May 16, 2021 Sermon

May 16, 2021                      Luke 22:  44-53                                  Rev. Peter Hofstra

            There is a meme that shows a historic painting of Jesus ascending into heaven.  But being this little one-celled attempt at humor, the caption goes something like, “Help me you morons!  I am being kidnapped by aliens.”

            That is how Ascension Day is locked into my mind.  A dumb cartoon.  But as I have reflected on Ascension Day for this sermon, my thoughts have been disturbed.  When Jesus ascended into heaven and the faith He brought to us really took off, it ended up leading to some really crazy stuff.  Like how many people faith has killed due to religious wars.  And this is not just like the Crusades attempting to reconquer the Holy Land back in the 1100’s and such.  It is the religious wars that tore Europe apart after the Reformation.  There is a little talked about chain of thinking that says one of the reasons that Christianity is so weak in Europe now is precisely because of the toll of violence that has been committed in the name of Jesus.  And lets not even talk about how heretics have been dealt with.  How about how Christianity continues to bleed into political debate to this day? 

            All of this has happened since Jesus left.  Makes you wonder.  But consider what Jesus said on his way up.  The Messiah was to suffer and then to rise from the dead on the third day.  That was supposed to take the place of the suffering of the world.  The new deal that Jesus was laying down for us was a two-step process.  There is the repentance and the forgiveness of sins.  That is the message that is to be proclaimed to the world.  Repentance and forgiveness, this is the mechanism of Third Level Love, that we talked about last week.

            A quick recap:  First level love is loving God with everything.  Second level love is loving neighbor as ourselves.  Third level love is to love one another as Christ has loved us.  The way to make that happen is through what Jesus speaks of today, the repentance and forgiveness of sins.  Everyone is our neighbor, not everybody is our friend, because under God’s law, we are called upon to love our neighbor but not necessarily to love one another. 

            I think I should clarify a little piece here.  Jesus speaks of the repentance of sin and the forgiveness of sin.  It is relationship building that he is talking about.  Because it was in the destruction of a relationship where this all began.  If you think about it in today’s terms, Adam and Eve ate a piece of fruit.  Yes, God told them not to.  Yes, this was a deliberate human choice to turn away from God.  But it was a fruit.  An apple, a pear, a pomegranate, a banana, something.

            And it was not that they happened to be walking past that tree and they went “Ohhhh, yummy.”  They were tricked, deceived, thrown out of Paradise due to the work of the serpent. 

            If you go back and read the story of Adam and Even getting evicted, in light of what Jesus says that the disciples are supposed to go and share with the whole world, I wonder if there was another way that story could have ended.  Because I was raised on two possible endings to the story of Adam and Eve.  They ate, they sinned, they got evicted.  Or, they did NOT eat, they did not sin and there is no need to renew the heavens and the earth because our first parents got it right.  Jesus was able to stay in heaven and compliment them as good and faithful servants. 

            But what if there was a third way?  When God confronted Adam about what happened with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, what was Adam’s response?  Let me quote:  ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.’  And then Jesus moved along the chain of events.  He went to Eve.  And she said, let me quote:  ‘The serpent tricked me, and I ate.’  And it takes Jesus as the Second Adam to come along and fix everything up in our relationship with God.  So we know from Jesus’ ascending words that the forgiveness of sin is because of this founding event in the capacity of humans to screw up.

            But what if Adam and Eve did the first thing Jesus says here.  Jesus tells the disciples to proclaim the repentance of sin.  What if Adam said, “I am sorry Lord, I screwed up.  Eve came to me, it looked good, and we ate.”  What if Eve said, “I am sorry Lord.  I messed up.  The serpent got me talking and thinking and I blew off the one commandment you set before us.  I am sorry.”  What if they had repented, instead of passing the buck?  Adam blamed the woman AND he blamed God.  “The woman whom YOU gave to be with me.”  Eve blamed the snake. 

            Would it have made a difference?  What I can say for sure is it wouldn’t have hurt the situation.  In light of what Jesus is saying at his ascension into heaven, it makes me wonder.  Remember how the passage starts: "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you--that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled."
24:45 Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures…  What were they understanding?  That the Messiah must die and be resurrected three later.  Why?  So there is the proclamation to the world of the repentance of sin and the forgiveness of sin.  We hang so much on the forgiveness of sins as the gift of Jesus that it blinds us to the reality that the repentance of sin is ALSO the gift of Jesus from the cross.

            If we understood that, it would change everything.  Because every time power, whether military or political or social or legal or moral or whatever kind of power it is, every time power has been used in the name of Jesus to change somebody else’s behavior, it is unchristian.  Because when we use power to change someone’s behavior, in the name of Christ, we are presuming that, in so doing, we are bringing them into the forgiveness of Christ.  We justify it by presuming we are doing them a favor.  But if we have not given the person the opportunity to come to Jesus on their own, to repent of their sin of their own volition, we are NOT carrying out the word that Jesus commanded the disciples bring to the world. 

            I am NOT saying that there is not a time to use military, political, social, legal, moral, even peer power to change somebody’s behavior.  But do not presume to be doing it in the name of Jesus.  There is persuasive power and there is coercive in the world.  Christianity is built upon the principle of persuasion, not coercion-presuming the power comes from God into our hearts. 

            I think we can define pretty well what forgiveness of sin means.  To be forgiven by Jesus is to be spared the consequences of our sins, the punishment we would otherwise have inflicted upon us.  That again goes back to the story of Adam and Eve.  What was the consequence for eating of the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil?  It was exactly what the serpent denied would happen, that they would surely die.  We have been dying for our sins ever since. 

            That is divine level forgiveness.  How about human level?  It is the means of repairing relationships.  Somebody screws up, there is a way to fix it.  Somebody has deliberately gone out of there way to be mean, evil, or otherwise take advantage of others and they have a change of heart, there is a way to fix it with the other person, to get that place Jesus spoke of last week, to love one another, to be friends. 

            But what does repentance really mean?  It means owning up to what you have done.  It is inclusive of asking the person whose been wronged for their forgiveness, engaging the second part.  It includes making amends, being willing, as far as possible, to fix things.  But it means something else as well.  It means forgiving yourself. 

            There is a step in the twelve step system used by AA about making amends for what you have done to others because of your alcoholism.  It is not about forcing your repentance on someone else, they may not want anything to do with you.  But the step talks about going as far as you are able.  Because there are times and moments where you will not be forgiven.  It might be by choice, someone is so hurt by what was done that they cannot find what it takes to offer forgiveness.  It might be by circumstance.  You may not know who you wronged.  Or they may not be available to you to repent to.  The best examples I have of that are broken relationships between parents and their grown children, when the parent passes on before things are resolved.

            Repentance is the mechanism by which, through the love of Christ, a person can lay their own ghosts, their own guilt, and their own fears to rest.  Because the first response to repentance is divine forgiveness.  That’s Jesus’ love, his death and resurrection on the cross.  In Christ we can lay down our ghosts, our guilts, and our fears.

            Knowing that, owning that, living into that, can be harder than offering forgiveness to someone else.  There is much truth in the statement that we are our own worst enemies.  But I believe that is why Jesus lays out repentance first as the message for the world.  It is the law of love working in us.  First, it is the love of God made manifest in God’s forgiveness of us.  Then it becomes the love of neighbor when we can, in turn, forgive and be forgiven.  That builds level 3 love, where we love one another as Christ has loved us.

            It is when sinful humanity attempts to insert human power into this process, defining what should be repented, what needs to be forgiven, that we quickly get to a place where there is blood on our hands.  Please understand that I get it, there is a place for a power and there are times and situations where there will be blood.  But do not call that Christianity.  The blood spilled and the body broken and the human killed on the cross-out of love for us-is what wound up that part of who we are and what we are as people of faith. 

            And so it will be by that new way, by repentance and forgiveness, offered, neither coerced nor demanded, that will change the world as well.  That is the power of God breaking into the power of the world.  That it will not happen as quickly as we like, or as profoundly as we hope for, that is when we fold our hands and bow our wills into God’s plan.  But when I have repented, been forgiven by God, followed that with my forgiveness of self, I stand ready to truly be God’s servant to the world in need of His love.  That is the message Jesus sent through his disciples.  Amen.