Joyful, Joyful
Releasement & Empowerment Personal & Transcendent
8 Pentecost – July 10, 2005
(Isaiah 55:1-5, 10-13; Psalm 65; Romans 8:9-17; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23)
At the heart of all the reading today is the deep, deep joy at the center of Christian life. The Old Testament lesson says, “come buy wine and milk without money and without price.” The psalm says, “let the valleys shout with joy and sing.” Saint Paul says that we are heirs, “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” And Jesus says that our hearing and understanding the word will yield fruit a hundredfold of what is sown.
The joy at the center of our faith is a response to a two-stage action of God in our lives. The first stage is releasement. The send is an empowerment. And both the releasement and the empowerment happen on two levels of life, a personal level and a transcendent level.
Releasement on a personal level has to do with forgiveness. Jesus healed by forgiveness, taught us to pray for forgiveness, forgave those who crucified him. We are released from our sins, released from bondage, forgiven, and that’s such a joy.
Christian forgiveness is radical forgiveness. It’s unconditional forgiveness. It’s a deep forgiveness that reaches down into the deep soil of human fallibility. It’s not just on the surface, on the rocky ground of life, it’s down where we really suffer, where forgiveness can take root and grow transformed lives.
Christian forgiveness doesn’t depend on our repentance. I’ve found myself at times in need of human forgiveness. And what I noticed was that human forgiveness always seemed to be contingent on my feeling really bad about what I’d done. Remorse was a requirement, and I was pretty much able to meet that requirement since I was pretty much remorseful, more or less, from a certain perspective… So I got some forgiveness, from some people, more or less, from a certain perspective. (For the rest, I just had to wait them out until they got tired of thinking I was a bad person.)
But that’s not how it is with God. God forgives completely, and totally before we even have time to feel bad, before we even ask.
Paul tells the Romans a little earlier in this letter that “while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” Jesus tells of the father rushing to embrace the prodigal son, before he even has a chance to give his well practiced expression of remorse.
The tricky thing about this personal release, the forgiveness of sin, isn’t that it’s hard to receive but that it’s hard to accept. The door needs to swing both ways. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”
God is more than ready to forgive, has in fact already forgiven, but to accept that forgiveness we need to forgive. We need to forgive each other – the intensely difficult forgiveness of subway bombers and child molesters, and the seemingly easier, but maybe even more important, forgiveness of those daily resentments that can build up in our spiritual circulation system and clog our souls as much as cholesterol can clog our arteries, and break our hearts just as easily.
We need to forgive ourselves, the past we can never do over, the pettiness of our personal projects, the failure to hope for the best we can be.
We even need to forgive God. I don’t know about you, but the world is not exactly the way I would want it to be. But it’s not my world. It’s God’s world. Running parallel to the plea to forgive us as we forgive others is the command to “judge not lest ye be judged.” Forgiveness requires letting go of the pretense of being God ourselves, and letting God be God. What we need to do is to be who we are. And that leads us into personal empowerment.
Forgiveness releases us. But it needs to move on from the passive to the active and become acceptance. And acceptance then needs to move on to then become gratitude.
Not only do we need to forgive each other, ourselves, and God, we need to accept each other, ourselves, and God as being precisely what we and they need to be at any particular moment. And we even need to celebrate that, because given the interdependence of everything I talked abut last week, “we” wouldn’t exist without the whole system.
Forgiving, accepting, and being grateful for who we are is at the heart of the idea of “call”. Jesus “called” the disciples, forgave them, and commissioned them to go out and spread the Kingdom. He calls you, too, and forgives you, and sends you out.
You’re life isn’t just “your” project. It’s God’s project. Each part of your life, each moment in your life has a kind of sacred, mystic shimmer to it that we can only recognize if we go through this forgiveness, acceptance, to gratitude. And we often can only see out of the corner of our eye when we’re not looking directly, in dreams and day dreams, in chance meetings, and intuitions. There’s a meaning to your life. There’s a purpose for your life. There is power in your life. You just have to see it. And then you have to use it.
On a transcendent level releasement is the redemption of fear.
After last week’s sermon when I talked some about sin, I was in a conversation where we were talking about how sin almost universally comes down to trying to control what we can’t control, whether that’s our own anxiety, or our relationships, or out in the world through terror or war. But behind the control is always a deep abiding fear. It’s the fear of the dark. It’s the fear of death. It’s the fear that’s so afraid that it doesn’t even know what it’s afraid of.
The psychologists at Guantanamo told the interrogators that the most effective tool they had at their disposal was fear, and they were right.
Fear sells far more products and services than sex. Just check out the revenues of the insurance companies or the health care industry, and the budget for the defense department. The profits from Viagra and deodorants are nothing compared to that.
Fear is probably as genetically imprinted on us a sex is – and that’s part of the reason that Paul calls us to overcome the flesh with the spirit, because as long as we are “in the flesh”, determined only by our genetic inheritance and our ego driven survival instincts, we’ll never overcome fear.
Jesus faced the fear. He endured pain. He embraced death. He entered the dark tomb. He descended to the shadows… to redeem them.
See, the flesh and the spirit are not opposed. Neither Jesus nor Paul were dualists. They were monotheists, as are we. Spirit is not the opposite of the flesh. It’s the higher order of reality in which the flesh is contained.
God is spirit, the Bible says, but in Jesus became flesh, to open the veil that keeps the two apart. The veil is fear. That’s why last week when Paul asked “Who will save me from this body of death?” he answered, “Thanks be to God for Jesus Christ our Lord.”
The perfect love embodied in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ casts out fear, releases us from fear in a transcending way, and opens us up for transcending empowerment. That empowerment involves the spirit flowing down into life now that the veil of fear has been torn in two.
“It’s no longer I who live,” Paul tells the Galatians, “but Christ who lives in me.”
What from a personal perspective was our meaning and purpose and empowerment is transcendentally just a slight (though vital) movement in the divine dance of life. God is all in all. And that is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Thanks be to God.
