Forgive Us Our Debts Psalm 130; Romans 5:6-11 First Presbyterian Church of Greenlawn The Rev. Frederick Woodward September 26, 2010

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1 Forgive Us Our Debts Psalm 130; Romans 5:6-11 First Presbyterian Church of Greenlawn The Rev. Frederick Woodward September 26, 2010 Psalm 130 (NIV) Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy. If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared. I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and his word I put my hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning. O Israel, put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love and with him is full redemption. He himself will redeem Israel from all their sins. Romans 5:6-11 (NIV) You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God s wrath through him! For if, when we were God s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life. Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. 1

2 Forgive Us Our Debts Today in this seventh sermon in a series on Lord s Prayer, we come to the petition, forgive us our debts. But the subject of forgiveness is so important and so vast, that it warrants a series in its own right. So after we spend a couple of weeks on the forgiveness petition, we ll spend two or three more weeks on the crucial subject of forgiveness before we return to complete this series on the Lord s Prayer. Today I want to focus on three main questions: (a) for what are we taught to ask forgiveness in the Lord s Prayer, (b) why do we have to ask for it, and (c) what does it mean for God to forgive us anyway? But to respond to these questions, we need first to clear up some of the hubbub about debts versus trespasses. Now some of us here grew up learning the Lord s Prayer with debts, and others of us with trespasses. Which is right and which is wrong? The answer, of course, is that neither is wrong, and both are right. Neither the word debts nor the word trespasses is more biblical and neither is more doctrinally or theologically correct. It is true, of course, that Matthew uses the word debts (opheileemata) in his version of the Lord s Prayer, but in his elaboration of the petition a few verses later, he uses the word trespasses (paraptomata) in such a way as to suggest that for Jesus, the words debts and trespasses were pretty nearly interchangeable (Matthew 6:14-15). And Luke, in contrast to Matthew, uses neither the word debts nor the word trespasses. Instead, Luke uses the more inclusive word sins (harmatiai). And so the bottom line is that all these words, debts, trespasses and sins have a biblical and theological basis. So how did it happen that some of us have come to learn the Lord s Prayer in one way and some of us in another? The answer is really one of history and tradition, and much less one of scriptural fidelity, doctrine or theology. The use of word trespasses in our Lord s Prayer comes to us by way of the Church of England, and their Book of Common Prayer, which was an Anglican prayer book already in existence before the Authorized Version of the Bible came out in 1611, what we call the King James Version. The word debts, on the other hand, comes to us by way of the Westminster Assembly 1 which was convened in England in 1643, a few decades after the King James Version was published. The use of the word debts came to reflect the tradition of English- speaking Presbyterians and the word trespasses, the tradition of English- speaking Anglicans, although it is also most familiar to English- speaking Catholics. And so, although many of us hold tenaciously to the words in which this prayer was first taught to us, that some of us say debts and others trespasses, is a difference that in the end makes little difference to either our doctrinal belief or our faith. And let me assure you, God hears our prayers no matter what word we were taught as children. 1 The Westminster Assembly was a synod appointed by the Long Parliament to reform the Anglican Church. Although its first work was to revise the doctrinal statements of Thirty- Nine Articles, it also created the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is included in the Book of Confessions in the PC(USA). 2

3 So what are we praying for when we pray that our debts or trespasses may be forgiven? Well, we are certainly not praying simply for forgiveness for poor financial management or for cutting across our neighbors lawns. Much more is stake than that! Debts and trespasses are metaphors that describe in different ways the disruption of our intimate and personal relationship with God. In the metaphor of a debt, we discover ourselves to be bankrupt before God, and without any means of repayment. If our accounts are to be settled at all, if we are to be redeemed from our indebtedness to God, it will have to be because God forgives us our debts, and not because we can come up with the resources on our own to pay God back. In the metaphor of a trespass, or boundary violation, we discover ourselves precisely where we are meant not to be, and we can t get back to where we belong on our own. If we are to be restored to our own property, to our own creaturely lot, so to speak, if we are to be returned to our appropriate roles, it will have to be because of the loving kindness of our Creator, who settled us in the garden at the start of creation, and has promised a New Jerusalem at the end of time. Luke, as I mentioned, doesn t use either of the terms debts or trespasses, but the more inclusive word sins. But like the Eskimos proverbially rich vocabulary for the precipitation we describe simply as snow, there is an equally rich biblical vocabulary for sin. And in fact, there is a scriptural basis for seeing sin not only as owing a debt or as trespassing on forbidden ground, but also as missing the mark, disobeying the law, setting up a stumbling block, misperceiving the nature of God and humanity, overstepping limits, acting unjustly or treacherously, rebelling, being sick or diseased, worshipping idols, straying from the way, acting profanely, falling to the side, and being twisted, perverse, evil, wicked, worthless, or foolish. All these words and metaphors point to the disruption of relationship with God, our Creator, a rupture or brokenness that we cannot repair on our own. And that is what we pray for when we pray that God would forgive us our debts, our trespasses, or our sins, that God would restore us to relationship with God and our neighbor. And if we ask why we have to ask God to do the forgiving, the answer again is that we can t forgive ourselves. But to say that only God can forgive our sins is to say something very counter- cultural. For we increasingly live in what some have well- described as a therapeutic age. What do I mean by that? Well, in a therapeutic age, the self is defined by inwardness or subjectivity, not in relation to God or neighbor. In a therapeutic age, self- actualization and self- healing become the highest goods. And the language we use when we are held captive in the therapeutic culture is the language of self-actualization, personal wellbeing, self-esteem, and generally feeling good about ourselves. When we look at the world only in that way, we are not particularly inclined to ask God for forgiveness. Why bother? For in this way of looking at things, all that is really necessary is that we forgive ourselves. Now if our problem is simply to forgive ourselves, we don t need to go to church. We could curl up with a self- help book on Sunday morning or go to a therapist on Monday. 3

4 But however helpful self- help books and therapy may be for folks, neither of course focuses very much on our relationship with God. Instead, they focus on our psychological experience or our family and social relationships. The therapeutic encounter neither concerns itself with nor necessarily even acknowledges our broken relationship with God, but focuses instead on psychological or social malaise (anxiety, psychic pain, depression or disillusionment). Let me be clear. It may be both needful and helpful for Christians to enter into therapy in the course of their lives, but central to our Christian worldview is that sin, this global word we use to describe the disruption of our proper relationship with God, is not something we can forgive ourselves. Jesus teaches us to pray for the forgiveness of our sin from the Father because we can t do that on our own. But because we not only commit a host of sins, sins with a little s, but also live in the condition of Sin (here sin with a capital S ), we are always at risk of self- deception. One of the ways we may deceive ourselves is by setting out to confess our sins to the Father, while ending up confessing our sins only to ourselves. That is one of the reasons we seek to confess specific sins before actual Christians rather than only general sin in our own private prayers. Apart from the community of sinners to hold us accountable, we are just too tempted to evade responsibility and to pray vaguely. Dear God, mistakes were made. And apart from a community to hold us accountable, we are tempted to seek forgiveness only from ourselves. Bonhoeffer was right, I think, to suggest that part of the reason many of us relapse into the same sins over and over again is that we are seeking to live off our meager reserves of self- forgiveness, rather than from the real forgiveness that can only come from God. 2 But what does it mean for God to forgive us anyway? Well there are some things it doesn t mean. God s forgiveness does not eliminate, for example, the consequences of our sinful behavior. When we sin, we unleash havoc upon ourselves, our neighbors, and God s good creation. Forgiveness may help us to go on with our lives in restored relationship with God, but it doesn t eliminate the effects of our harmful behavior. If I am in a hurry and run a stop sign and kill somebody, God s forgiveness will not bring that life back. And if God forgives me, God s pardon will not relieve me of my responsibility to make amends to those whose lives I have harmed. And in fact, if I don t seek to make amends, I may never become convinced of God s forgiveness for me at all, a subject to which I will return in a moment. That God forgives us does not mean that God condones our sin, or that our sins are unimportant to God. They are. Our sin and brokenness grieve our God, and our restoration to relationship is a source of divine joy as Jesus illustration of the shepherd who finds his lost sheep demonstrates (Matt 18:13). 2 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, (San Fransciso: HarperCollins, 1954), p

5 In forgiveness, as Albert Winn puts it, The past is neither ignored or denied, but the future is opened in spite of the past. God absorbs the cost of our sins and says to us, This is real, but it shall not stand between us. I will not have revenge on you. I will not exact payment. I will cancel it. Now let us go on together as before. 3 Now Jesus did not, of course, invent forgiveness. Jesus was a Jew, and his teachings on forgiveness were built upon a Jewish foundation. In the Jewish religious view into which Jesus was born, sin is violation of the covenant leading to objective guilt. Repentance, both a turning away from evil and a turning toward God, leads to God s forgiveness and to restoration of relationship with God. Now some Christian traditions stress the necessity of repentance as a condition of divine forgiveness and restoration to relationship. Those of us in the Reformed tradition see it a little differently. We see God s prior forgiveness and reconciling work in Jesus Christ as making our repentance possible in the first place. But all Christians recognize that Jesus not only said something about forgiveness, but also did something that forever changed our conversation about forgiveness. Christians dare to testify that Jesus himself personified and even embodied the forgiveness of God. As A Declaration of Faith puts it, in the death of Jesus on the cross, God achieved and demonstrated once for all the costly forgiveness of our sins. 4 And so while Jesus teaches us to be so bold as to pray to the Father for forgiveness, we trust as Christians that God s forgiveness has been fully assured to us through Jesus atoning sacrifice on the cross. It is the cross that gives us the courage to pray for forgiveness. It is the cross that gives us the confidence to approach the throne of grace. And why are we in need of such special confidence? Well, one reason is that many of us believe we are beyond forgiveness, and that very sense of about ourselves becomes a terrible impediment to trusting faith. Former First Lady Laura Bush released a memoir 5 earlier this year in which she acknowledged running a stop sign as a 17 year old and causing a motor vehicle accident that took the life of one of her high school classmates. The former First Lady acknowledged guilt about never having paid a visit to the young man s parents whose lives she believed, with ample reason, she had ruined. Laura Bush acknowledged that she lost her faith after this tragedy, and the alert reader may well wonder whether her faith was ever fully restored to her. There are many people who may come to believe that they are beyond the forgiveness of God. And the good news I bring to you this morning is that that is not true. No one is beyond the saving reach of our God. God is ready to forgive, and ready to restore us to joyful relationship. 3 Albert Winn, A Christian Primer: The Prayer, The Creed, The Commandments (Louisville, KT: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), p A Declaration of Faith was a document recommended for study and liturgy by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U.S., in 1977, but is not however included in the Book of Confessions of the PC(USA). The fuller statement in Chapter 4, section 4 reads as follows: We believe that in the death of Jesus on the cross God achieved and demonstrated once for all the costly forgiveness of our sins. Jesus Christ is the Reconciler between God and the world. He acted on behalf of sinners as one of us, fulfilling the obedience God demands of us, accepting God s condemnation of our sinfulness. 5 Laura Bush, Spoken From the Heart (New York, NY: Scribner, 2010). 5

6 And so this morning, I want to leave you with this thought: the instruction to pray for forgiveness is not just another impossible command. It is a golden thread given to you and to me to help us find our way back to the garden. That golden thread leads us directly to Jesus Christ, whose prayer for forgiveness for us from the cross gives us the confident assurance that God stands ready not only to forgive us our debts and trespasses, but also to restore us to the relationship with him for which we most long. 6