changed. I know he hasn’t changed. That knuckle-head...He just got caught. This is no cause for a party. Let him stay out there in the pig pen where he deserves to be, and let decent, upright people enjoy the benefits of their honest productivity.

Well, there he is. How do you like him? Maybe I’ve exaggerated the portrait some. I know I have. Maybe I’ve even caricatured the elder brother a little and not treated him quite fairly... but I do it for a purpose. I want to emphasize a contrast. I do see something of myself in him, in his spirit and attitude, and I’m not proud of it. Maybe you can see in him a reflection of some things in your life you’d rather have taken away and eliminated.

This guy is embarrassingly pertinent, needlesomely[3] so, and though I don’t like him, I believe I can benefit from a closer look.

1. I see in him, for instance a tendency to make an evaluation about somebody else only on the basis of external evidence.

That may be fine for purely scientific studies, but you can’t do that with matters of the heart. There are some things you can’t understand except from the inside. God sees the inner person,...the Father in the parable responded to the heart change of the boy.... He recognized its authenticity.... THE ELDER BROTHER SAW NTOHING BUT THE OUTSIDE AND MISSED ENTIRELY THE GLORY OF WHAT WAS HAPPENING.

It’s so easy to be cynical about somebody else’s spiritual experience...We’re guilty of it, too, just as the elder brother was. Maybe it’s an especially ecclesiastical kind of affliction.... We see the outside, only the outside, and from the outside another person’s conversion for instance, can seem terribly contrived, obvious, even banal.... Nothing to this.... Why would we even believe it?

We hear about jailhouse conversions and are instantly skeptical.... Yeah, sure... What’s he trying to get?

We see a person roaring through life, sowing wild oats, living it up, disregarding every moral standard in the book, and then, suddenly, transformation, and we smell a rat in the woodpile.

When an older person claims to have had a revitalizing experience, we say smugly, well, it’s easy to become virtuous when you can’t be anything else. How many times have you heard that cynical explanation? “I have to be good”, someone will say, “I’m too old for the alternative”......

And we snicker, superciliously, as if virtue were solely a matter of physical prohibition....From the outside, even meaningful spiritual experiences can look remarkably trivial.

It’s only when you see them from the inside that you can grasp their true significance.

And that means to some extent you must have been there yourself. The elder brother never had, so he missed what was happening completely.

No one who has never experienced in his own life what it means to have the burden of past wrong removed....No one who has never experienced what it means to be unshackled from the chains of a biding habit....No one who has never had his I.O.U.’s torn up and thrown to the four winds...No one who has never experienced the radical ecstasy of realizing that the Father, in spite of everything you might have done against Him, has never forgotten you, not even for a moment, and is there, with open arms, to draw you to His heart.......No one who has not personally experienced this can possibly begin to know the depth of what it means to come home to God.

The elder brother saw it only from the outside and missed the magnificent beauty of his brother’s transformation. If only he could have looked within, and within himself, where there was a like amount of garbage, he might have understood.

2. Next, I see in the elder brother the tendency to take whatever religion he had for granted.

His religion wasn’t a joy to him, it was a burden. He didn’t’ disparage it, he simply assumed it, and treated it as just another obligation of life.

Maybe this is the deepest tragedy of the whole thing.... what could have been, what ought to have been.

Surrounded by grace, every waking day of his life. Saturated in it, he never drank in the nourishing freedom of being an accepted son in his own Father’s house. It was there all the time and he never claimed it.

Oh, he loved his Father, in a way, I’m sure he did. He obeyed him, he honored him, he worked for him faithfully, but he did it more out of duty than out of a sense of joy and privilege. I bet he never once threw his arms around the Old Man’s neck and said, “Pop, I just want you to know I appreciate you.”

It wouldn’t have occurred to him. His loyalty was calculated, not off the cuff, fabricated, not free, studied, not spontaneous.....But it’s the nature of love to be exactly that.

There was a boy in my home town, a young man, who was engaged to a young lady for 3 years..... 3 years. And every Saturday night of the world during that 3 year period, he would ride the bus out to her house a couple of miles from town, spend the evening with her, and then catch the last bus of the night back into town at 11:45 P.M. He did that every week. That was his unvarying schedule for 3 years.... catch the last bus at 11:45.

After 3 years, she broke off the engagement. “I can’t take it any more, Ralph” she said. “If you really loved me, just once you would have missed that damn last bus.”

I apologize for the unseemly word, but the quote without it would definitely lose a certain punch.

Ralph is the reincarnation of the elder brother. And he’s not the only one. There’s a kind of piety, a kind of stale religious obedience that has about it a mildewed absence of freshness that numbs both those who have it and those who see it. There are plenty of good people, whose religion has never made them happy, whose faith has never shoved them into something impulsive, who in all their lives have never done something crazy for God.

They may be honest, sincere people, They may be conscientious, and possess untold quantities of integrity and good will, but you can’t be with them 5 minutes without recognizing that for the most part God is boring to them.

That’s tragic. It happens when you take a relationship for granted... any relationship......when you don’t let it grow.

It happens when you fail to express appreciation, when you stop giving thanks. It happens when you become careless and presume on the affection of the other.

It happens sometimes in a marriage relationship over an extended period of time. Lovers shout with excitement about each other.... after a while the expression of the ardor is less prominent.

I remember the old Scotchman who said, “I love my wife so much that sometimes I can hardly keep from telling her.”

Well, you ought to tell her. You ought to tell her while you can. Don’t wait till it’s too late, and you’re left forlorn by the mouth of an open grave.

Your relationship with the Father demands the same vigilance. The worst thing that can happen to our Christianity is to take it for granted. The elder brother never let himself be grasped by the miracle because he did exactly that.

If only he could have stopped driving long enough to sniff the fragrance of the new day, he also might have gone inside to dance.

3. Now, finally, I see in the elder brother another tendency which is worrisome, and from which I know I’M NOT IMMUNE. It’s the tendency to be elitist, the tendency to dissociate himself from those he sees as beneath him. There’s frankly a snobbery here in his attitude, a social distancing of himself from others.

See it in the text. When he’s talking to the Father about this business of repentance and forgiveness, he never once says “my brother.” Did you notice? He never calls the younger boy “my brother.” Every time he refers to him, he calls him “your son.” THIS SON OF YOURS HAS COME BACK.

I see it as a kind of window into his soul. It’s a spirit of exclusiveness, a spirit that builds walls to keep unwanted people out.

Perhaps the most revealing indicator of the breadth of a person’s soul, or a Church’s soul is who that person or Church is willing to call “brother.”

When we deal with the homeless, down at First Church, in that ministry of providing food and shelter each evening to men and women and children who for whatever reason have no place to come in out of the elements, do we think of them as “those people”, or can we honestly call them “brother”?

When a person knocks on the door of the Church, seeking a handout, or looking for a job, or asking for money to buy a ticket back north, are we able to say “my brother”, who, whatever his shortcomings, as much loved by the Father as any of us?

When our missionaries tell us about children starving to death in Africa, victims of political torture in Chile, people who have had to make it as best they could living in a refugee camp for decades because nobody on the outside would take them, can we call them brother, or does the sheer distance dilute the kinship?

Can we call the drunk driver, the pimp, the racist, the terrorist? Even if we deplore the choices they made in life, can we accept the person?

I pray for this Church every day. I hope you do. I guess the thing I pray most is that whatever else people say about our church....that it has beautiful architecture, lovely stained glass windows, stirring music, exciting program....I pray that more than any of that they would say that whoever seeks its ministry is received warmly. FOR THE CHURCH WHICH FAILS IN THAT FAILS EVERYTHING. THE SIMPLE, foundational axiom of our character as the Body of Christ is that when God accepts a person as His child, we should accept him as our brother.

The elder brother by distancing himself from his younger sibling distance himself from the Father by that very act. It wasn’t something God did to him--It was something He did to God.

He excluded himself from the Father’s joy, cut himself off from the Father’s gracious acceptance. If only he could have allowed his heart to rejoice with the Father’s rejoicing, maybe he, too, could have known the peace of blessed reconciliation.

Now I close with this. In the parable of the prodigal, no matter where you jump in, you always come back to the Father....2 boys, 2 brothers, 2 sets of problems, 2 responses.... Both sinned against the Father, in different kinds of ways.

The younger boy’s sins were out in the open, overt, sins of passion and excess. The sins of the elder brother were interior, covert, sins of spirit and parsimoniousness.

The younger boy finally came to his senses....The elder brother, so far as we know, never did. Maybe the supreme irony is that the younger boy, because he was willing to be a servant, ended up as a son....

The older boy, because he insisted on being treated a son, ended up as a servant. Yet to both boys, the Father came out of the House to bestow His gracious acceptance. That’s the magnificent thing. We see Him running up the road to greet the penitent younger brother.....

But it clearly says as well in the 28th verse that the Father came out to plead with that other pig-headed son. Even when the boy cut Him out, the Father never stopped believing in Him and aching for Him.

“Everything I have is yours.” Isn’t that Gospel? The whole, uncountable treasury of heaven is yours for the taking, with all my love and good will.

And, you see. That offer still holds. My friends, how incredibly broad and inclusive is this love of the Father. It spans the whole gamut of human possibilities. And the greatest wonder of all is that even you and I, with all our eccentricities, peculiarities, and sleazy records have a place in that heart and are safe there.... through Jesus Christ our Lord.

--

[1] “Heavy” was a slang term used more often in the 1980s by young people who wanted to reference something that mattered.

[2] Managua is the capital of Nicaragua and Ollie North was a U.S. Marine who clandestinely channeled money to the Contras (Rebels) in Nicaragua. In 1986 there was an investigation by the U.S. Congress about this issue.

[3] Tom Price used words very precisely and, at times, made up words.  This would be one of them.