THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
"ARE YOU FORGIVEN?"
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu,
Easter Sunday, April 12, 1998.
All across the United States and many other parts of the world today, Unitarian Universalist congregations will be celebrating Easter. Our traditional Unitarian Universalist Easter sermon is the popping out of flowers, the rebirth of life. We have a hard time, many of us, in dealing with the embarrassment of Easter. Crucifixion and resurrection are awkward for many of us. Like many of you, I had it shoved down my throat as a youngster that I was required to believe this literal story. I'm going to really try, for once, to take that ancient story seriously and confront it directly this morning. In it are some powerful, beautiful and profound truths about what it feels like to be a human being.
Not knowing what my sermon was going to be, our president commented to me after the Good Friday service that she understood the basic piece of Christianity to be that Jesus had died for our sins. I heard on the radio earlier this week an invitation from one of our local pastors to come to his Easter sunrise service. In that ad he insisted that the bodily resurrection of Jesus was the foundational event of Christianity without which it would not be Christianity. It rose or fell on the basis of the literalness of that story.
The full story of why I don't believe the literalness of the resurrection is available in another sermon, "The Rip in the Curtain of the Temple." The major reason is that I simply don't think that the early church understood Jesus' resurrection in that way. The empty tomb is the story that arises when you are trying to tell your children and your children's children about an experience that grabs hold of you in such a way that it transforms your whole life. It turned loose upon the Roman Empire a community of people committed to being a very special kind of community together. In the telling of that story to one's children and grandchildren, the story inevitably becomes more and more literal. So by the time it is frozen in Scripture--written down, passed around, collected, and finally becomes our New Testament--the story that contained such vitality has had to use the fragile mechanism of literal story to carry its weight. For many of us, the literal story gets in the way of the message itself these two thousand years later.
Jesus told people, "Your sins are forgiven." Now, that's a really weird thing to say. The Sanhedrin and much of Judaism responded to him as if he were saying, "I forgive your sins." Which isn't what he was recorded as saying at all. The difference is so dramatic that I cannot believe that it is not somewhere close to what the message really was. For what he told those who came to him, in story after story in the New Testament, was not "I forgive your sins," as if he were God instead of God; but rather, "Your sins are forgiven."
Now, it seems perfectly obvious to me that, in one sense, only the sinned-against can give me any relevant forgiveness. When I behave in an unconscionable manner with my wife and I go to her and I say,"I am sorry," it is her forgiveness I'm after. I really don't care about Jesus and God. The forgiveness that is significant for me is hers. And, only when she sees something like real repentance and an attempt to undo the damage that my acts did, does she begin trying to forgive me.
How often have you heard someone say,"I'm sorry," and "I'm sorry" meant, "I'm sorry I got caught"? Or it meant, "I'm sorry you were injured"? Or it means "I'm sorry you were the victim. I was actually aiming at someone else." That's not repentance.
What is hidden in Jesus' statement, "You are forgiven" is a truth that is true even if there is no God. It is true for secular humanists as much as it is true for Christians. When you behave in destructive ways toward yourself and other people, the consequences come automatically. You become the kind of person that does and did that. People begin to behave toward you as the kind of person who does and did that. The consequences happen all by themselves. They would and do come with or without God.
Many people think that when you sin you have sinned against God. It is God that you have to satisfy and get straight with. Blasphemy is perhaps one place to get a feeling for this. Blasphemy is the most fascinating concept. If God is God, then he or she knows my intent, knows the source of that intent, knows how that intent came to be in me, knows the life experiences that distorted or nurtured my insides. If such a God is offended by what I do or say, he or she is being pretty damned petty. To allege that God is offended by that kind of behavior is far more blasphemous about God than anything I could possibly do or say.
The consequences are caused by our behavior, not by God being ticked off at our behavior. But so does forgiveness come automatically, again caused by our behavior, not by God. For the forgiveness comes upon real repentance and the real attempt at restitution. Notice that does not mean that the consequences are undone. This is one of the things I find fascinating. People expect that after they have done their repentance and restitution that somehow the consequence of what they did should evaporate and disappear.
Buddhism has a more accurate symbol here. The idea of karma is that the consequences of your behavior, in one sense, are forever. This is why our behavior is so serious. This is also why Jesus does not say,"I forgive you" but "You are forgiven;" forgiven automatically upon real repentance and attempts to undo. How many times have I heard, "It's not my fault. I had this feeling. I had to act on it." No, we didn't have to act on it. That alienation from our own insides leads us into thinking that to have a feeling means that to be authentic to myself I have to act on those feelings.
That alienation from our own insides is what the Christian tradition has meant by Sin. Sin with a capital "S" does not mean being naughty. It refers to that very alienation from our own insides, our alienation from one another. The consequence of Sin, the alienation, is sins, the really stupid, destructive, dumb, and sometimes vicious things we do to each other and to ourselves. Jesus did not die for our sins, but for our Sin. That is, in his life and his teaching he tries to call us back from our alienation.
My personal prejudice is that Jesus would have considered all theories of sacrificial atonement, that Jesus died as a sacrifice to God to eliminate our sins, the nearest thing that there is to blasphemy. It implies, and indeed sometimes says, that God requires a blood sacrifice for sin, which is a very bizarre idea of God. Historically and in context it's not difficult to understand the use of those metaphors. Ideas of sacrifice were a part of the cultures to which the literature was addressed. That they were understood as metaphors is indicated by the fact that there are at least three mutually exclusive theories laid out in the New Testament. But the only theory of atonement that has ever made any sense to me is St. Anselm's--and he was not held to be a heretic for this so I assume that it is acceptable Christian doctrine. St. Anselm's understanding is that Jesus' life and his authenticity even unto having to face death for it is an example that moves us at deep levels, to reexamine our own lives and the ways in which we enter into relationship with one another, and community.
The only sacrifice involved in the forgiving of sins is repentance and restitution. For those of us with very large and very rigid egos, that can be a sacrifice indeed. Jesus can't, didn't, do that for you. A ritual, symbolic act can only be a symbol of that repentance and restitution, not a substitute for it. Here is where we actually get to the nub of the matter. The biggest problem about forgiveness is not getting somebody else's forgiveness, much less God's forgiveness. The biggest problem that many of us have is finally forgiving ourselves. It is true. Anybody who has managed to come to consciousness as a human being is aware of that split on your insides between what you know yourself to be and what you let other people out there think you are. I've never yet met anybody who had none of those secrets, attitudes, behaviors that they remember keenly, poignantly, and guiltily. Even after the person wronged and offended is apologized to and an effort made to make restitution for the damage done, most of us find it very hard to let go of the damage done, most of us find it very hard to let go of the fact that we really did behave that way.
Forgiving ourselves is at least as difficult as managing the apology. And this is a forgiveness that can be mediated. It can be mediated by a community of faith. Isn't necessarily, but can be. To be treated, to be behaved toward by a community of people I care about and who care about me, they, knowing full well what a schmuck I was, but still to treat me as forgiven, can be the beginning of feeling myself forgiven, of forgiving myself. This one does not come automatically. It is, indeed, conditional. It only feels real if the repentance and restitution are real. Some of you may have had the experience of being treated by family and friends as if you were forgiven when you knew perfectly well you were only sorry YOU got caught. How sometimes bitter the taste of that apparent forgiveness can be !
It is conditional. The community of faith can help by treating me again as if worthy of belonging again within the community. And it may be the only way that I can let go of the self-blame and the self-rejection that my own guilt produces. There are numerous examples of this if you need them. This ability of the community to mediate forgiveness and nurture something new in its place is a part of the magic that happens in an Alcoholics Anonymous group. There it has the capacity to happen even with a very high degree of anonymity. Many church communities function this way. They are able to be the agents of mediating forgiveness and acceptance. Circles of family and friends can be communities of faith, whether they have the label or not.
It is my personal prejudice that this is, indeed, where the resurrection took place and takes place. In the circle of followers of Jesus of Nazareth after his death there blossomed in their midst an awareness that it was not this man Jesus that was the bearer of the power and the truth that caught them afire while he was with them. That fire did burn, could burn continually as a part of their community if they were open to it.
The resurrection is not from a hole in the ground but within, in the midst of the circle of community, as we begin to treat one another differently. Those of us committed to the notion of individualism have some difficulty with this. We want our religion to be so totally and completely individualistic that we can go out and be religious amongst the trees. But there is something about the human species -- we are not, finally whole, finally free, finally human beings except in community. That is where the full power of what it is to be a human being can be enabled, nurtured, turned loose. It is something you can't finally do for yourself alone.
This is the business of ministry. This is the business of being a religious community: to be making whole human individuals. And the paradox of every community of faith is that it is about the business of trying to be that kind of community at the same time that it is made up of a community of screw-ups. This is where the resurrection takes place and why its hope and its promise are worth celebrating every Easter.