Recovering Sinners

Psalm 32; Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11

So often Jesus said to the people who came to him, “Your sins are forgiven.” They hadn’t asked for forgiveness. They asked to be healed of some physical, emotional, or spiritual ailment. And more often than not, the religious leaders of the community cried, “Foul!” They asserted that only God could forgive. Then Jesus would refute their assertion by telling the supplicant to walk, see, speak, be clean, or be free of the demon that oppressed them. 

The underlying notion of disbelieving religionists was that forgiveness had to be earned. The proper rituals had to be performed, the right sacrifices made, the correct words spoken. The word of forgiveness which Jesus spoke was summed up in his affirmation that the kingdom of God had come near, had interposed itself between the rituals and the reality. Jesus – the Son of God, the anointed one, the Messiah – was present at the behest of God to be living forgiveness for all who needed it. And everyone did need it.

Human repentance does not evoke divine forgiveness. Divine forgiveness creates the response of human repentance.

The psalmist in Psalm 32 begins at that point:

The one whose wrongdoing is forgiven,whose sin is covered over, is truly happy!The one the Lord doesn’t consider guilty—in whose spirit there is no dishonesty—that one is truly happy!

The psalmist had experienced this for himself. God had vacated the judgment against him. The psalmist’s spirit was renewed and its strengthening would allow him to keep on living at a higher level of faithful service than previously. The psalmist is human. We know that he will fall into sin’s trap many more times before his days come to an end. But because God’s forgiveness is always there, the psalmist can pick himself up, dust himself off, and start afresh.

Psalm 32 has a penitential tone to it. It is an appropriate psalm for the first Sunday in Lent. As we move down the mountain from the heights of God’s affirmation, we run up against the reality of the world. The temptation scenes with Jesus in the wilderness remind us where we are. Who of us wouldn’t want to do something and feed the world? Who of us wouldn’t want to be able to do something so spectacular in the name of Jesus that every believer would be affirmed and strengthened in their faith and every unbeliever would cry out, “I want Jesus to be my Savior!”? Who of us wouldn’t want to be able to have the power to direct everything towards God’s rule? 

As Jesus quickly realized, as good as these aspirations are, the methods do not justify the outcomes. Yes, God wants everyone to have food security and a sufficient life, God wants people to know and worship the divine being, and God wants the world to fully directed towards the divine purpose of worship and service. However, Satan’s methods are corrupted, divisive, counter-productive, and contrary to God’s will that all should call on God’s name, not in fear and subservience, but in joy and thanksgiving.

The psalmist starts with that joy and then moves on to remembering everything that went on in his life while he was under the sway of sin. 

When I kept quiet, my bones wore out;I was groaning all day long—every day, every night!—because your hand was heavy upon me.My energy was sapped as if in a summer drought.

The psalmist gives an aching description of the physical and emotional turmoil he endured before finally confessing his sin and seeking God’s forgiveness. He says that his body was wasting away under the constant weight of sin. He felt its consequences in everything he tried to do. The writer may have had some debilitating illness that he believed was divine punishment for whatever he had done wrong. Medical science is aware of the reality of psychosomatic illnesses brought on by mental distress which could be the inner torment of sin.

Today we know that illness is brought on by germs, bacteria, microbes that require the body’s immune system to go into action. We also know that allergies, genetics, and the absorbing of certain chemicals through breathing, touch, or ingestion will also create life-threatening illnesses. These maladies are often beyond our control or knowledge. The only way we can blame illness on sin is if we engage in risky behaviors. 

One message of the Lenten journey with Christ is that sin is a disabling force in our lives. Unchecked, sin can indeed eat away at our souls, leaving us feeling weak and deformed, less than our true selves. The reality of the descent from the mountain of the transfiguration is that the farther down we go the more noxious the sin gets. It is like cresting a mountain pass and entering a valley where the smog of a thermal inversion with a dangerously high air quality index grows worse the farther down we travel. It oppresses, it chokes, it kills.

Sin confuses our minds and darkens our hearts. Sin can have physical consequences; one example is substance abuse, an addiction to drugs or alcohol that poisons the body along with the soul.

The dynamics of addiction provides one way to understand the power of sin in our lives. Some forms of addiction begin as healthy desires. But then they are taken to extremes. An addiction to money or success may begin with the honest desire to provide for one’s family. An addiction to power or fame may begin with the desire to share one’s gifts and talents to make a difference in the world. A natural longing for love and intimacy may mutate into a propensity for unhealthy sexual behavior or inappropriate relationships. A desire to be rid of chronic pain can become a enslavement to opiates.

Addiction results from a lack of temperance and moderation. Too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing. Will power takes a hit and the quest for more of what the addiction makes possible further weakens internal restraints. We become trapped in patterns of denial and justification. Escape gets harder and harder. It becomes all too easy to keep silent, as the psalmist says, and to learn to live with the consequences. 

Psalm 32 suggests that sin operates like an addiction and is just as enslaving. That’s nothing new. The biblical narrative tells us the same thing. Paul said it best in his Letter to the Romans: “I don’t know what I am doing, because I don’t do what I want to do. Instead I do the thing I hate....But now I’m not the one doing it anymore. Instead it’s sin that lives in me” (Rom. 7:15, 17).

The psalmist could very easily have gotten into a deep despondency about his sin. But he doesn’t.

So I admitted my sin to you;I didn’t conceal my guilt.“I’ll confess my sins to the Lord,” is what I said.Then you removed the guilt of my sin.

It’s the guilt that immobilizes us to the effects of sin. Guilt so addles our thinking that we can’t see straight about stepping away from the sin that enslaves us. Guilt is like the security chain on a door that keeps it from being opened more than a crack. The opening is not big enough for us to reach through to grasp the forgiveness that is on the other side. In Revelation, John reports Jesus saying to the Laodiceans, “Look, I am standing at the door and knocking. If any hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to be with them” (Revelation 3:20). Guilt bars the door and keeps grace out. Forgiveness is there for the taking if we can break the chain of guilt.

The psalmist ends, 

The pain of the wicked is severe,but faithful love surrounds the one who trusts the Lord.You who are righteous, rejoice in the Lord and be glad!All you whose hearts are right, sing out in joy!

We are never completely done with sin; we still have moments of weakness, and we are always surrounded by temptations. Overcoming sin is a lifelong effort. To paraphrase Martin Luther in this 500th anniversary year of his Wittenberg 95 Theses, at one and the same time we are saved by God’s grace and still subject to sin. In the language of addiction, we are always recovering sinners. 

The good news is that Lent is the time to embrace the joy of forgiveness and to be painfully aware of the power of sin. Jesus went from the affirmation of being God’s beloved to condemnation by the sin-filled world as its greatest nemesis. May we follow him in recognizing not only the depth of our addictive sinfulness but also the height of his recovering forgiveness. May our journey of Lent be a journey of self-reflection, confession, and, ultimately, joyful redemption.


General Resource: John D. Rohrs, “Psalm 32 Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year A, Vol. 2, 33-37.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Do Power and Glory Mix?

Psalm 2; 1 Peter 1:16-23; Matthew 17:1-9

We say these words often. Once a week. Once a day. Perhaps more often than that.

“Thine is the power and the glory forever.”

You recognize them. These are the closing words of the Lord’s Prayer. We will be saying them soon, at the end of the Great Thanksgiving prayer of the communion liturgy. 

The Power and the Glory is the title of a 1940 novel by the British author Graham Greene. Like the American author Flannery O’Connor, Greene objected strongly to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist, rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic. Nevertheless Catholic religious themes are at the root of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels, of which The Power and Glory is one.

Nick Ripatrazone wrote in the February 2016 Atlantic that Greene’s book is a”violent, raw novel about suffering, strained faith, and ultimate redemption.”(1) The book’s hero is an unnamed priest on the run from Mexican authorities after a state governor has ordered the military to dismantle all vestiges of the religion. Churches are burned. Relics, medals, and crosses are banned. The price for disobedience is death. While many clerics give up their beliefs and accept their government pensions, the unnamed priest travels in secret, celebrating Mass and hearing confessions under the cover of night. Yet he’s also a gluttonous, stubborn, and angry man drowning in vices, and the religious ambition of his earlier years has been replaced with a constant desire to drink, hence Greene’s term for him: the “whiskey priest.” Tired of risking his life, the priest even prays to be caught.

The tension between the priest’s calling and his humanity, between his desire to flout the uncivil worldly authority with the authority of God and his human desire to ultimately succumb to it catches many of the themes of the Transfiguration as witnessed to and responded to by three of Jesus’ disciples. On the mountain God confirms Jesus as the one called to bear grace and reconciling love to a broken, unneighborly, and unloving world wracked with conceit, greed, and unbelief. The disciples continue to misconstrue Jesus’ ministry by wanting to enshrine him with two great leaders of the past. However, Jesus takes them with him down the mountain and into the thick of the ministry which will confirm the world’s denial of him in its sordid attempt to shut out the Light of the world. Yet God will affirm the power and glory of that Light when it bursts forth from the tomb three days later.

Psalm 2 is one of several royal psalms that celebrate the anointing of God’s chosen king. It may have been for a human king or it may be for the promised Messiah. Christians have historically read this text through a messianic lens. On the surface, the psalm warns the rulers of the earth who have placed themselves in opposition to God and God’s people. 

In the context of the Transfiguration Psalm 2 takes on additional meaning. Besides Jesus’ experience on the mountain, we also remember the Exodus account of the experience of Moses on Mount Sinai. Both events are instances of God putting the divine stamp of approval on the missions which will be going forward.

The obvious parallel between Psalm 2 and the Gospel story of the transfiguration is that both describe God’s anointing of a chosen one. The psalmist identifies the king as anointed, declaring, “You are my son, today I have become your father.” The story of the transfiguration echoes these words, as God’s voice booms through the clouds and names Jesus as the son whom God dearly loves.

Psalm 2 envisions God’s chosen king as a powerful military leader, who is ready – and able with God’s help – to conquer the nations of the earth. This is the dominant image of the expected Messiah which is recorded in Hebrew Scripture. With only a few exceptions, this vision of leadership is most prevalent in the rule of the Israelite kings. This is the Messiah for whom the Israelites and their descendants longed.

Except that this is not the mantle of leadership which Jesus took up. He would not become the type of Messiah that Israel anticipated. Like Frost’s traveler at the fork of woodland paths, Jesus “took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” Time and again, Jesus rejects the job description of a powerful, militaristic Messiah. 

We see this most notably in the report of the temptation of Jesus, a temptation that this psalm almost foreshadows. In the psalm God promises to grant  the king “the far corners of the earth” as his  property as well as power over the nations. Compare that idea to the dramatic scene from Luke’s temptation account, where the devil shows Jesus the kingdoms of the world and suggests that they could all be his (Luke 4:5-7). You can almost see the devil’s sinister smile as he makes this offer. The irony is that in the psalm it is God who laughs at the feeble rulers of the nations.

Jesus has come to reveal a different kind of royal leadership and a kingdom with a different mission and purpose. The kingdom that Jesus leads is not defined by power and might, but by humility and servanthood. That is also the message of the story of the transfiguration. Jesus sets the tone of all he has done and all he will continue to do in the limited number of days ahead. His mission is not about earthly glory. He does not stay long on the holy mountain, basking in radiance, as his disciples think he ought to do. Instead, he leads the disciples back down the mountain. Jesus knows that his throne is not of this world and that his true glory will be revealed on the cross.

It is true news: Jesus does indeed become a king on a holy hill, but it is the hill of Golgotha, not Zion. When that coronation happens, Jesus is clothed in shame, not in splendor. We don’t hear God laughing in derision; the mockers are the crowds and the executioners surrounding Jesus. The anointed one is crucified and all the expectations of an all-powerful Messiah are overturned.

Human expectations are upended and reversed. That is a key element of the scriptural narrative. It doesn’t make sense, it is counterintuitive. The people of Jesus’ day couldn’t understand it, and we aren’t a whole lot better at it today. You and I spend enormous amounts of time and energy in pursuit of success, esteem, power, control, and all the things that go along with them. We don’t know how to define our earthly kingdoms in any other way. Our minds are boggled by the concept that Jesus’ life and mission are defined by relinquishing power and by traveling a sacrificial journey toward death. 

We confess and somehow believe that God acted in Jesus to overcome death with life. In his journey toward the cross, Jesus, the unexpected Messiah, reveals a kingdom more eternal and more powerful than any the world has known. The power of the world and the glory of God reconciling the world in Christ don’t mix.

Among twentieth-century Christian writers, Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder stands out in his analysis of this unexpected kingdom and its lessons for us. In The Politics of Jesus Yoder demonstrates how Jesus defies the traditional expectations of the Messiah and forges a different kind of kingdom, the kingdom of God. This kingdom does not depend on military might or economic prowess, but rather is made known through concern for the poor, justice for the oppressed, love for friends and enemies alike. The kingdom that Jesus leads builds doors instead of walls, welcomes rather than bans, loves rather than despises, affirms rather than debases, seeks the truth rather than revels in falsehood. 

In the kingdom over which Jesus is Lord, he introduces a new social ethic. Jesus forsakes the quest for power and control and doubles down in a commitment to servanthood and sacrifice. It is truly an upside-down kingdom, where the last shall be first, and where suffering and death lie unavoidably on the path toward joy and lasting life. Jesus is transfigured and messiahship is transformed.

Now that the Light of the world is so revealed that the power structures of the world must seek to envelope it in darkness we are at a decision point. Which type of Messiah will we follow: the one dependent on brute force and oppression or the one that turns the other cheek and goes the additional mile? Which kind of kingdom will we give our allegiance to: the one that squeezes power out of every last individual or the one that promotes compassion, forgiveness, and love? 

May we lessen our thirst for power and open ourselves to God’s grace in Christ lavished upon us by the Spirit.


General Resource: Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year A, Volume 1, 441-445.

(1) “Revisiting The Power and the Glory During Lent,” Atlantic, February 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/02/the-power-and-the-glory-lent-graham-greene/461820/

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.

Copyright © 2017 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.

Blinded by Preconceptions

Mark 8:31-38

John Newton, once a captain of a British slave ship, after his conversion went on to become an evangelical Anglican clergyman. He wrote several hymns, the best known of which begins:

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
was blind, but now I see.”

When a sinner is convicted by the Holy Spirit, the eyes of that person’s spirit are opened. It is as if flakes fall away from his eyes, as when Ananias prayed over the blinded Saul following his Christ-vision on the Damascus road (Acts 9:18). The man born blind, whom Jesus healed with mud and sent to wash in the Pool of Siloam, told the religious authorities, “I don’t know whether he’s a sinner. Here’s what I do know: I was blind and now I see” (John 9:25).

Physical blindness may be a detached retina, macular degeneration, severe cataracts, or some other disease of the eye. Spiritual blindness may not limit physical eyesight, but it can be an even worse malady. Spiritual blindness is often entwined with a severe case of preconceived notions. These preconceptions make it very difficult to experience the life-changing power of the grace of Christ. In Jesus’ day all the religious authorities had preconceptions about God, about religious reality, about life and death, about the messiah, and they could not see beyond those preconceptions to the truth embodied in Jesus. Even the friendly Pharisee Nicodemus was locked into a set of preconceived ideas and had trouble grasping the import of the “born anew” imagery which Jesus used in trying to explain eternal life to him.

The disciples also were prisoners of the preconceptions of their culture about the Messiah. Jesus explained the program to the disciples, “The Human One must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and the legal experts, and be killed, and then, after three days, rise from the dead.” Mark adds, “He said this plainly.” Peter grabbed Jesus by the shoulders and shook him strongly. “No!” he shouted as he set about to correct Jesus. Preconceived ideas have that strong a hold on people. Just moments before Peter had proclaimed with astounding insight that Jesus was “the Christ.” How quickly he lapsed into his old thinking: the Messiah doesn’t die.

Even Jesus had to deal with preconceptions. Frederick Buechner suggests that after his baptism, Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness asking himself the question of what it meant to be Jesus. In the season of Lent, we who call ourselves followers of Christ, are invited, even compelled to ask, “What does it mean to be a faithful follower of Christ? What does it mean to be a Christian?”(1) We are called annually to examine ourselves to the very core of our faith and root out the preconceptions which will invoke Jesus’ stern correction, “Get behind me, Satan. You are not thinking God’s thoughts but human thoughts.”

We all have preconceptions. Certain things are supposed to be a certain way and don’t anyone try to change our minds. Not even Christ. Except changing our minds about life in general and especially life as a creation of God in relation to other creatures of God is what Jesus is about.

We all have preconceptions about Jesus. Even most of us who have had it taught to us from when we were very small, have trouble with the idea of a Messiah who dies. Untimely, unnecessary death is such a waste. To die is to lose. We use that imagery for teams when are doing well and then all of a sudden fade away into a loss, either in a single game or through the last month of the season. Or we use that imagery in individual competition on the tennis court, the golf course, the ski slope, the gymnastics venue. To die is to lose. To lose is to have no value.

Everything in life is competition. Even retirement. We compete to have the best possible retirement and then we compete to do everything we can possibly do during whatever time is allotted to us. People even compete to lose. A popular television program has been “The Biggest Loser.” Yesterday’s paper had a report about two high school coaches who were suspended because they were competing to lose a game in order to get a better seeding in the tournament.

We have a preconception that with Christ everything is going to be all right, that nothing will go against us. We forget about all the psalms in which the psalmist prays to God about the lousy rotten deal he is getting either at no fault of his own or because he clings faithfully to his belief in God.

Believing in Christ is not a talisman to ward off the evil of the world. Too many times in the two millennia since Christ, belief in our Lord has actually been a lightning rod for drawing persecution and evil towards us rather than deflecting it.

Peter was blinded by his own preconceptions. His cherished convictions about what the Messiah’s agenda should be would not allow him to see what the Messiah’s agenda must be. How often are we guilty of this very same malady? We arrogantly assume that we know what must be done, so much so that a word from Jesus himself would not dissuade us.

Of course, we are better than Peter. We would never rebuke Jesus. Our rebuking would be kinder, gentler. We would respond with benign neglect and insipid indifference. We will never touch a hair of his. We will merely let him die. George Studdert Kennedy was an Anglican priest who served with distinction as a military chaplain in World War I. He wrote the following lines about indifference:

When Jesus came to Golgotha they hanged Him on a tree,
They drave great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary;
They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep,
For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.
When Jesus came to Birmingham they simply passed Him by,
They never hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die;
For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain,
They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.
Still Jesus cried, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do,"
And still it rained the wintry rain that drenched Him through and through;
The crowds went home and left the streets without a soul to see,
And Jesus crouched against a wall and cried for Calvary.(2)

Do our preconceptions prevent us from hearing Jesus’ words to us today? Do our misconceptions about Christ lead us to neglectful and indifferent behaviors when it comes to following our Lord?

We live in a violent world. Violence isn’t just military. It comes in all kinds of guises: physical, mental, psychological, economic, educational, oratorical, discriminatory, and in indifferent, neglectful, and well-meaning dependence-creating relationships.

Peter’s rebuke of Jesus reflects the way we humans think. That’s what Jesus says. The world says the way to victory is the way of power an might. The world says that violence is to be met by greater violence, in a never-ending escalation of force and strategy. If that is allowed to continue unabated, everything will be destroyed and everyone put to death.

Jesus offers another way. Jesus breaks down the preconceptions. He allows violence to have its way. But he responds with life, not death. He responds with resurrection, not oblivion. He responds with heaven, not hell.

As long as our selves reign in our lives, we will be forever seeking shortcuts to the kingdom, we will try to substitute some easier way for the way of the cross. As we look to the remainder of Lent, as we look to our collective ministry as a portion of the body of Christ in Waverly, as we wrestle with our preconceived ideas of believer, of disciple, of church, of Christ, may the blindness of our preconceptions be healed and may we help Jesus to carry the cross of life into the world we inhabit, laying down our lives, probably not literally but certainly figuratively, for the people we encounter.

May it be so. Amen.

(1) Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 74
(2) Geoffrey A. Studdert Kennedy. Online text copyright © 2003, Ian Lancashire for the Department of English, University of Toronto.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.