I often wonder what goes through people’s minds during the silent
pause we have during the confession of sins at the beginning of the
service. Do people look back over the
week and start making a mental list of everything they’ve done wrong; and then
feel bad about it? Maybe people look
back over the week and think, “I’ve been a pretty good person overall. I haven’t really sinned.” Or do people’s minds go blank? Do they think, “Make this pause short and
let’s get on with this.” Maybe they
think, “I hope that pot roast I left in the oven is doing okay.” Whatever happens in your mind, when we think
about God forgiving sins I fear that we come up short on what that fully
entails.
People often think
of sin as if there were a list of dos and don’ts. Do the right things and you haven’t
sinned. Fail to do, or not do, the right
things and you’ve sinned. Then you need
to be forgiven; either by God or by someone else. While there are indeed things you should and
shouldn’t do, sin is not confined to such a mechanical understanding of things,
and neither is forgiveness.
In order to get a
fuller understanding of sin let’s go all the way back to the first sinners,
Adam and Eve. If you were here the Sunday
several months ago when we talked about Adam and Eve you may remember that
their story is actually one of two creation stories in the Old Testament. The first creation account is in Genesis 1. This is the famous one. What often gets left out is Genesis 2, which
is a completely different account that contradicts Genesis 1 in any number of
ways. It’s the creation account in
Genesis 2 and following that involved Adam and Eve. You may remember me saying that while the
accounts contradict each other they are deliberately placed there side by
side. The creator of Genesis knew we
needed both. Neither is exactly
scientific, but both speak of reality.
In the Genesis 1
account God speaks and things immediately happen. God is enormously big and powerful. You almost get the idea that God is far away
- at the edges of the universe - and his voice bellows things into
reality. But the Adam and Eve account is
entirely different. There God does not
speak reality into existence. God forms
it. Listen to Genesis 2:7, “Then the
Lord God formed man from the dust of
the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man
became a living being.” Do you hear how
close and intimate God is here? God is
not far away. God is close. The text goes on to say that God planted the Garden of Eden. Then just like Adam God forms the animals. And God makes Eve. Adam and Eve are carefully created and
crafted by God. God gives them the
garden and all three of them: Adam, Eve, and God are in the garden
together. That part that often gets left
out when we imagine this story. We think
of God making the garden and then leaving Adam and Eve to be on their own. No, all three are together.
While Adam and
Eve’s sin, their transgression, is technically disobeying God and eating the
forbidden fruit, it is rooted in something deeper. Adam and Eve decide they are not content with
the way God made them. They are not
content with their community with God.
They want something more. They
believe that God somehow left them incomplete, or that God left them lacking in
some way. The temptation from the
serpent is then to seek their own fulfillment apart from God, a
self-improvement project. They decide to
go it alone. Said differently, they seek
to define themselves apart from God.
They succeed at
it. Their close community with God is
broken. They sin and only God can make
it right again. They can never come back
to the innocence of knowing only God.
The same thing is
the root of our sin. Here we are living
a very finite and rather short lifespan.
We have been promised eternity, but we act like this life is ultimate and
God’s promises of heaven is an afterthought.
Is your life
driven by the realization that you are a child of God, that God created you
good and whole and complete, and that God wants to be in a relationship with
you? I’ll answer that for you. No, it’s not.
Your life is driven by anxieties, and uncertainties. It’s driven by getting approval from others;
and giving and withholding your approval to others. Maybe we aren’t nasty, greedy sinful people, but
our focus is here on this life and its pleasures and problems. We seek to live this life by getting
fulfillment from the world around us rather than God. Our lives are identical to those of Adam and
Eve.
All too many
prayers are prayed by people wanting God to fulfill them on their terms rather
than being fulfilled on God’s terms.
That’s a sure fire way to not have a prayer answered!
To put it
bluntly, it’s as if we’ve turned to God and said, “Thanks for making me, but
I’m good on my own now. I don’t need you
anymore. I’ve got a good handle on this
life thing.” Yes indeed we are foolish
enough to think that we can make ourselves, we can enhance ourselves, we can
improve ourselves better than God can.
How often have
you failed as a child of God because of peer pressure? In college there were people we called “Jesus
freaks.” You certainly didn’t want to be
one of them! They were oddballs, social
weirdos. Most of us are terrified by evangelism
because we don’t want people to dislike us.
What?!? God, who makes us, dies
to save us, and promises us eternal life is too embarrassing to share? Are we too ashamed to admit to others we need
God for salvation? Yes, we are. Before others we are all too often ashamed of
our only hope.
Maybe there’s a
person at work or at school or a neighbor who is always talking about
Jesus. They annoy you and you cringe
every time they talk about faith. You
don’t want to be associated with them too closely. No, you aren’t ashamed of your faith. You aren’t afraid someone will find out that
you belong to a church, but you consider yourself a well-balanced person. Faith has its place – at home or in
church. And work has its place. While you may use your faith principles at
work you don’t say things like, “My faith in God is driving me to do
this.” Or, “I can’t stand before God on
judgment day and defend myself if I agree to this.”
Do you see our
sin? It is nothing to do with virtuous
or naughty behavior. Do you see much we
are like Adam and Eve, not content with our God and thinking we need some enhancement
on our own terms?
Here’s the
ultimate truth. We all need God. And the God whose work we aren’t content with
in this lifetime is also the God we will be spending eternity with!
What should God
do? Justice would say to stamp out the
entire lot of us because we are such sinful failures right to our core! But God is forgiving. Even as we continually step away from God,
God’s forgiveness keeps bringing us back.
It is as if in forgiveness God says to us, “I know you don’t trust
me. You didn’t trust me yesterday. You don’t trust me today. And I know you won’t trust me tomorrow. But you are my creation. And even though you aren’t content with my
workmanship in you, and think you can do better on your own, I still choose you
and the miserable mess you’ve made of yourself.
We’re going to be together for eternity, and I’ll take you messed up and
broken rather than not at all.”
This is the root
of forgiveness from God. It is this
constant turning away from God that God forgives in us. This is the root of forgiveness that Jesus
gets at when he says you should forgive someone else not seven times but
seventy times seven.
I love these
words from Martin Luther in his devotional writing An Exposition on the Lord’s Prayer.
I’m picking up in the middle of a paragraph here:
“See how wretched this life is, being devoid of food and comfort
and nourishment for the soul, as the preceding petition demonstrates. Furthermore, it is a sinful estate in which
we would deservedly be damned if this petition [‘Forgive us our trespasses, as
we forgive those who trespass against us’] did not uphold us by God’s pure
mercy and compassion. Thus the Lord’s
Prayer makes us see this life as being so full of sin and shame that we become
weary and tired of it. And now, you
yelping cur, judge yourself, speak about yourself, see what you are, search
your own heart, and you will soon forget the faults of your neighbor. You will have both hands full with your own
faults, yes, more than full! (LW 42:71)
And I’ll let
Luther also get the final word with these famous words from a letter that he
wrote to his colleague Philip Melanchthon.
“If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true and not
fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious
sin. God does not save people who are
only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and
sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is
victorious over sin, death and the world.
As long as we are here [in this world] we have to sin. This life is not the dwelling place of
righteousness, but as Peter says, we look for new heavens and a new earth in
which righteousness dwells. It is enough
that by the riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away
the sin of the world. No sin will
separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a
thousand times a day. Do you think the
purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb
is too small? Pray boldly – you too are
a mighty sinner. (LW 48:281-282)
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