In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus is portrayed as a new Moses calling people out of the lifestyle and culture of the world around them, to live in a new way – in God’s way, within the world. And how better to grow into that way of living than through daily prayer that opens us up step by step all through our life to the spirit of God within us and the way of God before us?
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who
trespass against us.”
A number of years
ago, before we came to Fifty, Japhia and I attended a Christmas Eve service at
what was then one of Hamilton’s leading shopping-mall-style megachurches. There were choirs, a band, carols and
candlelight.
Near the end was communion. Things got a little quieter, more meditative
and reflective. The focus shifted from
the stable to the table. And to draw us
in to the gift of broken body and poured-out life, the minister led us in a
communion prayer of thanksgiving.
“Oh, Lord” he
said. “For this season and all it
represents, and for this sacrament and all it means we give you our
thanks. We are grateful for your
gracious love for all the world, and if any of us have sinned, may you forgive
us and …”
And at that point
all I could hear was the voice in my own head, saying, “What do you mean IF? Isn’t it ‘when’? Or even ‘because’? IF we have sinned?”
I didn’t stand up
and say any of that. I whispered it to
Japhia, though. And I’ve not since
forgotten that moment, nor since been back to that church.
When I was in
theology school at Emmanuel College, Dr. Heinz Guenther was the Professor of
New Testament. I remember him saying one
day in class that the Christian church, and Christian worship in particular is
one place in the world and in our life where the truth is spoken. Where we speak the truth, and hear the truth.
And
by that he didn’t mean the sermon. He
didn’t mean the hymns. Nor even the
reading of the Bible. What he was
talking about was the prayer of confession that traditionally is part of every
Christian liturgy. Like the prayer
we shared this morning: “We confess to God Almighty, and in the
presence of all God’s people, that we have sinned in thought, word and deed,
and we pray God Almighty to have mercy on us.”
That prayer was in our liturgy this morning precisely
because of our Scripture and our theme: “forgive
us ... as we forgive.” But we don’t
always include a prayer of confession in our worship.
Maybe we’ve heard too many prayers of confession that are overly negative and formulaic. Like the classic phrase in Psalm 22, “I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people.” (Psalm 22:6) Or the prayer of Psalm 51: “Have mercy on me, O God … according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions … For my sin is ever before me … I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.”
Or the prayers offer a bad idea of God, making God a great score-keeper in the sky, looking for all our errors and making eternal notes of them all, judging and punishing every mistake, condemner rather than redeemer of what is broken and weak.
But that's not what confession really is about, is it?
In the bulletin this morning I included these words of M. Scott Peck, that real human community “requires the confession of brokenness… [but] in our culture [we imagine] brokenness must be “confessed.” We think of confession as an act that should be carried out in secret, in the darkness of the confessional, with the guarantee of professional priestly or psychiatric confidentiality. Yet the reality is that every human being is broken and vulnerable. How strange we feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded!”
Did you notice that the prayer Jesus teaches us just simply assumes we all are sinners in need of forgiveness? “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
It's just the way life is, that we all make mistakes, we all cross boundaries, we all owe a huge debt to others’ gracious acceptance and forbearance of us, we all stand in need of forgiveness. And that it’s especially when we know the grace of God in our own lives, that we offer this same grace to others. Just as when we are able to practice forgiveness of others, we are better able to believe and to accept both others’ and God’s forgiveness of us.
And did you notice that all Jesus says about sin in this prayer is forgiveness? Not judgement, condemnation or shame. Not being bound to it or indelibly identified by it, but set free from it.
Blaise Pascal writes, "knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride, knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair, but knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness" in a way that is life-renewing and affirming. Because it's a wonderful circle of healing of sin and reconciliation against brokenness that Jesus envisions between ourselves, others and God. And it doesn’t matter where we enter the circle. Enter at any point you find yourself at in the circle, whether it’s giving forgiveness, asking for forgiveness, or receiving forgiveness, and in time you find yourself drawn into the whole of it.
There are, of course, all sorts of questions we have about forgiveness – about how it really works, is everyone and everything forgiveable, is forgiveness just a personal thing or is it also a political concept and a political action, does the other need to admit their wrong before they can be forgiven?
Big questions. Good questions for us to work through. It was suggested maybe I’d want to spend two or three weeks on this one line about forgiveness of sin. We could probably spend two or three months. Because forgiveness, as hard as it is sometimes to understand and to practice, is one thing above all that our life, our gospel and our whole community is about. In fact, in the whole of the Lord’s Prayer it’s the one and only thing that is ours to do. Like it’s our one part of the bargain in exchange for everything else we pray to God about.
For today, though, perhaps it is enough for us to take with us just two little things.
One, from Brene Brown, who has literally written the book on the gift of imperfection, who says that research suggests that the happiest and best adjusted people on Earth are those who begin with the assumption that other people – no matter who they are, are doing the best they can at the time.
And the second, a little longer thought from Elizabeth Lesser and a little essay in her book Broken Open – an essay she titles “Bozos on the Bus”:
Maybe we’ve heard too many prayers of confession that are overly negative and formulaic. Like the classic phrase in Psalm 22, “I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people.” (Psalm 22:6) Or the prayer of Psalm 51: “Have mercy on me, O God … according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions … For my sin is ever before me … I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.”
Or the prayers offer a bad idea of God, making God a great score-keeper in the sky, looking for all our errors and making eternal notes of them all, judging and punishing every mistake, condemner rather than redeemer of what is broken and weak.
But that's not what confession really is about, is it?
In the bulletin this morning I included these words of M. Scott Peck, that real human community “requires the confession of brokenness… [but] in our culture [we imagine] brokenness must be “confessed.” We think of confession as an act that should be carried out in secret, in the darkness of the confessional, with the guarantee of professional priestly or psychiatric confidentiality. Yet the reality is that every human being is broken and vulnerable. How strange we feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded!”
Did you notice that the prayer Jesus teaches us just simply assumes we all are sinners in need of forgiveness? “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
It's just the way life is, that we all make mistakes, we all cross boundaries, we all owe a huge debt to others’ gracious acceptance and forbearance of us, we all stand in need of forgiveness. And that it’s especially when we know the grace of God in our own lives, that we offer this same grace to others. Just as when we are able to practice forgiveness of others, we are better able to believe and to accept both others’ and God’s forgiveness of us.
And did you notice that all Jesus says about sin in this prayer is forgiveness? Not judgement, condemnation or shame. Not being bound to it or indelibly identified by it, but set free from it.
Blaise Pascal writes, "knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride, knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair, but knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness" in a way that is life-renewing and affirming. Because it's a wonderful circle of healing of sin and reconciliation against brokenness that Jesus envisions between ourselves, others and God. And it doesn’t matter where we enter the circle. Enter at any point you find yourself at in the circle, whether it’s giving forgiveness, asking for forgiveness, or receiving forgiveness, and in time you find yourself drawn into the whole of it.
There are, of course, all sorts of questions we have about forgiveness – about how it really works, is everyone and everything forgiveable, is forgiveness just a personal thing or is it also a political concept and a political action, does the other need to admit their wrong before they can be forgiven?
Big questions. Good questions for us to work through. It was suggested maybe I’d want to spend two or three weeks on this one line about forgiveness of sin. We could probably spend two or three months. Because forgiveness, as hard as it is sometimes to understand and to practice, is one thing above all that our life, our gospel and our whole community is about. In fact, in the whole of the Lord’s Prayer it’s the one and only thing that is ours to do. Like it’s our one part of the bargain in exchange for everything else we pray to God about.
For today, though, perhaps it is enough for us to take with us just two little things.
One, from Brene Brown, who has literally written the book on the gift of imperfection, who says that research suggests that the happiest and best adjusted people on Earth are those who begin with the assumption that other people – no matter who they are, are doing the best they can at the time.
And the second, a little longer thought from Elizabeth Lesser and a little essay in her book Broken Open – an essay she titles “Bozos on the Bus”:
We are all half-baked experiments – mistake-prone
beings, born without an instruction book into a complex world. None of us are models of perfect
behavior. We have all betrayed and been
betrayed; we’ve been known to be egotistical, unreliable, lethargic, and
stingy; and each one of us has, at times, awakened in the middle of the night
worrying about everything from money, kids or terrorism to wrinkled skin and
receding hairlines. In other words,
we’re all bozos on the bus.
This, in my opinion, is cause for celebration. If we’re all bozos, then for goodness sake [or God’s sake, she says] we can put down the burden of pretense and get on with being bozos. We can approach the problems that visit bozo-types without the usual embarrassment and resistance, [without the shame and fear we often feel about our mistakes and shortcomings]. And it’s so much more effective to work on our rough edges together with a light and forgiving heart …not to deny our defects but as a way of welcoming them as part of the standard human operating system.
This, in my opinion, is cause for celebration. If we’re all bozos, then for goodness sake [or God’s sake, she says] we can put down the burden of pretense and get on with being bozos. We can approach the problems that visit bozo-types without the usual embarrassment and resistance, [without the shame and fear we often feel about our mistakes and shortcomings]. And it’s so much more effective to work on our rough edges together with a light and forgiving heart …not to deny our defects but as a way of welcoming them as part of the standard human operating system.
[Sometimes, she says, it seems there is another bus, one where the passengers] are all thin, healthy, happy, well-dressed, well-adjusted and well-liked people who belong to harmonious families, hold jobs that don’t bore or aggravate them, and never do mean things [and] we long to be on that bus with the other normal people.
… But that sleek bus with the cool people … is also filled with bozos: bozos in drag, bozos with secrets. And when we see that every single human being … shares the same foibles and fallenness, a strange thing happens. We begin to cheer up, to loosen up, and we become as buoyant as those people we imagined on the other bus. As we rumble along the potholed road, lost as ever, through the valleys and over the hills, [we are connected in new ways to our fellow human beings; suddenly we belong,] we find ourselves among friends. We sit back, and enjoy the ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment