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“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for
the ungodly. For one will scarcely
die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person one would
dare even to die – but God shows his love for us in that while we were
still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:6-8).
Have you ever forgiven
someone who hasn’t repented? Have
you ever forgiven such a person all the way? Think of someone who hurt you deeply. Maybe it was miniature Pearl
Harbor, on the scale of just two individuals, but instead of incoming
bombs, it was a verbal assault. It caught
you completely off guard and in its wake there was smoldering
wreckage. It was unfair. It was untrue. And you can’t quite get over the open
hostility of it all . . . hatred even.
“Where did that come from?” you ask yourself.
For a while you don’t sleep very well. It wakes you up. You try to distract yourself with other
thoughts, but the issue keeps surfacing.
It’s sort of like one of those rubber balls on an elastic band that
you paddle away time after time, but it just keeps coming back at you. It’s a game you always lose. And when it comes back, you find yourself
getting worked up again, agitated. You
replay the scene over and over. Like
a loose and painful tooth, you can’t keep your tongue off of it.
Time passes.
The edge is off. You’re not
waking up in the night. You have
talked yourself out of revenge. You
have even forced yourself to pray for the fellow. You have decided that it would be good to
forgive, but it’s hard. The
offending party has made no effort to seek reconciliation and has expressed
not even a shred of sorrow.
More time passes.
It’s better, but certainly not over.
That was made abundantly clear at the grocery store. You turned your cart down the next aisle
and there he was, coming in your direction.
You consider quietly turning around and making your way to the
check-out area. But if he knows
you’re there, that would make you look like a frightened mouse. Too late.
There’s eye contact. You nod
and say “hello”, even smile a bit, and he returns the Cold War greeting,
but your innards are all wound up tight.
You don’t want to repeat the confrontation at all the ensuing
aisles, so you head for a check-out lane, trying hard to look casual about
it.
Forgiveness is a messy business for you and
me. We’re not very good at it. We try a lot of other things before we
try forgiveness. We try to distract
ourselves with work and play and alcohol.
We try avoidance. We surround
ourselves with likeminded people and slander to our hearts content. We try
to convince ourselves that maybe he just had a really bad day . . . or a
really bad childhood . . . or a really bad marriage. We try to convince
ourselves it wasn’t that big of a deal.
When the edge is off we try to convince ourselves that we have
forgiven him. Sometimes we even
convince ourselves we were worthy of the assault; we deserved it. We try a lot of things before we try
forgiveness.
Forgiveness is hard work, and it doesn’t happen
all at once. If there is an opposite
to the ease of flicking a switch, it is the work of forgiveness. Forgiveness comes gradually, in hard
fought bits and pieces. Someone
wrote forgiveness is sort of like losing weight. The first ten/fifteen pounds are
relatively easy. It’s that last five
pounds that prove really difficult. Forgiveness
is a slow, messy, laborious process. It is sweat of your brow work, and if it’s
not by the sweat of your brow, then it’s probably not forgiveness that
you’re practicing.
I’d like to burrow and expand on an illustration
Mr. Wille used in chapel last year.
Think of it this way. This is
your heart [large, red paper heart].
This is your heart after that surprise attack. [Crumpled up in a loose wad and torn a
bit.] And this is the work of
forgiveness. [Gradually unfolding
it.] This unfolding of the heart may
take months . . . years even. Again,
the initial results are encouraging.
It’s looking better already. The
trick is, don’t stop here [mostly unfolded, but not all the way], keep working
at it. Often what happens is we get it to this point and drop off – “good
enough” we conclude. “I’ve
successfully forgiven him . . . the stinkin’ wretch!” Obviously there’s more work to do. In fact we have a long ways to go!
Stay on task.
Keep moving in the right direction.
Pray for the individual. Reach
out to him, communicate with him openly and honestly, confronting him if
possible about the perceived injustice.
Do acts of mercy for him. See
him as a child of God, created by God, counted worthy of Jesus’ death . . .
capable of good. Keep at it.
Now, maybe you’re better at getting wrinkles out
of paper than I am. Maybe you’re
better at forgiving all the way than I am.
(I’m still learning. In fact,
I think it is a skill we can get better at as we age.) In the end, however, no matter how hard we
work at it, I fear our forgiveness can never be perfect forgiveness. There are still marks and wrinkles and
scars on the heart. They don’t
disappear altogether. The assault
has not been forgotten. The hurt is
not all the way gone. And you know . . . that worries me especially every time I
read the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant.
You know the story. A man, a servant, has just been forgiven
an impossibly large debt. Therefore,
that servant should have found it easy to forgive his fellow servant of the
small debt he owed. Instead, he grabbed
him by the neck and started chocking him, demanding payment (Mt. 18:21ff). You know what happens. That servant’s refusal to have mercy is
exposed and he is promptly thrown into jail, not just for imprisonment, but
also for torture. A part of us says,
“Well . . . he had it coming.” Truth is, we all have it coming for all
of us have been unmerciful in this way. We fixate on the speck of sawdust
in our neighbor’s eye, while ignoring the log in our own (Mt. 7:3).
So I don’t want God to forgive me like I forgive
others. I don’t want there to be
leftover wrinkles on God’s heart that I’ve caused, because just one of
these would be enough to undo everything.
If God can’t forgive me all the way, I’m lost. There’s no getting into heaven 95% forgiven,
95% righteous, 95% saint and the rest still sinner. We need better from God than we are able
to give one another. And God
delivers!
Isaiah 1, “Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow.” This
isn’t the dirty stuff on the side of the road he’s talking about. This is the kind of white that makes your
eyes water.
Psalm 103,
“As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our
transgressions from us” (vv.10-11).
That means we don’t have to worry about those sins coming back to
haunt us.
Psalm 130, “If you, O Lord, kept a record of
sins, O Lord, who could stand? But
with you there is forgiveness.” (No
wrinkles or marks or any other record of our sins on God’s heart.)
“In the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus
Christ, I forgive you all your
sins” not 95 % of them . . . all of them.
Jer. 31, “I will forgive [your] wickedness and will remember [your] sins no more”
(v. 34). The omniscient one
graciously chooses amnesia.
God delivered
what we needed the most. And he
didn’t wait for us to make the first move.
Have you ever noticed how Jesus was forever
walking up to folks and, without warning, saying to those whom he met,
“Your sins are forgiven.” Remember
that paralytic man who was dropped down through the roof by his
friends. First thing Jesus says to
him, even though he was hoping to hear something else, was, “Take heart,
son, your sins are forgiven.” And
after Jesus died on the cross, to the disciples who had abandoned him,
first thing he says is not a cool and measured, “hello” but rather a
reckless and merciful, “Peace be with you!”
Almost nobody ever asked him to forgive them. But Jesus knew that’s what they needed
the most, more than life itself. Also
for you and me, without forgiveness being the first word, there would be no
meeting of God and us.
We talk of preemptive military strikes, to get
the terrorists before they get us.
This seems to be a preemptive forgiveness, preemptive grace, to get to
the sin before it gets us! God’s
word of mercy is the first word in the Divine-human conversation. I think that is at the heart of our
text. “Christ died for the ungodly”
Paul writes. “For one will scarcely
die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person one would
dare even to die – but God shows his love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died
for us.” Preemptive grace!
I think we see this in Holy Baptism. Not that the baby comes to us lily white
and innocent. There’s a load of primeval muck there already, and much more
of the state-of-the-art filth is on the way. Yet there’s no point in delaying, and so
just days into the baby’s life, the Spirit begins the washing of
regeneration. Yes, you bear the
wrinkles on your heart, but more importantly, you bear the sign of the
cross on your heart and on your forehead which marks you, every bit of you,
as one redeemed by Christ the crucified.
That cross supersedes any other mark or scar.
How important is this? How central to our faith? We’re already deep into Lent, half way
there now, and the cross looms ahead.
When they nailed Jesus to the cross and left him hanging there, his
strength fading, the life literally bleeding out of him, looking down,
watching as he friends ran away and the authorities mocked and taunted, as
soldiers threw dice for what was left of his garments, he spoke. Seven times, the Bible says. He did not say, “You’re going to burn in
hell for this.” He did not
curse. He did not say, “God,”
literally, “damn you for this.”
Those who were there heard him say the hardest thing of all, simply,
“Father, forgive them.”
And so later, Paul wrote, “While we were yet sinners,
Christ died for us.” I invite you
then, as sinners, as those who only know how to forgive imperfectly, I
invite you to come to the Lord’s altar for perfect forgiveness. Come at his invitation and drink deeply
from his amazing grace, the blood of his Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, shed
for the forgiveness of all your sins.
Amen.
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