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Steps to Repentance

July 24, 2005                                                                                                Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

Quite a few years ago there was a book written, titled “What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School.” The author said there are three things which are vital for us to know, that, at least at that time, they didn’t teach. One is we must always be ready to say that we are wrong. Second, we must be ready to say that we are sorry. And third, we must be willing to say that we need help. Those of you who can’t say that you are wrong will never make it in business, according to this author. If you can’t say you are sorry, people will think you are arrogant and they will be right. If you can’t say you need help, your self sufficiency will short circuit your efforts in the end. What does repentance look like? I think that the three things I just mentioned are pretty good; the idea of saying that we are wrong, sorry, and that we need help. Last week I started a sermon that I am completing today about what is well known as the “parable of the prodigal son,” though I prefer to call it the “parable of two sons and their father” because the parable is certainly about all three. Last week we talked about the father and how the father demonstrates shameless love for his son; love like he just didn’t care what other people thought. Today I want to focus on the two sons. I think in them we find an example of what repentance is and what it looks like and, in some ways, what it doesn’t look like.

I’m reading to you from Luke chapter 15, the parable of a father and his two sons:

Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them. Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.’ So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him. The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate. Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’ The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’ ‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”

Why does Jesus tell parables? Well, I think partly it is because most of us don’t like to be told the truth in a propositional fashion like, “Go and do that” or “You should be this.” I think Jesus wanted to paint pictures through story. My conviction is that God is, at heart, a storyteller. The wonderful thing about stories is that once you hear them, they sort of enter the heart through the backdoor. As you drive down the road, you are thinking about a story you heard or saw and you finally get it. That’s what Jesus is doing; He is planting a seed, He is plowing hard ground with a plow, maybe ground that wouldn’t hear propositional truth but they hear the truth through story. As we look at this parable, look with me at a series of pictures Jesus is painting; a series of freeze frame pictures if you will.

The first picture we see of course is the son coming in to the father, asking for his property. My vision of this picture is the father kind of sitting there with his mouth wide open, wondering what is going on. You see as I shared last week, it wasn’t that unusual for a father to transfer property to a son in those days, kind of like we do today. Sometimes we’ll transfer property but we’ll say, “Let me use it until I die.” The same happened then. But this was unusual; the son didn’t ask for that, he asked for the property then. And in doing so, of course, he was saying, “Father, I wish you were dead now. Give me the property.” In that picture, I see the son coming in and asking that question and the father with a shocked look on his face and maybe the older son in the corner, looking on. The older son was the one who was going to be principle – he would get two-thirds of the property – you can imagine that no self-respecting older son was going to let this happen. If the father wasn’t going to say something, the older son should have but maybe he had his own issues with the younger son and his father as well.

The next picture for me is the auction, or the getting rid of the property. As I told you last week, if the younger son wants the property, it wasn’t a matter of just going to the local bank and transferring the stock or getting the money out. Rather they had to divide the property; one-third to the younger son and two-thirds remaining. It would have to be sold and it would take several days. So maybe – I don’t know exactly how they did it in those days – it was in the town square and the property was all around getting sold. The younger son may be sitting there with a smirk on his face and the older son over in the corner watching. I imagine the father had a tremendous look of sadness on his face. I imagine some of the people who were buying the property were walking away and talking in whispers because of the shame of this whole affair. I think it might be good for us to just pause for a minute and ask: Why do some children hate their parents so? It’s a good question. The answer, of course to, some degree, is that all of us as parents fail our children. We all sin against them; we do damage to them in their lives. And I think one of the most powerful things we can say to our children is, “I’m sorry. I’m wrong. Give me some help.” Of course, there are parents who abuse their children or who neglect them. I think some of it, maybe most of it, has to do with the fact that their children are human and as human beings, we don’t like to be told what to do. Parents are authority figures; they stand in the way of what children want to do. As human beings, we tend to define love in terms of how much cooperation someone else gives to our agenda. We have plans for ourselves and if someone doesn’t like them or stands in our way, we think they must not like us. There was a story of a young man who came to his parents and announced that he was going to marry a certain young lady. The parents knew this young lady. She was abusive in her language. She had a rather colorful past. And everybody knew this except the young boy. The parents got their courage up and said to their son, “We can’t support this decision of yours. You are an adult and you can make it, but we can’t support it.” His first question was, “Don’t you love me?” He felt that love meant cooperating with an agenda, even if he was making a really bad choice. Sometimes love is saying “No.” Sometimes love is saying, “We are not going to support that.” I don’t know exactly, because it is a parable after all, what this young boy was thinking, but obviously for him, his father stood in his way of what he wanted to do. For some reason he wanted him dead.

The next scene is the young man partying in a foreign country. He’s throwing his money around. You can imagine the scene; it’s not that different from today…lots of liquor, lots of beer, lots of loose people. Maybe he’s having a good time, maybe he’s had one too many, maybe as he is sitting there in a bit of a stupor someone is reaching into his pocket and stealing his money from him…who knows? He loses his money. A famine hits the land and he has to go to work. I love the way Jesus tells stories. The zinger in this one is that a Jewish boy goes to a foreign country and when a famine hits he has to go feed the pigs. Not only does he have to feed them, he is so hungry he wants to eat what they are eating. So the next scene for me is that the young son realizes that he has been stupid. This is the beginning of repentance; it’s the beginning because he realizes that his style of living, his style of relating, has not worked for him and things are desperate, intolerable and must change. He realized that he has been wrong. I want to say that a lot of people don’t get there. There are a lot of folks that we can all think of that don’t even get to this place. It’s kind of like the alcoholic and everybody knows it except them. I had a relative just like that. Until their dying day they just didn’t ever get it. They didn’t come to the place where things got so bad so they had to change. So they kept doing it. We do that. We’re not that motivated to change in our lives by the fact that we know things might be wrong for us. We’re motivated by the fact that those things no longer work for us. When they stop working and when things get bad, that’s when we are ready to change. That’s where this boy was. He was ready to change. So he sets off and he goes home.

And we come to the next picture which I described last week. As a parent, we often wait up for our children, don’t we? If they are coming home from the movies or from school or coming from somewhere, we are looking out the window for them. Kids just don’t understand until they have their own children. They don’t understand why their parents get so upset when they come in late. This father was waiting for his son for days and weeks. I imagine as he is looking out the window or is out working the farm, he is always looking down the road to see if his son is coming. One day, he is there. This dignified man, a leader of his community, dressed in fine robes, sees his son and picks up his robe, knobby-knees and all, and runs down the road. He just about tackles his son. The next scene for me is the boy standing there and saying, “Wow.” Not only can the neighbors not believe it, he can’t believe it either. The shameless love of the father; I told you last week that this is a parable and it’s dangerous to do one on ones, but certainly Jesus was trying to say that the father is a representation of the Father’s love for us, for His children. It’s a representation of God’s shameless love for us. Hasn’t God been shameless in His love for us? I imagine the God of the universe, the Creator of billions and billions of stars, choosing this place and becoming one of His creatures and all that means. Not only that, but being beaten half to death, spit on, cursed, nailed to a cross…shameless love! He didn’t care what people thought; He loved us that much. He still loves us that much. It is here I believe that the son changed. If you notice in the text, there is a change. When he’s in the fields, thinking about going back to the father, he’s going to say he’s wrong but he’s still trying to preserve his dignity. He’s going to go back and be a servant and maybe in his mind he thinks he will be able to earn enough to get back where he was or to feel independent. He’s still trying to hang on to what he had before. But then he sees his father; his father grabs him and hugs him and the son says this: “I have sinned against Heaven and against you. I have sinned against God and against you.” Then he goes into a speech and realizes that not only is he wrong, but he is sorry. Repentance has gone the next step, the step where the hurt really matters. It is really dangerous for us sometimes, we think we want to change something in our lives and we come up with ten things we have to do to change. That’s good as far as it goes, we need to have a plan of change…but it doesn’t reach the heart. Essentially, in step one that’s what the boy was doing; he had five things he needed to do to get his life back. But when he saw the grace of his father, the shameless love, the undeserved love, the unearned love, his heart changed. That’s what repentance looks like.

The next picture of course is the party. A few verses before this, it talks about how the shepherd goes after the sheep and there is rejoicing in Heaven over one sheep that is found; a loose translation of this is that Heaven throws a party. The father too throws a party. Now on its most basic level this parable is spoken to the children of Israel; lots of things in between but basically you have the righteous, the rule-keepers, the good folks. On the other hand, you have everybody else. Jesus, through the younger son, is speaking to them; he says, “Repent. God loves you. Your Father is calling you, child of Israel, my child.” But the older son is aimed at the righteous. Of course you see the picture of the older son coming in and he hears the music. He asks what is going on and he’s told and he can’t believe what he has heard. He can’t believe that his father would throw a party for a son who didn’t deserve it. And he’s really upset, he’s mad and jealous. He refuses to go in. Again the father – and in that culture, this would normally never happen – goes to him and pleads with him. He says, “You are always with me.” God’s mercy is greater than your ideas.

Now who are we in this? I think for most church people, if you think about it, we would have to identify with the older son, not the younger son. Some of us do identify with the younger son; in my life, at least in the beginning, I think I would have to identify with the younger son and how he lived his life. But for most church people it is the older son because most of us haven’t gone out and partied wildly. I have to say, first and foremost, it’s good to be good. Goodness is a good thing; we ought to teach our children more about being good. We’re sort of afraid of being judgmental around the world that we don’t talk about goodness and badness or good and evil much anymore and we are even chided for doing so. But at the same time, there is kind of a danger. You see, when you keep the rules for the most part, and you are good for the most part, it’s harder to see where you might be wrong in your relationship with God. It’s kind of like the person who walks out and says, “Great sermon Chris. I hope all those other people heard it.” It’s hard to see where we are wrong. I want to say to you that one of the things we always must do is look to ourselves first because we are all in need of improving our relationship with God and with one another. On a scale of one to ten, some people are ones and some are tens, but underneath the cross the ground is level. Of course if we can’t see that we are wrong it is hard to really say we are sorry. It’s really mistaken to say that the Pharisees didn’t see themselves as sinners, they certainly did. They did wrong but they were just a lot more “right” than anybody else and it was hard for them to have that deep heart-felt, wrenching experience of repenting.

Last but not least, and I think this is the most dangerous thing, is the sense of self sufficiency. The problem with good people is that they think they are good mostly on their own efforts and that they only need God every now and then. They only need God when they really need Him. I think that is the particular sin of Americans; we are just self sufficient people. There is some good in that, but when it comes to this kind of self sufficiency the Bible teaches us that we have nothing to offer to God. We are sinners in rags coming to God with nothing to offer. So I would ask you today to think about your own lives in terms of the love of God for you, the Father’s shameless love for you. Think maybe about an area that God would have you change so that your relationship with Him and also with others might be better. Say that you are sorry. Say that you are wrong and then that you are sorry. Give all your efforts and self sufficiency to the God of the universe who loves you so much. I don’t say that to you in a chiding way or even a way in which you would go and bang your head against the wall, just that we all need to repent, almost every day, but just on an on-going basis. We need to ask God to show us everyday how we can be better with Him. Do that as we pray.