Forgive Us Our Trespasses

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, March 30, 2025
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Last week, I got to attend my daughter’s first experience with the New York State School Music Association Contest (many of you know this as NYSSMA).  If you are unfamiliar, this is a music contest where you prepare a solo piece as well as sight-read and demonstrate some technical proficiency, and a judge gives you written feedback as well as a score from 0-10.  Erin played the snare drum, and then I accompanied her vocal solo, “Edelweiss” from the Sound of Music.  She worked hard, practicing daily for about a month, maybe more.  Her band director tried to reassure her – “I’ve never had a student get a 0,” he told his students.  But she came home and said, “What if I am the first student to get a 0?”  She was pretty nervous.  We kept reassuring her that this was supposed to be a positive experience to help her improve musically, and if it wasn’t fun, we wouldn’t need to do it again next year.  We are still waiting for the written results!  Standing in front of a judge knowing we’ll be given a score is intimidating!
Many of us have been there before, haven’t we – whether it’s taking a test in school, competing in a race for the best time or in a dance or gymnastic competition where we want a good score – the pressure of being judged can be nerve-wracking.  Even as adults, we may get nervous when it’s time for our annual review with our boss, or even for our regular physical checkup in the doctor’s office.  In many aspects of our lives, we operate as if we are living in a game of winners and losers, “keeping score.”  We judge others and even ourselves harshly.  If we apply this way of the world to our relationship with God, then we are constantly wondering if we are measuring up.  “I’m a good person,” we might say to ourselves.  But all of us also at some time or another wonder, “Am I good enough?”  Am I a good enough parent, spouse, citizen, human being?  We compare ourselves to others – is my car, my house, my clothes as nice as my neighbor’s?  “Thank God I’m not like that guy,” we might think to ourselves.  Living by the normal way of the world, much of our lives is in “evaluation” or scorekeeping mode.
As we turn to our gospel for today, we have this familiar story of the “prodigal” son.  Actually, this story is about two sons and their relationship to their father.  BOTH sons are living in this kind of competitive, judgmental world.  The younger son makes sure to get his inheritance early to get “his fair share.”  When he completely blows it all with bad decisions, he knows he doesn’t even deserve for his father to still claim him as his son.  Maybe he can go back and work as a hired hand?  The extravagant welcome and hospitality of his father, no questions asked, completely catches him off guard – his dad is not operating in his world of evaluation.
The older son is also keeping score.  We can sense years of built-up resentment in his conversation with his father – “ALL these years I have been working like a slave for you,” and what have I gotten for all my hard work? he complains.  His jealousy and sense of “fairness” keeps him from rejoicing with his father that his younger brother has returned home.  He doesn’t even claim him as his brother – “that son of yours,” he growls to his father.  He can’t understand that the love of a parent is not a scorecard, or that both he and his brother could both be “winners,” deserving or undeserving, of their father’s love.  He is the definition of a “party pooper.”
Notice that Jesus tells this parable when the “good” religiously upright people, the Pharisees and the scribes, grumble that Jesus is welcoming sinners and tax collectors and eating with them.  They, too, are keeping score.  Jesus is not being fair.  Jesus is being TOO generous and gracious.  Why does he seem to be paying more attention to the bad people than to good people like them?  Like the older son, they are resentful, unforgiving, and thus joyless.  They not only reject the possibility that God could love “those sinners,” they reject God’s love for themselves, choosing to stand outside Jesus’ invitation to his table, to accept that God actually loves them deeply and unconditionally, too.
Jesus tells us this parable to teach us that God operates differently from the ways of the world.  Like healthy human parents in a loving relationship with their children no matter what, God is not keeping score.  This parable is called the prodigal son.  There’s a $5 word for you that we don’t use often – “prodigal.”  It means “excessively or extravagantly wasteful.”  Jesus never uses that word in the parable to describe anybody – it’s a description of the story that humans added later on to summarize what this story is about.  It’s true that the younger son wastes his father’s inheritance, but Jesus teaches us here that God is also the prodigal one – excessive, extravagantly, arguably wasteful – in his love and grace for us.  “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours,” the father tells his older son- God our heavenly Father tells us. “All that is mine is yours!”  What would it feel like to be embraced by God the Father and to let go of keeping track, keeping score, and judging others, simply resting in the prodigal, excessive, never-ending love and forgiveness of God?  This is what babies do – we witnessed this with baby Otto’s baptism today. They know how to just trust and be loved by their family and by God.  They don’t question this unconditional love.  They don’t look around at other people trying to measure this love and jealously complain that so and so is loved more than me.  It’s when we grow older that we forget, we distrust, we judge, we evaluate.
In a few moments we will pray the Lord’s prayer. Jesus teaches us to pray:  “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  You cannot forgive if you hold onto resentments with a scorecard of wrongs in hand.  Forgiveness requires letting go, wiping the slate clean.  As Christians, we believe that if God were to keep a scorecard, none of us would measure up, of course.  We cannot fulfill God’s expectations for us on our own. We are in need of a Savior, every single one of us, no matter how good we might think ourselves to be by our own faulty standards.  And so God sends Jesus to eat with sinners and tax collectors.  All of them (Luke tells us) come near to listen to Jesus.  His prodigal love attracts sinners like a magnet, or a moth to the flame!  But Jesus hasn’t forgotten the Pharisees who are standing on the outside looking in – he wants them to come in and experience God’s embrace, too. 
 Jesus calls us, all of us, to come home.  For those who have wandered and don’t know how they can possibly be worthy of God, Jesus calls us to come home.  For the oldest children in us who are struggling to let go and forgive as we know God has already forgiven us – Jesus asks us to let go of resentment so we can rejoice.  Relax and live a little!  Jesus has come to seek out and find the lost, and he has found us.  All God has is ours.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.