Sermon for the week of Trinity 3
Micah 7:18-20 + Luke 15:11-32 + The Lord’s Prayer, Fourth Petition
The words of the two lessons you heard tonight deal most directly with God the Father’s compassion toward His children who have fallen into sin.
By “His children,” I don’t mean all people on earth. Yes, God is the Father of all people—and of all things! — because He created them all. But in the context of these texts, God is referring specifically to those who have been born again and brought into His house by covenant relationship: OT Israel, through the Old Covenant God made with Abraham, and NT Christians, through Holy Baptism, which is the seal of the New Covenant. Obviously these texts also have applications to those who have never known the true God, as God teaches all men here about His goodness and mercy in Christ, calling out to sinners to enter His kingdom and His family also for the first time. But primarily and directly, these lessons apply to fallen or “lapsed” Israelites at that time, or Christians in our time.
And by “falling into sin,” I don’t just mean the sins that all of us sadly commit every day. We daily sin much and always have need of repentance. As the Apostle John says, If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. No, I mean falling into sin and staying there, living in impenitence, committing mortal sin, as it’s called, that is, knowingly sinning against God and refusing to repent. That kind of sin drives out the Holy Spirit and separates a person from God’s kingdom of grace. A believer turns into an unbeliever again, and a child of God goes back to being the devil’s slave.
That happened all throughout the history of Old Testament Israel, right up to the time of Christ. Many Israelites fell away from the faith, including tens of thousands who escaped from Egypt with Moses, including the tax collectors and public sinners in Jesus’ day who started out as members of the Church of Israel, but wandered away into a life of sin.
The same happens to NT Christians, too. A person is baptized, maybe as a child, but then—often beginning in the teenage years, but it can happen anytime—he or she wanders away from the Father’s house. They turn their focus from God to their earthly life, to concentrate on their studies, or their careers, or their friends, or sports, or even video screens. They buy into the world’s lies about success and pleasure and happiness. They adopt the customs and the philosophies of this world. They go off to indulge their sinful flesh. They abandon the hearing of the Word and the reception of the Sacrament, and their faith dies. They become unbelievers. And none of it was God’s fault.
Then what? They’ve willfully abandoned their Father and His grace and Jesus, who suffered for them and never once betrayed them or lied to them or led them astray. Still, the Father wants to have the sinner back. Always! Now, it’s not the Father’s desire for the prodigal to be saved while he remains in his current state of unbelief and wild living, but to be saved from all that, to have him recognize what a huge mistake he made in ever leaving his Father’s house, to have him recognize that the world with its attractions and temptations was fooling him all along, to have him turn back to his Father in humility and repentance. See the Father’s joy as his son returns. See the Father’s immediate embrace of him who was lost. See the Father’s full forgiveness bestowed on the penitent son, and the celebration that follows.
And recognize that, while the parable depicts the son returning by himself to his Father’s house, in reality, what was it that turned him around? Necessity played a role. He lost all his money. He was left basically homeless and hopeless and hungry. The prodigal was deprived of daily bread for a time, that he might repent and return to his father, who was kind and good and provided daily bread even for the servants in his house.
So, too, God often uses earthly necessity and even tragedy to show people that they have a problem, that they can’t save themselves, that they need saving. Lack of daily bread, loneliness, despair, destitution, a ruined life—those things sometimes make fallen Christians recognize their sinful mistakes, even as God’s use of wicked men and pagan nations throughout the Old Testament to bring devastation and destruction on Israel were often His external means of causing them to recognize their transgressions.
What else caused the prodigal son’s repentance? The knowledge he already had of his Father’s mercy and kindness and goodness, which he witnessed every day while he was still living in his Father’s house but failed to appreciate it.
So, too, God sends His Word out and reaches many lapsed Christians with it, who once heard the Gospel and knew God’s love in Christ Jesus, but then left the Church or were even excommunicated for their impenitence. To them the Father calls out by His Spirit, reminding them that He is good and compassionate and will forgive them for the sake of Christ. That Word is the very thing that turns their hearts and brings them back, even though you can’t see the Word doing it; it seems like they’re returning alone along the path. But in reality, Christ Jesus is there, sending His Spirit to work repentance and to convert them again from unbelief to faith. And when that happens, the sinner is received again into the Father’s embrace, redeemed, restored, and forgiven.
Finally, we see in Jesus’ parable that it’s far better to be the son who falls away and then returns to his Father’s house than to be the other son who never physically left the house, but who despised the mercy and goodness of his Father all along and begrudged his brother the opportunity to return and be accepted back. That son has become prodigal without even knowing it.
So we are warned by Jesus as members of His Holy Church that there is more than one way to leave God’s kingdom of grace. A person can physically abandon the Church and leave. But a person can also remain an outward member of the Church, even as his heart turns evil toward his neighbor and faith in Christ disappears, so that his membership in the Church is nothing more than an outward show, his Christianity an empty shell.
The remedy against that, as well as the remedy for those who have fallen away and the remedy for those who still need to be brought into God’s kingdom for the first time, is the preaching of Jesus, the Word of God that depicts Him as a God who pardons and forgives, as the God who gave His Son into death, not to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. As the prophet Micah wrote, Who is a God like our God? Amen.
