A God Who Refuses to Keep Score

March 30, 2025 - The Fourth Sunday in Lent

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Epiphany. I want to acknowledge at the outset today that Joan DeHaven’s passing on Friday night is probably on a lot of our minds this morning. It is certainly on mine. I have much to say about her, about her life and her passing and her going home to be with her husband Bob and with her God, but I’m going to save much of that topic for Saturday’s funeral service. Today, today we have these scriptures, we have the lectionary passages for the fourth Sunday of Lent, and they more than deserve our attention. This gospel is the good news that Joan believed in, that kept her and Bob coming here week after week for so many years. So... that good news is what we’ll talk about today.

First though, I do want to talk about spring. This is our first spring back in Michigan, back in the Midwest after ten years away, and I want to tell you all that February and March are very, very different months here than they are in Charlotte, North Carolina. Our family spent the last ten years in the American south, between Charlotte and Sewanee, Tennessee for seminary, and though Abbey appreciated the climate there, the amount of sunlight especially, I could never get used to the hot, sweaty summers. I always longed for the comfort of air conditioning. Spring there felt like fall might feel to some of us here... for me, it was the end of comfortable weather.

Here, as I have found these last few weeks, spring is a season of renewed hope, it is a season where buds begin to show up on our trees, where the snow and ice melt, where the occasional sunny, 60-degree day reminds us of the joys of a Michigan summer. A friend of mine who is from eastern Michigan and now pastors a church in Florida messaged me this week and said, “I am so jealous of the paradise you are about to experience again.”

Spring also reminds us that our creator God is the God of new creation, both in our lives, as Paul writes today in 2 Corinthians, and in our world, as that which appears to be dead comes back to new life every single year. If you want more of that sermon, about everything old passing away, everything becoming new creation, again, be here Saturday.

Today’s sermon, though, focuses on a different aspect of spring, one that has a close connection to my heart, one that some of you are undoubtedly tired of hearing about. That aspect of spring, of course, is March Madness. Well, it’s not just March Madness, actually, it’s baseball’s Spring Training and Opening Day too. There is something for me about watching college basketball, about hearing a radio call of a baseball game in March that reminds me that all will be well in the world, that games are still being played, that summer is coming, and greens and blues are returning to an often gray and brown world.

This week, I posted a 6,000-word article to my own website, something I just put together for fun during Sabbaths and evenings over the last few weeks, ranking every baseball stadium I’ve ever been to with photos and a short paragraph about each. It’s ridiculous, I promise. I have been to 35 major league ballparks, at least one for every team in the country, and that’s how I saw America as a kid and in my teens and early 20s. When I posted that article on Facebook, I had a few fun interactions... our mayor said I gained credibility when she found out my dad was a Detroit-born Tigers fan, so that’s nice. But sports have always been my thing, starting with Cardinals and Blues games in St. Louis as a kid, continuing through to today. We’re heading to games with our kids this coming week.

I think I’ve always found some comfort in sports. My brain might just be wired this way, but there are stats to track, cards to collect. There are strategies to follow and implement and argue about; there are careers to follow, players who will be traded. All of that feels very left-brain to me, which is nice as a former math team captain. There are storylines too, and that touches into my more creative/right brain thinking, but there’s always a final score, there’s always a win-loss record. For Michigan against Auburn on Friday, that final score was not a good one, but for Michigan State, it was. The Tigers are supposed to be good this year, but they’ve started with 0 wins and 3 losses. Oddly, the Cardinals are supposed to be bad, but they’re 2-0. We learn how to think about these players and teams by keeping score, by points and runs. That feels... safe, to me? It feels logical, at the least.

But this sermon, and indeed this life, is not about sports. It is about the gospel, where Jesus constantly confounds our logic, showing us a better way. Today, in our reading from the Gospel according to Luke, we find what one commentator called “the crown jewel of all of Jesus’s teaching.” This story, which took me a while to read in the middle there just a few moments ago, is a well-known one, it is the parable of the Prodigal Son.

Countless authors and theologians have written books on this twenty-verse story, on the father, the son, and the older brother. My favorite is one by Henri Nouwen, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Rembrandt’s most famous painting, or at least one of his top three, is his Return of the Prodigal Son. My roommate during grad school in Seattle hung a huge print of that painting on our wall. Even the VeggieTales cartoon has a version of this parable where the prodigal is played by a young asparagus. If you have not heard this story before this morning, read it... every day this week. There is so much here.

Michelle Reineck told me this week that every time she reads it, she finds herself in a different one of the three characters. That is an awesome way to approach it. Our healing service discussion on Wednesday wondered about the unmentioned mother’s role, about what happened after the big party. A priest could preach on this passage every Sunday for the rest of his or her life and never cover all of what Jesus was saying to the grumbling Pharisees and scribes that day, what Jesus is saying to us today.

That is because, here, Jesus confounds our logic with unimaginable, unbelievable goodness and grace. A disrespectful son asks for his inheritance early, signaling he would rather his father be dead so he can go have fun with the family money. The father gives it away willingly, and the son squanders his share of the family fortune. He then has to get a job feeding pigs, who have more food than he does. At his very lowest, he realizes he still has a family, a father, who might care of his unworthy self, and then he turns, he returns to his father with a plan to beg for mercy. The father sees his child coming home and runs to him before he can grovel at his feet. The son gets a few words out, but before he can ask for a job, for a chance to earn back his father’s favor through his hard work, his dad has already given him a robe, given him a ring that returns him to family status, and then started a party to celebrate his beloved son returning home.

Some of you know this story, but the matchless grace of the father, the undeserved mercy and forgiveness and favor and love, this is a story at the very heart of the Christian faith, even though we rarely can bring ourselves to actually believe it.

So many people, Christians even, live in a world where “you get what you deserve,” or “you had that coming,” where hard work and good performance are the pathway to God’s favor. Jews in Jesus’s time certainly lived that way, with their laws and sacrifices giving structure to their relationship with God. And so, this parable was offensive to them... it can be offensive to us too. It is not hard to imagine the Pharisees and scribes as the elder son, the son who has been working diligently for the father for years, “working like a slave” he says. They have followed the laws, they have sacrificed, and now the reckless, wild, prodigal son, he gets rewarded just by coming back, by turning, by repenting? He did not follow the laws, did not sacrifice, did not do what was required. What kind of justice is that? There’s a lot to say about the elder son’s response... the resentment that builds in his heart against the son who is out “having more fun.” That is an insight into how he viewed his own life, as sacrifice and duty rather than love, rather than joy, rather than perfect freedom. Many of us lifelong, dutiful Christians have plenty to hear there.

But this is God’s justice, this is God’s way. The father welcomes the lost son back into the fold, back into his arms, as reckless in love as the son who left was reckless. The father knows that the act of turning, the act of coming back, is cause for celebration all on its own, because this is a father who refuses to keep score. This father just wants his children to come home, to be happy, to be loved, to be free from pain and sorrow.

Friends, I know that this is a familiar story for many, but this morning I want to remind us that we cannot get lost in the keeping of scores, of our own nor especially of others’. We cannot be the elder son who thinks that grace and love and celebrations are only for those who have somehow deserved them. We cannot earn love, God’s love, through our own work and sacrifice, we cannot earn grace and forgiveness, and we are never, ever unworthy of them. Love, grace, forgiveness, joy... they are offered freely, recklessly, abundantly by our God. At our best, we offer them in the same way to each other here at Epiphany. This church is welcoming to everyone, always. Our brunch is for everyone, always. Our hospitality and our care and our warmth, it is for everyone, always. These are not things anyone needs to earn, they are freely and abundantly given here too.

Our God is not a cosmic scorekeeper tallying points to see if we are worthy of love. That’s not how God works. And life is not a sporting event with winners and losers. If we want to see life through the eyes of sports, our lives are the sports we played as the littlest kids, before elder-son-style competition took over our lives... not keeping score but trying our best, taking turns at each position, having fun, building each other up and celebrating every good hit, every good throw, every made basket. Keeping score works if you need winners and losers, if you have a championship to fight for, but it has no place in God’s kingdom. 

In God’s kingdom, we are all just God’s beloved children, and God is waiting to celebrate with all of us, with robes and rings and fatted calves. We need simply to choose to fall into the open arms of our loving father, to choose the life Christ shows us and promises us, a life of goodness and grace and love, and then continue to choose it, again and again and again. Amen.