Grace to you and peace from God
our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Being a pastor is an interesting vocation.
If you ever want to kill a conversation fast, when a person meets you for the first
time and asks what you do, tell them you’re a pastor and watch their face. One
of two things happens, usually: either they freeze, trying to remember if they
have “sinned” – usually in the form of an off-color joke – since they were near
you, or they decide they’re going to play “gotcha” and ask you some question like,
“So, preacher, just how many angels can dance on the head of a needle,” or “If
God is all powerful, can he create a rock so big he can’t lift it?” The answer
to both questions, by the way, is God doesn’t engage in foolishness and waste the
time He created.
But every now and then, that person
has a serious question to ask: tell me about God; does God really forgive sinners;
what does it mean that God is merciful; if the church is for sinners, why is it
so hypocritical; if God is love, why did He kill His own son? Good questions, hard
questions, questions of the soul that I’m happy to try to answer no matter
where I am. Often I ask my own question – why do you ask? Maybe they had a
really negative experience at a church, or a pastor once publicly berated them,
or they were shamed so terribly by well intended parents or teachers, “You
better tell God just how sorry you are, and don’t come out of your room until
you are. Or, perhaps worst of all, “God’s going to remember that for a long,
long time.”
“How do you see God?” That’s an
important question that I ask. A person’s view of God gives me a lot of
information. Some see God as a stern and demanding disciplinarian, always with
the old “Uncle Sam” frown and scolding look in his face. Others see God as
something akin to Santa Claus, he gives you what you want when you want it, as
long as you’re a good boy and girl. Others see God as a fickle being, depending
on his mood. Others see God as angry, disappointed, and always ready to punish
at the drop of a sin-stained hat.
Sometimes I invert the question
to, “How does God see you?” That is often an eye-opener, too, as people start
to open up and drag the skeletons out of the closet with sins clicking and
clacking, guilt moaning and groaning, shame squeaking and creaking, and fear
making the teeth rattle and eyes twitch back and forth. Here, I hear words like
failure, broken, mess, stained, guilty as charged.
And, when I hear words like
these, descriptions like these, and they come from the mouth of a Christian whom
Jesus died to redeem, a soul that believes Christ is their Lord and Savior, in
that moment I see a soul that is burdened by the weight of sin, guilt, and
shame; a conscience that is turned in on itself and away from the good news of
Jesus; and a person whom satan is lying to with everything he’s got.
The Christian conscience is the voice
in the head and it is to be like an umpire, but instead of calling balls and
strikes, it allows you to see yourself as a baptized, forgiven child of God and
makes decisions and determinations based on that fact. And, the Christian conscience
also serves as a reminder that you are always and still a baptized, forgiven
child of God even when you make decisions that, in hindsight, weren’t the best
of choice to make.
There is nothing – nothing – that
makes the devil more exited than when a Christian starts to doubt God’s grace
for them in Christ Jesus. If he can twist the Christian conscience into believing
that they have finally stepped over the line, that they have outstripped God’s
grace, that the seventy times seven literally applies to them and they just hit
seventy times seven plus one, that there is doubt that Jesus can, indeed,
forgive. When it gets really bad, the inner voice actually becomes the voice of
the devil, using his words of judgement, damnation, and hatred. Through it all,
satan does his happy dance and it is ugly. It’s ugly because he’s rejoicing that
someone is in danger of joining him into damnable eternity.
To be sure, their conscience was
right – they truly were sinners, very well qualified, at that – who had fallen
quite far short of the glory of God. That’s all they could see. They were
seeing the truth of God’s Law that does, indeed, demand holiness and show how
far we come from that mark. But that’s all they could see. They were missing
something, a part of the picture that was hidden in the fog of satan’s lies and
twisting of the truth.
What they were missing was God’s
righteousness. His righteousness is not anger at the sinner, but rather a
declaration that the sinner is now declared righteous. It’s a divine acquittal
writ large – not just “not guilty,” but declared holy and restored.
Long promised throughout the Old
Testament, both foretold in words of the prophets and foreshadowed in the actions
of God in His people, God’s righteousness is a gracious and undeserved gift
given to His people. God gives it freely out of His love; He gives it out of
His own righteousness. He gives it in the propitiation of His Son, Jesus.
Propitiation – we don’t use that
word. In the Old Testament, sacrifices were made on a daily basis. The great
annual sacrifice was made on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On that day, the
High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies, a basin of sacrificial blood in hand.
He would pour the blood out on the lid of the ark of the covenant. That lid was
called the mercy seat. God would receive the animal’s blood in exchange for the
sins of the people. That act was called propitiation – a redeeming act of God,
receiving the innocent death of one for the sake of the guilty. It was a foreshadowing
of Jesus’ own death. No longer hidden behind the curtain of the temple, Jesus’
death outside the city gates was for all to see. Even Satan himself witnessed
the event of Jesus shedding His blood, surrendering His life, the Innocent for
the guilty, the righteous for the unrighteous.
The Old Testament priest did something
else with that blood – he would sprinkle it over the people. It was a visual
mark that the animal’s life was traded for them and they were marked with its
blood. They were redeemed and made righteous. You, too, have been marked with
Christ’s blood. In baptism, the holiness of Christ covers your sins. God declares
you righteous in Christ. By God’s grace, through faith, your conscience enables
you to see yourself as God sees you: forgiven, whole and holy. And, when you
see yourself as righteous in the eyes of God, you are set free from satan’s
lies that you are anything else.
Earlier, I said the vocation of the ministry is an interesting one. Our calling is to comfort the afflicted with the good news of Jesus. Sometimes, we even get to do this for ourselves.
The novelist Shusaku Endo tells
the story of a Portuguese Roman Catholic priest sent to Japan in the mid-1600s.
Ancient, feudal Japan was not friendly to Christians and when these priests
were discovered, they along with their flocks were arrested. While the members
of the church were tortured, the priests were forced to listen to their cries
and prayers for help. The Japanese official offered a deal: if the priest would
apostacize by stepping on a wood and brass relief carving of Jesus, the people
would be freed from their torture. Endo writes:
The priest
raises his foot. In it he feels a dull, heavy pain… He will now trample on what
he has considered the most beautiful thing in his life, on what he has believed
most pure, on whaat is filled with the ideals and the dreams of man. How his foot aches! …The priest placed his
foot on the [carving]. Dawn broke. And far in the distance, a cock crowed.
Later, when the disgraced priest
had been returned to his residence of house arrest, one Christin man who
escaped the Japanese soldiers snuck to the priest’s window and whispered,
“Please hear my confession…please, give me absolution for my sins.” The priest
reflects. “I, too, stood on the sacred image. For a moment, this foot was on
His face. It was on the face of the man who had been ever in my thoughts, on
the face that was before me in the mountains, in my wanderings, in prison…on
the face of him whom I have always longed to love. Even now that face is
looking at me with eyes of pity from the plaque rubbed flat by many feet.” As
the priest imagines the feet touching the carving of Jesus, in his mind’s eye
the feet change…they no longer are the feet of the Christians who stepped on
the plaque; they are the nail-marked feet of Jesus. In that moment, Endo
writes, “the priest could not understand the tremendous onrush of joy that came
over him at that moment.”
That story is why the Reformation
is of such great importance: seeing ourselves only through the lens of Jesus’ death
and resurrection and hearing the voice of God declaring us righteous, not by
what we do or don’t do, but through faith in Jesus.
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