Read the sermon · 34 min
Lost at home, week two
It is so good to be with y'all this morning. My name is Austin Duncan and we are continuing the second week of this series called Lost at Home.
When I was getting ready for this week, I was trying to think through ways that this relates to my life, and one thing stood out to me, and I'm just going to share it with y'all. I asked my mom if it was okay if I shared this and she said yes. So before you start thinking things, know that this is already been approved. It's already been signed off on.
Host mode
My mom has always been a host. And I don't mean in the normal sense of like, oh, she likes having people over. I mean that when people come over to our house, something happens to her. She goes into host mode. And once host mode is activated, there's no known way to man to be able to shut host mode off.
Growing up, if we had people coming over, the process started well before anybody ever even actually arrived. The house had to be clean obviously, but I'll tell you, there's regular clean and then there is people coming over clean. They're two different standards altogether. Regular clean, what does that mean? Well, that means that the house is fine. The house is okay. People are coming over clean means suddenly we're concerned about areas of the house that no guest in recorded history has ever inspected. Like, why are we dusting this? Well, people are coming over. Are they planning to climb on top of the refrigerator? I know. Just help me, Austin. Just help me. Just dust it.
There was always that wonderful childhood moment when you'd clean something to what you had believed was an objectively fine standard, and then your mother would walk into the room, look at it for like four seconds and say, "Okay, yeah, good job. So actually clean it." And apparently my entire first attempt was just ceremonial.
Then people would arrive, and that's when mom really would get going. Everybody needed a drink. Everybody needed food. Does anybody need ice? Are you sure? Are you good? There's more in the kitchen. Did you get enough? No. Try this. Seriously, try it. I made enough. And that phrase, I made enough, in my mom's vocabulary meant there was enough food left over to sustain everyone in the house through a moderately severe natural disaster. If 12 people were coming, we could have fed the block, the neighborhood.
And the funny thing is that once everybody sat down, she usually didn't. She'd be moving around the table. She'd be checking people's drinks, getting something from the kitchen, realizing somebody needed a spoon and noticing that one dish hadn't made it to the end of the table yet. And someone would say, "Oh, this is really good." And rather than just taking the compliment and eating her own food, she'd somehow interpret that as a request for more food. Oh, you like it? Well, there's more. Mom, they still have some. I know, but there's more.
At some point, almost every time, we'd finally reach this point where one of the guests would finally say what everyone else is thinking, which is, "Hey, Janet, okay, sit down." And she'd say something like, "No, I am." It's like, "No, you're currently walking." "Well, I'm about to." And someone would say, "Well, okay, actually, eat." "I will." Food's getting cold. Eventually, you'd have to convince the person who planned the meal, cooked the meal, set the table, spent the entire evening making sure everybody enjoyed the meal. You had to convince her that she was allowed to have the meal.
Now, to be fair to her, I think she loved it. It's not like resentment. No one's exploiting my mother to do this. Serving people was part of the joy of the meal for her. If you try too hard to help, at some point, you're probably just getting in the way.
A chair at the father's table
But I think there's something about that picture that has stayed with me this week as I was getting ready for today. And it's that you can know where everything belongs. You can spend an entire meal around the table without ever really sitting down at the table.
You can know who needs what. You can know what's running low. You can know what needs to come out of the oven next. And you can work harder than anybody else in the room. And when the evening's over, then realize that everybody else enjoyed something that you spent the whole night managing.
I think that there are people in this room, there's believers, there's those of us out there that we know God this way. We know his house. We know what needs to be done here. You know when you need to show up. You know the songs. You know the Bibles. You have a bunch of verses memorized. You know which ministry needs help. You know which hallway light never works correctly. You know which one's flickering and needs to be changed, and you know exactly how early you have to show up to arrive before somebody asks you to do something.
You've served maybe for years, maybe for decades, and maybe somewhere along the way you can get so accustomed to working around the father's table that you forget that there's a chair for you.
Where we left the story
We're going to be in the parable of the prodigal son that many of us know. And we're going to be looking at the second son today. That's the son that Jesus is going to introduce to us today.
Last week we met the other one. We met the son that everybody seems to remember from Luke 15. He asked his father for the inheritance. He packed up his inheritance. He went off out into the far country. And then what did he do? He just burned through it. Burned through every bit of it. And he eventually found himself in the pig field hungry enough that he's just begging for even the food that they get to eat. And then when he leaves, what's he doing? He's rehearsing this conversation he's going to have with his father the entire way home.
That's where we started last Sunday, or where we ended, with these rehearsed conversations. We talked about how we end up writing both sides of the conversation and how we prepare to answer things that the other person may not even ask. We also talked about how you can walk into a conversation with like four solid minutes of material for the other person just to be like, "Yeah, okay." And you're like, "Man, I rehearsed."
The younger brother had done exactly those things. He had done all of that. He had his speech ready. His speech: "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son." And he had that one more line: "Make me like one of your hired servants." But when his father saw him while he was still a long way off out on the horizon, what's he do? He jumps over the hedge. He runs down the road and he throws his arms around him and he kisses him, just happy to see him. And what's he do? He starts shouting for a robe and a ring and sandals and a feast and he's celebrating. The son has come home from trying so hard to go out into the world and just do whatever it is that he wanted. And he's coming home and what's he doing? Just trying to figure out how to be useful again. And the father is celebrating not because of that. He's celebrating because his son is alive.
Luke 15:24 says this: "My son was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found." And then Jesus says they began to celebrate.
Another son is still working
That's where we stopped last week. But Luke 15 doesn't stop. It keeps going. So the music's still playing. The calf is on the table. The house is full. The younger brother is home. This is joyous. We talked about how whenever he came home, the father is like, "We're celebrating because we have to. This is necessity. Of course, we celebrate. He's home."
But notice somewhere outside another son is still working. And that's where Jesus takes us this morning, because there's two sons in this story. There's not just one. And we're going to notice that there's multiple ways that you can get lost. One of them got lost by leaving, by physically just leaving the house, and the other got lost while staying.
What's that tell us? That means that there is a far country out there that you can reach through rebellion and there's a far country that you can reach through resentment. And the father goes to both. Last week he went out on the road and this week he just goes out the door.
Maybe the strangest thing, as we're going to see, about this second son is that the feast has been prepared in his own house. His father is inside. His brother's come home. The music is probably loud enough to hear out from the field. The neighbors probably can hear this music. And this older son still hasn't sat down.
I didn't find him, I recognized him
Before we read the rest of this, I want to say something that's important before we hear it. The older brother can be the occupational hazard of my job. If I stand up here this morning and I preach him to you like I discovered him this week, like I was sitting in Luke chapter 15 and I thought, "Wow, would you just look at this fascinating character?" I would be lying to you. I didn't find him. I just recognized him.
I could tell you how many times I have stacked chairs in this building. I'm not going to tell you the number. Knowing the number is the whole problem. Nobody asked me to count. There's not a punch card. There's no Crosswalk plus rewards program where you stack the thousandth chair, you get a coffee and you get to sit wherever you want. You get the preferred seating in the sanctuary. Someone sat in your spot last week. You can move them. No, that's not there.
We remember how many Sundays we showed up. We can remember how many times we've covered for somebody else. We can remember who was there and needed help. And usually a good deal more clearly, we can remember who wasn't.
I'll put it this way. Faithfulness can grow many columns in a ledger. Things done, things sacrificed, times I was overlooked, goats not received. We'll get to it. It'll make sense. And before long, what happens? You've started building a case without ever really deciding that you were going to be building a case. Now it's just happening, because now you're keeping track.
A guardrail before we read
I want us to hear this carefully, and before we go any further, there's going to be kind of a guardrail around this. When Jesus aims this parable at the Pharisees and the scribes who were grumbling way back in verse two, we can't turn that into the version where the Jewish people stand for the law and Christians just stand for grace. Jesus is Jewish here. His disciples are Jewish. The scriptures underneath this story we get from Israel's scriptures.
And those scriptures have been talking about the mercy of God for centuries. Hosea, he hears God and he says, "How could I give you up? How can I give you up?" Jeremiah hears God call this wavering Ephraim and he calls him my dear son. The Psalms sing about a God who's merciful and gracious, who's slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
So the problem that we come across in Luke 15 as we read this sometimes is the posture that we saw back in verse two. Verse two that says, "This man receives sinners and eats with them."
Music and dancing outside the door
With that in mind, listen to Luke 15:25.
Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing.
We're going to continue through verse 28. And he said to him, "Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound." But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him.
The first thing that Jesus tells us about this man's life is where he's been. And where has he been? He's been out in the field. He's been working. He wasn't in the far country. He wasn't taking what his father gave him and then just going out and burning through it left and right. He was on his father's property and he was doing what responsible sons do.
So whatever is happening inside of this man, laziness, that's not part of it. That's not what's happening inside of him. His hands have been doing the right things. They've been doing what his father's asked of him for years. And the trouble in the story is that his heart started telling him about why he was doing those things.
He gets close enough to the house he can hear music. He can see the dancing probably. He knows there's dancing and all that going on. In fact, Luke uses the Greek word symphonia for the music and chorus for the dancing, words that eventually make their way to symphony and chorus.
This picture is so clear. Something is happening inside that house and you can hear the celebration before you even get to the door to be able to open it and be welcomed in.
They would not dance
I think it's interesting too that Luke has handed us this image before. This isn't even the first place in his gospel that we get this. Back in chapter 7, Jesus described his generation as children sitting in the marketplace calling out to one another: "We played the flute for you, and you did not dance." And then a few verses later, he spells this comparison out in Luke 7:34. He says, "The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, 'Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!'"
Luke 15 opens with almost the exact same complaint. This man receives sinners and eats with them. They keep hearing the music of grace, but refusing to dance.
Now Jesus gives that kind of complaint some real legs to it. He gives it a body. He gives it something that we can see clearly. An older brother walks up on a house that is full of celebration, he hears the music and stops outside.
The preliminary investigation
And then he does something I love. Instead of walking the last 20 feet and finding out for himself, he calls a servant over to ask what's going on. The party is right there. He can solve the entire mystery with his own two eyes. Just walk in the door. But apparently, what did he need? He needed some sort of preliminary investigation before he's going to do that. Who authorized this? What line item did this party come from? Do we have budget for this? Was there budget in this line item for that calf to be killed for this party?
And the servant, who has no idea that he has just wandered into this minefield of a family situation, answers him the way that you would tell anybody good news. He's like, "What do you mean? This is your brother came home." And notice the relationship there. Your brother.
Then he explains that the father killed the fattened calf because he got him back safe and sound, a word that in the original carries this sense of health and of wholeness, of somebody arriving home in one piece. So the servant has walked up to this and he's like, "Hey, this is a search and rescue mission. He's home. This is a recovery. This is fantastic." And the father back in verse 24, he called it what? He called it a resurrection. He was dead and is alive again. So the servant knows what happened. The father knows what it means.
Leaving without going anywhere
What emotion is the older brother in this? The older brother is furious. It says he was angry and refused to go in. And there's an irony in this that I have missed for many years.
Last week the younger son was outside the house because he had left. And now the older son is outside the house because he refuses to come in. One of them left with his feet. The other has managed to leave without really going anywhere. He's close enough to hear the music. He's close enough to smell the dinner. He's close enough to see the light coming through the doorway. And he is still outside.
For me, as I think through that and I picture that, that is such a frightening kind of lostness, because it can happen so close to home. You can know every room in the father's house and gradually forget how to enjoy the father. You can know when to stand. You can know when to sit. You can know where the cups are stored. And you can become genuinely competent around the things of God while your heart is quietly packing bags and moving out.
Remember how this chapter started. This man receives sinners and eats with them. So the complaint is about a table. The complaint is about who's sitting at this table with Jesus. And then 28 verses later, Jesus hands us a man standing outside of the table because he objects to the person who got welcomed to sit at it. So he's telling these grumblers back in verse two a story about themselves, and I don't even know that they've realized that they're in it.
The father came out again
And then something happens that to me is like the center of this entire passage, this entire parable, the entire series we've been in. It's this phrase: his father came out and entreated him. The father came out again.
When we think back to this parable, we so remember the father running out and hugging the son. He comes out a second time. Last week he saw that son on the horizon. He was watching and he ran down that road jumping over the hedges. And now he's got a son standing in the yard, also probably angry enough to embarrass him in front of a house full of guests. And he leaves his own celebration to go after that son too.
I think that is important to note. If you notice, that older son called a servant over to ask what was going on. The father, did he have to go out there? He probably could have just sent a servant right outside to get him. Tell him, "Come inside." He had servants. He could have sent word that dinner was getting cold and that his son, "Hey, you know what? Fix your attitude and come back inside." Instead, the father goes himself to get him.
And I love this: the verb that Luke uses here, the appeal, he's entreating him. That is ongoing. He's entreating him. He's urging him. He's staying out there with him. And think about that scene. The music behind him, dinner inside, guests waiting, and in my mind someone around that table has most certainly asked, "Where did he go? Where's that older son? Where is he?" And somebody else had probably taken a bite and was like, "Oh, family thing," which is like the universal phrase in that scenario for "don't follow him." And the father stays outside.
And that matters, because it's easy to preach the older brother as though Jesus has finally reached the part of the story where the religious people are finally going to get what's coming to them. All right, we've been waiting the whole chapter for somebody to finally take these Pharisees down a peg. And here it comes. The older brother, the angry older brother, right on schedule. Everybody stretch up. This is happening. Thank goodness. This legalist is about to get it.
And then Jesus hands him the same father. The father comes out. And Jesus tells this story to older brothers because Jesus wants older brothers at the table.
The case he had prepared
And when the older brother finally speaks, we find out just how badly he needs that invitation. Read with me in verse 29.
Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends.
Listen to the shape of that sentence. These many years I have served. I never disobeyed. You never gave. This older son, he's got a strong closing argument. He showed up to this argument with some documentation. He's ready. He has exhibits and he has timestamps.
He says, "These many years I have served you." The verb in Greek for this is douleuo. It can simply mean to serve, but it can also come out of the vocabulary of a household slave. So it's like he's saying, "These many years I have slaved for you." And Luke lets us feel the irony of a son standing on his father's property describing his life with his father in the language of servitude. He started thinking about his relationship of being his father's son as like clocking in to his shift at work. That's heartbreaking.
Obedience is not the villain
And then he says, "I never disobeyed your command." Here I need to say the other thing that matters for us as we read through this story, is that obedience is not the villain here. The father never rebukes him for obeying. That doesn't happen. And Jesus doesn't treat faithfulness as some kind of spiritual defect. Some of us here have served Christ for decades and those years are really important. Those years matter. I'm not saying that they don't.
What Jesus is exposing here is what can quietly happen inside our faithfulness when we start treating it as currency for what we deserve, this mindset of, "Hey, I did this, therefore you owe me that."
In fact, John Calvin saw something we're sitting with here. He puts it like this, that Jesus doesn't stop the story to litigate whether the Pharisees have actually obeyed as perfectly as they imagine. He can grant the claim just for the sake of the argument. Suppose that you have been as faithful as you say. What does your anger at mercy reveal about the relationship that you assumed that obedience was building? Well, that question cuts a little bit deeper now.
I think some of the most dangerous words in the Christian life are "after everything I've done for you." You can almost hear the spreadsheet cracking open.
Two nevers
Notice these two nevers that he has in his phrase back to the father. The first one, I never disobeyed. And the second one, you never gave. That is two phrases from a man who knows the number.
Some of us know the number too. We know how long we've served. We know how much we gave and how many times we've covered for people. And we know who got thanked and we know who didn't. And we remember being there for somebody, and we know when we needed them.
I want to be careful with this too: some of those hurts are real. Churches can overlook people. Leaders, your human leaders that aren't perfect, can fail people. Maybe somebody really did get thanked for the work that you did, and somebody less qualified got that opportunity that you deserved. Maybe you've carried something for years while everyone around you just assumed, "Oh, he's totally fine carrying this."
So hear me when I say this. That wound can be entirely real. But our wounds, I'm not good at math, but our wounds are good at math. I'll put it this way. Resentment is pain that has learned how to keep score. And once it starts keeping score, it eventually starts rewriting reality.
Standing in the gift
You never even gave me a young goat. What? Go back to verse 12. When the younger son asked for his share, listen to what Luke says the father did. Luke 15:12. And he divided his property between them. Between them. What's that mean? That means that the older brother received an inheritance also. And now he's standing in the middle of it telling his father the phrase, "You never gave me."
Resentment can make abundance become invisible. Henri Nouwen spent years with this parable. He wrote a book that is fantastic. You should read it. And one of the things he saw was that resentment and gratitude can't live in the same room, because resentment keeps you from experiencing your life as a gift. The older brother is standing in the gift, but he just can't see it anymore.
And look at the size of his grievance. A goat. He doesn't even ask for the fattened calf, the meal that's already prepared. I would have asked for the fattened calf, but no, he wants the ordinary animal. He wants the Tuesday night meal.
That's painfully familiar, because our grievances so often are goat sized too. Who got thanked from the stage? Who got asked to do the thing that I should have been asked to do? Who got invited? Who got noticed? Who got the parking spot? There's three guest ones out there. Someone parked in it. Who got it? I've never lost six months of sleep because someone stole my kingdom. But I can absolutely lose an entire afternoon because someone got my goat, which for all I know may be where the phrase comes from. Don't quote me.
A party without the father
Then he tells his father what he would have done with the goat. What would he have done with it? That I might celebrate with my friends. His friends. This party with this goat that he wants, that he's imagining, doesn't even have his father in it either.
Think about that. The younger brother took the father's money and he left to go find this party and to spend it and just live up whatever he wants to do. And the older brother stayed home and still pictured a party without the father. That means different roads can carry you to the same place, to the same far country.
The younger son wanted the father's things without the father. And this speech shows just how far down that same road the older brother has traveled as well. One of them seized the inheritance and the other believes he's already earned it.
This is where these two weeks finally lock together for us. The younger son came home saying, "I am no longer worthy to even be called your son." And the older son stands in the yard and he's basically saying, "After everything I've done, I deserve to be treated like one." One of them thinks his failure has made his relationship with his father impossible. And the other thinks that his faithfulness has made this reward obligatory. You have to give it to me. That means one of them has a debit card and the other has a credit card.
The younger brother is so ready to negotiate his way back into the house as a servant, and the older brother has already been living in the house for years and he's already thinking like one. And the father goes out to both.
Son, you are always with me
That's the center, the center, not sinner, but center of this story. The younger son arrives with his confession rehearsed. And the older son arrives with his case all prepared. And neither speech gets the terms of the relationship.
To the younger brother who says, "I'm not worthy," what does the father do? He gives him a robe. He gives him the ring, the sandals, the feast, and he gives him the word, "My son." And then listen to what he calls this one, Luke 15:31.
Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.
Most of our translations say "Son." You might be in one that says "child." I like that one too. The older brother opens his speech with, "Look, look here, you," and the father opens with "child." The son brings this argument, and the father, the first words out of his mouth are about the relationship. Son.
And then comes the sentence that for me shows everything that this man understood. He says, "You were always with me." The son is asking for things that he thinks that he should have received, and the father tells him, "You've had me." He's had him the whole time. He's answering that ledger with his presence.
Psalm 73
There's an old song in Israel's scriptures and in all of our Bibles, if you're holding one, that walks almost exactly this road, and it is Psalm chapter 73.
Asaph looks around at people who cut corners and then they prosper anyway, who don't appear particularly concerned about God. And he has been trying to live faithfully, and he says his feet nearly slipped. So what's he do? He starts comparing, as we do. How relatable. And he starts counting. He's basically an older brother, but this older brother has got a harp and he can sing some songs and write some lyrics and things.
And he goes into the sanctuary and then something shifts inside him. Psalm 73:23 and 26 say, "Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."
That psalm starts with comparison and it ends with company. And is that not the father's answer here also? You are with me.
I think some of us know Christianity from the older brother's side of the house. We know how to serve. We know what needs to happen next. And we can get so good at managing the father's house, I'll say it again, that we forget how to enjoy the father.
This son of yours
Then the older brother says the sentence that shows resentment has done this to his other relationships too, not just to his father. He says, "When this son of yours came." He won't say "brother." This son of yours. If you want to see resentment in black and white, there it is. When our resentment is like that, it can sever our relationship without ever even raising its voice.
And then he adds, "who has devoured your property with prostitutes." Hold on. Where's that? Luke never told us that. Look at everything that the narrator actually gives us. Luke 15:13: and there he squandered his property in reckless living. That's the list.
The prostitutes come from the older brother. Maybe he's right. Maybe he's wrong. We don't know. And neither does he. But the version with prostitutes makes anger way easier to carry. Why? Resentment loves an open and shut case, a clean case. It likes a villain. It likes assigned motives. And it loves any sentence that begins with, "Oh, I know exactly why they did that."
And we do this constantly, usually with almost nothing to go on. Somebody doesn't say something to you in the lobby after church, and by the time you get to the car, well, you know why, don't you? Well, they've got a problem with you. It's about that thing from March. I knew it. You can build an entire case out of a person walking past you who was just thinking about something else.
It's the same thing we talked about last week, writing in the other person's lines, except you're writing them for somebody we're angry with instead of somebody that we're afraid of. And when we're angry, the lines we write for other people, they're never charitable, are they?
So here's the question that's worth carrying with you just out of this room and into this week. Ask yourself this. Who am I assuming against? Where have I filled in missing information with the version that makes my resentment the easiest thing to keep?
Grace gives people back their family name
And the father does something really remarkable with that. The son says, "this son of yours." And how does the father answer this? "Your brother." He hands him the relationship right back to him.
Your brother, the one who wasted the money. Your brother, the one who embarrassed the family. Your brother, the one you'd much rather discuss as a case study. Grace gives people back their family name.
It's easy for that to bother us, because we can be perfectly comfortable watching God show somebody mercy from a safe distance. We can see a video online like, "Oh, that's fantastic. I love that." But I can't keep calling somebody God's problem when the father keeps calling them my brother.
And then the father says this in Luke 15:32: "It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found."
Some translations render that as "we had to celebrate," and this word carries a sense of necessity, of what the situation required. The father never argues that the younger son even earned the calf. That's not even on the table. Nobody in this story thinks that that younger son has earned anything. The father's reasoning is somewhere else entirely. It's that he was dead and now he's alive. He was lost, now he's found. And given that, the joy therefore is the only fitting response.
The older brother keeps asking whether his brother deserves the party. And the father keeps talking about what? He keeps talking about resurrection. I think it's really hard to keep arguing about fairness next to someone who is celebrating a man who has come back from the dead.
The story stops at the door
And then Jesus ends the story. It's over. Why? We were just getting going. Except he doesn't really end it. We never find out what the older brother does. Maybe he stands out in the yard another hour presenting increasingly detailed arguments concerning the allocation of livestock and where it should have gone. Jesus doesn't tell us. The story just stops at the door, with the music still playing, with the father still outside, and the older brother still not answering.
And this isn't the first time the Bible's done this. Jonah ends outside as well. Jonah is sitting outside Nineveh and he's furious because God showed mercy to people that Jonah didn't want receiving mercy. It's like he's telling God more or less, "See, this is exactly why I didn't want to come here, because I knew you were going to be merciful to these people. You were gracious and merciful. You were slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. And I knew that was going to happen. I didn't want to be here for that." That's one of the strangest complaints in all of the Bible. Jonah's problem with God is that God keeps acting like God.
And then the book ends with God asking him a question. Jonah never answers, because the question was never really meant to stay on the page with Jonah. It comes looking for the reader.
In Luke 15, it leaves us in the exact same place. Remember who's listening here. The Pharisees and the scribes who have been grumbling that this man receives sinners and eats with them. So Jesus tells them about a lost sheep. He tells them about a coin. He tells them about a lost son. And then he tells them about another lost son. And then he walks the chapter right up to their doorway and just stops.
The father's outside, the feast is inside. And the older brother is now left. He has to decide whether grace is still good news when someone else is the person receiving it.
Can I celebrate repentance when it happens to somebody I'd rather keep being right about? Can I celebrate mercy when it lands on somebody I had such a great case against? Can I celebrate resurrection when I remember exactly how dead that person used to be?
The father went outside twice
The father in this story goes outside twice. And it cost him something both times. Running down that road, it cost him his dignity in front of the entire village. And standing in that yard cost him his own celebration.
And Luke keeps following that same pattern right out of the parable. That's why it doesn't end. He follows it right out of the parable and into the gospel. Jesus sits right at the table that everybody complains about. And he receives the people that respectable society has already filed away. And then Luke turns his face toward Jerusalem a little bit later. And the one criticized for receiving sinners is finally rejected by sinners.
The one who kept sitting at their tables sits down at one more table, takes bread, and says this: "This is my body which is given for you." And then he goes outside the city and gives it.
The parable doesn't tell us what it cost to bring those lost boys home, but Luke does. The gospel does. Jesus goes outside the gate. He dies. He rises. And therefore, when Luke's gospel closes, he says that repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be proclaimed in his name to all the nations.
So there really is a way home. The younger brother couldn't purchase it. You can't buy it. Christ gave it.
Are you going to go in?
I'm going to go ahead and ask the worship team to come up, and I want to talk about a couple of groups of people before we close.
Some of you have spent this morning realizing you're a lot closer to the younger brother. You left. Maybe nobody else in your life even knows that you left, but you know that.
Maybe you're on the other side. Maybe you know the songs. You know the language and you know when to stand, when to sit, and you've gotten really good at being close to home, but you know you're not.
Look at what happened before the older brother changed, before even anything changed. What happened? The father came outside.
Have you sat down with the father? Luke 15:31 says, "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours."
The music is playing. The table's ready. The father's come outside and your place is still there. Are you going to go in?
We don't sit at this table because we've finally made ourselves worthy to be sitting at the table. But communion interrupts that. You don't need to prove anything to God. You just simply need to remember Jesus.
Father, thank you for your grace. Thank you that you do not ask us just to earn our way into your family. Thank you that you don't measure your love for us. In Jesus' name. Amen.