“The Last Supper” – Leonardo Da Vinci (1498)
“But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us.”
Father Daniel Johnson is the rector at Christ Church, Spotsylvania. His comments on this week’s lectionary spoke to me so powerfully that I want to share some of what he said with you today.
So I’ve invited Ben to play the part of Fr Daniel and share Fr Daniel’s words with us. Father Daniel, also known as Ben, and I will have a bit of a dialogue in this sermon.
Daniel: The Confession of Sin in our liturgy is one of the most important aspects of our liturgical lives. If we pray the Daily Office, we get to confess our sins three times a day—at Morning Prayer, at Evening Prayer, and in Compline also.
Catherine: Here at St Peter’s, since the majority of our time in Zoom Church has been during the Easter season, when the prayer book rubrics allow us to forego the confession, I haven’t included the prayer, mainly because of the difficulties of our praying out loud together in this technological format of Zoom.
But now that the Easter season has come to an end and we have entered the season after Pentecost, we will once more pray the Confession of Sin together—the mute option will allow us all to pray along together without throwing one another off with the jumble that Zoom makes of our voices.
Daniel: Sometimes people see the Prayer of Confession as an unnecessary focus on sin. “Throughout our religious history the word sin has been weaponized against our fellow humans to control, manipulate, dehumanize, condemn, exclude, punish, expel, and in extreme cases, kill others. It is a word that carries centuries of harmful baggage.” But I think it is time to reclaim the word ‘sin’ and use it to draw us closer to God and to one another.”
Catherine: Daniel I want to back up here a minute. How do we define sin? Both Jesus and the Apostle Paul teach that sin is not just actions that go against God’s commandments and moral order, but that sin is also an internal power that enslaves us, and continues to hold us in its thrall. Paul tells us that our faith in Jesus sets us free from God’s condemnation of us due to our sins. Paul also tells us that the Holy Spirit gives us new life and the power to strive to overcome sin, not that we will overcome sin, but we always want to be working to obey God’s voice and to keep the covenant we have with God—as God asked the Israelites to do in today’s reading from Exodus. And when we confess our sins, we are confessing to God whom we know to be merciful and loving. God is always hoping that we will do everything in our power to keep our part of the covenant that we have made with God through our baptisms—and our part of the covenant is to love God with all our hearts, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. To ask for forgiveness when we don’t uphold our end of the bargain is necessary.
Daniel: In Chapter 3 of Paul’s letter to the Romans, Paul reminds them that we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Remembering that we are sinners helps us to have humility, to check our egos, to stop seeing ourselves as “holier than thou.” Humility before God helps us to avoid the self-righteous judgment of others. And remembering that we are sinners puts us in the company of every other human being made in the image of God. We’re ALL in the same boat!
Catherine: In today’s gospel, Jesus has compassion for the crowds because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. That compassion is how we see the love of Jesus play out, and that compassionate love of Jesus reflects the compassionate love of God, who as the Apostle Paul points out, proves his love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Daniel: Jesus knows that we are all participants in the fallen nature of humanity. We all harm others, intentionally or unintentionally through our words, thoughts and actions. But deep down we are essentially good. God made us good.”
Daniel: And God loves us even when we sin. When we ask for forgiveness with sincerity of heart, God forgives us. It is a gift we receive from God, but also a gift that God asks us to share. We can’t give what we don’t receive. So if we don’t acknowledge our sins, ask for forgiveness, accept forgiveness, and then turn away from our sins we will never feel the need to forgive others and work toward peace and reconciliation.”
Catherine: Having received God’s forgiveness for ourselves, we then want to extend that forgiveness to others. The Amish set the example for forgiving others. They take to heart the line in the Lord’s prayer that we pray—“Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” After Charles Roberts IV went to the West Nickel Mines one room school house in Lancaster County, PA, took ten school girls hostage and shot eight of them, members of the Amish community went to his family and offered their forgiveness. Their forgiveness did not undo his wrong or pardon it, but the forgiveness allowed movement toward a more hopeful future. The Amish tore down the schoolhouse the following week and later built a new school, which they named The New Hope School. You can read more about the beliefs of the Amish on the importance of forgiveness in the book Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy. Another example—the relatives of those shot at the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston SC, when confronting Dylann Roof, the shooter, for the first time in court, offered their forgiveness. One woman said, “I acknowledge that I am angry, but we are the family that love built. We have no room for hate, so we have to forgive.”
Daniel: As the beloved and forgiven people of God, when we do our best to be forgiving ourselves, we are then able to do what we can, even though we will do it imperfectly, to return to the goodness in ourselves and to do what we can to notice and to nurture that goodness in others regardless of how corrupted that goodness has become.”
Catherine: Yes, that is what we get to do as the disciples of Jesus in this world—to notice and to nurture that goodness in others.
Daniel: We are all interconnected in some way, shape or form. What happens to one person affects another; and what happens affects not only a single individual but resonates through the whole of our society. We are all complicit in the sins of our society. To say that we aren’t part of the sins of our society is to say that the issues in our society are somebody else’s problem. But saying that the problems are the problems of others has not healed our wounds or helped us to find unity.”
Catherine: Corporate sins are the sins that are done by a body of believers, sinful acts done by many to others—corporate sin is a way to describe the sins of our society. To pray for forgiveness for something that we did not directly do, but that we have reaped the benefit from, is to ask forgiveness for corporate sin. For instance, in recent years many denominations have prayed for forgiveness for the sin of slavery, because they, as institutions, reaped the benefits of a sinful system of enslaving one group of people to benefit another. A concrete example can be found at the Virginia Theological Seminary. Clearly documented is the fact that many of the buildings still in use today at the seminary were built by slaves loaned to the seminary by various slave owners for that purpose. The seminary benefited then from that free labor and continues to benefit from the use of these buildings. So to ask forgiveness for this corporate sin is not only an act of faith, but also an act of justice.
Daniel: Yes, the first step in moving forward toward peace and reconciliation and justice is to acknowledge our sins, whatever those sins are—to be as honest with ourselves as we can be. Honesty with ourselves helps us to cultivate the humility that we need to heal. And when we heal, we help others heal. And when others begin to heal, our society begins to heal. And as our society heals it begins to move toward peace, hope, love and justice.”
Catherine: When we pray the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, we pray for God’s kingdom to come on earth. And in that kingdom, all of us are united in love, and we can all live together in God’s peace, because we remember that every one of us is made in God’s image. We find that the compassion that Jesus had for us is the compassion that we strive to have for all of our brothers and sisters, and for all of God’s good creation.
Catherine: Our work as disciples that Jesus gave us, to cast out unclean spirits and to cure every disease and sickness, begins from a place of compassion—the compassion we can have for one another because God has had compassion on us, the compassion that God had for those Israelites in Egypt.
Catherine: God has Moses remind the Israelites as they wander in the wilderness—”Remember,” says God—“I bore you up on eagles’ wings, and brought you to myself.” So therefore, obey my voice and keep my covenant, and you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples—you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.”
My deep desire for us at St Peter’s is that we will claim our authority as disciples—to be visible in this world as disciples in a priestly kingdom and a holy nation, to keep God’s covenant, to seek forgiveness from God for our own sins so that we can cast out sin, and be people of compassion and healing. We are the ones who get to carry the compassion of Jesus out into the world, bringing the good news of the kingdom to all.
Daniel: So, let us remember. Let us confess, let us be forgiven, let us forgive. And let us go out as disciples and heal those wounds that divide.
Resource: Christ Episcopal Church weekly email newsletter “This Sunday, The Second Sunday after Pentecost,” Fr Daniel’s opening reflection.