Author: Steve

They prayed and thought about it for a few days, nominated two candidates, prayed and cast lots. Done. Living in the midst of a painful, confused and hotly contested election year, the description of Matthias’ election to be an apostle in Acts 1:12-26 looks appealingly simple. It is still a helpful model for selection of church leaders even if secular application to political office seems wildly unlikely.

This often-skipped text (between the Ascension and Pentecost) gives us a fascinating glimpse into a gatherings of the first Christians. I, at least, tend to picture them as eleven frightened men huddling in a small place, but verses 14 and 15 let us see a larger group (120 in verse 15) including women, even Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as Jesus’ “brothers,” (half-brothers or step-brothers).

Despite the size of the gathering there is a sense of incompleteness in the fact that only 11 are left of the 12 original and closest disciples, whom Luke calls apostles. As our look last month at Revelation 21 showed, there is a connection between the number of the apostles and the number of the tribes of Israel. As the work of N. T. Wright has consistently argued, the ministry of Jesus was meant to be the symbolic founding of a new and restored Israel. So twelve apostles are necessary to fully represent that new beginning.

In the midst of that large gathering for prayer, Peter arose to point out the problem in verses 16 to 19, the betrayal and demise of Judas. He finds the solution in Scripture, by a reference to Psalm 69:25, which he understands to have predicted Judas’ loss of the field bought with his blood money, and to Psalm 109:8, which implies the replacement of a corrupt leader.

I’ve heard it said that Peter and the rest acted prematurely to replace Judas in Acts 1. There’s a pretty strong theological notion that Paul was the genuine twelfth apostle and replacement for Judas. Matthias, who totally drops out of the story and is never mentioned again, is supposed to have been a hastily chosen mistake, selected without the guidance of the Holy Spirit who is not given until the next chapter.

The view that Matthias was hastily and wrongly elected is probably as bogus as are many of the contentions about elections today, an ad hoc device to secure a candidate preferred by those making the contention. I would contend that the community of disciples was acting properly in its selection of Matthias and that he is a good example of the fact that not every follower of Jesus, not even every apostle, is meant to be a superstar.

In fact, since this Sunday is Trinity Sunday, we can see the communal nature of our God being reflected here in the community of the church. Reflecting God’s own mode of life as a community of persons, the church goes about its business in a communal way. Nominations are received from the whole body and the community prays together for God’s direction through the casting of lots. That melding of hearts and minds in prayer and sensitivity to God’s leading is what all crucial church decision-making should look like.

So I’m quite content to accept Matthias as the twelfth apostle (with his name written on the foundation of the Holy City). Much of church life is like that, a quiet seeking of God’s will with unspectacular results in the moment, but with lasting consequences for the kingdom of God.

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

I find the last lines of T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, the final poem of his Four Quartets, incredibly beautiful and evocative. I go back to them, at least in my mind, every Pentecost. He took the first two lines from Julian of Norwich’s Showings, a promise which she believed Christ had spoken to her directly in regard to her experience of the torment of guilt for her sin in the midst of a bodily sickness.

To Julian’s lines, Eliot added his own brief lines of promise in regard to the spiritual process of being purged as if by fire, that is by suffering. He sees that fire of pain and loss as “Pentecostal” (“tongues of flame”), thus holy, and ultimately redemptive as it is woven into the orderly and beautiful form of a crown knot, which evokes the image of a fiery rose.

Like much of Eliot’s poetry, Little Gidding is itself a complex knot of allusions and meanings. The title is the name of a small 17th century Anglican religious community that was dispersed in the Puritan revolt. But its church was rebuilt and restored in both the 18th and 19th centuries. That little community of faith has a literal history of suffering and redemption.

In my reading of the Pentecost text, Acts 2:1-21, and Eliot’s poem, the fire and the rose represent two aspects of the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. There is a passionate, fiery, possibly even destructive aspect that calls us forward into new life, maybe even through purging and loss. But then there is the rosy,  peaceful, ordering work of the Spirit who is called the Comforter, settling, building and establishing us in that new life which we may have entered, “as if by fire,” in pain and loss.

I also think that personality type may incline some of us more toward the fiery side of spiritual life while drawing others of us toward the rosy side of the Spirit. Yet both are part of God’s own Holy Spirit and both are necessary in us as individuals and in us as a church together.

As she was grading final papers for four classes, my wife received a link to a bit of higher education satire from a Facebook friend. You can see it here. It was a fictional college memo regarding a rubric for a “Core Educational Competency In Reading Things In Books And Writing About Them.” As many college instructors will attest, it is, all humor aside, a competency sadly lacking among students today.

A general inability for or disinterest in “reading things in books” has severe consequences for the practice of Christianity. As we find in the Gospel lesson for Ascension Day this week (it’s Thursday, though we, like some other churches, celebrate it the following Sunday), Luke 24:44-53, our faith was founded from the beginning in what was written, first in the Hebrew Bible to which the text refers in verses 45 and 46, and then in the writings of the New Testament.

Rembrandt pictured the prophetess Anna, who appears in Luke 2:36-38 to meet the baby Jesus, as a thoughtful reader of the Hebrew Scriptures, presumably studying and coming to some understanding of the prophecies regarding the Messiah. The portrait, which speaks of a life-long devotion to such reading, is a fitting image for that to which we all as Christians ought to aspire.

Luke tells us in chapter 2 verse 38 what Anna did after she came to the temple and recognized the fulfillment of the Scriptures in Mary’s baby. Anna “began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.” That’s the order of things in the Ascension texts as well. Jesus explains what has been written about Him and then commissions the apostles to witness, beginning in Jerusalem.

During this time between the Ascension and the Return of Jesus, it’s a core competency for Christians that we be able to read things in The Book and then tell about them. Whatever the rubric is for that, we need to accomplish it.

I grew up in the Los Angeles area (Santa Monica) and never want to move back. One thing which soured me on my hometown was the poor air quality there in the pre-auto-emission-control era, even in our bayside part of the metropolis. Suffering from asthma I savored every trip to my grandmother’s home in the clear air of northern Arizona and every excursion to hike in pristine mountains with the Boy Scouts. Coming home from a long backpack trip in the Sierras, I would dread the moment when the car came up over the “Grapevine” and I could see the whole smoggy, congested city we were headed back into.

In fact, if you had asked me to describe heaven or paradise, I would have talked about something that looked a lot like a high Sierra meadow or lakeshore or else what was then the still fairly wild country around our northern Arizona cabin. It would not at all have included skyscrapers or freeways or even concrete. There would certainly have been no smog or crowds or noise or crime.

I’ve had to adjust my conception of paradise as I’ve looked more honestly and deeply into the promises of Revelation, particularly chapter 21, our text for this coming Sunday. As Eugene Peterson makes plain in Reversed Trumpets, the description of our eternal home is not some natural wilderness, unspoiled by buildings or roadways or great numbers of human beings. It’s a city. To put it simply (though certainly not originally), though the human story begins in a garden, it ends in a city. God intends to ground and center His kingdom in a renewed and restored city.

Peterson notes that the city chosen by God, Jerusalem, though not a crushing mega-city like L.A. or Tokyo or New York, is still not the most attractive place on earth and has a pretty sad history. It was after all, the place where God’s people abandoned their faith and where Jesus was rejected and crucified. Yet God selects just such a place to redeem and renew as the image of eternal life with Him.

Unlike some of my friends and colleagues who seem to enjoy living in or visiting huge sites of human habitation, whether for the food, for entertainment, for the wide possibilities of ministry or for the sheer energy of it all, I am still a pretty reluctant urbanite. I still enjoy every opportunity to escape to mountains or fishing stream.

The hope I do see in the picture of the Holy City in Revelation 21 is that it seems to include and redeem all the best of city life along with all the natural beauty I associate with non-city wilderness, a river flowing through the midst of it and spreading trees. It seems to tell me that I don’t need and should not be isolated from my fellow human beings in order to enjoy the best of life as God created it. Despite the separation of “nature” from city in present times, it will all come together in peace in the Kingdom of our Savior.

In the meantime, I try to see how God is at work in our present cities, how that vision of a the perfect city where beauty, humanity and urban life come together perfectly can inform the ways in which we live together here and now. It feels like a calling not to leave and abhor the city, but to work for its redemption, insofar as God gives us grace and wisdom, to make these present dwellings more like that eternal residence.

You have to take the Bible literally. That’s what I was taught growing up. It was an understandable concern to avoid the nineteenth and twentieth century theologies which wanted to transform the historic Christian faith, based on events attested to in the Old and New Testaments, into metaphor for the workings of the human mind or spirit. My teachers rightly wanted me to hold onto convictions that God created the heavens and the earth, that Israel was redeemed out of Egypt, and that Jesus Christ died and rose again for the salvation of the world.

The problem with the literalness I was taught was that it was naive and fairly oblivious to the fact that the writers of Scripture often used image and metaphor to talk about the actual saving events they had experienced. Without believing that Jesus was in any literal sense a four-legged animal, they called Him the Lamb of God or “the Lamb who was slain,” as we read last week from Revelation 5. Scripture is like our own day-to-day speech, literal description and reference interlaced with constant use of conscious and unconscious metaphor which helps us communicate and understand the world we talk about together.

Failure to distinguish metaphor from literal speech is the subject of many jokes. This recent Beetle Bailey cartoon turns on Zero taking “teach you a lesson” literally when Sarge is using it metaphorically. Unfortunately, a number of people fail to see that their “literal” interpretations of Scripture are nearly as laughable as Zero’s literalness.

Revelation 7, our text for this week, has invited any number of “literal” interpretations which have failed to grasp the use of imagery and metaphor and have therefore led to laughable and even sad misinterpretations. Much of the dispensationalist eschatology, which many evangelicals still embrace and is reflected in the Left Behind series, arises out of mistaken literalist understandings of this chapter.

Modern Christians should have gotten the clue not to take the imagery of Revelation 7 literally in the first verse as it pictures 4 angels standing at the 4 corners of the earth. Unless we are prepared to embrace a flat, square-shaped understanding of our world, we have to abandon slavish literalness from the outset.

The particular image I’m focusing on this Sunday is the number which appears in verse 4, 144,000 “sealed” servants of God, 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel. Dispensationalists insist on both the literalness of the number and of their literal descent from the tribes of Israel. A much more sensible understanding reads this as a symbolic number of the redeemed from, as verse 9 has it, all the peoples of the earth. Their connection with Israel is as the spiritual completion of the fullness of all that God meant Israel to be, as Paul argues in Romans 9. The “new Israel” is all who believe in Jesus, whether Gentiles or literal descendants of Israel.

In any case, it’s impossible to get a literal 12,000 from each ancient tribe of Israel, since 10 of those tribes ceased to exist in any real form in the 8th century B.C.

So that intriguing number 144k is a picture to talk about the fact that in Christ God will complete the full number of all those who will be saved. It’s neither a literal total number of faithful believers (as Jehovah’s Witnesses teach), nor a literal number of Jews who accept Christ during the “Tribulation” (another bit of imagery from verse 14 that combined with time images drawn from other chapters is supposed to be a literal 7 years long). The 144k is the same multitude from every nation that is gathered to worship God and the Lamb and who are blessed with eternal joy and peace in their Lord’s presence.

The book of Revelation is not so hard to understand when one dispenses with the needlessly complicated burden of systems that hold up the pretense of literalness while failing to see that their own doctrines are irreducibly committed to metaphor and imagery whenever it suits them. Freed from such silliness, Christians are much more able to read this book with a spirit of genuine hopefulness rather than a morbid curiosity. Thanks be to God for giving us these images to refresh us along the way.

The end of C. S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader is in part  a reversal of this Sunday’s text, Revelation 5. At the “very end of the world,” Edmund, Eustace and Lucy meet a lamb who invites them to join him in a fish breakfast. As they talk with him, he becomes a lion, the familiar figure of Aslan and they are told they must learn more of Aslan as he appears in their own world, a clear reference to Jesus.

At the beginning of Revelation 5, John is shown a sealed scroll and there is an angelic call for someone worthy to open it. But no one is found in heaven, on earth or below the earth. John weeps, presumably because he wished to know the contents of the scroll. Then in verse 5 an angel informs him that the scroll will be opened by “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David,” who “has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”

The surprise comes in verse 6 when what John sees is not a lion, but a “Lamb, standing as slain…” The conditional translation of most versions is wrong. It’s not “as if it had been slaughtered.” There’s no “if” about it. We can see that down in verse 12 as the angelic song begins, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.”

As Christians often caught up, even if unwillingly, in what some term “culture wars,” the surprise of this chapter of Scripture should be often on our minds. We may imagine that it is our goal as believers to “win” some sort of battle on behalf of God or what is good, whether it’s some matter of civil justice, a moral issue, or the freedom to express our faith publicly.

I can’t find a recent article I read which compared the action of Bree Newsome who scaled a South Carolina flagpole to tear down a Confederate flag “for Jesus” and the refusal of court clerk Kim Davis in Kentucky to issue licenses for gay marriages. Though coming from what are likely opposite political perspectives, they were both Christians confident that their duty was to battle evil through a public stand. But I wonder if Revelation 5 calls into question that shared perspective. What if our aim is in fact to become like the Lion who became a Lamb, and to be slain by evil rather than battling it?

The Lion of verse 5 conquered, but His victory is what we see in verse 6, being the Lamb who was slain. It’s the slain Lamb who is worthy and receives the worship of the whole universe together with “the one seated on the throne” in verse 13.

Aslan is wonderful, but perhaps we need to work a little more on being like the Lamb than like the Lion.

I use fishing as the example. Stanley Hauerwas uses bricklaying. Others may select their favorite complex skill which must be learned, at least to some degree, as an apprentice, receiving both instruction and example from a master, someone proficient in the art to which one aspires. Cooking, parenting, car repair, accounting, and even video game play might all be good examples.

Following Alasdair McIntyre, Hauerwas wants the acquisition of some craft or skill to be an image of the acquisition of moral virtue. One learns how to be a good person by association with good people. But he and I also see it even more fundamentally as a picture of how we become Christians, that is, people who do not just profess faith in Jesus Christ but who live out that faith in visible and tangible ways.

The problem for us in this picture of Christianity as a skill acquired through association with a master is that we clearly understand our master to be Christ Himself. We learn much from observing “saints,” well-practiced godly men and women who manifest the Christ-life in their own persons and practices. However, as I preached on the two Sundays before Easter, Jesus is our ultimate and final example. It is He that we emulate when we aspire to truly live as we believe.

Yet here’s the thing: Jesus is pretty conspicuously absent right now. We have the example of the life He lived on earth two millennia ago and lots of His instruction recorded in the Gospels, but when it comes to seeing how a Christian brick is laid or a spiritual fly tied, He’s not present to show us in person.

That’s what gives some of the absurdity to the “What would Jesus do?” question. While we can be very confident that Jesus would not lie or cheat or that He would give food to a hungry person, many of our questions about practicing faith are not so easily answered. If we ask how Jesus would vote in the upcoming presidential election or whether He would choose to give government agencies the power to decrypt private cell phone communications, the only honest answer should be a resounding, “I’m not sure!”

In fact, it feels a bit like a situation some of us have experienced, when a supervisor or teacher or friend has provided a bit of instruction, even visible example, but then promptly walked away to leave us to figure out mostly for ourselves how to use the new software or solve the math problem or secure that diaper. She or he got us started, but the finish is up to us. It’s that feeling that the book of Revelation addresses. We’re not as alone as we might think and the completion of Christ’s work in our lives is not merely in our own hands.

This remaining presence and work of Jesus Christ to help us grow in His likeness is part of what I take Revelation 1:8 to mean when God says “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” and 1:17 to mean when Jesus (the Son of Man) says, “I am the first and the last.” We normally take that to be an assurance that what has been begun in Christ will be completed. The book of Revelation is about an end time when all that God has planned will be finished. But I think we might argue that this book is even more an assurance that Christ is superintending all the times in between, from start to finish.

Thus Jesus has something to say to the seven representative churches of Asia Minor. He hasn’t simply left them to figure things out on their own (their various failings demonstrate how disastrous that can be). And the text emphasizes the current ministry of the Holy Spirit (wonderfully represented in His multiplicity of power and manifestation in 1:4 by being called “the seven spirits who are before his throne”). John is “in the Spirit” in verse 10 as he’s given a message to the churches.

In other words, it’s not just the beginning and the end of our Christian experience which the Lord supervises. It’s everything in between. In verse 8, God is the one, “who is, who was and who is to come,” first of all the God of the present. Likewise in verse 19, John’s commission is to write first “what is,” and only then “what is to take place after this.”

As we look, therefore, for four Sundays at texts from Revelation, I hope we can see our Lord very much present as example and guide right now, and not merely as a teacher who’s left us on our own until He gets back. That kind of start-to-finish Savior is who Jesus is.

Vindication is a good feeling. We enjoy it directly when we are proved right or justified in even the simplest matters. It happens in a sports trivia discussion when someone pulls out his smart phone and in a quick search that yes, the University of Oregon’s football program really did begin in 1893. And it happens more significantly when the verdict on a lawsuit clearly rights an injustice, like awarding damages to a person injured by a faulty product.

Jesus’ resurrection is not just the happy conclusion to the Gospel’s story of Jesus’ life. It is the final vindication of all that Jesus taught and did and of who He claimed to be. He was crucified as a pretend messiah, a false claimant to be the rightful King of Israel (as was written above Him on the Cross). The resurrection shows that it was those reasons for crucifying Him which were false and that He is truly King of Israel and the promised Messiah.

Above is Titian’s marvelous altar-piece painting of the risen Jesus victorious carrying a banner that is at once the crusader flag and His cast-off grave clothes. He is vindicated in His radiant resurrected life over all the forces, like the soldiers in the forefront, which put Him in the tomb and would have kept Him there.

As followers of Jesus it is good to remember at Easter that this event is also our own vindication. We may seek too much for those sweet immediate justifications of ourselves, being proved right in few seconds by an Internet search, receiving a favorable decision from a court, or perhaps seeing our candidate win an election. But our true and best vindication has already been accomplished for us in Christ and we will receive it in full only when we too have been raised with Him.

Until then, we hope and trust in our vindication by God and not by our own efforts to ensure victory over others around us. It is God who ultimately fights our battles and wins our cause. We may need to strive hard for rights or justice or some good cause, but the final vindication of all those efforts comes from the same power which raised Jesus from the dead. That’s why the Nicene Creed says, “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” That’s real vindication. Everything else, every other victory, is something less.

It’s a bit dicey to center a whole sermon around a Bible text which may not even be authentic. Since it’s such a well-known passage I was unaware (or had forgotten) until I started studying this week’s passage, Luke 23:33-38, that my focal sentence, the beginning of verse 34, has some doubtful manuscript pedigree. The familiar words, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” are not found in a number of ancient manuscripts of Luke.

There are, nonetheless, good reasons to accept those words of Jesus as genuine, not the least of them being that Jesus’ prayer of forgiveness is echoed by Stephen in Acts 7:60. Clearly the first Christian martyr wished to emulate his Lord by asking forgiveness for those who were killing him.

Stephen, in fact, shows us that these words and the whole manner of Christ’s death is an example for us as Christ followers. Jesus’ command to love our enemies extends even to the point of dying at their hands.

One reason some scholars give to not accept verse 34a as genuine is that it breaks up the continuity and stands oddly between the end of verse 33 and the second half of verse 34. But that picture (nicely depicted in the forefront of the Francesca painting above) of bored soldier/executioners playing dice for Jesus’ robe is the perfect exemplification of the attitude which Jesus found extenuating. They had so little idea that were murdering the Lord of all that they could even play a game while He died.

Jesus prays to the father for His killer’s forgiveness, but He is the answer to His own prayer as He hangs there on the Cross. By giving His life and then rising again He accomplishes the very offer of forgiveness which He requests.

You and I are not nearly so able to ensure divine forgiveness of those who hurt us, even in ignorance, but when we follow Jesus’ example on the Cross, we can be assured that He has already done all that is necessary for the forgiveness of our enemies, and our own sins as well. May God make us more like Stephen, ready and willing to follow that example and lay down our lives in love rather than in hate.

Why should I forgive? How do I forgive? Whom should I forgive? When should I forgive? These are all great questions and we’ve explored them all to some extent already this Lent. But what exactly does forgiveness look like practically speaking? What do I do when I forgive someone? Is it just a matter of reordering my feelings toward a person or is there something more to it, something that needs to be done?

Our text this week from Ephesians 4:25-32 ends with a call to forgive “as God in Christ as forgiven you.” I’d like to suggest that what goes before is a picture of what is actually done when one forgives, that is, a description of what a forgiving life looks like.

So forgiveness involves speaking the truth (verse 25) about what has happened, letting go of anger (verses 26 and 27), repentance on the part of offenders which involves a turn to honest work and generosity (verse 28), a refusal to speak evil of others and a positive speaking of what is edifying (verse 29), an end of thoughts and behavior which grieve the Holy Spirit (verse 30), again the putting aside of feelings of bitterness, anger, malice, etc. (verse 31), and finally acting kindly toward the person one is forgiving (verse 32).

All of the above are actions which one can choose to take as one seeks to forgive, even those involving emotions like anger. Verse 26 recognizes that emotions have to some extent an uncontrollable component. We will sometimes simply be angry. But we can choose not to sin in our anger, can act in ways that do not spring from anger. That would be one part of what it means to offer forgiveness.

Even as I write this I’m finding fruitful paths for thinking about forgiveness. I can be angry with the person being forgiven while not acting out of that anger in my behavior toward him or her. That means the issue which some raise about forgiveness not leaving a place for righteous anger with injustice (i.e., in racial violence) is answered.

Cultivating a life that looks like verses 25-31, will move us toward the direction which ends verse 32, to forgive as we are forgiven by God. What’s more it will move us in the direction we ultimately wish to pursue, in the first two verses of chapter 5, to be like our God, living with each other in love.

Henri Nouwen wrote, “it is clear that the hardest conversion to go through is the conversion of the one who stayed home.” There are many ways to go at this most beloved of parables in Luke 15:11-32. I’ve usually stuck with focusing on the incredible forgiveness of the father and an old sermon of mine turns the father and his sons into golfers with the lesson being that the father isn’t keeping score between his offspring.

This time, since our theme for Lent is forgiveness, particularly our forgiveness of each other, I’d like to zero in on that elder brother. He’s very prominent there in Rembrandt’s beautiful portrayal of the story, standing there on the right disapproving with his hands crossed in rejection of his brother (even though the parable has him in the field and not present at the father’s first welcome of the prodigal).

The genius of Jesus’ parable is that He does not tell us the conclusion of the elder brother’s story. Our last glimpse is of him standing outside the house, not joining the welcome party, hearing his father’s assurance of his love for him as the oldest alongside his father’s joy at the return of his youngest son. We are not told what he did after that, whether he went in to join the party or remained embittered and distant from both his father and his brother.

Our challenge should be obvious, the same challenge that the parable and its accompanying shorter parables (the lost sheep, the lost coin) posed for Pharisees and scribes who grumbled at Jesus welcoming and dining with sinners. Will we enter into the party, that is the spirit of forgiveness and welcome, for those who’ve done wrong, or will we remain outside in the loneliness of our resentment? If anyone thinks that’s an easy question, they are not being honest and need to hear again Nouwen’s words about the hardest conversion.

I like math. It was one of my favorite subjects. I still like the way in which mathematical problems “hold still” and have plain, recognizable answers, even if those answers can be difficult to find. Math is so different from the slippery, fuzzy work I do most often as a pastor, where “answers” for people’s problems and church ministry are anything but defined and recognizable.

So I find it fascinating that math and spiritual work come together in the text for this week, Matthew 18:21-35. In response to Jesus talking in the previous section about how to deal with a church member (literally “brother”) who offends you, Peter poses a question about the limits of forgiveness. How many times?

At least some rabbis held that three times of forgiveness for the same offense was enough. The fourth time need not be forgiven. So Peter, evidently having already learned something about Jesus, more than doubles that number and asks if seven times is enough.

Jesus must have flabbergasted him with the reply in verse 22 that seven is not enough, but either seventy-seven times or seventy-times-seven. Either way there’s much forgiveness expected! The argument in favor of seventy-seven is the use of that number by Lamech in Genesis 4:24 to assert the extent of his vengeance for wrong done to him. So Jesus would be contrasting the reach of Christian forgiveness with the scope of unredeemed revenge.

I’m not exactly preaching on the text this week, but engaging the congregation in dialogue about what it means for us. Jesus illustrated what he meant about the extent of forgiveness with the parable of the unforgiving servant in verses 23 to 35. I am hopeful that our conversation with help us all grow in the practice of forgiveness and begin to extend our hearts to the sort of dimensions Jesus envisions when He does the math for forgiveness.

Forgiveness begins with God. That was the gist of last week’s sermon which looked at the key affirmation in Exodus 34:6, 7 that the nature of God is loving and forgiving, not wrathful. Genuine and complete human forgiveness starts from the fact that we are forgiven by God.

This week in Genesis 50:15-21 we look at how our forgiveness not only begins with God’s forgiveness of us, but is empowered and furthered by God’s work and activity in our lives, God’s place in our human interactions.

After Jacob’s death, in verses 15-18, Joseph’s brothers come fearfully begging forgiveness for their treatment of him, afraid that Joseph had held back while his father was alive but would now seek revenge. Joseph’s answer in verse 19, “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God?”, displays for us one of the ways in which God’s “place” in forgiveness. As we read over and over in the New Testament, it is God’s place to judge and exact punishment for sin, not ours.

While it is not ours to judge, as Paul writes so clearly in Romans 14:1-12, ending with, “So then, each of us will be accountable to God,” it is ours to offer forgiveness to each other. It is out of a complete assurance that God will hold all accountable that we can freely offer forgiveness without fearing that sin will go unreckoned or unpunished. So by refusing to put himself in God’s place of judgment Joseph was able to forgive his brothers and reassure them.

All this does not mean that forgiveness is a matter of pretending that a wrong has not been done. It’s not like being bumped in a crowded concert hall or hearing a friend make a remark that could be taken as an insult but wasn’t meant to be. In those cases we wave our hand or shrug it off with the knowledge that no real harm was done. That’s not forgiveness.

Implicit in the idea of forgiving is a proper fixing of blame. If I were to hear my wife or a friend say to me, “I forgive you,” I would be entirely correct to wonder what offense I’ve committed. There cannot be forgiveness without a charge of offense. It is our place in forgiving to make that charge. What is not ours, but God’s place, is to follow up that charge with judgment and punishment.

This balancing of proper blame versus improper judgment is a difficult thing. We will often err to one side or the other. Yet we can only hope to reach real forgiveness if we remember, like Joseph, that we are not in the place of God.

As I said last night in Ash Wednesday worship, Lent traditionally focuses on the three great spiritual disciplines Jesus talks about at the beginning of Matthew 6: prayer, fasting, and alms giving. But I am proposing this Lent to consider another spiritual discipline which may be the most difficult of them all: forgiveness. Forgiveness is a practice at the heart of what it means to be a Christian.

Learning to forgive is not just an optional part of Christian life and devotion. It is incumbent upon us as the only proper response to receiving forgiveness for our own sins.

As the text I’ve chosen for this Sunday’s sermon, Exodus 34:1-9, makes clear, forgiveness is part of the nature of God. As He identifies Himself to Moses and the people of Israel by the divine name, mercy and forgiveness top the list of the ways God describes Himself and what He does. Which is fortunate for the Israelites at that moment, since God and Moses are right then engaged in repairing the consequences of their sin while Moses was on the mountaintop the first time.

As we walk through Lent this year, trying to understand forgiveness and grow in our ability to practice it, this is the place to start, with God’s own merciful and forgiving nature. We are empowered to forgive by the primary fact of being forgiven by the grace of God in Christ Jesus. So forgiveness always begins with God.

Well before Christmas we purchased a gift for our daughter and son-in-law. My wife had located on-line a set of Star Wars mugs which they wanted. I placed the order and they arrived a few days letter. I picked up the box from our front porch and started upstairs to show Beth it had come. Near the top the box slipped from my grasp and bounced down the stairs with the horrible sound of glass breaking. The gift was broken before it was even received.

For the past three sermons I’ve  been exploring human sexuality as God’s gift to us, offered in our creation as male and female, celebrated in the beauty of marriage, and being well-received even in celibate singleness. However, our text for this Sunday, Romans 1:18-32, shows that the gift of sexuality is constantly being broken in our lives. The breakage may be caused negligence like my careless handling of a package or by the willful damage of abuse or deliberate rejection of God’s design. Or the gift of sexuality may even “arrive” broken by physical disability or a disordered desire.

Though Paul clearly understands some sexual activity to be sinful in verses 26 and 27, his argument is that such behavior is more the result–“God gave them up”–of a prior rejection of God and His designs for human life than it is the cause. In other words, the gift of sexuality is more often broken by inattention and carelessness about one’s relation to God and others, than by a deliberate intent to ruin and pervert the creation design of male-female marriage.

In practical and pastoral terms, the upshot is that there is a great deal of sad and painful brokenness in our lives around sexuality. That pain is definitely not all nor even in a majority about homosexual behavior. Because we turn away from God to our own wills, His gifts get broken in us all the time and we end up doing sinful things and hurting one another constantly, regardless of sexual orientation.

Homosexual behavior is only one way to break the gift of being created male and female. Heterosexual promiscuity, pornography, and prostitution are far more prevalent than any homosexual behavior and are reflect our breaking of God’s gift just as much.

The beginning point for healing of the brokenness begins where Paul goes at the beginning of chapter 2, after a long list of all the ways human life is broken by sin. “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”

Yes, the Bible teaches that homosexual behavior is sinful. Yet it also teaches that we are all sinners. If we have not broken God’s gifts to us in that one particular way, we have broken them in other ways. The only hope we have for healing is the grace of Jesus Christ, offered to broken sinners. That grace given through the Cross is the broken body of our Lord raised up again, so that we who have been broken through sin might also be raised up with Him.