Will you pray with me?  Lord, may the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our rock and our redeemer.  Amen.

The story we heard today is, almost without doubt, the most familiar, and probably most beloved, of all of Jesus’ many parables.  I’m willing to be you’ve heard it a hundred times before, and if you’ve spent much time at all hanging around church services, I’m willing to bet you’ve heard quite a few sermons preached on it, too.  Even if you’ve not spent much time hanging around churches, I think you’ve probably heard this one before…or at least heard of it.  You know the name of it, right?  Help me out.  This is the parable of the ________  _________.  Right. 

Now, though this story is well-known and much-beloved, we know that Jesus wasn’t first telling it to us.  He was telling it to a very specific group of people, and telling it to them for very specific reasons.  So, to understand the story, it’s worth spending a little time thinking about its first audience.  As we enter the scene, a big group of tax collectors and sinners has gathered around to hear Jesus teach about God.  They hear Jesus’ preaching about a new world with the ears of the outsiders, of ones for whom the kingdom of heaven, for whom a change in the status quo, would almost certainly be an improvement over current conditions.

Also gathered there are Pharisees, members of a sect of deeply faithful men working hard to draw close to God.  And with them are scribes, highly educated, the elite, the authorities on religious life in their communities.  Those two groups hear Jesus’ preaching about a new world with the ears of the insiders, of ones for whom the kingdom of God, for whom a change in the status quo, might be an improvement—but for whom it might not be an improvement at all.  So as they listen to Jesus, the scribes and Pharisees begin to get uncomfortable.  They begin to mutter among themselves about Jesus’ scandalous way of welcoming, and eating with, and talking to tax collectors and the sinners, the ones whom they think that by their behavior have placed themselves far outside the bounds of God’s love.  Jesus overhears them, and it is in response to their words that he tells today’s story. 

Now, in a moment, we’re going to hear this story again, but before we do, I want to invite you to place yourself in that first crowd of hearers, to think about with which group, if you had been there, you would have been standing.  Are you a Pharisee, deeply committed to God, a faithful practitioner and a lover of your religious tradition?  Are you a Scribe, well-educated, well-informed, cultured, basically a good person but impatient with the ignorant and uneducated?  Are you a tax collector, outcast for aligning yourself—out of necessity or out of the desire for profit—with a government or a group that noone likes?  Or are you just a simple sinner, a misbehaver, a breaker of rules, feeling unwelcome because of what others, or because what you yourself, believe to be true of God?  With whose ears do you hear this story?  The insider, or the outsider?  The righteous, or the un-?  As you sit here in this crowd, where do you stand in that other crowd of Pharisees and Scribes and tax collectors and sinners gathered around Jesus? [pause]

Have you got an answer?  Good.  OK, so now that we’ve done a little bit of thinking about who we are as hearers of this story, I invite you to join me in becoming tellers of it.  Not for nothing is it one of the most familiar of Jesus’ stories; it’s one of the closest to the center of who Jesus says that God is, so it’s worth practicing telling it, too.  So I’m going to invite you to tell this story to one another in the pews.  Let’s begin by turning to someone in the pews around you, preferably someone you don’t know, and take a moment to introduce yourselves to each other.  And if you can’t or don’t want to turn to someone sitting near you, then I invite you to just imagine yourself telling this story to someone you know.  Here’s how we’ll do the telling: I’m going to narrate the story, and whenever I raise my hands like this, that’s your cue to fill in the blanks with your partners.  If you and your partners have different ways of filling in the blanks and different ways of telling the story, that’s OK—after all, you could be sitting next to a Pharisee, or a tax collector or a scribe or a sinner.  So I invite you to let your different tellings enrich each others’ understandings.  Ready?  Here we go. 

This is a story about a ___[raise hands]____.  One day, he had a conversation with his ________.  And he said _______________.  And when the inheritance had been given, he _________.  And when his money was all gone, he hired himself out to__________________.  After a long time, he came to himself, and began to think of home, and decided to go to his father and say_______________.  And his father saw him coming while he was still afar off, and _______________.  And the father said ___________.  And they began to celebrate.

Now the elder one, the one who hadn’t gone anywhere, was in the field, and when he returned, he heard music and dancing, so he called one of the slaves and asked what was going on.  The slave replied _____________.  And the brother___________.  So the father came out and began to plead with him.  But he answered his father and said __________________.  And the father replied ____________. 

Now, I began our telling of this story with these words: this is a story about a __________.  What are some of the things you said to fill in that blank?  Just call out a couple.  Did anybody say that this was a story about a father?  You know, they call this the parable of the prodigal son, but I think that’s a poor name.  I think this is a story about a prodigal father.  My Webster’s dictionary defines the word “prodigal” as “recklessly extravagant” or “wastefully lavish”.  Now, the younger son may have been wastefully lavish in his living, but I don’t think this story is about the son’s behavior so much as it is about his father’s heart.

This is a father who loves and gifts his two sons extravagantly.  To each in his own way, he gives two sons the means and the support for them to become the authors of their own destinies: one with an early inheritance, one with a home and livelihood.  When his two sons leave him for their own self-imposed exile, one in a far land, one outside the party tent, he is grieved at having lost his them.  And so, he watches, and waits, and when, out of their brokenness or their anger, they finally draw near, he goes out to two sons and invites them home.  He does not care that they have failed to properly appreciate the gifts he has already given them.  He does not count the cost that might be his should they turn from him again and all his gifts be wasted.  He goes out to them with a lavish, a recklessly extravagant love and invites them home. 

It is a mighty, a prodigal kind of grace the father offers his sons when they wander far from his heart.  And in its way, it is a terrible kind, too.  For, make no mistake, though Jesus uses the metaphor of a human parent, this isn’t a human kind of grace. 

That is to say, this isn’t tame grace, domesticated and easy to accept.  This is a desperate, a frantic grace that cares less for the brother that is working safely home than it does for the one that is lost.  This is a precipitous, a prodigal love that prefers to spend its time focusing on those who are outside its embrace over those who are within it. 

This isn’t tame grace.  This is a careless, an outrageous grace that cares not at all, not one bit for the older son’s (or the Pharisees’, or the scribes’) injured sense of justice, or propriety, or dues.  This is a prodigal love that just wants them at the party.

This isn’t tame grace.  This is a fierce grace that cares not at all, not one bit for the younger son’s (or the tax collectors’, or the sinners’) need to explain and apologize and justify and unburden their souls.  This is a prodigal love that just wants them home. 

So, Jesus tells the crowd of Pharisees and scribes and tax collectors and sinners gathered around him this tale of the prodigal father and his un-tame grace, and he ends the story—or, more accurately, doesn’t end it—with the younger son inside at the feast and the father outside, pleading with the angry older son.  There is no resolution, no “ever after”.  It is not a satisfying ending, and Jesus knows it.  He leaves it open-ended, to force his listeners wonder about what comes after.

You see, this story of Jesus’ isn’t so much about the sons, about the nature of humankind or human sin, as it is about the father, about the nature of our God, and our God’s grace, and the reason for the telling—and the reason for deciding to retell it here in the middle of Lent—is to make us think about how we respond when faced with such wild, prodigal grace.  So he leaves the story hanging and we’re left wondering, what’s the story that happens after this story? 

So, I want to wonder together just a little bit.  I want to invite you to turn one more time to your storytelling partners, and spend a moment telling the end of the story.  What’s the story that comes after this story?  Will the older brother go to the party, or stay outside, injured and alone?  Will the younger son stay at the party?  What will the younger son do if his brother comes inside—or if he doesn’t?  And what will happen the next day, after the reveling is over?  What will the younger son, or the father, for that matter, do in the morning?  How will the sons respond to their father’s un-tame grace? [pause for conversation]

Amen.