“Dare the Impossible”

A Sermon Based Upon Mark 2: 1-12

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin.  

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Second Sunday of Advent C,  December 6th,  2015

“Which is easier---to say to a paralyzed person,  ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say,  ‘Get up, take up your bed, and walk?’ (Mk. 2:9 CEB)

"Why, sometimes I’ve believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”  
                                                                     ----The Queen in Lewis Carroll's Alice and Wonderland

It seemed like just another Bible Study on a summer Wednesday evening at the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.  A 21 year old Dylann Roof entered off the street, was warmly welcomed, sat down to listen.  For almost an hour after praying with and hearing everything the pastor had to say, he stood up and opened fire on the Bible study participants, killing 9, including the pastor, who was also a state senator in South Carolina. 

After the white supremacist murderer was captured apprehended the very next day, Nadine Collier, daughter of one of Dylann Roof’s nine victims, had one message for the suspected killer: “I forgive you.”

At Roof’s bond hearing, Chief Magistrate James Gosnell allowed Collier to deliver a statement to the suspect who joined via videoconference: “I just want everybody to know, to you, I forgive you. You took something very precious away from me. I will never talk to her ever again, I will never be able to hold her again. You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people. But God forgives you, and I forgive you.” The video feed shows Roof watching with a chilling blank stare.

What does it take to forgive someone like Dylan Roof?  How does one muster the courage, the conviction, or the moral fiber to grant such a gift to someone who has already taken so much? http://jonathanmerritt.religionnews.com/2015/06/22/what-does-it-take-to-forgive-someone-like-dylan-roof/#sthash.42AoPOmF.dpuf).  One thing for sure, what the members of those families and that church did, got the attention of the entire world.  It also caused quite a stir and a national debate about whether or not this act of forgiveness was premature (http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/07/04/us/ap-us-charleston-shooting-forgiveness.html).

MAKE FORGIVENESS A PRIORITY

One may debate about timing of forgiving, but however you feel about forgiving a murderer, especially one who had just killed a member of your family, you must admit, those folks at Mother Emmanuel AME Zion in Charleston put on quite a display of “their” Christian faith for the world to witness.  They certainly had a distinguished role model too.  As Jesus himself said, while he was being crucified, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.”   Dylan Roof knew what he was doing when he murdered those innocent people in that historic church in cold blood, but maybe those disciples in Charleston also knew what they were doing too.   For no practicing and doing the hard work of forgiveness is one of the marks of a true disciple of Jesus Christ. 

Mark’s gospel seems to be written in such a way to show that forgiving sins was a top priority of Jesus’ ministry.  This is made clear when a paralyzed man was surprisingly lowered down through the roof and Jesus looks straight at him and says, “Child, your sins are forgiven!”  (2:5).   Even though some have suggested Jesus was forgiving this fellow for destroying the roof of his home (which may have been true), that would seem unlikely to be the whole motive since this paralyzed man’s friends were actually the ones responsible.  

Jesus’ agenda to quickly or immediately forgive this man upsets the normal process of granting forgiveness, which it was believed God would only do through a ‘certified’ priest.   By referring to himself as “son of man” (NRSV) or ‘the human one’ (CEB), Jesus chooses a term right out of the Hebrew Bible (Dan. 7: 13ff), referring to a savior-like figure who was to come to usher in a new age, establishing God’s kingdom-rule and judgement on earth (Mk 1.15).  Ironically Jesus uses this designation, not to mete out judgment, but as to offer God’s forgiveness and grace to sinners.  Jesus’ defines himself as a ‘physician’ who has ‘not’ come ‘to call the righteous’ but has come ‘to call sinners to repentance’   (Mark 2.17).  

Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross, which Mark’s Jesus defines as ‘giving his life as a ransom for many’(Mk 10.45) will later be interpreted by Paul and the church to be in sync with Jesus’ own agenda and to forgive, which the apostle Paul understood as God ‘reconciling the world to himself through Christ, by not counting people's sins against them. (2 Cor. 5:19 CEB).  Thus, the agenda of Jesus in Mark is seen as nothing less than the agenda of God through the entire gospel event.  This desire of God to ‘forgive’ human sin through Christ’s death on the cross is God’s desire to ‘show his love for us’ ‘while we were still sinners (Rom. 5.8).  

Few would doubt that it’s ‘God’s business to forgive’ (Heinrich Heine) sins through Jesus Christ, but it is also just as important to the gospel message to understand that forgiveness should be our human and Christian agenda too.   It would be a tragic mistake to expect God’s forgiveness of us, without our own willingness to forgive others.  In the middle of the Lord’s prayer and Christian piety are those unforgettable words,  “Father forgive us our sins (trespasses or debts), as we forgive those who sin (trespass, debtors) against us.” 

While Mark’s gospel doesn’t give us ‘The Lord’s Prayer’, it does give us even more direct words from Jesus saying, “Whenever you stand up praying, if you have something against anyone, forgive so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your wrongdoings” (Mark 11:25).  What this means is that there is no gospel for you, unless you give gospel forgiveness to others in Jesus’ name.  Isn’t this why that Amish community who had five girls murdered forgave so quickly, even if it still hurt?  Isn’t this why those hurting folks at Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, S.C., also went against their own overwhelming hurt and anger to forgive Dylann Roof?  They were not doing this for the perpetrators were they?  They were doing this to preserve their own true personal trust in God’s forgiveness.  Only through faith in the ultimate justice of God can a person forgive those who intentionally hurt us.

YOU WILL NEED A COMMUNITY

But forgiving those who sin against us is not possible in our strength alone.  It takes a community to be able find and to give forgiveness.  Just as important as the forgiveness given to the paralyzed man, is the ‘faith’ (Mk. 2:5) of his four friends who brought him to Jesus.  He would not have received the forgiveness Jesus gave unless they had lifted him up, broke through the barriers to bring him into Christ’s presence.

This image of a person ‘paralyzed’ by life, needing the help of others to find the gift of God’s forgiveness, reminds me of a powerful story I heard which came out of the aftershock of September eleventh, 2001.   As we all recall, many people flocked back into churches after the attacks; some who had only recently become delinquents from church, and others who hadn’t been in church for many years.  I can’t recall the source of the story, but it was told as one man realized he needed to come back to church, he told his friends it he couldn’t because it would be hypocritical for him.  He said that when they came to the part of the service where it was customary to pray “Father forgive, as we forgive”  he said with all that has just happened, he just couldn’t  pray that right now. “That’s O.K.”, his friends replied.  “Come and pray with us, and when we come to that part of the prayer, you go silent, and we will pray it for you until the day you can pray it again.” 

Isn’t this what we all need a ‘community’ for?   We all have times when it is impossible for us to be fully Christian, even when we desire to be with our whole heart.   The Christian life is, in some ways, always impossible, but it can be especially impossible when it comes to forgiving an intended hurt.  We not only need God’s help to do this, but we will also need the help and strength of our brothers and sisters in faith.  Because they want to do the will of God, just as we do, sometimes only they, and their strength will be able to pull us along, when we are tempted, weak, or incapable of following the demands of the gospel for ourselves. 

Forgiveness is always hard, and it is sometimes impossible for us.  And shouldn’t it be nearly ‘impossible’ if it IS really from God?  Recall that wonderful line from the the Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Wonderland.   Alice had just protested that ‘one can’t do impossible things.”  “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen.  “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day.  Why, sometimes I’ve believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast” (http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Quotations/Dodgson.html).

Forgiveness is one of those ‘impossible’ demands of the gospel, which will almost always seems impossible in that moment as we are most hurt, but as time goes by, that forgiveness become the ‘impossible thing’ that will only make the most sense.  

Forgiveness will finally make sense to us because it is the only thing which will finally release us from the ‘hurt’ and allow to heal us, and help us conquer our hurt, so we can move on toward the future God wants to give us.  Only by living toward this ‘future’ can the full healing power of forgiveness be released within to change and reshape us.

This  power to forgive, as we are forgiven, does not always happen all at once.   We will not always have the power to pray, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do”, as Jesus did.  We aren’t Jesus.   We can’t do this alone.  But we can have Christ’s power released in us, and this is why we need ‘others’ who share the vision of God’s coming kingdom with us.  We need their strength, for this is how God strengthens us, so that when life has us on the ‘ropes’ and takes our own strength away, we will have God’s presence and power given to us through the strength of others who’s concern and care remind us that only God’s redeeming love and grace can and will fully and finally redeem us all.

MOVING BEYOND YOURSELF

To do the ‘impossible’ work of forgiveness will mean doing the most impossible thing of removing your own ‘self’ from the center of your universe.

Certainly, most controversial in this great story is just that Jesus pronounces forgiveness for this paralyzed man, but it is in how Jesus pronounces it.   The main concern in this story is not that this man had sinned, nor is it even that Israel had become a nation of sinners, nor that that these self-righteous legal experts proved to be the worst of sinners by all their complaining, but the main offense of this story is that Jesus announces that God desires to forgive sin without any priest, without any religious ritual, or without any obvious human input at all, except for this ‘faith’ that is particularly observed in these four friends who brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus. 

What Jesus is declaring in this text is what the Christian faith must still declare in the world:  God has always desired to forgive and restore us, even if don’t know how to ask for it.   And often, strangely enough, it is not our faith that is the key to receiving and giving this forgiveness, but it is also the faith of others who believe in us, for us, and with us, that God desires for us to forgive and be forgiven.  Through Jesus Christ, God desires to release us from the power of sin to release the power of healing into our lives, by saying to us, through our own faith, “Child, your sins are forgiven.” 

While there is a lot of ‘strange’ science in some of  Sigmund Freud’s work, there are also some powerful elements of truth, especially when it come to understanding the invisible workings of the unconscious mind.  Freud attributed the illnesses of many of his patients to feelings that were deep within, often forgotten by the conscious mind, but still having their influence upon their lives, in dreams, feelings, and sometimes even in physically unexplained illnesses.  This was especially the case with one girl named “Anna O”, who was a patient of one of Freud’s colleagues.  Anna seemed to be physically suffering hysteria from hidden emotional pains experienced early in her life, but which were still not fully healed and were unresolved in her heart and mind.   We might even use the word that was the key to her healing as ‘forgiveness’.   It was only through gentle ‘talk’ with the patient, rather than cold, impersonal or harsh prescribed treatments that the patient could be hoped to be cured and restored to wholeness and health (http://www.psychologistanywhereanytime.com/famous_psychologist_and_psychologists/psychologist_famous_sigmund_freud.htm).

None of us know all the possibilities of the power of forgiveness until we unleash them into our hearts.  And we can’t unleash these powers on our own, we need God’s help.  This is what this powerful story is mostly about, isn’t it.  The help that this ‘paralyzed’ man received from his friends and most of all, from the forgiving love of God, being unleashed through the healing presence of Jesus Christ.

Can God’s forgiveness help heal our lives, and especially our own ‘hateful’ world?  Can forgiveness help us fully encounter the love of Jesus Christ, not only in our own personal lives at Christmas, but also in the greater world around us?  Waldo Beach once said that ‘it is fairly easy to see the operations of grace and forgiveness within the private circles of family and friends, for instance in the constant love of a mother for a rebellious son.  But can the forgiveness of sins be practiced on the stock exchange or in labor negotiations?  Can there be such a thing as ‘gracious’ politics?  The cynic and maybe even the ‘sensible’ in us would answer “no!”  Realism may lead Christians to think forgiveness as only part of our personal and private affairs.  We think it we should be ‘fair’ in our business and social dealings, but not necessarily forgiving. 

However, Beach concludes, there are occasional moments in history, when political decisions must be infused with and tempered by the spirit of charity only reflected in the moral goodness and grace of God.  One instance he named is seen in the policy of Abraham Lincoln, one of history’s most sensitive religious thinkers who had experienced both God’s judgment and God’s grace.   As a response to judgment of war, “Lincoln prosecuted the cause of the war against the south in all its necessary cruelty and heart ache.  But Lincoln too was moved by the compassion of grace to look for a way of forgiveness beyond punishment.”

In hope of restoring the union beyond the great civil strife that all had known, Lincoln began his second Inaugural address with an opening statement of forgiveness, saying,  “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the world we are in, to bind up the nation’[s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations...”   Somehow, Lincoln knew one can’t fully experience healing until you fully forgive.  Only by offering healing do you receive the fullness of healing yourself.   And our greatest healing often begins with the simplest of words such as: “Child, Your sins are forgiven!    Amen.