“Forgiveness”  

A sermon preached by Rev. Will Ed Green for Foundry United Methodist Church Sunday, December 5th, 2021 

What would you do if you were you were really free? Free from things that trip  you up, habits and attitudes that keep you from really living life fully? Free from guilt  and shame that keeps you rooted in past wrongs and old regrets? Free from believing  something you’ve done makes you less worthy of God’s love or capable of doing of  God’s kin-dom work?  

On this second Sunday of Advent, John’s good tidings of God’s forgiveness come  to us from an unexpected place. Not halls of earthly power where past wrongs are  adjudicated by corrupt court systems. Not pulpits of religious power where divisions  between right and wrong and welcome and unwelcome are laid down. No, God’s word  comes from to John in what the Scripture calls ‘eramos’ the deserted places, the  wilderness. Places which represented vulnerability and risk, which existed outside the  realms of what was tame, safe, or familiar. These are good tidings find us in places we  don’t expect to find them.  

Once invited to the wilderness we’re called to us to ‘metanoia,’ or to change our  minds, the word translated here as repentance—and in the verses proceeding the ones  read today—doesn’t mince any words in demanding it. This isn’t a simple sojourn for a  quiet picnic in the woods. It is a spiritual experience which invites intentional  examination, one in which things that limit our perception and insulate us from truth are  stripped away. We’re called to confront the truth about who we are. The truth about how  we live. The truth about how both of these reflect—or do not—the values we profess. 

Now. Let me pause lest you think I’m going to go all “Sinners in the Hands of  Angry God” you here. Centuries of bad theology have left us associating repentance with  street-corner preachers proclaiming our impending doom and destruction. But Luke’s  ‘metanoia’ isn’t about shame, and it’s certainly not about damnation. It is a free gift of God’s grace—the kind John Wesley called ‘justifying grace’—that invites us to confront  and honestly address the spiritual and emotional baggage that weights us down in life so  that we can we can move more freely in our relationship with God and with others.  These good tidings aren’t just about confrontation, they are the promise of  transformation.  

John’s baptism of repentance is the first step on a journey of ‘afesis,’ the word  translated as forgiveness. It literally means ‘a release from bondage, a letting go of the  former things as if they’d never happened at all.’ If these are good tidings of  confrontation, they are also good tidings of invitation. An invitation to freedom from  anything that prevents us from receiving the hope of God’s love and our call to be that  hope made alive for others in the world.  

Luke echoes the ancient words of the prophets Isaiah and Malachi—each of whom  themselves wrote from wilderness places at wilderness moments in the lives of God’s  people—offering hope that our present realities and possible futures are not bound to, or  by, our previous mistakes. Even in the wildernesses of our sin and brokenness, where our  lives are full of trip hazards like regret and shame and constant detours caused by habits  and ways of thinking we know we need to change, God comes to be with us. Helps us  face, without fear or shame, the fact that we don’t always get it right. That we’re fallible.  That we fudge up.  

And then, get this! God helps us clear up that clutter that’s clogged our paths.  Grants us grace to map out a new way, to change our minds about the directions we’ve  been journeying and sets us on a new path where we are free to live more freely and fully  in the light of God’s love. These are good tidings of freedom and hope.  

The question is, I suppose, whether or not we’re really ready to receive them. I  grew up in a family system where we were really good at apologi