The Problem of Our Guilt

        I’ve always been astonished that there aren’t any St. Judas Episcopal churches. Certainly, Judas is someone that we can identify with.  He was the betrayer of Jesus to the Pharisees and the Roman soldiers with a kiss.  Judas is probably more well known than any of the other disciples of Jesus.  We know him by his reputation for being a traitor.   We have all done worse and we know it.  That is why we spend so much time being guilty.

As a matter of fact, guilt seems to be the name of the game in religion.  We are such horrible sinners that we cringe before God constantly.  Many of our religions have made a cult out of our guilt.  Sermons in some churches preach hellfire and brimstone to the congregation and make them cringe in their pews.  Jonathan Edwards preached a fiery sermon to his congregants in Northampton, Massachusetts called  Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God.  The sermon detailed the destruction waiting for those who don’t follow God’s word.  The legend is that the people in the pews in the middle of that sermon ran from the church in great fright. This was at the time of what is called The Great Awakening, and fundamental Christianity was in great demand.   One of my professors in seminary pointed out rightly that the point of Edward’s sermon was not the destruction that made up such a large part of his discourse, but instead it was the thin, spider-web line that held all of humanity up out of the fires of hell.  That thin line is God’s infinite Grace.   That was, unfortunately a subtlety lost on the members of his congregation, and it is also a subtlety that is mostly lost on us.

      The Roman Catholics go to confession constantly, confessing even minute sins in order to satisfy the need to be purified before receiving the sacrament.  There is a certain sense to confession, in that having conversation about our misdeeds with a caring pastor is an excellent way to get past them and come to some kind of understanding of what the reality of forgiveness is.  The problem is that we often establish this kind of thing as a ritual that frequently has no meaning at all.

What this produces is that we remain in our guilt and even enhance it every time that we fall short.  Guilt produces all kinds of behavior that isn’t helpful.  We lash out at one another in anger, we blame others, we retreat from each other.  None of these things help in the establishment of community, and community ought to be the foundation of our religion.

       Fortunately, God has given us a solution to this.  Jesus took our sins to the cross with him, giving himself up for our salvation and for our eternal life.  Forgiveness is the mission of God to all of us.  He long ago recognized the problem that we have with our guilt and our constant sin and decided to do something about it.  Finally, Jesus was sent to be God in our midst, to live life as a human and to come to an understanding of what human living involves, and the horrible mess that we have made of the world because of the selfish way that we have lived it.

            Uniting us to God with forgiveness is the great gift that we have received because of Jesus’ death on the cross that we created and his resurrection from the dead that we didn’t create, yet we celebrate at Easter.  What greater gift could we all have been given than the forgiveness that has come to us because of this powerful gift that has come from the hand of God.  Forgiveness is the key to our lives.  It is the way that we can remove from our lives the guilt that sin produces.  Always, we are forgiven by our loving God of all that we have done so that we can be effective disciples to tell the world the wonderful news of what God has done for all of us.

         That forgiveness is a constant is shown in Jesus’ life.  After Peter denied Jesus three times after his arrest, following his resurrection, Jesus met Peter on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, he forgave Peter three times by asking him, Peter, do you love me?     When Peter answered that he loved him, Jesus told Peter to feed my sheep.  He asked him this three times for each of Peter’s denials.  This was an incredible display of forgiveness on the part of the risen Jesus.  It is only a foretaste of what God has in mind for all of us.  Forgiveness is ours to relieve all of the guilt that we have built up.  It is also our gift to give to the world.  It is our mission to show the world the elegant news of God’s forgiveness and the possibility that we can get on with our eternal lives in the freedom that we so fervently desire and to feed God’s sheep with the great gift of forgiveness and love.