March 15, 2026

Indianola Presbyterian Church

"If you are good enough... So are they"
Sermon by Rev. Trip Porch

March 15, 2026                                                                                                                 Based on Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32 CEB

The same scene has played out in households all over the world throughout all of time.
I know it was the case in my house growing up as a kid... I won’t tell you if it’s currently the case in my house with my kids...
One sibling gets something the other sibling doesn't, and the other one notices immediately. 
It does not matter what it is. 
A slightly bigger piece of cake. 
Five more minutes before bedtime. 
A window seat on a long car ride. 
The moment the perceived inequity registers, the protest arrives: "That's not fair."
The parents laugh about it.
We roll our eyes. But the thing is: we never really outgrow it. The instinct just goes underground. We stop saying it out loud and start keeping score inside. We catalog the injustices. We track who gets the things we don't, and those patterns form our opinions about what people deserve and what they do not.
And then maybe we experience something bigger than sibling rivalry. Where the inequity actually causes harm. Not just a window seat but a situation where someone we love does something that causes real damage. 
Suddenly the question is not just fairness. It is something heavier.
It’s: “Can I still see this person as someone worthy of love? Can I find my way to a version of this relationship that is livable? Can what is broken between us ever be enough?
Jesus knew this territory. He told a story about it. 
And though it’s maybe one of the most famous stories he told… it’s a story that doesn’t wrap up so neatly.
Before we dive in, I think it’s worth taking a moment to explore the context.. 
Jesus is eating with sinners and tax collectors, which is making the religious leaders deeply uncomfortable. 
They are muttering amongst themselves, forming judgments against Jesus. So he tells three parables in a row about things that were lost and then found: a sheep, a coin, a son. Or, as it turns out, two sons. Because the story is really about both of them.
A man has two kids. 
And this story begins when the younger one walks up to his father and asks for his inheritance. 
In that culture, this request carries a brutal weight. Inheritance passed at death. To ask for it early was, in effect, to say: “I wish you were dead, Dad. Give me what I have coming so I can leave this family for good.”
It was not just rude. It was a rupture. 
A deliberately chosen estrangement, with the father still standing right there.
And the father gives it to him.
The younger son goes as far as he can get, 
he lives it up and burns through everything. 
The older English translations tell us he lived “riotously” .
Now he finds himself desperate in this foreign country, so desperate that he ends up feeding pigs to make ends meet. 
For a Jewish audience, there is no lower place. 
He is tending unclean animals, hired by a stranger, 
so hungry he is eyeing the slop in the trough to feed himself.
And then the text says he "came to himself." 
He woke up. 
He thinks “even my father's servants live better than this.” So he heads home, rehearsing a speech the whole way. "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me like one of your hired servants."
He has concluded, somewhere on that road, that he is not good enough to be a son anymore. 
The best he can hope for is not repair of the relationship, but to be useful enough to be tolerated in the same community and space as his family.
Then his father sees him while he is still a long way off. 
The father has been watching the road. 
He runs to him. You can picture the song beginning his apology,
and before the apology is even finished he reaches him and they’re embracing. 
The son gets as far as "I am no longer worthy to be called your son" and the father is already calling for the robe, the ring, the sandals, the feast.
"This son of mine was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found."
Extravagant failure is met with extravagant love. Not because the younger son earned it. Not because the wound he caused was small. But because the father's love is simply not organized with any accounting.
The son came home. That is enough. That is more than enough.
This is the thread running through this whole series…
You can come home. Whatever you have done, whatever wrong path you have taken, you can come home. You are good enough.
If the parable ended here, it would be a beautiful story about the God who runs to meet us, and we would leave feeling warm and held and grateful. But the parable does not end here.
The older son has been out in the field working a long day. He comes toward the house and hears music and dancing. He asks a servant what is going on and is told: your brother is home and your father threw a party.
He refuses to go in.
I’m sure there are those of us who can relate to the younger son, making a wrong choice and still somehow being shown grace and forgiveness
But I think if we sit with the older son too…  we understand him as well. 
Not just as a character in a story, but in our bones.
He has done everything right. He stayed when his brother left. 
He worked every day. He was faithful. 
He did not embarrass anyone. He held the family together while his brother was spending half their father's estate in a distant country. 
And at no point during those years did his father throw a party for him.
"That's not fair."
But more than unfairness, there is a wound here. 
His brother did not just make a bad decision. He chose to abandon his family, abandon his responsibilities. 
He took the money and walked away from all of them, including his older brother. That is a betrayal. 
And now he is back, and the family is supposed to just pick up where they left off? It really isn't fair. 
The older son's anger is not petty. It is the anger of someone who was left behind, who absorbed the costs of someone else's choices, who has been carrying something heavy for a long time and has just been told to put it down and come dance.
He says to his father: "I have been working for you all these years like a servant, and I never disobeyed you, and you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who devoured your wealth… you killed the fatted calf for him."
Notice the language. He does not say "my brother." He says, "this son of yours." 
It’s not just the younger son who has abandoned them
The estrangement runs in both directions. 
The younger son may have left the family. But The older son, in his anger, has left the relationship with his brother too. He has drawn a line and placed his brother on the other side of it.
The father does not dismiss the older son's anger. He does not tell him he is wrong to feel what he feels. He says: "Son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours." 
And then: "We had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found."
Notice what he does there. 
He switches the language back. 
"This son of yours" becomes "this brother of yours." 
He is handing the relationship back. 
He is saying: I know you have put distance between you and him. 
But he is still your brother. That has not changed.
He does not ask the older son to pretend the younger son did not leave. 
He does not ask him to act like the years did not happen or the wound was not real. 
He just keeps insisting that his brother is still his brother. 
Still someone the father loves. Still someone worthy of relationship.
We have been sitting with "good enough" for several weeks now, 
mostly as a truth we receive for ourselves. 
Of course we need the reminder. 
We all need to experience that father running to meet us to tell us everything is okay.
This parable agrees with all of that. But with the older son it turns and asks us a harder question.
If God sees you as good enough, can you also accept that God sees them as good enough too?
Not your sister in the window seat. 
Not the person who was mildly rude to you at the bank last Tuesday. 
The person who actually caused harm. 
The one who left. The one whose choices you absorbed. 
Can you accept that the same father who runs to meet you also runs to meet them to declare they are good enough?
This is where the parable stops being comfortable and starts to issue a challenge. Because the older son's position is not unreasonable. He was wronged. 
The estrangement was real. The betrayal was real. And nothing about the younger son's return erases any of that.
So the question is not whether the harm happened. It did. The question is what we do with the person who caused it now that they are back and standing in the same yard as us. 
How do we live together after harm? Is there a world where that can be good enough?
We say "forgive and forget" as though they are a package deal, but they are not and they probably should not be. 
Forgetting, when real harm has been done, is not wisdom. It is just amnesia. And sometimes the things we remember protect us and the people we love.
But forgiveness is something different from forgetting. 
Forgiveness is the long, slow work of releasing someone from the debt you are owed. 
Not pretending the debt does not exist. Not saying the harm was fine. Just deciding that you are not going to let the unpaid balance define the relationship forever.
The father in this story has not forgotten what the younger son did. "He was dead, he was lost" is not the language of someone who has forgotten. 
It is the language of someone who has been grieving. 
The father knows exactly what happened. He just refuses to let it be the final word.
The older son has not forgotten either. And he should not. But his memory has become a wall. The younger son is on one side of it and the older son is on the other, and the older son is convinced that is the only just arrangement.
What the father is inviting him to is not forgetting. 
It is something more like this: 
Can you be angry and still come in?
Can you hold what happened and still come to the table? 
Can you carry the wound and still share a life with the one who caused it? 
The younger son came home expecting to be a servant. He was not asking for the relationship back. He was not expecting to pick up where they left off. He was asking for something much smaller: just let me be near. Let me be in the house. 
Let me be close enough to be fed.
That is a very honest place to start after a real estrangement. 
Not: pretend it never happened. 
Not: everything is fine now. 
Just: I am here. I am home. 
Can we figure out what this looks like from here?
And the father's welcome, extravagant as it is, does not erase what happened. 
The robe and the ring and the feast are real, but so are the years that are gone. 
So is the wound. So is the work that lies ahead for all of them, including two brothers who have not yet spoken a single word to each other in this story.
We do not know what happens after the party. We do not know if the brothers ever find their way back to something that resembles what they had before. 
They probably do not, when is it ever the same as before?
But maybe what they can find is something that is good enough. 
A version of brotherhood that is wounded and honest and still present. 
A relationship that does not pretend, but also does not give up. 
A way of sharing a life and a table and a father, even with all the awkwardness and grief that comes with it.
Maybe that is what the father is really inviting the older son into when he goes out to him in the yard. Not "everything is fine." Not "forget about it." 
But: come inside. Your brother is home. There is room.
We do not know yet what this is going to look like. 
But come inside and let's find out.
That might be good enough. It might even be holy.
The parable ends without resolution. We never hear the older son's answer. We never see the brothers in the same room. Luke leaves it open, the way the parables tend to do, because the question it is asking does not have a tidy answer.
But here is what we do know. The father went out to both of them. 
He ran to the one who came home with nothing, and he walked out to the one who was standing in the yard with his arms crossed. 
He made room for both of them. 
He kept insisting, to both of them, that there was a place at the table.
I think we can trust our God to be the same for us.
Maybe this week you are carrying something. 
Maybe it is your own sense of unworthiness, the feeling that you have done too much wrong to deserve the welcome you long for. If so, I think the story of the younger son may be for you… May you hear his story telling you:
Come home. The father has been watching the road. You are good enough to be called a child of God, and nothing you have done has changed that.
And maybe this week you are carrying something else. 
A wound that someone caused. A betrayal that still sits heavy. A relationship broken by someone else's choices that has never quite come back together. Maybe the story of the older son has something for you…
The father is not asking you to pretend. He is not asking you to forget. 
He is asking you to consider: Can this broken relationship be good enough? 
Can you share a life with someone who hurt you, 
not as though it did not happen, 
but as someone who is still, when all is said and done, your brother? Your sister? Someone the same God loves?
There is no easy answer for us in this story. No obvious “one size fits all” path to healing and wholeness. The parable leaves us with an open-ended invitation. 
With the father standing in the yard, and the door open behind him, 
with the music still playing inside.
And him telling us
Come inside. Your brother is home. There is room.
May we hear God telling us, broken as we are, “Beloved child you are good enough”

And may follow God’s invitation to come inside.
To accept that other broken people are beloved children too,
That they are our brother, that they are our sister
And try to find  a way to live with a good enough relationship.

Friends, God has left the door is open, for you and for me, 
for everyone…
May we step inside, and join the feast.

PRELUDE                                                          “Ash Grove”                        arr. Philip Keveren

INTROIT                            "O Worship the Lord"                                      Robert McCutchan

WELCOME                                                                    Rev. Trip Porch

One: This is the day that the Lord has made

All: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.  

*CALL TO WORSHIP

One:  We come to this place from different directions.

Many:  Some of us have been on a long road home.

                 Some of us have been holding  the door closed.

One:  We come to a God who does not wait for us to have it all figured out.

Many:  A God who has been watching the road.

               A God who runs out to meet us.

One:  So let us worship the One whose love is wider than our ledgers.

Many:  Whose grace is more stubborn than our grievances.

One:  Let us worship God.

All:  Thanks be to God. Let us worship together. 

*HYMN 753                           “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace”                           PRAYER OF ST. FRANCIS

*PRAYER OF CONFESSION                                                           Robin Murray      

Merciful God, we confess that we have been harder on ourselves than you have ever been. We have rehearsed our failures until they felt like our identity. We have decided we are too far gone, too flawed, too much of a disappointment to deserve the love you keep offering. And we confess that we have been harder on others than you have ever been. We have kept careful accounts of what people owe us. We have let the harm done to us become the whole of how we see the one who caused it. Forgive us, God, for the ways we withhold from ourselves and from others the grace that you give freely. Loosen our grip on our ledgers. Remind us that we are loved, and teach us to love in kind. Amen.

*ASSURANCE OF PARDON                                                          Rev. Trip Porch

*RESPONSE OF PARDON 851 “Come, Bring Your Burdens to God”      Woza Nomthwalo Wakho

*PASSING OF THE PEACE                                                                  

One:   The peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all,

All:      And also with you.

WE LISTEN FOR GOD’S WORD

ANTHEM                                "O Love”                                                           Elaine Hagenberg               

CHILDREN’S MESSAGE                                                                                                                  

PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION                                                                   

SCRIPTURE      Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32  CEB                                                                                 

SERMON 

WE RESPOND TO GOD’S WORD

*HYMN                   “We’re Part of the Blessing”          Text by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette

We're part of the blessing of God's new creation;
The world may not see it, but we know it's true.
For God in Christ Jesus has given salvation;
The old life is gone! God makes everything new!
We're part of the blessing, for we are God's children.
We're loved and forgiven! We're welcomed back home.
And now we are called to be part of God's kingdom,
To welcome the children God claims as his own.

A man had two sons and the younger said to him,
"I want my inheritance now! It is mine!"
His father divided the property with him;
That son spent it all and was soon feeding swine.
But then he remembered his father providing;

He thought he would beg to go home as a slave.
His dad saw him coming as he stood there waiting;
He ran out to greet him and welcome and save.

 We're part of the blessing of God's new creation;

As we have been welcomed, may we share God's grace.
There's no room for grumbling in God's gracious kingdom;
There's no place to question God's loving embrace.
The outcast, the sinner, the poor, struggling mother,
The addict, the seeker, the one who is lost —
God welcomes them home and invites them to dinner
God runs out to greet us through Christ and his cross.

Text: Copyright © 2016 by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette. All rights reserved.

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE  followed by the Lord’s Prayer using debts and debtors.

TIME OF OFFERING   online giving is available at  www. indianolapres.org/give 

OFFERTORY                        “Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart”                arr. Douglas E. Wagner                      

*OFFERTORY RESPONSE  698           “Take, O Take Me as I Am”                              TAKE ME AS I AM

*PRAYER OF DEDICATION 

God of open doors and long roads, we return to you what was already yours. These gifts are our way of saying yes to the invitation you keep extending. Use them to open doors, to go out to people who are standing in the yard, to set tables where everyone has a place. We offer them in gratitude, and in trust. Amen.

*HYMN 754                                “Help Us Accept Each Other”                                                      BARONITA

TIME OF COMMUNITY SHARING 

CHARGE & BENEDICTION

CHORAL RESPONSE        "The Lord Bless You and Keep You"                           James D. Wetzel

POSTLUDE                   “Presto” from Sonata in C Major, Op. 33 No. 3                      Muzio Clementi            

  Acknowledgments: Unless otherwise indicated, all texts and music are printed and broadcast under OneLicense.net license #A-702452