This image of a bowling score sheet is the way it used to be. A few years ago I discovered it’s all automated now, that modern bowing alleys actually keep score for you and post it above the lane for everyone to see. I’m not sure I would have liked that back in my high school and college years when I bowled a little more often.
I was a pretty mediocre bowler. My sister bowled in a league and became quite serious about it, but I only dabbled despite being fully equipped. She gave me a bowling ball one day for my birthday and I ended up buying my own bowling shoes because of how difficult it was to fit my size 13 narrow feet with rental shoes. Yet I was always in the group that was happy to break 100 and only once in a great while managed to get to 150 or so.
So I’m not sure how much progress it is to have those scores up there for everyone in the bowling alley to look at. I’m not thrilled at having my gutter ball or failure to pick up an easy spare on display. I imagine others might feel the same.
Yet human nature is such that we interact with each other in many areas of life as if a scoreboard is hanging up there ranking each of us. One obvious place that happens for pastors is comparing church size. But we do it with grades, income, success in romance, general levels of happiness and all sorts of other scoring scales both measurable and immeasurable. As we read in our very familiar text this week from Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32, siblings are notorious for this sort of score keeping in competition with each other.
Believers in God may particularly feel the presence of some sort of divine scoreboard keeping track of moral and spiritual performance. As I look at this well-known story of two brothers and consider the conversation of the father with the elder brother at the end of the parable, I believe it is Jesus’ declaration that God the Father is not keeping score, or at least not in any way that we might typically assume.
So let us remember that God’s love toward us is not based on a good score in the contest of life, especially in comparison with our brothers and sisters in the faith. Instead, let us learn to accept His freely offered love and grace, and to do our best to offer it those around us, forgoing every temptation to keep score.