It was with some trepidation that I chose the story of the prodigal son as the basis for this morning's message.  After all, when you're dealing with one of the great Biblical clichés there's always the risk that you'll produce one of the not-so-great homiletical clichés.   I tried approaching the story from various angles, and what I found was that the story contained enough material for an entire series of sermons.  Since I'm only going to do one. . .  I'll limit myself to extracting a few simple lessons from the way the father deals with each of his two sons.

Jesus is telling this story to a crowd of sinners and tax collectors, and pharisees.  It's a thinly veiled allegory, and I expect most of his listeners knew it . . . particularly the pharisees.  The father is God, the younger son is a "sinner" and the older brother is a pharisee.  Now, on to the story. . .

It starts with what has to be a really unpleasant situation.  The young son is asking dad to carve up the estate. . . can't wait until he dies.  Has to have it now.  And at this point dad does an amazing thing . . . he says OK.  You just know that the father knows exactly what's going to happen.  They probably even discussed it to some degree.  Anyway, the young son had his mind made up, and the father let's him have his way.  Here, Jesus is showing us how God deals with rebellion.   With unlimited freedom.   He gives us the freedom to do really stupid things; self-destructive things; things that grieve God terribly, but He lets us do them anyway.  And He loves us fully all the while.

That freedom also has its counterpart in our human relationships.   People, even those closest to us, don't always act the way we wish they would.  We may be 100% right, and we may rightly try to wield our influence over them, but ultimately they have the freedom to act as they choose.  They are free people, just like we are free people.  Does this sound anarchistic?  You may say  "Don't I have the right to tell my kid to be in by 11 o'clock?"  Of course you do . . . and your kid has the freedom to stay out til 3 a.m. and suffer the consequences.   Let me give you a simple example out of my own past.  When I was in high school, I developed a burning desire to buy a 1952 Chrysler Imperial.  My father, in a very subtle way, did everything he could to discourage me from buying that car, but in the end he relented and I bought the car.

What if he'd said no.  How would that have affected me?  If the father had tried to stop the younger son from leaving, would he have ever come back?  Would he have been able to swallow his pride?  Think about your own lives. . .  How many of those old psychic wounds were caused by someone saying no when they should have said yes. . . or clamping down when they should have eased off.  The people who inflicted those wounds probably loved you, and thought they were doing the right thing for your moral and spiritual development.  It just happened to be the wrong thing at the wrong time.  Have you forgiven those people?
Moving onward in to the familiar part of the story . . . Indeed, the son does leave... packs up his money and heads to a distant country where he squanders his inheritance in wild living.   As you might expect the money runs out, and to top it all off, there's a famine.  In order to survive, the prodigal finds himself doing the absolute worst thing that a good Jew could do. . . taking care of the pigs.  This is rock-bottom.  It's here in the pig-sty that the young son comes to grips with his own state. . . and decides he'd rather be the lowliest person on his father's estate than where he is now.

Earlier I was talking about the unlimited freedom God grants us . . . Jesus now shows us the other half of how God deals with rebellion. . . unlimited grace.  The young son was pretty bad, he didn't just go to a Mennonite college. . . or question some sacred doctrine, yet the father not only lets him back into the estate, he puts the ring of sonship on his finger and throws a party.

That's a pretty special father . . . . Imagine . . .

God's grace is an invitation to forget the your past.  If God had wanted to remind the young son of what he had done, God would have made him the lowliest of his hired hands.  But he didn't, he restored him to full sonship.  In the same way, God invites us to forget our past.  He has made us fully his children.  Each of us is special, with a unique set of strengths and weaknesses, and each of us has that same status in the kingdom.  Everything He has is ours.

This is where the older son balks.  The fact that the younger son is back means he's getting gypped out of even more of his inheritance and he doesn't like it one bit.  The older son presents us with somewhat of a problem.  All through Sunday School we were told that the young son was the prodigal, and here is this guy making a big rebellious scene.  It ruins the end of a perfectly good story.  Right?  Well, it depends what point you're trying to make.  Jesus was telling this story to the sinners and the pharisees. . .  and this older brother is a pharisee.  And the fact that this part comes at the end of the story must mean it's pretty important.  So, we've seen how God handles the young son. . .   How does he handle the older son?

The first thing father does is he pleads with the older son.    That doesn't move the older son, tho.  He invokes his record:  Verse 29  "All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders.  Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends."  translate  Oh! what a hardship it is to be in the kingdom of God.  Look at all the things I've done for you God, and how good I've been.  And what do I get for it. . . I get to go to Heaven with sinners.  Curiously, the pharisee, who is in the kingdom, has a totally wrong-headed notion of what it means to be in the kingdom.

Now we don't like to be compared to pharisees, but we have a lot in common with the older son.  Like him, we're in the kingdom but we don't always know why, and sometimes we're not even totally happy about it.  Some of us have rejected what our parents said it means to be the kingdom, and are still struggling to replace those old tenets with new ones.  And some days, like the older brother, we may even fall into thinking that being in the kingdom means amassing browny points and getting rewards.

God, however, has the final word in this story.  He says to the older son:   vs 31.

"My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.  But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found."  In a word, God is saying that being in the kindgom means sonship.  That's what it's all about.  That's the reward.  And not sonship for just a few pharisees, but all us sinners as well.

We talked earlier about God's gift of unlimited freedom, and later about his gift of unlimited grace and Love.  But from a literary standpoint, the positioning of this idea of sonship sends up all sorts of flags that say "Important".  So I'd like to close by talking briefly about the implications of sonship for the church.  Stripped of its gender-specific clothing, it means that all of us, no matter what our past failings, no matter how vile our rebellion, and in spite of our present weaknesses, can be fully God's children when we humbly repent before Him.  All on an equal plane.  The whole idea probably doesn't sound nearly as radical as it is.
Imagine the church where sonship is fleshed out.  Any guttersnipe or rebel can get in if he's willing to commit his life to Christ.  And you can't look down your nose at that person as they struggle.  In fact, you can't even look down your nose at people who are more conservative than you are, or more liberal than your are, or who make more money than you do, or less.  People help each other in areas of weakness with the humility that they haven't arrived yet either.  Imagine that church.  Now, by the grace of God, let's work to make it our church.