The Sunday of the Prodigal Son: St. Luke 15: 11-32
[Restate the lesson of the Prodigal, of ourselves, and of humankind.]
Three lessons today:
1.Home. It is real. It is the place you long for. You can distract yourself while you are away (and this is the danger in our world – we make eating out of trash cans seem like a feast). We feel it in our bones, and know that we were made for something better. The irony is that many of us do our best to deaden this homesickness. (Psalm 136: “By the rivers… hung up our harps”).
2.Free will. It is real. Choices have consequences. The most important choices are whether to live a godly life in Christ, or to reject this life. One means living a life that will bring blessings because it continually draws from an unending spring of goodness. [it is a life in the garden where beauty continually blossoms; others are like life among cut flowers, their beauty fades as soon as they are removed from the ground(?)] All other choices draw from other sources that are less pure and eventually run dry. God does not punish those who reject Him, but neither will He force Himself on them. Again, Free Will is real; this mean that Choices have consequences. [Explain using the Prodigal’s choice, segue to repentance].
3.God wants you to come home. Some people imagine God as a Cosmic Speed Trap, the one who is trying to trap you in a mistake so that He can punish you. We do not learn about God from such nonsense: we learn from Christ, God who walked among us. And this parable shows who God really is, or at least what His relationship is to us. He is the one who created the perfect home for us; not a prison or a courtroom, but a great estate that we could enjoy forever, but who also allows us to reject this paradise and leave. This, after all, is our story. Not just us as individuals – although Lord knows all of us have rejected Him and His house – but the whole human race. This is why we sing Psalm 136 starting on Prodigal Sunday and throughout Great Lent: because we are in exile from our true home… but this is not the end of the story. We do not stay in exile forever: at Pascha Christ comes out from the tomb like the father in today’s lesson, bidding us to join Him in paradise.
So come home. Reject a life of emptiness and exile. Repent of all those things by which you have rejected holiness. God is running out to greet you. And He will greet you with those wonderful words, not of judgment or condemnation, but of welcome; “let all rejoice and welcome these my children, for they were gone but have returned, they were dead but now live again, they were lost but now they are found!”
Glory to God for who He really is and for giving us this home.
