(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Forgiveness”, originally shared on November 8, 2023. It was the 284th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Can we all be forgiven? God is merciful and
God us just. Which do you hope God will be toward you? Which do you hope God
will be toward those who have wronged you or who have wronged others? Or are mercy
and justice the same? Today, we’re going to find out.
Today is Trash Day in our neighborhood. There
used to be one guy who passed though three times. He’d stop here on his break
and we’d talk. Now the drivers seem to be rotating, but we still remember each
one with a Christmas card and a cash gift. We are grateful that our trash is
hauled away.
Of course, we put more out to the curb than
trash. We also put out separate containers for green waste and for recycling. But
it’s all stuff that we want removed.
And the trash company comes and takes it
away. It’s that simple. But somebody has to pay.
It’s kind of like forgiveness.
There’s a very old joke about a little boy
who misheard the “and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who
trespass against us” part of the Lord’s Prayer (from Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke
11:1-4) and recited “and forgive us our trash baskets as we forgive those
who put trash in our baskets.”
Cute, but either version seems to say that
the forgiveness of our sins is conditional. It’s conditional on our forgiving
others.
And then there is the passage in Matthew
18:23-35 where Jesus tells the parable of a king who forgave a servant a huge
debt, and about that same servant who refused to forgive a fellow servant a
small debt. The king called his servant back and then sent him to horrible
punishments until he would pay everything he originally owed. And the passage
ends with verse 35,
35 So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you
do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.
Is God’s forgiveness conditional upon our
forgiving others?
The key to this passage, in my opinion, is
the words, “from your heart.”
I don’t think that it just means
“sincerely”. I think it means that knowing the enormity of the unearned
forgiveness that we have received transforms us. Our true selves are changed.
The 16th century Church reformer,
Martin Luther’s explanation of that “forgive us our trespasses…” part of the
Lord’s Prayer, in his Small Catechism asks, “What does this mean? He writes,
“We ask in this prayer that our heavenly
Father would not regard our sins nor deny these petitions on their account, for
we are worthy of nothing for which we ask, nor have we earned it.
Instead we ask that God would give us all
things by grace, for we sin daily and indeed deserve only punishment. So, on
the other hand, we, too, truly want to forgive heartly and to do good gladly to
those who sin against us.”
Our hearts are transformed, and a sign of
that transformation is our now natural life lived in response to what we have
first received from God. We naturally forgive. Our hearts have been
transformed. As Luther said, “we, too, truly want to forgive heartly”. We
forgive from the heart.
But more than trash gets taken away on Trash
Day.
There are three cans in front of our house.
I think that they represent three ways to live
the Christian life in response to what God has done for us at the cross:
forgiven us and reconciled us to God.
The first is recycling. Recycling
lets some of what we want to get rid of be put to use. For example, it’s been
said that every life serves a purpose, even if it’s as a bad example. I think
that someone who is a bad example made that one up. 😊 But, if we repent, if we turn away from the
holes we have dug for ourselves, and we teach others to avoid the darkness of
our lives, God may recycle our lives into something that is light to the world.
The second is green waste. Green Waste
lets some of what we want to get rid of bring new life. Its purpose is to be the
compost that provides good soil for new life to grow. Its decomposition brings nourishment
for the fruit of the Christian life to develop, just as our failures and
redemption can be a bridge to life and a credible witness to those who were
lost in the same way.
We have recently been told that we can also add
food waste to the green waste can. Some have embraced this act of stewardship,
but I don’t think that it’s really caught on. That kind of waste rots, smells
terrible, and attracts rats and disease.
And that brings me to the third can: trash. Trash
is foul. It serves little to no purpose, It’s not healthy to have around. Our
image of hell as an unimaginably horrible place filled with worms and fire
comes from the trash dump in the Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, outside of
Jerusalem. It was a place of spontaneous combustion, city trash, and the
corpses of dead animals.
Our trash is our sin. It is the consequence
of our condition before God. The awareness of our sin tells us to give up. God
tells us that we are loved.
The world tells us that we need to try
harder. God tells us that we have a Savior, and that that Savior is Jesus
Christ.
Somebody has to pay to remove it, and
somebody did. But it wasn’t us.
Jesus paid to reconcile us to God. We are forgiven
through his death on the cross. It is through Jesus that our sins are forgiven.
We just open our hearts to receive the gift so that our hearts may be
transformed by the one true living God.
But how do we live that? Are we to just
accept any wrong done to us? To forgive people out of hand? Without boundary or
limits?
Are Christians to be the doormats of the
world? In some ways, “yes,” and it has been so from the beginning, when Jesus taught
his disciples to be careful, in Matthew 10:16,
16 'See, I am sending you out
like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as
doves.
We are called to forgive those
who have wronged us from our hearts. But, I don’t think that means we should
forget. We are to learn from our experiences while not becoming that which we despise.
As has been said, “Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.” We
are to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”
This means that we forgive
others because we have been forgiven, and because our unforgiving resentment
only hurts ourselves.
At the same time forgiveness does not preclude our desire for justice
that may allow the kingdom of this world, the governmental authorities, to extend
civil and criminal penalties.
But how we do that, and to what
extent we pursue or cooperate with that process, will also be weighed against
the burden it places on our conscience, on our renewed self and our desire to
both experience and to extend the forgiveness of God.
We all want to receive some resolution when
we have done things that we know are wrong.
But there can never be complete restitution;
we can never even know what all our sins are.
I heard a story about Francis of Assisi, who
is said to have received a visitor at his door one day. The visitor had been burdened
by guilt over some gossip that he had passed along which turned out not to be
true, but had harmed the reputation of someone in the town. He wanted Francis
to tell him what he could do to make up for it.
Francis told him to take a feather pillow,
rip it open, and place a feather at the entrance to every home in the town and
then to return to Francis.
When he did this, Francis told him to take
the empty pillowcase and collect all the feathers that he had set out on the
doorsteps.
The man said, “That’s impossible! Who can
know where they have gone to by now?”
Francis replied that it was the same way
with gossip. No one can know where it goes.
We are sinful by nature and we have earned
only punishment, but the good new of Jesus Christ is that our sins have been
washed away by the blood of Jesus on the Cross.
We don’t need to be better, we need a
Savior, who will then make us want to be better from the inside out and who
will make us better. And we have that Savior in Jesus Christ our Lord.
It’s been said that guilt is
the gift that keeps on giving. And we all want some resolution of it, but
sometimes it is a burden to us.
This is not only true for
Christians, but for all people of good will. I’ve heard it called the “Ethical
Paradox”. That is, that it is those who are most concerned with doing the right
thing that agonize over it, while it is those who are the least concerned with
doing the right thing don’t think about it at all.
That’s why “doing good”
requires a definition of good that can only come from God.
I took a philosophy course one
year in college from which, I think, I remember very little. What I do remember
is what the professor said in the few minutes at the end of each class where he
had finished his prepared “professor” notes early and went into what I would
call his “cracker barrel philosopher” mode. 😊
One day, while in this mode, he
made the observation that, in his opinion, most of the world’s evil, and
probably all of its most heinous evil, had been done by people who sincerely,
in their heart of hearts, believed that they were doing good.
One of the things that I think that means,
is that we need to be very humble before God. We need to live in response to
the new life that God gives us and renews in us each day, to self- examine what
we do in order to consider both our motives and our actions, and to trust only
in God as the source for a life that truly is life.
Things weren’t any different for the Early
Christians thousands of years ago. And yet the love of God seen on the cross
that has won us forgiveness has changed everything about what it means to be
truly human, as Paul writes his letter to the Romans, in Romans 8:35-39,
35 Who
will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or
persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36 As it is written,
“For your sake we are
being killed all day long;
we are accounted as
sheep to be slaughtered.”
37 No,
in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor
things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor
anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God
in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Everyone who turns to the Lord will be
saved. There is no difference in God between God’s mercy and God’s justice.
When Job, in the Bible’s book of Job,
struggled with God’s mercy and God’s justice, the answer he gets from God is
essentially, “I’m God and you’re not.” 😊
All we can do is to turn to God and live. To repent and trust in God’s forgiveness paid in full for us by the inseparable love of God, and to be grateful that our trash has been hauled away on God’s ultimate Trash Day. At the cross.
No comments:
Post a Comment