Pig Slop -

Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Too often, when people think about God, they think about an angry God that is zapping the ground around them with thunderbolts. They think about the images from Revelation, where God throws people and devils into a fiery pit, to be consumed and destroyed. People think about living in front of God like walking on a tightrope, with a laughing God ready to knock you off the tightrope so you will fall into the pit with God belly-laughing at you as you plummet down, down, down!

But that’s not the way Jesus and His early disciples saw God. It isn’t the God that they loved and worshipped. And it isn’t the God we find in the Bible.

The Apostle Paul had traded letters with the church he had founded in Corinth. This church was vibrant and alive, it had already created daughter churches, but it had a problem. The church at Corinth had a tendency to go off track, but in their defense, they asked many questions of Paul. What we call the 2nd Letter to the Corinthians actually appears to be the third letter that Paul wrote in response to three different sets of questions from the church at Corinth, in Southern Greece.

Today’s reading is a key part of the letter we call 2 Corinthians.

17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! 18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.
In this section, Paul points out that when we have Christ within us, we are a new creation. And it was all because of God – God sent us Christ, and through His sacrifice, we have been reconciled to God. Because of Christ’s sacrifice, God does not count the sins of those people who believe that Jesus was the Son of God against those people.

But there is something more. We followers of Jesus have been given that message of reconciliation to tell everyone about. This is the Gospel – Christ’s sacrifice has removed the problems between us and God the Father. We are to act as ambassadors for Christ – telling people about what He has done.

And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.
And Jesus made this point, the point that God loves us deeply and will treat us well when we come home to God by telling a story about a young man who took his inheritance and left home. Let me tell the story in a more modern version, a version that will make sense to the children who are here today.

There was a child who was raised in a nice suburban home. Dad and Mom both worked – but the child was taken care of by two grandmothers who took turns with the young child. Eventually, they taught the child the alphabet and then how to read, and then the child went to school, gained friends and every day came home after school to one or the other of the grandmothers, who fed the child good food, helped with homework, and enjoyed the conversation with the child. Around 5:30, the mother and father would come home, the entire family gathered together around the table with plenty of food and talked of their day, they watched some television together, and then they went to bed, where Mom and Dad would give the child a hug, a kiss, and a prayer, and tuck the child into a nice warm bed under a blanket and a beautiful quilt.

Each Friday evening was spent eating out and going shopping. On Saturday the family took the children, for there were now two of them, to different activities, camping, museums, quick trips to the beach, or the park, or somewhere in the city. They might work around the house together, or they later spent time traveling for a soccer match. Sundays were much the same, after church, they either worked together around the house, shopped, or traveled to some event for the kid’s benefit. The whole family came along. It was a good time – Dad and mom both made good money, and the family spent time together.

Then the child became a teenager and friends became important. The child met some good friends that the parents liked – and some friends that the parents did not like. They told the child that those friends weren’t very good friends and they told the child that it would be wise not to have those friends. But the child, who had never seen anything truly bad happen, now decided that the parents were just trying to keep the child from having fun, and continued to hang out with the bad friends. In fact, the child began to avoid the good friends and hang out only with the bad friends.

Eventually, as graduation came about, the child ignored the parent’s suggestion of college, took the money from graduation presents, and went to live with a group of the bad friends. At first it was a lot of fun. The child spent time with friends and slept in on weekends. The child and friends had pizza almost every night and ate at expensive restaurants and had lots of fun.

But over the next months and years, the child woke up feeling terrible many mornings because too much pizza isn’t good for you, and because the child and the child’s friends drank and smoked and ate poorly. And soon, the money ran out and the child began to not be able to go out very much and then not at all. the child had to work very hard at very low paying jobs cleaning up after slobs at a restaurant, not even waiting on tables, but cleaning tables and washing dishes and taking out the trash in a terrible restaurant in the worse part of town and the people who ate there were real pigs, but it was the only place where the child could find a job. The child was so short on money that sometimes the child took the leftover food from the plates and ate it.

The young person now lived with six other young people in an old, drafty house with terrible furniture and slept on the couch under an old blanket because there weren’t enough bedrooms.

And so the child began to feel badly about the child and the child’s life, and one day, waking up on the floor in a cold house alone, and finding just one half-eaten slice of pizza laying in the box from the night before and a half-drunk can of warm Mountain Dew, the child decided it was time to go home to the child’s parents, knowing that Mom and Dad would say, “I told you so.” But at least, there would be some decent food and a warm bed and someone who might even hug the child. And so the child went home and asked the child’s parents if the child could sleep on the couch, mow the lawn, clean the gutters, clean the house, and generally work hard for a warm place to live and some decent food.

This is what happened to the man in the story that Jesus told, For you see, for centuries, teenagers have thought that their parents were rough on them and controlling of them, and teenagers have thought that they knew more than their parents did. And for centuries, young men and women have learned that their parents actually were pretty wise people, and those young men and women have given up on the wild and crazy lives that they decided to live and gone back to meet with their parents.

Now there have always been two types of young men and women. There are those who come home angry, demanding things of their parents and other people when they make decisions that lead to troubles in their lives. And there are those who are like the young man in the story that Jesus told, young men and women who recognize that their problems were due to their own decisions and their choices to take shortcuts, to take the easy way out, to avoid the hard work and steady work that is needed in life.

In Jesus’ story, the young man decided when his money ran out that he needed work. But since he had gone a long way away from home and his friends were only interested in his money, the only work he could get was to feed pigs their food. This was very upsetting to him, because the man was born to a Jewish family, and Jews consider pigs to be too dirty even to eat. They won’t eat ham or pork chops or barbeque or even soup beans with ham because they were told in the Law of Moses that pigs are too dirty to eat. And this young man could only get a job feeding the pigs – and it didn’t pay very much – and he couldn’t get enough food.

And then he remembered home and his parent’s house. He remembered that even the lowest servant in his father’s house was well-fed and well-clothed. And so he decided to go home, to ask his father to give him a job as a lowly servant so he wouldn’t be hungry anymore.

You see, the young man knew that his father was a decent, good man. But the young man didn’t know his father very well. He understood how bad his behavior had been toward his father, but he didn’t realize just how much his father loved him. But he understood just enough about his father to know that he should go home and ask his father for help – and he was willing to work hard for that help. What he could have had for free, just because he was the son, he was now willing to work hard for as a servant, just to get half as much, because he now knew how bad things could be.

Well, when the young man in Jesus’ story got home, his father saw him coming. His father ordered that a particular calf be butchered and turned into steaks and roasts so everyone could have good food. He began to get everything together for a party. And when the boy finally got home, his father ordered the servants to bring him some good, clean clothes and put a fancy ring on his finger. It was as if you went home and your parents were so glad to see you that they took you out to your favorite restaurant, gave you new, warm clothes, and even bought you a brand new smart phone.

For, you see, the boy’s father loved him and was very glad that his son had come to his senses. The father forgave all the past problems, the bad things the boy had done, the time he had been away, for he was simply so glad and happy to be able to talk with his son that he loved so much.

But there was another good brother, you see, who stayed with the father during all this time, who did everything the father had ever asked, who did not misbehave. And this other son was upset – and jealous and angry. He complained to the father that he had always done right by his father, and yet his father was celebrating greatly with the brother who had gone away.

And so his father told him – don’t be jealous. Everything that I own is yours and you and I are always together. But I had lost this son, it was like he had died – but now he’s come back and our family is together again, and so we had to celebrate. The family has been reconciled; the family has been brought together again.

Jesus told this story because some of the “good people” were complaining that He spent time with people who sinned, people who had wandered far from their spiritual home. And so Jesus told this story because he wanted us to think about our own tendency to wander far from home. The great church father Augustine of Hippo talked about how sin is like wandering far from home. We wander far away from our heavenly Father, we even give up our birthright to be with God and have everything God the Father has, and we wander far from home, looking for our own pleasures and ignoring the good things that are right in front of us with our heavenly Father.

For, you see, each of us has a heavenly Father who is ready to give us anything and everything. Each of us could have everything our Father has, and God the Father owns absolutely everything. Our Father’s greatest desire is that we spend time with Him, talking with Him, being with Him, and yes, working with Him. And yet we wander far from the Father who loves us, going off into far countries and getting our hands filthy with the dirty pig slop of the world.

And there are always people who feel that they have served God for years and years and so they look down upon those brothers and sisters who have gone into the world, who have wandered far away from God, and who now wear rags that are covered with pig slop. It is critical for us to remember that we have all wandered far from home, that none of us are completely clean, that each of us has pig slop on our hands. In truth, there are no brothers who have stayed at home, completely doing our Father’s work. We’ve all spent time wandering around, feeding spiritual pigs, and feeling starved spiritually.

Perhaps your earthly father isn’t as forgiving a man as the father in Jesus’ story. Perhaps your earthly father isn’t a very nice man at all. Perhaps you’d like to forget that you have an earthly father. Or perhaps you have troubles with your earthly mother. That’s ok. It happens. But this story is not about them and you. It is about God the Father and you.

The point of the story is that our heavenly Father is much wiser and kinder and more loving than any earthly father or mother could ever be. Every man on this earth looks pretty ragged compared to our Heavenly Father. But that’s why we fall in love with God, our Heavenly Father. How can you help but fall in love with Someone who loves you that much?

Perhaps you don’t know just how much your Father loves you. But just like the brother who was feeding the pigs and remembered that his father treated his servants well, understand this much: God the Father loves you and treats His people well. And if you will return to His house, He will welcome you with the love that is yours as a son or daughter of our heavenly Father.

This is what Paul meant by reconciliation. This is why Jesus died – to bring to our attention the love that Father has for us, to put it in front of our eyes, to flash a neon light on that love. Jesus wanted to get our attention and let us know that Father loves us deeply and wants us with Him all the time. And our ministry of reconciliation that Christ has given to us, is to tell the entire world how much God the Father loves us so that more and more people raise up from the pig slop of the world, will take the long walk home to find their Father, and will live in the joy as the Father greets them with open arms, a beautiful new robe, a sparkling ring, and a delicious feast.

Down here in front of me is a railing. It is the place where the water of baptism cleans the pig slop off your skin. If you will, it is the place where the ring of love is placed on your finger, the place where you exchange your filthy rags and are dressed in the finest robes of salvation. It is the place where you return to your Heavenly Father. Come to the railing and be reconciled.