Lent 4C 2025

Text: ““31[The Father] said to [the older son], ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32 It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found’” (Luke 15:31-32).

The theme for today’s readings is summed up in one word: Grace. That’s not an easy subject to discuss. E.B. White commented about humor, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog, but the thing dies in the process, and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” The same can be said about grace. So we’ll tread carefully. But let’s consider grace with two stories from the book What’s So Amazing About Grace by Philip Yancey.

The first is a story about a young girl who grew up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City. Like many teenagers, she battles regularly with her parents over her nose ring, her music, and her clothes. The arguments happen again and again until, one night, she runs away.

She goes to Detroit, figuring it will be the last place her parents would look for her. “Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she’s ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her some pills… She was right all along, she decides: her parents were keeping her from all the fun.

“[And, of course, the man—she calls him “Boss”—isn’t doing all of it to be nice. There’s a price to the way he treats her, but she’s willing to do what he asks her to.] The good life continues for a month, two months, a year…. [Soon,] the first signs of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean… and before she knows it she’s out on the street without a penny to her name.

“[She does whatever she can to support her addition, which leaves her] sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores…. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens.

“One night as she lies awake listening for footsteps, all of a sudden everything about her life looks different. She no longer feels like a woman of the world. She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She begins to whimper. Her pockets are empty and she’s hungry. …She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she’s piled atop her coat. Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind: of May in Traverse City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossomy trees in chase of a tennis ball.

“God, why did I leave, she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. My dog back home eats better than I do now. She’s sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.

“Three straight phone calls, three straight connections with the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two times, but the third time she says, “Dad, Mom, it’s me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m catching a bus up your way and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there, well, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus unit it hits Canada.”

“It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and during that time she realizes the flaws in her plan. What if her parents are out of town and miss the message? Shouldn’t she have waited another day or so until she could talk to them? And even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given them some time to overcome the shock.

Her thoughts bounce back and forth between those worries and the speech she is preparing for her father. “Dad, I’m sorry. I know I was wrong. It’s not your fault; it’s all mine. Dad, can you forgive me?” She says the words over and over, her throat tightening even as she rehearses them. She hasn’t apologized to anyone in years.

“…When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, “Fifteen minutes, folks. That’s all we have here.” Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror, smooths her hair, and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips, and wonders if her parents will notice. If they’re there.

“She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect. Not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepare her for what she sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot. They’re all wearing party hats and blowing noise-makers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner that reads, “Welcome home!”

“Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She stares out through the tears quivering in her eyes like hot mercury and begins the memorized speech, ‘Dad, I’m sorry. I know….”

“He interrupts her. “Hush, child. We’ve got no time for that. No time for apologies. You’ll be late for the party. A banquet’s waiting for you at home.”” (Yancey, Philip. “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” p. 49-51).

The second is about a man “who was battling with his fifteen-year-old daughter. He knew she was using birth control, and several nights she had not bothered to come home at all. The parents had tried various forms of punishment, to no avail. The daughter lied to them, deceived them, and found a way to turn the tables on them: “It’s your fault for being so strict!”

He described what their anguish looked like: “I remember standing before the plate-glass window in my living room, staring out into the darkness, waiting for her to come home. I felt such rage. I wanted to be like the father of the Prodigal Son, yet I was furious with my daughter for the way she would manipulate us and twist the knife to hurt us. And of course, she was hurting herself more than anyone. I understood then the passages in the prophets expressing God’s anger. The people knew how to wound him, and God cried out in pain.

“And yet I must tell you, when my daughter came home that night, or rather the next morning, I wanted nothing in the world so much as to take her in my arms, to love her, to tell her I wanted the best for her. I was a helpless, lovesick father.”

“Now when I think about God,” Yancey writes, “I hold up that image of the lovesick father, which is miles away from the stern monarch I used to envision. I think of my friend standing in front of the plate-glass window gazing achingly into the darkness. I think of Jesus’ depiction of the Waiting Father, heartsick, abused, yet wanting above all else to forgive and begin anew, to announce with joy, “This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.”

One of the questions we must figure out, any time we try to understand one of our Lord’s parables, is where we fit in.  That’s true here, as well. Thankfully we put ourselves rather naturally—and correctly—into the role of the son. But there is a little more to consider. There is the older brother.

We could dig into what that older brother was thinking, what he said or didn’t say, what he should or shouldn’t have done or felt, but here, too, notice what we discover about their father: He is just as lavish and loving with the older son as He was with the prodigal. ““31 [The Father] said to [the older son], ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32 It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.’” (Luke 15:31-32).

The older son had been clothed in robes that were just as rich and beautiful as the robe brought for the prodigal son. Day after day he had eaten the best food there at his father’s table. “My son, …all that is mine is yours,” he said.

At different times you and I might be in the position of one of those sons or or the other. In either case, the father’s grace is just as lavish. He is the one who comes running to you, arms open. In fact, He ran all the way to the cross to buy you back. He gave His only-begotten Son into death on the cross in order to bring you from death to life. You were dead in your trespasses and sins and He has made you alive through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The moment that you were brought to the waters of baptism—as you were buried with Him, through baptism, into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, you, too, might walk in newness of life—that moment when the water was poured on your head, the Father rejoiced in heaven, saying: “This, my child, was dead but is now alive. He was lost but now He is found.”

He continues to celebrate every soul that turns to Him in repentance and faith AND He rejoices at the opportunity to lay a feast before you every week. He hasn’t killed a fatted calf, but He has sacrificed a lamb—the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. He sets that feast before you, saying, “Take and eat… take and drink. This is for you. You were dead and are alive again. You were lost but now you are found.” Your father says to you, “My son, my daughter, come and eat. Come and drink. All that is mine is yours.”

That, by the way, is what Paul means when he says we have been given the ministry of reconciliation. That God, that father at the plate-glass window aching for His child, is making His appeal through you. The Father has sent you out into this world—not to be the instrument of that wrath, but to implore those who do not believe to repent and to be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ. “14 For the love of Christ [compels] us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; 15 and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. 16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh” (2 Corinthians 5:14-16a). Now you get to regard them by grace seeing them, as God does, yearning for them, “heartsick, abused, yet wanting above all else to forgive and begin anew….”

Just like dissecting a frog, God’s grace is messy. It is ugly. It deals with real sins and the consequences. Repentance, after all, starts with understanding the harm that you have done. It requires respect for the feelings of those you have harmed. It involves accepting the consequences of your actions. Repentance requires you to put away the self-righteousness that you use to try to paper over the damage you have caused. And, on the other end, there are some wounds which can not be healed in this life. But that is the only road to understanding, receiving and living in God’s grace.