July 7 sermon - On Forgiveness: It's In The Middle Of The Lord's Prayer For A Reason

This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’ For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. (Matthew 6:9-15)

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     You could say that it's all about consistency.  As Christians, we have to live consistent lives. It gets put many ways: “Practice what you preach.” “Make your actions match your words.” Or, more appropriately perhaps for those of faith, “Walk the talk.” Faith does a lot of talking. Churches and pastors and individual Christians say a lot of things, and they often say them with great authority, and for the most part they expect (or, at least, they hope!) that the people they're speaking to will pay attention to them. But why would people listen to us if we don't live up to what we say we believe – or, if we don't live up to what people know that we at least profess to believe. I mean, even if you never speak about your faith to anyone, there are people who are going to know that you attend church, and because of that they expect a certain kind of life from you – certain behaviours that match the values and teachings of Christ – and my experience is that a lot of those who say they're not Christians are very aware of Christ's teachings and of His example, and they're quite willing to point out where we don't follow them. And so they don't listen to us. The point is that we have to be consistent in how we live our lives.

     There's nothing that turns people off the church more than what they perceive as hypocrisy. Oh, some will say church is boring, and some will say that they just don't believe what the church believes, but what you hear from non-churchgoers on a fairly regular basis is this refrain: “The church is full of hypocrites!” That hurts, doesn't it. We're not hypocrites. We're very sincere. But the refrain has been around for a long time. When Mahatma Gandhi tried to attend a Christian church in South Africa more than a hundred years ago, he was turned away at the door – because he wasn't white. One of the things he said for the rest of his life was, “I admire your Christ, but you Christians are so unlike your Christ.” There's more than enough evidence for us to say that Gandhi's words are still true. I suppose that some “hypocrisy” is inevitable: we're not perfect, after all, and so even if we know what Christ wants of us the unfortunate reality is that we won't always do it perfectly. But people might cut us some slack if only they could see us trying! And that's where it becomes truly sad – because there are Christians who must know that their actions or behaviours aren't matching their faith, and yet they persist in those actions and behaviours.

     My theme for July is going to be “On Forgiveness.” It's an important topic because it may be the one point where Christians fall down most easily. Really - it's so easy to talk about forgiveness, isn't it. Forgiveness is easy to talk about, but it's a lot more difficult to live forgiveness out. Over the years, I've seen a lot of unforgiveness in churches, and I've seen that unforgiveness do a lot of damage – to the church and to the people involved. Unforgiveness leads to anger, to bitterness, and to divisions. Unforgiveness is a sign of serious spiritual sickness. If we want to be spiritually healthy, we need to learn about forgiveness and we need to display it where necessary.

     Today's Scripture was Matthew's version of what we now call “The Lord's Prayer.” It's kind of a strange name, because this isn't actually a prayer. Jesus didn't pray it. He used it as what you might call a template for His disciples to help them understand how to pray, and as a template, the structure is interesting. The Lord's Prayer begins by acknowledging the qualities of God, and it ends by acknowledging our needs. But there's a little bit of a “bridge” part to the Lord's Prayer that does both:

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

     Those words are pretty much right in the middle of the Lord's Prayer. As we say it traditionally, “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” It's basically the same thing. Next week, I want to talk a little bit more about what exactly forgiveness is and we'll think about those two words. But for today, my point is that based on the template, forgiveness is what everything else in The Lord's Prayer revolves around. Maybe the point Jesus was making to His disciples was that forgiveness (and unforgiveness for that matter) are the centre of the Christian faith around which everything else revolves. Unless we can at least make a sincere effort to master the art of forgiveness (and it is an art) everything else in our lives of faith runs the risk of falling apart.

     Think here about the solar system for a moment. If the sun in the centre of the solar system were to suddenly disappear, all the planets (and everything else – dwarf planets, and asteroids and comets) would soar off in all different directions because there would be no gravity to control them. The planets would still exist, but the solar system would be in chaos, and in fact it wouldn't even really exist – because how can you have a solar system without a sun? Forgiveness works in a similar way in a life of Christian faith. Some would say that love is the centre, but love without forgiveness wouldn't work. As I pointed out last week, Jesus wants us to love our enemies – and to do that there has to be an element of forgiveness involved! Otherwise we'll simply love those who love us, or at least those who haven't hurt us – and there's not a lot of challenge to that! If there is no forgiveness in our lives, then (just like the solar system without the sun) all the other Christian gifts and qualities we show would suddenly have no centre around which to organize themselves. We might still do nice things and we might still live good lives, but if there's no forgiveness then bitterness and anger will eventually overtake us – because eventually someone's going to let us down or hurt us - and unless we can forgive them our faith will be in chaos, just like planets without a sun to revolve around.

     Jesus' teaching on prayer sees this as a two way street: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” That means that we need to be both forgiven and forgiving. As the old song says about love and marriage – you can't have one without the other. If we're being honest, we need to seek God's forgiveness because we haven't got it all right, we have done things we shouldn't have done, and we have hurt people around us from time to time. If there's anyone here today who can say in all honesty that you've never hurt another person's feelings by doing or saying something thoughtless, then you're either completely oblivious or you're a far better person than I am. But I believe we all do thoughtless and even hurtful things from time to time, and when we do these things, it isn't only our relationship with other people that suffers – it's our relationship with God. So we need to acknowledge our need for God's forgiveness as a first step. But we need to be consistent. If we seek God's forgiveness for ourselves, we have to offer our forgiveness to others. You can't truly be forgiven if you are not willing to be forgiving. We'll explore that a little more over the next month as well.

     Sometimes we say The Lord's Prayer so often in church and at other times that it becomes a rather thoughtless thing; little more than a set of words that we've been able to memorize. Perhaps we don't really listen to what it is that we're praying when we pray The Lord's Prayer. Perhaps we forget that it's really a teaching from Jesus about how to live a life that's faithful to God and how to pray in a manner that's faithful to God – not in these words, but in this way. And if we listen for the teaching contained within The Lord's Prayer we discover that among other things there's a call for us to live consistent lives of faith. There's a call for us to “practice what we preach;” there's a call for us to “make our actions match our words;” there's a call for us to, yes, “walk the talk.” In a way, Jesus is reminding us not only to go to church, He's reminding us that we actually have to live in such a way that our faith makes a difference. Jesus is probably saying to us, “Practice what you preach!” “Make your actions match your words!” “Walk the talk!” Be consistent, in other words, because if we can't be consistent about as important a thing as forgiveness, then why should anyone listen to anything we have to say about anything else?

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

     Challenging, isn't it! But then again – the gospel is supposed to be a challenge!