Who here remembers the famous Saturday Night Live skit from the 90s called Wayne’s World? The skit, which later spawned two full length films, starred Mike Meyers as Wayne Campbell and Dana Carvey as Garth Algar. Wayne still lives in his parents’ basement and he and Garth have their own public access show. And somehow they manage to get some really famous celebrities to join them on their show. And then they totally fangirl over the celebrity and bow down to them shouting, “We’re not worthy. We’re not worthy.” It became one of the most well-known lines from the skit and from the movie. Wayne and Garth viewed those celebrities as so much greater than them that they did not feel worthy to be in their presence.

I think that often Christians feel that way about God. We feel unworthy to be in God’s presence. We even see that way back in the ancient stories of Israel. Whenever the Israelites would come into the presence of God, they feared being so unworthy that they would literally die. When they built the temple, the priests were the only ones allowed in the Holy of Holies, the place where God dwelled, because if anyone else went in, they would be deemed unworthy and would die. We don’t worry as much about dying immediately when entering God’s presence today, but we do still worry about being unworthy of God quite often. Out of curiosity, I logged into CCLI’s SongSelect website, which houses the lyrics to thousands of hymns and praise songs used by churches. And I put in the keyword “unworthy” and did a search for lyrics with that word in it. How many songs would you guess there were with that keyword? Now, before I tell you the answer, I also did a search for the term “worthy” just to compare. That search resulted in a lot of songs about God being worthy, which was not the comparison I wanted. So I changed my search to “I am worthy.” The results of that were more interesting. And I also did a search for “we are worthy.” Between the two, I came up with 55 songs. And the songs with unworthy in the lyrics? 570.

Here are the lyrics to just one of those songs (this one is called “Though Unworthy Am I” by Mosie Lister):

Chorus

My heart cries out unworthy

So unworthy am I

Yet today I can sing

I’m a child of the King

For He loves me

Though unworthy am I

Verse 1

I’m unworthy of the price

Jesus paid for me

Unworthy of His blood

Shed on Calvary

Yet His great hand reached down

Into the depths for me

For He loves me

Though unworthy am I

Verse 2

I’m unworthy of the peace

In my heart I can feel

Unworthy of the joy

That I cannot conceal

So unworthy His love

Yet I know it’s real

And He loves me

Though unworthy am I

So, are we unworthy? Of God’s love? Of salvation in Christ?

In our passage for this morning from Luke 15, we see two sons: an older son who does what his father and the society require of him and a younger son who decides he wants to do things his own way. The younger son decides he doesn’t like the normal way things work and he wants to do his own thing, so he goes to his dad and asks for his inheritance early. The father probably could have said no, but he loved his son and wanted to give him a chance. So, he gave the younger son his inheritance and the younger son went and squandered all of it “in dissolute living,” as the text says. It is actually this phrase that lends to this passage often being called the Prodigal Son. The word that the NRSV translates as “dissolute” is a word that could be translated as “prodigal” or “extravagantly wasteful.” The younger son wastes the property his father gives him. And he is left literally wallowing in filth as he finds a job working for a pig farm. But he doesn’t have enough even to eat and considers eating the pig food.

But eventually, he decides that he should return home. He remembers how his father’s servants were treated and realizes that they live better than he is currently living, so he hopes his father might accept him as a servant. And then he says to himself that he will go to his father and say to him, “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 hands.” The Prodigal Son does not feel worthy of his father’s love. It’s probably that unworthy feeling that kept him from attempting to return home sooner. And now that he is going to return home, he feels unworthy to return as the son.

Have you felt unworthy of God’s love? Maybe you sinned and felt like God could never forgive you. Maybe you drifted away from the church and worried about returning cause you felt like you didn’t belong. Maybe you’ve struggled with doubts and don’t feel like God will accept your meager amount of faith. You may resonate with the words of the song I quoted earlier, “My heart cries out unworthy so unworthy am I.” And sometimes those feelings of unworthiness keep us from drawing closer to God. Sometimes those feelings actually push us further from God. Author Brené Brown once wrote, “If we want to be able to move through the difficult disappointments, the hurt feelings, and the heartbreaks that are inevitable in a fully lived life, we can’t equate defeat with being unworthy of love, belonging and joy. If we do, we’ll never show up and try again.” The prodigal son felt himself unworthy because he’d made a huge mistake in his life and it very nearly kept him from returning home.

Sometimes our own guilt and shame from the mistakes we make can feel a strong sense of disappointment and failure. And we feel, not only unworthy, but worthless. We begin to feel that we have nothing to offer anyone…especially God. That was how the Prodigal Son felt about his dad. He felt that he had made himself worthless to his father. And so he was afraid to return home. But an interesting thing happened when he decided to return home anyway. Listen to how the text describes the scene: “So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” Not the response the son was expecting. He came prepared to have to grovel with his father just for a chance to be a servant. But instead, his father hugged and kissed him.

No matter how unworthy we feel, we are always worthy in God’s eyes. No matter how far we stray from God or how much we turn our backs on God and waste the gifts God has given to us, no matter how much we resist coming back to God and choose rather to bury ourselves in the filth and muck, God is always just waiting for the moment we come back within eyesight to run hastily to our side and envelope us in God’s loving embrace. But knowing that and believing that are two different things. And I think that there are two things that keep us from believing that God loves us no matter what.

The first thing is shame. Shame tears us down and makes us believe we are lesser than we are. Brene Brown talks about shame like this: “Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.” It tears us down to the point where we don’t even believe we are capable of change anymore. That’s a really difficult place to be. That’s where I think the Prodigal Son was when he was in the muck by the pigs. He felt so low that he couldn’t see a way out. And that can just shatter our psyche and crush our spirit. Carl Jung described shame as a “soul-eating emotion.” And the Prodigal Son’s soul was being eaten because of the shame he felt. And it threatened to hold him hostage and keep him from the love of home and of his father.

The other thing that keeps us from believing that God loves us no matter what is fear. Fear makes other things greater than they should be. When we fear anything, it is because we have made that thing bigger and more powerful and scarier than it truly is. The Prodigal Son feared his father’s reaction if he were to return. He made the mistake that he had made a bigger thing that it was. And then he couldn’t see how it would even be possible for his father to forgive him and welcome him back in love. When we become afraid of God’s punishment or of hell or some negative consequence to our bad behavior, we make the negative higher than it should be. Paul Coehlo once wrote, “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” Fear lifts up the wrong things too high.

When we combine shame and fear, as the Prodigal Son did, we lift the wrong things up and tear ourselves down. And that just separates us further from God and God’s love. So, this morning, let’s consider what shame and fear may be keeping us away from God in some way. And let’s release it. Let’s let it go and return to the arms of the God who loves us and is ready to embrace us in his loving arms of peace. Are we worthy of that love? No, but also yes. We did not earn it, but we are worthy of it because of Jesus. So let’s face each day with renewed energy and hope, and try our best at all that we do. And let us realize that we have been the Prodigal and received grace upon grace, but God may be calling us as a church to be more like the father and to embrace the wayward children who come among us and simply love them as the father loved his son, love them as God has loved each of us, unconditionally and because we are worthy in his eyes. Thanks be to God! Amen!