The Answer

Romans 3:21-26

February 19, 2017 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Several years ago, we had some friends who, due to a variety of circumstances, found themselves in a desperate situation. Cathy and I discussed it, and we were in a position to be able to loan them some money to help them get beyond the desperate place so that they could make some good decisions. So we talked with them about it, they agreed they would pay us back just as soon as they can, and seemed grateful. And things did even out for them, but they didn’t offer to pay us back. We let it go for a long time, then began to notice their postings on social media about expensive vacations and new purchases, and they never mentioned the money they owed us. I learned pretty quickly how money and loans can really mess up a friendship. When we mentioned the loan to them, we got a very nasty response and an even nastier post—one of those that doesn’t name you but you know is about you—online. And we were told, not in these words but told nonetheless, that we were unforgiving because we hadn’t just written off the loan. We lost some good friends over a matter of money and forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a rare and difficult thing to find in our world today. Make a mistake, forget to pay your mortgage, say the wrong thing at the wrong time and see where you end up. Forgiveness, it seems, is in short supply, no matter what part of our world we’re talking about. Perhaps we fail to find forgiveness because we’ve not experienced in our own personal lives. We don’t experience it, so we don’t extend it—it becomes a vicious cycle, right? In addition, we live in a hard world, one where being “strong” is equated with not showing mercy. And then along come these crazy Christians who stand up and dare to declare in the Apostle’s Creed, “I believe…in the forgiveness of sins.” For the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at this creed, this statement of belief that comes to us from at least the fourth century, this creed that defines what we believe and who we are as followers of Jesus. We are people who believe in God the Father Almighty, who believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, who believe in the Holy Spirit, and who believe in the church and the communion of saints. As we’ve talked about over these weeks, all of those have an impact on the way we live here and now, in 2017. These are not just a set of beliefs that we give mental assent to on Sunday mornings; these are meant to define the way we live 24/7/365. And there is, perhaps, no more relevant part of our statement of faith for today’s world than this one: “I believe…in the forgiveness of sins.”

First of all, if we’re going to know what we’re forgiving, we have to know what “sins” are. I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up, I somehow got the idea that “sin” was just a list of things that good Christians did not do. It was all about my actions. “Sin” was all the “thou shalt nots” in the Bible, and beyond that, the things modern American Christianity had decided should be “thou shalt nots.” In some places, for instance, it was considered a “sin” for a woman to wear pants; in other places, it was considered a “sin” to listen to rock music, and when Christian rock music became a thing, there was a huge debate as to whether or not it was okay or from the Devil (because those were the only two options apparently). Far too often, we define “sin” as just a list of behaviors, which leads public figures to make statements that show they have little understanding of what “sin” really is. Ted Turner, for instance, once said he hadn’t done anything bad enough that anyone needed to die for him, and our current president, when he was campaigning last year, said he hadn’t ever asked for forgiveness. “If I do something wrong,” he said, “I think I just try to make it right. I don’t bring God into that picture” (qtd. in Hamilton, Creed, pg. 130). That’s not any kind of political statement, because I believe President Trump actually represents that majority of people today who believe either that there isn’t anything such as sin, or that what they have done isn’t sin and therefore doesn’t need forgiveness.

Paul has a different idea in the passage we read this morning from his letter to the Romans: sin is not something we do, it’s the inclination of our heart. In what has become one of the most famous verses from this dense book, Paul says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (3:23). All have sinned. All fall short. If you remember, a couple of weeks ago, I shared with you that the word for “sin” in the New Testament literally means “to miss the mark.” It’s an archery term that describes an arrow that doesn’t make it to the target or misses the center spot that it’s supposed to hit. Paul adds an additional athletic metaphor here when he says we have all fallen short; the image there is of a runner who falls behind in the race and who can’t possibly finish first (cf. Briscoe, The Communicator’s Commentary: Romans, pg. 89). In the first part of this letter, he’s been making the case for how unrighteous humanity is, and in this section that argument begins to come to a head as he points out he’s not just talking about Gentiles (those who were not God’s chosen people) or just about Jews (those who were God’s chosen people). He’s talking about everyone; “there is no difference between Jew and Gentile,” Paul says (3:22). We’ve all missed the mark. We’re all falling behind in the race.

And we have been since the beginning; that’s Paul’s point. This is not a new thing. Way back in Genesis, God created man and woman and pretty quickly, they disobeyed God. God had a marvelous plan for fellowship, for a perfect relationship between himself and humanity, but that plan didn’t get past the first generation of human beings. It didn’t get past the third chapter of the book! Sin entered the world in the form of disobedience, and it became our “default” setting. That’s why, according the Bible, sin isn’t really something we “do;” it’s not a list of do’s and don’ts. Sin is in our nature. It’s the bent of our heart. And so from that Genesis moment, God began to work to put things back together. He worked through ordinary people, making covenants or promises with them, inviting them to live in a life-giving way, and yet the story of the Old Testament is the story of humanity breaking covenant with God over and over and over again. We are inclined to break our relationship with him because we’ve convinced ourselves that we know better, that we know best. Think of it this way: Cathy and I approach broken things very differently. When Cathy has something that gets broken, she will get out the owner’s manual or get online and find out how it’s supposed to work and what the best way is to fix it. She goes to see what the creator knows about fixing the brokenness. Not me. What’s the point of reading the manual when you can just open it up and figure it out on your own? I’ll work to try to fix it on my own for quite a while, just like I did with a running toilet at our house a few weeks ago. When I was done, it was no longer running just a little bit. It was spouting water out of everywhere. And that’s what happens when we try to fix the brokenness, the sin, in our own strength and ability. We end up in a worse mess than when we started. Why do we try to fix it ourselves when God has already provided a way for us to mend those broken places, to repair what sin has damaged? The way God has provided is called “forgiveness.”

Paul talks about God’s solution in these terms. He doesn’t stop with reminding us that all have fallen short of the goal; he goes on to give us the answer, the hope we need: “And all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (3:24). There are three big words there we really need to grab ahold of to understand what forgiveness is all about: justified, grace and redemption. “Justified,” in Paul’s world, was a word which came from the law court. To be justified was to be acquitted, to be held guiltless. It means that the ruling has come down from the judge: “not guilty.” It contains the sense of being accepted, approved and welcomed. Being justified doesn’t mean you didn’t do the crime, but it does mean you won’t do the time. You won’t be punished because the judge has chosen to grant you freedom. But what Paul is describing takes this idea even deeper, because Paul says we are able to be justified, to go free, because someone else took the punishment for us. He says it was because of Jesus—literally, in verse 22, he says it is because of the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. Jesus came and lived a perfect life, then offered that life in exchange for your freedom (Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans, Part One. pgs. 53-54).

And that is why the end result of our justification is redemption. These two words, justification and redemption, are closely related. “Redemption” has the sense of being delivered after the payment of a ransom. It has the sense of being bought back, of being a slave and the one way to become free is for someone to pay the cost (Wright 54-55). What we have been given is not just a pardon, it’s a costly deliverance, an expensive exchange. Redemption means someone else took the punishment that was to be handed out to you. A story that has made this image clear in my mind comes from World War II and centers around a Polish priest named Maximilian Kolbe. Father Kolbe took bold stances against the Nazi government that had taken over Poland, and was arrested and convicted of publishing unapproved materials. He was taken to Auschwitz, where he began ministering to the prisoners—hearing their confession, praying with them, comforting them. Then came the dark day when a prisoner escaped from his barracks and was not caught. The commander of the camp determined that ten men from the same barracks would be killed in exchange for the one who escaped, and that they would die by being put in the starvation bunker. The ten were selected and as they were led away, Father Kolbe broke ranks, offering to take the place of one of the prisoners who had a family. When the commander learned he was a priest, the exchange was made quickly. Days passed in the starvation bunker while those outside heard the sound of singing and worship coming from the hole in the ground. Father Kolbe was the last to die, a smile on his lips and his eyes fixed on some faraway vision (Colson, Being the Body, pgs. 348-357). He gave his life so that another man could live and in doing so, he lived out the example of Jesus, whose life was given so that we could be justified, redeemed, made right in our relationship with God.

And none of that is possible without the word in the middle: grace. When we proclaim that we believe in the forgiveness of sins, we’re really saying we believe in grace. Grace is sometimes defined as “unmerited favor,” or getting what we don’t deserve, and with that definition, there are really two sides to grace. Jesus got what we didn’t deserve so that we could get what we don’t deserve. Jesus received death so that we could receive life, so that we could be forgiven and deal once and for all with the sin that so easily grabs ahold of us. That’s why the word that is translated “grace” here can also be translated “charm,” “approval” or “beauty.” There is a beauty to grace, to being forgiven, to experiencing forgiveness. It’s why we look at stories like the 2006 shooting in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania and marvel at the response of the Amish in that community—going to the shooter’s widow and offering forgiveness, setting up a scholarship fund for his children, attending his funeral. If you remember, the media had no idea what to do with that response, but you couldn’t help but watch it unfold. There is a beauty to grace, to forgiveness. The world doesn’t understand it but it is still fascinated by that beauty.

Very often, however, even as we proclaim our belief in the forgiveness of sins, we’re happy to receive forgiveness for ourselves while resisting the idea that we must forgive others. “But, pastor, you don’t know what they have done to me!” And that’s true, I don’t, and you don’t know what others have done to me. We keep all that stuff pretty private unless we vent about it on social media, but here’s the thing that smacks me in the face. Jesus didn’t say there were levels of forgiveness, that some things should be and other things shouldn’t be forgiven. Jesus put it pretty plainly in some verses I wish he hadn’t said. In the sermon on the mount, Jesus says this: “If you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins” (Matthew 6:14-15). Those words mess with the way I want the world to work. You see, like most people, I enjoy and crave being forgiven myself, but I find it difficult to forgive others who have deeply wounded. Yet, Jesus seems to say pretty clearly we will only be forgiven as we forgive. Even in the “model prayer” that we often recite, he tells us to pray these words: “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). In other words, in the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God to forgive us up to the level we forgive others. We set the bar as to how we want to be forgiven by the way we forgive others. That’s scary, isn’t it? And I don’t believe it’s because God is wanting to withhold forgiveness from us. I think it’s because we only open ourselves up to the possibility of being forgiven as we learn to forgive. In other words, we close off the channels of forgiveness, we cut off part of the relationship we could have with God when we refuse to forgive. If our calling is to be like Jesus, and it is, then we’re called not to just believe in forgiveness, but to practice it. Every day. With every person. All the time. Now—are you sure you want to affirm a belief in forgiveness?

Before you answer that question, though, let’s consider some things forgiveness is and some things it isn’t. First of all, forgiving is not the same as forgetting. We have this horrible phrase of “forgive and forget,” but the reality is our brains aren’t wired that way. Life would be a lot easier if they were, but we can’t just “turn off” certain memories and hold onto others. Even when you make a choice to forgive someone, you’re still probably going to remember what happened. Into every relationship come times that are hurtful. I have a good friend who, several years ago in a meeting, said some intentionally hurtful things to and about me. Later, he apologized and asked for forgiveness and I was glad to give it. We’re good friends to this day, but I obviously can’t say I don’t remember what happened. (If I didn’t remember, I wouldn’t have just told you about it!) There are times when that pain comes back full force, and I think some of that is the enemy trying to do damage to my soul by bringing that memory back. But we don’t forget.

What we do instead is choose not to actively remember. We make a choice that whatever happened will no longer control us. It will no longer define us. Forgiveness is not saying to the person who wronged us that they are okay or that what they did was okay. It’s choosing not to hold it over the head of the other person or to hold onto it in our own lives. And that brings me to the language we use. When someone apologizes, if you're like me, the common response is, “It’s okay.” But that’s a lie. It’s not okay, or there would be no need for an apology. What we need to say at that point is not, “It’s okay,” but three incredibly powerful words: “I forgive you.” It may seem awkward, but it’s really the only way to turn the corner. Don’t brush what happened under the rug, but offer true and sincere forgiveness.

Forgiveness is also not an escape from any consequences that might come. Forgiveness might happen between two people but consequences can still come; sometimes they are legally required. And sometimes consequences are exactly what is needed to help the one who has sinned change (Hamilton 141-142). Many years ago, I knew a young man whom we called Skip. When I met Skip, he wanted to join the church soon because he knew he was going to end up in prison. He already had several layers of legal trouble, but in the midst of that, he had met with the police officer who had been assigned to his case and was offered grace. The officer shared the good news with Skip and told him he could be forgiven. Skip received and welcomed that good news, even coming to church with the officer. But there were still consequences and Skip was indeed sent to prison. After a relatively short time, he was up for parole, and folks from the church including that police officer went to testify on his behalf. Because of Skip’s change in attitude and behavior, the judge also offered forgiveness and released Skip. He came back to the church and he and the police officer were often invited to other churches to tell their story of forgiveness and reconciliation.

I wish that were the end of the story, but the reality is that sometimes the consequences we have to face aren’t so much “out there” as they are inside of us. Skip did indeed face the legal consequences, but we came to realize he never could forgive himself. Part of that stemmed from his inability to get a job after his incarceration; no one would hire an “ex-con,” so he turned back toward the only life he knew, a life of self-destruction. After a short time, he disappeared from church, and eventually ended up back in prison because of poor choices. I can’t help but wonder what his story could have done for so many if he had only been able to forgive himself, if he had only been able to accept the forgiveness he was offered. The same could be said about Judas in the New Testament, couldn’t it? Judas betrayed Jesus, and you can debate whether or not he “had” to do that or if it was a choice, but the fact remains that he did it. The bigger question, in my mind, is this: could Judas have been forgiven? Remember on that last night with Jesus, Peter also betrayed Jesus by denying that he even knew him, and yet Peter found forgiveness after Jesus was raised from the dead. I believe Judas could have found that same hope, that same forgiveness if he had only waited three days. If only he had waited until Jesus was risen. Instead, you know the story: wracked with guilt, Judas went out that same night Jesus was betrayed and hung himself. He took his own life because he could not forgive himself. Sometimes the consequences we most need to deal with are internal rather than external.

And that’s why I call forgiveness the answer. It’s the answer to the question the world doesn’t even know it’s asking. Theologian Paul Tillich says forgiveness is “the divine answer, to the question implied in our existence” (qtd. in Hamilton 130). It is something we need to not just believe in, but practice, for the sake of and the health of our souls. I have a friend who routinely tells me, “You can’t preach on forgiveness too often,” and that’s why. Just as we eat well and we exercise for the health of our body, we forgive for the health of our soul.

So…how? How do we practice forgiveness? I wish there were a “1-2-3” process for forgiveness, but the reality is it’s much deeper and much more difficult than that. The Greek word for repentance is the word metanoia, which means turning around, going one direction and then going another (cf. Hamilton, Forgiveness, pg. 25). When we’re talking about behavior, it means we change our heart so that we have a change in behavior. We actively choose to go another way. Sometimes forgiveness is like one of those zero turn mowers that can literally turn on a dime; we are able to forgive the other person quickly and move on with life. But other times, when the hurt is especially deep, forgiveness is more like turning a cruise ship. The turn, the change doesn’t happen instantly; it happens in increments, bit by bit—increments so small you might not even notice but there is still a definite change taking place. And, remember, because we’re doing this for the sake of our soul, being a forgiving person doesn’t depend on the other person coming to ask for forgiveness. Sometimes we say, “I’ll forgive him or her when they ask for it and when I feel they deserve it.” Thank God he doesn’t wait until we deserve it, because it would never happen. None of us “deserve” forgiveness; rather, it’s something we extend as an act of grace because we want a healthy soul. We choose to forgive; it’s a conscious choice, and it will often be a lot of work. Increment by increment, moment by moment, choosing not to live as a person wounded by the other.

The closest we get to an instruction manual for forgiveness is in Matthew 18, where Jesus gives us directions for dealing with sin in the church. I’ve preached a whole series on this passage because it’s so important, and we usually don’t do what Jesus says to do, but real quickly, here’s what Jesus says. If there is a broken relationship, the first thing to do is blast them on social media. Oh, wait, no that’s not right, even though that’s the first thing we tend to do today. No, Jesus says you go directly to the other person and seek to make things right. Offer forgiveness and attempt reconciliation, which is the goal. If that does not work, Jesus says, take a neutral party along—one or two others, he says—who can help forgiveness and reconciliation happen. And if that doesn’t work, he says to “tell it to the church.” I don’t think he means stand up in front of 400 people and announce someone’s sin against you. Rather, “church” in the first century was more the equivalent of our LifeGroups or small groups today. That’s the way they functioned—trusted friends who could help bring peace and provide grace. So, a slightly larger group—and then Jesus says something that might sound shocking. He says, “If they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector” (Matthew 18:17). That sounds like you’re throwing them out, that they are no longer in fellowship with you. And while there might be good reason to treat someone who has wounded you with a bit of distance—like in situations of abuse, where forgiveness does not mean putting yourself back into a dangerous situation—think about how Jesus himself treated pagans and tax collectors. He welcomed them, loved them, constantly invited them back into a relationship with God. A broken relationship does not relieve us of the responsibility to continue to love the other person the way God would have us love them (Matthew 18:15-17).

One line in our Covenant Prayer comes back to me: “See that you do not lie to God.” Forgiveness, my friends, is serious business. As Adam Hamilton puts it, “God will not be toyed with. Don’t pretend you’re seeking forgiveness if you’re really not. The kind of half-hearted apologies we sometimes offer don’t cut it here” (Forgiveness 27). The reason is because forgiveness is all about giving God glory and honor. Paul says that when we “fall short,” we fail to give God the glory he deserves. The reverse is true as well. When we fully and truly practice forgiveness, when we live the way Jesus calls us to live, God is honored. God is glorified. And God is glorified because forgiveness is a difficult act. It’s not something we can do on our own. It is one of the clearest evidences of God working in our lives.

Now, I don’t want to be morbid or “end on a downer,” but I feel the need to say this out of my own experience: today is the only day you have. It’s the only day we’re promised. In my years as a pastor, I’ve heard countless stories of people who thought they had more time, who would have asked for forgiveness if they had known that their loved one was going to die so soon. Or people who would like to have had one more conversation to make things right. If we truly believe in the forgiveness of sins, as we say we do, then the time to live that out, the time to practice it is now. Jesus even tells us if we are offering our gift at the altar and remember we have a broken relationship, we should leave our gift and go make it right (cf. Matthew 5:23-24). The time is now. “I believe in the forgiveness of sins,” for it is the answer to the question we don’t even know we’re asking.

Before we pray, let’s listen to the words of a song called “Forgiveness.”