A sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church of Cuba. Based on Luke 24:44-53 and Acts 1:1-11.
This year, I’m using a book called The Year of the Bible, by James Davison. He was previously a Presbyterian pastor and just retired from being a professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. The Year of the Bible is structured so that every day, you read a couple chapters from the Old Testament plus either a New Testament chapter or a Psalm. If you stay on top of things, you end up reading the whole Bible in a year. I slacked off in February and March, so I will have to re-do parts of it, though.
Most people who try to read the whole Bible get bogged down somewhere around Leviticus or Numbers. There is no doubt that it’s a slog. Leviticus is a bunch of rules, most of which make no sense. Numbers is full of Israelites grumbling and testing God’s patience. Again and again, God threatens to abandon them, Moses intercedes, and God relents. There are consequences, but in the end, God upholds their covenant and promises to make Israel a mighty nation in the Promised Land.
The story in Numbers is a microcosm of the whole Hebrew Bible. From the very beginning, God is present with first individuals and then tribes and nations, the fickle humans turn their back on God, and God says, “OK, I’ll forgive you THIS time, but don’t do it again.” When Judah pushes God too far, they are exiled to Babylon, but even then, God eventually relents, the exile ends, and the Temple is re-built.
In the passages preceding what we read today, the disciples are in turmoil. They think God has abandoned them yet again. Let’s review the story arc. Jesus makes his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, but then he is arrested and crucified. The disciples’ hopes for a restoration of Israel are dashed. They thought Jesus was the Messiah who would expel the Romans, cleanse the nation, and rule an earthly kingdom devoted to worshipping God. Now they know that cannot happen, for their leader is dead. The whole movement has come to an end, with everyone fleeing in fear for their lives. A few days later, they discover the tomb to be empty—they are even deprived of a grave where they can reverence their murdered leader. In the midst of their grief, Jesus appears to open their minds to understand the scriptures. First he walks with a couple disciples on the road to Emmaus, then he appears to all of the disciples gathered together. Now they understand: God’s kingdom is not an earthly regime, but instead God rules over each person’s heart. Jesus is indeed the Messiah. He has not abandoned them, but instead, will be present with them. Well, sorta: as soon as Jesus gets done teaching them, he leaves them again, but with a promise to send help. Next week, we will hear about what comes next: the Holy Spirit will descend upon the disciples. God will always be present with them, and with us. Once again, humanity has broken the covenant by killing God’s anointed one, the Messiah, Jesus Christ, but once again, God forgives.
But why? Why does this all happen? The key is in the middle of Jesus’s teachings to his disciples. “Repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” The Messiah had to be killed and raised so that the disciples could witness God’s ultimate forgiveness and share it with the world.
The Greek word that we translate “forgiveness” is “aphesin.” It has other connotations like freedom, deliverance, and remission. It comes from a root that is something like “sending away.” In the Presbyterian version of the Lord’s Prayer, we refer to sins as debts. They are debts to God. That’s a useful metaphor because debt is so common to us. We incur debt to buy a car or a house. Most of us carry credit cards so that we can incur debt on a moment’s notice, even for something as trivial as lunch. Meanwhile, the US government currently has an outstanding debt of $28 trillion. We are swimming in debt, just as we are swimming in sin.
Many people take out loans for college. The premise is that your college education should improve your future employability and earning potential, so you are essentially borrowing as your future self. But sometimes, things don’t work out that way. For example, when we had kids, my wife was no longer able to work, so we didn’t have her income to help pay her student loans. This is a common enough situation that there is a process in place to address it. Requesting a deferral is pretty easy. The loan continues to accrue interest, but payments are not required—yet. Still, the debt remains. This is not forgiveness, but forbearance.
For decades, real estate became increasingly valuable, so borrowing money to buy a house seemed like a fine idea. Then in 2008, suddenly the real estate market crashed and home values dropped. Suddenly, people were “upside-down” on their mortgages, meaning that they owed more debt than the house was worth. In this case, forbearance doesn’t really help. If your debt is too high, you can never pay it off.
In the bad old days, debtors’ prisons were common. Basically, if your debts exceeded your ability to pay, the government would imprison you. How the heck could someone ever get out of a debtors’ prison? In some cases, the debtor’s family would pay the debt. In other cases, the debtor became an indentured servant until they worked off their debt.
But Jesus says that we are to proclaim forgiveness, not forbearance. The word used means a total sending away of the debt. We don’t have to work it off. The debt doesn’t remain hanging over us. We are totally relieved of our debt to God. That’s great, because the debt of our sins is like an upside-down mortgage. God has been so good to us, but like the grumbling Israelites, we reject God’s goodness. We can never earn our way back into God’s heart. We must rely on forgiveness through God’s grace.
In a sense, God’s forgiveness is like a presidential pardon. In the waning days of a presidency, the outgoing president usually issues a bunch of pardons. The Constitution gives a president almost unlimited authority to forgive federal crimes. Presidential pardons are often controversial, but there is really nothing people can do except grumble. Early this year, there was some discussion about whether President Trump would issue “pre-emptive pardons,” that is, pardons for unspecified violations. This turned out to be the only real limit. A presidential pardon must be specific. It must address a particular crime.
In a similar way, Jesus teaches his disciples to preach “repentance and forgiveness.” Our sins create a barrier between us and God. They block our ability to receive God’s love. They burden us with guilt and leave us feeling unworthy. Repentance is an honest acknowledgement of our sins, an accounting of our debt. Think about the person in an upside-down mortgage. If they simply ignore the debt, they will live in perpetual fear that the bank will take their home away. But if they make an honest accounting of the debt and the bank forgives it, they can live in freedom.
Jesus taught his disciples that repentance leads to forgiveness leads to freedom. When we are freed of our debt to God, we are free to be in a deeper relationship with God. I am reminded of a scene in A Bronx Tale. The main character loaned money to someone who didn’t want to pay him back. Instead, the guy kept dodging him. If you have an outstanding debt to a friend, it hangs over the relationship and prevents you from enjoying each other’s presence. In the same way, if sin hangs over our relationship with God, we cannot enjoy God’s full presence in our lives. If instead we turn towards God and accept God’s forgiveness, we unlock the joy that God offers us.
The disciples heard this good news and responded with joy, worship, and fellowship. Verse 52, “And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.” Their heartache at the loss of their friend and teacher was replaced by the joy of God’s grace. They had encountered Jesus together. The encounter broke down not only the barriers between each of them and God, but also between one disciple and another.
In the same way, we each have experienced God’s grace. I have not personally had a vision of Jesus or an outpouring of the Holy Spirit like some people have, but I have had experiences of God acting in my life, times when I had an awareness that God is good, God is real, and God is still working to reconcile the world. Even if you haven’t had a direct encounter with God, you are a recipient of God’s grace and can encounter Jesus through the Bible. My God-encounters have been few and far between, but I encounter God vicariously each time I read the Bible. I read this story and imagine being a disciple, seeing Jesus’s hands, his flesh that was pierced at his crucifixion, raised in blessing. I read about Abraham or David and imagine a life of faithful devotion to the Lord’s guidance. I read Paul’s letters and imagine myself in one of those early house churches, squabbling with my fellow “baby Christians” and receiving Paul’s teaching that reveals God’s will. We are the recipients not only of God’s continuing presence, but also of thousands of years of stories about God’s work in the world.
Jesus opened his disciples’ minds to the entire Hebrew scripture—Torah, prophets, and psalms—so they could see that God’s work was all of one piece. In Genesis, we read of our expulsion from Eden and subsequent decline into depravity. Then Noah comes along and is a righteous man that God makes a personal covenant with. Then Abraham comes along, and God makes a permanent covenant to bless all humanity. From then on, we read of cycles of progressive redemption. The Israelites sin, God forgives them, and the bounds of the covenant expand.
God is eternally seeking reconciliation with all people and indeed all creation through Jesus Christ. The story of salvation reached a climax with Jesus’s death and resurrection. In Jesus’s ascension, his transcendent grace exploded upon the world and was suddenly open to everyone.
Let’s share that message with the world. There are plenty of preachers telling the world that they are sinners, that they have a debt to God, that, in Calvin’s words, they are “totally depraved.” They preach a debtors’ prison model: you owe a debt to God, and you cannot come to God until you work it off. Jesus taught us that yes, we are sinners, BUT, our debt has been forgiven. The slate has been wiped clean. We are free to enter the kingdom of God, not because of anything we have done, but despite anything we may have done.
This is good news, the very best news. Through grace, we are forgiven. Jesus has removed all barriers between humanity and God. We encounter God’s grace, abounding love, and forgiveness each time we read the Bible or gather together in our Lord’s name. We have been touched by the Holy Spirit, who has reconciled us to God and restored us to full membership in God’s kingdom. And if we are reconciled to God, we are free to be reconciled to one another. Just as God has removed the crushing burden of our sins, we are commanded to show others how their burdens may be lifted, to share the peace that comes from a right relationship with God. Then we may enter into fuller, deeper relationships with each other, forgiving as we have been forgiven, loving as we are loved, and sharing the deep joy of being a part of God’s family. Let us follow the disciples’ lead and go forth in joy, proclaiming forgiveness by the grace of God. Amen.
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