B – 33^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time: 19 November 2006
1 Samuel 1: 4-20; Psalm 132
Hebrews 10: 11-14; MARK 13: 1 – 8

Remembering What God Forgets

A Sermon by John C. Bush, Interim Pastor
First Presbyterian Church
Birmingham, Alabama

The caterpillar is struggling in the process of gaining its freedom and becoming something different from what it is. One day it will emerge from that cocoon as a butterfly. You were watching something very profound and, though you may not have been aware of it, it’s something profoundly personal as well.

Watching a parable, as it were. A parable of humanity engaged in the struggle to be free of its webs, its hang-ups, its bindings, its prisons. A parable of ourselves, struggling with the bonds of our own making, with webs spun by others, with bindings so tight and so real that they obscure the internal reality of the creature seeking to be made new.

The struggle the larvae goes through inside that cocoon is a necessary part of the process – but what is happening -- the metamorphosis – doesn’t depend on the larvae. It isn’t something that little creature is doing to or for itself, but it is part of a much larger plan, a greater scheme that is one little part of how the universe works.

Watching myself, imprisoned by my fears, bound by expectations of the society I live in, confined by the prejudices of others – and sometimes even by distorted spiritual truths placed upon me by toxic religious systems. Watching my own struggle to be free of the suffocating webs that hide me from myself and distort who I am and separate me from those who would love me – if only they could see the real me inside it all. Not just as I am, but as I might become.

The anonymous writer of what we call the Book of Hebrews in the New Testament is trying to make the distinctiveness of his new faith – Christianity – understandable in terms of the Jewish religious practices familiar to his colleagues. On the one hand, this writer has a specific and rather narrow worldview. Yet, he often breaks out of that narrow view with spiritual insights of universal significance.

In the passage we read today he is preoccupied with the traditional role of the priest, offering animal sacrifices in the ancient temple on the Day of Atonement. Building on that analogy, he says that such sacrifices are no longer necessary, for Christ himself "offer for all time a single sacrifice" that is all-sufficient and enduring. What God asks of us now is a sacrifice of the heart. Then he gives us this amazing insight – good news so wonderful we have great difficulty believing is: God remembers our sins and misdeeds no more. God has forgotten them already.

We say it there in the creed: that we believe in the forgiveness of sins. But, as with much of what we say we believe, we find it much more difficult to live as if we believe it. We seem determined, in fact, to remember what God forgets. To carry burdens of guilt long after they have been lifted; to hold grudges far too long; to put ourselves down, despite the fact that God has already reached down to lift us up.

The forgiveness of sins. What does that mean? It is about the liberation of real persons – our very own liberation from the dead weight of the past. From the forms of brokenness and alienation that disfigure who we really are as children of God, created in the very image of God’s own self. In the words of theologian Shirley Guthrie, we Reformed Christians take sin seriously, but not too seriously.

In our lives – with family, friends, social relationships, political loyalties, career involvements – we seem to be being drawn into a tangled web of complicity in our own bondage and brokenness, and that of the world around us. This accumulated guilt can take many forms. It may flow from the consequences, intended or otherwise, of our actions and attitudes. It may be the weight imposed by tradition, or by the accusations of others. I may come from the compulsive behaviors that drive us to self-destruction, dishonoring ourselves and others.

Whatever the character of this bondage and brokenness, it has the form of a past that throttles the present and condemns the future to a mindless repetition of what has been, or what might have been – but not of what might be. The forgiveness of sin is purely and simply a release from that past and an opening toward the future.

The problem is, we keep remembering what God forgets. Keep holding on to that past, unable or unwilling to turn it loose and move on in the assurance that God has already given us this new future. We are, it seems, addicted to the past. As Henri Nouwen puts it in one of his books, All addictions make us slaves, but each time we confess openly our dependencies and express our trust that God can truly set us free, the source of our suffering becomes the source of our hope.

This is the message of grace that rests behind what the Hebrews passage want us to know. Nouwen again: We are intimately loved long before our parents, teachers, spouses, children and friends loved or wounded us. That is the truth behind our lives. [God says] ‘I have called you by name, from the very beginning. You are mine and I am yours. I have molded you in the depths of the earth and knitted you together in your mother’s womb. I have carved you in the palms of my hands and hidden you in the shadow of my embrace. … You belong to me. I am your father, your mother, your brother, your sister. … Wherever you are I will be. Nothing will ever separate us.

Why, do you suppose, are we so afraid to trust that? Why is it so much easier to believe that God is against us and not for us? Has abandoned us, and is not with us? Maybe it is too much to ask, right now, that you believe this. If so, then maybe there is a lesson to be learned from the pages of Alcoholics Anonymous: You may not believe in these twelve steps, they say, but then believe that I believe they work. For now, perhaps you have to start by believing that I believe it. Which may let you try it out, and find that it works for you – so, then, perhaps you can trust it for yourself.

If the problem is that we insist on remembering what God forgets, then the solution for us may be to learn how to forget what God forgets.

Cardinal Jaime Sin of the Philippines told a story from his early days as young priest. A woman came to him seeking spiritual counsel and who insisted that she had regular, face-to-face conversations with Jesus. Cardinal Sin set out to help her deal with reality and move away from such a pattern of hallucinations, but she insisted that it was true. One day he asked her to do something for him. He told her that once, as a young man, he had done something truly terrible, and that it continued to trouble him. Would she please ask Jesus about it the next time she spoke with him. A few weeks passed and she came again, and again insisted that she had spoken with Jesus. "Did you ask me, for me, about that terrible thing I did years ago?" he asked. "Yes, Father, I asked him." "And what did he say?" "He said, he doesn’t remember."

I believe in … the forgiveness of sins. Don’t try to hide from the audacity of that affirmation! And, for heaven’s sake, don’t waste any more time and energy remembering what God forgets.

[COPYRIGHT 2006, John C. Bush]

NOW TO JESUS CHRIST, WHO LOVES US
AND FREED US FROM OUR SINS BY HIS BLOOD
AND MADE US TO BE A KINGDOM,
PRIESTS OF HIS GOD AND FATHER,
TO HIM BE GLORY AND THANKSGIVING
FOREVER AND EVER. AMEN.