So often I look at this parable and know that I am much more like the older, stodgier, do-right brother. Most of us in church on Sunday morning are. At least we are in the stories that we would be willing to tell. We’re willing to let our sins of “goodness” show. We can ask forgiveness for being too busy, too committed, or too needed elsewhere to be any more involved with people who have messed up their lives. We’re willing to admit our lack of compassion for the sinful masses out there that can’t seem take care of themselves. Like the older brother, we have justified that they really don’t deserve the Father’s love. We can have our moment of feeling a little bit remorseful for thinking we’re better than that, but…

But what if we decided that at church we would be different? What if we let our hurts and feelings show a little bit more? What if we refused to swallow the pain of our loneliness or despair? What if we admitted that our marriage, or our finances, or our kids were a mess? What if we told this community our prodigal stories? What would happen – here in serious Presbyterian-land?

I really don’t know what would happen, but there’s something in me that senses that we would be troubled, deeply if someone really bore all their burdens in this place. We don’t seem quite ready for it – as if anyone really ever is. No one is ever really ready to hear the big confessions from someone they love. No one wants to hear their teenage daughter say, “I’m pregnant,” or watch their father choke out the words, “I’m an alcoholic.” We hide this side from others. We keep our secrets. We stuff away those times when we are afraid or embarrassed for anyone to find out who we really are. And here it is – right in scripture – a story from Jesus about a Father who loves and celebrates his lost son who has squandered the family inheritance on prostitutes and whatever else and has come back begging to live a servant’s life at home.

God loves the lost ones. Scandalous! Maybe it is a story we want to forget. Maybe this is a story best told from the point of view of the older brother. God loves him too after all – even as hard-nosed as he turns out to be. But as I approached the text this time, I’m finding myself drawn to the story of the lost son, the troubled son, the one who made a shambles of his life and returned anyway. The power of forgiveness to restore him to wholeness is incredible. It’s really what forgiveness is all about, and yet we can too easily shelve that away by somehow convincing ourselves that it doesn’t exactly apply to us.

But it does apply to us. I know that I have needed, craved, yearned for that kind of love and acceptance that the Father of this story is able to give. As much as I hate to admit it, I’ve also been the lost one, the prodigal daughter so to speak. There have been times in my life that I have been lost to God through my own poor choices and stubborn self-indulgences. You don’t exactly have to be eating pig slop in a foreign country to recognize that your life has become a mess. The first step to getting out of the mess is to turn to someone somewhere who gives you a hand up out of that hole with compassion and the understanding that life doesn’t have to be that way. There are wonderful people out there who will love you just as you are until you can become something else.

The times when we can let someone into our pain enough to experience kindness and forgiveness, why, those are the moments in which lives are changed completely. I can’t say it any better or more concisely than Jesus did in the telling of this story. What I can do is tell you that there are millions of stories just like this one that have the potential for happening each and every day. What holds us back is our own fear. We are afraid of not receiving the love we so desperately want and getting a reprimand in its place. We are afraid that someone else will be offended if we are received in celebration when what we thought we deserved was a punishment. We are afraid of not ever forgiving ourselves even when we have been forgiven. Truly coming home seems an impossibility.

The church that tells this story has been the same church that has silenced its power. As your pastor and spiritual leader, I don’t really want you to know about my brokenness. You may want me to think that you don’t have any brokenness. But as you may have guessed by now I am human, and I know that you are too. There have been times I have been hurt by you. There have been times that I have contributed to your pain. I have prayed for forgiveness, and I confess that I have also prayed for others to get to it and repent already. We have been in relationship with each other for 7 years – long enough to be way past the honeymoon, long enough to quit pretending that we can be perfect, long enough to have recognized times when all we can do is offer a moment of forgiveness that looks a lot like God’s grace. And yet, we still sometimes stop short of making those little offerings that make a world of difference. I understand, really I do. Even though forgiveness is at the very heart of our faith in words, it is so difficult to put into action.

So what if… what if in this small community we began to trust each other to be fully human? Now by this, I don’t mean to suggest that we go to the extremes of being overly emotional or giving in to every anxiety. That’s actually playing back into the older brother’s pain and jealousy for not being recognized as he thought he should be. What I’m asking is: what would it look like for us to be really real with one another? What if we could put aside our embarrassments and tell the stories about when God’s grace changed our lives? God’s grace is tricky. It does seem most noticeable precisely at those moments when life is at its lowest, and the only way out is when we are humbled before God and each other. Admittedly, those stories are hard to tell, and sometimes they are even hard to hear.

God loves the lost. God loves the lost ones who come to church to hide. God loves the lost ones who cannot bear the staring eyes of the church community. God loves the lost ones who run away and do bad things. And God even loves the lost ones who turn their faces from a moment of pure grace. God loves us all.

Amen.