Joshua 5.9-12; Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians 5.16-21; Luke 15.1-3, 11b-32

 

I’m the oldest brother. Enid was next, then Jamie. Nine years later, Sarah, the youngest, was born. Of course, as my sisters are glad to remind anyone who will listen, brothers are not always a blessing. Cain killed Abel. Jacob tricked Esau with a bowl of soup and a hairy disguise. Joseph’s brothers beat him and sold him into slavery. It’s no better in the New Testament. Jesus called two pairs of brothers among his disciples—James and John, Simon Peter and Andrew. Do you remember whom Jesus caught arguing over who was the greatest? If he really wanted to bring peace, Jesus shouldn’t have called brothers. Malachi said that when Elijah comes, he will turn the hearts of parents and children to each other (4.6).  But even the coming of Christ doesn’t stop sibling rivalry.

 

In the early 20^th century, Alfred Adler saw a link between birth order and personality. I’m the first-born. Therefore, I’m a rule follower, a high achiever, and used to being the example. And I’m stubborn. Dr. Michael Jackson has called birth order “one of the fundamental elements in the social construction of kinship systems.”^[1] Your place in the family can shape the attitudes you have toward challenges and failures. If you know who you are, there’s a better chance you’ll make healthy choices when life throws you a curve.

 

Adler discovered that middle children are often overlooked and feel invisible, but they are also easy-going, humorous, and good at mediating conflict. Youngest children can stay the baby and expect everyone to do everything for them, but they’re also often the best at making friends. Only children can have trouble sharing, but they also tend to be more mature. Me? I’m the oldest brother. That makes me the Goody two-shoes who steps on other people’s toes.

 

Adler may have oversimplified. But he’s not far off when it comes to Jesus’ parable. The youngest son fits the mold: he expects everyone to drop what they are doing to give him what he wants. When they do, he burns high and fast, traveling far, making lots of friends, spending like there’s no tomorrow.

 

It’s hard not to be judgmental. We hear his story all the time. A 14 year-old girl from Tomball steals a few hundred dollars from Dad’s wallet, hitches a ride to Dallas, catches a bus for New York, and she gets caught up in the drug culture, running scared, and sleeping on ventilation grates. A family in the Woodlands finds out their 16 years-old son is gay, kicks him out of the house, and he winds up on the street at night in Houston. New Covenant Christian Church downtown serves hundreds of runaway teens and homeless drug addicts every year. If you’ve gone with the men’s group on Wednesday nights to feed that crowd you know there are lots of prodigals, lots of young people who find themselves suffering indignity and the deepest, most troubling loss.

 

But they aren’t the only ones who are lost, just as the youngest son is not the only one who’s lost in the story. The older brother fits Adler’s expectations. He is rigid and judgmental about the one who has strayed. He can’t accept his father’s generosity. He sees the party as wasteful. How often have you forwarded an email complaining that some social service coddles wrongdoers? I saw one that said Governor Perry’s HPV immunization order rewards teenage sexual activity! It’s as ridiculous as saying needle exchange programs reward IV drug users. But it’s what we older brothers believe. “Throw a party for that reckless kid, Dad? How’s he going to learn his lesson if you put my rings on his fingers, my robe on his shoulders, and kill the fatted calf that ought to belong to me?”

 

The older brother is also lost. That’s why Jesus tells the story in the first place: the religious leaders were asking Jesus why he ate with sinners. I bet they were older brothers. So Jesus told them about brothers who are spiritually lost, one in his cups and the other in his self-righteousness. The younger brother strayed so far from God that Augustine said he became a “wasteland” to himself, of hunger, lack, and destitution (Confessions, Book II,10). But the older brother became a wasteland of sterile righteousness and stiff-necked morality. Neither brother understood the father’s welcome. Neither one had the power to forgive what the younger one has done. Each one put himself far from God and set himself against God, and in fact attempted perversely to imitate God (II, 6).

 

We’re attracted to the prodigal. We identify with the older brother. But this isn’t their story. It’s really a story about the father. The father is clearly the one acting the way God wants us to act. The father willingly gives away what will be squandered. The father joyfully welcomes the lost son’s return. The father patiently explains the justice of it all to me, the stubborn older brother, but I can’t get my head around being more generous than what that punk deserves. Then dear old Dad has the audacity to invite me to Junior’s feast.

 

Think of it as a story with three versions: perversion, aversion, and conversion. There is no question that the younger son is acting out of perversion, the twisting around of God’s purposes for his life. Perversion is a distortion, an overturning. There is also no question that the older son is acting out of aversion. Aversion is turning away from God. What is required of the perverted is the same thing that is required of the averted, a third kind of turning, conversion, the turning of life back to God. Conversion is God’s way of overcoming our gratuitous perversions and aversions by God’s gratuitous, prodigal, wasteful, generous grace.

 

That’s what this story is about. Conversion begins when we see our own twistings and turnings away and repent. It takes me, recognizing my own sin, my own missing of the mark, my own lack of direction or misdirection or stumbling about in the weeds and rough. My conversion begins when I repent, either of my sinful wastefulness or my self-righteousness, and turn toward God.

 

But conversion doesn’t happen alone. The younger son repents before he comes home, but his conversion cannot be complete until his father embraces him, kills the fatted calf and orders his servants to prepare the feast. The young son’s conversion is not complete until he comes to the feast, and eats and drinks, and experiences the joy of a welcoming community. There is one thing still missing, though. Junior’s conversion is not fully complete so long as his older brother remains outside, sulking and unprepared to accept his younger brother’s return.

 

That’s the radical message of Jesus’ parable. We older brothers and sisters need conversion, too, in order for the prodigal’s conversion to be effective. We who have been raised in the church and never left it, we who, as Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right,” we who are “accountable … for good order and common sense and respectable behavior” (Revelation), must repent of our aversion to the radical hospitality of God. From one older brother to another, hear this: no sinner fully converts until the righteous also convert and come to the table. Jesus eats with sinners. But he wants the righteous rest of us to get down off our high horses and eat with sinners, too. Then when we’re all at the same table, maybe we’ll stop judging each other by the color of our sins.

 

First Congregational Church of Roscommon, Michigan, average age 75, is getting younger. They’ve been praying for young families. Pastor Nancy Bresette has been telling the church to be careful what they pray for. They recently embraced a group of young women and their babies from a local home for unwed mothers. Many of the women came to the home directly from jail. There they serve out their probation, complete their high school education, and learn parenting skills they never learned in their homes growing up. First Congregational Church of Roscommon is now welcoming these unlikely guests by the vanload each Sunday and rediscovering the church’s mission and purpose. One teenage mother recently asked to be baptized. What would Jesus do?

 

We will not be a growing congregation until we run out on the road and wrap our arms around lost prodigals. Then, having set them down at the table, we have to go out again and find all those older brothers and sisters who think we’ve done some great injustice by welcoming the wrong people, and plead with them to come in and join the party.

 

You and I have a responsibility to act on behalf of the father. Yes, we are imperfect, some younger, some older, each with faults and sins of our own. But Christ gathers us together anyway and pours out his Spirit upon us. When we are assembled and gathered, we become ecclesia, church, and koinonia, a mutual sharing and fellowship in Christ. We are called to be the everlasting goodness and generosity of God. We are called to welcome everyone to the table.

 

This is our God, who rejoices more over a lost sheep that has been found than over 99 who never strayed. This is our God, who spends everything he has left to throw a party for the one lost coin that is found. This is our God, who gives away everything that is deserved and when that is squandered gives not the deserved punishment but an abundant, extravagant feast. This is the God whose responsibility we share. This is the God of Jesus Christ. This is the God who wants you—in all your sickness, grief and despair, in all your self-loathing inadequacy, in all your remorseful penitence, in all your confusion, in all your sadness, in all your guilt, in all your sin—this is the God who wants you to come to the table and sit, eat, drink, and celebrate. God does not only give grace to the undeserving. This isn’t about being lost and found. God raises the dead to new life. This is about dying and being reborn. This is about resurrection.

 

Have you squandered your just rewards? Come on home. There’s room for you at the table. Do you feel your faithfulness has earned you an honored place? It hasn’t. But there’s room for you, too. Lost and now found? Dead and now alive? Oh, let’s break some bread. I’ll pour the wine. Now, about that younger brother, you were saying…?