I Beg Your Pardon

1 Timothy 1:12-17

Presenting Engagement: Confess What?!
The Psalm reading in the Presbyterian lectionary for today would seem rather harsh to many people. It’s the kind of condemnation that a lot of people feel is an effort of the church to make good people feel guilty about themselves. It’s the kind of condemnation that drives some people away from church entirely and drives some churches to dump that depressing prayer of confession entirely.

I’m talking about Psalm 14.

It begins like this:
Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God. They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.[i]

Well what are we to make of that? Surely there is someone who is good. Surely there is at least one person who has done no abominable deeds. Surely somebody out there truly seeks after God.

I know that I do.

And I know that you do too.

We’re good people, you and I. Aren’t we?

After all we’re here in church today and that makes us good people, doesn’t it? At least that must mean that we are not the ones saying: “There is no God.” I didn’t do any deliberate harm to anyone on the way here and that too makes me good, doesn’t it? I haven’t coveted anybody’s anything or taken the Lord’s name in vain or murdered or stolen or littered or even forgotten to make up my bed today and all that makes me a good person. Doesn’t it?

Well that’s what many people think to themselves about themselves. So when they come to the moment for silent prayer in the prayer of confession, they shift in their pews uncomfortably. They shuffle their feet or pick at their fingernails because they can’t think of anything to pray.

A Canon on the clergy staff at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London remarked that in some baptism services in the Anglican tradition where people are asked if they “repent of sins that separate us from God and neighbour,” you could actually perceive the mental calisthenics that people were doing just to think of something they’d done wrong so that they could feel appropriately penitent at that particular moment when such a feeling was required of them by church ceremony.[ii]

But conjuring up an appropriately contrite feeling or accepting layer upon layer of guilt until you just want to jump off a cliff, is not what confession is all about.

It’s about mercy.

The Canon from St. Paul’s went on to describe what church confession does and what it does is first acknowledge the fact that we human beings commit sin. It is simply our nature. Second, confession describes how “sin is manifest: through negligence, weakness, through our own deliberate fault.” It’s not just what we do but what we don’t do as well. It’s not just what we say but also what we think. Murder is obviously a sin, but so is hatred.[iii]

When it comes to confessing, we’ve all got a story to tell. We’ve all got a reason to ask God for mercy.

Biblical Context: What’s going on?
In this letter to Timothy that we read today, the writer tells his own story. He talks about his own need for mercy.

“I was a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. I had acted ignorantly in unbelief.”[iv]

This writer is acknowledging his sins in word and thought, his sins in deeds, his sins in ignorance and negligence, his sins in weakness, and in deliberate fault. It’s all there.

This letter is referred to as one of the Pastoral Epistles which includes both letters to Timothy and the letter to Titus. Now traditionally, these were thought to have been written by the Apostle Paul late in his ministry. But more recent scholars have recognized that the theology expressed in the Pastorals conflicts with theology of Paul in letters that we are sure Paul wrote like Romans, Galatians, and Corinthians.

Much of the content of 1st Timothy relates to conflicts in the church and how those conflicts should be dealt with. But these conflicts were about disruptions to a church organization that saw itself with a long term role in society. Paul, however, thought the end of time was near and was interested in the church in the short term rather than in the long term.

So who wrote these letters and what can we do with them?

Perhaps it was someone in the Pauline tradition some years after Paul’s death by which time everybody realized that the end of the age was a bit farther off than Paul or any other of the Apostles had expected. In that situation, Paul’s proteges had to resolve long term church issues that Paul hadn’t imagined. And yet, they sought to resolve those issues under the authority and the name of Paul.

And when it came to confession of sin, they used a version of Paul’s story.

You remember that Paul was a Jewish zealot who persecuted the Christian church but was at the same time righteous in terms of the Torah law. In other words, he kept the Commandments and the other laws of Moses and followed the teachings of the prophets. In terms of Judaism, he was definitely not a blasphemer. He was not someone who needed mercy for committing sin under the Hebrew traditions.

But something changed- he was converted. This paul now testifies about his need for mercy. His persecution of the Christians made him a man of violence. His denial of the divinity of Christ made him a blasphemer. This writer from the school of Paul or in the style of Paul, tells Paul’s story in order to provide a personal example.

He is an example of the human capacity for sin and he is an example of the human need for mercy.

In effect, this writer is saying: “I was the biggest sinner around. My need for mercy was tremendous. I sinned against God by blaspheming. I sinned against other people through my violent ways. I even sinned when I didn’t realize I was sinnin g because I was ignorant of the fact that what I was doing was wrong because I did not believe in Christ Jesus.”

Explication of Text: What’s it all mean?
But the writer is saying one thing more. He is saying: “If I was the biggest sinner around and God had mercy on me then God will show mercy on anyone. No one was less deserving of mercy and more in need of mercy than I was and yet the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.”

This story makes Paul into an example but it does not make Paul into a hero. Paul isn’t some triumphant banner carrier for Christ in a righteous army of faithful Christians. Paul was judged. Paul was found guilty of his blasphemy and his violence and his ignorant unbelief. The amazing thing is that Paul still received mercy.

That’s what makes this passage so amazing. Paul didn’t get a free pass. He was judged and he still received mercy. He was given a reprieve even though he was sinful. He was strengthened by Christ even though he was sinful.

The story of this Paul is not about conjuring up an appropriately contrite feeling or accepting layer upon layer of guilt until he just wanted to jump off a cliff. The story of this Paul is about receiving mercy.

The whole gospel is about receiving mercy.

Christ Jesus is about receiving mercy.

And so this passage from 1st Timothy includes the wonderful doxology that we often use as our assurance of pardon: “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”

It’s all about receiving mercy.

Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?
I think that many people who dislike the Christian concept of confession of sin only see confession as the laying on of guilt.

For them, sin is like a stack of clammy pancakes that have sat out on the plate too long and have grown cold. The stack grows taller and taller. The syrup gets stickier and stickier until the pancakes become a plateful of inedible, unappealing mush. The eater’s appetite disolves and they are driven away from the table.

That clammy stack of guilt is all they see and so they’re driven away from church and driven away from Christ because they think the judgement will be too much for them. They think they will be put down by God and will become unable to see themselves positively in the future.

That’s unfortunate because then they miss the part about mercy. They don’t see that confession to God leads to mercy from God. They don’t see that mercy from God changes their relationship with other people for the better and changes how they see themselves for the better.

But I think that group is actually a minority.

The majority are people who dislike the Christian concept of confession of sin because they don’t think they have sinned. When it comes time for the silent confession they are the ones shifting around in their pew uncomfortably. Not only can they not think of anything they’ve done wrong lately but they think of sins as deliberate acts of felonious significance. Sin is murder or theft or road rage or animal abuse or fraud, something you go to court for and maybe even something you go to jail for. And since they have not done anything of that magnitude, these folks don’t think that they have done anything that requires forgiveness from God or anybody else for that matter.

In essence, these are kind of like the people described in Psalm 14 who say in their hearts that there is no God. The idea in the Psalm is not just that some people disavow the existence of God. It’s not just that some people deny the possibility of God. We call that atheism. No these people act as if there is no God. They act as if there is no need for God’s mercy, no need for God.

This kind of atheism has more to do with how people behave rather than what they believe. We call this “practical atheism.”[v] It’s a kind of autonomy in which people judge for themselves whether or not their deeds require repentence. If you can decide something like that for yourself, then you obviously don’t need God. If you can decide for yourself what the law is and whether or not you’ve broken that law, then you have no need either for God’s judgement or God’s mercy.

But here’s the universal truth that we try to deny all our lives: the Psalm says that when the Lord looks down on humankind, there is no one who seeks God.

We all think we can make up our own index of right and wrong. At times, we all think we have nothing to confess.

Conclusion: What’s the Point?
That is why the example of the Pauline writer in 1st Timothy is so important.

Paul was a preacher and teacher and evangelist who was widely known and respected in the first century Christian communities of Greece and Rome. His example could lead others to re-evaluate their own lives. His story could lead others to re-examine their own stories. His willingness to confess his sinfulness and tell of the mercy he had received from God could lead others to confess and receive mercy.

We don’t seem to get many church or civic leaders who confess freely and honestly and tell their stories unless they’ve done some great wrong and have gotten caught. Occasionally, some television evangelist does something sensational that undermines his credibility and cries publicly about his guilt- and gets a boost in ratings and advertising dollars.

But there are very few religious leaders who make an example of the sinfulness of their everyday live in both words and thoughts, in deeds and in deeds left undone.

So we use the example of ourselves, for ourselves. We make our confession aloud together to take responsibility for what we do as a society and we bow our heads to make our individual confessions directly to God.

And then the minister tells us that God has heard our confession and that we are forgiven.

We learn that the saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners and we are grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord who has strengthened us and appointed us to his service. AMEN.

[i] Psalm 14: 1-3.
[ii] http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=97.
[iii] ibid.
[iv] 1 Timothy1:12-13
[v] Cousar, Gaventa, McCann, Newsome. Texts For Preaching. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 510.

Radical Acts of Forgiveness

Leviticus 25: 10 ff

Presenting Engagement: defying gravity
I want to tell you the stories of two Catholic churches this morning.

One is about the broad, octagonal dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral in Florence, Italy built in the 1430’s. The contractor on the job was the sculptor, mathmatician, architect, and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi who had the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany.

The remarkable thing is that Brunelleschi figured out how to use interlocking brickwork to eliminate any requirement for framework underneath the dome to keep it from collapsing into the cathedral during construction. This had never been done before and all the while that Brunelleschi was performing this feat of gravity defying engineering, everyone except his patron thought his math was flat wrong and that he was a complete lunatic and perhaps a heretic whose work would fail in total embarassment. Cosimo was even thrown into prison for bad government and treason over this.

Well, popular opinion and conventional wisdom were wrong. The dome was successful and on the ceiling at the highest point, the Grand Duke commissioned a stunning fresco mural of the last judgment. There’s certainly no doubt about which side of Christ he thought his reprobate enemies and doubters sat.

In the second story, it seems the legal defense costs of the contemporary Catholic church’s child abuse scandals have been so great that some Archdiocese have filed for bankruptcy and sold churches buildings to secular interests.

Pews, stained glass windows, pulpits, and even marble altars have been sold or donated to other churches. In one church recently, the mortar between the polished marble altar and the wall was chipped away and when the altar was removed, workers found that the concrete in the wall behind it was crumbling and fragmented and frail. In other words, the beautiful polished marble that was shown to God covered up a frail framework that was the body of the building.

Why tell these two stories?

Well the point of the first tale is that in order to find truth, we have to look up because that’s where God is. I don’t mean that we have to believe God lives in some mystical realm above the sky that Greek philosophers called “heaven;” it’s that we have to go above and beyond our humanistic, earth-bound world where vision and imagination are enslaved to the bondage of gravity.

But when Brunelleschi and de’ Medici did that they found out that looking up can be a radical act that not only defies gravity but also defies the frightened voices of conventional wisdom and popular opinion.

You know those voices. They’re the ones that say what’s possible and what’s impossible, what’s true and what isn’t true whenever you dare to be different.

The second tale reminds me of Paul’s comment to the Corinthian church that we have the treasure of the glory of God stored in clay jars- which are our bodies.[i]

You see, we can polish up our external surfaces all we wish and offer God our gleaming faces, but behind that marble is a frail, flawed, and crumbling structure-a clay jar. We have got to be honest about the human condition. We’ve got to know ourselves as both polished marble and crumbling concrete even though those same frightened voices urge us to ignore our weaknesses and just polish that marble a little more.

Those voices say: You can find truth in the gleam of the marble’s surface. But if you really don’t like the image that you see reflected in the polished marble then just shop around for different image.

One commentator, cleverer than I am, recently inferred that in our market driven world, where value is whatever appeals to consumer wants and desires, our search for truth could just as easily happen in the aisles of Home Depot as anywhere else.[ii]

Well, today’s scripture readings show that we do need to look above and beyond ourselves to find an indespensible characteristic of God that we need to imitate in our own lives. That characteristic is merciful forgiveness and these verses give us a particular language to talk about mercy and forgiveness and a particular way of thinking about our relationship with God.

Biblical Context: the laws of redemption
That relationship is all about a redeeming God and the command to be a redeeming people.

This 25th chapter of Leviticus decrees a year called Jubilee. That is the 50th year: the year following seven times seven years and during Jubilee, all debts are essentially cancelled.

Every seventh year is also a time of release. For instance, the Hebrews must let the earth lie fallow, which is an act of releasing the land back to God. The earth’s burden of debt to the landowner in terms of yielding produce is cancelled. Every seventh and every fiftieth year financial debts and debts of servitude are also cancelled within the community of Israel.

In the meantime, there is a redemptive social mechanism, a means of redeeming debts and redeming relatives who are in servitude. If any member of a family falls into debt and has to sell off a parcel of land or a house in order to get out of debt, a kinsmen must buy the parcel back and redeem the debt. No land may be sold in perpetuity.

If your kinsman goes into debt and falls on hard times you must take in him and his family to live with you and you may not lend family members money at interest or make a profit off of their hard times. Relatives who bind themselves over to their kin under a term of indentured service may not be treated like slaves and must be released from indenture in the Jubilee year. If a Hebrew falls into servitude to a foreigner, a relative should redeem that person by paying off the debt to the foreigner.

These are all holy practices not decided by some selfless group decision or democratic referendum or inspired by either conventional wisdom or by popular opinion.

No. They are commands of God that originate above and beyond human instinct.

Explication of Text: what’s it all mean?
So, what is the purpose of all this language about redeeming and redemption? It must be important because these instructions also appear in the book of Deuteronomy which was organized by a completely different editor than Leviticus[iii] and they appear even earlier in Exodus, which was composed by still another editor.[iv]

First of all, the God of Moses considers all land to be God’s, and we are tenants on God’s earth. We cannot lay claim to land that is owned by our master.

Second, and more importantly, the social practice of redeeming debts originates in God’s redemption of the Hebrews from servitude to the Egyptian Pharaohs. Redemption is the practice of a community that has been redeemed.

In the history of the Middle East, this redemptive act of the God of Moses is radical for its place and time. The rivals of the God of Moses were Pharaohs and carved idols and not one of them was forgiving or capable of deliverance.

And since the characteristics a community reflect what that community worships, the people who worshipped these other gods were also unforgiving.

Only the community that worshipped the God of Moses had the language and practice of forgiveness. The Hebrew verb for God’s action of redeeming the Hebrews from Egypt describes the act of a protective kinsman, someone who protects the family and keeps it together. God is a protector who redeems people and forgives debts for the good of God’s family.[v]

So when the people of Israel continued this godly practice of redemption, they were doing like Filippo Brunelleschi. They were going against the grain of conventional social practice. They were doing something other societies didn’t do. They were looking above and beyond the polished marble to find inspiration and so 1280 years before Christ the Israelites found that mercy was a characteristic of God.

Listener Context: how does this relate to my life?
What does this mean for us nearly 3,300 years later as we attempt to be a Christian community surrounded by the confusing and often misleading voices of conventional wisdom and popular opinion?

Well for one thing, Christianity still confesses that forgiveness originates with God. It comes from above and beyond our human experience and imagination.

This is a radical confession that defies the voices that tell us that everything we need to know can be found in the polished marble of human invention.

Did you know that if you tour the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. or the Field Museum in Chicago or the American Museum of Natural History in New York, you will be challenged to find any exhibit on the development of the human capacity for forgiveness.

Oh yes, you’ll see all manner of displays about human progress. You’ll find things on technological invention, on the development of group coordination in hunting, and even the evolution of organized community structure.

But nothing about the development of a human concept of mercy. Nothing on cancellation of financial debt as a moral virtue. Nothing about the refusal to hold grudges or seek vengence. Nothing about refusal to exploit people in servitude or economic duress.[vi]

Redemption is a religious concept, a gift from God.

But we contemporary Christians claim this 3300 year old solidarity with those Hebrews who were redeemed from Egypt and followed social practices of redemption that set them apart from the conventional wisdom and popular opinion of their times.

We do this whenever we pray the prayer the Lord’s Prayer that we learned in Matthew and in Luke.[vii] When we pray: “forgive us our debt as we also have forgiven our debtors,” we refer directly to the Torah practices of redemption.

When we pray these words, we claim kinship with the historical family of God that asks for God’s intervening, redeeming hand on behalf of ourselves and the community as a whole.

We also claim kinship with early Christians who have used this prayer as liturgy for over 1,907 years.

By the end of the first century, an order of instruction has was used by early Christians, called the Didache (didah-kee), and which organized worship and liturgical practices that affect every aspect of living- inside and outside of church. It was intended to ensure the formation of a particularly Christ-led community which acted quite differently from neighboring communities. Among the instructions of the Didache was the charge to say the Lord’s Prayer three times each day.

The point is that when we practice redemption by asking for our debts to be forgiven and by forgiving our debtors, we are making a radical and unconventional confession that truth is revealed by God rather than by the marketplace of conventional wisdom and popular opinion.

You may not think of yourself as a radical.

In fact that idea might just conjur up all sorts of images that you really don’t want to be associated with! But the word, radical, has to do with going to the origin or the roots. A radical in math is an expression that is the root of another numerical expression.

If you are a radical, you are someone who tries to get to the roots of things and for Christian radicals, the roots are the word of God rather than the frightened voice of social convention.

Conclusion: what’s the point?
So be a radical. Look up above and beyond your earthly experience to find the truth which is that we need mercy. This is a truth will not collapse on top of you.

Be a radical and pray for the redeeming of your own personal debts and for the debts we incur as a society.

Be a radical and forgive the social debts which are owed to you.

Be a radical and don’t hold a grudge or store up ill will in your heart.

Be a radical and wage peace instead of aggravating hatred in your community.

Be a radical and practice Godly acts of mercy rather than exploitation.

Be a radical and get back to the origins of your Christian faith because there, among those radical, counter-cultural origins you will find the kingdom of God.

And when you find the kingdom of God, you will find hope.

AMEN.

[i] 2 Corinthians 4:7.
[ii] Apologies to David Holmberg. “On Language.” The New York Times Magazine, July 7, 2007.
[iii] Deuteronomy 15: 1-11.
[iv] Exodus 21:1-11
[v] Walter Brueggemann. Theology of the Old Testament. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), pp 174, 175.
[vi] Walter Brueggemann. “Always in the Shadow of Empire.” Michael Budde & Robert Brimlow, eds. The Church as Counterculture. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), p 45.
[vii] Matthew 6:10-14; Luke 11:2-4.