Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 11, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Most of you have probably seen the bumper sticker: "Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven." The way a lot of loudly self-professed Christians talk and behave kind of makes you wonder if they know or really believe that they aren’t perfect, but never mind. The most vocal and visible parts of the larger Christian church certainly give the impression that our faith is largely about forgiveness. Some of us have a bit of a problem with that idea. After all, the talk about forgiveness is based on the idea that our biggest existential problem is that we are sinful and that what we need therefore is forgiveness of our sin; and some of us don’t really think that our biggest existential problem today is that we’re sinners. The idea that what’s wrong with us is sin strikes us, or at least it strikes me, as rather medieval. In our men’s group meetings on Tuesday evenings we just watched a documentary on Martin Luther. Luther was a medieval person if ever there was one despite the fact that his work marked the beginning, or at least one of the beginnings, of the end of the medieval world. He certainly thought that we humans are horrible, irreparable sinners-irreparable at least by our own efforts. He thought that he himself was a horrible sinner. In some ways he was right, although not so much in the ways he thought he was, but I digress. More modern theologians, like Paul Tillich for example, have thought that we modern, or post-modern, people have a bigger existential problem with the perceived lack of meaning in our lives than we do with sin and that what we need therefore is less forgiveness than it is a sense of purpose and meaning. I pretty much agree. Still, there’s no denying that sin and forgiveness are a big part of our Christian tradition.

There is good Biblical warrant for this focus on forgiveness. A word search of the entire New Revised Standard Version of the Bible reveals 64 uses of the word "forgive," 4 uses of the word "forgives," 41 of "forgiven," and 22 of "forgiveness," for a total of 131 uses of some form of the word forgive. That’s a lot of uses of that word. Clearly forgiveness is a major Biblical theme.

Many Christians who, unfortunately, were given a one-sided and distorted view of the Old Testament as children would probably think that most if not all of these references occur in the New Testament; but that is by no means the case. Many of them come from the Old Testament, from Hebrew Scripture. One of those uses occurs in Psalm 103, part of which we heard this morning. Verses 2 and 3 of that Psalm read in part: "Bless God, O my soul, and do not forget all God’s benefits, who forgives all your iniquity...." Psalm 103 then goes on to develop this idea in some of the most beautiful and powerful lines about God’s forgiveness in the entire Bible:

God does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as the heavens are high above the earth,
so great is God’s steadfast love
toward those who fear God;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far God removes our transgressions from us.

In the Gospel reading we just heard, Matthew reports a parable Jesus told about forgiveness. Before I look closer at that parable, I have to comment that the way Matthew reports the parable says at least as much about Matthew as it does about Jesus. I’m thinking in particular of the way Matthew has Jesus end the parable. He has Jesus say that God will torture us if we do not forgive others as God has forgiven us. That imagery of torture, of extreme punishment for transgressions, is pure Matthew, not pure Jesus. You don’t find it, or at least you find a whole lot less of it, in any other Gospel or in the writings of Paul. Matthew had a thing about physical punishment for our wrongdoing. I don’t think Jesus did. That being said, this parable has a couple of important things to say about forgiveness, so let’s take a closer look at it.

In the parable, a king forgives a debtor who cannot pay his debt after the debtor pleads for mercy. That part of the parable is about how God handles our sin, seen here as a debt we owe to God. God forgives, at least when we ask for forgiveness. Whether or not we even have to ask, or what the true significance of our asking is, is a subject for another day. In this parable, the forgiven debtor promptly becomes a creditor of another debtor. He demands payment from his debtor just as the king had demanded payment from him. His debtor can’t pay, just like he couldn’t pay the king. Just as he had begged forgiveness of his debt from the king, his debtor begs forgiveness of his debt from him. Unlike the king however, the original debtor now become a creditor refuses to forgive his debtor’s debt. He seized his debtor by the throat, demanded payment, and had the unfortunate debtor thrown into prison until the debt was paid. When the king heard of it he was furious and handed the unforgiving man over to be tortured until his debt was paid. Matthew draws the moral of the story by having Jesus say: "So my heavenly father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from the heart."

There are two parts to the point of this parable. The first is the point of Psalm 103. God forgives our sin and does not hold our transgressions against us. That idea is, as I said, firmly grounded in Hebrew Scripture. The second point is a further development of the first. Because God forgives us when we transgress against God, so we must also forgive others who transgress against us. That is of course a very familiar notion to us. We repeat a version of it every week when we recite the Lord’s Prayer: "And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors," we say. Or in another version: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." We are to respond to the way God treats us by treating our fellow humans the same way. It’s the point of all Christian ethics. God loves us, therefore we must act in love toward others. We don’t always do it, but we know that we should.

Which is all very fine and good, but what happened to that reservation about this whole forgiveness approach to the faith that I began this sermon with? It remains a legitimate concern. Many people in the more liberal Christian traditions like ours don’t like the focus on sin and forgiveness that characterizes so much of the Christian tradition. At the UCC church in Seattle where I did my first internship when I was in seminary the congregation would not let the pastor do a prayer of confession in the Sunday service because they so disliked the notion that they are sinners who need forgiveness. They let the pastor substitute a "prayer for healing and wholeness," I guess because they could more easily accept the idea that they are not yet the whole, complete people God calls them to be than they could that they are sinners in need of forgiveness. Are the good people of that church right? Should we give up this talk about sin and forgiveness altogether and use some other language to talk about our need and the nature of God’s grace in our lives?

It will come a surprise to none of you who know me that my answer to that question is no. After all, I include a section on forgiveness in nearly every worship service I create here. I usually begin that part of the service the way I began it this morning, by quoting 1 John 1:8: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." I may not, in fact I do not, believe that sin is our only existential problem and that forgiveness is the only thing we need from God. Sin may not even be our primary existential problem, and forgiveness may not even be primarily what we need from God. We do struggle for meaning in our lives. We do struggle to hold onto a sense that we not alone in an uncaring universe. Those are real existential problems for us. But here’s the thing: If we are honest with ourselves, I think we have to agree with the First Letter of John when it says our denial of sin is self-deception and with Paul when he says that all sin and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23 Can any of us say that we have never harmed another? I can’t. I know that none of us can deny that we participate every day in social, economic, and political systems that harm hundreds of millions if not billions of people on this planet. Our Christian tradition became one-sided in its focus on sin and forgiveness. There’s no doubt about that; but the tradition is not fundamentally wrong. We cannot say that we have no sin. We do sin and fall short of the glory of God. And so we need God’s forgiveness.

And we need to forgive others. We sin, but others also sin against us. God forgives us, so we need to forgive them. We need to forgive them not so much because they need our forgiveness, although as a psychological matter they may need our forgiveness as part of their journey back to wholeness. More certain is that we need to forgive those who harm us because holding onto anger and resentment harm us far more than it harms those with whom we are angry, those whom we resent. God forgives us, and we owe it to God to forgive others; but we also owe it to ourselves, for no road to wholeness is finished while we hate and resent any of our brothers and sisters.

And here’s an even harder thing: God forgives us, and so we can and need to forgive ourselves. I know this is true of some of you, and I certainly know that it is true of me: Absolutely the hardest person in the world for us to forgive is ourselves. I have things in my life for which I still have not fully forgiven myself, and so do some of you. Yet God has forgiven me, and God has forgiven you. God calls us to forgive those whom God has forgiven, and who are we to say that we know better than God? That healing and wholeness that the people of that other UCC church wanted to talk about rather than talk about sin can never happen until we forgive ourselves. So, if there is something that is heavy on your conscience. let it go. Maybe you need to ask the forgiveness of one whom you’ve harmed before you can do that. The 12 step programs certainly teach that truth; but however you have to do it, do it. And here’s the great good news: It’s possible. It’s possible because God has already forgiven you. In Christ Jesus we are forgiven, and we are called to be forgiving too, forgiving of others and even of ourselves. With confidence in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ we can do it. Amen.