A few months ago, I told y'all that my second favorite genre of movies after post-apocalyptic Distopian films like Red Dawn, the best movie ever made, was like mid-90s coming of age, and really any coming of age movie. But I graduated high school in 1998, so I kind of have a particular, my heart is in a great mid-90s coming of age movie. And I love those, because they're about life change. They're about so many times, it's about the social stratification of high school where college experience changing.
They're about awareness, and they're about acceptance. There's always like a really great tension point in a coming of age movie. But there's a character that shows up in almost every single coming of age movie. But first I'm going to tell you about this, that's not a character.
But I'm going to argue with you that it is, because it has to be there in every single one of them. And any great coming of age movie is going to have a party. They're going to have a party scene. I'll start running them through your heads.
Now I know there's the breakfast at Tiffany's argument, but I'm going to argue with you that doesn't even count. But just think about it, there's always a party. And that party is interesting, that party is critical, because the whole point of that genre of movie is someone changing, that is a perfect environment for change to happen. It's a perfect environment for awareness and acceptance to change.
I think about one of the movies I mentioned a few months ago, and I lost points with some of you, and also I gained points with some of you. You can't talk about a coming of age movie without talking about the genre of a few at class. It can't hardly wait. If it's on TV, I will watch it, full disclosure.
But that whole movie takes place. It's all about everything changing at this party, about the awareness and the acceptance of the people who weren't very important, but coming important. And then it also leads into the second thing that happens at parties. Sometimes folks show their true colors, and where they used to be very accepted now, people are aware of who they actually are, and they're no longer that important.
I think the fist fight scene and days and confusion of the moon tower, we think about that, these movies are about awareness and acceptance. And that party is a character inside of those stories. And this morning we're going to look at what's possibly the most famous story in scripture. It's the most famous parables.
I think that people think about so many times when they think of the stories that Jesus tell, and we typically call it the prodigal son. Although I think that when we start reading it, we're going to realize that that name might not be the best indicator of who's the most important in the story. But it's a story about awareness, it's a story about acceptance. It's a story where a party plays a critical role in the changing awareness and acceptance of its characters.
And so let's jump into Luke chapter 15. We're going to read verse 11 through 32. It's on the screens behind me. You can put your vibeside if you have them.
You also, if you go to myfoundry.life and message notes, the scripture will be there if you want to read it on your phone. This is what it says. Verse 11, When he finally came to his senses, he said to himself, at home, even the hired servants have food enough to spare. And here I am dying of hunger.
I will go home to my father and say, Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy of being called your son. Please take me on as a hired servant. So he returned home to his father and while he was still a long way off his father saw him coming filled with love and compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him.
His son said to him, Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy of being called your son. This father said to the servants, quick, bring the finest robe in the house and put it on him and get a ring for his finger and sandals for his feet and kill the calf that we have been fattening. We must celebrate with a feast. For the son of mine was dead and is now returned to life.
He was lost but now is found. So the party began. Meanwhile, the older son was in the fields working. When he returned home he heard music and dancing in the house and he asked one of the servants what was going on.
Your brother was back, he was told, and he would. Her father had killed the fat and calf and we were celebrating because of his safe return. The older brother was angry and wouldn't go in. His father came out and begged him, but he replied, all these years I have slaved for you and never once refused to do a single thing you told me to.
And all that time you never gave me even one young goat for a feast with my friends. Yet when the son of yours comes back after squandering your money on prostitutes, you celebrate by killing the fat and calf. His father said to him, look dear son, you always stayed by me and everything I have is yours. We had to celebrate this happy day.
Your brother was lost and has come back to life. He was lost, but now he is found. So everything kind of changes this party. What we're going to learn in this story is this is that our awareness tells the story of our acceptance.
So let's walk through this. We have three characters. We have this older brother and we have this father. We have a very unique circumstance what's going on.
So when it comes to the father and says, listen, I want to get out of here. So can you give me what you will give me when you die so I can go do my own thing? And scripture in the Old Testament, we read that in the Jewish system of inheritance that you always give the oldest son a double portion of what every other son gets. And so we see two sons in the story.
And so the father has a third of his estate to the son. And at this point in time, wealth was not held up in liquid resources. This probably was problematic for the father. He's had to sell land.
He's having to sell animals. He's literally to liquidate what he has in order to give his son this third of what he's owed. And this is highly, highly irregular. This is very insulting.
This is not a normal thing to do whatsoever at all. And so the younger son says he goes to a distant land. The way the scripture is talking about this is he gets as far away from his family as he can. He gets as far away from his father as he can.
It's so far away that if he takes one more step farther away that he will actually be closer. The language is saying that he goes halfway across the world. He is trying to distance himself from his family. And then he begins to squander what he has.
He begins to be wasteful. He's scattering his wealth. He's not being intentional. He's not being deliberate.
He is just being careless. And as careless as he can be. And about the time the money runs out, this famine comes in. And this whole story is a masterful piece of literature.
If you look at the shape and the arc of it. Because it's telling the story in a way that this just didn't happen to him. The way that he chose to ask for stuff, the way he chose to leave his family, and the way he chose to spend what had been given to him. He worked himself into the situation.
This didn't happen that he caused this. That he would have had the wealth to ride through this famine if he would have been smarter with what he got in a very deceitful and unhealthy way. And during the famine, I got the point where he had to get hired by a farmer. And if this is a good Jewish son, like where it's expecting it to be in this story, for him to be working for a Gentile, feeding pigs, it's the farthest that you can go from who he was raised to be.
If he wants to get as far away from what he was supposed to be as he can, he's actually gotten into it now. This isn't necessarily about distance, but this is also about behavior. And while he is at this point, scripture says this. Verse 17, he finally came to his senses that his heart changed, that he became aware of what he had done.
He became aware of his situation, that he became aware that what he thought would cause the good life is actually done the exact opposite. I'm going to read just 17 through 19 and 4, and I want you to look at how many times that he uses the word I in this. So when he finally came to his senses, he said to himself at home, even the hired servants have enough food to spare. And here I am dying of hunger.
I will go home to my father and say, Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you. And I am no longer worthy of being called your son. Please take me on as a hired servant. It's in the situation that we see in repenting.
Repentance means to turn. Like the literal translation of repentance means to turn. So here he is at the furthest distance physically, but also emotionally and spiritually from his entire family and from the way that he was raised, he makes 180 degree turn and begins returning home. This story just illustrates the physicality of repentance, the heart transition of what's going on.
He said, I did this to myself. He said, I did this incredible amount of personal awareness. His our awareness that tells the story of our acceptance. He accepted what he had done and accepted who he was.
His vision of what his life was like was not a good vision of what life should be like. So we come to the point where the younger son is meeting with the father and he has this rehearsed apology he's going through. If you read 17 through 19, then you also read about this interaction. It's the exact same phrase.
He has this right. How many of you have gotten yourself into a pickle before? Or you've realized you need to apologize to somebody or something that has to happen? You rehearse what you're going to say.
You know what that feels like? I need to say this. I'm going to write it down. I'm driving over there.
He goes up and his scripture says his father sees him from a long distance away. If you're familiar with the story of Jacob and Esau in the Old Testament and of their meeting again, this story has this tiny rabbit trail. It has marvelous parallels of what restoration looks like. But he's coming and his father sees him and his father begins running down.
You can also imagine the main thoroughfare in this village and his son. They come and they embrace and the younger son starts his rehearsed apology and the father interrupts him. You don't even need to say these things. When it says that he embraced him, the literal translation of that is that the father was hanging off of the sun.
He's hugging him in a way that the son is supporting his weight. It's at this moment that we become aware of the true character of the father and the true character of the father is a forgiveness and of love. And the thing that he immediately says, like he interrupts his son's apology where the younger son is saying, hey, I'm a really bad son. He interrupts him and says he calls to the surface and says listen, I need you to bring the best robe in the house and put it on him.
I need you to bring him a ring that signifies his status and his ability to control economic interests and the fame that ring stood for. And he put sandals on his seat. Where the younger son was coming to say, can you put me on the bottom rung of the household here? The father saying, I'm going to fully restore you to who you were on the day that you asked every single thing from me.
Where you said I do not want to be considered part of this family anymore, please remove me from it. I'm going to put every single thing back in your life. What's killed a fat and calf? What's this?
This animal that's saving for a special occasion. It's like, you know, you have that roast in the back of the freezer that you're waiting for. It's like, I know I've got one more venison back strap in my freezer. I'm saving that thing.
He says, take it, kill it, start eating. And he says, not just a handful, like a nuclear family sitting around the dinner table, like this, the entire community has been witnessed to this reunion. And now the entire community will be taking part and place in this celebration. The way the father accepted this son, the way he was fully aware of what he had done.
But he's saying, I'm deciding to put a different story in the play. I'm aware. I'm aware. I'm aware.
Tells the story of our acceptance. Now, at this point in time, the elder son enters the story. The party is going on. He hears the music.
He hears the dancing. How you hear dancing? I thought about that. Oh, how you hear it.
I mean, it's like, I know this weird mountain tap dancing. I'm not going to attempt to do that. You're hoping I would, weren't you? No, no, no, no, no, no, not going to happen.
But he comes up and he hears all this and another one of the servants meets him. And he's like, what's going on? He's like, well, your younger brother is here. Your younger brother is home.
And we're celebrating. And he's not celebrating. He's caught up instead of an story of equity and a story of justice. Well, this isn't right.
The servant is caught up in a story of joy and celebration. The way he even tells like, it's all right. We're celebrating. Your brother's back.
You need to come in and get on this. There's a party and you need to be here. And this eldest son is so mad. He's standing outside of the house.
And the father has to come outside to meet him. There's always a good confrontation in the house party in the movie. It's going on right now. Backyard.
And they begin this conversation and they're older brother. We're not even recognizing that as his brother. He says, your son did this. And he gets in that point to where he exaggerates what he thought was going on.
Again, that person or that person or when you are hot and mad about something, you might have your rehearsed defense or apology going on and you begin stretching the truth and exaggerating. Like he's going straight into that. And the father stops him. He says, every single thing I have is yours.
Nothing is changing about who you are. I liquidated everything for him. Literally everything's yours. He calls him his equal.
But he makes it conditional. He makes it conditional in the fact that yeah everything I have is yours. But you need to check yourself and you need to see that your brother was once dead. And now he is alive.
He was once lost and that he is found. We see a very different story of personal awareness between these brothers and this father. A very different story of acceptance of the situation. Now, when we first read this, verse 11 it started out, said to illustrate the point even further.
To really put this story in perspective, we have to think about all of chapter 15. It starts off like this. Tax collectors and other notorious centers often came to listen to Jesus' teach. And this made the Pharisees and teachers of religious law complain that he was associating with such sinful people and even eating with them.
To eat with someone in this culture was the supreme form of acceptance. You wouldn't eat with someone who you thought you were better than. Jesus tells two stories to illustrate this point. The first one he tells a story of a sheep herder who had a hundred sheep and he lost 99.
He kept, he knew her 99 that sheep were, but he had lost one sheep. And how he was willing to do everything and risk everything he hid to find that one sheep. He found that one sheep that he celebrated with everyone. And then the next story is of a woman who had ten coins that was told as though this was her life savings.
And she lost one. She knew her nine of them were, but she lost one. She tore the whole house apart. Like took all the furniture out, swept and swept until she found that one coin.
Another one that gospels that tells that story that it tells the story is though she was so happy about finding that one coin. She went and spin it on a celebration for all her neighbors to celebrate finding the coin that she lost. And then Jesus tells this story to illustrate the point even further. And it's critical for us to think about this and realize all this here because there's multiple ways that we can go with this.
Multiple ways we can take this. What's critical about is for us to understand how we respond to God's forgiveness of sin. It tells a big story about how we view God. The more problem we have with forgiveness, the more of the older son we have in us.
We're actually creating a small view of God. We're creating a little view of God. That can affect both us and our heads and our hearts. That also can affect others in the way that we touch other people and the stories that we tell and the stories that we have influenced people.
How we respond to God's forgiveness of sin tells a big story about how we view God because our awareness tells us we're of our acceptance. Maybe if we struggle with understanding God forgiving, what it's actually showing is that we're struggling to understand God forgiving us. We've created a small view of God then. So there's two things really for us to think about this when we take home with us and it's this.
The first one is this. There's no such thing as unredeemable. So the story shows us. There's no such thing as unredeemable.
And a good Jewish boy who did with this younger son would be unredeemable. There's nothing worse that he could have done than what he did. And we see this acceptance, this love, this restoration, and this celebration for what goes on. You know, if we're a religious leader of Pharisee, we might look at this story and look at the situation that Jesus was in with the tax collectors and other notorious sinners.
I love that translate. I'm notorious sinners. You might ask the question, why pursue sinners? Why pursue sinners?
They're asking Jesus that and we can't have to ask ourselves that. Multiple ways, but we pursue sinners because there's such thing as repentance. And we see repentance worked out beautifully in the story of this younger son with this awareness of brokenness because repentance can't be accidental. We don't stumble into repentance.
Repentance is intentional. Repentance is willful. That's the way this younger son, he did all this stuff on purpose. Like he got himself into this situation and he knew it.
The repentance always leads to restoration. That's why we pursue sinners. And that's why Jesus pursued each of us. You know, the elder son's argument makes a hundred percent sense if you live in a world without grace, right?
Well, he did this wrong. He did this wrong. He did this wrong. He doesn't belong anymore.
He wanted out. Let's let him be out. If you live in a world without graciousness, you can make a pretty good argument for the way the elder son behaves. But what this story shows is that we do not live in a world without graciousness.
In fact, we live in a world where God or graciousness is the first action that he makes. The second thing that we see here about that, about God's love is that God's love is a both and not an either or. See, both of these sons acted with insult. The younger son acted with insult in the way that he wanted to be broken away from his father.
And the elder son acted with insult in the way that he was refusing to participate alongside his father in this. They both acted with insult. The change was how they became aware of it. All the eyes, eyes, and eyes can go back and listen to the elder brother.
It's always he and he's at finger pointing what's going on, that blame instead of awareness. The younger son exercised repentance. The elder son, the father, you're dangerously close to thinking that you can create your own salvation. Some of us might, the fancy word for that is works righteousness.
He's like, you're on the line, man. Let me invite you into a relationship of restoration. What comes alongside of me is we restore your brother to the place he has because we love him, because we see him as family. There's no winner, there's no loser in this story.
One son seeks forgiveness, other son seeks justice, but what we see is that God seeks grace, filled, lavishness in spite of anything. How we see ourselves before God is a big deal. How we wear that and to what level have we accepted that. And the challenge is this story, if you notice it doesn't resolve itself, if you're a musician, this is still ending on a minor chord.
It doesn't resolve because the resolution of this story happens in our heart. It happens in the way that we are seeing and think about this. It happens in the way that we see ourselves as the younger son or the older son, both to God and also both to others. Where do we find ourselves in this story?
It ends on a cliffhanger because it's meant for us to think about. It was meant for those fair seasons religious we just think about and it's meant for us to think about. First 32, we had to celebrate this happy day because your brother was dead and has come back to life. He was lost and now he is found.
Let's pray together. Lord, we realize that all of us can be stubborn. We can be the younger brother. We can be the older brother.
God, but what we realize is that each one of us cannot do this on our own. Our acceptance means our willful decision to follow you. Our willful decision that says, you know what? We have gone far away from you as we think we could have and it did not work out well for us.
God, for some of us, that's a heck of a story. God, for others of us, that's just an emotional battle that we are coming to. But regardless of that distance, we recognize there is that distance. And that you are waiting for us.
And God, that younger brother I imagine it felt a little weird when he had that robe and that finger back on that robe and that ring back on his body. That he had to become acclimated to his status again. God and each of us have to become acclimated. We have to become aware of how much you accept us in spite of what we have done.
What we're going to do is it's called sanctification. It's called holiness. That's us coming to terms with what you have done so that we can then begin waiting on the road for others alongside of you and be part of that celebration.