Being Forgiven

Having been born and raised in Massachusetts, and having spent a lot of time with people who grew up in the Roman Catholic Church, I’m used to hearing people use the phrase “Catholic guilt.” It’s one of those terms that’s easy to understand, but hard to define. But in a pinch, I’d say it means a sense of guilt that lingers even past the church’s rituals of repentance and forgiveness; a persistent anxiety that even if you live a pretty ordinary life, and you try to do the right thing, you’re still doing something wrong. As Alec Baldwin’s character put it in 30 Rock: “Even though there’s the whole confession thing, that’s no free pass… Whether things are good or bad or you're simply... eating tacos in the park, there is always the crushing guilt.” I’m not trying to knock the Catholic Church, by the way! I don’t think it’s supposed to feel that way. But for many people, it does.

Many mainline Protestant churches in recent years have gone quite far in the other direction. Seeking to rid ourselves of the moralizing Puritanism of the past, we’ve adopted a kind of polite discomfort with conversations about “sin” in many churches. Yes, there’s a confession during the service, but we don’t talk about it. Maybe during Lent. Personally, I grew up in a church in which I don’t really recall “sin” being on the radar at all. We focused a lot on learning from Jesus, on being good people and serving the community. But there wasn’t a prayer of confession on Sundays. We didn’t talk about “sin” in youth group. These dynamics of repentance and forgiveness weren’t a part of everyday life.

And if that’s true in mainline churches, it’s even more true in secular life. People are still imperfect; people still do sin. But we don’t always have the language to talk about it.

So I was interested to see the title of the most recent episode of the NPR Podcast Hidden Brain: “Winning the Battle Against Yourself.” This sounds like a title for Lent! In this episode, the host, Shankar Vedantam, interviews a psychologist and neuroscientist named Emily Falk about all the ways in which our willpower fails us. He begins with the: “Many of us have been raised to believe that if we want to get something done, we need only to set our minds to it. And yet something odd and discouraging often happens… [What we do] is not what we set out to do. It’s as if we are not the ones in charge.”

And I realized, as I listened, why it sounded so familiar. This idea of the divided will is an accidental paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans: “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)

It was a great interview. It had some great practical tips on strengthening your willpower.

But there was something missing, for me. Everything they discussed was about diet, or exercise, or productivity at work. It was all about the ways in which we fail to meet personal goals. But there was nothing about the ways in which we fail and hurt someone else; when we say something in anger that we really shouldn’t have, or break the trust of someone we love. There was no need for forgiveness. But there was also no room for forgiveness: only striving to be better.

And so the most stereotypical form of “Catholic guilt” at one end of the spectrum and pop psychology all the way at the other share something in common: they can both tell you all about how you have to be better in the future; but they don’t leave you, it seems, with a feeling of being forgiven.

But forgiveness is at the heart of our readings today.

We begin with the story of the ancient Israelites worshiping the golden calves. They’ve escaped from Egypt, and they’re wandering in the wilderness, and Moses has gone up to the mountain to commune with God. He’s been gone for forty days. And the people start to get nervous. Moses said he would lead them to worship God in the wilderness, but he’s disappeared. And they only know one way to worship a god. So they say to Moses’ brother Aaron, “Make us some gods.” (Ex. 32:1) And he melts down their jewelry and makes it into two golden calves for them to worship.

And God is mad! “Your people,” he says to Moses, “whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely.” (Ex. 32:7) Moses corrects him: Why are you so mad, God, at “your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt?” (32:11) And then he appeals to God’s PR department: You don’t want the Egyptians to say, Look, God “brought them out to kill them in the mountains,” do you? (32:12) You don’t want people to think of you as a god who’s focused on punishment, right? You’re a god who sets people free. And God relents. God “change[s] his mind about the disaster,” and the people are forgiven. (32:13–14)

And we should note: They haven’t repented yet. They haven’t confessed their sins or changed their ways. They still don’t even know that it’s wrong to worship those calves. But before they even begin to make amends, Moses intervenes, and God decides to forgive them.

That wasn’t the end of human sin, and it wasn’t the end of divine forgiveness, and in the end, we needed and we received an even greater mediator than Moses. The Son of God himself came among us in Jesus, to intervene on our behalf, and to show us what God’s forgiveness is like.

That’s why Jesus tells these two parables in today’s gospel: to show us what God’s forgiveness is like. When we go astray; when we fail to walk in Jesus’ way of love; when we do not love God with all our hearts, or we do not love our neighbors as ourselves—God doesn’t respond with wrath. When your willpower fails you completely, and you can’t stop yourself from slipping back into the same broken patterns as before, God looks at you and sees a lost sheep, who needs to be brought back to the flock. He doesn’t want to scold you, or to punish you—he wants to pick you up, and lays you on his own shoulders, and he rejoices, because what was once lost is now found. When you are convinced that you’re not good enough, when you feel that vague sense of constant guilt, God is looking at you like you’re a precious coin; God treasures you enough to stop everything and search for you.

Even when we are like sheep who don’t even know we’re lost; even when we’re like coins hidden under the couch; even when we’re still worshiping the golden calves, God is already seeking us out to offer us grace and mercy, not with anger and punishment but with patience, love, and joy.

All we have to do is accept that we’re forgiven, and act accordingly.

And that’s where we come to the apostle Paul. Paul is an all-or-nothing kind of guy, by all accounts, and you see it here in his letter to Timothy. He isn’t just a little lax about his prayer life; he persecutes the church. He doesn’t just prioritize his own comfort over love of his neighbor; he’s a “man of violence.” But nevertheless, “the grace of [God] overflowed for [him] with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.” (1 Tim. 1:13–14) And in his gratitude for this mercy Paul arrives at a deep humility: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,” he says—“of whom I am the foremost.” (1 Tim. 1:15) There is no finger-pointing here; or rather, the only finger Paul points is at himself. The “sinners” and the “saints” are not distinct groups of people—we are all always both. And in fact, the people most grateful for God’s mercy and love are those, like Paul himself, who have needed the most of it.

That humility is the key. It’s what allows for empathy and connection between us. That recognition that all of us are imperfect, that all of us have fallen short, is the most solid foundation for forgiveness that we have. We can own up to the truth when we’ve done something wrong, knowing that there is joy in heaven when we come to admit it. We can accept that when we are forgiven, we are really forgiven; although we remain imperfect, God isn’t holding a grudge. We can forgive one another when we have been wronged, because we know what it’s like to need to be forgiven.

This is true in our closest relationships. It’s true in our neighborhoods and places of work. It’s true in our nation and in our city and in our world. And I think it’s an important part of the healing that we need from a culture of anger and violence: to recognize that every one of us has gone astray sometimes. Every one of us has needed forgiveness, and every one of us deserve the chance to be forgiven, because there is joy in the presence of the angels of God as soon as we begin to make it right.

To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God,
be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. (1 Tim. 1:17)