Fairhaven UMC

So I have been a pretty big reader since I was a small child and actually I probably read way less now than I did when I was in like middle school, which is probably a combination of two things I think. First is just being burned out from eight or seven years of higher education where you like read hundreds of pages every night. I got kind of sick of that. And like the rest of you, social media has fried my attention span.

So there’s that. But reading has always kind of been the way that I understand and process things. So if I hear about something new or interesting, I wanna do some reading on it to get a fuller picture. I want to really intellectualize it, to understand it inside and out.

I wanna explore what other people have said about it so I can internalize it for myself. And I do this about things it makes sense for, you know, like theology, history, science things, but also for things that it kind of doesn’t, I guess. And something that comes to mind for me on that is running. This was a while back, but whenever I took up cross country in high school.

I read a number of books about training technique, how to run, one of which I distinctly remember. I can see the cover of it. It was called Run: The Mind-Body Method of Running by Feel. And the basic thesis of that book is that your body knows how long and how hard you can run on any given day, and that you train best by listening to what your body is telling you.

Unfortunately, my body has not told me to run in like 10 years, but it will. It was a good book. But the irony is that it was telling me to trust my own experience of running when what I really wanted was for the book to tell me specifically what to do to get as fast as I could be. And the entire point of the book is that following some program to the letter is just not going to work for you if you want to reach your full potential because you’re an individual, you’re unique, you need different things.

But that’s my tendency. I want to grasp everything in my brain crystal clear. Just tell me how it is. So about that same time in my life, I was becoming a Christian.

So this would have been early high school. And I’d been in church a couple years. I really loved it. I wanted to understand the faith for myself.

And I wanted it the same way. I wanted it to be cut and dry in a way that I could hold on to, in a way that I could unimpeachably explain it to someone else. Here’s what I believe. Here’s the reason that it is true.

True. So I gravitated towards an area of theology called apologetics. If you’re not familiar with that, apologetics, it comes from the Greek word to speak in defense, not like apologize. It’s different.

It’s basically a type of evangelism that seeks to prove that. the existence of God, and then more specifically prove the God of Christianity, prove Jesus Christ by appealing to science, to logic, philosophy, math, and so on. And there are some very sophisticated arguments. Some of the great thinkers in history, the physicist Blaise Pascal was a big apologist.

C.S. Lewis, the writer of Narnia, was an apologist. The Apostle Paul is kind of doing that throughout a lot of his letters.

He’s seeking to explain Jesus to the Gentiles and convince them to follow him by using images, principles from the Greeks’ religion and philosophy. It’s like using other languages to explain and prove Jesus. So about at the same time in my life, what I really found myself drawn to was apologetics. And the figure I was drawn to was Ravi Zacharias.

I don’t know if any of you are familiar with that person. But he was an Indian-born pastor and apologist who, until his death a few years back, was one of the most influential in the world. Right? He had a radio show every week that I’d listen to at work. I read a couple of his books.

And I really found this way of relating to faith useful, logical. It helped me digest it. It helped me understand it in the same way I might process information from history or for science, nice and cut and dry. And he was obviously brilliant.

So by the time I applied to college, I remember writing in my application, I always planned to study religion. that my prime interest in that field was apologetics, understanding the faith and explaining it to other people. And I wanted to be able to preach and teach convincingly like Robbie Zacharias, long before I knew I wanted to be a pastor. So he died in 2020.

I’d largely switched gears by then. I relate to Jesus now in a way that’s different, not logical, not analytical so much anymore. But just a few months after he died in 2020, accusations started pouring out that he’d engaged in all kinds of sexual misconduct, abuse, coercion against, I think, like 200 women in multiple countries. His own ministry hired investigators to look into these reports.

His own ministry concluded that they were true. And so I was left with this question. How could it be That a man who helped teach me and millions of people how to believe in Jesus in our minds didn’t really seem to know Jesus at all and indeed behaved like the devil in his private life. Our gospel text this morning describing Jesus’ appearance to the disciple that we unfairly name Doubting Thomas helps us understand, I think, because it makes us confront what it actually means to believe in Jesus.

So think about that just for a second for yourself. What does it mean to believe in Jesus? If you believe in Jesus, what does that look like for you? How does that belief function? What does that mean? Is believing to decide in your mind that something is just empirically true, that it’s verifiable by the evidence that you’ve been given? So in my apologetics era, I think I’d have said, yeah, basically that’s what it is. I had faith. I believed because the information I’d received about Jesus seemed to be factually correct.

But the thing is, that’s a pretty new idea of what belief is. That’s not really how belief is talked about in the Bible. Believing in that sense is an Enlightenment-era concept that’s only really existed for like 500 years now. Because in scripture, particularly in John’s gospel, belief is not a noun, something that you acquire with enough evidence, like you believe in the theory of gravity or something like that.

Believe is a verb. You don’t have it. You live it. And so for John and for Thomas, to believe is to be in an ongoing relationship with Jesus.

In the New Testament, to believe is to live your life as if something is true, and that is to live your life as if Christ is risen indeed. So in the days after Jesus’ crucifixion, the disciples were obviously not interested in doing that. They just witnessed him arrested, tried, condemned, tortured, killed. They knew that he’d been placed in a grave to rot.

They’d rolled a rock in the front of the cave entrance like this final punctuation mark declaring the end of his life, of their hope. And there was nothing left to believe in, as far as they were concerned. Why would they live their lives as his disciples when there was nobody to follow? And things changed pretty rapidly after those three days. Mary Magdalene sees him.

We read that on Easter Sunday. She speaks to him at the tomb. And Jesus sends her back to announce to the disciples that he is alive and is coming to them. And she tells them, I have seen the Lord.

but we can assume, I think, that the disciples don’t really buy it because that’s where we pick up in our reading from John today. And after Mary’s given her report, they’re still in hiding, right? She said Jesus is alive. He’s coming. He’s around.

But they’re still hiding in this locked room, so they don’t really seem to believe it very much. Mary’s word apparently isn’t good enough, and they’re still afraid. and Thomas is perhaps even more devastated than the rest of the remaining 11 disciples, and he has simply run away. He’s not with them anymore.

John’s gospel doesn’t tell us where Thomas is. But by Sunday evening, despite this locked door, they have fortified themselves in the upper room. Jesus miraculously shows up and stands among these 10 disciples and says, Peace be with you. And I think that’s beautiful.

Jesus’ first words to his handpicked disciples after literally going to hell and back are, Peace be with you. Peace must really be something that he wants for them and for us if it’s his first priority when he’s resurrected from the grave. And then after that, after he’s done that, he shows them his pierced hands, his side, scarred but transformed in his resurrected body, and they are filled with joy, John says. Now they believe.

Jesus breathes on them with the Holy Spirit. He gives them the authority to forgive sins, and they are back in business. They believe again. Not in their heads, mind you.

but in that they are once more living their lives as his followers in the world that tried and failed to take his life. We know that they believe because they go out despite the risks. But Thomas is absent, right? Thomas misses Jesus’ visit. And not only is he absent, when the other disciples find him, he completely rejects the possibility that Jesus could be alive.

Unless I see nail marks in his hands, put my finger in the wounds left by the nails, and put my hand in his side, Thomas says, I will not believe. I will not believe. He’s not getting disappointed again. He wants empirical, unassailable proof, which to me it seems he sure isn’t going to come.

Whenever he’s saying he’s not going to believe unless these things happen is kind of a when pigs fly sort of thing, right? But, And so a few days later, when Thomas has rejoined the group, Jesus returns to them again, again despite these locked doors. And again, those same words, peace be with you. And he has a message for Thomas specifically. Put your finger here.

Look at my hands. Put your hand into my side. No more disbelief. Believe.

And he has, out of love for Thomas, met him on his own terms. Okay. You know, you said you wouldn’t believe unless you could see and feel the wounds from my crucifixion. Well, here they are.

And Thomas does indeed get that proof that many of us would like. Wouldn’t that be nice, right? But the remarkable thing is that he doesn’t seem to take it. John doesn’t tell us that Thomas actually insists when Jesus comes to touch the nail marks to put his hand in his side the opportunity arises, Thomas doesn’t do it instead it’s when he meets Jesus when he hears Jesus’ voice calling out to him his response is to be overwhelmed with faith my Lord and my God, he says He sounds a lot like what we heard Mary Magdalene say last week Whenever she said, And Jesus now comes to each of his followers in the way that they need him. Not the way they think that they need him, but the way that they need him So that they can call him mine, my teacher, my Lord, my God.

Amen. But he tells John, he tells all the disciples down the line, which now includes us, that the real gift, the real blessing is for those who do not see and yet believe. Belief in Jesus is just so much deeper, so much harder to pin down than this beyond all reasonable doubt standard of proof that we might find in a courtroom. There’s going to be doubt.

Doubt. Instead, the belief that we’re invited to in the resurrected Jesus is belief despite all reasonable doubt. It’s belief without proof, let alone the kind of proof that we can lay down to somebody else to prove Jesus to them. I’m not sure many people in history have actually ever been convinced by logic, by reason, to believe in Jesus.

it’s believing without that proof and then committing our lives to him anyway. More than anywhere else, we meet Jesus as we do his work in the world. We meet him as he appears before us in the face of other people, the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed specifically. Pope Francis was very insistent on that.

and we see him as we seek him out, as he speaks to our hearts, it’s that voice that mattered so much more to Mary Magdalene and to Thomas than being able to physically touch Jesus in front of us. Just as he tells Thomas the proof kind of belief is great if you can get it, where you believe Jesus is Lord the same way you believe your sibling or spouse or some celebrity is real and touchable. But if you’re a person like Thomas who struggles with faith in the resurrected Christ, you should know that that kind of belief that never has an ounce of doubt exists. is completely unnecessary to life as a disciple.

That’s not the kind of belief we’re asked to have in Christ. If you’ve ever been worried that you don’t have enough faith in Jesus, you have enough faith by wanting to have faith. Relationship with him is the kind of belief that matters. Not seeing, yet believing anyway matters.

believing in your heart. It’s the willingness to walk, to sacrifice, to serve as if he’s alive, regardless as to whether you feel yourself feeling as if he’s as physically real as me standing here. You are not expected to believe in Jesus with that same kind of belief that you believe in the Pythagorean theorem, if you remember it. Or that Columbus crossed the ocean in 1492.

Because that’s not the kind of belief that transforms. You can know, you can believe in your head and not be transformed, not be changed, not you live your life any differently. Ravi Zacharias showed me that pretty clearly after my teenage years. And I would suggest to you that there are plenty of people who believe in Jesus in their minds, that he’s a historic figure, that they are sure lived and died and rose again, and that doesn’t make the tiniest bit of difference in their lives.

We know that this is true. Some 67% of Americans at the last poll identify as Christian, which simply means they believe in Jesus, right? Do you think that 67% of the people in this country are followers of Christ, believing in him in such a way that they stake their whole lives on him, that they seek to live in mercy and justice and righteousness and love, that he is their Lord, that he is their Savior, their everything as they seek to be transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit. 67% of America. Do you even think that 67% of churchgoers believe in Jesus in that way? And yet, that’s what it’s all about.

That’s what belief is in the body of Christ. The ability and the willingness to say, my Lord and my God, from the depths of your heart, without ever having put your finger in his nail holes or a hand in his side, And I wonder if a lot of people who struggle with faith, who struggle with belief in Jesus, do so because they’ve been seeking a standard of evidence and apologetic that they don’t really need. Because remember, Thomas didn’t really need what he thought he needed. He just needed to hear from Christ.

this is never, ever, ever going to be something that you understand inside and out. That you can hold in your hand and analyze and grasp. That’s not what Jesus is like. John Wesley had in his 30s what you might call a dark night of the soul.

He wasn’t sure about his call. He wasn’t sure about his faith. And a Moravian preacher and kind of a mentor of his, Peter Bowler was his name, famously told him, preach faith until you have it. And then you will preach faith because you have it.

And that’s the challenge, I think, a beautiful one for those of us who are not lucky enough to meet Jesus at the mouth of the tomb. For those of us who have never gotten to touch his resurrected flesh in the upper room. Live the life of a believer, of a disciple, until you are one. Decide to trust Jesus until you really do.

And then you will live the life of a believer, of a disciple, because you believe. And you’ll trust him because you found that he’s trustworthy. And for many of us, that’s not going to be a one-time thing. We’re going to find ourselves recommitting to belief repeatedly over the years and relying on our siblings in Christ to believe for us when we can’t.

But it is worth it. These disciples have decided in Scripture. and that face-to-face meeting that Thomas and Mary Magdalene got is coming for us to, each and every one of us, we will see him. We will touch his transformed body that has transformed our souls.

We will one day be able to look at him in the eye and say, My Lord and my God. Thanks be to God in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen.

So occasionally, and this seems to happen, especially during church council meetings or if I’m doing the announcements at one of the other churches, I will misspeak and mix up Lent with Advent. So please don’t listen carefully for it because I do it all the time, probably like 50% of the time. And when you live according to the church year, which by necessity I basically do, I’m always looking towards Advent or Lent, whatever’s coming next, these seasons start to feel familiar in some ways, and these two particularly feel similar. They’re both usually purple, right? The color both of penitence and royalty.

Both are about a month of preparation for the big day, right? both lean heavily on scripture that’s prophesying what God is about to do for people who don’t really get it. And in both Advent and Lent, there’s this sense of quiet, of anticipation, of spiritual preparation, and one that really resonates with me. I like that. And this Palm Sunday, I really find myself focusing on those parallels.

Maybe because it’s been cold and gray like a Pittsburgh December, it just feels like we’re in Advent again. But for the first time ever, Palm Sunday feels to me like another moment in the year where we blanket the sanctuary with greenery, which we’ll do later. Christmas Eve. It’s not just the greenery.

It’s not just the purple pyramids. What sticks out to me is the song, the proclamation that the crowd is bringing today. It sounds like Christmas. You remember the angels appearing to the shepherds in Bethlehem’s fields, right? Luke chapter 2, what we always hear on Christmas Eve.

Nearby, shepherds were living in the fields, guarding their sheep at night. The Lord’s angels stood before them. The Lord’s glory shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angels said, Don’t be afraid.

Look, I bring good news to you, wondrous, joyful news for all people. Your Savior is born today in David’s city. He is the Lord. This is a sign for you.

You will find a newborn baby wrapped snugly and lying in a manger. And suddenly a great assembly of the heavenly forces was with the angel praising God. They said, glory to God in heaven and on earth peace among those he favors. That song there, that last line, glory to God in heaven, peace among those whom he favors.

That’s where we get the words to angels we have heard on high. And in this song that the angels are singing, this heavenly host lights up the night sky, telling the shepherds of the coming of Jesus into the world and what that will mean for them, for us, for all creation. The disciples, the followers of Jesus, proclaim something very similar 30 years later as Jesus approaches the gates of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. And this is how it goes in our reading today.

As Jesus approached the road leading down from the Mount of Olives, the whole throng of his disciples began rejoicing. They praised God with a loud voice because of all the mighty things they had seen. And they said..

. blessings on the king who comes in the name of the Lord, peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heavens. So two really interesting things are going on just in this brief passage. First, we know that line of the crowd song as well.

The first line, blessings on the king who comes in the name of the Lord. We say that during the communion liturgy, except we say it as it was actually written in Zechariah. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. There’s no king in the prophet’s words.

Because the people have slightly but very significantly changed what was originally prophesied. And that second line has undergone a similar sort of transformation. Notice the difference. So the heavenly host at Bethlehem sang, glory to heaven and on earth peace among those whom he favors.

In Jerusalem, what the people are singing is peace in heaven and glory in the highest heavens, which is similar to. But again, a distorted version of what was originally proclaimed. Because the people are experiencing and succumbing to this temptation that we ourselves face constantly. They’re subtly changing Jesus into something they want him to be, while also obscuring what he wants us to be.

They’re making him someone who will do something for them that doesn’t really affect what they have to do. And this can be dangerous. The hymn writer, pastor, and missionary Fred Kahn, he’s got a few hymns in our hymnal, he points this out particularly as it relates to that phrase, peace in heaven. That’s what the crowd in Jerusalem is proclaiming as Jesus comes, peace in heaven.

Fred Kahn grew up in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation. He knew quite well the risk that comes with reshaping Jesus into something that he’s not, no matter how subtly, into something we might prefer that he be. So as for peace, consider that it’s a whole lot easier, a whole lot more straightforward for us if Jesus Christ means peace in heaven. because that’s none of our business, really.

Peace in heaven, heaven’s far away. Heaven’s got nothing to do with us right now, but peace on earth is what the heavenly host proclaimed at Jesus’ birth. And peace on earth is our business. that requires something of us.

It’s a lot harder because it’s in our control a little bit more day to day. So seeking peace, real peace, not just the absence of conflict, but peace, that’s hard work. And yet the people sing peace in heaven as Jesus descends from the Mount of Olives into the holy city. because they don’t really want peace on earth, after all.

That’s not what these people are looking for. That’s not what we’re looking for most of the time. At the moment, they’re longing for Jesus as he comes into Jerusalem to take his rightful place as a king over his people. They want him to throw out the Romans, their Herodian collaborators.

They want him to be this warrior king like his ancestor David. And so they say, blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord. They’re not looking for peace, at least not in the short term. They’re looking for reversal.

They’re looking for revenge. And that’s understandable. They’ve been oppressed. They’ve been occupied.

They have been exploited for generations now. And they think that this is a moment of revolution, that Jesus’ entry into the city on the back of a colt marks the first spark that will lead to this final revolution, this final confrontation, victory for Israel. Our reading this morning stopped before it. But Jesus knows all of this, and it really grieves him.

The next two verses really reveal his pain over their misunderstanding of what he’s there for. As Jesus came to the city, he observed it, and he wept over it. He said, if only you knew on this day of all days the things that lead to peace, but now they’re hidden from your eyes. Jesus knows very well that peace is not on the immediate horizon.

We know that as Holy Week is before us, that those longing to see him on David’s throne are in for a big disappointment in the next coming days. But perhaps Jesus’ triumphal entry, as we often call Palm Sunday, happened 33 years before in the stable at Bethlehem as he entered into creation, God in human flesh. That’s when he became king. His first triumph over the world, over death and sin, over Satan, was in his taking on of weakness and the frailty of a baby boy.

And there, in that moment, the angels announced his triumph, rightly, the way the people do imperfectly at Jerusalem’s gates. And I don’t mean this to be harsh on Jesus’ crowd of followers. We make Palm Sunday a celebratory day for a good reason. They’re absolutely right to celebrate, to call out in joy.

They lay down their cloaks, their palms on the road before him. And we shouldn’t fault them at all for that because they know, they’re completely correct that Jesus is their king. their mistake is just in understanding what kind of king he is and what that means for them, what that means for us. Christ as our king does not mean peace in heaven.

It’s not abstract. It’s not something far away that’s distant from our daily living. If Christ is our king, it means peace on earth. It means that we, in our lives, are responsible for living with Jesus as our king.

In a reign of peace, of justice, of mercy, his law governs us right now. Not peace in heaven. Peace on earth. And that’s a great victory.

That’s what we celebrate on Palm Sunday. The triumph of God over darkness and evil. We’re his subjects now. His kingdom is over all creation right now.

And that’s why Jesus says, if the disciples weren’t cheering for him, even the stones would cry out. All the world has received their king. But the coming of Jesus comes with obligations. First, that those who rule without seeking peace and righteousness are not kings at all, not at all legitimate, the same way Jesus is talking about Caesar, about Herod.

And all of those of us who would be followers of Jesus must be committed not only to calling him king, but to serving him as the kind of king that he is, offering our lives in justice and mercy and righteousness while seeking peace. And so the psalmist this morning sings out in Psalm 118, open the gates of righteousness for me so that I can come in and give thanks to the Lord. The people that are lined up from the road on the Mount of Olives were ready to march into the capital city behind this new king, but not necessarily into the gates of righteousness. They’re ready to go into the gates of Jerusalem, but not necessarily the gates of righteousness behind their Savior.

The gates of righteousness are those we enter whenever we follow behind him as our Lord, walking in his footsteps, living in his way. These gates are wide open. We’re welcomed into these gates today. And this really is a day of great celebration.

But the gates of righteousness don’t necessarily open to a road that leads straight to the palace and the royal throne, but to cleansing the temple, facing down the authorities, this mockery of a trial, and then finally the cross. But still the road that the gates of righteousness opens to will lead us to this true king and as well as to a transformed life worth living. One that will never end. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

So at this point in my life, at least now, you know, I don’t have any prodigal siblings. I never really have. We all have our issues. Everyone does.

Every family does. But I think my parents would agree that, generally speaking, they got pretty lucky. My youngest brother is a college student who coaches girls’ high school basketball. My next brother works for an electrical contractor.

He’s about to have a baby in a couple months. He’s got a ranch house and two golden retrievers. Exceedingly normal life. My sister lives with her boyfriend in New York City.

She works for a nonprofit that fights housing discrimination. She’s doing the kind of stuff she always wanted to do. And I, unfortunately, am perhaps in the most respectable line of work in America. And I’ve gone through a very orderly, very successful academic and early work career before that.

I did not sneak out of the house as a teenager. I did not smoke in the bathroom. I worked to get good grades. I did my extracurriculars.

I got good scholarships. And now I’ve landed in something resembling a stable career, allegedly. Okay. And as it happens, at one point last year, Stormy can confirm this, someone looked at me revolted and groaned that I am, quote, disgustingly normal, which kind of hurt, honestly.

So I think I’m pretty far from a prodigal son, as classically understood. That’s a word, prodigal, that we really only use at this point in English when referring to this biblical story. You never use that anywhere else anymore. But it simply means, outside of this context, a person who is wasteful and extravagant and decadent, irresponsible, kind of that sort of person.

And that’s how Jesus here in Luke’s gospel sums up this character. The so-called prodigal son wastes his wealth through extravagant living. He blows the inheritance that he asks to cash out long before his father is actually dead, which is pretty offensive to begin with. Hey, dad, give me what you’re going to give me when you die.

And accordingly, the reality is this as I read the story. If I’m looking for myself in the parable, I’m very distinctly the older brother. I never really caused any problems. I’m always, you know, dutifully doing what I’m supposed to do.

And this is, of course, the classic older brother or older sister role, even today. And it seems like it was 2,000 years ago in Galilee. You got that responsible oldest brother. Right? Now, I won’t spend too much time today talking about what this parable says for those among us who recognize themselves as prodigals, those who have spent their lives at odds or running from God and their loved ones.

I think the parable is pretty clear for those people, right? God’s arms are always wide open no matter what. Those who have wandered are welcome to come back to their loving father. And I hear this all the time. You’d be surprised how often I hear this, the number of people who tell me the church will fall down if they ever come in.

And it’s very sad because Jesus is teaching us here that the exact opposite is true, that the Father rolls out the red carpet for the one who feels like he has no worthiness to come back. But people say that to me all the time. Amen. but there is no one that God doesn’t want in this place.

And there’s no one that God wants more, either at the baptismal font, the communion table, or in those seats, than someone who’s never been there before or has been away for a long and difficult time. The walls of the church won’t fall down. And in fact, the Father prepares a heavenly party for the situation. That is what this parable tells us.

God has a special place for the prodigal sons and daughters, and I hope that’s obvious to all of us from the way that Jesus speaks in Scripture, including in this parable. But what I think is perhaps more important to many of us here is to speak to the perspective of the older brother. because the majority of us probably see ourselves more in him. The Pharisees are supposed to as well, by the way, and they’re the church folks of their days.

This parable is told for the benefit of the Pharisees, of those who are the older, responsible brother, rather than those who is the miscreant younger brother. He’s not the one listening to the story. Most of you, to the best of my knowledge, are responsible, productive members of society. You’re not people who spent last night getting drunk, gambling, partying away your inheritance or your social security check.

Most of you, I think it’s fair to say, are people who are decent and respectable. And so I would put myself in that category, I like to think. And so this is uncomfortable to acknowledge, but I would suggest that being in that place of decency, of respectability of that older brother is a really dangerous place to be spiritually. It can be kind of corrosive to your heart.

The propensity of the prodigal younger brother to visible egregious sin is obvious. He’s squandering his father’s estate on prostitutes and gambling and all this stuff. He’s very visibly bad, so to speak, right? Those of us who live in that older brother zone are prone to much sneakier forms of sin. Right? The older brother who’s clean cut and dutiful and responsible is well behaved.

This is not the same thing as being good. I want to say that again. Being well behaved or hardworking or respectable or however you might best relate here is not the same as being good. goodness or holiness, we might say, is an orientation not only of your behavior, but of your heart and of your spirit, what’s going on inside, not just what you’re doing outside.

You can go about your life squeaky clean in your behavior and still have a heart of ice cold stone. And that really, I think, comes to the surface in this parable. When the prodigal son comes home and his father welcomes him with joy and generosity, you can sense what’s boiling in the heart of that well-behaved older brother. Pride, resentment, insecurity, envy.

he’s enraged. First, he refuses to go to the welcome feast, and then he lectures his father about it. He reminds him how naive he’s being, how despicably his younger brother has behaved, as if his father doesn’t know, right? And now this is just a guess on my part, but I’m pretty confident in this. I promise you, That all of the bitterness and the jealousy and the pridefulness is not just emerging now that the brother is home again.

This isn’t new. This sludge has been bubbling in the older son’s heart since he was a kid. He watched his brother shatter a window with a baseball and get away with it. He watched him bring home C’s and D’s every semester, sneak home late after getting drunk with his friends, steal his father’s money out of his dresser to buy drugs.

He watched his mother cry as this got worse and worse and worse. And meanwhile, he did his best in school. He helped with the housework. He got a job of his own as soon as he was able.

And to this day, very rarely misses a Sunday of church. Very different. Very different. So make no mistake here in this parable, he has been genuinely harmed by his brother.

His whole family has been harmed. If you’ve ever had a relative like this in your family, you know what it’s like. His soul has been harmed. He’s been made more callous.

He’s been made intolerant in a way he’d never want. He never wanted to feel this way about his brother. And his feelings here upon his brother coming back and getting this celebration make complete sense. Because in some ways, and he’d never say this out loud, but he’d be happier if his brother had simply stayed dead.

It would keep the equilibrium that developed since he left. His parents wouldn’t be threatened by painful entanglement in this mess all over again. And it certainly would keep things more fair. He could keep up the good work and lead a decently secure, quiet life.

They all could. But now that’s coming crashing down as his black sheep of a brother returns. And so the young man’s father desperately tries to get his older son to understand the situation from his perspective. This brother of yours was dead and is alive.

He was lost and is found. This forgiveness, the celebration is offered freely without regard for what’s come before. That was then. This is now.

All this stuff has happened. Yes, but he’s back. Yes. We thought you were dead and now here you are alive and well.

And the father runs out of the house to meet his son. His arms are flung open. He’s got tears in his eyes. He doesn’t wait for an apology or a justification.

He doesn’t look for an excuse before deciding how to react. That comes second. The parable shows that the father, that God has no interest in tough love towards the one who comes back. Just regular, old, soft love.

And that is just intolerably frustrating for the older brothers among us. We older brothers want the prodigal son and people like him in our lives and in the world who have harmed other people to face some kind of justice, by which we mean punishment, before they can be brought back into the fold. And it helps maintain this alluring myth to which we cling desperately of having earned our place in the world. And in God’s grace of getting what we have come to deserve.

But that’s just not the case. Because that wouldn’t be grace. This feeling, this conviction that we have that everybody’s got to get what they deserve is the result of pride scarring our hearts. Because here’s the thing.

Listen to this parable, how it went here. The older brother didn’t do anything to earn his position either, if he’s honest with himself. What right does he have to be angry at the mercy that was shown to his younger brother? His father tells him this. He says it softly and kindly.

Son, you always were with me, and everything I have is yours. He’s been taken care of his whole life. He, just like his younger brother, has received nothing but unconditional love from his father. And even so, he’s stewed bitterly about his poorly behaved brother for years, for a lifetime now, as if the love that his father has for his brother somehow devalues the love that he’s unceasingly received himself.

The reality is that love has never been a limited resource in that household. But the brother treats it with contempt because he’s not receiving it on his own terms. He’s not receiving the love that he thinks he deserves because if that other guy’s getting it, what’s that mean about me? And so he lashes out at his father for loving not only the so-called deserving son, but also the undeserving son, and says, I’ve served you all these years. I never disobeyed your instruction, yet you’ve never given me, never given me so much as a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends.

But when this son of yours returned, after gobbling up your estate on prostitutes, you slaughtered the fattened calf for him. Again, this is just kind of crazy. He’s lived in his father’s household his whole life. He’s been cared for, he’s been loved.

We see no evidence that’s not true. But he can’t see that. He can’t see past the grace that was shown to his undeserving brother. And here’s what strikes me most about the situation.

This part, I really just noticed this for the first time. You know, he says, You’ve never even given me a young goat to celebrate with my friends. Did he ever ask? Did he ever ask for this goat to have a feast to celebrate with his friends? Did he ask like, hey, dad, I’d love to do this. Is there any reason whatsoever to believe the father would say no if he was asked? Or has this brother just lived in this grudge for untold years, relishing the bitterness? You know what that’s like.

You like being mad. Convincing himself. His father loves him less, just stewing over it, despite that just not being true. He lives in this prison that he’s made for himself.

Okay. Our Lenten playlist song this morning was Casey Musgrave’s Rainbow. And the refrain of that song sounds to me like it could have been written by this father who’s speaking softly to his resentful older son as this wayward younger son returns. This was how the chorus went.

The sky has finally opened, the rain and wind stop blowing, but you’re stuck out in the same old storm again. You hold tight to your umbrella, but I’m just trying to tell you there’s always been a rainbow hanging over your head. this son, this eldest son has always had everything that he’s needed. He’s always been swimming in the father’s love.

He just needs to unclench his fists, lower his shoulders, and look around and see. He needs to put down the umbrella that he’s been gripping tight to and look up at the sky. And so I wonder, are you hearing this parable for you? The infinite, the steadfast love that the Father has for you is not limited by the love God has for anyone else. No matter how much you might hate or resent or be disappointed in them, even if you’re completely justified in that resentment, even if, maybe especially if, It doesn’t matter how much they deserve it.

It doesn’t matter how much you deserve it because there’s no such thing. That’s not how grace works. That’s not how the love of God is poured out. The mercy that is shown to others in no way diminishes the mercy that’s been rained down on you.

And, you know, rest assured that you have needed and received mercy. Mercy. That does not dim this rainbow of salvation that hangs over your head. So be deeply vigilant if you find yourself begrudging mercy or compassion shown by God or others towards the prodigal, the wayward, the criminal.

Be careful. Think twice. If you even silently, quietly start to believe that you have earned your place in the world or the kingdom of God by anything you have done, because remember, being well-behaved is not the same as being good. Pride, which is the real fault of the older brother here, pride, is a lie that erases grace.

It’s a sin. And the older brother in this parable, who again is just dripping in this corrosive sin himself, tries to distance himself from this more visibly sinful prodigal brother, and he hisses at his father in disgust. I don’t know if you noticed this, but he hisses. He’s so mad about this son of yours, he says, has returned.

This son of yours. But hear the words that his father uses in response to him. We had to celebrate, we had to be glad because this brother of yours was dead and is alive. He was lost and is found.

There is grace enough for all. There is room for all people in the Father’s household. And there is more love than we could ever know what to do with. And that prodigal, that wayward, criminal, addict, outcast, excluded son or daughter, well, that’s not just that son of yours, God.

That’s your brother, your sister. And that rainbow overhead is for both of you. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Amen.