FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT 2016 LUKE 15:1-3, 11-32

It wasn’t the smell that made him want to throw up. But that was bad enough. The heady whiff of pigs. That’s what the pitiful wretch before him reeked of. And it wasn’t the sight of him that made him want to heave. But that dirt ingrained in his face, embedded beneath his fingernails, matted in his hair would surely have done the trick for more sensitive digestions. And neither was it those ragamuffin clothes, so badly in need of burning, that almost induced him to wretch. It wasn’t even the shocking realization that beneath the rags, underneath the pig muck, behind the aroma of goodness-knows-what, stooped the skeletal frame of his little brother. No, it was noneof these assaults on the senses that caused his belly to contort. It was the reaction of his father. That is what disgusted him.

His father. A good man. Too good, the older brother thought. Soft, even. That was his problem. Always being taken in - by beggars faking poverty, able-bodied people pretending to be infirm, staff playing hooky. Why, just the other day he dropped a coin into the cup of a disheveled woman holding a scrawny child, oblivious to the fact that that same waif had been held in the arms of a different beggar a few days earlier. Yes, that summed up his father. Gullible. Sure, he possessed a good heart – an infuriatingly good heart, but he was a sucker, a fallen victim to the sob-stories of the undeserving.

He loved his dad, he really did. And that is....... (Read the full Sermon here: Our nauseating God.pdf )