Yesterday at Hennepin County Jail the folks there and I talked a lot about forgiveness. It came up in the discussion of Paul's second letter to Timothy, where Paul talks about the fact that if we deny Jesus, He will deny us. So that got us talking about heaven and hell, and about sin and forgiveness. Is there any sin that can't be forgiven, the men asked. Nope, God wants to forgive us, was the response. How do you get right with God? You seek it with all the genuiness you possess, folks said. What if you don't care about God and don't think you need forgiveness, someone asked. Then there's a real problem, that's how you get separated from God, how you choose hell-- it was a fascinating discussion. The scribes and pharisees in today's Gospel (Lk 11: 47-54) also don't seem to know they need forgiveness. Jesus criticizes them for building statues to honor long-dead prophets whom their fathers killed, without appreciating the fact that they were participating in that sin. "You bear witness and give consent to the deeds of your ancestors," Jesus says, "for they killed them and you do the building." As a result, the current generation is charged with all the "blood of the prophets" from the beginning of history to the current day, Jesus says. Quite the indictment! The point that Jesus is making is that we have to understand and own our sin in order to seek forgiveness, and that includes what we would in this time call institutional sin, the sins of our "fathers," as Jesus puts it. So many of the problems we see in modern society are the result of generations of "sin," if you want to call it that. Things like racial prejudice, the glorification of material goods, the worshipping of power, the tolerance of poverty, the turning of basic human needs, like healthcare, into profit centers. Are we like the scribes and pharisees in today's Gospel in that we participate in the sins of prior generations without acknowledging that fact, and thus are in no position to seek forgiveness? I know we can't change the past, but in what we do we can perpetuate it, and become responsible for it, which is what Jesus says about the scribes and pharisees of His time. We can need forgiveness. Might be worth some thought the next time the conversation turns to subjects like "white privilege." The sins of the past do matter.