Chipped – Forgive Me

Chipped – Forgive Me
Sycamore Creek Church
April 24, 2011 – Easter
Matthew 6:9-15
Tom Arthur

Peace, Friends!  Christ is risen, he is risen indeed!

Chipped

Have you ever been driving along a road and some car kicks up a rock onto your windshield, and CRACK!  You’ve got a big chip in your windshield.  My wife had a rental car one time and was driving to a conference when a very small pebble from a dump truck in front of her hit the windshield and cracked it.  Yikes!  It was a not a happy moment for her.  Up to that point the car had been beautiful and flawless, but now it was damaged.

Life is like that windshield.  We’re driving along having a grand ole time when someone kicks a rock up in our windshield or when we kick up a rock into someone else’s windshield and these lives aren’t the shiny happy perfect lives that we had wanted at times.

Of course the size of the rock matters for the damage done.  A small rock can produce a small chip.  Although over time that small chip, if not treated, can spread out and destroy the whole windshield.  What are the small rocks we throw around in life?  Changing the story just a little bit to make ourselves look better.  Being impatient with those around us.  Ignoring an obvious need that we easily have the ability to meet.  Small white lies.

I was pulling out of a parking space one time and before I realized what I had done, I was really really close to the car behind me.  It filled the entire rearview mirror.  I pulled forward and looked at the car through the rearview mirror to see if I had actually done any damage.  I didn’t see any damage in the rearview mirror, but then I wondered if anyone had seen me.  I looked around to see if anyone had noticed.  Then I realized what I was doing.  I was more concerned if anyone had seen me than if I had done any damage.  So I parked the car, got out and looked to see if I had actually hit the car behind me.  Yep.  I had.  There was a nice little dent in it.  Nothing too big.  Their car would have worked just fine with that dent in it.  But I felt convicted, so I left a note even though no one had seen me.  I was tempted in that moment to just drive away, but that would have been a small chip I had made in someone’s life.  Later when I talked to the person on the phone, I came to find out that they had just bought the car that day!  They were glad I left a note.

There are small rocks that make small chips, but there are also medium size rocks too.  Telling a lie one time might be a small chip, but continual lies over time add up and break down trust.  Or verbal abuse by a spouse or parent can wither our spirits.  Or neglect can be a medium size rock that comes through our windshield.  We want and desire love but we don’t receive it.  We just want to a touch or hug or squeeze of the hand or encouraging word, but all we get is silence and distance.  These are the medium size rocks that we kick up at one another’s windshields.  Perhaps they go right through or crack the windshield so much as to make it unusable.

Then there are the really big rocks that shatter our windshields completely.  Last summer I was at a wedding down in North Carolina when someone rear ended the car I was in.  We had stopped to wait for someone in front of us to turn left.  The car behind us didn’t notice us stopped.  We were at a dead stop when we were hit at about 45 MPH from behind.  I was in the back seat, and all I remember was the impact and glass flying everywhere.  It was like an explosion.  My body immediately went into a state of shock, and I could barely think or act.  I was really dependent upon the people around me helping me to do what needed to be done.  The policeman, the EMT, bystanders, other friends in the car who weren’t in quite as much shock as I was.  Without these men and women who helped me, I would have had a hard time functioning at all.

It’s not just car wrecks that cause this kind of reaction in us.  Big rocks come through our windshields more often that we’d ever wish or hope for.  Someone we should be able to trust sexually abused us as a child.  Or we physically abused a child, spouse, or family member.  Or in the midst of what is supposed to be a trusting commitment of marriage, our spouse has an affair.  These kinds of things are not quickly fixed because the damage shatters our lives.

Beyond even these big rocks are boulders that come crashing down on us.  I’m talking about the kind of thing that totally destroys your entire life.  Like a boulder that doesn’t just shatter the windshield of a car but crushes the entire car.  I hope and pray that you will never have something like this happen to you.  Here we’re talking about things like murder.  The effects of murder are magnitudes beyond the small chips that we get in our windshields.  Life cannot go on in the same way.

The repair work from the smallest of chips to the crushing of a car is done through forgiveness.  It begins with forgiveness and it continues with forgiveness.

Forgiveness involves two things: chips in our lives and the chips we make in others’ lives.  Forgiveness has to do with the damage people do to us and the damage we do to others.  Today we begin a three week series on the repair work of forgiveness.  Next week we’ll look at the issue of forgiving others.  Today we’re looking at the repair work that needs to be done because of the chips, cracks, and crushes we’ve put in others’ lives.  Throughout the series, we’ll use as our guide the prayer that Jesus taught.  Will you pray it with me?

Matthew 6:9-15 (NLT)

Pray like this:
Our Father in heaven, may your name be honored.
May your Kingdom come soon.
May your will be done here on earth, just as it is in heaven.
Give us our food for today,
and forgive us our sins,
just as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us.
And don’t let us yield to temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you.
But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.

This is Jesus’ teaching for us today.  Thank you, God!

Forgiveness

So today we begin with our own need for forgiveness.  Our own forgiveness is about two things:

1. How can I make things right?
2. How can I be set free from the guilt I carry?

Of course when we begin talking about forgiveness we get very quickly into another topic that cannot be ignored: sin.  The Bible has two ways of speaking about sin.  Sin is straying from the path that we were supposed to be on or missing the mark that we were aiming at.  Of course, both of these things can be either intentional or unintentional.  We can intend to stay on the path but still stray.  We can intend to hit the mark and still miss it.  Or, if we are honest with ourselves, too often we intend to leave the path that we know is right and to miss the mark that we know is best.  In each of these instances of sin, forgiveness asks the question: how can I make it right and how can I be set free from the guilt that I carry?

Guilt can weigh us down and destroy us.  It can bend us so low with a weight that is impossible to carry.  In the book Atonement by Ian McEwan that was made into a movie by the same name, Briony is bent low by guilt.  As a young girl she has a crush on an older boy, Robbie, who is in love with her older sister, Cecilia.  When she sees him make some physical advances on her sister that she doesn’t fully understand, she becomes jealous.  Later that night her cousin is raped, and Briony “sees” the man who did it.  She tells the police it was Robbie to get back at him.  From this point on Robbie’s life is ruined, and so is Cecilia’s.

But it isn’t just Robbie and Cecilia’s life that is ruined.  Briony’s life is destroyed too.  She grows and realizes the mistake that she made, but there is no way to undo the damage that was done.  Her cousin ends up marrying the man who raped her, and Robbie and Cecilia’s lives are destroyed.  Briony becomes a nurse in a London hospital during WWII, and we see her trying to scrub her guilt away by attending to the needs of fallen soldiers.  She scrubs the floor.  She scrubs the bed.  She scrubs her hands, but she can’t get the guilt off of her body.  She sent a big rock through the windshield of too many people’s lives

The Bible tells us that when we sin against others we also sin against God.  Psalm 51:4 says, “Against you [God], and you alone, have I sinned” (NLT).  Psalm 51 is traditionally the psalm that David wrote after he had an affair with Bathsheba and had her husband killed in an attempt to cover it up.  Would you think that David would be praying that he had sinned against Bathsheba and her husband, Uriah?  I would.  But David sees deeper.  David realizes that when he has sinned against another human who is made in the image of God, he is sinning against God.  All our sin is a sin against God.  From the smallest of chips to the biggest of cracks, when we stray from the path or miss the mark in loving others, we also miss the mark with God.

I asked on Facebook this past week what guilt people carry around both big and small.  I heard stories about ignoring needs, especially those needs that were right there in plain view.  I heard stories about saving money by buying in big box stores rather than supporting small local businesses.  I heard stories about being impatient and disrespectful in tone and wasting resources such as time and money.  People carry around a lot of guilt when it comes to parenting.  Did I nurse my child long enough?  There can also be some big guilt in this arena like the decision to terminate a pregnancy.  There is a lot of guilt that we carry around in our marriages too.  Did I fight long enough and hard enough to save my marriage?  Why did I give into the temptation to infidelity?  There’s enough guilt here to crack and shatter a lot of windshields.  So what do we do with that guilt?  How do we make things right?  We may try to fix these things by ourselves, and while there are some positive and helpful things we can do, we can never totally repair the situation on our own.  We need help.

Into this complicated mess, steps God’s forgiveness, God’s forgiveness in the flesh of God’s son, Jesus Christ.  Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and community were all about forgiveness.

Forgiveness and Jesus’ Life

Jesus’ life teaches about forgiveness.  There are too many teachings to recount them all today.  Jesus forgives a paralytic man and then heals him to show that he has power to forgive (Matthew 9:5-6).  Jesus teaches his disciples to forgive seventy times seven times (Matthew 18:21-22).  Jesus tells a story about a slave who is forgiven of his debt but then goes out and demands repayment from those who owe him.  His master calls him back in to give an account of his unforgiving ways (Matthew 18:32-33).  Jesus teaches us not to judge but to forgive (Luke 6:37).  And while it may seem at first glance to be in contradiction to this teaching, Jesus also teaches us to reprove or correct one another then forgive (Luke 17:3-4).

Maybe though the most powerful teaching Jesus has on forgiveness is the prayer that he taught which we find in Matthew 6:9-15.  He teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our sins as we have been forgiven.”  He goes on to add some commentary at the end: “”If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you.  But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.”  Wow!  Our own forgiveness seems to be highly dependent upon our willingness to forgive others.

I did a bit of in-depth work on this prayer while I was in seminary.  I came to the conclusion that the form of this prayer was borrowed from the Psalms.  But not just any psalm.  The Lord’s Prayer is in the form of a cursing psalm.  Yeah, those psalms that you like to skip over because the psalmist vents and asks God to do a lot of bad stuff to the people he or she doesn’t like.  Jesus takes this form of cursing and turns it upside down and makes it a prayer about forgiveness.  Jesus’ life and teaching are all about turning things upside down by forgiving.

Forgiveness and Jesus’ Death

Jesus’ life isn’t the only thing that teaches about forgiveness.  Jesus’ death also teaches us about forgiveness.  He dies without retaliation and he forgives his executioners.  Don’t think that he didn’t have the power as the Son of God to wipe away everyone from existence who was torturing him.  Instead Jesus said, “Father, forgive these people, because they don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34, NLT).

Forgiveness and Jesus’ Resurrection

Thankfully it’s not just Jesus’ death that forgives us, although sometimes as Christians that’s all we focus on.  Jesus’ resurrection also has to do with forgiveness.  Easter has to do with forgiveness.  If Jesus just died for our sins, but wasn’t raised from the dead by God, then how would we know whether this whole forgiveness thing actually works in the end?  We wouldn’t.  Jesus’ resurrection shows us that forgiveness wins!  In the book of Acts we read about a sermon that Paul preached where he says that it was Jesus “whom God raised and whose body did not decay. Brothers, listen! In this man Jesus there is forgiveness for your sins. Everyone who believes in him is freed from all guilt and declared right with God” (Acts 13:37-39, NLT).  Yes, Jesus’ death forgives our sins, but Jesus’ resurrection also forgives sins.  In the resurrection forgiveness wins.

Forgiveness and Jesus’ Community

Jesus then passes on this message of forgiveness to the community of those who follow him.  He makes the rather startling statement that “if you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven. If you refuse to forgive them, they are unforgiven” (John 20:23, NLT).  What’s this all about?  I wonder if Jesus doesn’t understand our need to see and feel and touch forgiveness.  When we confess our sins to God, we are forgiven, but sometimes we don’t feel like it.  It is hard to confess to a God that we can’t see.  And so I wonder if Jesus understood that we need a kind of flesh and blood ambassador to really experience God’s forgiveness.  Of course that flesh and blood person was Jesus, but now that flesh and blood person becomes each one of us, the members of Christ’s body, the church.

Paul says, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18, NRSV).  Through Jesus, we are taught and shown how to make things right, and our guilt is forgiven, whether you feel it or not.  We as a community exist to help you fully live into that forgiveness.

This past week I talked to a woman who contacted me because she needed to confess some past sins to someone.  While she could have chosen anyone and any follower of Jesus could have been Jesus’ representative to her, she chose me.  I asked her if I could share this story anonymously.  And so we sat at the confessional booth of a local diner over coffee, and she told the story of things that she had done over the past several decades that she felt significant guilt over.  She had never told these to anyone else.  They had hidden in the darkness of her soul and the guilt was bending her down.

Adam Hamilton, a pastor at Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City says that “forgiveness is giving up the hope of a different past and taking on the hope of a joyful future.”  That’s what this woman was doing in that confessional booth of a local diner.  Giving up the hope of having lived differently in the past and taking on the hope of living joyfully in the future.  Recently she had been introduced to Jesus, and she had committed her life to follow after him.  She felt that part of this new life meant confessing these things.

As we sat and talked, and as she unloaded the guilt of her past, I could see through the tears a kind of new life in her.  I could see the darkness being filled with light.  I could see the weight of that guilt being taken off her shoulders and given to the only one who can carry it, Jesus, the Son of God who taught about forgiveness, died for our sins, was resurrected by God to show that forgiveness wins, and the one whose community follows in that path.  When she was done, I looked her in the eye as Jesus’ representative, and I told her what Jesus told me tell her, “Your sins are forgiven.”

Today on Easter we celebrate the resurrection and the empty tomb.  In the resurrection, Jesus rolls away the rocks that we have used to chip the lives of others, and the tomb of our guilt is empty.

On this Easter celebration day when the tomb is empty and forgiveness wins, will you join in me praying again that prayer that Jesus taught?

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,
the power and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.