338 Past Due

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Past Due” originally shared on November 20, 2024. It was the 338^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   What’s the difference between debts and trespasses? And what does that have to do with Christ the King Sunday? Or not? Today, we’re going to find out.

   The total American household debt is $17.94 trillion. The average American household credit card debt is $7,499. Only around 23% of Americans are 100% debt free.

   Being arrested or cited for trespassing is relatively uncommon.

   But I still prefer the “forgive us our trespasses” version of the Lord’s prayer over the “forgive us our debts” version, though in many ways they mean the same thing.

   Why? Maybe because it’s the one I grew up with, have used the longest, and therefore is more meaningful to me. But also, it’s because of the secondary, sometimes referred to as “archaic” or “literary”, meaning of the word “trespass”.

   As a verb it means to commit an offense against a person or a set of rules. As a noun it means a sin or an offense. Those are closer to the human predicament and to the answer that is given by God on the cross.

   “Forgive us our debts” says that we owe something to God, and what do we do about debts? We ask God to forget them, so that we again become good with God, but we still sin (racking up more debts) requiring our constant prayers for forgiveness.

   “Forgive us our trespasses” suggests that we have committed offenses which, in the context in the Lord’s Prayer, are offenses against God. Those offenses are based on the violation of boundaries. That is closer to our human condition.

   We were created for a perfect relationship with God. For that relationship to have any meaning, we had to have the ability to reject it. And we did. That Sin brought evil into the world and separated us from that relationship with God.

   God made a chosen people who were blessed to be a blessing, liberated them from slavery, gave Laws for a good life, made them a nation, saved them from hostile foreign powers, instituted prophets, priests and kings, and none of them brought people back to that relationship with God, except for short periods.

   Finally, God came Himself and gave his life on the cross and took it back again to restore the relationship for all who believe and are baptized into His reign.

   Our condition is not that we need to be better. Our condition is that we need a Savior.

   That’s where we are in John 18:33-37, the reading for this coming Sunday, the last Sunday in the Church Year, Christ the King Sunday, being celebrated in the vast majority of Churches all over the world.

   As the current year has been coming to a close, our Sunday Bible readings have been focused on the last Judgement.

   In today’s text, Jesus is being tried in Jerusalem by Pilate, a local officer of the Roman Empire, an empire so influential that reports in social media last year indicated that most men in the Western world still think about it several times a week. And when the “Gladiators 2” movie comes out this coming Friday, it will be even more often. 😊

   It begins with John 18:33-36,

³³ Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” ³⁴ Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” ³⁵ Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” ³⁶ Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here

   Pilate had totally missed the message, and so had the Jewish leaders of that time that Jesus was referring to.

   “Not of This World” was a popular clothing brand for younger Christians around the 1990’s. Its logo was its acronym, NOTW, with the “O” drawn as a halo connecting the “N” and the “t”, which was drawn in the shape of a cross. I don’t see much of its clothing anymore, but I still see its logo decals on cars’ rear windows around town.

   It’s, at least in part, a reference to Jesus’ reply to Pilate that Jesus’ kingdom, “is not from this world”

   Our recent elections, and the campaigns that preceded them, seems to be pointing in another direction among some Churches in the U.S.

   Jesus’ followers didn’t form an army. They didn’t form a gang, because, as Jesus said, “But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”

   The only boy in my first confirmation class was walking down the street in his neighborhood when he was approached by a couple other young men. “Where you from?”, one of them asked him, a common gang challenge.

   “Right around the corner,” he replied. Wrong answer.

   “That’s cool,” one of the young men said, and as they passed by, he swung a lead pipe around into the back of our member’s head. He lived for a few days in the hospital and then died.

   Armies and gangs want to know where you’re from. Jesus wants us to know where He’s from.

   The kingdom of God belongs to no nation, no empire, and no gang. We are in this sinful world, but we are not of it. Jesus spells it out in this Sunday’s text.

   It concludes with  John 18:37-38,

³⁷ Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” ³⁸ Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”

   Pilate thought that truth was a proposition, different for everyone.

   Jesus showed us that truth is a person, Jesus. He came to restore the relationship with God that every one of us knows   we need to be whole. Even when we cannot yet name the Name.

   Jesus said, in John 14:6-7,

   ⁶ Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. ⁷ If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

   Jesus, who was fully God and fully human being came to restore the relationship with God for which we were created. He is the only one who can make us whole. He is the Truth.

   Pilate asks Jesus, “What is truth?” John 14:7, above, begins with the conditional phrase “If you know me”. Another “verse that begins with “If” also comes to mind.  

   You’ve probably heard someone say, “the truth will make you free”? It’s something that Jesus said, but it’s also a phrase that’s often thrown up in Christians’ faces to support some non-Christian’s s personal cause. It’s a way to say that what they believe is the truth and that Christians better get with the program because Jesus said, “the truth will make you free”. But did Jesus say that? No.

   Jesus did say it, but not in the way most people think it means.

   Jesus says, “the truth will make you free” in John 8:32. But that quote begins with a great big “If”, in John 8:31-32,

³¹ Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; ³² and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

   This Sunday is Christ the King Sunday.

   We in the United States had a revolution to get rid of kings so that the people could rule. 😊  It was a radical idea then, in human history, and it is a radical idea right now. One that we are still struggling with.

   We struggle not to put ourselves at the center of our lives. Often, we fail. Hubris always brings us down.

   But Jesus is the one that people long for when they know that they are powerless, when they need a good ruler to be in charge, when they know they need someone who is both Savior and Lord, Christ and King. When they know that they need Jesus, not human beings. When they know that they need transformation. And it has always been so.

   Human beings, both in political office and not, have struggled not to become kings, not to be told what to do, what to think, and what are and are not appropriate boundaries for civil behavior. We struggle not to live in God’s place, or at least not to pose as God-like in our lives. We struggle to let God be God and to trust and to depend upon Him, to let go and let God.

   Christians seek to make the world as much like God created it to be as it is in our power to do so.

   The day of God’s perfected reign is coming, but we don’t fear the end. We long for it.

   The first recorded Christian prayer comes in the second to the last verse of the very last book of the Bible, in Revelation 22:20,

20 The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.”

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

   That prayer has been on the lips of Christians for about 2,000 years. Abraham and Sarah were called to walk until God told them to stop around 2,000 years before Christ, and their faith was reconned to them as righteousness long before the giving of the Law. We have been waiting, longing for Jesus’ return for around 2,000 years and Jesus hasn’t returned yet.

   Though, God’s timing has allowed us to live and to believe and to be saved. 😊

   We have trespassed against God, and we continue to be both saints and sinners every day. We have rejected the relationship with God that is our salvation. But God has called us to repentance, to turning around and going away from the things that destroy us and to live in response to the life that has been given to us by God.

   Jesus will return in God’s own time.

   God is not past due. Our repentance as a human race is past due, and yet God gives us time! God has given us the time to receive the gift of faith, and to know that our relationship with God has been restored by Jesus on the cross. Our sinful past has not gone away, we require a savior. Our Savior is coming!

   And when he comes, how will you stand before God’s Judgement? Only by the grace of God. Repent and believe. Believe and be baptized. Your ticket to heaven has been stamped, “Paid in Full” for you by Jesus, on the cross! Christ is the King.