The Divine Crash

Today we started a new series for Lent.  We are going to study the early church’s steps to forgiveness.  Feel free to listen at the bottom of the post or via my iTunes podcast.  However, if you listen to the audio, the twelve year old boy you hear preaching is me, I have a cold and I lost some of my voice.  As always the notes are below for you to read and comment on.

Read Scripture: Matthew 21:12-14

Prayer: “Jesus, as you have cleansed the temple.  Cleanse us.  Move in our hearts and drag everything that offends You in to the light.  It hurts, it stings, and it is disgusting but the only way to come back to You is if You cleanse us.” -  Amen.

 

For this season that moves us closer to the cross and closer to the resurrection we will be looking at several steps towards forgiveness.  More specifically these steps are something that I learned in seminary and they are steps widely recognized by the church community as ways to bring about forgiveness for yourself, for others, and for what has been done to you.

 

As we journey together towards the resurrection we bring with us our whole lives and everything that has happened to us.  Forgiveness will allow us to drop some of that baggage and run towards Jesus with open arms.  These are not steps that are once and done, you can’t leave church each week and say “I’ve done step one and now I am better.”  These are events and actions that you will need to practice on a regular basis.  Depending on what happened in your life you may need to practice it every single day or even every hour.

 

So then, our first step is to acknowledge the hurt.  Acknowledge what happened was wrong.

 

It’s like this: Recently, I was on an airplane flying across the globe and I found this letter that someone else wrote.  It is called the 29E letter and you can read it online but an edited version is like this:

 

Dear Continental Airlines, I am disgusted as I write this note to you about the miserable experience I am having sitting in seat _29E_ on one of your aircrafts. As you may know, this seat is situated directly across from the lavatory, so close that I can reach out my left arm and touch the door.

All my senses are being tortured simultaneously. Its difficult to say what the worst part about sitting in 29E really is? Is it the stentch of the sanitation fluid that’s blown all over my body every 60 seconds when the  door opens? Is it the woosh of the constant flushing? Or is it the passengers asses that seem to fit into my personal spase like a p0rn0graphic jig-saw puzzel?

I constructed a stink – shield by shoving one end of a blanket into the overhead compartment – while effective in blocking at least some of the smell, and offering a small bit of privacy, the rear end-on- my-body factor has increased, as without my evil glare, passengers feel free to lean up against what they think is some kind of blanketed wall.  The next butt that touches my shoulder will be the last!

I am picturing a board room full of executives giving props to the young promising engineer that figured out how to squeeze an additional row of seats onto this plane by putting them next to the LAV.

I would like to flush his head in the toilet that I am close enough to touch and taste from my seat. Putting a seat here was a very bad idea.  I just heard a man GROAN in there!  This is horrible!

Worse yet, is I’ve paid over $400.00 for the honor of sitting in this seat! Does your company give refunds?  I’d like to go back where I came from and start over.  Seat 29E could only be worse if it was located inside the bathroom.

I wonder if my clothing will retain the sanitizing odor ….what about my hair! I feel like I’m bathing in a toilet bowl of blue liquid, and there is no man in a little boat to save me. I am filled with a deep hatred for you plane designer. And a general dis-ease that may last for hours.

We are finally decending, and soon I will be able to tear down the stink-shield, but the scars will remain.

I suggest that you initiate immediate removal of this seat from all of your crafts.  Just remove it, and leave the smouldering brown hole empty, a place for sturdy/non-absorbing luggage maybe, but not human cargo.

 

 

What happened to this man was wrong and we need to acknowledge that something things are not okay.

 

Forgiveness does not mean condoning or accepting what happened.  Forgiveness never says evil is okay or permissible.

 

To truly experience forgiveness means you call evil evil.  It means we acknowledge that what happened was wrong and should not have happened.

• • Forgiveness means that domestic violence is not okay.
  • Forgiveness means we shout publicly that child abuse is wrong.
  • Forgiveness means that we do not keep quiet when we see people being marginalized for any reason.

 

To start the process of forgiveness means we may have to dig up the hurt caused by our uncle in that dark bedroom 10 years ago and declare that IT WAS NOT RIGHT!

 

This is what Jesus is doing when he cleanses the temple.

 

Jesus sees what is happening in the temple.  People were bringing their animals for sacrifice and they are being told that their sacrifice isn’t good enough and they must buy one at the temple and the people at the temple are charging obnoxious prices.

 

The people were forced to pay these huge prices or they would not be allowed to make their sacrifices to God.

 

In essence these people were being extorted to be in right standing with God.

 

Jesus can not stand this anymore.  Jesus stands up and declares that this is wrong.  He says that this building has been turned into a den of thieves.

 

With that Jesus goes crazy! In John 2:14-15 it says that Jesus made a whip and started flipping over tables.  In Mark and Luke it says that Jesus wouldn’t let anyone sell animals while he was there.

 

Jesus stood and declared that what was happening was wrong.

 

For Jesus some things are just detestable and healing can’t happen until that is acknowledged.

 

So then, what is it you have swept under the rug because it hurt.  What is it you are allowing to impact your life and yet in some twisted way you have convinced yourself it is okay, normal, or healthy?

 

If you are answering that question then declare that those things are not normal, healthy, or okay.    It isn’t about telling people, maybe we aren’t there yet, it is about knowing in your own mind that what was done to you or you did to someone else wasn’t right.

It is like this, when I was about 13 my dad took me, and my sister, to Oklahoma for 6 weeks of summer break.  On our way their we camped out to save money on hotels.  That night I told my dad I was cold and he asked where my pants were in the car so he could get them.  I told him I didn’t have any pants because we are spending July and August in Oklahoma and I didn’t think I would need them.  My dad stood there, yelled at me, and called me the stupidest person he had never known.  I spent the rest of the night in the car crying.  Later on he apologized but the damage was done.  I spent years blocking that memory out of my mind, it didn’t come back to me until my son was born and there it was, it was on my mind again and I vowed to never say that to my son, no matter what.  This was now affecting my son and he was only an infant.  I had never acknowledge that what my dad did was wrong.  I wasn’t stupid, I was 13 years old. The first step to my forgiving my dad for saying that, for forgiving myself for not bringing pants, and to forgive my son when he forgets something, was to acknowledge that what happened was not right, that no parent should ever say that to a child they are stupid and no child should ever hear that from a parent.

 

However, you may not even know what is happening.  The mind is a fickle thing, it will actually black out your memories of evil as a way of protecting you, yet those evil events will still impact your life without your knowing it.

 

David was in this predicament and in Psalm 139:23-24 he prays to God asking God to show him if there are anything that David is holding on to that isn’t letting David be free from bitterness and hatred.

 

If you have those times in your life that are totally blacked out by your mind then ask God to reveal to you how those times are showing up in your life.

 

On the cross Jesus declared that everything that happened is forgiven. In the temple Jesus declared that somethings are just wrong.

 

As we journey towards forgiving ourselves, our accomplices, and our victims the first thing we must do is decide that our actions have caused hurt that the events in our lives have hurt us.

 

When we do this we are taking the first step towards forgiveness, there is a saying that forgiveness is about letting go of hurt and realizing the one we were holding back is our-self.

 

Let us close in prayer: “God we admit that we hold on to things that don’t bring life.  We sweep under the rug and justify all sorts of hurts.  Give us strength to acknowledge that somethings are wrong.  That some events are horrible, and that sometimes we have hurt other people.  Be with us, guide us, and show us how to open ourselves to your healing and forgiveness.” – Amen

Sermon Audio

 

Filed under:
Sermon by RevBT