MARCH 26, 2006 PASTOR SCOTT FULLER
Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; I Cor. 1:18-25; John 2:13-22
Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we may believe and in believing we may obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Al and Jeri Bergstrom showed me a postcard last week from their granddaughter, Chelsea, who was visiting Rome. The picture on the front was a beautiful view of that historic city. The short message on the back described her amazing opportunity to sing in the Sistene Chapel. The effect on her grandparents as they told me about it? Priceless. One picture, a few short sentences, a treasure chest of pride and love.
Postcards force us to cut to the chase, to get to the point, to boil down the bulk of all the stuff we could say and settle for that which we ought to say or feel the need to say. That’s rarely an easy thing to do.
Walter Prausnitz was an English professor at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., when Carolyn and I were students there. He was a campus legend: sharp as a tack, demanding but clever, picky but fair. He once assigned the class a 10 page paper which caused a little grumbling. That inspired him to tell us of an assignment he’d received in graduate school: write a twenty page paper on a certain author – no problem.
When the students turned in their work, without so much as a glance at those detailed documents, the professor returned them with this command: By next week, cut it down to ten pages. Apparently there was some grumbling from the overachievers in the group, but for most of the students, it was no big deal as ten pages out of twenty are often filler and repetition.
But the next time they met, the professor repeated his actions, once again returning their papers unread and giving them another week to boil it down to five. Then, said Professor Prausnitz,You should have heard the weeping and gnashing of teeth when our final assignment for the quarter was to cut our original twenty pages…down to one!
Why all this talk about postcards and professors pushing pared epistles? Because today’s Gospel lesson holds what many warmly refer to as the entire Bible…in one verse. Take a look at the Gospel – second line from the top – the sentence begins For God so loved… Let’s all read it together: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life (John 3:16).
The trip of a lifetime captured on a postcard, a twenty-page paper boiled down to one, and now the entire Bible reduced to a single verse. With that theme in mind, here’s an assignment I was given at the seminary: A professor asked us to describe what’s wrong with our human experience of life… using only one word. What one word would you choose? What’s wrong with the human race?
-cruelty -hate -disunity -unfaith -selfishness
We all picked words that described terrible problems, but nobody picked up where the professor was heading. The word he chose to describe humanity’s predicament was…guilt. Would you agree? Some didn’t then and don’t now – arguing that many people in our society seem to survive quite nicely without appearing to feel any guilt for their actions that cause so much pain. And yet…I’ve never felt comfortable declaring what another person feels on the inside by how they seem to live on the outside.
So let’s just honor my old professor for a moment and wrestle with this question: What are some practical effects of guilt on a person’s life?
-eats at us -makes us intolerant -depressed -sick
-can also make us do good works to try and work off our guilt
Carolyn and I received a fascinating book from Greg and Lois Weber for Christmas entitled PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives. The author, Frank Warren, as an art project, printed 3,000 postcards inviting people to anonymously share a secret: “something that was true, something they had never told anyone.” He handed them out in the subway, at art galleries, even slipped them between pages of books in the library.
Then they started to come in. As you can imagine, the messages on them, the secrets that were shared, run the gamut from inspiring to disturbing, from glad to sad. A good many of those confidential confessions prove that my old professor was on to something. Here is a sample:
He’s been in prison for two years because of what I did. 9 more to go.
I would give anything for an opportunity to show even the smallest kindness to my ex-wife.
I wish I would have spent more time with him…when he could still remember my name.
When I was three, my dad liked me to brush his thick red hair. One day he asked and I said I didn’t want to. I never saw him again – he went away and then he died. I am 65 and some days I still think it was my fault.
I’m sorry. We were young. I think about – and regret – it every day.
I’m having a hard time…coming to terms with my mediocrity.
Sharon: innocent freckle-faced red-haired good Sharon:
I was a vicious, vengeful compulsive BRUTE to you at school.
30+ years on – Now I’m very sorry.
I haven’t spoken to my dad in 10 years…and it kills me everyday.
Remember the subtitle to this book: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives. Well, I disagree: I think that most of them are entirely ordinary…which means that most of them could come from us…which means that most of us are probably wrestling with guilt over some of the things we’ve done or failed to do.
So what can we do with our guilt? The author, in addition to a psychologist who introduces the book, claim that the simple act of writing a confession on a postcard and putting it in the mail has helped many, many people. And I think they’re probably right. What a beautiful example of “letting go” of something that can’t be fixed.
But as much of a blessing as that may be, it’s still only half-way to healing, only part of the formula preferred by other experts. From the ages-old roots of the Church to the newer but healthy growth of Alcoholics Anonymous, guilt, we-and-they-say, is best addressed with a one-two punch. Confession is good…but a word of forgiveness makes it real. It’s critical that we let go…but it’s incomplete if we don’t then let God!
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life (John 3:16).
I’m convinced that a huge part of that love, that: life-giving, peace-making, hope-creating grace, is God in Christ given and shed for us for the forgiveness of our sins. Only when this truth for the world fills those empty places in our hearts, can we fulfill the role that God has made for us. Amen.