We can understand how he felt, can’t we? Some of us have stayed home over the years. We worked instead of played. We saved instead of spent. We did our duty no matter how unpleasant it was. We took on our shoulders the heavy mantle of responsibility. When the chips were down, when things really counted, people could count on us. God knows, it hasn’t been easy sometimes so if, along the way, we got a little piece of success, well, that’s only fair. We earned it, didn’t we?

Some people may believe that virtue is its own reward, but we never bought that. We worked out a straight quid pro quo bargain with God. And the terms were plain. We would work hard, do what we should, keep our noses clean and tight to the grindstone, and then God would reward us with success – financial success, personal success, family success – but most of all, money.

Not so long ago, the American Management Association published an article entitled “The Changing Success Ethic.” The author, Richard Huber, points out that…

“In America success has meant making money and translating it into status… Success was not simply being rich or famous. It meant attaining riches or achieving fame. You had to know where a man began and where he ended in order to determine how far he had come.”

Huber’s article was the result of a questionnaire returned by over fifteen hundred business people in which they were asked to define success. By far the largest group of them, over one third, defined success in terms of achievement: achievement of goals they had set for themselves. We’re not strangers to that point of view, are we? You and I have grown up in a society and in families where, whatever else we may have learned, we were taught to achieve, to compete, to strive, to win, to climb to the top and stay there no matter what. Sometimes, there was the not-so-subtle suggestion that the more we achieved, the more we would be loved. “Mother loves you when you get a “B” Johnny, but she will really love you when you come home with an “A”! Confronted with that kind of demand and expectation, it’s no wonder that some of us grew tough and cynical. We lost touch with our own feelings. We forgot how to be loving and gentle and tender and forgiving. After all, if the success of our lives is going to be measured by how much we work and how much we achieve, of what possible worth are the deeper things of the human spirit: our hopes and dreams, the impulses to care and share?

I believe that’s our problem when it comes to understanding what the Gospel is all about… What real worship is all about… what this church is all about. In a sad and tragic way most of us can identify far more closely with the Elder Brother than the Prodigal Son. We are just as convinced as he was that people should only get what they deserve.

When we look deep inside don’t most of us feel that in this life we earn most of what we get? We earn our living. Some of us earn degrees. We earn advancements. We earn people’s respect. If we get some success or recognition, didn’t it come because we earned it?

Even the love we get from our parents, our children, our partners; we may not like to say it in so many words, but isn’t there a sense in which we feel we have earned that love? If not, why would it be necessary to say, “I’ve tried to be a good parent, a good spouse, not perfect, you understand, but I’ve done my best.”

If tragedy strikes, if illness comes a bit too often, or death comes a bit too soon, we invariably say; “She didn’t deserve that.” “He deserved something better than that.” As good, decent, responsible, respectable people, we deserve what we get and we like it that way.

That is the heart of our problem, just as it was for the Elder Brother. When his father threw that wingding of a party for his younger brother, he simply couldn’t take it. The Prodigal hadn’t earned it. He didn’t deserve it. If anyone deserved a party, it was he, the hard-working, steady, decent, dependable older brother. Where would the family have been without him? What thanks did he get for all his years of work? An invitation to join this party for his good-for-nothing kid brother who never had amounted to anything and never would? It’s no wonder he was angry. Can we blame him?

Even his Prodigal brother would probably have admitted he was right in feeling the way he did. You remember when the Prodigal came to himself, he figured he would never deserve to be taken back as a son, but he just might be allowed to earn his keep as a hired hand.

It’s so difficult to shake loose from this basic way of looking at life – that we only deserve what we have worked for and that we only get what we pay for. That is what keeps life moving. That’s the way we plan our lives from working for grades in school days, earning degrees, getting decent salary raises on the way up, making a few friends along the way, putting aside something for retirement – all the time, looking out for number one.

The only trouble with that way of looking at life is that it blocks us from any possible understanding of the wonderful, surprising, graceful love of God. So long as you and I are bound up in the conviction that in this life we only get what we earn, then we can never really experience the love of God. Why? Because in the most profound sense, we simply will not need God. Look at it this way: if God is only going to give me what I deserve as a faithful, committed, hard-working, law-abiding, church-going person, then I am in control of God and God’s love. I determine how much love and forgiveness I am going to receive. It all depends on me. There will never be any surprises. None of those wonderful moments when I get something I did not deserve, something I did not earn, something I did not expect.

Friends, Christianity is not a summons to greater effort and achievement. Christianity is not a demand to live a morally perfect life. Christianity is an invitation to a party given in our honor – something we never earned, deserved or expected. Let me quote something from C. S. Lewis: “Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts. If we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are done away with and the rest is a matter of flying.”

That is what the Christian Gospel is all about. That is what this church is all about. If it is simply morality and right living that we are concerned with, why bother having churches? Practically every institution in the country is concerned about that sort of thing: families, the Scouts, the schools, the government, the courts, P.T.A., Rotary, Kiwanis. You name it. If the only reason for the church is to join our voices with the millions of others urging us onward and upward, then I, for one, don’t see the need for church.

But in fact the church is concerned with something else. That something else is this strange word “gospel” which means “good news.” But that’s still just a word, isn’t it? Jesus knew that as well as we do. So instead of giving lectures in theology, he told stories. He told a story about a boy who had done nothing to earn or deserve his father’s love and about another boy who felt he really didn’t need his father’s love anyway. Then he shows that father reaching out his arms to both his sons. “There,” said Jesus, “That’s what love is all about. That’s what life is all about. That’s what God is about. Can you believe that? Can you feel it? Can you accept your invitation to God’s party?” At that moment, like so many Elder Brothers, his listeners looked at him in utter amazement. “You’ve got to be kidding! Who could believe something like that?”

The centuries have come and gone since he told this wonderful story. The world has usually preferred to join the Elder Brother on the outside of the house. His way seems so safe, so dependable, so secure. But every now and then someone comes across this invitation from long ago and realizes that, wonder of wonders, the invitation is for them, the party is being given in their honor. And they go in. Why don’t you do that this morning?