Repentance and Forgiveness
“Then Jesus opened their minds to understand the Scriptures and said to them, ‘That is why the Scriptures say the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in the name of the Messiah to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of all this.’” — Luke 24: 45-48.
As most of you know, I have been serving this church since 1996. Only the Rev. Mr. Samuel Scoville, who served from 1861 to 1879, served a longer stint as pastor here.
I mention the distance from the time I arrived because I want to address something I distinctly remember saying from this pulpit when I first got here. I said the biggest problem our nation faced is a lack of critical thinking on the part of its citizens.
As I listened to the radio just this morning I heard an interview with the well known African-American Pastor, T. D. Jakes, who was plugging his latest book. He said (and I quote) “people have stopped thinking.” So, I am not the only one worried about this.
However, I realize there are other issues. The problem is both more complex and more subtle than simply a dearth of critical thinking. Among other problems, our populace is not well served by what has loosely been called the “the media.” This would include both the so called “main stream media” and even the not so main stream media.
Let me offer one simple example of a media problem: the reporting done on presidential polling. It feels like a new poll about the approaching presidential election comes out several times a week.
With each new poll one candidate goes up and one candidate goes down. The numbers seem to change daily. And new attention is given to the numbers by members of the fourth estate daily.
I probably don’t have to tell you, the vast majority of these polls are taken on a nation-wide basis. Hence, the key question they ask and try to answer is this: what do a majority of people across the nation, right now— never mind on Election Day in November but right now— what do a majority of the people think when it comes the candidate for whom they might cast a ballot.
Well, you might make the argument that only the real voting in November will mean something, so why even bother taking a poll? But I would suggest polls do give us information of some value. For instance, they can detect trends.
However, there is one very, very big caveat which by far too few people seem to talk about. No one, no news organization, no polling organization, takes the poll which really needs to be taken.
You see, the only polls being run are, as I said, nation-wide. These are of little or no value. Why? That’s not how we elect a president. We do not elect a president by popular vote— never have. We do not elect a president on a single national ballot— never have.
We elect a president on fifty separate state ballots, on a state by state by state basis according to the combined number of representatives and senators each state has in congress. Hence, in order to really take the pulse of the electorate, you need to do 50 separate, individual state by state polls.
What does the nation think, as a whole? That question does not matter in a presidential election. The so called “electoral college” renders national numbers for the popular vote meaningless.
To use some real math here, in the 2008 election John McCain garnered just under 46% of the popular vote. And the final 2008 nation-wide polls were, in fact, fairly accurate, within a percentage point, when it came to predicting the total popular vote.
But McCain won only 32% of the vote in the Electoral College. So those polls were off by, oh, a mere 14% with the only vote which really counts— the Electoral College vote. (Slight pause.) And yet still we listen to these statistics about nation-wide polling and these statistics are constantly publicized, given credence even. These statistics are totally meaningless.
Why are these statistics gathered? Why do we pay attention? Who is wrong here? Is it the media or is it us?
Is this just a good way for the media to sell advertising space? Or is the media actually trying to hide the reality from us?
Or do we simply and willfully— willfully— ignore the reality of how the presidential election operates? Or is the real problem perhaps that we are readily and easily mislead? Have we stopped thinking? (Pause.)
And these words are from the work commonly referred to as Luke: “Then Jesus opened their minds to understand the Scriptures (the pastor repeats this phrase for emphasis: understand the Scriptures) and said to them, ‘That is why the Scriptures say the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in the name of the Messiah to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of all this.’” (Slight pause.)
As I said at the start, I have been serving this church since 1996. In all that time, I believe I have been pretty consistent with a basic message.
And as I have noted before, Tom Rasely even wrote a song about it: It All Comes Down to This. Love neighbor; love God. There’s nothing very tricky; there’s nothing very hard.
Equally, you need to wonder why we pay any attention at all to the polling I outlined earlier. There is nothing tricky and hard about the Electoral College system, if you pay attention to how it operates, if you think.
And the message in Scripture is not tricky or hard, if you pay attention, if you think. Loving neighbor and loving God, the eternal covenant with God, should leap off nearly every page of the Bible, if we read carefully, if we think.
That leads to a pair of very simple questions based in the Gospel passage read today. “What is repentance and what is forgiveness?”
I find many people don’t like the words ‘repentance’ and ‘forgiveness.’ Perhaps they simply don’t know what these words mean. But the real meanings of these words are not tricky or hard to discern.
You see, many people think repentance means being sorry. And many think, if you’ve done nothing wrong, why do you need forgiveness.
However, theologically, Biblically, the word ‘repentance’ does not in any way mean being sorry. Repentance means turning toward God, offering one’s life to God, committing one’s self to be in partnership with God— repentance. (Slight pause.)
Yeah, but what about this forgiveness stuff? (Slight pause.) Tell me, do you know anyone who is perfect? (The pastor looks at his wife and says: “Put your hand down Bonnie.”) O.K. Then, in the human sense, we all need to be forgiven on some level.
Even so, that kind of forgiveness is not what forgiveness is about in the theological or Biblical sense. Theological forgiveness means God accepts us no matter where we’re at.
Or, to paraphrase the slogan so popular in our denomination, ‘no matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey,’ God loves you. So, theologically, Biblically, forgiveness is not about being forgiven for wrong doing. Theologically, Biblically, forgiveness is about the love God offers to each of us and to all of us no matter where we are or what we’ve done.
I guess what I am trying to say is we need to use just a smidgeon of critical thinking when it comes to Scripture. And just like how people follow the polls at election time, when we pay attention to the wrong thing, to poor analysis, we can be mislead. When we treat repentance or forgiveness as if they meant being sorry or needing mercy for doing something wrong, we are looking at the wrong things.
And there is nothing tricky or hard about this. Repentance: strive to be in partnership with God. Forgiveness: God loves us no matter what happens.
And Tom is right in his lyric. There is nothing very tricky and nothing very hard about understanding Scripture. Love neighbor; love God. Amen.
04/22/2012
United Church of Christ, First Congregational, Norwich, New York
ENDPIECE: It is the practice of the Pastor to speak after the Closing Hymn, but before the Choral Response and Benediction. This is an précis of what was said: “There is one other thing I’ve stressed in my time here. It’s that the covenant God makes with humanity can be traced throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. And when this passage says “Jesus opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” that’s what it getting at. The Bible, as a whole, is the story of God’s journey with humanity and it is the story of the unconditional love God has for humanity.”
BENEDICTION: Let us place our trust in God. Let us go from this place to share the Good News as we are witnesses. And this is, indeed, the Good News: by God we are blessed; in Jesus, the Christ, the beloved of God, we are made whole. Let us depart in confidence and joy that the Spirit of God is with us and let us carry Christ in our hearts. Amen.
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