A Fourth Church Sermon by Adam Fronczek

March 18, 2007 | 8:00 a.m.

Sermon on the Fourth Sunday of Lent

Adam Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16–21
Luke 15:1–3a, 11b–32

God of compassion, you are slow to anger and full of mercy,
welcoming sinners who return to you with penitent hearts.
Receive in your loving embrace all who come home to you.
Seat them at your bountiful table of grace, that, with all your children,
they may feast with delight on all that satisfies the hungry heart.
We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ our Savior,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Prayer of the Day for the Fourth Sunday of Lent
Book of Common Worship, Presbyterian Church (USA)

Madrid is full of boys named Paco, which is diminutive of the name Francisco, and there is a Madrid joke about a father who came to Madrid and inserted an advertisement in the personal columns of El Liberal which said: PACO MEET ME AT HOTEL MONTANA NOON TUESDAY ALL IS FORGIVEN PAPA and how a squadron of [the Civil Guard] had to be called out to disperse the eight hundred young men who answered the advertisement.

Ernest Hemingway begins one of his short stories, “The Capital of the World,” with these lines. As Hemingway says, it’s a joke, a joke about how many men in Madrid are named Francisco. Having gone to school at Vanderbilt, not far from the University of Tennessee, I can tell you that in that state you could probably tell the same story in equally effective terms using the name Peyton Manning and no one would ever guess you had made it up.

The joke, however, carries another important truth, the truth that one of the great universals, one of the things that makes us most alike as human beings, is our profound desire for forgiveness. On this particular day, most of us can think of someone in our lives who we really wish would forgive us or whom we really wish we could forgive. There’s so much freedom in that, so much liberation in letting go of those emotions of guilt or of anger, and when we’re stuck in that place where forgiveness has not happened, we are enslaved by those same feelings.

Make no mistake about it, forgiveness is a big deal. Forgiveness is what makes it possible for us to live together; forgiveness is what mends and sustains relationships. Forgiveness matters, because without it, we lose friends and become estranged from family members. In a larger sense, it’s the absence of forgiveness that has kept nations, religions, and ethnic groups at war for centuries, many times over differences that hardly exist anymore, but people continue to die because they will not forgive one another.

Forgiveness is a big deal, and so it should come as no surprise to us that the prodigal son is one of the most powerful and memorable stories in all of the Bible. People who haven’t been to church in years, maybe even never, know this story, remember it. In most sermons, I feel the need to refresh the congregation’s memory about the passage that was read just five minutes before, in case they were nodding off, but there’s not much need for that this morning. Even if you were nodding off, chances are you know the story.

Forgiveness is a big deal, and like most things that are extremely important, forgiveness is also difficult. Miroslav Volf, theologian from Yale University, tells this story from his upbringing in Croatia: His brother Daniel, at the time five years old, used to slip away from their apartment to visit “his soldiers” at the military base just two blocks down the road. The soldiers would play with him and entertain him. On that particular day in 1957, “one of them put him on a horse-drawn bread wagon. As they were passing through the gate on a bumpy cobblestone road, Daniel leaned sideways and his head got stuck between the door post and the wagon. The horses kept going. He died on the way to the hospital.”

I don’t know who was guilty. Perhaps Daniel shouldn’t have been away from home in the first place, but the soldier who put him on the bread wagon was brought up on trial. Daniel’s father, Miroslav Volf’s father, wouldn’t press charges. Even so, the soldier was destroyed. He himself was hospitalized, then discharged, and Daniel’s father made a journey of two days to tell him that he was forgiven. And to tell him why. “God forgave them, and so they forgave the soldier,” (Volf, Free of Charge, pp. 122–123). The soldier couldn’t rebuild his life without forgiveness.

Volf says that forgiveness is not just important to us, it is important to God; it’s so important that some theologians have argued that God forgave the world even before creating it. God saw the possibilities of creation, possibilities for goodness and truth and beauty in the world, and God knew that mingled with that goodness would be all kinds of human misdeeds, deceit, anger, tears, and blood and that we could only exist together if we were shown how to forgive. So God forgave us and then created us. We owe our very existence to God’s forgiveness (Volf, p. 136).

Volf also acknowledges that forgiving is hard. He says that it’s called forgiving because it is a kind of giving. Giving is hard enough, because when we give, we do something selfless, for the benefit of another, but often we give things we want to give. We give and we see someone get the help that they need. In giving we can make up for what someone can’t do for themselves and we ourselves can rejoice in the way that we increase their happiness. When we forgive someone, we do the same thing, but we do it for someone who has wronged us. We do something we don’t have to do, and we do it in situations where we probably don’t want to do it. There’s difficulty and there is importance in taking that step.

And so because forgiveness is important and because forgiveness is difficult, we remember well this story that we know as the story of the prodigal son, maybe for no particular reason except that that’s what the Christian tradition has called it. Our pew Bibles in the New Revised Standard Version, with their extra-biblical italicized subtitles above various stories, are a little more clever. They call the story “The Parable of the Prodigal and His Brother.” Perhaps we’ve titled it this way because we all know what it’s like to be the prodigal son. We’ve all done something for which we need forgiveness, so everyone can relate to him. The extended title in our pew Bibles would seem to indicate that we can also relate to the older brother: we’ve all seen people who were forgiven in a way we didn’t think they deserved when we were well behaved in the first place and got nothing.

The interesting thing, though, is that we seldom name the story according to the father, but he’s the one who really makes the story memorable, because he’s the exceptional one. The father has two sons, two very different sons, and he loves them both. When his younger son squanders his money and turns his back on the family and their values and then asks for forgiveness, the father forgives him. And when the older son is angry about the injustice of it all, the father helps him to understand why forgiveness is so important.

Look, if you haven’t before, at the way the father responds to the older son’s complaints: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” Of course the older son is right. You can’t squander your inheritance in dissolute living and absolutely we should honor generous parents by serving and obeying them when they need us. That’s justice, and justice is important.

If this story were about justice, it would be equally powerful. It would be equally powerful because it would be absolutely frightening: The prodigal son returns home, no money, clothes torn, starving, emaciated. He would drag himself up the road; he hasn’t slept well; he’s got a cold. He walks up, knocks on the door, and when it opens, there is his father, who says, “Are you kidding me? I already gave you what you deserved, I gave it to you, your inheritance, when you asked for it. You didn’t deserve it yet, you weren’t ready. And now you’ve lost it, gambled it away, all of it gone on prostitutes and booze. You didn’t care to be my son anymore. Now I don’t care to be your father. Get out of my sight.” That’s justice. That’s memorable, and it’s powerful, and it hurts because we don’t want fathers to deal with their children that way.

But the son is in luck. The son is in luck because there is one more thing the father needs from him. The father needs to forgive him. The father doesn’t want to carry around that kind of anger and resentment. He hasn’t seen his son in years. He had almost forgotten about him—maybe he was dead—and one has to move on, and that was getting easier, day by day, but then, out of the blue, his son appears at the door. And listen again to the way he explains it to his older son: “We had to celebrate and rejoice because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found” (Luke 15:31–32). He says to his older son, “Even more important than the fact that your brother is alive is the fact that we’ve found him, because now we can choose how to live. We can be angry about it and let it eat us up inside, or we can give him what he needs and welcome him home, and we won’t have to live with all that anger.”

The important thing to realize about the way this story is told is that if God deals with us according to justice, we’re in even bigger trouble than the prodigal son, because we don’t have anything that God needs. And that’s why the story is powerful. Jesus tells this story when he’s being criticized for hanging out with the wrong kind of people: “He welcomes sinners and eats with them; he doesn’t understand justice the way we do,” they say. But Jesus, God come down to earth, tells us this story so that we’ll know that even though we’re sinners and even though we don’t have anything God needs, God kills the fatted calf when we come home.

“Madrid is full of boys named Paco. A father came to Madrid and inserted an advertisement in the personal columns of El Liberal which said: PACO MEET ME AT HOTEL MONTANA NOON TUESDAY ALL IS FORGIVEN PAPA.”

Welcome to Madrid.

Amen.