Please Note That Most Messages Follow
The Revised Common Lectionary

This morning is Home Coming Sunday here at First Baptist Church and we are delighted to have all you folk join us for this very special day! There is nothing so grand as the feeling of coming home. It is at home that we find family and friends.

Matthew Shephard, the University of Wyoming student who was killed last October was buried by his home church in Casper, Wyoming. He was murdered because of the way in which he had chosen to live out his life. While the 650 mourners attended, a crowd was gathered behind police barricades across the street.

In the crowd was Rev. Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka Kansas along with a group of his church members carrying a sign saying:

"God Hates Fags!"

Perhaps more frightening than the sign itself were the twisted faces of angry, hateful people who called themselves Christian as they reviled Shephard and anyone who grieved for him. The signature of their faces said: "I am 100%, without a doubt, certain that God is on our side!"

There is an old saying:

Me, myself and I...
we three,
Are more than certain...
God loves,
Just we!

While it amazes me how man can take something as pure and powerful as the love of God and pollute it with hatred, I am even more amazed by the mass of people throughout the world who choose to believe in that kind of a corrupted and twisted message.

God hates? God HATES??? Listen to me very carefully this morning and make certain you understand what I am about to say. While some people choose to live a lifestyle that is displeasing in the eyes of God, while it is true that God abhors the sin - God always - ALWAYS loves the sinner.

God often talks to us directly through Scripture. That is, He plants the words full of actual graces as we read and hear them, and sudden undiscovered meanings are sown in our hearts, if we attend to them, reading and hearing them with minds that are searching and in prayer.

In our Gospel lesson this morning, we read a story of a young man who had chosen to live a life apart from his Father. He went to his Father and said "Dad give me what I have coming to me and give it to me now. I can’t stand this two horse town any more. I have lived the way you have told me to all these years and the time has come for me to get out of Dodge and live the way I want to live. I am bored with your way and now I am going to live it up! I’m going to have fun! I’ll show you that you are wrong Dad and I am right. Just give me my inheritance and let me go."

Man can you imagine the hurt and heartache of that Father? I bet you can. Some of us might even be tempted to say: "I’ll give you what you got coming!! I’d love to give you what you got coming!!!"

For those of you who are visiting today you might not know that my children are ages 4 and 5. My son, Seth will be 6 in a few days. Last weekend they stayed with my in-laws along with some other children. My wife and I sat there and listened attentively while her Mom and Dad filled us in on all the details. Their comment was that our children were on their best behavior. We were so proud! I asked Seth "Seth what happens when you don’t do what we say?" "I gets a whoopin’!" Which I admit has happened but not very frequently. They have really come a long way! When you use to ask Seth where his feelings were he’d almost always say "Back here (pointing to his backside)." I use to tell him after a spanking "I only hurt your feelings!"

But this Father chose to give his son what it was that he requested. His son turned his back on his home and his Father and out the door he went.

I spent my teen years during the 70’s. One of my favorite songs, and still is by the way, was recorded by a group called Steppenwolf. The name of the song was "Born to be Wild." Perhaps much to your pleasure I won’t try to sing it but the words went something like this:

"Hicthin for the runway - headin for the highway!
Looking for adventure and whatever comes my way.
Born to be Wild."

That was basically the attitude of the Prodigal Son. But we all know what happens. He lives it up. Spends all his inheritance. Finds himself without money, without substance, and a really BIG way wants to go back home and live return to the stability of his Father’s home.

It is at this point that a characteristic which is so incipient of God is reveled. I want to re-read to you first the words from the parable and secondly the words from Isaiah.

"So he (the son) set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he (his father) ran and put his arms around him and kissed him." (Luke 15:20 NRSV)

"Thus says the Lord GOD, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered." (Isaiah 56:8 NRSV)

Now let me add to those verses some words from the Apostle Paul:

"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:38 & 39 NRSV)

Do you see the message this morning? The umbrella message is this: Our Heavenly Father loves us! Period! No matter what!

We may be living a life that is in total contradiction to what the Bible teaches. But God sees us where we are and He still loves us. Like the Father in our Gospel lesson, He gives us the freedom to take our lives and make a total mess of them. And like the Father in the parable, He is patiently waiting for us to realize that we are far better with Him than we are apart from Him.

Thomas Merton, in The Seven Story Mountain, writes "There is a paradox that lies in the very heart of human existence. It must be apprehended before any lasting happiness is possible in the soul of a man. The paradox is this: man’s nature by itself, can do little or nothing to settle his most important problems. If we follow nothing but our natures, our human wants, our own philosophies, our own level of ethics, we will wind up in hell.

When a ray of light strikes a crystal, it gives a new quality to the crystal. And when God’s infinitely disinterested love plays upon a human soul, the same kind of transformation takes place. And that is the life called sanctifying grace.

The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside itself. But when Light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it."

You see? God, our Heavenly Father is waiting - waiting for you and for me. Come home. Come home He is lovingly and gently calling. Patiently He is waiting for you and for me. He has provided for us His Son, Jesus to come into our lives as light into a crystal. To be splendidly transformed and radiant for all the World to see. . . Amen.

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