Sermon

GOD’S FORGIVENESS FROM WITHIN

Ash Wednesday – February 25, 2004
Stephen Elkins-Williams

You cannot see it very well from where you are, but a friend recently gave me this small, sealed hand wipe. It is marketed as the “Wash Away Your Sins Towelette”, containing “anti-bacterial formula” which “kills sins on contact.” The package hypes this product as not only “handy “and “reliable”, but even “heavenly scented”! “Right your wrongs with a swipe,” it declares on the back and offers these six-step directions:

1. Remove moist towelette.
2. Devoutly wipe away wrong-doing.
3. Spot check for stubborn guilt.
4. Wipe again as needed.
5. Discard sins in waste receptacle.
6. Go forth purified and moisturized.

Of course this is a tongue-in-cheek novelty product, not a serious one; but its quick and easy, “do-it-yourself” mentality does help us to see some fallacies in our own habitual approach to repentance. Too often, for example, we regard sin and guilt as something outside of us, as external accretions which can be removed with the correct intentions and actions. We might feel some uneasy responsibility and discomfort about certain ways we have behaved, but it wasn’t really us who did that. As Flip Wilson’s Reverend Leroy used to say, “The devil made me do it!” So we do something unusually nice for someone or we give away some extra money or we say a special prayer, and then we feel better. We have wiped away our sins and guilt. Or so we think.

The trouble is that sin is more than external to us. While we are created in the image of God and therefore good, and while we are much more than the sum of our thoughts and actions, still our identity and our character are informed and infused by our decisions, some of which are sinful. By sinful, I mean that which goes against our identity and mission as children of God and therefore as brothers and sisters of one another. Any actions and consciously-agreed-to thoughts which do not reflect our love of God and of our neighbor infect us from the inside, not just the outside, and they separate us from God and one another. We cannot just wipe them away as if they never happened.

We cannot, but God can. Unlike the suggestion of the “Wash Away Your Sins Towelette”, we cannot absolve ourselves. Only God, whom we have offended by our lack of love, can forgive us. Because God has created us, only God is in a position to reach inside us, so to speak, and to forgive us, to recreate us and give us new life. God can restore us to ourselves and in relationship to others. God, our Creator and Redeemer, can continually give us new life.

God can and does. Not because we say the right words or perform the right actions. Not because we wipe ourselves with the right heavenly scented ointment. Not because we somehow manipulate or force that forgiveness. God forgives us even before we ask, and by our asking we accept that precious and unmerited gift.

“Return to me with all your heart,” says the Lord. “Acknowledge your true identity as children of God. Repent of what separates you from me and from my other children. Ask forgiveness and you will receive it: ‘good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your [hearts].’ I will never fail you. I will never reject you. ‘Behold, I make all things new.’”