Worship on the Fourteenth of Pentecost & Presbyterians Sharing Sunday
10:00 am September 14, 2025
Minister: The Rev. Brad Childs Music Director: Binu Kapadia
Vocalist: Lynn Vaughan Welcoming Elder: Sam Malayang
Children’s time: Brad Reader: Iris Routledge
We gather to worship God
Music prelude
Greeting
L: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you
P: and also with you
Lighting of the Christ candle
Welcome and announcements
Preparation for worship
Call to worship:
L: O God, you have searched us and known us.
P: You know when we sit down and when we rise up.
L: You discern our thoughts from far away.
P: Before a word is on our tongues, Lord, you know it completely.
L: Such knowledge is too wonderful for us, and so we humble ourselves in worship.
P: In this hour, search us and know our hearts, O God, and lead us in the way everlasting.
Opening praise: Come, now is the time to worship
Prayers of approach and confession
Storytelling God, we gather in your presence this day, called by the stories of your people over the centuries.
You are the source of wisdom we seek,
Your mercy eases the troubles that stir our hearts.
And we come to praise you, for your stories have the power to challenge us and change us.
Draw near to us as we draw near to you this day.
Tell us the stories that will change our lives, through the grace of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.
We gather in Jesus’ name to hear the stories he told, to gain wisdom and to know your Spirit’s guidance.
Yet we confess that pride prevents us from hearing the good news and that we resist the power of your Word to change us.
Forgive what we have been, help us amend who we are and set us free to be who you have called us to be.
Response: Glory, glory hallelujah
Assurance of God’s grace
The Apostle Paul asked, “Who is in a position to condemn? Only Christ – and Christ died for us; Christ rose for us, Christ reigns in power for us, Christ prays for us.” Friends, believe the good news of the gospel. In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven and set free by God’s most generous grace.
We listen for the voice of God
Song: Jesus we are gathered (514)
Children’s time
The Lord’s Prayer (535)
Song: Tell me the stories of Jesus (348)
Scripture readings: 1 Timothy 1:12-17 & Luke 15:1-10
Response: Behold the lamb of God
Message: “Older and Younger Brother”
Jesus tells this story: he says that “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? 5 And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders 6 and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbours together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’
Parables are interesting. When I was a kid, my Sunday School teacher told me that Jesus told stories to make things easy for people to understand. Unfortunately, my Sunday School teacher was wrong. The word we translate as “parable” can also be translated as “dark sayings” as it is in the Psalms or as “riddle” as it is in Ezekiel. In fact, when Jesus’ own disciples ask him directly why he speaks in parables, he answers, “Therefore I speak them in parables: because though seeing they do not see and though hearing they do not understand.” (Matt. 13:10) In short, Jesus doesn’t say “I tell parables because they are easy to understand”. He says just the opposite. He says, “I tell parables… because they confuse people”. Instead of easy answers that people can take and be on their merry way, Jesus tells stories that make people dig and question. He tells parables because they make disciples (students) who want to learn. The same is true for us today. Parables are still odd. If you read them closely, they will hit you the wrong way. They are full of oddities and exaggerations that don’t make any sense. Take the parable of the lost sheep. It seems crazy. Why would anybody leave 99 sheep behind to go chase after just one, and then throw a big party when he finds it? No one right?
Jesus then tells a second story. He says, 8 “Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins[a] and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? 9 And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbours together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’” Again, this story seems odd. Who on earth would go searching the house for a single coin and then, when she finds one, spend a whole bunch of money throwing a party for her neighbours to celebrate a single coin? Again, no one is right?
Finally, Jesus tells this third story. In this one, a son leaves his father, goes out and parties all his money away. Then the son sees the error of his ways and comes running home to his father. In the story, the Father takes back his son. He runs to him, puts a robe on him and a ring on his finger, kills the fatted calf, and invites all the neighbours over. Again, he throws a party. But the older brother is angry. He’s been faithful. He’s been good. And so, he complains just as the Pharisees did about welcoming a sinner to a meal. But the loving father says, “‘My son, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’” And in the end, we all see the error and selfishness of the older brother and the great love of the father. Who wouldn’t celebrate the return of a wayward child, right? We all would!
But there’s the rub. See, we’ve got it all wrong. That’s what parables do. If you want an easy answer, you can have one. It will just be the wrong one. However, hearing you won’t hear. But if you dig a bit… you’ll find much more.
Unfortunately, we are so far removed from the culture of the first-century Jewish storyteller that we answer all three of these questions incorrectly. We wouldn’t leave the 99. We wouldn’t spend a fortune celebrating our finding one simple coin. We would invite the son home. The original audience would completely disagree with us.
When we hear that the shepherd leaves the 99 behind to seek the one lost one, it seems ridiculous. When Jesus says, “Which one of you wouldn’t leave the 99?”. We’re tempted to say. “I wouldn’t”. But the original audience would have taken it as a given. They would say, “Of course I’d go after the lost one”.
The second story is the same. When we hear that this woman would spend a bunch of money celebrating the recovery of one small coin, we think it sounds nuts. When Jesus asks, “Who wouldn’t throw a party to celebrate finding one lost coin?” Again, we think, “I wouldn’t”. But the original audience wouldn’t have seen it that way. You see, when a Jewish woman got engaged, she would often be given a set of 10 coins, much in the same way women today are given an engagement ring. Basically, what’s happening here is like a women losing one of many small diamonds from her engagement ring. And so the actual value of the coin doesn’t really matter. The coin has sentimental value. She’s so happy to have found it that she’s more than willing to throw a party and celebrate. It’s not the coin that matters… It’s the meaning behind it.
And the third story is again the same. When Jesus presents a man who’s glad to have his son back and essentially asks, “Who wouldn’t throw a party after his wayward son comes home?” we say… “Of course, we would celebrate”. But again, that’s not how Jesus’ first audience would have seen this either.
You see in the story, the younger son comes to the father and asks for his meros or allotment. Quite literally, what he is asking for is for his inheritance… … … Now, refresh my memory for a second. When exactly does a son get his inheritance from his father? … … … He gets his inheritance… when his Father is dead. What’s happened here is the younger son goes to his father and says, “I wish you were dead”, “Give me my money so I can leave and never see you again.” What he does is the ultimate insult. But it gets worse. See, at the time, there were two main ways of distributing an inheritance. 1) The first is this: the oldest son (the firstborn) would get the entire inheritance and then be charged as the new head of the household. 2) The second way it could be done would be like this: First, the oldest son would be given 50% of everything. Then the next youngest son would receive 50% of what’s left, followed by the next 50% of that, and so on, until it was all gone. In other words, in the best-case scenario here, the younger brother tells his father he wishes he were dead and then steals his older brother’s rightful portion of the inheritance and runs away with it. Next, the boy squanders his whole (scratch that, his father’s / brother’s) inheritance away… and in the end, this Jewish boy ends up dreaming about eating slop along with pigs (an unclean animal the boy isn’t supposed to be near).
It is at this point, in utter disgrace, the son goes home with his tail between his legs. And that’s when Jesus’ story makes its wildest turn.
See certain aspects of this story are important to note.
1) Jewish men… respectable men did not run. They would never be seen running. Running was for children at play. Men didn’t run. Poor men didn’t run. Rich men certainly didn’t run. Rich heads of households… definitely didn’t run. It was considered undignified. I once had a professor who said that this would be like seeing the CEO of a Fortune 500 company pick his nose and eat it at a shareholders’ meeting. It’s disgraceful. Original listeners to this story would have found it gross.
2) A robe signified a high social standing. Basically, a nice robe was looked at much like a car. Having a nice robe was as luxurious as owning a new S-Class Mercedes-Benz.
3) A ring (or sometimes a staff) was used to identify a person as a member of a particular family. If someone ran out of money or goods to trade with along a journey – but they had a recognizable family ring, they would be allowed to make purchases on a promise for a later payment. In other words, a family ring was like a first century Jewish credit card.
But Jesus says this son tells his father that he wishes he were dead. He steals from his brothers’ inheritance. He squanders his money away in debauchery, and he longs to eat with the pigs. And when he comes home… his father, “when the boy was still a long way off,” runs to his son, puts the workers to bring him a nice new Mercedes-Benz, and hands him a new credit card with no limit. And then he throws him a party.
When we hear today that the young son comes back and that the older brother complains, we’re tempted to see the older brother as the bad guy and the father as an example. But that’s not the way the original audience saw it. The original listeners would have seen the older brother complaining about his sinful brother being invited to the table as a righteous hero and the father as the butt of a bad joke.
When we hear these three stories, we tend to think: No, I wouldn’t chase after one lost sheep, No, I wouldn’t spend a bunch of money to celebrate finding a single coin, and Yes, I would have a party if my wayward son came home.
But Jesus’ audience would have answered every one of those differently. Yes, they would have gone after the lost sheep, yes, they would have celebrated the lost coin, and no, they would not have ever taken the sinful son back.
But that’s actually the whole point. Jesus isn’t telling three parables. He’s actually telling just one parable. They were never meant to be read separately as the lectionary had them done this morning. They are really just one story: as one theologian has called it, “The Story of the Three Losts”.
Remember, this whole thing (these three losts stories) are all a part of a response to the same statement. Verse 15 says, “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. 2 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” In response, Jesus tells this “dark saying” about three lost items: A sheep, a coin and a person.
Now, the Pharisees were the good guys. Today, we think of them as those bad people that Jesus was constantly correcting. But in reality, they were the most loved and respected religious leaders of their day; the example to everyone else. They were thought of as heroes. And even though there were official priests, the people sought the advice of the Pharisees most often instead. They were “the pious ones”. In short, they are the older brother (the good ones, the rule followers). But when they looked at Jesus and asked, “Why do you hang out with those people?” they crossed the line. And in response, Jesus points out the ultimate irony; Jesus says, “You people are the sinners. You care about things (like sheep) and you care about (status) and money (that are basically worthless), and when you find them you celebrate… … … but you don’t care about the one thing that really matters… the one thing you should care about… You don’t really care about people.
As Francis Schaeffer noted, “There is nothing more ugly than an orthodoxy without compassion”.
It’s easy to think about the parables as nice little stories with a nice little lesson. But they are not. They are hard to take. They are “dark sayings” with great depth. And if we let them, they will challenge us.
Author Craig Blomberg teaches that to understand the parables, you have to answer a straightforward question: Who am I in the story? But generally, I think the answer is always the same: “pretty much all of them”.
Sometimes I feel like the lost sheep, living my life on my own. Sometimes I’m the woman who lost something precious, who is desperately searching for that thing with deep meaning in my life. Sometimes I’m one of the 99 safely sitting in the fold. Sometimes I feel like the younger brother out squandering my life away. But maybe Blomberg is missing something. Maybe who we are in the story is a lot less important than who God is in the story and who we want to be?
More often than I care to admit, I’m more like the complaining older brother, usually righteous but ultimately wrong. But who God is – is who I want to be. I want to be the loving Father, the one who, instead of judging the sins of others or reliving the past, moves beyond it in order to celebrate the return of the lost.
So now the only question is: Who do you want to be? -Amen
Song: God forgave my sin/Freely, freely (774)
We respond to serve God
Our time of giving
Prayers of thanksgiving and intercession
Ever seeking God, we come before you in prayer, for you have sought us out and claimed us as your own.
Thank you for showing us how we are precious to you through the life and love of Jesus Christ.
In our prayers we name before you other precious souls and situations.
With your Spirit, seek them out.
God of mercy, draw near to all who need you.
We pray for those who feel lost in life:
those who are frightened or anxious,
those who are struggling with addiction or mental illness,
and those who are lonely or despairing:
(Silent pause for 10 seconds)
May your reassurance and comfort find them.
God of mercy, Draw near to all who need you.
We pray for those who have wandered away:
for those separated from their families by conflict or distance,
for those whose relationship with the church is broken or forgotten,
and for those who have given up on the future in despair.
(Silent pause for 10 seconds)
May your healing and mercy find them.
God of mercy, Draw near to all who need you.
We pray for those who feel forgotten:
for those who think that they are worthless or unloved,
for those who believe that their sins are too great to forgive,
and for those who are convinced that not even God can love them.
(Silent pause for 10 seconds)
May your love and grace find them.
God of mercy, Draw near to all who need you.
Ever watchful God, you keep seeking out wandering sheep and lost coins, lives of all who are precious to you.
Thank you for your attentive love and your patient compassion for us all.
May we rejoice with you when any lost soul is embraced, and never substitute our judgment of them for yours.
Make us servants of the mercy we meet in Jesus Christ. Amen.
Song: Immortal, invisible, God only wise (290)
Sending out with God’s blessing
Go in joy, knowing God rejoices over you;
and care for others, knowing God rejoices over them, too!
And may the blessing of the God who made us,
the Christ who mends us,
and the Spirit who gives us life
be with you now and always. Amen.
Response: Go forth into the world
Music postlude
Brad’s Notes: I love the parable of the Prodigal Son. It has been a favourite of Christians for untold years. But with that said, this parable doesn’t really belong to us (at least not anymore). This parable isn’t really ours. It used to be, but I’m beginning to believe that it was written for someone else.
Here is how it all went down:
The Pharisees come to meet this newly famous Rabbi called (Yeshua or Joshua in English). Yes. Jesus’ name is Joshua. The Greeks would pronounce it Iesous (Jesus in English). Immediately, the Pharisees discuss what they find out about this man. They narrow in on one thing. They complain, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them”. How, after all, could Jesus be any sort of Holy-Man or a teacher at all, if he shared meals with “unholy” non-Jewish people? In response, Jesus told the Pharisees three confusing stories. And like all parables (a word also translated as Riddles and “dark sayings”) these stories are a little confusing. If the parables of Jesus confuse you a bit, then you get it. They are supposed to be challenging to understand. But why?
Jesus tells three short stories, but they are actually just one story with one central point.
The first story Jesus told is known as The Parable of the Lost Sheep.
I bet most of us have heard this story. In it, a shepherd loses one sheep out of a hundred and then Jesus asks the crowd a question. He asks, “Which one of you wouldn’t leave behind the 99 and search for the lost 1?”.
Now, of course, the Shepherd is supposed to represent God the Father and Jesus himself, the 99 sheep doing what they are supposed to do are supposed to represent the Pharisees who accuse Jesus of fraternizing with sinful people. And the lost sheep is supposed to represent the so-called “sinners” Jesus has been accused of eating with. The whole story is supposed to let the Pharisees know that God accepts the lost; He seeks after the lost. But there is a problem. The crowd would have hated this story and found it wildly offensive.
Now, there is obviously some tradition of speaking of God as a shepherd in the Hebrew Scriptures, but it was generally taken with a kind of grain of salt. Psalm 23, for example, wasn’t particularly popular in the Jewish tradition because people also thought of shepherds as being very lowly and dirty. It’s also worth noting that David, a shepherd, wrote it, which likely made him less bothered by the image. But for most people at the time, the entire idea that God is like a shepherd would be at least a little insulting. In Jesus’ day, shepherds were outcasts of sorts. They were scorned in part because they smelled like stinky sheep. Now, I grew up around a couple of shepherds and remember visiting my friend Mike in grade school when they were shearing the sheep. Have you ever smelled wet sheep? I promise you not one person here would ever mistake the aroma of damp sheep for a bouquet of roses. Shepherds smelled like sheep, and remember, they didn’t go home at night to bathe. They basically lived in the pastures with the animals. David got the job in his family precisely because he was the youngest. It was the worst job in the family.
Shepherds were also seen as rootless wanderers. Sheep left to themselves will eat all the food in one location, including the roots (until there is absolutely nothing left but a wasteland). Other animals will also do this, but unlike cattle, the sheep will still stay on barren land and basically starve to death, unless someone or something makes them move on to greener pastures. Thus, the shepherds had few roots and often encroached upon other people’s lands. This made shepherds untrustworthy. In Jesus’ day, Shepherds were so untrusted that they were not even legally allowed to testify in court cases. They couldn’t swear legal oaths either or vouch for someone’s good character. People didn’t trust shepherds. And here, when people accuse Jesus of hanging out with unclean people. He responds by telling a story where the character standing in for God is a shepherd (someone thought of as impure), and the Pharisees are described as being a bunch of dumb sheep, and the so-called “sinners” are just another dumb sheep just like them. But Jesus has asked a question, what shepherd wouldn’t leave the 99 in safety to go after the one lost sheep – something they would do all the time? And the answer is, everyone would.
But Jesus isn’t done. Right away, he moves seamlessly into another story, almost exactly like the first one. In this one, he describes God as a woman who’s lost a vital coin (probably one that was a part of an engagement bracelet). Jesus did this more than once. And while that may not be a big deal to us, I’m sure the Pharisees loved this! Remember, at the time, women were not even considered a part of the people of Israel (the covenant people) unless they were married to a circumcised (covenanted) male or were still living under their circumcised (covenanted) father’s household.
In this story, God is a woman, the Pharisees are a bunch of coins, and the so-called sinners Jesus eats with are coins just like them.
I think it’s important to note that: You might think of this like a woman’s engagement ring, and one of the diamonds has fallen out. And so again the answer to Jesus’ question, who among you wouldn’t scour the house to find it and then have a party to celebrate finding it, comes with a simple answer. Just like with the sheep that everyone would go look for, Everyone would search the house for the lost wedding coin and celebrate finding it.
And this is where Jesus moves on to the reading from today. This is easily the most well-known of Jesus’ three responses to the Pharisees’ challenge. In this one, God is described as being a wealthy landowner. “Ah, finally,” the Pharisees would think, “now he is starting to make sense”. Here, Jesus uses the most typical rabbinic form of analogy for God (a wealthy upstanding Jew, like them), amazing how that works. Finally, the red-hot anger of the Pharisees would subside. Finally, he was talking like a respectable teacher.
But he wasn’t. In this story, the wealthy Jewish Patriarch acts about as undignified as a Jewish man ever possibly could.
His younger son, who has no right to do so, basically tells his father that he wishes he were dead so that he can get an inheritance. Then the boy receives this inheritance before his father’s death, which would never have happened even if the father were a massive pushover. In any typical Jewish home of the time, the boy would have more likely been “cut off” from his inheritance altogether and just as likely would have been beaten by the father’s workmen for the insult. But that doesn’t happen.
Then the boy immediately sells off his inheritance for cash (dividing his family’s land), runs away to live like the Gentiles (the very people the Pharisees accuse Jesus of eating with). The boy quickly wastes all of his money away on “wild living” and prostitutes in a Gentile land, loses everything and ends up wishing for the animal feed his new Gentile masters have him feeding to the pigs he is now caring for, even though they are unclean animals he’s not actually allowed even to touch.
The boy is a terrible son, wished his father dead, wasted his money, degraded himself and wants to go home.
The boy returns home, himself barely a Jew at all in the minds of the audience hearing the story, in the hopes that he can apologize and spend the rest of his days as an outcast servant in his father’s household.
But before he can even apologize, his father runs up to him (something Jewish men, especially respected Jewish men, do not do – children run). He then puts a new robe on his child, new sandals on his feet, and places a new ring on his finger, (essentially giving him a brand new credit card and a new car). He also throws a big party for him and eats with him, just like Jesus was accused of doing with sinners.
Now, at this point, what happens? The older brother shows up, making a big stink in front of all the guests, and insults the father for taking the younger brother back and sharing a meal with him. And the story ends with the little brother (the prodigal) back in the fold and restored to the family, eating with the father and with the older brother on the outside looking in.
Everyone is foolishly celebrating the return of this lost son – which they would never do.
But I bet that is when it really hit the Pharisees that Jesus is saying they are acting like the jaded older brother.
The religious leaders of the time came to Jesus and accused him of disrespecting God by eating with sinners. And in response, Jesus tells three stories whereby God looks nothing like the Pharisees ever would have imagined him. He tells three stories about three lost things being found and celebrated. He tells three stories where the Pharisees are represented by dumb sheep, a bunch of coins that didn’t happen to fall off the bracelet and a disrespectful, unloving child who believed he should be able to decide who God invites to eat at his table.
And with that, we all sort of cheer, don’t we?
The stories say, Hey, you would celebrate the return of the sheep. You would celebrate the return of a coin. But you would never celebrate the return of a person lost who made mistakes.
You care about animals and money but not people.
With this, we say, “Amen”. Amen. What is wrong with these pious people?
We like to see the Pharisees get what’s coming to them. And we like it, because when Jesus told these three stories, we were the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son. We were the people Jesus had just invited to the table. We were not the fine upstanding, righteous Jews. We were the people the Pharisees didn’t want around. I wasn’t born to a Jewish family. You probably weren’t either. We are the good guys in the story. It’s meant to show the Pharasees that we also belong at the table with the King.
But there’s a problem.
There have been two thousand years between the time Jesus told this story and the time we read it this morning.
The Word of God is a living thing, not bound by the constraints of its original audience. Jesus had his audience, and the story meant one thing to them. When Luke wrote it down, he too had an audience, and it meant something slightly different to them. We, today, here and now, are yet another audience, and it means something a little different to us as well.
I was once told that anytime we read a parable, we need to ask ourselves who we are in the parable.
Well, for the last 2000 years, the Church has been pretty clear that we, the non-Jews, God has invited to worship the Jewish Messiah, the ones God opened the doors to and asked to His table, that we are the lost sheep, coin and child. And we have loved that.
But what was once the outcast is now the norm. Who has become the outsider we don’t want at the table?
A monumental shift has taken place. Somewhere in the last 2000 years, we transitioned from being the newly invited guests at the table to becoming the older brother trying to dictate who God will offer His meal to.
Now, in the story, Jesus never defends the actions of the “sinners” he eats with. In fact, the younger son is clearly a “sinner”. And yet he invites him in anyway. He doesn’t approve of everything he does, I’m sure, but he does love him. In fact, the Father loves him so much that he acts completely undignified at the very thought of having him back. He would do anything.
I suspect that each one of us will answer this differently, and yet I think we all need to ask it.
See… If we are now the Older Brother… If we have taken on the role of the Pharisees, then who is the younger brother… who’s the “sinner” we try to stop from coming to the table?
I’m not sure exactly who all the “younger brothers” are out there. But I can promise you this. This parable isn’t really ours anymore, whoever the “younger brothers” are… It’s theirs now. It was written for them.
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Numbers in brackets after a song/hymn indicate that it is from the 1997 Book of Praise of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Those and other songs are being used in accordance with the specifications of Dayspring’s licensing with One License (3095377) and CLC (A735555).
The Rev. Brad Childs retains the copyright (© 2025) on all original material in this service. As far as Brad Childs is aware, all of the material that has not been attributed to others is his own creation or is in the public domain. Unacknowledged use of copyrighted material is unintentional and will be corrected immediately upon notification being received.
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