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You are here: Home / Archives for Forgiveness

Proper 19A 2017: The Absurdity of Hell Anywhere But of Our Own Making

September 17, 2017 by Cam Miller

Link to Lectionary Readings: http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu

This is a very ordinary, old sermon
about mercy and forgiveness.
It is no big deal really, just the kind of stuff
we have grown used to hearing about from Jesus
and other sources in the Bible.
It would hardly be worth mentioning again,
except that we have so much doggone trouble
understanding the one
and practicing the other.

As befits two very different topics,
mercy and forgiveness,
we also have two really different stories:
Joseph giving some mercy to his brothers,
and Jesus urging the practice of forgiveness
to his friends.

Now mercy and forgiveness
may seem like Siamese twins,
but truly, they are not even identical
or fraternal twins.
They are two significantly different
categories of relationship and healing.

Today’s first story, about Joseph,
is a small little cog
in a much bigger wheel.
It is part of a much larger narrative
that links a big cycle of stories together,
all of them about the First Families of Israel.

These big fat Old Testament stories
have some juicy little morsels in them
but they are almost accidental to the grand narrative.

Sometimes, when we read these Hebrew texts,
we get overly interested in the subplots,
but it is the bigger story that is more important.
If we do get caught up in the detail,
it may cause us to focus on a little current,
like today’s story about Joseph,
but miss the bigger picture.
With Matthew and the Gospels,
it is just the opposite.
Matthew’s story is a simple little parable
that was turned into something
much bigger and more complex,
and our objective is to dig in and find
the little bits of ore.

I’ll start with Matthew,
and something I’ve mentioned before,
because it is worth the reminder.

Jesus and the other itinerant rabbis
of his generation,
taught with parables.
Parables were pithy little stories
with one simple point
aimed like a spear
to get stuck in the brains of their audience.
The reason they taught in parables
was because most of them could not read or write
and most of their audience could not read or write.

Parables were one-point stories
told with a sharp edge
that cut into the brain.
They lodged there like a hatchet
never to be removed.

The story we heard today in Matthew
has a parable hidden in it somewhere
but in the telling of it,
as it was passed down over a couple of generations
before Matthew put it into writing,
the simple little parable
morphed into a complex allegory.

I’m repeating something I have mentioned before,
I know, but it’s important.

While parables were a unique linguistic form,
used by first century rabbis,
allegories were a story-form used
by educated Greeks and Romans
in their philosophy, religion, and literature.

What I just read from Matthew is an allegory.
It is an example of a parable
that rolled like a snowball out of Galilee
and became a big fat snowman in Rome.

The point of Matthew’s allegory
is that God is like a king
who forgives his slave of an impossible debt.
Then, in the complexity of the story, the king
discovers the very slave whose debt was forgiven,
did not model the king’s generosity.
Instead, the slave had a fellow slave
imprisoned and tortured
because he was owed money.

That sounds odd in our world,
but in those brutal days,
they tortured debtors to find out
if they were hiding money somewhere.
It was a pretty grim system.

In Matthew’s allegory,
God is a king who forgives our impossibly huge debt.
The slave is us,
if we do not forgive those
who have trespassed against us.
The slave’s punishment will be our punishment
as the allegory goes –
each character and event reflecting
the promise and threat of our relationship with God.

We will be thrown into prison and tortured
if we behave badly –
presumably in Hell and by fire.

In other words,
according to Matthew’s allegory,
God’s forgiveness
is conditional
and completely dependent
upon our forgiving others.

But let’s face it,
that kind of logic and conditionality
only makes sense if we believe God is a cosmic judge
or stern parent with a big, horrendous paddle in hand.
To me, a God driven by that kind of
stingy, niggling conditionality
sounds too narrowly human
to be the God of all that is –
the God and Creator of the Cosmos.

But my opinion is not the only reason
to suspect that Matthew’s version of the parable,
now an allegory,
dramatically changed from Jesus’ original.
Think about Jesus.

He was a populist teacher
and revolutionary,
talking to peasants who were brutally oppressed.
If we keep their miserable social context in mind,
it is hard to imagine Jesus saying:
You know, God is like a king
who threatens imprisonment and torture
to those who don’t do what he says
.

Where is the good news in that?

For peasants living under the Roman Empire
and abused by their local corrupt tyrant,
Matthew’s description makes God
just more of the same.

Somehow that doesn’t have the ring of Jesus to it.

Please, do not imagine I am picking on Matthew,
but rather, trying to understand him.
It is in understanding Matthew better
that we excavate our way back to Jesus –
who died half-a-century before Matthew.

But there is another place to dig
in both the Jesus and Joseph stories,
and it has to do with the difference
between mercy and forgiveness.

In Joseph’s day,
and still in Jesus’ day too,
there was a culture of blood-libel.

We hear the commandment,
‘eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’
and think it is primitive and vengeful, but
in its time and place
it was radically progressive.

The rule of an ‘eye for an eye’
indicated to the ancients, that
if you kill my sister
I do not have the right
to bring my clan over to your village
and wipe out your whole family.”

Retribution had to be proportional!

Taken in its context,
of a bloody and violent culture of blood retribution,
this was a huge social improvement.
As a law and custom,
‘an eye for an eye’
reigned in unrestrained brutality and violence
that was commonplace in blood feuds.

Jesus’ takes the ‘eye for an eye’ teaching
and refines it in the parable we imagine is
buried underneath Matthew’s allegory.

Jesus declares that mercy
is a higher value than vengeance.
Mercy, in fact, replaces even measured retribution
as the core-value for Jesus’ community.

We may hear these stories and think, “well duh,”
but if we look at how our own institutions
of law and governance function,
I’m not so sure we have actually bought into
the supremacy of mercy.

Jesus was preaching forgiveness
as a radical strategy
that would free the minds
of brutalized peasants from the toxic consequences
of bitterness and resentment.
But Jesus preaching that to his peers
is a lot different than the Church preaching that
to marginalized people.

You see, the Church preaching forgiveness
has often been the tool of oppression.
The Roman Church,
that came to be the religion of Caesars;
and the Roman Catholic Church,
that inflicted horrid violence on its world
in the form of such things as Inquisition;
the Anglican Church,
that acted as partner in British Colonialism
to raped indigenous cultures it colonized;
and The Episcopal Church,
that tagged along with the U.S. government
to convert the leftovers of Native American genocide;
were major perpetrators of violence and abuse.

It is a very different thing
from Jesus talking with his peers,
for powerful institutions with a history of violence against their subjects,
to insist that their victims
forgive and forget, and show mercy.
Only those with the power to execute punishment
have the ability to show mercy –
victims cannot show mercy toward their abusers
unless the power arrangement has been reversed.
Herein lies a difference between
forgiveness and mercy.

While forgiveness
is something all people can practice,
mercy is something that implies a power differential.

Mercy is a gift granted from one person
who possesses the power to give it,
to another person
who does not have the power
to grant mercy to themselves.

See how that works?
But forgiveness is not a gift.

Victims of oppression
can practice forgiveness,
but when they do, it is not for the perpetrators;
nor is forgiveness a gift to the perpetrator.
Forgiveness is a strategy
to free the heart and mind
of the one who has been wounded or abused.

Forgiveness is a strategy
for those who have been transgressed against
so they can move forward,
without the corrosive effects of resentment,
and the acidic bile of bitterness
continuing to wreak injury to themselves.

We cringe at the idea of forgiving someone
because it feels like
we are giving him or her a gift,
a gift they do not deserve.
It feels like we’re letting them off the hook.

“Why should I forgive him or her?”

It is an almost instinctual response
that reveals our indignation
at the idea of giving something
when WE should be the one
getting something in recompense.

But Jesus does not suggest we give anything away
when urging us to forgive,
rather, he is recommending a strategy.

I would go so far as to say that forgiveness
is the practice of self-health,
or the act of caring for oneself.

Forgiveness, as Jesus teaches it,
is not a moral achievement
but rather a protocol for one’s own
healing and recovery.

Forgiveness is not an ethical principle
or test of our moral purity,
it is a tactical maneuver in spiritual warfare.

As we read about forgiveness and mercy in the Bible
we need to always remember the context.

Joseph could show mercy
only because he had power.
He exemplified forgiveness earlier in his life
when he used it to free himself of bitterness
and hatred toward his brother’s for their betrayal.

But later on, when he was powerful,
he could grant mercy –
and perhaps did so
because he had already practiced forgiveness.

Likewise, Peter asks Jesus
how many times he has to forgive some jerk in their community,
and Jesus answers, “Seventy-seven times.”
What he is really saying is,
“Well, how long do you want to suffer
under the effects of resentment, bitterness, and anger?”

Peter is asking for a rule
and Jesus gives him a functional strategy for living:
“How much acid do you want in your heart?”

Forgiveness is not a rule or commandment
it is a strategy for health,
and a weapon of spiritual warfare.

Please do not think of forgiveness
as something we do for someone else, but instead,
think of it as something we practice for ourselves.

Mercy is something we grant
when we have the power to do so,
but forgiveness is something we practice
because it heals us as we practice it.
The difference is significant.

 

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Forgiveness, Mercy, retribution

Proper 18A 2017: Reconciliation

September 10, 2017 by Cam Miller

Josip Racic, Mother and Son

TEXTS FOR PREACHING

Liturgical Reading (“To My Mother” by Wendell Berry): http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2009/05/09

Gospel (Matthew 18:15-20): http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=158

SERMON

In a recent Finger Lakes Times column,
I pointed to 1968,
highlighting a few events
out of a seemingly endless convoy
of ever-more horrific moments.

For those of you who lived it,
I’m sure this will bring back memories;
and for those who did not,
it will give you a hint of the social polarization
that consumed our culture fifty years ago.

  • January 5, 1968: Dr. Benjamin Spock (the baby doctor) and William Sloan Coffin (Chaplain at Yale) were indicted for conspiracy to encourage violation of draft laws.
  • January 23: the U.S. spy boat, The Pueblo and its crew of 83, are captured off the coast of North Korea.
  • January 31: The North Vietnamese surprise American and South Vietnamese forces with the Tet Offensive, marking the turning point in how Americans viewed the war.
  • February 18: The U.S. announces the highest weekly casualty count of the war – 543 Americans killed and 2,547 wounded.
  • March 12: Eugene McCarthy comes within two hundred votes of defeating President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire Primary.
  • March 16: Bobby Kennedy announces his Presidential campaign, the same day (though not revealed for another year) that Charlie Company rampages through the Vietnamese village of My Lai and for three hours, massacres more than five hundred infants, children, women and men.
  • April 4: Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated at a Memphis motel while planning the Poor People’s March on Washington. Riots break out across the country, claiming at least forty-six lives.
  • April 23: Students occupy five buildings on the campus of Columbia University. At the behest of the university, police storm the buildings and violently remove them.
  • May 11: 2,500 people led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, occupy “Resurrection City” on the Mall in Washington.
  • June 5: Bobby Kennedy is assassinated the night he wins the California Primary.
  • August 28: In Chicago, at the Democratic National Convention, police charge demonstrators without provocation, beating many unconscious, sending one hundred to emergency rooms, and arresting 175.
  • October 18: At the Olympics in Mexico City, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, medalists in the 200-yard dash, raise the Black Power salute during the “Star-Spangled Banner.”
  • November 5: On Election Day, Richard Nixon defeats Hubert Humphrey by .7% of the votes cast, with White Segregationist candidate George Wallace, receives 13.5%.

You get the picture.

For those who lived through it,
no matter where they lived through it,
alienation was likely the fog in which they were engulfed.

I turned fifteen at the end of 1968
and already had become involved
in anti-war and civil rights politics.
It was also the year I was introduced to pot,
and the relative calm and innocence of childhood
would disappear forever.

I mention 1968 more as a metaphor
than as a history lesson.

It was a time when the society was rent asunder
by extreme alienation,
even worse than now if memory serves.
But it was not only society at large that was alienated,
it was individuals in families and among friends.

A severe alienation entered into the relationship
between me and my parents,
most particularly, with my mom.
The seeds of that alienation
were of course planted in my childhood,
as is most often the case with such fractures.

In later life, I would come to understand
that such fierce disaffection and hostility
surrounding one child in a large family,
is most often a symptom of a dysfunction
In the family system,
that becomes expressed through the weak link.
I was the weak link,
and the relationship between mother and youngest son
was the embodiment of a family dysfunction.

That perspective, however,
was hard won from years of reflection and therapy;
and the blistering of that relationship
carried on into adulthood,
generally masked by politeness and tolerance.

In short, my mother and I
had an extremely complicated and painful relationship,
one that neither of us understood in real time,
and that neither of us knew how to mend
in any serious or authentic way.

You may have had such a relationship
with one of your parents,
or a sibling or child even, it is not so unusual.

Two of the readings today
poke at the dying embers of such alienation,
and may, for some people,
actually stir up some hot coals.

Matthew’s story about Jesus
telling Peter how to resolve alienation
created by a personal wounding or offense,
may work out well between individuals
within relatively equal power relationships,
and within a generally healthy
congregational or institutional culture,
but otherwise, probably not.

And Wendell Berry’s poem
describes a mother cast in the image of God,
a mother or a god
most of us would be utterly delighted to have known.

The truth is,
in the Church,
we are no better at talking honestly about forgiveness
than we are about authentically exploring sex.
We idealize the one
and ignore the other if at all possible.

(Don’t worry, I’m not going to explore sex
from the pulpit today).

From what I can tell,
from my own experience
and having been privy to the experiences of many others,
forgiveness, the way we think about it,
and the way we describe it,
does not truly exist
in instances where the injury or violation
is deep, severe, or violent.

Instead of a state of being –
a point on the horizon we arrive at –
forgiveness is a meandering and never-ending process.

Forgiveness looks and feels different
at different times and places,
just as memory is modified by time and circumstance.

Forgiveness has the wobbly legs of a toddler
learning to walk.
The babe forgets one day’s progress in the next,
and crawls again on the way to remembering
that he or she has taken steps.
Forgiveness is likewise, up and down
and full and anemic,
and restful and anxious,
and calm and festering.

When the wound is severe,
or the alienation deep and painful,
forgiveness is not a happily-ever-after ending.
Rather, it is a process of learning
and knitting
and unraveling
and gathering up
and quilting.
Just like a poem or a cathedral,
forgiveness is never complete;
never done once and for all –
at least not when the injury has been profound.

So as I have mentioned before,
my mother suffered one of those stair-step illnesses.

She would go along doing okay
until an acute episode would take a little more from her.

Then she would plateau again,
until the next episode,
which would steal a little more vitality.
This went on for thirteen years.

In the last months of her life
she was profoundly anxious about being left alone.
She and my dad lived with one of my sisters,
which greatly benefited her quality of life.
She had a hospital bed in the living room
and at some point, she became so anxious
she insisted on not being alone at night.
If she woke up and no one was there,
she would yell until someone appeared.

I do not remember at what point
people stayed next to her all night,
but my sisters did buy my dad
a mission-style chair and ottoman for that purpose.
I still have that chair in our house today.

Anyway, I lived about a hundred and fifty miles away,
and the last time I saw my mom alive,
is when I finally got up the courage to attempt reconciliation.

It was the middle of the night
and everyone was asleep except me,
and my mother who slept restlessly.
I had to hold her hand or she would become agitated.
So the mission chair was pulled up alongside the bed
like a boat alongside a dock.
My hand slipped through the railing of the
hospital bed
and we held hands.
At one point, my whole arm had fallen asleep,
from my fingertips up to my shoulder.

All the lights were out
except for several nightlights plugged into outlets
on several walls, so that, while dark,
the darkness was never complete.
The oxygen machine that fed her 24/7
made its mechanical sounds
and occasional gurgles.

I can remember like it was yesterday,
how the words were lodged in my throat.
I knew my thoughts were disassociated
from my emotions,
because I lectured myself how silly it was
that I couldn’t say the words.
“Just say it, you bonehead,
what is the big deal?”

Finally, I did.

“Mom,” I muttered,
in a moment that I knew she was awake.
“I…” – there was a pause
while I swallowed hard,
“I am sorry…I’m sorry for all the pain I caused you.”

I waited for my mom’s reply,
wondering what she would say
but mostly relieved that I had finally said it.
If nothing else, I had owned my part.

But of course, I wanted something else.
Something more.
Something more, from her,
even though it had not been a condition of my saying it.
Suddenly I felt vulnerable
and began to wonder, “What if?”
What if she never says anything?

I was asking for forgiveness,
but what if she didn’t forgive me?

What if I am the only one asking for forgiveness,
and she doesn’t?

I was tripping through the anxiety
and anguish
and vulnerability
and guilt,
and all the things
tumbling around in my head and heart…in silence.

It was silent.
It was dark.
The oxygen machine,

the cold bars of the bed rail,
my mom’s listless hand,
the dog wandering in and out, the ache in my back.
I gave up with a sigh.
I did my part but it was met with silence.
I didn’t feel resentful or angry exactly,
just deeply disappointed
and very, very tired.

I leaned back into the mission chair
and put my feet on the ottoman.
I closed my eyes
but sleep was somewhere on the other side
of chaotic and complicated memories.

About half an hour passed
when out of the silence and darkness
my mom’s voice arrived.
“We did the best we could.”

That was all she said, but it was enough.

“We did the best we could,”
acknowledged both the content of our relationship
and the mutuality of our injuries and responsibilities.
It was the simplest of responses,
yet it embraced both forgiving and forgiveness,
as best we could in that moment.

It was not a Disney ending
but it was a real-life moment of grace.
In the context of our relationship,
given the personalities of the two people involved,
it WAS enough.

My mom died not long after that;
I was not there but I am told
she found more peace at the end.

The process of forgiveness
and reconciliation with my mom
is not done yet;
I am still learning.

I am at peace with her;
she helped to give me that, and
I hope I helped to give her some peace as well.
But I suspect I will keep discovering
more and better ways to forgive and reconcile with her,
even as I continue to discover new
and unexpected dimensions of the wounds
that remain.

That is how forgiveness and reconciliation work.

They meander
and flow
and evolve over time
rather than coming to a final end.
That is also their power.
So long as we remain open to the process
of forgiveness and reconciliation,
they have the potential to continue healing
in new and profound ways.
When we wash our hands of forgiveness,
and pretend it is done and over,
never to go there again,
we lose the on-going gifts of healing.

So, healing is a process,
a never-ending and evolving process.
That is its power.

“Forgiving and forgetting” is actually not the ideal
nor the goal to reach for.
Rather, it is to enter into the river of forgiveness
and experience its current and flow,
and allow it to take us far into the distance as it will.

Thanks mom.

 

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At The Fish Tank: Proper 19C

September 11, 2016 by Cam Miller

Her face is round
and before she was aware of my presence
I saw her staring at the fish tank
as she sat in the entryway outside my former office.

She was sitting very primly
as she stared at the fish,
evoking the image of a small girl
though she was not young.
Her girlish face held tired eyes
and she was riding that wide meridian
we call mid-life.

I knew her.
She was poor
and the aura of poverty was a gray cloud
through which her otherwise light presence shown.
Wide gaps between her teeth
whispered neglect like broken windows
on an abandoned house.

Her valiant attempt to make out-sized,
second and third hand clothing
appear neat and muss-free
could not conceal a limited capacity
for personal hygiene.

I knew her by name
and for a split second before she realized
I was there, I studied her face.

I knew her story, at least part of it.
She had labored at the most menial of jobs
but in her thirties became determined
she would go to school and earn an Associate’s degree.

Working full time
and going to school full time
seemed obvious to her.
What else would you do?

“Some people have parents,” she once confided to me
with reverential awe, and a slight
but barely perceptible hint of judgement,
“that don’t want their children working
at all during school.”

The concept seemed mystifying to her
and I hid my embarrassment
at my own parental and class prejudice on the subject.

The tiny bit of public assistance she received
was suspended when she lost her job.

“If you don’t work twenty hours a week,”
she explained to me,
her words drenched with earnestness,
“the county can’t help you with school.”

Then she looked down at the floor.
After a silence she mumbled that no one would hire her.
She had applied to more jobs than she could count.
Now, sitting outside my office,
she was out of school,
out of work,
out of a place to live,
out of money,
out of food.

She looked at the floor again
as she asked if I had any food cards left.
She probably remembered that the last time she was in
I turned her down.
But before I could answer her question,
she asked me another.

It wasn’t a casual question either,
not something that just popped out of her head.
Clearly she had been thinking about this question
for a while.
She had been stewing on this question –
its moist heat sweating through her thoughts.

She straightened up her already prim posture,
hands still folded neatly in her lap
and ankles crossed as if some long ago lesson
from Catholic school.
Then she looked me straight in the eyes,
her eyes big and wide open with expectancy.

“What parent,” she wanted to know,
“would sit and watch her baby fall?”
She pointed to an imaginary toddler in the room with us
as if she were the mother
watching an imaginary baby fall down.
I could tell she knew that I knew what she was asking,
but I allowed silence to hang there between us.
“What parent would do that, just sit there, I mean,
and watch his baby fall?”

I asked her point blank, “What do you think?
“I don’t want to think bad thoughts,” she whimpered.
“I don’t want to think bad thoughts about, you know;
I don’t want to think bad thoughts about…God.”

Just then the fish tank bubbled and burped.
It’s funny how we remember little details
and so often forget the big ones.

Maybe you want to know what I told her, but maybe
you would rather think about your own answer.
Your own answer is a lot more important than mine.
Maybe there is no answer?

You see, one of the hallmarks of 21st century
Christian spirituality
is that we are faced with asking really big questions
but we do not get really big answers.
And another hallmark of Christian spirituality
in the 21st century is that we are able
to live within the tension of those two things:
really big questions and little or no answers.

In this century, in post-modern, secular society
we have to ask a question like,
“Why would God
watch us fall on our face
and not do anything about it?”

Then, when we acknowledge we do not really have
an adequate answer to that question,
we are still able to live in the faith that God loves us,
and even wants every good thing for us.
It is a crazy faith that is stubborn and flexible enough
to live between a rock and a hard place.

Does a loving parent watch as his or her child
fall hard and not do anything about it?
Not just fall,
but does God sit idly by
while that child is pushed and shoved
and trodden upon
by ordinary human greed?

Does a loving God do anything
to help an earnest single woman
simply struggling to work for a living?
Here is what I said to her.

I told her that I don’t know the answer to her question.
I told her it confuses me too.
I told her that it is easier for me to imagine
her troubles are the result of human failure and neglect more than God’s indifference –
and by human failure,
I told her I meant prejudice and greed
and hardness of heart.

I told her it was a good question to ask,
and that everything I ever read about God in the Bible
indicates that God can handle our anger
and even our suspicion.

I told her that I get angry with God fairly often;
and that I question God’s judgment on a regular basis,
even as I laugh at myself for doing it.
I told her that all of my confusion
and anger
and frustration with God
usually leads me right back to thinking about people;
about how we act
and when we are negligent
and what differences we could make
if we had a mind to make a difference.

Here is the thing that mucks up our thinking
about God
and human evil
and why bad things happen to good people.
We think it is supposed to be a well-ordered universe
in which the good guys get rewarded
and the bad guys get punished.
We can see that is not true
but we keep trying to think that way
because that is the way most of us were raised:
rewarded for good things
and punished for bad.
We earned praise and approval
and we received discipline and punishment.
That is the world we want
because it is predictable
and seems fair.

On the other hand,
we know from experience
that is not the world we have
and we presume something went wrong
because we do not think God wants it this way either.
But then we have a Gospel story like the one from Luke.
It really messes with our penchant for order.

“Now the tax collectors and sinners,” it says,
“were coming near to listen to Jesus.
And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling:
‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them!’”

That little word in Luke
that Elizabethan English preferred to translate
as “sinners”
is rooted in a more ancient Hebrew word: Resha’im.
Resha’im refers to people who have
“sinned willfully and heinously and who did not repent.”
(J.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism).

In rabbinical literature,
Resh’im is always translated as, “the wicked.”
What Luke is saying with the accusation in this story
is that Jesus welcomed and ate with the wicked.

Now in Jesus’ world the wicked
were mostly people who had professionalized their sins:
not only did they do bad stuff
but they made money doing it!

The wicked refers to
prostitutes,
crack and meth dealers,
pornographers,
Executives of credit card companies,
people who sold those ridiculously bad mortgages
to customers they knew could not afford them.
You name it,
any professionalized sin we can think of
and it qualifies for the category of the wicked.

Jesus, Luke says without debating it,
welcomed the wicked to his table,
to our table actually.
You see, in Christianity,
we adopted that silly formula that
IF we repent
and change our sinful ways,
THEN God will forgive us.
It is a very nice, very tidy,
almost economic formula that works pretty well for us:
Do the right thing
and get the reward.

It is a great formula
if what we are aiming for
is a well-ordered society or
a Church that insists upon orthodoxy:
God will like us
IF we have the right belief.
And conversely,
if we do not believe the right things,
THEN no matter what we do
we will not be able to gain God’s forgiveness.

IF…THEN: a conditional phrase
that makes clear what the bargain is.
But Jesus mucks it all up.
He says: “God forgives you, NOW go and repent.”
Hear the difference?

You are forgiven IF,
which is our formula,
and Jesus’ formula: You are forgiven, now go…

This is a critical difference.

Jesus declares that the wicked,
not just the every day, ordinary old sinners like us,
but the wicked,
those who haven’t repented yet,
are included in the kingdom of God
whether or not they repent.

The wicked are welcome at the table.
The wicked are brought into the kingdom of God
even while they are still wicked.
The wicked are welcome even before they make restitution,
even before they have confessed,
even before they pay for their crime.

How wrong is that?
It is a total violation of the way we like things.

According to Luke,
Jesus ate with the wicked while they were still wicked,
and Jesus announced that God loves them.
THEN – if you can believe it –
Jesus forgave them even before they had earned it!

What is the punch line for us? Go and do likewise.
So here is our predicament.

At the fish tank,
which is a metaphor for events and encounters
in every day life we do not anticipate or plan for,
we have to make decisions and act
with insufficient information
about what God does or does not do.

We have to choose answers
that do not come from above
and only belatedly, if we are lucky,
come from within.

In the absence of certainty
and without big answers to life’s big questions
we still have to decide
and we still have to choose
how to act
and whether to act.

Instead of making those decisions
based upon of what we will get for our reward
or if and how we will be punished for our crimes,
the more faithful
and just plain better human response,
will be based upon what we value
and what we care about.

We know the universe does not operate
on reward and punishment
so the question is whether we will be as radical
in our embrace as God is,
and whether or not we will make our decisions
based upon the values we claim to hold
rather than the hope of reward
or the threat of punishment.

Those are two big questions we can answer
because we hold the answer to them:
Will we be as radical
in our embrace of the wicked
as God is?
And will we base our decisions
on what we value
or the hope of reward and fear of punishment?

Honestly I do not know why
God would order a world
in which the wicked get loved and accepted
just as they are –
even before they have changed
and even if they never get punished for their sins.
But according to Jesus, that is our world.
If we are followers of Jesus,
that is also our value.

The question we face is if we will go with it or not?
Some days I do better than others
with God’s crazy and bizarre way of doing things,
and on other days, not so much.
It is on the other days,
the days I just can’t go along with God
that I am grateful even the wicked are loved.

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Forgiveness, Justice, Mercy

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 Trinity Place, An Open Space for Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts

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