From Sampler to Sower

Mythbusters: Water's Edge

Weekend Teaching Series: Mythbusters: Water’s Edge

Message Title: Myth #3: It’s to late for me to go home now

Sermon in a Sentence: You are God’s child, and there will always be a place at home for you.

Text(s): Matthew 12:31-32; Luke 15:11-24

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 6 of 10; Again, about the only difficult thing was producing another episode of our Mythbusters spoof videos.

Message Summary:

This week I decided to offer something even better than a summary.  If you’re interested, I’ve posted the full audio of the sermon in our Senior High Service.

Of course, if you’d rather read a summary, here it is.

We started off telling jokes.  Seriously.  Had three volunteers come up and share the best joke they had ever heard.  Then I pointed out you can only hear a great joke once.  The power of a joke comes from its surprise, and once you’ve heard it, it can’t surprise you any more.

In some ways, parables are like jokes.  The power of a parable comes from the surprise.  The problem is, a lot of times modern readers don’t find them as surprising as the original audience.  Take the parable of the Good Samaritan.  In our day and age, the idiom “Good Samaritan” refers to someone who goes out of their way to help a stranger in need.  So when the good Samaritan stops to help the victim of robbery in the parable, we’re not surprised at all – that’s what good Samaritans do.  Not so with the original audience.

What’s more, the more often we hear parables the less surprising they become.  And if we simply tune out the parable the same way we tune out a joke we’ve heard before (after all we already know the punchline right?) we miss out on the truth Jesus is trying to tell.

With that preparation, we launched into an examination of the parable of the prodigal son – at least the first half of the story.  We noticed the profound insult implied by the son’s request.  (Essentially, he says: Dad, I wish you were dead.)

We also noticed how he keeps trying to find happiness and fails.  He asks for his inheritance, which would have amounted to taking official ownership of his share of his father’s property, while the proceeds from the property itself would continue to accrue to his father until his father’s death.  Getting his inheritance wasn’t the same thing as getting a lot of money.

“Not long after” Jesus says, he converted his capital into cash.  It’s as if he always said “If only I own my own property, I’ll be happy” but when he gets his wish, he realizes he’s not.  So he says “If only I had some cash I’d be happy.”  But he’s not.

“If only I could get away from here and start life on my own, I’ll be happy.”

But he’s not.  He runs through his cash living recklessly.  And then comes the next blow – famine strikes and he discovers he can’t make enough money to survive on his own.

At this point I imagine it at least crossed his mind to go back home.  But he doesn’t.  He seems to assume he doesn’t have a home to go back to.  After all, he burned his bridges pretty thoroughly when he left.  So he falls for Myth #3 It’s too late for me to go back home now.

Instead he takes a job as a day laborer tending pigs.  A life of insecurity (day labor) and humiliation (a Jew tending pigs.)  It doesn’t get much worse than that.

Only it does.

He finds he can’t survive on his day laborer’s wage.  Maybe if it wasn’t for the famine he could.  But as things are, he’s desperate.

Finally he comes to his senses.  Literally, he comes to himself.  In a moment of clarity he sees his situation and decides to do something about it.  He heads back to the land he left.

Only he doesn’t head home.  Yes, he’s headed back to his father.  But he’s not headed home.  He’s not going back as a son.  He’s looking for a new job.  “I’m not worthy to be your son, would you make me one of your hired hands.”

(Ever notice how many people in the church have returned to the land they left, but haven’t come home?  Yes, they’ve come back to the church, but they’re still trying to earn their own way into God’s favor.)

The good news you know – his dad’s watching.  His dad sheds his dignity and runs to embrace his boy.  The son tries to blurt out his confession, but Dad’s to busy giving orders to prepare the celebration for his son’s return.  Because his dad knows the thing the son has forgotten – you’ll always be my son and there will always be a place at home for you.

However, that doesn’t mean that myth #3 is busted.  While it is true that we will always be God’s children, and if we will return to him, there will always be a place at home for us, it does not mean that it can never be too late to go back home.

Here we looked at Matthew 12:31-32.  Jesus’ warning about the unpardonable sin.  We considered what blasphemy is – to speak against, to treat with contempt, to ignore as that one doesn’t exist.   Here it seems to me that Jesus warns it is possible to live so long in a distant land we forget that it isn’t home. I argue that the unpardonable sin is unpardonable, not because it is so awful God won’t forgive it, it’s because we’ve lived in it so long we forget to return.  And when that happens, it can become too late for us to go back home.

So how do we avoid letting it get too late.  My advice:

• Stay close to home. When life is messy it’s easy to run away from the church.  Don’t.
• Keep coming back. It’s easy to assume that we can’t come back until we’ve beaten what we’re struggling with.  Don’t.  Even if it’s possible that we might fail again tomorrow, come back today.
• Don’t delay. It’s easy to assume when we fail, especially repeatedly, that we might as well just give up.  Don’t.  Don’t waste time before returning.
• Don’t assume you won’t be welcome. Again, we’re quick to assume that God gets frustrated with our repeated failure and will eventually tire of us.  Don’t.  Here him say “You will always be my child and there will always be a place for you.”
• Remember it was the return, not the repentance that made restoration possible. In the story, the son didn’t even manage to get his confession out of his mouth before he was embraced by his father.  The turning point in the story wasn’t his confession, it was him coming back down the road one more time.  He did repent.  But it was the return that made the repentance possible.

Element of Fun/Positive Environment: Once again we aired an episode of our original video series, Mythbusters: Water’s Edge.  This week we took on Mom’s advice “Wait 30 minutes after eating to swim” and the “myth” that Red Bull gives you wings.

Worship Set: Opener: Father, Spirit, Jesus; After sermon: Untitled Hymn, Hungry, Amazing Grace (My Chains are Gone) and The Stand

Favorite Moment: Don’t know if it counts our not, becuase it wasn’t really on Tuesday night, it was getting ready for the service.  But my favorite moment was turning our baptistry into a jacuzzi for the making of the video.  (Our baptistry doesn’t really have jacuzzi jets, in case you were wondering.)