Squandering and wandering

Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity

Interesting. When I was preparing this, I could have sworn that the Gospel Reading was that of the Prodigal Son. I find that it is the Parable of the Unjust Steward, instead. I believe that I have been gently compelled to preach the following, and crave your indulgence if this is not what you are expecting.

Update: This will teach me to mix my missals. The Prodigal Son is today's reading from the Anglican Missal, not the English Missal.

There are times when, reviewing your bank statement, you think, “I wish I hadn’t bought that. What a waste of money!” or “I’m flushing money down the drain with that utility company!” If we were truly to take stock of the money we actually waste… well, it doesn’t bear thinking about does it?

What other things do we waste?

Time, energy, even the resources of our poor planet.

Our Lord shows us the prodigal son – prodigal means wasteful – to show us how the Father treats His children. What does the Lord think that we waste?

[PAUSE]

The prodigal son asks his father for his inheritance. What is interesting that he inherits a quantity of the father’s substance – that’s the literal translation. We do talk about being men and women of substance because we often think that what we own makes us who we are. The prodigal son takes control over what he believes is his by right. And the father lets him.

Does this compare with us and God? Surely we have no right over His substance? Surely He doesn’t owe us anything, does He?

We remember that God creates us in His own image. This does mean that we are, in some way, like Him. God and human beings share characteristics. God and Man are both rational. God and Man are both capable of love. God and Man have knowledge. Of course, whatever aspects we share, God possesses them perfectly, and we don’t. God’s knowledge far outstrips human knowledge. God’s love for us is more that we can know, and sometimes more than we can bear.

We do possess something of God’s substance, but the mistake that we make is that we believe to have it by right. That’s how we fall and leave God. As soon as we think that God owes us, we have lost the idea of love and entered into a world of buying and selling and profit and loss. In talking of rights, we enter into a world of legal and illegal and right and responsibility and politics. In this world, we can waste what God makes of us. We waste our time, our thinking, our love, our lives. We even waste our very selves because we see ourselves as a thing to be bought or sold in some kind of transaction in the world.

When we come to our senses, we are still thinking in these terms. We seek to go back to the Father but only as a slave, because that’s all we’re worth. In realising our sins, we believe ourselves to be totally depraved and legally Hell-bound. Again, we are looking, believing that we have grasped and control Law which we have torn out from the Goodness of God. In all this we forget God the Father as He is and His love for us. If we are lovable, then we are not totally gone out of God’s righteousness because we still bear the image of God. We are redeemable.

This is where God’s greatest gift to us comes in. It is the gift of Himself. His very existence gives us someone to believe in the darkness of our sin as we sit and bewail our wasting of our own souls. It is that belief in God, trusting in Him when we cannot trust anyone to love us, that is Good. In remembering his father back home, the prodigal son has faith in who his father is. Likewise, our Faith is a gift of God because God is a gift of God, and believing in Him, we find a way to live that brings us back to Him. It is because we continue to have faith and we continue to build up that faith that we become ourselves again: we become Good. This building up of our faith needs to be done by working in obedience to God, just as the blind woman trusts the instructions of her mother to direct her away from the cliff.

[PAUSE]

And then, when the prodigal son is home, we see the father throwing a lavish party! How wasteful is that?

Well it isn’t wasteful at all for such extravagance has a purpose in celebrating others. It is for all!

We should and actually need to rejoice when someone lost comes home for that is the expression of true love which is given to us and is part of us. While the son shows himself to be prodigal by taking away what he believes to be his, the father shows him how what he has is supposed to be used. In reunion with God, we don’t have profit, loss, law, politics, buying, selling – there is no such thing as possession. All these things are far too small ways of thinking, of knowing and of loving.

In reunion with God what we do have is Him as He really is and ourselves as we really are. In keeping the faith as far as we feebly can, we will be like Him for we will see Him as He really is.