Sins, Debts & Trespasses / Luke 11:1–13 / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday July 27th 2025 / Season of Pentecost / Mount Olive Lutheran Church

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday July 27th 2025: Season of Pentecost / Luke 11:1–13 “Sins, Debts & Trespasses”

Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when He finished, one of His disciples said to Him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” And He said to them, “When you pray, say:

        “Father, hallowed be Your name.

        Your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread,

        and forgive us our sins,

               for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.

        And lead us not into temptation.”     

        And He said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’? I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs. And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!”

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends two of last week’s catechumens wrote reflection papers on The Lord’s Prayer. On the Family Confirmation night the Thursday before the Confirmation of their Baptism Emmett Janssen provided this excellent summery of The Lord’s Prayer in his presentation:

The Lord’s Prayer shows us how to pray and talk to God. It reminds us that He loves and cares for us. Each line of the prayer has a meaning like asking for help, forgiveness and protection. It helps us grow closer to God and live the way the Bible teaches. It makes me feel closer to God and it also reminds me that I can talk to God about everything big or small. This prayer teaches me that God is always listening and will hear and answer every prayer and He cares about what is going on in my life.

The other catechumen who chose to write and talk about The Lord’s Prayer was Zackary Roberts who said:  

“The Lord’s Prayer teaches me to forgive someone who hurts me or my feelings and to ask for forgiveness for what I’ve done but not only from the person I have hurt, but also from God.”

Entire books have been written on the Lord’s Prayer and each petition, each part of the prayer, each request could be taught on for hours all by themselves, so our sermon today will narrow our focus on the Fifth Petition, “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” we’ll do this remembering what Zack said when he took note of the way in which The Lord’s Prayer keeps forgiveness in front of our eyes acting as an encouragement for us to forgive and be forgiven and to hold fast also to what Emmet wrote, when he said that The Lord’s Prayer “reminds us that [God the Father] loves and cares for us,” and that “God is always listening and will hear and answer every prayer and He cares about what is going on in [our] lives,” remembering that we have this need for forgiveness and the need for reconciliation and forgiveness with those who have sinned against us.

The Lord’s Prayer has been handed down to us through the generations originating from two Gospel readings 1) from the Gospel of Saint Luke which we heard today and 2) from the Gospel of Saint Matthew where Jesus teaches,  “Pray then like this:

        “Our Father in heaven,

        hallowed be Your name.

               Your kingdom come,

               Your will be done,

               on earth as it is in heaven.

        Give us this day our daily bread,

               and forgive us our debts,

               as we also have forgiven our debtors.

        And lead us not into temptation,

               but deliver us from evil.”[1]

The prayer in Matthew is a little longer than in Luke including additional things like where God the Father resides “our Father who art in heaven;” that His “will be done on earth as it is in heaven;” even including a petition to deliver us from evil. Another difference you may have noticed is our use of the word “trespasses” where the two accounts in Scripture says “sins” or “debts.” How did we arrive at “trespasses” instead of using “sins” or “debts” in the Fifth Petition of the Lord’s prayer? One reason is that in 1526 William Tyndales’ English translation of the Bible emphasised the nuance, the sort of delicate shade, within the Greek word for ‘debt’ which can mean ‘a departure from a correct path’ or ‘a deviation from the proscribed way.’ Perhaps you’ve been out in the country side and seen the warning sign on the edge of a person’s property or a farmer’s field that says, “No trespassing, violators will be prosecuted,” and while I don’t think it would hold up in a court of law, at least not in Canada there are even signs like this, “No Trespassing, Violators Will Be Shot, Survivors Will Be Shot Again.” If someone makes ‘a departure from a correct path’ or ‘a deviation from the proscribed way,’ they would be trespassing. Keeping those signs in mind a trespasser would be at the mercy of the owner of the land and in a similar way a debtor when they have taken a loan from a lender lives their life at the mercy of the money lender. With banks and lenders regulated by federal and provincial laws there are protections for both the debtor and the lender but borough money from a criminal and then there are no such protections, trespass against them and ‘violators may be shot, and survivors may be shot again.” As Saint Paul teaches, “the wages of sin is death ….”[2] 

And yet Saint Paul also teaches that “the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”[3] With this is mind there is perhaps an even better reason for using the word “trespasses” regarding the words “debts” and “sins” as found in The Lord’s Prayer and that’s that Jesus Himself clarifies this relationship between these three words when in the Gospel of Saint Matthew He concludes His teaching of His Prayer by saying, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”[4] Jesus then does appear to be using the word “debt” in the prayer as a figurative illustration of forgiveness. And also uses the word “trespasses” as a way of expressing how sin crosses a line that should not be crossed, and how once crossed puts the one who has departed from the correct path, the one who has deviated from the proscribed Way into mortal and eternal danger and jeopardy.   

How sure can we be about this? Dear ones, consider how Jesus again uses the concept of debt, the idea of debt in practice, as an illustration for sin when later in the Gospel of Saint Matthew as Saint Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?,” Jesus answers Peter saying, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times,” and then Jesus adds this parable:

“Therefore the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. When he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. [now as an aside: A talent is a around 6,000 day’s wages so roughly the sum of payment for 20 years labour; so 10,000 talents times 20 years labour would be 200,000 years wages which would be impossible for one man to pay back working it off through daily hard labour during his lifetime. Back to the parable, Jesus continues saying] And since he could not pay, his master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be made. So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the master of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. But when that same servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii and seizing him, he began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay what you owe.’ [Now as we established this is roughly a hundred days wages] So his fellow servant fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ He refused and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt. When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their master all that had taken place. Then his master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers, until he should pay all his debt. [Then Jesus concludes the parable to Saint Peter and the disciples saying] So also My heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”[5] So with this in mind: “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors …” “forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us” … “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” And so we have used over the generation the word trespasses in the Lord’s Prayer as we pray it daily to teach and encourage us regarding forgiveness both in our request for forgiveness from our gracious heavenly Father through Christ Jesus His Son and to teach and encourage us regarding forgiveness with each other.

Saint Paul teaches the same in his letter to the Colossians, when he encourages them, and us, saying, “put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”[6] Earlier in Paul’s letter to the Colossians, which we heard reads in our Epistle today, Saint Paul teaches us saying, “therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving,” this encouragement can be applied to what we have learned in our daily praying of the Lord’s Prayer He teaches us, the one Jesus gave us when His disciples asked Him to teach them how to pray. They often saw Him go off alone to pray and here they, and we, are taught the prayer He was Himself using as He prayed to His heavenly Father and now we, as His Baptised children, as believers in Christ, the Son of God our Father, are called and encouraged to pray in the same why. 

But now you might ask, why Jesus would ever pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us?” Jesus was no sinner! He had no sins. This is true. Jesus certainly prayed the second part of the prayer as people did sin against Him. Famously upon the cross of His crucifixion as they were unjustly taking His life Jesus prays, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”[7] They do not know their trespass! What they also didn’t understand is that while Jesus had no sin of His own He took on your sin and mine with the wages that came with the trespass. And so Saint Paul in our Epistle while explaining forgiveness in light of the Good Friday death and burial of Jesus and the Easter Sunday resurrection of Jesus, teaches, “Having been buried with [Christ Jesus] in baptism, in which you were also raised with Him through faith in the powerful working of God [the Father], who raised Him from the dead. And you,” Saint Paul says, “who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with [Christ Jesus His Son], having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This He set aside, nailing it to the cross.”[8] Jesus paid the debt we could not pay; He took the punishment for our trespasses in our place that ought to have brought to each of us both temporal and eternal death and in its place gives you and me light and life, the very forgiveness of our sins and the freedom to forgive those who have sinned against us.

And so, dear ones, we take to heart this prayer that He so graciously gives to us trusting that the words of the Fifth Petition that we pray are trustworthy and true and that in them we have what we pray for, “the forgiveness of sins.” Be encouraged, God the Father is always listening and will hear and answer every prayer and He cares about what is going on in your life. If you feel your prayers are as persistent as Abraham’s prayer Jesus promises that His heavenly Father will hear them and will likewise grant good gifts to you. Just think Abraham in our Old Testament reading only asked if God would relent over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra if ten righteous people could be found, but Abraham could have asked for more. In the end at the cross of Good Friday God the Father found not ten righteous, not even five but only one His Son Jesus and because of this righteous one, the only truly righteous one in all of history God relented the destruction and now shows us His mercy answering our prayers for forgiveness on account of His Son.        

The Small Catechism asks about this part of the prayer, “What does this mean?,” I leave you with the answer that is given to that very good question, “We pray in this petition that our Father in heaven would not look at our sins, or deny our prayer because of them. [For] We are neither worthy of the things for which we pray, nor have we deserved them, but we ask that He would give them all to us by grace, for we daily sin much and surely deserve nothing but punishment. So we too will sincerely forgive and gladly do good to those who sin against us.”[9] Amen.    

Let us pray:

Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] Matthew 6:9–13
[2] Romans 6:23a
[3] Romans 6:23b
[4] Matthew 6:14–15
[5] Matthew 18:21–35
[6] Colossians 3:12–13
[7] Luke 23:34
[8] Colossians 2:12-15
[9] The Fifth Petition, The Lord’s Prayer, Luther’s Small Catechism, Concordia Publishing House 2017, Page 21. 

Photo Credit: Main photo detail of man pointing at his open hand from John L. Krimmel painting "The Village Politicians" wikimidia.commons.