Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Unsettled and uncertain, disoriented, lost,

These lines, from a newly composed hymn we’ll sing together at the end of this service, speak so clearly to the sense that so many of us have today. Disoriented, lost, without means of discerning where we are—let alone where we’re heading. The expectation that our daily life—our routines, or waking up and going to work and returning home and going to sleep and everything in between—can provide some measure of meaning and stability threatened. Loss of livelihood, fear, the invasion of actions and principles that are so contrary to what we hold dear: we all too easily find ourselves in a place where “no confidence consoles us or trust in anyone.”

As clearly as these words speak to our own circumstances, I can’t help but see reflected in them also the figure of the prodigal son. I can’t help but imagine him taking his share of the inheritance and going to a far-off country and encountering there . . . well, disorientation and uncertainty, a life unmoored and confounding. That he had agency, that this situation resulted in part from his own poor choices, is true, but secondary to the forces beyond his control that made the effect of these choices so dramatic.

While we may not make the same choices as the younger son, I’m sure that many of us can sympathize with his plight because many of us have been to a similar place. Away from comfort and familiarity, risking the new, we may encounter forces beyond our control that make even trivial bad decisions seem catastrophic.

But if in the words of the hymn I can see the younger brother, I can also see in them the elder, the one who stayed. He decided to stay—with the familiar, if not always comfortable—and his expectation of reward, or even just meaning, for doing so is seemingly threatened by another force outside his control—not a severe famine, but a father’s love. A father’s love and care and welcome for another, love and care and welcome that he feels has been withheld from him.

If many of us can sympathize with the younger son, I’d dare to say that many of us may identify with the elder son. The loyal employee who sticks with a company long beyond their own self-interest is served; the loving spouse who has sacrificed their career; the dutiful child holding off on living their own life. These and so many others like them are stereotypical characters—stereotypical, but relatable and familiar, because so many of us have or will come to see ourselves at least in part in them.

For the elder son, the confounding of daily life comes when it seems to him that his decision to remain is not enough, that his slaving away in the fields will never make him worthy. If the younger son experienced the shock of adverse circumstances during a severe famine, the elder confronts something more terrifying: that his entire life may have been built on a mistaken assumption of what gives that life meaning.

Talk about unsettled and uncertain.

Both these brothers experience a “coming back to self.” Feeding pigs, dreaming of eating what they eat, the younger brother remembers the food provided to his father’s hired hands. He acknowledges his need to eat, and he determines to say to his father that he has repented of his sins and to ask to be brought on as a hired hand.

The elder brother experiences his own coming back to self: his sudden awareness that the assumptions of his life may have been wrong. He is angry and resentful: “For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command.” I stayed. Where’s my celebration?

If the younger brother recognizes his need for material security, the elder recognizes something more profound: the need to know that what he has chosen in life, what he has done, all his labor and toil, matters.

Where I think so many of us—here in this Chapel, in our city, our country, our world—find ourselves this morning is understanding that these two brothers aren’t competing ways of life but complementary articulations of our own hunger: hunger for some measure of happiness and security, and hunger to know that, for all our failings—whether through bad decisions or mistaken assumptions, through self-serving confession or anger and resentment—to know that, for all our failings, our lives and what we do in them matter.

The good news is not that we won’t make mistakes, not that we won’t be selfish, not that we won’t be angry or resentful. The good news of this parable, the good news of the Gospel, is that it is in those very failings that God meets us, as the father meets his sons—meets his sons in love, and bids them be transformed by love. The good news is knowing that this welcoming and transforming love, in an unsettled and uncertain world, is absolutely primary.

 “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you,” the younger brother begins, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” He can’t even finish his rehearsed confession. But it doesn’t matter; what matters is that he has returned, and been met by love. His father is already calling for the finest robe and the fatted calf to welcome his son home, his wayward, prodigal son, the son who left, the son who died and is alive again.

And to the elder son, in his anger and resentment, the father confirms that his  entire life is built on a mistaken assumption—the assumption that he ever had something to prove, that he ever had to do something to make himself worthy, that he ever had to do anything other than being absolutely himself: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” What devastating, heartbreaking honesty. What devastating, heartbreaking, welcoming love, welcoming his son to a transformed understanding of what it really means to remain, to abide.

As the father exhorts his older brother to “celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found,” so does God bid us to be beacons of welcoming and transforming love. To lay aside our anger and resentment toward those whom we feel have wasted their chance, whom we feel don’t deserve welcome. To look on them with the eyes of love, with whom we abide and who is always with us, whose all is already ours. Knowing ourselves to be loved, knowing them to be, too. And as “ambassadors for Christ,” attempting, in the final words of our hymn, “day by day to live the holy promise of what we sing and pray.”

“Day by day.” We will go astray, we will operate under mistaken assumptions, we will come to ourselves and return and confess and rage against unfairness. We will be met by love and be charged, day by day, to take love as our chart and compass in this unsettled and uncertain world. And we will be challenged to learn, day by day, to look through love’s eyes, to see a universe full of creatures waiting to be welcomed and transformed.

Amen.

[1] “Unsettled and uncertain,” words by Carl. P. Daw Jr., © 2025.