September 21, 2025 - Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Healing: Remembering and Returning

September 21, 2025 Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost 
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Deuteronomy 8:1-10Luke 15:11-32
“Healing: Remembering and Returning”
Melissa K. Smith

When I made the decision to leave my first call, my first job as a pastor, I thought I was done. It was clear that the church and I were not compatible in vital ways, and it was what I call a “broken call”. But fifteen months of being integrated into a community that did not want me to function as the pastor they called me to be destroyed my image and dream of who God created me to be and I knew I needed to leave.

In the in-between of being there and coming here, I was introduced to a Presbyterian pastor and coach named Lorna. Lorna led me through forgiveness coaching, which not only salvaged my call to ministry, but also helped me heal and renewed my call to ministry and my passion for ministry. It was a difficult and grace-filled process to get to the point where I could forgive the church. We revisited old wounds, unpacked unenforceable rules I had created, and over time my perspective and heart changed.

Forgiveness is healing and it requires us to remember wounds and return to our stories so that we can let go of past hurt and genuinely and sincerely look at our old story, rewrite our new perspective in, and let go so we can live.

In my forgiveness journey, and in my own training to become a forgiveness mentor, I have learned what forgiveness is and what it is not. Forgiveness is healing, forgiveness is a choice, and forgiveness is life changing. Forgiveness is not condoning poor behavior, it is not forgetting what happened and moving on without reconciliation, and it is not going to happen on its own with time.

To forgive us our sins, God came into this world incarnate and Christ died on the cross…if that’s the length God went to so we can experience forgiveness, it is fair to assume that forgiveness is not easy – but it is so worth it.

The two scripture readings we have this morning are about remembering and returning: two vital components of forgiveness. In Deuteronomy 8 we read of the ways God provided for his people. Their story was one of being an exiled people, of leaving the only home they knew, of wandering a desert for forty years to the point where slavery seemed better than this. But their story with a new perspective – looking at the same situation with a fresh outlook coated in forgiveness sees this season of life as remembering God’s provision.

In Deuteronomy 8 Moses recounts the Israelites wandering through the desert as recorded in the book of Numbers. He says, “Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. The clothes on your back did not wear out, and your feet did not swell these forty years.” It was a long forty years. It was a season of being ripped away from an old identity and discovering who they were as God’s people. It was a season of frustration and monotony. It was a season of waiting and longing for home.

In the midst of remembering that time, God is not rubbing in their faces that it took them a generation to make it to the Promised Land nor is God trying to rub salt in the wound of recent difficult family history. Rather, God is reframing that season of life to remind his people that he was there the whole time. And now when they tell the story of how they were saved from slavery in Egypt, they have a new story to tell. Rather than being the people who were victims of the exile, they are people of God’s grace and provision rather than victims of diaspora. They are recipients of a new identity in God. Same story, same situation, but a new and forgiven perspective.

We can see a similar paradigm with the story of the prodigal son.

The young son had been welcomed home even after he wished his father dead and asked for his share of the inheritance – which his father gave him. But he spent all of his money and experiencing true suffering. He turned his eyes back toward home: he returned to a place he never dared to go again. He took a chance.

I remember my fear when I walked into a pulpit again after I left my first call. I frequently pulpit supplied and preached at smaller churches throughout our Presbytery. But someone had told me that if I wasn’t serving a church, I wasn’t a pastor. It was hard enough to have left my work and call, but being told that I wasn’t a pastor really shook me. I remember putting on my robe and walking up to the pulpit terrified. I have been preaching for years, but the act of returning to a place I didn’t know if I still belonged was so difficult.

And as we continue to see our siblings in Christ return to church after having broken their habit of coming each week during the pandemic, I wonder if they too are wondering if they still belong, if they will still be welcomed, and if they are still wanted.

To return is to make a bold move. If we are returning somewhere we had intentionally left, then it could mean going somewhere where we don’t know if we will be welcomed back. If it’s returning somewhere we haven’t been in a long time, then it could mean that you don’t know what you are walking into because it may have changed since you were gone.

The father of the prodigal son welcomed him back in the best way possible: with arms wide open ready to receive him and a party ready to celebrate his return.

The older son did not have the same reaction. He is disgruntled – he’s upset. He is looking at his brother’s story through the lens of an unchanged perspective, through a lens not coated in forgiveness. But we are called to look at the younger son, the prodigal son, like the father did with arms wide open, ready to accept the new and forgiven perspective we get to have through the healing gift of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a vehicle for true healing. It does not change the past, but it does give us permission to let go of the ways the past is holding us hostage to hurt, and it gives us freedom to let go of the sting and to look at our history, to look at our story, from a new perspective and to tell our story in a new way. Forgiveness is not just between us and God. Forgiveness is a daily posture we are called to practice. Forgiveness is healing and we are invited to be healed, to be made new, and to live from our new perspectives and new stories.

The poem on the front of your bulletin is Wendell Berry's "Remembering That It Happened Once"

We stand with one hand on the door,
Looking into another world
That is this world, the pale daylight
Coming just as before, our chores 
To do, the cattle all awake,
Our own white frozen breath hanging
In front of us; and we are here
As we have never been before, 
Sighted as not before, our place
Holy, although we knew it not

This poem is remembering the nativity - God's incarnation that happened in a barn, in a real place, in this world. And remembering that it happened once changes how we see the world now.

God came into this world to save this world – that we might experience forgiveness, grace, and life. Forgiveness is not passive – it is a gift we have been given to utilize in our lives; but it is a decision you have to make for yourself.

Remember the length God went through so that you might be forgiven. What will it take for you to forgive others, to remember and return to your wounds and hurt so you can heal and tell your story from a new perspective?

Memory is powerful – and being able to look back and remember what has happened shows us the sacred and holy spaces we may have missed because of the fear of returning if we do not forgive and let go of our hurt.

Remember and return…embrace the gift of forgiveness and experience healing in a new way.

Thanks be to God. Amen.