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The morning is Luke chapter 15. I begin the reading at the verse number 11. And Jesus said, "There was a man who had two sons, and the younger of them said to his father, 'Father, give me the share of property that falls to me.' And he divided his living between them. Not many days later the younger son gathered all he had and took his journey into a far country,

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and there he squandered his property in loose living. And when he had spent everything, a great famine arose in that country, and he began to be in want. So he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his field to feed swine. And he would gladly have fed on the pods that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything.

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But when he came to himself, he said, 'How many of my father's hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger. I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.' And he arose and came to his father.

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But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' But the father said to his servants, 'Bring quickly the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet, and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry.

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For this my son was dead and is alive again.' He was lost and is found." And they began to make merry. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me.

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. You see it sometimes on church bulletin boards. As long as you think you are green, you will keep growing. As soon as you've decided you're ripe, you'll start to get rotten.

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I'd like you to keep that in mind as we approach one of the most beloved parables of the New Testament together this morning. Because I want to look at this old parable in what I would suggest is a new way. This first century boy has a lot to say to us as personalities of the 20th century. But I want to look at his adventures this morning at an angle which is slightly off camera.

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You know the story very well. A boy wants his portion of his inheritance. It is given to him. He goes off into a far country, wastes what has been given to him, finds himself in want, decides that he would be better off at home, and plans to return there, asking his father to take him on as a hired hand.

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When he gets home, his father is more willing to love him even than he is to be loved. It's an old story. But look with me this morning at that story from a different perspective. Notice first of all that the prodigal thought he was a star.

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He had a very high opinion of himself. He was one of those who could be described as a keen observer of life, but as a rather poor interpreter of life. That is, he had gathered to himself a lot of knowledge. He understood the things that were going on about him, at least in factual terms.

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But he had not yet achieved wisdom enough to understand what the things about him meant. He chafed under his father's authority and leadership. He resented the process of primogeniture, the honoring of the oldest son, which was typical in the first century. He knew himself to be a young man with considerable intelligence and savvy.

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It was not easy in those days to go off to a far country. There was no travel agency that you could call to make a reservation. It took a lot of grit and gumption and determination to go into a far country. And when he went there, he evidently achieved some popularity.

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Make no mistake about it, this boy was no dummy. He had zeal and he had enthusiasm and he had courage. He had the spirit to try to do something which most of his peers would never have risked. As a matter of fact, when you compare him with the older brother, who appears in the second chapter of the story, which we will not be noting this morning,

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that older brother finds himself stuck fast in the status quo and bitterly resents it and yet never does anything to change the situation. Well, that's not so with this younger boy. He has more vigor than that. Let me put it to you this way.

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If you had to choose one of the two brothers, the older or the younger, to spend a week with on a camping trip, which one would you choose? I think most of us would choose the young fellow. His problem, of course, was that he had knowledge without wisdom. And some of the saddest chapters in the human experience have been written out of just such a circumstance.

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Think, for example, of Germany in the 1930s. Here was a nation that had a greater percentage of its young people in college than any other nation in the world. Here was a nation that had a greater percentage of its people being college graduates than any other nation in the world. Here was a nation which, in terms of real numbers, had more Ph.D.s than any other nation in the world.

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Germany was the land of fox and of braum. "Sheep may safely graze, death, death, where is thy sting?" The scriptures set to music. This was the land of Luther, the one who first translated the Bible into the language of his people. And it was also the land of Gutenberg, the man who mastered the printing media and got the word out to the people.

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This is where Goethe wrote his lines. This is where Brunewald painted his pictures. This is the society that produced a man like Albert Schweitzer, who had a Ph.D. in music and in medicine and in philosophy, and laid aside these things and the honor that might have been his to offer his whole life in the service of poor people in the heart of Africa, and offered himself so completely and so utterly that he captured the world's heart and admiration.

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If there ever was a land in which culture and education were at the apex, it was the Germany of the 1930s. And out of that came Hitler and Garibald and Goering and Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Dachau and the blitzkrieg and the final solution and Judenraus and nerve gas and genocide and lampshades made out of human skin. Germany was the heart of education, but Germany had no education for its own heart.

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They called themselves the super race, the super people. They saw themselves as stars. Knowledge they had, wisdom they did not. That sometimes happens to people. That sometimes happens to individual persons. And that's what happened to this prodigal. He thought he knew enough to do whatever was right, and he set himself to the doing of that, and notice this. His father let him go. Let him do it. It takes a tough love to do that kind of thing.

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And three cheers for parents who don't try to lock their children in the room or chain them with their commands, but are bold enough to let them have freedom. These are the parents who love as God loves. Love does not, as demonstrated to us by our father God, mean treating children like puppets, fastened with strings, little marionettes to do our will. Not at all. God's love is a free love. It is a love which allows people to fail.

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God does not raise his children so that they become hothouse pansies ready to be withered by the world's first winter. Not at all. Woodrow Wilson, who was a great Christian and a great president and a great teacher, once said, "It is not the wit that makes men, but the lure of things worthy to be loved." It's very easy to compel, it's very easy to educate, to cram or ram or jam facts, information, into the minds of those in your care.

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But to give wisdom, well that takes patience, and that takes love, and that takes allowing the freedom to fail. God grants that here at the First Presbyterian Church there will always be that kind of love, and that kind of caring, and that kind of openness, and that kind of freedom, and the absence of wits. Instead, let us teach by the lure of things that are worthy to be loved. Let us have room for prodigals of all ages, for those who are keen observers of life but poor interpreters,

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for those who have too much ego and too much education but are as yet blind to the need for wisdom. Let's welcome them, those who have to hurt a bit in order to find out who they really are. That is, of course, what happened to the prodigal. He went off into this far country and lost all of the money that he had. He saw himself as a star, but like most stars, he burned out.

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And he ends up in a pigsty, and he thinks to himself that he was better off in the house of his father. Experience, you see, is now granting him wisdom. And Jesus, the teller of this tale, says that the boy began to come to himself. He recognized the mess he made of things, but tragically, having recognized that mess, he moves into an equal and an opposite error.

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You see, at first he saw himself as a star. Now he sees himself as a clog. First he saw himself as of the heavens. Now he sees himself of the mud. Luther described him as a drunken peasant who climbs up on one side of his horse and falls off the other, then climbs up that side of the horse and falls off the other. You see, at first the prodigal wanted no limits, but now he sees himself as without any potential.

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At first he wanted total freedom, and now he's ready to give up all the freedom he has, for he decides to sell himself into the service of his father, to offer himself as nothing more than a hired hand. At first there was the folly of education without wisdom. Now there's the folly of wisdom without faith. He has no faith in his father, and he has no faith in himself. And there are, of course, many in the 20th century who are like that.

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People who are deeply and fundamentally unsure of themselves, people who lack self-esteem, people who always want to get something or do something because that, they think, will make them be something. People who are deeply dissatisfied, feel inadequate and inferior. This is the root of most of the social maladjustment and psychopathology of our time. Twice during my ten years as a college professor, I conducted an experiment with classes. I told a class in religious philosophy on two different occasions, three years apart, that I would give them no grades or marks throughout the course of the course.

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Now they would hand in their papers and they would take their tests and examinations, and I would grade them and I would tailor my assignments to their particular needs. But I said, "I want you to go after the material in this course, built upon your valuing of that material, the worth of it, and also because you think you can do it." I mean, you're a good enough student to have been admitted to college. I want you to work on the basis of what you understand yourself to be. I don't want you to pursue grades. I don't want you just to go for marks. I just don't want you to seek something beneficial on some kind of academic bell curve.

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I want you to go after the course because it's worthwhile and because you're worthwhile and because you can do it. I thought it was an interesting experiment. Both times I tried it, I had to give it up. The students were unable to endure it. They couldn't tolerate going through a semester without grades and marks and gold stars and strokes. They had to have some kind of feedback to know where they were.

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Now that was very troubling to me. You see, these students have come through an educational process which is largely dominated by behavioristic psychology. Now, the behaviorist is an atheist. He does not believe in God. He also does not believe in man, at least as we understand man. The behaviorist sees man as a kind of machine, and you can make the machine do anything that you want in terms of the responses you give to it. You see an animal trainer with a seal. When the seal does what he's supposed to, they give him a fish.

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When he doesn't do what he's supposed to, they give him some punishment. Now, the behaviorist says you can teach people in exactly the same way that you teach seals. When they do what you want them to do, you give them some reward, and when they don't do that, then you don't give them the reward. You can program them, especially if you start with them as children, you can program them to be exactly what you want them to be simply by your response as part of their environment.

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The behaviorist goes on to say, for example, that there's no such thing as a criminal. A criminal cannot be held accountable for his crime. He is the way he is simply because of the response of his environment. Or they will say there's no reason to applaud a hero, because a hero or a heroine does what he or she does simply because their environment conditioned them to do that. They deserve no particular applause for it.

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There is no such thing, B.F. Skinner, the guru of behaviorism, says, as either freedom or dignity. We are not free, and we have no dignity. We are nothing more than machines that respond to the strokes, to the gold stars, to the grays, to the applause, to the conditioning that we receive. In behaviorism, God is gone, and man is gone, and ethics are gone, and freedom is gone.

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And who is to program those who program all the rest of us? And I saw the fruits of that in my students. They had been taught this way in their schools. They had to have grades. They had to have rewards. They had to have stars.

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You didn't pursue the subject because the subject was worth learning. And you didn't go after the subject because you understood yourself to have a mind and heart and a body that were strong enough to enable you to gain it and master it. You went after it because of the applause you got. And when you didn't get that applause, when you didn't get grades and gold stars and strokes, well, when there was no applause, there could be no learning.

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I found my students to be addicted to the need for that kind of thing. And that's just what we see in the prodigal. The prodigal, you see, now understands himself to be of no worth at all. The only thing that will give him any sense of worth is if he gets a stroke from his father.

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At first he was all ego. Now he's lost all of his ego, and he goes to his father ready to sell himself into slavery just to get a stroke from dad. And out of that stroke, some sense of worth again. May God grant that in this church we do not teach by offering prizes and badges and gold stars,

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that people do not discover their measure or their worth by the amount of applause they receive. But let there be in our fellowship the kind of loving interaction in which people come to a sense of their own worth as the children of God. Let us freely love and respect one another, and let us encourage those to seek after the things of God because of who God is and because of who they are, and not because of any side rewards they might receive.

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The prodigal was willing to be a slave, and there will be some who are willing to come to us and to offer themselves to become nobodies in the kingdom of God. God does not seek nobodies. God seeks somebody. Those who are products of the infinite mind of the Creator.

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That's the reason the father doesn't accept the son's offer of slavery, but instead gives him a robe and a ring and sandals on his feet. He says to his boy, "You're not a star, but you're also not a slave. You're my son." And that's what makes the difference.

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You see, when he gave him the ring, the ring was the family signet. It showed he was part of the family. The robe, and it was the richest robe, was the signal of his abundance, that which was properly his. And sandals were not worn by slaves or servants. So in giving him sandals, he was removing him from that level of life.

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What the father was saying is, "You are my child. Whether you do good deeds or bad deeds, you are my child. Whether you obey me or disobey me, you are my child by the very order of creation." And what is true of the prodigal is true of all of us, you see.

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Whether we sin or not, we're the children of God. Whether we do good or not, we are the children of God. We are not saved by our good work, and we are not saved by our faith, which is nothing other than another good work.

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We are saved by grace. We are saved by the love of God who cares for his children. We have been made by him, and we are his. This is the way Paul describes it, "By the grace of God, I am who I am."

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There's a story which comes out of Indian missions about a little tiger cub who right after he was born, his mother was killed, and he was raised by a herd of goats. And responding to that environment, he became like a goat.

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And one day, a great king tiger walked by, and he saw this cub behaving like a goat, and he said, "What is the meaning of this preposterous masquerade?" And all the little cub could do was stand there and bleat and chew grass.

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And the king tiger took the little cub by the scruff of the neck, and he carried him to a stream, and he forced him to look at his own reflection in the water and to see how his reflection was similar to the reflection of the king tiger.

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And then he said, "You will eat no more grass. You will eat red meat." And he fed him some red meat. And he said, "You will no longer bleat. When you bleat, you will sound like this." And he threw back his great, tawny head, and he shook the forest with a great roar.

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And in that moment, the cub came to understand who he was. And from that time on, according to the story, he followed the king and learned what it meant to be a king. Salvation, my friends, is when we throw aside all the false images of ourselves,

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when we come to recognize that we are not stars, but when we also come to recognize that we are not slaves, that we are, in fact, the sons and daughters of God, not because of our conduct, but because of our conception.

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To come to a recognition of this is what Thomas Merton, the great mystic of the 20th century, calls "to break through to the already." The conversion experience is not the conversion, is not the experience, is not the moment when someone suddenly decides, "God now loves me."

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But the conversion, the experience, the change which is uplifting in life is when you discover that God has always loved you. When you break through to what has always and already been true, and when you understand that, that makes a difference in all of life.

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You handle temptation differently, you handle fear differently, you handle anxiety differently, you handle doubt differently, you handle success and victory and triumph. Every aspect of your life moves into a new perspective.

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Sergei Prokopiev, the great Russian composer, set the parable "The Prodigal Son" to music, a ballet suite. George Balanchine choreographed it. I had the privilege of seeing Mikhail Baryshnikov, the great dancer,

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dance the role of the prodigal. At the end of the ballet, when the prodigal is coming home, he drags himself across the floor, literally, on his knees and his belly. He drags himself across the floor.

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The father comes forth from the house, and he's in very imposing robes, and he stands on a platform so that his height is accentuated. And he doesn't even look at the prodigal. All he does is extend his arm at his waist, as I am now doing.

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Now, when the prodigal gets to the foot of the platform on which the father stands, he reaches up and clutches the ankles of the father and pulls himself up onto the platform. Then he reaches up and grasps the knees of the father

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and pulls himself up to his father's knees. No strength in his own legs or in his own body. Then he reaches higher, and he clutches the robes of the father at the waist, and he pulls himself up to his father's waist.

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And doing all of this, the father never even looks at him. And then, and it takes a dancer as great as Baryshnikov to do this, he grasps his father's waist, and with the strength of his arms, lifts his own body in a kind of vertical bar and folds himself into his father's arms.

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And he cuddles there. And as he cuddles, the father draws him close, and the music comes to an end. It's quite unforgettable. It's also quite untrue.

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Because you see, according to Jesus, the father didn't just stand there. When he saw the boy, he ran to him. And he not only ran to him, but he threw his arms about him, and he gave to him a hoard of hugs and kisses.

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And he gave him a ring and a robe and a sandal. That is, he said to him, "You have status, and there are things for you to do, and responsibilities for you to undertake." And then he cried out, this father, so delighted in the return of his child,

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he cried out, "My child was dead and is alive. He is here. The fullness of life is here. And he can have it, and he can have it abundantly." You see, my friends, beyond ego and education, and beyond wisdom and experience,

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and beyond faith, is love. The love of God. And that is the gospel. And may every teacher teaching in this church teach that gospel.

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A God who loves us no matter what. And may all of us so live in the joy and the power of that gospel, that others might see and believe. Let us pray.

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Our Father, how easily and trippingly that word moves across the tongue. Our Father, and yet there it all is, we come as your children. Forgive us when we act like stars. Forgive us when we're willing to sell ourselves for a clause,

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to offer ourselves into the slavery which is to see ourselves without a theme. Teach us through Jesus Christ our Lord, of the beginning and the unending nature of your love. And in the joy and the power of that, make us whole.

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We pray it in his name. Amen. you