Homecoming. There is something so special about HOME.
'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.(1)
The Bible is full of homecoming stories that would be
perfect for a day like today - Jacob's homecoming to meet brother
Esau, the return of the nation of Israel from exile, and this one
we just read, the return of the Prodigal Son, in what has been
called the greatest short story ever written.
"Father, I want RIGHT NOW what's coming to me." My
inheritance!!! It was an outrageous request - it said in effect,
"Dad, drop dead!"
Dr. Kenneth Bailey, who taught for years at the Near East
School of Theology in Beirut, writes of knowing of only one case
in modern village life where this kind of request was made. An
older son asked his father to divide the family inheritance. And
the father, in great anger, took a stick and drove his son from
the house, never to permit him to return again. All the
neighbors in the village applauded.(2)
But not the father in our story. He actually accedes to
his younger son's wishes. The boy loads up the loot, heads for
greener pastures, squanders all he has, and ends up in a pig sty,
not the place for a nice Jewish boy who is not allowed the
pleasures of pork.
He comes to his senses, realizes what an idiot he is, and
maps out his classic confession: "Father, I've sinned against
God, I've sinned against you; I don't deserve to be called your
son. Take me on as a hired hand." Sounds a little contrived,
like the kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar (or, in this
case, the bank vault), but we all know parents can be pushovers,
and this dad has already been noteworthy in that category.
It is a speech the boy never gets to deliver. Dad sees him
coming and does something that is completely out of character for
a dignified village patriarch - he sprints down the road to meet
him, his long robes flapping behind him. This is actually
shameful, and Dad KNOWS it. He directs the shame and
embarrassment to himself instead of to the boy where it rightly
belonged. The servants are instructed to bring good clothes, a
token of position, the signet ring that empowers the holder to
transact business in the family name, sandals for the feet so no
one would mistake him for an unshod peasant. Finally, grain-fed
beef for a party fit for a king. Amazing! The poet has written
that "home is the place where, when you have to go there, they
have to take you in,"(3) but I doubt that our young man ever
envisioned anything like this.
Someone has said that "Justice is getting what we deserve,
mercy is not getting what we deserve, and grace is getting what
we don't deserve." This is a story of wonderful grace. The
greatest short story ever written.
Have you ever placed very young children in front of a
mirror? They enjoy seeing a face looking back at them as they
enjoy seeing all faces but they don't realize that the face they
see is them. Then, all of a sudden, the expression changes.
They begin to note the connection between their motions and the
motions reflected in the mirror. "Hey, that's me!" The same
thing happens to us when we read this story. We hear it at first
as an interesting tale with wonderfully drawn characters, but the
more we listen the more we realize, "Hey, that's me."(4) It
describes us and God, and the glorious homecoming that can await
us as well. As I said at the beginning of this, the Bible is
full of wonderful homecoming stories, and, truth be told, the
whole panorama of scripture is a homecoming story - it starts
with the first three chapters of Genesis and our departure from
paradise; it ends with the last three chapters of Revelation and
our restoration to paradise. Homecoming.
Is something keeping you away from home? Perhaps that old
bumper sticker is apropos here: "Feeling far away from God? Who
moved?"
Some of you have heard Dr. Fred Craddock, one of my favorite
preachers, at Chautauqua. Fred tells the story of the first time
he ever went to talk to a pastor about something that was
personal.(5) It was very difficult, he said, to do that.
He and some fellows were working at a box factory, and one
day they went downtown to get a hot dog or hamburger for lunch.
He still had on his nail apron and they had on theirs, because
that's what they did - they drove nails to make those boxes.
As they were walking down the street, they passed a blind
man on the sidewalk with a guitar and a sign that read, "I'm
blind, please help me." He had a little tin cup taped to the
neck of his guitar. Well, the three of them decided they were
going to play a trick on this man, so they reached into their
apron and took out several nails, and each of them very noisily
deposited them in that tin cup. The blind man said, "Thank you,
thank you very much. May God bless you. Thank you very much."
Craddock said that that incident began to eat at him - it
had been an ugly and a terrible thing to do, and he simply could
not get rid of it. So he did what people do in desperation. He
went to see his pastor. He confessed what he had done, and the
pastor sat behind his desk and said, "Are you aware that this
country is at war?" because this was during the last days of the
Second World War. "People are dying by the hundreds every day;
soldiers have been away from their families for years. We don't
know how this whole thing is going, people dying, starving. And
you are worried about nails in a blind man's cup?" And the
pastor sent him away.
But Fred's problem would not go away. Finally, he went to
see his youth pastor, a very wise woman by the name of Mignonne.
He told her what he had done, and she told him that it was,
indeed, a terrible, terrible thing to do, and that she felt the
pain of it even as he did. And then she said, "God forgives you
for that, but why don't you, next week when you have your lunch
hour, why don't you go to that same blind man and tell him what
you did, and ask him to forgive you, and then, if you have a
nickel or a dime or a quarter, give it to him." And Craddock
says that is exactly what he did, and the poor man forgave him.
"I know how it is," the man said. "Lots of boys are full of
mischief." Craddock finishes that story by saying, "It may not
seem like really such a big deal, but think about what you are
carrying around right now. What would you like to get rid of?"
Today can be the day. YOUR day. Homecoming day.
Come home, come home,
Ye who are weary, come home;
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
Calling, "O sinner, come home!"(6)
Amen!
1. J. Howard Payne, "Home, Sweet Home," from the opera "Clari, the Maid of Milan."
2. Kenneth E. Bailey, The Cross and the Prodigal, (St. Louis: Concordia, 1973), p. 31
3. Robert Frost, "The Death of a Hired Man"
4. Dave Wilkinson, "The Lost Younger Son,"
http://www.moorparkpres.org/sermons/2001/111801.htm
5. Fred B. Craddock, Craddock Stories, Mike Graves and Richard Ward, eds., (St. Louis :
Chalice Press, 2001), pp. 101-102
6. Will Lamartine Thompson 1847-1909
click and send us mail