Absolution - So How Long Does Forgiveness Last?

The following is an item written by my pastor, Pr. Kevin Martin, for a recent monthly newsletter. I thought it was a really good response to the question many have when it comes to Holy Absolution.
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A church member asked me recently: “Pastor, after you pronounce absolution in the divine service, uhm… how long does… the ah, forgiveness last?” I thought that was a great question and I also thought there might be others who’ve wondered the same thing but were afraid to ask. It lasts forever! That’s the short answer. But the (only slightly) longer answer is even stranger and better…

All our sins were forgiven, all people’s everywhere for all time when Jesus died on a cross outside Jerusalem, April 6, 30 AD, 3 pm. Whether they know it or not. Whether they want to be forgiven or not. We all are and were forgiven completely on Good Friday (which we recently celebrated). Easter Sunday (while it is the larger day, festival-wise) is actually the icing on the cake, the results of what Jesus won in the darkness of that terrible Friday afternoon. But that’s what (Who!) did it: Jesus forgave the world’s sin by dying in our place that Great Friday. And the great thing about that death of His that day is that it didn’t just forgive sins people were committing then. His death reached back, the previous week, previous month, previous year, previous century, previous millennia, reached back all the way into the distant past, all the way to another garden, where Adam and Eve had just eaten an apple and had lost a great deal. That original sin was forgiven that Friday afternoon by Jesus too. And His forgiveness reached for-ward, centuries ahead, to cover over your sins and mine. It reaches forward to cover everyone’s sins who will ever live until that day when He returns in glory and there is no need for anymore forgiveness. Jesus’ death covers and forgives all sins, of all people of all times and places. Always.

So what happens at the beginning of the communion service when the pastor stands up, (after we confess that we are poor, miserable sinners) and says “As a called and ordained servant of Christ and by His authority, I forgive you all your sins.”? If Jesus won forgiveness for all of us for all time, what’s up with that? Well, it’s the Department of Redundancy Department (sort of). Jesus, through His servants, is doing the forgiving thing all over again, or more exactly applying the effects of that forgiveness like a fresh coat of paint on a peeling and cracked wall.

Why? Because we are people of little faith. Because our sins keep coming back to haunt us like Scrooge’s ghosts (only not so kind-hearted!). We keep seeing the stain re-appearing on that wall we thought we’d painted and made sparkling white. Here’s where it gets a little weird (a little sci-fi): the wall (us!) really is sparkling white. There are no cracks, no peeling paint. Jesus’ death has made us just like Him, pure and holy. But instead of just telling us we are fine, pure and clean, and demand we believe it better, because we really do see and feel the stains, the damage, and so do our neighbors, Jesus repairs the damage we perceive all over again just as He did that Friday afternoon in the 1st century in Jerusalem. Another coat of paint on the wall, another wrapping in the robes of His righteousness. The death of Christ really was the end of the world and the beginning of a new age, a new time. But faith is required to live in that new world, that new time, and when faith falters, even a little bit, so do the good effects of Jesus’ death—from our perspective at least.

So Jesus keeps fixing the unbroken wheel—the wheel of our bodies and souls, because to us it is bent and out of round, really broken, even though it was repaired perfectly even before we were born or even did the damage. We simply have trouble living into the life Christ gives, living as we truly are in Him. This is the mission of Christ He carries out through His holy, catholic, orthodox, and apostolic church: He continually continues, by the forgiveness of sin, to make us over in His image; He makes us grow up into His image, to become true human beings at Last.

Our lack of faith keeps us from seeing this, experiencing this, living this. So the forgiveness of sins in Holy Baptism, Holy Preaching, Holy Absolution, Holy Communion continually makes right all that we get wrong, really, truly, physically, eternally, spiritually, ontologically, and metaphysically. Because we need it. Because we live in a fog of unbelief that clouds everything. At His Return in Glory, we will see Him as He is and so be like Him and will never have need of any more “touch-ups”. Till then, Jesus doesn’t mind forgiving what He’s already redeemed, over and over 70 times 7, times 7 times 7 times… well, you get the picture.

So when I tell you this Sunday: “As a called and ordained servant of Christ and by His authority, I forgive you all your sins” that will last forever. Even when you walk out of church and bark at your wife, it’s already been “pre-forgiven” if you will. You’re good (and so is she, though if you tell her and show her how good and lovely she really is, life will be better for both of you, I would judge). But because you will have trouble believing that, because other sins will mount up, we’ll see each other again next week and go over it all again, until one Day, the Last and Great Day, Jesus will show up and real Life will begin in earnest…

                                        - Pr. Kevin Martin
                                          Our Savior Lutheran Church (Raleigh, NC)

Ritual and the Divine Service

“Rituals do not reflect reality, they enact reality. The Divine Service does not simply reflect what Christ is like, it enacts us in His flesh as His Word is broken open through preaching that reveals Christ to us as He was revealed to the Emmaus disciples in the breaking of the bread. To break open God’s Word is to see Christ at its center, for as Jesus Himself tells the Emmaus disciples concerning the testimony of the Old Testament: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into His glory?” (Luke 24:26). God’s Word is first broken open for us in the Liturgy of the Word so that we might be prepared in the Holy Supper to eat His body broken in death and His blood poured out for the remission of sins. In the liturgy of Word and Sacrament you leave behind the world and all its cultural baggage, and only then do you begin to perceive through your rational mind and your senses that Christ is present bodily to give you the gifts of heaven… At the center of the Liturgy of the Lord’s Supper is the cross, where we feast on the body and blood of our host. Think of the ambiguity of this act of participating in a banquet of joy in which the food is the One who sacrificed Himself in a humiliating, shameful, and scandalous death. It is hard to comprehend that through Christ’s bodily presence, heaven itself is present with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven when we eat His body and drink His blood. What is it that we perceive here through our eyes, our ears, our nose, our mouths? Joy at our salvation at the heavenly feast? Horror that the violence of Calvary is in, with, and under what we consume into our bodies? Sadness that participating with us in Christ are all the saints who are no longer with us, including our closest relatives and friends? These are thoughts that ritual can evoke, and they are too big to be analyzed, discussed, categorized, and pared down to size.”



(‘Heaven on Earth: The Gifts of Christ in the Divine Service’ – Arthur A. Just, Jr., pages 38-39)

Doctrine and Practice

Quote of the Day

"Doctrine and practice, especially liturgical practice, while distinct, cannot really be divided. Doctrine is largely hidden, like the studs that form the walls of your house. But how those walls are finished has as much to do with the structure of that house as those hidden two by fours."

Pr. William Cwirla

Doxologizing

“Doxologizing” – Texts for Pentecost: Gen. 11:1-9, Acts 2:1-21, John 14:23-31

On the surface, it would appear that Pentecost is all about language. From the tower of Babel, where language and the confusion thereof seems the main problem; to the day of Pentecost in our Epistle where the ability to speak foreign languages seems the miracle, to our Gospel where Jesus promises the Spirit to teach us all things in a language we can grasp, finally, divinely

It is an appealing line of thought, that language is the pivot on which all turns. It has been an appealing thought in late 20th and early 21st century theology and philosophy where thinkers like Wittgenstein remain popular for their attention to language as the crux of the matter. It’s an appealing idea on a personal level for any of us who’ve ever struggled to learn a foreign language, like oh, say, maybe a hypothetical college sophomore tackling Hebrew (being poorly advised to do so) with a succession of weak amateur teachers, who managed to convince him only of this: that the story of the tower of Babel proves that foreign languages are a curse from God designed to gum up all the works of the world, and that laboring in the foreign language departments of academia is a sure way to experience the ancient curse in a very first-hand sort of manner!

So, the takeaway from this line of thought is that if we can only get our language right, find the right words, attach them to the right concepts, drill them into our heads and those of others, then everything will come right and Paradise will be restored. So much of the modern church has been devoted to this idea that Christianity is all about getting our language right in our talk of God, the right words, concepts, propositions and the acceptance thereof.

But I don’t buy it.

Nope. I don’t think language was the problem back at the tower of Babel, nor that the Holy Spirit is sent mainly to make me talk pretty one day. I think there is a much deeper problem in all three of our lessons today that God addresses in Christ and that the language thing is just a means to a much greater end, just a wrench in God’s toolbox, for getting this bigger problem sorted.

So what is more important than getting our language of God right? In a word - Worship!!!
Worship is what we were made for. Our worship is what got all fouled up in the Garden of Eden. Worship was the issue at Babel, the issue at Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost, the issue when Jesus promised the Holy Spirit, and the issue that we are really trying to address in our catechesis, which four of our young people have undergone this past year and will be confirmed in this morning.

I have often wanted a bumper sticker (especially at pastors’ conferences) mirroring the old “It’s the economy stupid” that would say “It’s not the language, the concepts, the outreach, and it’s definitely not the numbers; it’s the worship, stupid!” The very word “orthodoxy” does not, as most think, mean “right teaching.” No, a beginning Greek student would tell you it means right glory, literally, the right glorifying of God which is to say “right worship!” The Christian Church is about worship, first, last, always, and the restoration of that true worship of God which comes to us through faith in the cross of Jesus Christ.

Look: in heaven there will be no more catechisms, no more debates, no more question and answer sessions, no more evangelism, no more outreach, no more books designed to reshape our thinking. No. All of that will be gone. There will be no more faith even, because we will see what we now must believe. But what there will be, forever and amen, is worship, the worship of God in Christ Jesus, the Song that goes ever on, the Dance that never gets old, and the Game we never tire of playing where each round is better and more delightful than the last. We were created to worship the Holy Trinity, and in that worship to share the fullness of the divine life and delight forevermore. This is the light that illuminates Paradise, that which makes it Paradise, that indefinable something we have been chasing all our earthly lives and never quite envisioning, never quite capturing...

Our earthly worship gives, on the whole, a very poor idea of the heavenly reality (especially when we try to make the Divine Service relevant to ourselves instead of ourselves relevant to God). What we do here on Sunday mornings, is just the barest hint, the vaguest shadow of what goes on before the throne of God in heaven. But it’s a start.

In our catechesis this year, we went through a lot (306!) questions and answers. And we had had fun with that thing, didn’t we? But the point of it all was not just to get confirmed and cash gifts, or to amass knowledge about God that we file away or impress others with. No, the purpose of all this was to draw deeper into the worship of Christ, to make all our words worship words, and what we do here on Sunday is meant to lead us to make all our lives one great doxology!

But I see some of you don’t look so convinced of this.  That Pentecost is about worship not language. Alright. Let’s go back to the very beginning, [a very good place to start!] to Genesis and the Tower of Babel. Maybe if I convince you of this, the rest will fall into place.

In the days of Babel, the whole earth had one language and one speech. And what they did with that was to try to make a Name for themselves by building a City, a Tower topping out in heaven. Trying to make a Name for ourselves is a total rejection of the Name God gifts to us through faith by Word and Sacrament, in Holy Worship, Divine Service. So, when God saw the building of the Tower at Babel, He pronounced it a disaster. And He came down and confused our language, started foreign language departments to stop this project - the Babel Project.

And what was that Babel Project finally, if not worship, fouled-up worship? It was worship of ourselves, a monument to ourselves, the man-made heaven modern man still yearns for and dreams of. It was a total rejection of the heaven that God gives in Christ and a demand to substitute a Kingdom we’ve built through our own engineering and outreach endeavors. And once the Tower is built, we go conquer the world and make’em live in it (like-it-or-not) by our proselytizing.

The confusion of our language at Babel was not the problem.  It was the divine solution, a temporary stop-gap to the real problem of fouled up worship. And so the restoration of true language at Pentecost was no final solution, just the means towards restoring true worship!

We still build our Towers of Babel today. Our businesses, governments, states, churches, are, too often, monuments to ourselves, attempts to scale heaven by our impressive works and too often explicit rejections of the heaven Jesus gives only as a Gift by Way of the Cross. Much of the modern church’s endeavors are just Babel-building!

You can drill people with the language of Christian dogma, but if that is the end-all, it is just another Tower of Babel. Language is an important tool, but one designed to be used to worship for Christ’s sake. That is to say, our language is only right when it is doxological, when it is by and for the worship of God in Christ.  To that end, God sends His Spirit again today in Word and Sacrament, to re-shape our language yes, but more so to glorify, to eucharistify, to doxologize, all our words by the incarnate Word of Christ Jesus, that, ultimately, in the worship of Him, we’ll find Peace surpassing understanding, guarding our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Sermon by:  Pr. Kevin Martin (May 19, 2013 - Pentecost)