Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The text is the Epistle lesson from Romans 3. “For we are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith.”
Occasionally, someone will ask
what I enjoy the most about being a pastor, either here at St. Paul’s or just
in general. I suspect most people think I’m going to say something about
baptizing babies, or being around the school kids, getting to tell people about
Jesus, or only working a few hours on Sunday mornings while playing golf the
rest of the week. True, I do enjoy those things, but that’s not quite what I
like the most, and I do work more than just a Sunday morning (although it is
funny how many people think that is truth). My favorite thing about being a
pastor, my most favorite part of this vocation is this: I get to proclaim to God’s
people, with troubled, burdened consciences, that are struggling with guilt and
shame that their sins are forgiven by Jesus. Yes, that happens in preaching and
Bible class, but more to the point, I get to say to an individual person, a
Christian soul weighed by the knowledge that they have sinned against another
person and against God, “I forgive you all your sins, in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
Still, that may seem to be an odd
choice to identify as my favorite part of this vocation, and a very specific
one, at that. Television shows and movies don’t speak much about God’s gift of forgiveness
through the pastoral office. Books rarely mention absolution, unless it
involves a weird plot twist. MASH’s Father Mulcahey was the closest, but that
was only on occasion. But it’s not just pop culture. Seminary doesn’t spend a
lot of energy teaching about it – at least, not compared to exegetical study of
Greek or Hebrew or preaching. I took three preaching classes my last year at
Seminary. I can only remember a singular lecture on pastoral care by
absolution.
So, if it’s such an odd part of
pastoral ministry, and such a small part of our pastoral training, why do I
like it so much?
Some years ago, I was at a
pastor’s conference where the keynote speaker was an old-school-Lutheran pastor
whom I will call Pastor James. Pastor James was speaking with us about the art
and craft of pastoral care, that is, the caring for the soul of the baptized
child of God. As Lutherans, we think of Law and Gospel usually in the vein of sermons.
His thesis was that the same Law and Gospel we use in preaching should be the
key when caring for God’s people. God’s Law holds us accountable before God.
That’s why we feel bad when we sin, both horizontally in human relationships
and vertically in our relationship with our Heavenly Father. The Law, with its
demands of perfection, exposes us as sinners and the Christian conscience
realizes our Old Adam won the battle in that moment – sometimes in a very, very
bad way. If we were to dare to stand before God as judge on our own merits, we
stand condemned. That’s magnified when we realize that our merits are, in fact,
worthless. Thus, the terror, the guilt, the shame of sin. You can’t fix it; you
can’t remove it; you can’t undo it. The medicine, the cure for the crushing
condemnation of the Law is the Good News of Jesus Christ. That Good News is
that Jesus perfectly fulfilled that Law, living as God demanded and as none of
us can do. As the perfect, sinless Son of God, He then became the Lamb of God,
sacrificed for the sins of the world. The fancy term is “vicarious atonement”:
a substitutionary sacrifice, the holy for the unholy, the sinless for the
sin-stained.
In the Old Testament, God’s
people offered countless animal sacrifices. To use a British term that is also
apropos to describe the sacrifice, it was a bloody mess. The animal was
slaughtered. To demonstrate that the animal was taking the place of the worshipper,
its blood was caught in a basin. Some of the blood was poured out on the altar;
some was sprinkled on the people who brought the sacrifice. Literally, they
were marked with the life-blood of the animal. That covering of blood was
called the propitiation. Life was taken so that life could be given through the
forgiveness of sins.
That’s the image Paul is using to
explain Jesus’ sacrificial death. What was true in Old Testament sacrifice
becomes infinitely more true as Jesus becomes the Lamb of God for the sins of
the world. He dies for us. The holy for the unholy; the sinless for the sinful.
By God’s grace through faith in Christ, His blood covers our sins. Not
literalisticly, of course. But, that is how God sees us: with our sins covered
by the blood of Jesus. Because we stand under the propitiation of Jesus, God
declares us righteous. His death becomes our life. His holiness becomes our
holiness. His sinlessness becomes our sinlessness. His Divine Sonship becomes
our identity as sons and daughters of God.
This is what Paul preaches to the
Romans, and that is what we as Lutheran Christian pastors are taught to
proclaim. Pastor James said this isn’t just for proclamation from the pulpit.
It’s to be delivered person to person, each time they feel as though they are
standing before God, as naked and exposed as Adam and Eve, with every raw,
terrible sin illuminated by the holy brilliance of the Law. He told us about
the time he was flying when the person next to him started talking, telling his
life’s story. Because he was listening as a pastor, Pastor James realized that
this fellow traveler was actually confessing his sins – not formally, but in
his story. And, because Pastor James was listening as a pastor, he acted as a servant
of Christ. When he finished, Pastor James said he stood up, the airplane
serving as an ersatz confessional, and with his huge, Norwegian Minnesota
accent, he thundered the words of absolution to an embarrassed but grateful
traveler among a confused and somewhat disgruntled congregation of flyers. “I
forgive you all your sins,” and with the sign of the cross, declared that
terrible burden of guilt to be covered with the propitionary sacrifice of
Jesus. He did it, he said, because that is our calling as pastors. When a
penitent confesses their sins, knowingly or without realizing it, we are called
to speak forgiveness, regardless of where, when, or how.
“You pastors,” he said to us,
“you pastors get to tell the burdened, troubled conscience that, yes, the
Christian has sinned and fallen terribly short of the glory of God, but his or
her Savior has redeemed the same child of God. You tell the saint, the
baptized, the child of God that powerful word. Listen in your conversations for
the shame of the Law, and when you hear it, if there is even an inkling of
Christian faith, you deliver the Good News right then and right there. You give life to the one who is otherwise dead.”
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| "Christ's Ambassador" 2 Corinthians 5:20 - Full of Eyes |
That opened my eyes, and my ears, to the necessity of delivering this life-giving word of God in settings I previously ignored. I began to listen more carefully and put into practice this gift of absolution delivered by grace, through faith in the One who died for our sins. It’s led to some interesting moments. One Sunday after church, while filling my car at a Valero gas station, a woman pulled up opposite me at Pump #6 and after a couple of questions about my clerical shirt, she began telling me her sordid life’s story. With a voice that was an admixture of hope, guilt, fear, and a splash of challenge, she asked, “Tell me: can God forgive that mess?” That morning, Pump #6 became a confessional. I crossed across the island and with my right hand held high, I proclaimed forgiveness to her. “In the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ, I forgive you all your sins,” and with the invocation of the Trinity I made the sign of the cross over her. A moment later, as I drove away, she was still there, standing perhaps a little taller and with a smile on her face.
But the conversations aren’t
always so easy. For all of it’s joy, for some, they have swallowed the barbed
hook of satan’s lie that Jesus can’t forgive a sin, a terrible sin, their sin. How
do you proclaim forgiveness to a soul who thinks they are unlovable, un-mercy-able,
unforgivable? For over two years, I corresponded with a former Lutheran church
worker who was in prison serving 30 years – given his age, that would likely be
a life sentence. Don’t worry about what he did; it’s irrelevant. Besides, I
won’t tell you, anyway. What is important is that he was overwhelmed with shame
and guilt at what he had done. Convicted by both man’s law and God’s Law, He
was fully aware that his sin destroyed his family, his home, the church where
he served. He was a professional church worker, remember, and he knew his Bible
very, very well. His letters dripped with God’s conviction against sinners,
citing passage after passage of God’s condemnation for sinners who broke His
commands. Paul’s “Through the Law comes knowledge of sin,” was no joke for this
man! Finally, at the bottom of page 6, he asked a question that was almost like
the woman at the gas pump: “How can God forgive me when I sinned against Him,
His church, and my family and hurt so many people?” Did you hear the question?
It wasn’t denial – God can’t forgive me. It was inquiry, how? I know I am an
absolute disaster, so how can God do this?
I let his letter marinate on my
desk for almost a week, bathing it in prayer, imagining he was sitting across
from me in person. Finally, I began to type. I leaned back into Pastor James
who leaned back into St. Paul who leaned on nothing more than the cross of
Jesus. “Yes, you are a terrible sinner and what you did is great and grievous
against both God and man. Jesus died for sins as these – not just for the
light-weight, low-calorie, socially dismissible, low-impact, slightly
inconvenient sins. He died for the murderer who hung next to Him on Golgatha.
He died for the great apostle who once sent countless Christians to death. He
died for prodigal sons who wish dear old dad was dead so he could get his
inheritance faster. He died for a prophet who despaired so greatly that he
prayed God would take his life. He died for a disciple who denied knowing Jesus
and for others who ran in fear. He even died for those who drove nails into His
perfect body, for the man who condemned Him to death, and those who stood at
the foot of His cross, mocking, doubting, disbelieving. The difference is the
former confessed their sins with the sure and certain hope that Jesus did, in
fact, die for sinners like them. The latter either thought they had no sins to
confess or that they certainly did not need to confess their few-and-far
between sins to a Man whom, they thought, was a hypocrite and a heretic who
deserved to die. You asked “how can God forgive me?” The short answer is: because
He loves sinners. Then, I wrote the words we read from Paul: The righteousness
of God has been manifested apart from the Law…the righteousness of God through faith
in Jesus for all who believe. There is no distinction, for all have sinned and
fallen short of the glory of God and are justified by His grace as a gift,
through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God put forth as a
propitiation by His blood to be received by faith.” “There’s the answer,” I wrote. “God sent
Jesus for you. Do you believe it?”
I won’t lie: when I signed my
name, sealed and stamped the letter, and dropped it in the mailbox, I did so
praying for the words to be received, for the man who would read them, for his
broken and bruised heart to be strengthened by the Holy Spirit. I think I
prayed those prayers every day. It took almost a month before I got a letter
back. Where the previous letter was page upon page of Law-driven
self-flagellation, this was three progressively shrinking paragraphs that
barely covered a page.
The first was a quick description
of his emotions reading the letter, five or six sentences long – maybe half a
page. The second paragraph was two sentences long. He picked up in Romans where
I left off with one small change in verse 27. Paul wrote, “Then what becomes of
our boasting?” He wrote boasting, then drew a single line through boasting and
wrote “guilt” so that it would read, “What becomes of our guilt?” He continued:
“It is excluded…by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith
apart from works of the Law.” The final paragraph was one simple sentence. “I
believe; help my unbelief.” I still have that letter which, I am not too
embarrassed to say, includes more than a few tear-marks, shed from joy at the
Spirit’s work in this man’s heart.
That is why I love speaking
absolution. Those words that God calls me to speak robs satan of his power of
guilt and shame and restores the Christian conscience to a right relationship
with God – even one that is not much more than a bent reed or a smoldering
wick. He has called me to do that. It is a joy to do so.
I know: it's Reformation Sunday
and I haven't said much about Martin Luther. That's because if he were here, he
would scold us if we talked about him. Instead, he would point us to Jesus. That
blessing of the full and free forgiveness of sins for the sake of Christ was at
the heart of the reformation some 500 years ago, one which still echoes through
the centuries to parishes and God’s saints still today. So, Jesus, with His
gift of forgiveness for sinners, is where we go this Reformation Sunday, every
Sunday, and every day of our lives. In His name. Amen.
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