Psalm 40:1-5; Luke 15:11-32
A Sermon Preached by Donald Mackenzie
University
Congregational United
“This brother of yours was dead and has come to life, was lost and has been found.” Luke 15:32b
Everyone knows what it feels like to be lost. Everyone knows what it feels like to make a mistake and be in need of forgiveness and everyone knows that subtle resentment that can come from doing good and not being rewarded. Given that, everyone should be able to find a place in the parable called The Prodigal Son. A Prodigal is one who goes to extremes. We can easily see how this applies to the younger son. And we can see how it also applies to the elder son in his extreme self-righteousness. But the father, the parent is also prodigal in the way he forgives both his children. This ability to forgive is the foreign territory in this story and to explore that foreign territory, we first must be sure we understand the familiar territory of going to extremes on the landscape of loneliness, being lost and being in need of forgiveness.
The younger son wants his inheritance so he can go away
and have a good time. He takes it, he
loses it and suddenly he realizes just how lost he is and the desire to get
back to that place where he belongs, that desire to get back home, overwhelms
him. Being lost is one of the most
frightening, the most anxious experiences we can have. We can, each of us, remember some moment as
small children where we suddenly couldn’t see our parents, we couldn’t figure
out where they might be, the direction we should
go. So, we cry out. As adults we have parallel experiences and we
also feel like crying out even though often we keep our pain to ourselves. Being lost is being in a place, be it
physical, mental or spiritual where we do not belong. It’s being in a place where we are not known
or loved, or so it feels, and it’s being in a place where we don’t know how to cope
because the landscape is so unfamiliar.
One of the most extreme examples of being in a place where we do not
belong is being in jail. As prisoners,
we feel that lostness as deeply as one might because
we have no control over it. That feeling of not belonging, of desperation and
of hopelessness, is the subject of many blues songs and this one, “The Midnight
Special” by Leadbelly is a good example. (There is a
thin line between preaching and entertainment and ordinarily the purpose of
preaching is not to entertain. But it is
also true that sometimes ordinary words cannot get us to the place where we
need to be. And right now we need to be
in that place where we can feel all those feelings that deal with the
loneliness and lostness of imprisonment. For we are all prisoners of something aren’t
we? Whether it is money, sex, religion,
politics, art, lack of self-worth, anger or frustration, we all find ourselves
locked in a place from which we can’t seem to escape. In this first song, we hear the hope that the
light from the
“Well you wake up in the mornin’
you hear the ding dong ring. You go marchin to the table, you see the
same dang thing. You go marchin to the table, knife a fork and a pan. If you say anything about it, you’re in
trouble with the man. Well let the
Whether we are imprisoned justly or unjustly, the lack of control and the longing to be in that place where our names are known and loved, that place where we belong, that sense of being lost is wholly defining.
But sometimes, of course, our prisons are of our own making and we just can’t seem to get back home. The remorse from having made bad decisions can put us in a very lonely place, a place where we are in need of healing. Again, I invite you to ponder your choices in life and where they have taken you.
“I was born for wanderin’, guess I always will. And I wonder if it’s greener on the far side of that hill. Sometimes, I’m weary, sometimes I’m lonely too. Sometimes I see a farmer walkin’ slow when day is through. And I know he’s got a woman, waitin supper every day. And I curse this wanderin’ fever that took my life away.”
We can get pretty hard on ourselves thinking about how life might have gone differently if only we had this or that. It’s that feeling of estrangement, of being out of sync, out of place, even out of time that is so poignant. This is common to humanity. We can all feel like prisoners or strangers at one time or another in our lives.
But inside these feelings of being in the wrong place or held in the wrong place, or just not sure where we ought to be, a good blues tune not only holds and describes that despair but also gives us a clue about the hope of finding our way home.
“Well once I lived the live of a millionaire, spending my money, Lord, I didn’t have a care. Takin’ my friends out for a mighty fine time, drinking high priced liquor, champagne and wine. But then you begin to fall so low, you haven’t got a friend and no place to go. If I ever get my hands on a dollar again, I’m going to hold on to it ‘til the eagle grins. Nobody knows you, when you’re down and out. In your pocket you haven’t got a penny, and your friends well you haven’t any. But then you begin to rise again, everybody wants be your long lost friend. It’s mighty strange, without a doubt. Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.”
Everyone knows what it feels like to be lost. In fact, it is that feeling of displacement,
of estrangement that causes the disorientation that can be at the root of so
many of our mistakes, our sins. So the
need for forgiveness is great and we all know what that feels like as well.
But it is that ability to forgive that is so undeniably foreign. It’s the Egypt of the Hebrew people. We don’t belong there, or so it feels and when we get there, we don’t know how to behave. So, the parent, the father in our story is our guide and shows us, even gets right to the heart of who God is and what God is. For it is love, and only love that can respond with forgiveness instead of judgment and give each of us that second chance that we so desperately need. This is the love that can move us to treat our neighbors as ourselves. In fact, when we get it, when we understand that home is the heart of the love that God is, that love is where we belong, we can relax a little about getting lost. For each of us also knows that if we are with that one who loves us and whom we love, we are never really lost. It is when we feel estranged from love that our lostness, our loneliness can overcome us and we wander or find our selves imprisoned.
In this story we can see just how badly each child needed
the love that the parent gave so willingly.
Whether it’s the light from the train called the