Good morning, friends. How are you doing today? Wonderful. It’s great to see you. If you’re visiting, my name’s Alex. I’m one of the pastors here. My wife and I got to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary this week. Just to, keep you in the loop. She is more beautiful today than the day I met her.

We’d planned a trip for our fifth anniversary some time back and we were just found ourselves in the midst of life, I think we’d just had our first child around that fifth anniversary, so we made a decision on that fifth anniversary. The big trip that we’d planned, we would put back till our tenth anniversary.

And so the years passed by and we got to our 10th anniversary, very excited about the impending big trip, and about that time we just had our third child. And so we decided, you know what, that 10th anniversary trip, we’re gonna put that one and our 5th anniversary trip back to our 15th anniversary. And it’s just gonna be the best trip ever.

We’re just gonna combine it all, it’s gonna be wonderful. So this anniversary, We went all the way to Evergreen, to a restaurant, and while we were there, we decided to put back those trips to a later date, to be decided in the future. 20 seems like a goodly round number, and so we’ll let you know how that goes.

Maybe at the 20th, we’ll finally make this this a trip. Today, we get to move on to a new series. I love the energy of TV. moving into a new series, just all of the possibilities of what God may say to us. And in this series, we’re going to do something that is maybe a little more unusual. We have a couple of different types of series coming up We’ll take four weeks to do some conversation around community in August and then in September We’re moving into a series on the book of Revelation, which as I’ve already expressed before is terrifying to me But we’re gonna do it.

We’re gonna get through it together. But this series We’re actually going to tell the same story three weeks in a row. We’re going to spend three weeks wrestling with this parable that we’ll get to. The parable that we often call the parable of the prodigal son. It’s actually a horrible name for the parable.

It doesn’t seem to be what is the central thrust of Jesus. Argument in the parable, but it’s how we’ve come to know it We’re gonna spend three weeks looking at the three prominent different characters within this parable. I’ll spend today looking at the younger brother Aaron will preach next week and he’ll spend time looking at the elder brother and then our friend Kevin Butcher who has this Incredible father’s heart for people will come and he’ll spend the third week teaching us on the character of the father.

Having that space gives me this opportunity to do something that, that perhaps I rarely feel time to. We’re gonna to begin, we’re gonna, we’re gonna start with some ideas on what exactly is a parable? Cause, cause there’s a possibility that you assume that you know that, and I assume that we know that, but actually, a parable is not just a parable.

a story. It’s a work of art. It’s something that is created to illustrate something. In the brilliant Monty Python’s Life of Brian, there is a moment where a rabbi figure from the first century is teaching. We are left to assume that perhaps it’s Jesus, perhaps it’s not, and as he’s teaching he says, a man went from Jerusalem to Jericho and someone in the crowd yells back, Oh yeah, what was his name then?

And the teacher looks back and says he doesn’t have a name. And the guy responds, he doesn’t know his name. You’re making this up, aren’t you? With the important truth being he is making it up. If you’ve held the sense that a parable has to be a true story, that, that’s not actually the purpose at all.

They are made up by design. Richard Snodgrass described parables as stories with intent. They have a purpose behind them. Marianne Moore said of poetry, and we can take the quote and turn it to be about parables, she said this, in poetry, there, it’s about imaginary gardens with real toads in them. Parables, the same truth.

It’s a made up story, it’s not real. But the characters within it, those are certainly real. The Greek word parabolae means quite literally to throw alongside. You have a point that you’re trying to teach and you throw a story alongside it to capture people’s imaginations in a fresh way. way. During the time that Jesus was teaching and in the centuries before, there was a conversation amongst Jewish teachers as to how you got across the point that God wanted you to get across.

How you got people to capture the teaching point that you were trying to make. And there were two theories as to how you did that. The first was through a method called Halakha. The law. You taught commandments. You reminded people of important truths. You went through things like the Ten Commandments.

You talked to people about not committing adultery, not committing murder, all of those different elements. But there were some people that said teaching. Requires more than just reciting specific commandments. So they said there’s not just halah the law, there is also Agatha, the meaning of the law.

We, we might describe those things in a couple of different ways. There’s halah, which are decrees. There’s aada that inspires. It gives you this sense of why you’re doing that. Another one might look like this hallah is how to act. Agadah is how to participate in the eternal drama, it invites you into God’s story through the use of other stories.

Abraham Heschel says this, Abraham Heschel is a rabbi, he said, Halakha by necessity treats with the law in the abstract, regardless of the totality of the person. It is Agatha that keeps on reminding that the purpose of performance, of obeying the law, is to transform the performer. That the purpose of observance is to train us in achieving spiritual ends.

You’re not supposed to just obey rules, you’re supposed to come to live in the way of Jesus. And when we do that to a watching world, it is beautiful. This art form of parable that Jesus uses is not unique. to him. It’s actually found present in the Old Testament. You may have seen it and missed it. The most famous one occurs in 2nd Samuel.

In the Old Testament, parables are known as mashals. In 2nd Samuel chapter 12, we read a story. The context for this story is important. David, the most famous king of Israel, has had an affair. In the midst of not going out to war with his army, which was the practice of the day, he’s seen a beautiful young woman bathing and he’s taken her for himself, despite the fact that she’s a married woman.

He’s then followed that up by having her husband killed. And incredibly for a man who is called a man after God’s own heart, it seems at this point he has no sorrow, no sense of repentance for his actions, despite the fact that He knows the law. He talks all the time about the law. He sings about the law.

He’s very aware that he’s done something wrong in that abstract sense, but nothing has changed. And then the prophet Nathan comes and tells him this incredible,

The Lord sent Nathan to David. Nathan came to him and said, There were two men in a certain city. One was rich, the other was poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cows. Imagine who the rich man for a moment might be. But the poor man had only one little female lamb that he had brought, bought.

He raised her and she grew up in his home with his children. She would eat his food and drink from his cup. She rested in his arms and was like a baby. a daughter. Now a visitor came to the rich man. The rich man thought it would be a pity to take one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler, so he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared her for the traveler.

David burned with anger against the man. I solemnly swear as the Lord lives, he said to Nathan, the man who did this certainly deserves to die and he must pay back four times the price of the lamb, because he did this and had No pity. And in this beautiful moment, Nathan turns to David and says this, You, or in Old English, thou, thou art the man.

It’s you, David. David believes he’s the moral authority that can make a statement on the right and wrong of someone dealing with sheep. And the parable teaches him, David, you’re in no place. To make this judgment. You can’t even make this, you can’t even make this judgment for yourself around people and how you interact there.

Marshall parable. It has this beautiful way of doing these three things. It awakens. our insight. It then awakens our conscience and then it awakens action. It leads us to live in a different way. Here’s the tension, here’s the problem. This parable, if you’ve been around church for a while, is so familiar to you.

How do you obey it? How does it capture your heart when you know it so well? Perhaps you heard the reading and perhaps because Angela read it so it caught you in a different way, but for the most part, Most of us enter into this, and we say we know. There’s a story about two brothers, yeah, one brother. He leaves, then he comes back.

The father welcomes him, surprisingly. The younger brother’s kind of mad about it. This story doesn’t do for us what it did for the first audience. So today we’re trying to go, going to try and recapture it in a way that it makes sense to us anew, it captures us afresh, it does these three things for us.

To try and help us do that, I’m going to try and weave two narratives together. I’m a little concerned about how this is going to go, but I’ve done stupid things before and they’ve turned out okay, like 50 percent of the time. And the odds are Right in the middle as it turns out. So let’s see how it goes as we get into this parable.

As you prepare your heart to hear what God might say, Bob Goff says this, We don’t always get to pick the parable we’re living, but we get to pick who we are in the parable. Most parables come with characters, and those characters come with choices to be made. As we go through these three weeks, you’ll encounter these three characters, the younger brother, the older brother, and the father.

The question that you might ask yourself throughout it is, who am I called to be in this parable? And who do I most connect with now? In the reading of the parable, and how does that change over the weeks? Jesus himself gives us a little context to the parable as we get into it. In Luke chapter 15, verse 1, and we’ll be in Luke 15 if you have a text in front of you that you’d like to turn to.

We’re told this. Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering to hear Jesus. Tax collectors and sinners are two categories of the worst people in the minds of a first century Jew. Sinners you might think are the worst, but tax collectors are actually the worst. The sinners are like, we don’t want to be grouped with those people.

Get them separate from us. Just acknowledge that they’re terrible people. But both groups Have come to gather around to hear Jesus, but there’s protest from the Pharisees There’s fascination to me in that those furthest from the father were attracted to the one who was closest to the father And yet for the religious leaders of the day that presents a problem.

The Pharisees and teachers of the law muttered, this man welcomes sinners and eats with them. To a first century Jewish person, who you ate with was a matter of association. It spoke of approval, potentially, of their lifestyle. And to a Pharisee desperately trying to obey God’s law, there’s a sense of how can you do that?

How can you do community with people that have no values? How do you do community with people that don’t obey Torah? How can you live with them like this? And yet for Jesus, that seems to be no problem. Everything that we’ll hear over these three weeks is centered around this idea. It’s why I suggested that the name, the parable of the prodigal son, is actually a poor choice.

of name for a parable. Jesus major thrust, his major argument, is around the second son. And for those of us that have been in church for a while, I would suggest that is the character that we’re most in danger of being like. We’re very easily turned from younger brothers into older brothers. As you hear the parable, there’s a flow to it.

It begins with a conversation. There’s then a journey, an outward journey away from home. There’s the far country where most of the action takes place. Then there’s the journey back home. And finally, another conversation. It means that the parable follows a structure that’s called a chiasm. It goes outward.

And then it comes inward, and that structure is important, it matters that we know that’s happening as we read it. And so with all that preparation, with all of those details, you’ve heard the parable once, we’re gonna go through it step by step, and let’s pray that God would capture each of our hearts as we do that.

Jesus, you know us in this room. You know us intimately. You know those of us that already associate ourselves with the younger brother. Amen. You knew those of us that associate ourselves with the older brother. You know the ways that some of us have stepped into a role of being that father, of welcoming people home.

You know each of us. Help us to hear your words anew. Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable. Help us to see you freshly.

Amen. Luke chapter 15 verse 11. There was a man who had two sons. Automatically, to a first century Jewish person, the story has some notes of familiarity. Many of their most famous stories had two sons. Most of the ancient Near East, the land area around Israel, had, as a principle, something called primogenitor.

The lore of the firstborn son. A firstborn son was always the best son. In the stories, he was always the hero. He would be the one that would inherit. Fascinatingly, Israel as a nation had flipped some of that concept on its head. In their stories, many of the heroes were second born. Sons. This had become so ingrained in the minds and hearts of the people of the time that actually hearing a story you would Potentially at least long to be the second born son and not the first born son So imagine a group of religious leaders who have been very irritated that Jesus is eating With a bunch of tax collectors and sinners start to tell you a story about a second born son Suddenly you say okay, that’s a good one That’s the person that I want to be, the person that I want to copy.

And already the story will twist in a way that will confuse and surprise. This story in general will irritate most of his first listeners. There’s not anything good for anyone to hear in some ways. Everyone is accused of something, everyone is struggling with something. In verse 12, we’re told this, The younger one said to his father, Father, give me my share of the estate.

Give me some of the money that you’ve saved up. Now in the 21st century in Denver, what do we assume this question is centered around? The guy wants to buy real estate, right? He’s help me out, father. I can’t afford 700, 000 for a house. Could you hand over some of your hard earned savings and that will get us on the property ladder and we’ll be fine from then on.

To us, this doesn’t seem like a particularly combative ask. It’s a request, right? To a first century person, the ask is deeply problematic. There’s an implication behind it. The implication behind it is this. Dad, I’m sick of waiting for you to die. Dad, you’ve lived long enough. I’m struggling here. I want my freedom.

I want my sense of being able to do what I want. Hand over your money now. To a first century person listening, this would be like a dagger. This would be so sharp in their minds that this would be an unbelievable request. Every first century person listening would be saying something like, say no.

Clearly he’s dishonored you. The response may be something like the response David had to hearing the story. This man deserves to die. Who says something like this? to the father. And yet in this story, the father, unbelievably to that audience, will agree to it. Our first narrative in a parable I’d love to throw alongside this one.

A young girl grows up in Traverse City, in a cherry orchard that’s owned by her father. To those watching outside, her life looks idyllic. But she wrestles with her father’s strict laws, the ways that he says that she should live her life. Regularly they end up in shouting matches, and as she gets older and older, they shout more and more at each other.

She remembers one distinct moment where in the midst of an argument, she looks at her father and yells, I hate you, I wish you were dead, as she slams the door. She hears him knock on the door late that night, looking to have a conversation, but she has no interest in talking, so she feigns sleep. And then, that night, she enacts a plan that she’s planned in her mind time and time again.

She runs away from home. She leaves. In Luke, chapter 15, verse 13, We see that effect that happened in the younger brother’s story. We don’t know how long after this initial conversation it is, but the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant land, and there squandered his wealth in wild living.

We are fairly comfortable in our century of, with people moving around, moving to different locations. In the first century, not so much. Leaving was a huge deal. And here we encounter this. idea that he squandered his wealth in wild living. This particular Greek word, asotos, is the only time it’s used in scripture.

If you were going to translate it into English like 20, years ago, you’d probably use the word profligate, but nobody knows what that means today. And so wild living works much better. He goes and he starts spending. He gathers friends because he spends, he gathers community. As he spends, he’s the life and soul of every party.

There’s no particular details as to what he does here, we get some details later when the older brother will say he wasted his money on prostitutes, but we don’t know if that’s true, we don’t know how the older brother knows that information. But to a first century Jewish person, there’d be an assumption that there’s some wild living of all kinds.

There’s wild living in his attitude towards sex, his money, his use of money, his buying of food, all of those different things. For a moment, he lives this life that has provided him with everything he thought he wanted. Everything that seems to be the driving motivation for his ask of the money in the first place.

And now we come back to our other parable, which I meant to say is one I’ve adapted from the writing of Philip Yancey in a book called What’s So Amazing About Grace. You can check that out for yourself. She’s only been to Detroit once in her entire life, on a trip to watch the Lions win the Super Bowl.

It’s my story, so I can do what I want with it. I can do what I want with it. Didn’t say that in the original. With all the news that comes out of Detroit, all the stories about gangs and violence, she never believes her parents would possibly look for her there. California, maybe, or Florida. But certainly not Detroit.

When she arrives in this big city, she’s amazed by the size of the buildings, just the life going on around her. On the second day, she meets a man who offers to buy her lunch, helps her find an apartment, and offers her some pills that just make her feel better than she’s ever felt in her life. She’s more convinced than ever that her parents are just keeping her from all the fun.

This seems to be the life to live. This man keeps hanging around her and eventually he says I’d like to get you in a really nice apartment. He shows her a couple of things that guys will pay money for and she gets to live in a penthouse. She gets to order room service. She gets to buy clothes whenever she wants.

For a while. Everything just feels a little bit magical. She’s like a woman of the world doing whatever she wants to do. In this story right now, life is good. The prodigal son story turns on chapter 14. We read, after he had spent everything, there was a severe famine. Famine was common to the region. It’s an area that survives on fairly little water.

And so if you have a season of drought, crops can die pretty quickly. There’s one fertile crescent. And we don’t know exactly where he is. We’re just told he’s gone to a distant country. But somewhere in this country, suddenly famine hits. And he begins to be in need. Three things come together to create that need.

They combine to cause this moment of tension. He’s run out of money is the first. There is a famine in the country he’s visiting. That’s the second. And the third is that his friendship group, his community, is driven by his wealth. And when he no longer has wealth, he’s just a foreigner. in a different land.

We’re fairly aware that we have a different attitude even today of foreigners that have wealth and foreigners that don’t have wealth. And same scenario here. When he’s wealthy, he’s accepted. When he’s not wealthy, he has nothing and he has no one. He’s far away from home. After a year of everything seeming great, the first signs of illness start to kick in.

She suddenly doesn’t feel herself anymore, and she’s amazed at how quickly the people in her life turn mean, especially the guy that rented her this beautiful apartment. Suddenly she finds herself out on the streets. She’s developed a cough that she just can’t get rid of and a drug habit that is even worse.

Suddenly for a moment she starts to wonder about the life choice she’s made. Suddenly the friends around us seem less and less. She’s surviving, but only just. In chapter 15 we hear, we see the moment where the younger brother hits rock bottom. He goes and hires himself out to a citizen of the country who sent him to feed, he sits in the fields to feed pigs.

Again, something lost in translation in this is the Jewish dislike for pigs in general. It’s written into all the law codes that you avoid pigs and so the code that we’re seeing here is that he’s now no longer just unacceptable to his father, to his family he’s now unacceptable to God as well. He’s hit himself.

the lowest of the low. He’s hired himself, yes, but the person he’s hired him to out of famine perhaps is unable to pay him anything that he might live on. He longs, we’re told, to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but nobody will give him anything. This is the furthest point out and the story and the graph I showed you earlier.

And there’s actually something beautiful about it. There is a beauty to rock bottom. For the prodigal son, it’s no money, no friends, nothing to eat. For you and I, it may have been almost anything. Sometimes the rock bottom moment looks something like the prodigal son’s story. In other cases, it’s not about profligate living.

Sometimes it’s simply about the end of self reliance. And we’ve believed that we can actually create a fairly good life for ourselves. We can earn money, we can have children, we can buy a home, and perhaps there’s something that comes up that questions that. There’s some life incidence that isn’t solvable in the normal way.

Perhaps there’s a sickness. Perhaps there’s a loss of a job. Perhaps there’s a loss of a person. Anything that gets you to that point that says, I can’t survive this by myself, is to us that same point in the story. Anything that recalibrates us and turns us back towards God is the moment of rock bottom.

Rock bottom in life feels awful. In the story that navigates us back to our father, it is actually a gift that turns the story, creates that moment of repentance back to a parable. One night, she’s asleep on the street. Sleeping’s probably the wrong word for it, really. How can a young girl in Detroit ever really sleep?

She has no money, nothing to feed her hunger for drugs or for food. She’s cold. She shivers under a pile of newspapers that she’s piled on top of her. Suddenly she doesn’t feel like a woman of the world. She feels like a small child. She whimpers as she lies there, freezing. And then suddenly some synapse in her brain fires and one image comes to mind.

Traverse City in May, where a million cherry trees bloom and a golden retrieve are running through the trees chasing a tennis ball. It’s warm, she’s home, and her father is calling her to dinner. In verse 17, we read this moment for this prodigal son. When he came to his senses is the verse, is the passage where all of the story turns on.

It’s the moment that scripture calls repentance in Greek. It’s the word metanoia in Hebrew. It’s the word teshuva. Both of them have this element of return, of turning around, of beginning a journey home. Fascinatingly, this is the moment where the prodigal’s fate is decided. This is the moment that his welcome actually begins.

The band Mumford and Sons in their song Roll Away Your Stone write this, it seems that all my bridges have been burned, but you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works. It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart, but the welcome I receive with the re. Start. There’s this moment where he has directed his thoughts and intentions back towards home.

It has to be lived out, but the welcome is assured in that moment. He has a plan. I will set out and go back to my father and say to him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I’m no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants. He has a picture of home that is compelling, but he has no faith to believe that he could possibly be received as a son.

That’s a step too far. He’s done far too much to burn bridges to believe sonship could be on the table. But servanthood, that seems doable. Perhaps his father would receive him back on those terms. Three phone calls. Three connections with an answer phone. She leaves a message for her father on the third one.

Dad, I’m thinking about maybe coming home. I don’t know if you want to see me again, but, I guess if you don’t I’ll just keep going until I get to Canada. But, just to let you know, I’m on my way. She jumps on a bus. It takes seven hours to get from Traverse City through to Detroit with every stop.

Throughout that time, she replays the idea of her plan in her head. Shouldn’t she have given them more time? They’ve probably given her up for dead at this point. Shouldn’t she have given them some time to get used to the idea that she’s alive and wants to come home? Throughout the journey, she, her mind flits back and forth between that, those thoughts and the conversation she plans to have with her father.

Dad I’m sorry, it wasn’t your fault, it was all mine. Dad I know I messed up. Can I possibly come home?

Verse 20. So we got up, it’s repeated so we know it’s important, 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. The father has no idea of servanthood in his mind.

He cannot see a plan that is second best. He only sees the possibility of sonship, of restoration. The ring represents family authority. The idea of shoes is deeply important too. To be uncharred, it was to be a disgrace to have nothing. It’s a sign of belonging to God. to a family of value. The celebration of the fatted calf is of beyond value in our minds.

Everything in the father’s mind turns quickly towards celebration and speaks to a deep longing that each of us have inside us. A longing to be received and loved as a child is received and loved by a father. The hip hop artist Eminem in his song Headlights, has these lyrics. I guess he had trouble speaking of his father, keeping up with every address.

But I’d have flipped every mattress, every rock and desert cactus, owned a collection of maps, and followed my kids to the edge of the atlas if someone ever moved them from me. The song speaks to the desire to be a good parent and at the same time to be loved by your parents and hits us right in the middle of this parable which speaks of that desire.

We who long to love family members, those close to us well, long to love children, all still have this desire to be loved and welcomed by our father. Welcomed home as we would welcome a child home. If you have sat and looked out of the window waiting for headlights to turn onto the driveway, sat on the front porch, waiting for a kid to come back from work, if you have engaged in anything, any activity, that has longed for a family member or a friend to connect, you know something of this father’s love and waiting and something of the longing of a child to be loved by his own parents.

As the bus pulls in to Traverse City, the bus driver says, 15 minutes here, 15 minutes that would decide her life. She consciously rubs the lipstick off her teeth, looks down at her fingers covered in tobacco stains and wonders if her parents will notice, if they’re even there. Not one of the sights she’s imagined in her mind meets what she sees as she steps off the bus.

In that plastic chaired bus terminal. 30 to 40 family members are gathered, great aunts, uncles, grandmothers, great grandmothers, brothers, and sisters. And then in that moment from amongst the crowd, her father steps. And as he walks towards her, she begins to recite the sorry that she’s planned all that journey home.

And in the midst of it, he looks at her with tears in his eyes and says, hush, there’s no time for sorries. No time for that now. There is a store, there’s a party waiting for you at home. There’s a party waiting for you at home. The welcome home to us, surprisingly, comes in spite of the sorry. The planned apology of the prodigal son is cut off quickly, as it is in our story.

We are the ones that need to confess to speak our brokenness, but the father simply, it seems, needs, simply needs for us to return home to him. All that is on his mind, is a deadness and now a liveness. In verse 24, we read this for this son of mine was dead and is alive again. He was lost and he’s found.

And so they begin to celebrate. This is the story of a father who simply longs for children to come home. The story of the younger son is one of a one who’s broken and needs a father to receive him exactly as he is simply because he came back to him with no sense of repaying a debt, no sense of recrimination, just welcome in to a family.

And here’s the problem. It’s a story we know, but a story that we forget. Our invitation today is to remembrance. In Psalm 103, we read these words. Praise the Lord, my soul, all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion.

who satisfies your desire with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagles. The beautiful promise of Jesus throughout his teaching and in his death and resurrection is that all of our wanderings at distance from our father can be forgiven, but forgiveness can never be forgotten. It loses its power over us when we forget.

All of our wanderings are forgiven, but forgiveness must never be forgotten. That’s why we need to tell this story in new ways to allow it to capture our hearts freshly again. Whether your journey home was today, yesterday, or long ago, the memory of our welcome should stay fresh. in our minds. I don’t know how many times you’ve lived this story out, maybe the first time, maybe ten times, maybe a hundred times.

I have a feeling this story is constantly alive in us in new ways over and over again as we wander and are found. One great hymn phrases it like this, prone to wander. Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. Here’s my heart, Lord, take it, seal it for thy courts above. Today we’re invited to remember and we wanted to give you a piece of liturgy to help you do that.

The picture of the prodigal son that was outside if you walked through the south doorway that you saw on the screen earlier. We have a copy that you’d love, we’d love to give you. I’m going to ask you to sit for a moment. Aaron’s gonna lead us, or actually sing over us, a song, sung by a guy called Matt Brock, called I Am Loved.

It’s a reflection of all the things that we just talked about. And at a certain point, whenever he feels right in the song, he’s gonna invite you to take a walk, to step out of your chair, and to walk to one of our prayer team who will be dotted all around. They have a picture, a copy, of that image of the prodigal son.

On his knees in front of his father, he’s wearing a new robe, his feet are shod, he’s wearing a ring, his father’s hands rest on his back. He’s home, and amongst all his wanderings he is home, loved and welcomed by his father. As you walk to one of those people, I’m going to ask you to feel the weight of that first returning.

The joy in your father’s love that surprised you that came out of nowhere, perhaps. Perhaps you’d heard about it, perhaps there was a moment where it captured your heart for real. Perhaps this is the first time you’ve heard that story. This can be your first return to your father, too. Come find someone, they’re going to pray a short blessing over you, and you can go back to your seat.

Jesus, in amongst these words that are mine, there’s a story that is yours.

Please help each of us to find ourselves restored and re storied through this parable.

Amen.