The last few meditations have hovered around the Lord’s story of the Prodigal Son.  We’ve talked about the homecoming.  We’ve talked about the prodigal son himself and all of the prodigals, nomads, and exiles among our people who have wandered away from the church.  But what about the elder son?

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Do you know what it’s like to watch a child go off the rails? I had to watch a young niece completely lose her moral compass.   It wasn’t that she had a bad home life. Her parents surrounded her with love as she was growing up. They certainly provided her with the material necessities of life. They gave her their time. They set reasonable boundaries for her. Then at one point she simply lost it. She tried pretty much everything, including taking up with a married man. What can a parent do in circumstances like these? I watched her father in tears as he contemplated the gulf between the little girl that he knew so well and the young adult that he didn’t understand at all. Eventually she rediscovered herself. Her summary of those years was “I must have gone crazy.”

Pastors, by the way, are not immune to the pains of raising children. The daughters of two, girls that I knew as children, came out of the closet as lesbians and their parents had to make the adjustment. The son of one pastor was in prison when I knew him. Susan and I navigated the teen and young adult years of our own children with fear and trembling. Children don’t get to choose their parents, and for the most part parents don’t pick their children. We can only traverse the vagaries of life with unconditional love and do the best that we can for them.

There is one young man that stands out in my mind. The father was an active layman in the congregation. His son got into trouble and ended up in the penitentiary. A penitentiary is not a safe place for a young man, and it can turn him into a hardened and more skillful criminal. His father shed many a silent tear and offered up a great many ardent prayers. The boy served his time and was released. Now the question was “who is he?”

He came to church every Sunday. He attended the contemporary service and sat right about there, second row from the front right in front of the pastor. Can you imagine the pressure that puts on the pastor? Not only does he have to direct the message to the entire congregation, but he has to speak meaningfully to this young man who is attempting to reconstruct his life. That’s when the activity of the Holy Spirit becomes critically important, both in what is said and what is heard.

There are so many “church words” that we throw around without stopping to think what is really involved in them. Sin is the result of really bad choices that people make, choices that cause fathers to shed silent tears in the night. Sin has the tendency to tear relationships apart. It can separate a parent and child. It can also separate husbands and wives. If we can recognize the tragedy in bad choices, how much more is God torn as he contemplates his own fallen children? We blithely speak of the wrath of God, as if we could understand his anger when he watches his children make the same bad choices over and over again. Nor can we really understand his tears as his unconditional love reaches out to us.

“While we were yet sinners” St. Paul wrote to the people of Rome. That is the incomprehensible point. It isn’t when we come to the realization that the choices that we have made are wrong and destructive to ourselves and others that God is willing to grant us his forgiveness. It isn’t when we have spruced ourselves up and shined our shoes and put on our church clothes that we become acceptable in the Lord’s sight. It isn’t after the young man has done his time, paid his debt to society, it is while he is still in the middle of whatever he is doing that’s wrong, it’s right in the middle of the mess that the Lord intervenes. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

The meditations for this past week have been hovering around the story of the Prodigal Son. We’ve talked about the homecoming. We’ve talked about the young man and all of the others who are nomads, prodigals, and exiles, but what about the older brother. The way that Jesus has constructed the story the older brother has stayed with his father. He has been responsible. He is the one whom his father could rely upon to get the work done. Frankly, he is the one who should have been rewarded. A Pharisee listening to Jesus tell the story would certainly have identified with the older brother, as would every good church member. After all, a good church member has been faithful. He or she hasn’t wandered off. Ah, but the problem is the elder brother wasn’t prepared to accept the prodigal home. “Let him first prove that he is worthy!”

But then there’s another incomprehensible church word that we toss around—“grace.” The organist of a church that I served gave me a little devotional booklet. There were several stories that have meant a great deal to me. One was about a missionary in central Africa. He had grown up on the eastern seacoast of the United States, and he truly missed the sea. I understand that. It was only when I could show Susan, who grew up thinking that Pennsylvania was out west, that the Gulf of Mexico was really part of the Atlantic Ocean that I could get her all the way to Texas. On Christmas Eve there was a knock at the missionary’s door. When he opened it there was one of the members of his church. In his hand was a basket of seashells. “This is a gift for you,” the man said. “My goodness,” the missionary exclaimed, “you would have had to walk for two or three days just to get to the sea, and just as long to return.” “The journey,” his parishioner replied, “is part of the gift.”

The reality of the things that get lumped together in the creed under the words “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried,” are all a part of the journey, and are all a part of the gift which God has given us. Those words are descriptive of a very harsh reality and summarize the price tag placed on the gift of grace. That the gift is undeserved and unearned is only part of the story. This gift is a sacrifice on the part of God.

The picture that the Lord drew for us in the story of the Prodigal Son is, sadly, too often a picture of reality. Young men and young women do turn their backs on family and journey into a far country of immorality. And I’m sure more than one father or mother has stared earnestly down the road, hoping and praying for the return of a child. There was another son, however, one who was right there who also needed the father’s compassion. The older son too had difficulty conceiving of a father so gracious, so generous, that he could care for both of his sons. If the younger son needed the grace of forgiveness and acceptance once again into the family, the older son needed to learn the meaning of grace and forgiveness. And we need to understand the generosity of a Heavenly Father who graciously restores us—time and time again.

There are so many roles open in the story of the Prodigal Son, and from time to time we have probably played most of them.