Preaching the Same Parable Three Times and Finally Getting It

Someone should have taken me aside.

I don’t remember why, but in one year as a student pastor (essentially a seminary intern) at the Trinity Christian Reformed Church in Iowa City, Iowa, I had already preached the parable of the prodigal son twice. A seasoned mentor might have gently but firmly said that we had covered this particular parable and perhaps it was time to look at another. No one did.

So, at a Sunday evening service in the spring of 1978, I stood at the pulpit and looked out at a congregation that included a surprisingly large number of university faculty members, among them a psychiatrist named Ming Tsuang who always sat in the front row and would jokingly refer to himself as “Ming van der Zuang” to fit in with what was a largely Dutch congregation.

I opened my Bible to Luke 15.

This time, having covered the younger brother and father in previous attempts, I preached the older brother.

The younger son memorably takes his inheritance early, squanders it in a distant country, and comes home rehearsing his apology on the way. There is the father who sees the younger son coming from a long way off and runs toward him.

And then, there is the older son — the one who stayed. Who worked. Who kept every rule and met every expectation and never once caused his father a moment’s worry. Who stood outside when the party started and refused to go in.

I knew this parable. I knew its theological contours. I could even conjugate the Greek verbs and explain what the father’s running would have meant in first-century Palestine. What I had never done was look at the older brother and recognize myself in him.

That evening, somewhere in the middle of the sermon, I did.

I’m no longer sure what I said in the moments before the tears came. I know that I was describing the older brother when something in the text reached across the centuries and convicted me. I had spent twenty-four years playing by the rules — mostly. I had done everything that was expected of me — again, mostly. And yet, none of that had ever left me feeling loved unconditionally.

And here was this congregation, watching their young student pastor dissolve into tears, and they were not embarrassed. They were not alarmed. I noticed that Ming Tsuang looked up and appeared concerned, maybe wondering if he might have to provide care. The rest of the congregation simply waited. And in their waiting I felt, for the first time in my life, something I could not yet name.

I had been invited to join the party. And I realized, at last, that I wanted to go in.

The next morning, I sat in the office of my supervisor, Bill Nibbelink. Bill was a professor at the University of Iowa who had been appointed to look after me after the senior pastor had departed for Colorado and, reportedly, the ski slopes. Bill had grown up in the same Dutch Reformed tradition I had — the same theology, the same formation, the same rigid instinct for doing things right — where mistake-free living is often confused with righteousness.

But Bill had done something with all of that which I had not yet managed. He had transcended it without escaping it. He saw the humor in it and loved the richness of it, and he seemed, inexplicably, to believe in me.

I knew this because he had written in my mid-year evaluation that my preaching was, and I am quoting directly, “pitiful.” That word. I have never forgotten it. But somehow his honesty made me trust him more, not less. A man who would write that would also tell me the truth about everything else.

That Monday morning, he looked at me and said simply: “Tell me what happened.”

And so, I told him. About the older brother. About the rules I had kept and the acceptance I had never felt. About the congregation waiting in silence while their student pastor wept in the pulpit. About the party, and the invitation, and the moment I realized I wanted to go in.

Bill listened. And then he helped me find the word for what had happened to me on that Sunday evening in Iowa City.

The word was grace.

I have thought about that Sunday evening many times in the forty-plus years since. I have thought about the older brother, standing outside, and what it cost him to stay there. I have thought about the congregation who had shown up on a Sunday evening to hear a twenty-four-year-old student pastor preach a parable he had already preached twice. They listened. They waited. They loved him anyway.

In the years since I have thought a lot about grace — not the theology of it, which I had known for years, but the feeling of it. The discovery that I was accepted, not because I kept the rules, mostly, but simply because I had been invited. Because the father was already running toward me from a long way off.

That evening in Iowa City I became, as I see it now, a human being. Aware that I needed as much as anyone what I had been trying to proclaim.

I will always be grateful.

Note: I recently learned that Ming Tsuang went on to become one of the most distinguished psychiatrists of his generation, spending decades at Harvard before moving to UCSD. He had over 800 publications on schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, substance use disorders, and other related mental illnesses. He died on March 18, 2026, at the age of 94, still devoted, according to his obituary, to his faith and active in his church.