"This brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found."

Luke 15:32

Then finally it hit me! In a flash of inspiration, I realized there are two prodigals in this story. If "prodigal" means to spend lavishly, then technically there is another prodigal in this story, beyond the famously wasteful son for whom the story is popularly named. For in the end, this is a story about how a father lavishes his love upon his long-lost son.

Sadly, that didn't necessarily answer the question of what I was going to say about all of this, but in terms of titles it seemed like a great insight to me. Little did I know that some of the best preachers ever, including my all-time favorite whose name I'm not even going to mention for a change, were way ahead of me.

But in fairness to the story's author, even "Prodigal Father" doesn't do justice to the full breadth of this brief masterpiece. My trusted New Interpreter's Bible commentary comes closer to getting it right: The Prodigal Son, the Waiting Father and the Elder Brother , it says in the inscription above this passage.

And, sure enough, the wisdom of that title becomes evident in the very first sentence of the story. "There was a man who had two sons." That's really what the story is about, isn't it? This is not just an account of an impatient, wastrel son. It's about a man, his two sons and the relationships between all three.

As such, it's a story for all time and for everyone who has ever been in a family, including moms, daughters and sisters. For regardless of gender, this is a story about adolescent rebellion and alienation from the family. It's about the appeal of the new and the lure of the foreign, and the consequences of our youthful choices. It's also about the nostalgia for home, the power of self-discovery, the importance of owning our mistakes, the joy of reunion, and the power of forgiveness.

So it's about a lot, in other words. The problem is that if you try to cover all those themes in one sermon, you're doomed to failure.

The good news, I think, is that you can boil this whole saga down to one word: This is a story about grace. God's grace in particular.

***

Now, we all know that the Prodigal Son has emerged as one of the Bible's greatest hits. But it's actually only one installment of a kind of trilogy. And they are all told in response to one, overarching complaint:

The Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.

You would think that welcoming sinners would not be such a big deal. I saw a sign out in front of a nearby church recently that I think Jesus would have liked: Churches aren't perfect. If they were, you couldn't come.

I'm not sure the scribes and the Pharisees in this story would have found that funny. As always, Jesus is hangin' out here with what they perceive to be the wrong crowd, and it makes them mad.

They must have made pretty big fuss about it, too, for in response, Jesus tells not one but three parables - one about a shepherd who loses a sheep, another about a woman who loses a coin and this one, about a father who loses a son.

He wastes no time getting into the heart of this one: "There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, 'Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.'

Like every child ever born, it seems that this son learned about his rights much earlier than he learned about the value of one's relationships.

Give me what will belong to me, demands the young man. We don't know why he asks this of his father. Whatever the reason, this brazen request sounds impatient and disrespectful to our ears, and it is.

But it's much more than that. It's also final. In that time, to ask for your inheritance early is to treat your father and your family as though they were already dead.

That point is even more evident in the Greek. So he divided his property between them , the text says of the father. The word for property here is bios. So he divided his bios , his life, between them.

It cost the father everything to let his son go, but he does so nevertheless and without any argument. He must know that for this child to become himself, he must let him go. If his son is to find his own home he must first have the chance to get badly lost.

Which the son immediately precedes to do. Like so many young women and men before and after him, including, I suspect, many of us in this room, the young man is fueled by the belief that real life and real happiness lie out there somewhere, beyond the confines of his small town, his small life. So he packs his bag and leaves.

But of course he has more gusto than sense and it's not long before his money's gone. And it's not much longer after that that he is reduced to feeding the pigs, and stealing their food to fill the gnawing hunger in his own belly.

You don't have to be Jewish to understand that eating food intended for swine is about the lowest point a young man like this could reach. And you don't have to be Jewish to understand that when your life is at stake you'll eat anything, and you'll do anything for a little bit of cash.

You don't have to be Jewish to understand that because my guess is we've all had our own prodigal moment. When we've spent our resources and washed up on some distant shore, feeling hungry and a long way from home.

If you have had one of these prodigal moments, these prodigal experiences, then maybe you also know that it can be the best thing that ever happens to a person.

For the text tells us that right in the middle of the pig slop, this young man "came to himself." Standing there in the middle of the stink and the muck - stink and muck of his own making, moreover--he realized who he was and who he was not. And he also realized whose he was, and that his father's love still had a claim on him.

Yesterday Robyn and I went to see the new movie "Amazing Grace." The film is mainly about the stalwart abolitionist, William Wilberforce. And well it should be for the account of how Mr. Wilberforce brought down the slave trade in Great Britain is a story for the ages.

As inspiring as that story is, the title of the film has nothing to do with William Wilberforce, directly. Instead it is named after the famous hymn written by Wilberforce's contemporary, John Newton, played brilliantly in the movie by Albert Finney.

The title is a good thing, too, for Mr. Newton's story also deserves to be told. John Newton was the son of a sailor. And he followed in his father's footsteps, eventually serving on the man-of-war, the H.M.S. Harwich. Apparently he did not have his father's stomach for fighting, though, and he deserted. He was soon recaptured, however, publicly flogged and pressed back into service.

At his own request, John was transferred from a war ship to a slave ship. He must have been a talented sailor for he eventually rose through the ranks to captain his own slave ship, despite his record as a deserter.

Then, one night, caught in the throws of a violent storm that threatened his vessel, he prayed for God to save him.

And God did. In the middle of the stinking human waste of that slave vessel, John Newton realized that like the Prodigal Son, he was lost.

What separates the Prodigal Son and John Newton from so many of the lost souls out in the world? I think merely this: they had the courage to admit it. They knew that the only way out of the mess they were in was to admit they were in a pig sty of their own making. That who they were in that moment was not who they were created to be. And that where they were was not their home.

* * *

That first step on the journey home--owning our mistakes--is a big one. For both the Prodigal Son and John Newton it made what followed possible - the joyous reunion with a loving father. I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.

The real question is why is this grace? To be welcomed into the unconditional embrace of God's love - why is this grace?

The conventional view is that it's because Mr. Newton, along with the young man in this story, got something they did not deserve.

I actually believe that this view of grace is . . . backwards. Yes, the Prodigal Son and the repentant slave master both experienced extravagant, unconditional forgiveness.

But I actually think that is exactly what they deserved. The father welcomed his son home not because of who he, the father, was. The father welcomed the son home because he was his son.

Yes, on some basic level this prodigal young man deserved to eat food fit for pigs. But surely the point here is that from God's point of view, no one deserves to eat with the pigs. That's why the father welcomes the son home, cause home is where he belongs. And that's why he wraps him up in a royal robe, because underneath the dirt and the stink, he's family.

Unfortunately, the moral of this story is very hard to internalize. In his famous book, The Return of the Prodigal, , Henri Nouwen describes how easy it is to identify with the son in the pig sty and how hard it is to identify with the son, kneeling at the feet of his father.

He writes: The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realized . . . truly accepting love, forgiveness, and healing is often much harder that giving it (pg 13) .

Part of the problem here, I think, actually has to do with fathers. Some of us have had difficult relationships with our earthly fathers, and for some that makes it difficult to think of God in those terms. Indeed, nowadays it seems that just about every theologian worth his or her salt is trying to help us move beyond identifying God with a particular gender.

Every theologian but one. For the German theologian Joachim Jeremias "Repentance means learning to say Abba again" ( New Testament Theology: the Proclamation of Jesus , pg. 156).

That may be hard for you to do, for any number of reasons.

But imagine that you are God's own envoy, come to earth. And that you're sitting with a group of tax collectors and sinners, a group who have been taught their whole lives that a fearsome God is going to visit judgment on their heads, a group who probably feel as good about themselves as John Newton felt about himself on that slave ship.

Imagine telling them this story, the story of the Prodigal Son. Telling them that those who once were lost can now be found. Telling them, in effect, that after going through many dangers toils and snares, that grace, that God, is waiting to welcome them home.

Amen