“HOME TO THE HEALER”

Celebration of Recovery Sunday, January 14, 2007

United Lutheran Church---Red Wing,  MN

Luke 15:11-32-- The Prodigal Son & The Waiting Father

Grace to you and peace from our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ, the healer of our every wound.  Amen.

              As I searched and pondered for a suitable text for this morning and our Celebration of Recovery, I knew that the Bible provided example after example of healing stories of Jesus told in the Gospels.  Any one could help us focus in these few minutes on the human dilemma, the need for healing in our lives, and the desire/hope of experiencing wholeness once again. Yet it wasn’t the stories of Jesus healing the physical infirmities that caught my eye and imagination this week as much as it was this parable of the Prodigal Son and the Waiting Father.

              It contains such familiar images of our common human experience.  This is a story of the consequences of personal decisions which are sometimes born of rebellion, as well as a searching and longing to be free, to be loved, to be needed.  All of that coupled with the transformation of a life in which there is reconciliation and a celebration of joy.  All of these aspects to the story drew me to use it to focus our attention this morning. I trust you know the story and have either read the parable or heard it read often.  But perhaps in a partial retelling we can extrapolate guidance and hope for this day of celebration.

              The younger son of the two brothers sees a big world out there and claims his inheritance, his share of his father’s property.  He gathers all of his things and heads out to encounter the world.  He wants to do “his thing”, to find himself, and to look for his true self in the world of conditional love.  It’s a world that fosters addictions because it offers what cannot satisfy the deepest cravings of the heart. 

              Addiction might be the best word to explain the lostness that deeply permeates contem-

porary society.  Our addictions make us cling to what the world proclaims as the keys to self-fulfillment:  accumulation of wealth and power, attainment of status and admiration, lavish consumption of food and drink, or sexual gratification without distinguishing between love and lust.

              These addictions and others create expectations that can only fail to satisfy our deepest needs.  As long as we live within the world’s delusions, our addictions condemn us to futile quests in “the distant country”.  Whatever or wherever that “distant country” may be.  They leave us facing an endless series of disillusionments while our sense of self remains unfulfilled.  The addicted life could be designated as a life lived in the “far country”.  From where our cry for deliverance often rises up.

              PRODIGAL in essence means extravagant, or wasteful, or spendthrift.  I am a prodigal every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.  I am a prodigal when I seek to satisfy my own emptiness, even self-destructive tendencies, or am on “the lam” from those things and those persons who have hurt me or have tried to hurt me, but also from those persons I have hurt, whether willfully or unintentionally. 

              Why do I keep ignoring the place of true love and persist in looking for it somewhere else?  Why are we surprised at how we keep taking the gifts we have been given—our health, our intellect, our emotions, and our abilities---and keep using them to impress others, to receive affirmation and praise, to compete for rewards instead of accepting them as gifts and using them for the good they have been intended?  It’s as if I or we keep trying to prove to ourselves that in this world we do not need anyone, not even the love of our Creator?  I can make it on my own!!!

I can be fully independent and then I help to develop co-dependencies.  And beneath it all is the great rebellion, a radical “NO” to a love greater than any human expression.

              One of the powerful dynamics of this story comes as a revelation when the prodigal has spent all his resources, lost all of his friends, and finds him self coveting the pods being fed to the pigs.  He realizes that the servants of his father have bread enough to spare and he is starving to death.  He has taken an inventory of his life.  In lieu of an intervention, the inventory and assessment of his own life brings about this critical awareness…”BUT WHEN HE CAME TO HIMSELF” or as a different translation states, “WHEN HE CAME TO HIS SENSES”. His life was “spent” , there was no where else to turn, he had hit bottom, or “crashed and burned” as some like to say.

              He has come to admit that this is no way to live and is not the life he had hoped to experience.  There is no one else to blame since his friends had disappeared when his money had run out.  Whether they had used him or he had use them isn’t the point. As painful as the recognition is, for a transformation to take place, often when we are faced with addictions in our lives and the lives of those we love, this is where one needs to be before we are willing to get help and get healthy.

              So, he prepares his confession.  “FATHER, I HAVE SINNED AGAINST HEAVEN AND BEFORE YOU; I AM NO LONGER WORTHY TO BE CALLED YOUR SON; TREAT ME LIKE ONE OF YOUR HIRED HANDS.”  Perhaps he is still bargaining so that he can survive. Yet ventures toward home with some fleeting hope of being taken back, restored, and healed.    I’ve always imagined that he practiced that speech all the way home, phrasing and rephrasing right up to the moment when he sees his father coming down the road to meet him.

              Was it important for him to say to his father?  First, to come to himself and then to express his confession.  How important was it for him to honest with himself that he could not make it on his own and to have taken inventory of his life?  To own his own predicament and despicable condition?  I trust you know the answer to that as well as I do.  For will change ever come and will we turn around unless the inventory and confession follows?

              The surprise in the parable, if it is a surprise at all is this…he wasn’t the only one who had been “working over his life” in his mind.  There was another… in this case it was the Father.  It’s always someone else who has longed for reconciliation, a reunion, from afar.  Watching down the road, checking the mailbox(today the e-mail), going to the bus station/train station/airport, and even the daily obituaries.  There was and is a need for healing, even a transformation in that lost one’s life.  An owning up, a willingness to get help and not simply to be enabled which is always the danger when you love someone who is destroying themselves.

              So here he comes with the words spilling out of his mouth but the one who has longed for the return, longed for a reconciliation, longed for an opening for healing and to be part of the healing process.  And the call is immediate for the ring, the robe, and the sandals.  A PARTY!

A CELEBRATION!  For joy of joys, “LET US EAT AND CELEBRATE; FOR THIS SON OF MINE WAS DEAD AND IS ALIVE AGAIN; HE WAS LOST AND IS FOUND!” The waiting God who has not gone looking and hunting us down, but who’s heart and love toward any prodigal willing welcomes and receives back in an act of forgiveness. 

              One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God’s forgiveness. Often we cling to our brokenness/our sin which prevents us from letting God erase the past and offer

us a new beginning.   While God wants to heal us and restore us to our full dignity as one of God’s children, we often don’t trust ourselves and the radical reclamation on God’s part.

Receiving forgiveness, being healed, requires a willingness not only to see myself as I really am, but a willingness to let God be God.  The two facts Reeves shared that he has learned in his recovery are: #1—There is a God.  #2---I’m not God!  For only God can do all the healing, restoring, and renewing.  The discipline is that of becoming a child of God.  Jesus makes it clear in the scriptures that the way to God is the same as the way to a new childhood. “UNLESS YOU TURN AND BECOME LIKE LITTLE CHILDREN YOU WILL NEVER ENTER THE KINGDOM OF GOD.”  We begin anew.  ONE DAY AT A TIME!  On our way home to the healer.  Always on the way.

              The truly extravagant one in this parable isn’t the one who wasted and was the spendthrift of his father’s inheritance. The extravagant one is the one who has waited and waited and wanted to lavish love upon the one who was “dead and is now alive”…who was “lost but now is found.”

The great mystery of our faith is not that we chose God, but that God chose us and daily choses to restore and renew us.  For God loves us with a “first love” and an unlimited, unconditional love and wants us to know that we are God’s beloved children.

              When we’ve wandered about as far as we can go, done about as ;much as we can to hurt ourselves and others, or experienced about as much hurt as we can endure, it is then that God’s extravagance is seen and experienced in  the healing forgiveness that allows us to be reconciled to God and to one another.   When you and I are finally confronted with the unqualified gift of someone who died, in advance, to forgive us…no matter what, only then can we see that forgiveness surrounds us, beats upon us all of our lives, and we awaken to what we have already been given but never fully recognized. 

              We are forgiven and healed because there is a forgiver!  Through this person named Jesus.  The extravagant love of God exemplified most powerfully for us is through the cross of Jesus Christ who died to reconcile, heal, restores us to God and to one another.  The parable speaks about a love that is the first and everlasting love of God who is father as well as mother to us.   Jesus whole life and preaching had one aim; to reveal this inexhaustible and unlimited love and to let that love guide every part of our daily lives. 

              While that transformation often times is a process changing us one day at a time, nevertheless, the Spirit of God continues to call and guide us home to the healer.  That is always a reason to celebrate.                                        

                                                                                                                Pastor Clark Cary