Prodigal

Hooray for break!  I had a great time in Des Moines with my lovely friends this past week!  I also had a chance to go to church at Walnut Hills UMC with Sarah.  (Thanks for getting up after a late night so we could go, friend!)  One of the reasons I miss my church in Des Moines is Pastor Doug. I think everytime I hear his sermons I'm challenged to  look at myself/faith/life/the Bible/etc. from a new perspective.  I'm not saying his sermons are crazy or out there, but that man has a gift for uncovering new insights in well-worn, taken-for-granted stories.  For instance, this past Sunday, he talked about the story of the Prodigal Son from Luke 15--a very normal thing to do durng Lent.
Perhaps the reason this sermon seemed like it came out of nowhere was because I had never bothered to learn what "prodigal" meant. (aka, I'm the ignorant one.  I'm sure the rest of you mastered this one a long time ago.)  I spent the previous 26 years believing that "prodigal" had more to do with desertion and delinquency than anything else.  Apparently, I was very wrong.  So much for learning words through context; this one fooled me.  "Prodigal" means overly extravagant or wasteful.  (If I'd have bothered to read the commetator's text notes in my Bible, I would have discovered this, too.)  This "new" definition certainly makes sense within the context of the story, but wow if I'd know this earlier, I would have understood this parable more clearly a lot earlier.
Doug's main point was that while the son's wastefulness is often our focus, there's someone else in the story who is even more prodigal: the father.  The father welcomes his son back unconditionally in spite of conventional wisdom, in spite of prudence and logic, in spite of the fact that he had a loyal son who had done everything right to measure his prodigal son against.  There was no probation period in which the son had to prove he 'really meant it'; instead, the father threw a big party right away.  A big party  for a wasteful, previously-unfilial, irresponsible son seems like a prodigal sort of thing to do when I think about it.  Why waste time, money, resources, love, and effort on someone who hasn't shown them to you, right?  That's not very wise or practical. 
That was Doug's point.  God and the Kingdom of God defy human wisdom.  God's love is not prudent; it is prodigal.  It is extravagant and wasteful, and God "wastes" his love on a bunch of people who will never deserve it--us.  But God does it anyway because God's love doesn't work according to our ideas of merit.  (Lucky us.) 
I re-read the passage a few days later because I was still thinking about this sermon.  You know, the first part of Luke 15 contains the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin.  All three of these parables are formulaic.  Someone has several____.  He/she loses one ____.  Leaving all the other _____, he/she searches for the lost ___ (except in the "prodigal" story).  When he/she finds the lost _____, he/she gets all his/her friends together and throws a big party. 
Okay, I'm going to come clean here, friends.  I feel for the filial brother. I feel for the 99 sheep the shepherd leaves alone so he can go find his lost sheep.  I resent Luke 15: 7, "Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance."  This is great if you're the "lost" one, but IT IS SO HARD to be okay with when you're one of the ones who isn't "lost".  See the problem is that I'm both, right?  I'm always lost because I'm a sinner.  (I guess this is the good news....)  Yet, as a Christian, if I'm trying to do what I'm 'supposed to' it's hard to not resent that even though I'm supposed to "keep up the good work" that this whole 'doing the right thing' situation isn't merit-based.  I'm not very good at this unconditional Kingdom of God love at all.  It's a lot easier to judge and compare, isn't it?  How come it's easier to resent this sort of love than recognize how very, very fortunate I am?