Fifth Sunday in Lent, 2014
Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
Eldridge Cleaver was a major leader in the Black Panthers in the 1960’s and 70’s. He became notorious for advocating rape as a political act, admitting that he had at first raped black women for practice but then focused on white women. He saw this as an act of insurrection against an unjust, racist political system. In the late 60’s he fled the United States after provoking a shootout with police in Oakland, CA. He had a falling out with Huey Newton, another leader in the movement, because Newton thought violence was harming their cause and Cleaver believed in the necessity of armed conflict. He was a brutal, violent man, a criminal and a self-confessed rapist, a person who victimized vulnerable human beings.
But in 1975 he returned to the States claiming to be a born-again Christian. He confessed his sins and renounced the things he had said and done in the past. Shortly after his conversion to Christ became public, I was talking to someone who said, “well, why should he be forgiven?” Why should he be able to get away with all the things he had done and then receive forgiveness from God (and, by implication, from God’s people)? He was a despicable human being; aren’t we, by accepting him as a believer, saying that what he did was OK? For this person who was talking to me there was something scandalous, even immoral, about God forgiving such a man. Maybe it’s OK for God for forgive people who are guilty of gossip, or backbiting, or hating their neighbors, normal, socially-acceptable sins, but certainly not hardened criminals like Eldridge Cleaver. It’s one thing to forgive people for the kinds of “little sins” that we’re comfortable excusing, but it’s quite another to offer forgiveness to someone who’s committed real crimes, who’s done inexcusable, reprehensible things. And yet, in the words we’re looking at this morning, Jesus puts forgiveness of sins at the very center of our relationship with God. We may not appreciate it when God forgives a notorious criminal any more than Jonah appreciated God’s mercy toward the Ninevites, but the fact remains that forgiveness of sin is at the very heart of the Christian message.
The first thing I want to point out is that this phrase in the Lord’s Prayer says something about us: it says that we are all constantly in need of forgiveness. Not just notorious sinners, but all of us. This follows immediately after “give us, this day, our daily bread,” which suggests that it’s something we need to be praying every day, just as we pray every day for the provision of food to meet our physical needs. Much of Eastern Orthodox spirituality is based on the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” This prayer recognizes that everything we receive from God comes to us through his mercy, that we are not worthy to claim anything from Him and need to be constantly crying out to Him for mercy and grace.
In the denomination where I pastored, there were some who were influenced by the doctrine of entire sanctification, a form of perfectionism loosely connected with John Wesley but having little to do with his actual teaching. People who bought into this teaching believed that if they acquired the right experience they would be lifted out of the realm of struggle, that they’d become people who no longer sinned, who no longer felt pulled in the direction of sin. Their sin nature had been eradicated. I knew a number of people who grew up under this teaching, and it tended to result in two different tendencies. Some were able to convince themselves that they’d received the experience and had been delivered from the realm of sin. I’ve heard stories, although not very convincing ones, about people who claimed to have this experience. Smith Wigglesworth was a Pentecostal evangelist in the early 20th Century. One of my college professors told a story about Wigglesworth preaching against this doctrine. After the service, a woman stormed to the front of the church and informed him that he was wrong, that she herself had received the experience of full sanctification and was no longer tempted to sin. He had a glass of water in the pulpit with him, so as she was talking he picked up the glass and threw the water in her face; her response was a graphic demonstration that her sinful nature had not been entirely eradicated, which is why he did it. Those who persuade themselves that they have this experience end up embracing a counterfeit (and usually not a very impressive or convincing one at that).
The second group is more honest; these people recognize that they still struggle with sin; they’re deeply aware of their imperfection. They know that they still struggle with temptation and fall into sin. And it tortures them, because they think there’s something within them that’s blocking the experience. One deacon I knew had grown up in a church with this emphasis. He was a good man, a committed follower of Jesus Christ who went out of his way to help people in need. But he wasn’t perfect, and he knew it. He couldn’t live with his imperfection, because he had been taught that perfection is the normal state for Christians. It became so bad at times that he had to be hospitalized. I visited him in the hospital where he was being treated for depression; but his depression wasn’t the result of a congenital mental illness; it was the result of bad theology. He had been taught, in his early life, to expect something that God has not promised. In fact, Jesus has told us implicitly not to expect perfection in this life by instructing us to pray every day, “give us, this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors.” People whose sinful nature has been eradicated don’t need to pray in this way. It’s a good and healthy thing that we begin our worship with confession and crying out for mercy.
When we pray as Jesus instructs us here, we’re confessing that we are “debtors.” In the traditional form of this prayer in English, we say “forgive us our trespasses,” which is a mistranslation popularized by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. There’s nothing wrong with using this form, but it’s not the right translation of this passage in Matthew. The word here is the common word for debts, and the parallel passage in Luke uses the common word for sins. Our sins have placed us in debt, have put us in a position where we owe more than we can possibly pay, even if we had all of eternity to do so. We are “debtors;” we are finite people with an infinite weight of debt.
The second thing to notice about this phrase is what it says about God: He is a God of mercy who is eager to forgive. Last year, Iron Men read a book by A.W. Tozer, but unfortunately it wasn’t one of his better ones. Tozer, at his best, had a great gift for teaching Christians how to grow spiritually. Here’s something he said about the danger of thinking that God is just waiting for an opportunity to pounce on us for our sins: “Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God.” He was especially concerned about our tendency to lose sight of God’s goodness. He goes on a little later: “Much Christianity since the days of Christ’s flesh has... been grim and severe. And the cause has always been the same–an unworthy or an inadequate view of God. Instinctively we try to be like our God, and if He is conceived to be stern and exacting, so will we ourselves be” (“God is Easy to Live With,” in The Root of the Righteous, p. 14). God isn’t waiting eagerly to punish us for our sins. John says “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). God’s desire is that we stop sinning, that we not continue acquiring debt. But he has not only paid the penalty for our past debts, He has also provided for our future debts. Our debt of sin has been marked PAID IN FULL, and the payment is more than adequate for all of our debt, past, present and future.
The third thing is that this part of the Lord’s Prayer says something about how we, having received mercy, ought to respond to others who are in need of mercy. The great danger is to internalize our faith and not allow it to impact the way we live our lives. Joseph Valachi was a Mafia hit man who became a government informant. He told of being ordered by a mob boss to eliminate an enemy. He and another hit man had been unsuccessful, and when they reported to the boss what had happened, he said, “that’s OK, we’ll get him later, Then he asked them, "'Did you boys go to Mass today?' (It was Sunday." Why, no, said Valachi. They had been too busy trying to assassinate Bugs Rafferty (and, besides, Valachi had no use for religion). The old man shook his head. 'Rubbing out Bugs is important for business,' he said, 'but going to Mass on Sunday is important for your soul'" (reported by Thomas Day in Why Catholics Can’t Sing, p. 115). Responding to the Gospel of Jesus Christ is connected with every part of our lives. A few years ago I was meeting with a bishop in the ELCA; he had read two of my sermons and commented, “well, you know we Lutherans get nervous when people talk about discipleship because we’re concerned that it will lead to works righteousness, that it will undermine the doctrine of justification by faith alone.” I have to admit that he and I never did warm up to each other. But it’s important to point out that this way of thinking doesn’t do justice to the Lutheran Confessions, which speak at length and repeatedly about the necessity of good works. They just make it clear that good works flow from saving faith and are not the foundation of our acceptance before God.
Receiving and giving forgiveness are directly connected. But we need to be careful about this. First of all, forgiveness is not minimizing a person’s guilt, saying “oh well, it’s not such a big deal; let’s just forget about it.” The first step toward forgiving someone is acknowledging that what the person did was wrong. God doesn’t minimize our guilt. Our sins cost Him the death of His only Son. If we want to know what God thinks of our sins, the place to look is Jesus on the cross, crying “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
The second thing to keep in mind is that forgiving others is often a process, and if someone has deeply wronged us we probably won’t be able to forgive all at once. If we try to offer forgiveness too quickly and lightly, we may end up deceiving ourselves and accepting a counterfeit. The question is how to get from where we are to where we know we should be. And this begins with a recognition of the truth about ourselves. If we’re angry and bitter, if we just can’t let go of the wrong, we need to begin by admitting this in God’s presence. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann suggests that making use of the Vengeance Psalms, these Psalms that Christians often struggle with because of their anger and violence, can, surprisingly, be the first step toward learning forgiveness: “The articulation of vengeance leads us to a new awareness about ourselves.… John Calvin describes the Psalms as ‘An Anatomy of all Parts of the Soul.' And so they are. They tell us about us. The Psalms provide space for full linguistic freedom in which nothing is censored or precluded” (Walter Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms, p. 58).
Praying the Psalms, including those psalms where the authors are crying out for vengeance, provides a context for facing the truth about what is in our hearts. As much as we want to be like Jesus in asking forgiveness for those who hate us, we can't get there without acknowledging what we really feel. Eugene Peterson, the author of The Message, says the same thing; praying these difficult Psalms can actually point us in the direction of forgiveness: “For those who are troubled about the psalms of vengeance, there is a way beyond them. But that way is not easy or ‘natural.’ It is not the way of careless religious goodwill. It is not the way of moral indifference or flippancy. It is, rather, the way of crucifixion, of accepting the rage and grief and terror of evil in ourselves in order to be liberated for compassion toward others.... My hunch is that there is a way beyond the psalms of vengeance, but it is a way through them and not around them. And that is so because of what in fact goes on with us. Willy nilly, we are vengeful creatures. Thus these harsh psalms must be fully embraced as our own. Our rage and indignation must be fully owned and fully expressed. Then (and only then) can our rage and indignation be yielded to the mercy of God. In taking this route through the Psalms, we take the route God has gone. We are not permitted a cheaper, easier, more ‘enlightened’ way” (Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer, p. 68).
But we need to ask one more question. When we pray “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” does this imply that God only forgives us to the extent that we forgive others? We really don’t know fully what is in our hearts. We may think that we’ve forgiven someone, only to find anger and resentment welling up that we didn’t know was there. If we say that we are forgiven only to the extent that we fully and completely forgive others, we’re essentially saying that we can’t be forgiven; we’re setting an impossible standard. In this case, we’re not justified by faith through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ; we’re forgiven by exercising forgiveness. Our forgiveness of others becomes the primary thing, the condition upon which God forgives us. But really the movement goes in the opposite direction. God forgives us fully and freely, and then we are called to forgive others in the same way. If we refuse to forgive we’re showing that we haven’t truly understood what it means for God to forgive our sins.
But struggling, and often failing, to forgive those who have wronged us is not the same thing as refusing to forgive. We’re called to cultivate forgiveness, to cry out to God for grace to forgive, to take steps in the direction of forgiving those who’ve wronged us; but our forgiveness at its best is an imperfect imitation of the forgiveness that God has granted us. Here’s how Paul says it in Colossians: “Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other, just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (3:13). The Gospel of Jesus Christ first brings healing to our relationship with God, but then it also begins healing our relationships with one another. And this begins when we show others mercy because God has shown us mercy.
The truth about us, as fallen human beings, is that we are debtors and can never, even if we had all eternity to do it, pay off our debt. Paul says that by nature we have “no hope and [are] without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). Our condition, as fallen human beings, is absolutely hopeless; but Paul continues after this with one of his great phrases: “But now….” This was once true of you, but now everything has changed because of God’s mercy and grace. “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13). We can pray these words from the Lord’s Prayer in confidence because Jesus has paid in full the debt for our sins, a debt that we were incapable of ever paying. The Christian music group, Glad, has a wonderful song about this: “Be ye glad, oh, be ye glad, every debt that you ever had has been paid up in full by the grace of the Lord, be ye glad be ye glad be ye glad.” Every debt has been paid up in full by the grace of the Lord. Surely this is a reason for gladness. John Newton, that notorious slave trader who experienced God’s mercy, said near the end of his life, “Although my memory’s fading, I remember two things very clearly: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior.”
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