Come Home
David Orendorff · Luke 15:11-32 · March 25, 2007
This parable of a father and two sons is one of Jesus’ best known parables. It is one in a series of parables whose theme is seeking the lost. It is even familiar to most non-church folks. It speaks of the three people who have lost home. The younger brother lost his home because he was so self-centered that he squandered the gifts of his father until he was desperate. The older son lost his home because he was so self-righteous that he couldn’t come to the party for his brother who was dead and is now alive, was lost and now is found. And the father lost his home because he had two sons who were so damagingly self-engaged and they would not come home.
Henri Nouwen has a wonderful description of the home the father offers in his book “The Inner Voice of Love:”
Home is where you are truly safe. It is where you can receive what you desire. You need human hands to hold you there so you don’t run away again. But when you come home and stay home, you will find the love that will bring rest to your heart. 1Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love, (Doubleday, New York, 1998), 12
Home is a relationship that offers unconditional love, forgiveness, and care. The book of John’s Revelation, that very strange last book of the New Testament, describes the vision of home this way:
See, the home of God is among mortals.
God will dwell with them as their God;
they will be God’s peoples,
and God will personally be with them;
God will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away. 2Revelation 21:3-4
The desire for such a home is deeply rooted in our psyches and our souls. Again, Henri Nouwen writes:
There are two realities to which you must cling. First, God has promised that you will receive the love you have been searching for. And second, God is faithful to that promise.
So stop wandering around. Instead, come home and trust that God will bring you what you need. Your whole life you have been running about, seeking the love you desire. Now it is time to end that search. Trust that God will give you that all-fulfilling love and will give it in a human way. Before you die, God will offer you the deepest satisfaction you can desire. Just stop running and start trusting and receiving. 3Nouwen, ibid., 12
God, the father of this parable, calls us home. And in our souls we desperately want to come home. And because we are here in worship we have begun the long journey home.
To Jesus hearers, this invitation to come home would also resonate in a way we might miss two thousand years later, for the parable is not only about a father and two sons, it is about God’s love for both the Jew and the Gentile. The Jews are the people God has chosen and the people who have chosen God. Gentiles are everybody else. God is the father who provides for all the children, both Jew and Gentile, and wants them home.
The younger son corresponds to the Gentiles. They are the ones who, having inherited the gifts of God, the good earth and her produce, the love of humanity and its mercy, left home and squandered God’s generosity with their own immediate and insatiable appetites.
And the older son, the one who stayed home to work the farm for God, are the Jewish people. They are the ones who have kept the faith. But many of them have done this with a self-righteous attitude that will not even recognize the Gentiles as their brothers and sisters, who now refuse to welcome the Gentiles home.
We can contemporize the parable and understand that there are lost young children in the world who have wandered far from God and squander God’s generosity in self-centered lives. And there are older children, Christians who have stayed on the farm but self-righteously will not celebrate the coming of the unchurched or the non-Christian into their midst.
Truthfully, I do not see a self-righteous attitude as being prevalent at Bear Creek. I know that a few folks have expressed a feeling of having encountered an attitude of superiority or entitlement from those who were early in on the start of Bear Creek. And this division between the old timers and the late arrivals has been a problem for us. But I have honestly not seen it. I see old and new Bearcreekians working diligently to party together, to invite each other into friendship, into classes and covenant groups, into worship and mission, into being disciples of Jesus.
I remember when Matt and Jana came to worship with us last year. They had just moved to our area and Jana was well along in pregnancy. Being far from both Jana’s and Matt’s parents, having moved away from their friends and their church, they needed family, they needed a home. Bearcreekians rallied to the need. On that first Sunday, Sara and Ann sized up the situation and gave Matt and Jana their phone numbers. Jeannie as Lay Leader and chair of the Nurture Committee arranged meals for after the delivery, and many of you delivered those meals. Bearcreekians have continued to celebrate Matt and Jana in our midst now with John, our second newest congregant.
There are a great number of equally gracious stories of this congregation welcoming, celebrating and supporting folks who come among us for the first time. We are, of course, not perfect. We sometimes neglect the guest in our pews or at coffee fellowship because we are excited to see old friends, because we are shy, or because we are afraid that we might greet someone as if they were new when they aren’t. In our hesitancy we miss an opportunity to make new friends and to make this home. And to those of you who have experienced this lack of Christian hospitality, I apologize and commit us to be better.
In general, however, I commend this congregation for living up to its mission statement: “to create a diverse family place of belonging for all people and to reach out and make disciples of Christ.” 4The Bear Creek UMC mission statement It is a foundational part of the Bearcreekian soul to make this place home for the lost. It is why Ellen or someone from her committee stands at the door every Sunday to welcome us home.
In reflecting on this parable, I did notice a place that we do truly need to improve. In this parable I notice that the father’s love is not passively waiting for the return of either son, not simply waiting for them to show up. The father is staring down the road longing to see his younger son come home, and when the prodigal son is seen, the father, forgetting all the decorum and right behavior of a patriarch, forgetting the younger son’s failures in love, runs down the road to meet his child and to fully restore him to home.
And when the father knows that the older son has not come to celebrate, he does not wait passively at the party, hoping the older son will come home, but he goes out to where his son is, he leaves the party to find his son and invite him home. I think that we (and I mean to include myself here) too often passively wait for the lost to find us. While God is actively seeking to find the lost, we are too often sitting home waiting for the lost to find us. It seems that once we have been found, we have a tendency to fall into an evangelical passivity and we stop looking for other lost souls. Shouldn’t we, like our heavenly father, be running down the road looking to find and greet lost children? And shouldn’t we, like our heavenly father, go looking for our brothers and sisters who were once with us but now no longer come to the party?
We live in a region that is desperate to have a home, to belong. We live among broken families, latchkey children, fractured relationships and all those desperately seeking love in all the wrong places. We live in a world lost in war, poverty, anxiety and depression. And we have a home for that world from our heavenly Father and Mother. It is a home we can offer to all who are lost. The world must have this home of forgiveness, reconciliation, unconditional and universal love or it will perish. Shouldn’t we be shouting to share our joy and writing giant slogans on public walls inviting the lost home?
The lost of the world are no different than we once were. Their most basic needs are the same as ours. Within every child there is a fear, a wound, a loneliness and a lostness that can only be healed by coming home. This truth is universal. It is not just we here who need such a home; it is also a world of lost who, try as they might, cannot find their way home. Shouldn’t we be calling, assisting and caring for them?
God’s finding us and bringing us home is an antidote to what ails us. Shouldn’t we be actively seeking the lost and offering God’s home and healing to them?
In a moment we will sing one of our great hymns, “Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling.” Jesus is God made flesh, is servant love made flesh, and is the father, the grandfather, the mother, the grandmother, who loved us even as we wandered from that love in self-seeking pleasures and self-righteous judgments and now calls to us, “O sinner, come home.”
By sinner, grandmother does not mean “one who broke the rules.” Grandmother means the lost. All the righteous and all the unrighteous, all those who pretend at whole and all those that have no idea what whole might be. Grandmother God is calling for her children, all of her children who suffer being lost to come home to forgiveness, unconditional love and apple pie.
As we sing this “Softly and Tenderly,” I invite us to sing it to the world of the lost. To sing so that a world of lost souls might hear us invite them home. Sing to your neighbor who is struggling with her life and children. Sing to your co-worker who is desperate to belong to something other than work. Sing to your children who have wandered away from God’s love. Sing to the world that starves and wars. Sing to all God’s lost children to invite them home.
Amen and Shalom.