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“Forgiveness”   A sermon preached by Rev. Will Ed Green for Foundry United Methodist Church Sunday, December 5th, 2021  What would you do if you were you were really free? Free from things that trip  you up, habits and attitudes that keep you from really living life fully? Free from guilt  and shame that keeps you rooted in past wrongs and old regrets? Free from believing  something you’ve done makes you less worthy of God’s love or capable of doing of  God’s kin-dom work?   On this second Sunday of Advent, John’s good tidings of God’s forgiveness come  to us from an unexpected place. Not halls of earthly power where past wrongs are  adjudicated by corrupt court systems. Not pulpits of religious power where divisions  between right and wrong and welcome and unwelcome are laid down. No, God’s word  comes from to John in what the Scripture calls ‘eramos’ the deserted places, the  wilderness. Places which represented vulnerability and risk, which existed outside the  realms of what was tame, safe, or familiar. These are good tidings find us in places we  don’t expect to find them.   Once invited to the wilderness we’re called to us to ‘metanoia,’ or to change our  minds, the word translated here as repentance—and in the verses proceeding the ones  read today—doesn’t mince any words in demanding it. This isn’t a simple sojourn for a  quiet picnic in the woods. It is a spiritual experience which invites intentional  examination, one in which things that limit our perception and insulate us from truth are  stripped away. We’re called to confront the truth about who we are. The truth about how  we live. The truth about how both of these reflect—or do not—the values we profess.  Now. Let me pause lest you think I’m going to go all “Sinners in the Hands of  Angry God” you here. Centuries of bad theology have left us associating repentance with  street-corner preachers proclaiming our impending doom and destruction. But Luke’s  ‘metanoia’ isn’t about shame, and it’s certainly not about damnation. It is a free gift of God’s grace—the kind John Wesley called ‘justifying grace’—that invites us to confront  and honestly address the spiritual and emotional baggage that weights us down in life so  that we can we can move more freely in our relationship with God and with others.  These good tidings aren’t just about confrontation, they are the promise of  transformation.   John’s baptism of repentance is the first step on a journey of ‘afesis,’ the word  translated as forgiveness. It literally means ‘a release from bondage, a letting go of the  former things as if they’d never happened at all.’ If these are good tidings of  confrontation, they are also good tidings of invitation. An invitation to freedom from  anything that prevents us from receiving the hope of God’s love and our call to be that  hope made alive for others in the world.   Luke echoes the ancient words of the prophets Isaiah and Malachi—each of whom  themselves wrote from wilderness places at wilderness moments in the lives of God’s  people—offering hope that our present realities and possible futures are not bound to, or  by, our previous mistakes. Even in the wildernesses of our sin and brokenness, where our  lives are full of trip hazards like regret and shame and constant detours caused by habits  and ways of thinking we know we need to change, God comes to be with us. Helps us  face, without fear or shame, the fact that we don’t always get it right. That we’re fallible.  That we fudge up.   And then, get this! God helps us clear up that clutter that’s clogged our paths.  Grants us grace to map out a new way, to change our minds about the directions we’ve  been journeying and sets us on a new path where we are free to live more freely and fully  in the light of God’s love. These are good tidings of freedom and hope.   The question is, I suppose, whether or not we’re really ready to receive them. I  grew up in a family system where we were really good at apologizing for every little  transgression. Quick to say I’m sorry, in no small part I’m sure, lest someone hold our error against us, but also in the firm belief something fundamental about who we were  was broken.   But forgiveness, the kind we receive today, turns this relational economy on its  head.In a world where we’re pre-conditioned to keep score, where Santa’s making a list  of who’s naughty and who’s nice, we learn quickly how to define ourselves by the worst  we’re capable of. God’s promise of, as the old hymn puts it “grace that is greater than all  our sin,” means that we loose a vital part of how we’re taught to judge ourselves and  others in the world. It’s easy to say I’m sorry. And it can be so much harder to believe it.   This week I returned to my long-time spiritual companion Henri Nouwen for  insight into what good tidings the word ‘forgiveness’ might hold. He points out that the  real work of forgiveness begins only when we first allow ourselves to be forgiven. “It is  very hard to say,” he writes,“Without your forgiveness I am still bound to what happened  between us. Only you can set me free.” He goes on, “That requires not only a confession  that we have hurt somebody but also the humility to acknowledge our dependency on  others.”  I remember a Christmas some 20 years ago when my siblings and I all got  chocolate malt balls in our stockings. Midway through the afternoon we realized my  younger brother was missing…along with all the chocolate balls. So we began to  frantically search the house not really clear which one we wanted to find more.  Eventually we found them both together, my brothers feet sticking out from underneath  his bed and, when we pulled him out tinfoil and chocolate covering his face as he  frantically shoved every piece of candy he could grab into his mouth.  My mother, ever ready to teach us a lesson, invited us all into the living room.  After a stern talking to about not taking other peoples things she told my brother that we  were going to forgive him once he apologized, and it would be like it never happened.  Immediately he burst into tears, and when she calmed him enough to speak, he told her he didn’t want to be forgiven. If we for gave him, that meant he'd have to forgive us  someday too.  I think of him there now, face still glittering with foil and tears running down his  cheeks, befuddled at the idea that we weren’t going to hold this moment over his head— except for the occasional sermon illustration—any more than he could hold our wrongs  against him over ours. Sick to his stomach, not only because of the chocolate, but perhaps   because there was nothing he could do to fix what he’d done—there was no way we were  getting the chocolate back—and that meant he had to rely upon someone else to receive  it.   That’s the thing about these good tidings of forgiveness that can be so hard to  grasp. We don’t earn them. We can’t buy them. No amount of keeping score or stock of  our past wrongs, no amount of self-loathing and regret will somehow make us worthy of  them. They simply are. Flowing into the wilderness places of our lives where we’ve  become lost wandering down roads of past wrongdoing and regret. Into the backroads  and byways we’ve built to protect ourselves from our need for others or from confronting  the fact we are—despite our temptation to occasionally believe otherwise—masters of  our own destiny.  But Emmanuel, God with us, forgives freely and with no other purpose but to  set us free. And does so, over and over again, no matter how many times it takes,  until we’re able to really receive that gift. So we gather, lighting candles to brighten  the gloom of the wildernesses in which we wander. We come to the table,  proclaiming “in the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven,” to help us remember  that Our God meets us in our wilderness places, amidst the tangled messiness of our  lives. Invites us to face the facts of our past mistakes, our old hurts and long-lived  resentments, not to shame us our drive us to different behavior through guilt, but to help  us lay them down and walk away. To trust that we are in fact who God has said we were since the Spirit hovered over creation’s waters, beloved. And when it’s hard, the old lies of naughty and nice, of worthlessness, of fear,  creep in, God gives us grace, sanctifying grace, new each day, that is big enough to hold  the truth of our brokenness and possibility of our becoming whole. You are beautiful. You  are beloved. You are worthy of freedom. And there’s nothing in this world—no power, no  preacher, no denomination or political party—that can change that fundamental truth God  has baked into your being.   It is not lost on me that here, at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in Luke chapter 3,  the path laid out begins with forgiveness. With freedom from our sin so we’re able to  participate fully in what Christ is up to in the world, so that “all flesh can see the  salvation of God.” Everything else Jesus does, all the miraculous signs and wonders, all  the moments of teaching and reprimand, every table overturned and belly filled, begins  with the belief that God, by God’s grace and with our assent, “forgives our sins.”   Advent is not simply a season of waiting. It is also an invitation to holy  preparation. To go with boldness into the wilderness places of our lives, to examine  where we’re getting tripped up or bogged down or detoured. And to let God to come and  do what God does best. “Come, thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free.  From our fears and sins release us, let us find our rest in thee.” What would you do if you  were you were really free? This Advent, my hope of us—for you and for me—is that we find out.   Amen.  https://foundryumc.org/archive