Sermon Tone Analysis

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!! Leaving Home
{{{"Luke 15:1-2; 11-19
Now the tax collectors and "sinners" were all gathering around to hear him.
But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them."
Jesus continued: "There was a man who had two sons.
The younger one said to his father, 'Father, give me my share of the estate.'
So he divided his property between them.
"Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living.
After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need.
So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs.
He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.
"When he came to his senses, he said, 'How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death!
I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: 'Father I have sinned against heaven and against you.
I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.'
So he got up and went to his father."
}}}
Luke 15:1-2, 11-19
I wonder if there were a bulletin board in the Galilean Village in Jesus' story.
I wonder if the anguished father, distraught but still hoping, might have tacked a notice there: "missing son.
Dark hair, dark eyes.
Last seen carrying all his possessions down the road toward Diaspora."
It may be the greatest short story ever told, this parable of the lost son.
It is the story of somebody, and everybody—the story of us all.
And the Storyteller was Jesus.
The fifteenth chapter of Luke records a set of three parables included in no other Gospel.
In the next chapter, we will see how the first two parables show how much Jesus wants to find those who have gone away from God.
But in the parable of the lost son, the emphasis is on leaving—and being welcomed home.
We must remember that there was a very specific situation which caused Luke to save these three stories.
The ministry of Jesus recorded in the Gospels is not at all like the modern church.
Jesus was positively fascinating to the irreligious and antireligious sinners.
All of the outcasts and runaways from God habitually and continually drew near to Him.
This congregation of failures was not occasional—it gathered again and again, wherever Jesus spoke.
The most undesirable people constantly gathered to drink in His words.
By welcoming these followers, Jesus put the religious world of that day out of joint.
He was the great disturber of the peace.
Discussing Him, the religious leaders muttered back and forth to one another, not even using His name as they hissed like snakes, "Thissss man welcomes ssssinners and eats with them."
Indeed, Jesus didn't just tolerate these sinners; he had a positive joy and pleasure in their company.
In contrast, the religiously devout could not even approach wicked people on the street, no less eat with them.
Jesus responded to the Pharisees' mutterings by telling three stories.
The greatest of these three is the dramatic parable about a boy who ran away, and then came back.
And it is about the boy's father, who joyously welcomed him home.
The story tells us that Jesus is acting like the father.
Spiritually, many of us leave home; but He welcomes us back as an act of sheer grace.
!!! Getting Away from the Father
The first part of this parable gives us insight about why we leave home spiritually.
Any of us could make the decision that the essence, the real meaning, of human life is to get away from the heavenly Father.
In this parable, the younger of two sons demands from his father his share of the estate.
That is, he understood that the essence of life is the immediacy of fulfillment: "I want it all /now."/
This boy was probably about seventeen and unmarried, because Jewish men in his day usually married at eighteen to twenty years of age.
In Jesus' world, a father could divide his estate before his death.
The younger son would have received about two-ninths of the inheritance.
But here was the hitch: If the father were alive, the son could possess his part of the inheritance, but he could not dispose of it or liquidate it until the father died.
In this story, though, the boy wanted to have it all /and /dispose of it.
He wanted to treat his father as though he were already dead—nonexistent.
He did not care that this would deprive him of all other claim on his father.
He wanted it now, and he wanted it all—every last penny of it.
He wanted life in its totality and its immediacy.
He was like Eve in the garden; she had every tree except one—but she wanted that one right now.
All of us have been that way— whatever stuff there is in life, we want it all, and we want it now.
We only go around once in life, and we grab the gusto.
To many of us, "the gusto" is getting everything we can from the Father and getting away from Him—now.
Despite his son's treating him as if he were dead, the father in Jesus' parable gave the boy what he wanted.
God is like that with all of the stuff of our lives, too.
He showers it upon us—health, home, family, money, employment, friends, sunshine, air to breathe—all of it—even though we may stand at the door, ready to leave.
As the psalmist said, "The Lord is good to all" (145:9), and as Peter said, "God is no respecter of persons" (Acts 10:34, KJV).
Jesus summed it up this way: "He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good" (Matt.
5:45).
In Jesus' story, the father gave the boy his share of the inheritance, with no strings attached—except the father's love for him.
When his son demanded the stuff of life, the father simply handed it over.
Compare that with the strange strings that have been attached to some modern wills.
A Californian left sums to his granddaughters—provided they give up bobbed hair, rouge and powder, jewelry, dances, and movies, and that they wear dresses, "long at both ends."
An exceedingly wealthy Englishman left his nephews a large sum—with the provision that they rise at five each morning and exercise for three hours.
In 1953 a man left the Metropolitan Opera $150,000—with the stipulation they put on an awful opera he had written.
The Met declined the offer.
The essence of getting away from the father is an urgency of independence.
Luke 15:13 says, "Not long after that. . .
."the boy left.
The inheritance was burning a hole in his pocket.
There may have been a few days of respectful lingering; but his mind was already in another far country.
When we have decided to get away from the Father there is a kind of hellish haste or ruinous rush.
There has already been an inward separation; now that becomes an outward separation.
When we decide that life is away from the Father, there is of necessity a haste, a running, a frenzy.
Perhaps we have to run so fast to forget that, in truth, there is no life away from the Father.
This leads naturally to the desirability of distance: The son "set off for a distant country. . .
."
This was not unusual in the world of Jesus, for emigration was the order of the day.
Half a million Jews lived in Israel, but four million lived elsewhere throughout the known western world.
Palestine often experienced famine, so it could even be prudent at times to emigrate.
Apparently, though, there was more in this boy's belly than a fire for emigrating.
He wanted all the stuff of life his father could give him; but more than anything else, he wanted to get away from his father.
To get away from the Father's care, restraint, protection, and boundary is the beginning of insanity in our lives today.
When he left, the boy in the parable estranged and alienated himself from his past and his real life.
Later in the parable, Jesus devotes only six words to his sin, saying the boy "squandered his wealth in wild living."
There are no lurid details about how many women he slept with, what kind of parties he attended, how much alcohol he consumed.
For Jesus, the essence of sin is not all of that voyeuristic detail.
Instead, the essence of sin is when we think that the essence of life is to get away from the Father.
Jesus came to tell us that /life /is with the Father; /death /is away from the Father.
You may think that the worst thing you can do spiritually is some specific, heinous sin.
That is really not the case in the beginning.
Spiritual suicide consists in this—in wanting to get away from the Father.
Everything else simply follows from that.
!!!
The Reality of Life Away from the Father
Life away from the Father does not begin with dullness.
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