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.

Sabbath Chores

Luke 13:10-17

Presenting Engagement: Sunday rules.
As a kid, I would spend about a month at my grandparents’ home every summer and every Sunday afternoon we’d go over to the next county to visit other folks in the family. They lived in a village of less than a thousand people nestled in the shadow of a low mountain range bordering a long Tennessee Valley Authority lake.

Still in church clothes, the grown ups would sit in green, straight back rockers on the front porch and talk about local gossip and wayward family members. I, still in church clothes, would sit on the front porch floor, pretty bored, playing with a toy car or I could shuffle down the privet-lined, gravel lane that ran from the house to the intersection with the main road down next to the court house. There were no buildings between the house and the corner so you could see the back of the court house as plain as day. And there in back of that building was a large sort of yard where men lounged all afternoon on summer Sundays.

Once I asked who those men were who always lounged there and I learned a major distinction about the front and back of any rural court house. The men who loitered in front of the court house, slicing chunks of tobacco from plugs of Reynolds Natural Leaf were citizens in good standing while the men who loitered in the fenced-in yard behind the building, slicing similar chunks from identical plugs of Reynolds Natural Leaf, were convicts. It seemed by definition, the rule was that good folks got to have their tobacco in front of the hall of justice but the desperados had to go around back.

Rules. Rules. Rules.

You can’t get away from the rules, no matter where you are or how you live or what day of the week it is and Sunday was a day when the rules were applied more enthusiastically than all the other days of the week.

In Fact, this indolent, summer time ritual of visiting the kin on Sunday afternoon was chocked full of rules. There were rules about what you could wear, where you could go, how grimy you could get, how noisy and boisterous you could be around adults. Of course life wasn’t any less strict for those adults because they weren’t allowed to do their work on Sunday and none of the adults I knew played golf because the local Baptists thought it was somehow related to dancing.

But not working on Sunday simply for the reason that it was Sunday made very little sense to me as a child. In other words, the “causistry” of Sunday sabbath regulations did not appear rational to my kid-sized brain.

So I eventually asked my grandfather about why the preacher worked on Sunday. Well, it seemed the preacher had a special sanction. I asked who was down at the T V A on Sunday making sure that the big dam didn’t burst and flood the town. It seemed that people called engineers had a special sanction too. Doctors had special sanction if there was an emergency and of course farmers had really special sanctions or else the splotched Guernsey dairy cattle would bloat all up and the pigs and chickens would die of thirst or starvation. The people with the biggest sanction of all on Sundays were moms and wives because without them, well without them all the men and boys would have starved including the farmers, doctors, engineers, preachers, and even court house jail guards. Not a pretty picture.

So, it seems only natural that if all these kinds of mere mortals get sanctions to work on Sabbath then Jesus of Nazareth ought to get a sanction too! But the synagogue leaders did not see things with the clarity of a child.

Their causistry was obscure, but rules were rules.

Biblical Context: Jesus’ controversy.
Now, when it came to the matter of how religious practices were mediated in Hebrew society Jesus was precocious as a child and confrontational as an adult. You recall how he was already unsettling the religious establishment as a twelve year old asking those embarassingly insightful questions to the Jerusalem temple elders. As minister who is the parent of a teenager, I know how that goes. It can be frustrating to say the least!

And as he became older, Jesus continued to speak truth. In fact, you could say he was a religious activist who had so many confrontations with religious leaders over the three years of his preaching and healing ministry that his activism ultimately was the presenting argument for putting him on the cross to die.

Part of that activism was that he never seemed to go along with the established causistry of religious regulations. In fact, he thought the religious establishment had gotten it all wrong and were misleading the people.

It wasn’t that Jesus disrespected human authority; it was that he respected God’s sovereign authority above all.

So there he was in one of the local synagogues one Sabbath day, teaching as a rabbi normally would. A woman entered with a crippling ailment that caused her back to bow right over so that she could not even stand up straight. Anyone with even a touch of osteo arthritis can understand exactly what she was going through.

Jesus saw her plight and unburdened her. Did you notice how Luke presents Jesus’ statement? “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.”[i]

Set free! Liberated! This claim is a direct, metaphorical reference to the Egyptian exodus when God set the Israelites free from slavery to the Pharaohs. Now Jesus has set this woman free from bondage to her crippling ailment.

But the synagogue leader did not think it was right to do miracles on the Sabbath because this leader, standing there in the same room with Jesus, spoke disparagingly about Jesus’ act of healing.

The description in the gospel makes the synagogue leader sound like a politician who is disgruntled over another politician’s stance in a debate. If you watch those debates, have you noticed how the candidates put eachother down without making honest eye contact with each other? They look at the debate moderator and the television camera but avoid looking at the person they are attempting to belittle with their answer. The strategy is to get the crowd on their side and make their opponent seem totally unworthy of recognition.

That is just what this particular synagogue leader wanted. He was outraged that Jesus the rabbi had come into the synagogue and healed someone on the Sabbath so instead of glaring at that rabbi, the leader addressed the crowd who were assembled there and quoted the Ten Commandments. “Don’t come in here on the Sabbath and expect to be healed and don’t follow anyone who does work on the Sabbath,” he’s saying.

But Jesus of Nazareth did not play to the crowd. He responded directly to the synagogue leader, looking him directly in the eye and saying: “You hypocrites!”[ii] Perhaps noting that special sanction for farmers, Jesus pointed out how even the oxen and donkeys get watered on the Sabbath. Wasn’t that work? Didn’t the synagogue leader do this work on the Sabbath too? And here was this Hebrew woman, a spiritual descendent of Abraham, a family member of God’s chosen people. Was her liberation less valuable than the watering of a donkey or an ox?

Explication of Text: What’s it all mean?
The resources of Hollywood could probably turn this exchange between Jesus and the synagogue leader into a cinematic blockbuster. It has all you could ask for: pathos, moral outrage, a hero who sticks up for the little person against the hard-hearted establishment. All that stuff that makes a great movie moment is right here in this gospel account by Luke.

There are actually two things going on in this story. First, this is a didactic moment, a teaching moment.

What Jesus was teaching that day was that scrupulous adherence to the letter of the Torah law[iii] pointed out a moral fallacy. It pointed out how these hypocritical people were so stuck in the rut of scriptural absolutism that they missed the fact that healing this woman was more righteous than ignoring her on account of the Sabbath.

Healing is divine work. Jesus was teaching the crowd and the leaders that doing God’s work takes place every single day of the week. Rest from your profit making labors on the Sabbath but don’t ever rest from your divine chores.

It is particularly significant that this woman’s crippling illness was thought to be the work of Satan. In the scriptures, we find that any debilitation was considered caused by evil spirits and so if you were leperous or crippled or bleeding from sores that would not close, you were ostracized from healthy society. No one would eat with you or touch you or befriend you in any way.

The healing of this woman was more than physical healing. Jesus was liberating her from a severe illness and at the same time he was reconciling her with her people, her kin, the other descendents of Abraham in that place. God’s will is the reconciliation and restoration of people each and every day of the week.

First, this is a didactic moment. Second, Jesus was a prophet and this is a prophetic moment.

The prophecy here is that the Kingdom of God is constantly breaking into this everyday world that we live in. This world thinks in terms of the concrete rather than the abstract. This world wants quantifiable performance results and test scores and metric analysis and church growth figures.

But the kingdom of God does not operate on these human terms. You can’t measure reconciliation. You can’t pick up a handful of restoration and put it in a test tube, fire up a bunson burner under it and find out at what temperature it boils.

Jesus’ prophecy tells me that the Kingdom of God is not found in the absolutism of doctrine. It is found in loving my neighbor as myself. It is found in the divine chores of liberation and healing. If I bury my head in the absolutism of the Sabbath regulations and don’t do my divine chores, then the Kingdom of God might pass right by me and I will have missed it.

Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?
I think it is often very difficult to parse God’s will in the Bible because much of scripture relates to the particular rather than the general. We look for universal truth in stories of particular situations in particular lives thousands of years ago. So it may be disconcerting and confusing when we come across a text like this one today because this particular story of this particular situation seems to contradict the particular divine commandment to observe the Sabbath that comes from another particular story a thousand years earlier.

The German scholar, Gunther Bornkamm wrote that Jesus’ offense in the synagogue that day was not an offense against the Sabbath itself. Jesus’ offence was against “Sabbath causistry” developed to excrutiating exactitude by a pedantic religious hierarchy.[iv] In other words, the commandment to observe the Sabbath wasn’t what Jesus objected to. He objected to the social custom that had been developed around the commandment. He objected to the fact that that social custom had obscured the original relevance of the Sabbath.

It is oh so easy to venture forth into a noble cause only to find that after time has passed we have forgotten our original intent, lost the original relevance of our endeavor. And when that happens, all we have left is a hollow ritual.

I think we can find this in any number of places in our lives. Perhaps we have turned lively and meaningful celebrations into routine procedures. We might have turned precious relationships into wooden associations. We might have turned interesting work into weekday routines just for the sake of a paycheck.

When that happens, it is unfortunate.

But when those rare moments happen in which the presence of the Kingdom of God flashes by and we miss it because we were too busy performing fossilized traditions out of some short sighted sense of formality, well that is more than unfortunate. It is isolating and hope denying.

Conclusion: What’s the Point?
Jesus Christ is our best hope in life and in death. Don’t miss his presence and lose that hope. Be watchful for signs that the Kingdom of God is present. You’ll know it when you see it.

You’ll know it when someone goes out of their way to do a senseless act of kindness for someone else.

You’ll know it when someone forgives someone else even though they are not obligated to.

You’ll know it when old enemies make peace.

You’ll know it when someone gives their time to tutor a child or visit a shut in or welcomes a stranger into the church or begins a recycling program or speaks some unpopular truth.

You might just see it while you’re sitting on the front porch in a green straight backed rocker conversing with your family on a Sunday afternoon in the summer in your church clothes.

For heaven’s sake, don’t miss it! Amen.

[i] Luke 13:12
[ii] Luke 13:15
[iii] Exodus 20:9 & Deuteronomy 5:13
[iv] Bornkamm, Gunther. Jesus of Nazareth, 3rd edition, (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 97.