As Christ Has Forgiven You

Today we wrap up our series on the Foundations of the Church. We’ve explored some of the key ideas that make us a community following the will of God. The first was unity and how important it is to work together for the good of this world. Last week we looked at some of the specific actions we take as the community of God and that included this idea of carrying the burdens of others. We don’t ignore the challenges others face; we move toward them, offering whatever help we can. There’s no right or wrong way to do good, either. There’s absolute freedom in how you choose to do good for others, it just has to actually be good for them. We heard how the Apostle Paul doesn’t look kindly on those who are sneakily fulfilling their own selfish ambition. We’ve got to be humble and consider how God would judge our actions. We are directly responsible for how we care for others, and how it is that we help carry their burdens. We were even encouraged to hold those in the church in special care; that’s what it means to be a church!

Now we transtion to our last foundational topic on the church community, that is forgiveness. Kathryn (9:30)/Laurie (11) is going to read our scripture for today. We are, again, looking at the Apostle Paul, this time from a different book he wrote called Ephesians. Paul was regularly trying to help these small churches navigate complicated waters of different religious and cultural practices. Last week we heard about some of the division in the church around Jewish and non-Jewish practices. This time Paul has in mind the occult. People who practice magic, astrology and believe in a destiny so strong there is no escaping it. Here’s what he has to say about how we are to treat one another, especially with these practices happening around and in the community. This is Ephesians 4:25-5:2. Hear now the word of the Lord:

Ephesians 4:25–5:2 NRSV

So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

And from Mark 11:25 Jesus says

Mark 11:25 NRSV

“Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.”

This is the word of the Lord for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Let’s pray: Lord, may we be an inclusive community passionately following Jesus Christ. Open our hearts to what forgiveness ought to look like in the church and with others out in the world. We don’t want simple, pat answers, Lord. We want the fullness of life in you, so guide us today. In Christ we pray, amen.

I don’t know about you, but when I hear people talk about forgiveness, I nod my head and say, “yeah, yeah, I know.” I’m supposed to forgive, but maybe I don’t want to forgive; maybe, I’m not ready yet. I can look back at some of the toughest trials I’ve gone through and still I am hurt by them. People who would say they are committed followers of Jesus Christ have caused me years of pain. I think of one boss I had in particular. Sometimes work can be the hardest because you simply do not have any other options. You must endure your boss’s antics because your only other choice is quit or get fired. That doesn’t leave you with very many good choices, does it? And if you don’t have other things in order - money to get you through finding your next job, an education in the right field, stability in your home life, good health - you could find yourself truly stuck enduring an awful hardship.

Well I was stuck like that years ago. I had a boss that accused me of doing things I didn’t do, blamed me for things I had no control over, and did things behind my back to mess up my career. If its getting later in the evening and you ask me the right questions I can still get pretty riled up over this all these years later. But the biggest problem I had with this person, in my mind, was the style of leadership he used. Years later I heard the label for it as the “zap-gotcha” method. He wouldn’t tell you what your job was, or what his expectations were. He’d let you do whatever you wanted, but as soon as you did something he didn’t like he’d ZAP you. I was too young to understand what was happening at the time, but as I’ve gotten older and managed people myself, I saw how preposterous this whole scenario was. It was at the tale end of working with this person, after a final zap for no good reason, that I vowed I would never do that to someone else. I would never leave someone in the dark about expectations, or harp on their mistakes. I was going to be a better leader than that.

So I started reading up on management. If I’m going to be better than this person was, I’ve got to know what I’m doing when it comes to working with other people. One of my favorite books is the story of a man who was an awful manager and eventually got fired for not leading well. With nothing to do he ends up coaching his sons pee wee hockey team and he realizes the problems he has at work are the same things plaguing him in coaching hockey. He’s got to learn a different way of doing things. And he sees how zapping people when they do something wrong doesn’t make people better; it makes them worse! It makes people walk on eggshells worried they will upset the boss or violate some unwritten rule they didn’t know about. So he learns the right way to lead is to catch people doing something right. That’s what encourages people; that’s what builds them up and motivates them to work together and benefit the rest of the group. So I put this into practice. I’m catching people doing things right; I’m encouraging a better, healthier environment. And I feel good! I’m doing it right! I have created a better environment so that people are not emotionally scarred from being at work! A few years removed from being so stuck I feel on top of the world.

And that’s when I notice, there is something still very broken in me. That vow may have helped me grow as a person, but it certainly didn’t heal that hole in my heart. It didn’t reduce my bitterness; it didn’t cure the anguish from that trauma. So, what did I do wrong? How come I created a better path, bringing good out of the bad that had happened to me, and I am still upset? Why can’t I get over that pain? And I know what I went through is just one of a long list of pain and traumas all of us have gone through. I’ve only been at Grace for a year, but I have heard of some of your painful experiences - divorce, cancer, chronic pain, fighting among factions. One of the toughest things I think many people have to deal with is not getting along with someone and every time you are in the same room together its like daggers coming at you. They don’t even have to say anything; they just give you a look or turn and walk away and the trauma of the past is right there all over again. How do you heal when the past keeps hurting you in the present?

In the Christian faith this is a problem that we confront head on. We don’t skirt around this issue, or blame the victim. We say there is a better way to be in community and the key here is forgiveness. The Apostle Paul, who was the founder of this church in the city of Ephesus, was writing to encourage them about what it looks like for this community to follow Jesus Christ. He starts by reminding them that this community was formed by the grace of God, and that Jesus’ death and resurrection means all of us have the opportunity to be adopted into the family of God. We can be made alive in Christ. Then he tells the church three things about what it means to be this Christian community. One is that we are united together, which we talked about two weeks ago. Two is that we live a new kind of life in Jesus, which we talked about last week as we carry each other’s burdens. And three is that this new life comes with new rules. The new rule is “build each other up…be kind to each other, be tenderhearted” and finally “forgive one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

Now Paul has some cachet with this community. They respect him a lot because, when he was there with him, there was a pretty incredible incident that happened. Its actually found in another book of the Bible - the Book of Acts - and it describes how Paul was preaching in this city and a guy named Demetrius was upset. He was angry that Paul was drawing people away from buying their silver shrines. There was a big temple of Artemis in this city, which was actually one of the seven wonders of the world, and some even said of all the wonders, this one was the most spectacular. So Demetrius sells these silver shrines to remind people of their visit to this beautiful temple and to pray to Artemis. They are making a ton of money doing this, but since Paul showed up on the scene they start to lose profits. They are so angry they start a riot. They shout and scream and want to kill Paul and his two friends with him because people keep converting and are rejecting idolatry, which these silversmiths profit from. Paul knows what its like to be in a riot like this. Just a bit before this he was in the city of Lystra where he was stoned. That means they took the biggest rocks they could find and hurled them at Paul until they thought he was dead. Then they dragged him out of the city to rot, but by the grace of God he wasn’t dead. He got up and went back into the city to start preaching again. Its nearly the same in Ephesus. He’s ready to dive right in there and persuade the people to the righteousness of Jesus, but people convince him otherwise. They love his boldness though. They know Paul is more than willing to put his life at risk for the good of this Christian community.

So when Paul says to forgive one another, they know he means it. He’s saying I’ve gone through some terrible things. In another place he lists how he’s been beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, drifting in the ocean for 24 hours, hungry, thirsty, striped of his clothes; all of this just increases his resolve to tell others about God’s incredible love and forgiveness. He has learned that God doesn’t hold a grudge; God forgives the instant you repent. That’s one of the key ideas about forgiveness as you look at all the scriptures on the topic. Forgiveness happens when we confess and repent. Another key here is that forgiveness is not just for our sins in the past, either. God knows we may presently have sin, and that our future will include sin, too. God forgives all of it. We call this eschatological forgiveness. If you didn’t ask for forgiveness in your last breath, right before death, God doesn’t say, “ohp! You missed it! Now you have to go to hell!” No, that’s not how it works. Forgiveness releases us from all of the burdens, past, present and future.

I heard about this idea this week that I think applies well here. Its about how we think about our community. For some, people are like animals that need a fence to protect them. It creates a clear boundary of who is in and who is out. When you have a fence, you know exactly where you are supposed to be and not be. This is a called a bounded set. But there’s another way to keep animals together. Imagine you have a huge property, so big you can’t keep it all fenced in. What do you do? The answer, of course, is to build a well. Its the source of water that keeps the animals connected together. They don’t need a fence when water is the source of life. When it comes to forgiveness, we could easily get stuck on what we see as the requirements to forgive another person. ‘They have to repent; they have to confess! They have to tell me they know they were wrong before I have to forgive them.’ That’s true in a way, especially if you are a brand new Christian and you are just figuring out the rules, but for many of us what we really need to be focused on is digging wells. We need to be busy helping people access the source of life, the root of forgiveness.

So how does this play out in our community; how can we dig wells in our day to day lives? Well for me its a reminder that I’ve got to do more than just better manage people than my old boss did. That’s a good start - make the world a better place; do better than the people who came before you. But we’ve also got to be able to let go of these things from our past. We’ve got to forgive people even if they aren’t ready, and work to imitate God in our relationships with one another. And how does God forgive? God forgives for all time. God releases us from the burdens of the things we haven’t even done yet. He sees past what is immediately in front of us; he sees the intention of our heart and the frailty of our human bodies and he forgives. Paul points specifically to the love of Christ and how Christ died on a cross for us.

And what does Jesus say from the cross? “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” The only qualifier is the ignorance of those who sin. Jesus offers forgiveness to all; not just those who realize their mistakes, not just those who have already repented - for all. There is something cosmic going on, where forgiveness is given before you even know you need it. That’s not to say confession doesn’t matter, or that repentance isn’t integral to the Christian life; they do matter and the fullness of the Christian community includes these things, but I wonder if what Paul is aiming at, and what Jesus moves us toward is living with others as though they are already forgiven, anticipating that the moment they realize they are wrong, God forgives, and we need to be ready to forgive too. In fact, living by catching people doing things right will only increase people’s confession, and increase the realization that they need to repent. If we live in relation to others knowing that God will forgive them, perhaps that will even help us to forgive, too, releasing us from the wounds others inflict on us.

Let’s wrap up. There are a number of things I could end with. I could tell you a story about how four young Jewish boys rescued a man out of the water who had a swastika tattooed on his hand, or I could tell you about the shooting at an Amish school house and how at the funeral for the shooter, dozens and dozens of Amish folk surrounded the parents telling them that they loved them and forgave the son who had killed their own children. I could tell you how if you pause at night and mentally forgive those who have hurt you, you’ll sleep better at night, but let me end with this, the story of Daylan, who was put in jail for over a year after a fight at a bar. His crime? His sister called him to pick her up after a fight had broken out. He rushed over and when he arrived, a man pointed a gun at him. He disarmed the man and threw the gun away. The police then began shooting at Daylan so he ran. Later an officer testified that Daylan had pointed the gun at the officer and fired multiple times. Video evidence, however, showed that Daylan told the truth - he disarmed the man, tossed the gun and ran when he was shot at. That’s what landed him in jail for a whole year before he was finally released after a verdict of not guilty.

That’s what makes an incident a few years later all the more surprising. Daylan had heard a boom and his house shook. At first he thought it was a small earthquake, but then a relative came to his door and told him there was a car crash outside his apartment involving a police officer. He ran outside, saw the mangled car, and as flames engulfed the car, he reached in and pulled the officer out of the vehicle. After losing a year of his life from false testimony, a year away from his children, and his dear mother, he chose to forgive and risk himself to save another person. This is what he said:

We need to work on our humanity ... that’s the main problem of this world. We’re stuck on how to...get even, and that is not how I was raised... You learn, you live, you move on and I was always taught to forgive... You can’t base every day of your life off of one interaction you have with [an] individual. I don’t want to be called a hero. I just ...hope (that trooper) sees this and knows he’s forgiven.

Praise God! If we could be more like Daylan, what might this church and this world look like? Such willingness to let go and forgive someone, to not hold a grudge against a person or an institution that has wronged him, is an example for all of us. Daylan reminds us what Jesus meant when he said forgive them, for they know not what they do. He isn’t putting up a fence about what is right and who is wrong; he is digging a well so the community can experience life. Let’s be open to forgiving others, not only for the good it does for us, but for the good it does for the church and for the whole world. Amen? Amen.

Prayer: Lord, forgive us for our sins. Forgive us for the times we have held on to our hurt and pain for too long. Forgive me, Lord, for waiting on someone else to realize that they have harmed me. Forgive me, Lord, for letting a wound fester and continue to cause me pain, when you have called all of us to life in its fullness. Lord, I forgive that man who hurt me. I put him in your care. Lord, for those who are struggling today, who are holding onto their pain, holding onto their grudges, by your Holy Spirit, may we release them. Forgive us, Lord, and forgive those who have hurt us. I invite you to hold your hands out. If you have sinned, if you have held onto your pain, put out your hands as though you are giving something to someone. Lord, take our sin, take our pain, as you promised you would in going to the cross on our behalf. Let this be the day we are set free from these burdens.

Hear this church: The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. If any one sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ; and he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. I declare to you church, in the name of Jesus Christ you are forgiven! Join me in the prayer Jesus taught his disciples:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the glory and the power forever. Amen.