Roger Ray, pastor
May 1, 2011 Easter 2
Commissioned to Forgive the World from Community Christian Church on Vimeo.
John 20:19-23 19
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."
My cousin, Temple Dickinson, wore a full thick beard when we were in Middle School but he was clean-shaven in High School. The reason for this grooming change was that the student dress code in my little Kentucky High School, forbid facial hair. But the Middle School had no such restriction because, prior to my cousin's early maturity, it had never been an issue.
Any dress code or operations manual is basically written to correct past mistakes. If your office dress code forbids men from wearing fireman's overalls and coats and hats to work, then you can bet someone had tried it. You can read your office manual as something of a hit parade of past colorful employees.
You can do something like that with the gospels. They were not written during the life time of Jesus and so, they were written to accomplish certain goals of later generations..... it is not much of a stretch to realize that they were written, at least in part, to correct some past mistakes.
Mark was written first, then Matthew and Luke. Then, a full generation later, John finished his gospel that, in many ways, responded to problems which were being experienced in the church near the end of the first century.
I've shortened our lectionary reading for today to just five verses out of this late chapter in John.
It records an encounter with the resurrected Jesus, something which is almost certainly, a creation of the gospel writer and not reflective of any actual encounter.
Now, that may not sound good to you but I can tell you that the church did and does this kind of thing even now. You have at least heard of the fifteenth century spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a' Kempis. Thomas writes this manual for monastics as if it were Jesus speaking in the first person.
You might think that you would not stand for such a forgery, but it was offered sincerely as what Thomas believed Jesus would say to the people of his day and it was read by hundreds of thousands of people with that kind of authority.
Several years ago, when I was living in Louisville, a young pastor went to serve a dying congregation with a large building in an impoverished Louisville neighborhood, and he wrote his weekly newsletter column over the name of Jesus. Signing most of them, "with tears, Jesus." Now, they did fire him after a few months and, I'll admit, I was somewhat relieved by that decision, but you have to admire his modern temerity.....well, maybe you do, I certainly didn't admire it..... but in the late first century, for John to write an ending to his gospel that was John putting words in Jesus' mouth to speak to the church of his time was entirely acceptable.
Divorced from reading this as a historical encounter with the risen Jesus but more like a vision of Jesus coming back to give the young church marching orders.... What is it that John believes is so important for the church to hear?
In these five short verses, the post-Easter, resurrected Christ is telling the apostles that they are commissioned to forgive sins.
Do you remember that story in the fifth chapter of Luke where Jesus heals the paralyzed man? At first he says to the man, "Your sins are forgiven," and some of the religious folk standing around complain about that saying, "who can forgive sins but God?" And so Jesus shows him that he has the authority to forgive sins by telling the man to pick up his bed and walk, which he, miraculously, does.
So Jesus has the authority to forgive sins and long after Jesus was dead, John wants the surviving church to know that this authority has passed to them. In fact, the apostles have a fairly short job description in the gospels and high up on the list of what they are suppose to do is to forgive people.
Of course, the Catholic church, which likes to formalize things, takes these verses to justify a formal sacrament of the church.... The sacrament of confession or what is called in modern times, the sacrament of reconciliation. If you read about the practice of the sacrament of reconciliation, it seems like a wonderful idea. If you actually go to a Catholic church and look into the confessional booth, you will probably see about a half inch of dust collected on the seat. Great idea.... Nobody does it.... Which is just one of the problems with organized religion.
There is a parable which says that a Christian and the Devil were walking one day and the Christian discovered a great truth. Showing the truth to the Devil, Satan said, "here, let me organize that for you." Because, when it comes to spiritual truths, nothing is as effective in killing it as being institutionalized.
If, for example, the risen Christ had come to you and said, "I have given you the power to cure cancer, just touch any patient and they will be instantly healed," what would you do? Would you make them fill out forms and wait six months? Would they have to pay premiums for years before you touched them?
Would you tell them that you only touch people who were paying premiums before they got cancer because you refuse to touch people with pre-existing conditions?
Seriously, if you had been given the ability to cure terminally ill patients with the touch of your finger, wouldn't you be running through the cancer wards touching as many people as you could? If you carried in your hand the cure for cancer, wouldn't you use it, share it, spread it around as far and fast as you could?
Well, of course, we don't have that power.... Or at least most of us don't. But the cure which was given to us was the ability to forgive people and for a whole lot of folks, that's more valuable than being cured of cancer. And a lot more people suffer from guilt than suffer from cancer.
Now, you might say, back to the cancer thing..... I'm not going to cure people who smoke.... They really deserve what they get. And maybe you will say, "I'm not going to cure obese people.... They kept eating all of that fast food when they knew what would happen to them."
And you can keep going, eliminating the undeserving. Of course, we've seen how that works. Do you remember the welfare reform discussions of the 80's in which President Regan wanted to help only the "deserving poor"? Except, when you really squeezed him on the point, everyone who was poor was really to blame for their own circumstances..... anyone ought to be about to get a camera and a couple of monkey's and make a few million dollars on bad movies shouldn't they?
And all of us remember the years when AIDS was first spreading across the country and discussions about assistance for those who are HIV positive often circled about the "innocent" victims.... Which meant people who got the virus through a blood transfusion or an accidental transfer of blood.... But not those nasty people who got it through having sex..... because, somehow, people who got sick because they did something which is about as universal to human experience as breathing are not actually innocent! Hypocrisy is still America's favorite pastime.
What John believed was so important to tell the church, and, I think it is safe to say that he didn't simply have in mind a small community in Ephesus near the turn of the second century.... This is a message for them and, more importantly, for us. It is not the apostles we need to worry about, it is the people who carry on the apostles' tradition. YOU are commissioned to forgive sins.
It doesn't take a priest. It doesn't take a special ceremony or carved walnut box. You just need to get busy.
I like the way it is expressed in the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Those of you who have never been to an AA meeting will have heard about the 12 steps and you may imagine that they say things like: Don't drink.... Don't go to bars.... Don't go in a liquor store.... Don't hang out with drunks.... Drugs are bad, m-kay?..... or...Don't listen to Rush Limbaugh (sorry, I was thinking existentially.... Rush Limbaugh makes me want to drink).
Actually, the word "alcohol" only appears in the first of the 12 steps and the word "alcoholic" is only in the last step. The rest of it is about spiritual growth and, the majority of the steps, seven of them, are about confession and forgiveness.
AA assumes that addiction is a spiritual problem. You may not agree with that but AA has the best track record of success in helping alcoholics to regain sobriety of any program in the world so, disagree to your heart's content, I suppose.....
And, what is really neat about it is that there are no professionals involved... no fees, no one is in charge.... It's free and it works and it mostly focuses on forgiveness and we, church folk, really ought to be down with that.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
The one we Protestants get hung up on and the one the Catholics have made overly institutionalized is this concept in the fifth step. Most folks would still ultimately say that it is God who forgives sins but people in AA recognized that just telling God doesn't make it real enough for most of us. God is a bit of a silent partner in our lives and so you can confess things to God that you can still never really take responsibility for.
I have a friend who confessed to me once that he was having inappropriate feelings for a woman in his work place. Their jobs were such that they spent a good deal of time in private conversation with one another and she was single and had told him that she had a strong physical attraction to him.
He confessed to me that he had similar feelings and that he was really frightened by that. I asked him, "What are you going to do about it?" And he replied, "I've already taken care of it. I told you and now that I have told you, I know that I have to take charge of this and make certain that I am faithful to my wife."
Gossip is the scourge of the human condition and whenever you confide in someone you take a great risk, but to not be honest and tell another human being about your faults ultimately means that you are never going to take responsibility for them.
But when someone has the courage to confess something to you, you need to remember the authority that has been given to you. You might not want to express it in the first person.... You know, you might not want to say: I forgive you.... Remember, you are not Donald Trump.... You have to keep your ego in a certain amount of check.
I include an assurance of pardon in every worship service because I believe that it is just that important.... It's like being able to cure a social cancer.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux said, "You learn to love by loving." Which is like the modern proverb that says, "you learn to sing by singing, you learn to ride a bicycle by riding a bicycle." You learn to forgive by forgiving. You don't learn about it by listening to sermons or formal assurances of pardon.
You learn by forgiving the neighbor whose dog barks at night and you move on to forgiving the person who doesn't do their share of the work at the office. You build up muscles to be able to forgive your ex-spouse for..... everything... and you to forgive your parents for not being better parents and maybe you become able to forgive yourself for letting the dog bark outside at night, and for not doing your share of the work, and for not having been a better spouse and maybe even for not being a better parent.
We have the ability to bring a lot of healing to the world.... We can learn to forgive poor Mexicans for coming across the border to harvest our fruits and vegetables and them prepare them for us in local restaurants and change our sheets in our hotel rooms. We can learn to forgive Muslims for being kind of stuck in the 17th century and we can learn to forgive the hoodlums who insist upon showing our local Muslims how sophisticated we are by painting graffiti on walls of their house of prayer and burning their holy scriptures on their front lawn.
I am convinced that we can never heal the world through judgment and revenge.... We've tried it, it doesn't work. I'm just suggesting that we try forgiveness.... I've seen that work but mostly I've seen it go untried.
You are commissioned to go forth and forgive.... By me... by John... and, probably, by Jesus. You are welcome to stay here until the end of the service, but once you hear Barry start playing the postlude, get out of here and start forgiving.
