There's A Home For All Of Us

 John 14: 1-14  Easter 5 May 7, 2023

 The place I considered my home

for the first part of my life is in Woodhaven, in 

Queens, New York.

It was a house that had been owned by my family

since the early 1900’s

It was a two family house and

and we moved there when I was three

We lived in one apartment and my grandparents lived in the other.

 

The house was built in the 1800’s it had skylights and dumb waiters,

and porcelain tile in the bathrooms.

There was a basement filled with all sorts of

treasures and toys and games and pictures

from all generations of my family.

 

Queens was a great place to be a kid,

In the 1970’s New York could be dangerous place,

but Woodhaven where we lived was a sweet neighborhood.

Milk was still delivered to people’s porches

there were parks and libraries and stores.

One of my second cousins owned the bar around the corner.

My great uncle lived a few streets over,

our church was on the corner.

Walking along the street we would always

see at least one old friend or family member.

 

That was home to me. Not just the house,

but the neighborhood, the other people,

the stores, the graffiti, the elevated trains.

 

And it was my home,

until my father was transferred to Houston, Texas

and we moved down there where we weren’t

familiar with anyone or anything.

  

For a long time, about 20 years,

While living in Houston and then living in San Francisco

I clung to the fact that Woodhaven was home

From the age of 8 on, I wanted to get back there.

I dreamed of getting back and living

in that house or at least that neighborhood.

 

And when I was about 27, I finally moved back to New York.

And one of the first things I did was go to Woodhaven.

It stirred up all those feelings of familiarity.

 

It pretty much looked the same.

There were all of the same buildings, restaurants,

some of the same graffiti was there,

my elementary school, the five and dime store was still there.

The house was still there.--There were some changes,

but it was mostly the same place I had grown up in.

But strangers were living in it.

 

And I went our family’s favorite pizza place

that we had eaten in 20 years ago,

and as I was sitting there eating this great pizza,

I realized that Woodhaven was not my home anymore.

The people I knew had moved on and

I had moved on. It just wasn’t the same.

It was not the enchanted place I remembered

The best I could do was visit and be a visitor.

 

It was not my home anymore.

But if Woodhaven was not my home,

then where was my home?

For a while after that I was feeling really lost.

 

Maybe some of you can relate to my story.

A lot of people have longings to go home.

Whether it is a place, or a time, or a sensibility.

We have the need to go back to a place that we can call home.

 

Many people feel that longing for home

even when they’ve made a new home for themselves.

- Some people feel that even if they still live

in the very same place that they grew up in.

- Some people feel that even when they have never ever

had a place that was secure and safe.

 

Maybe we all have that longing to go Home.

Home with a capital “H”

But at times we’re not quite sure how to find it.

 

I found a lot of profound quotes about Home

while I was writing this, some by Maya Angelou, 

William Shakespeare, Emily Dickenson 

but the best one for me was from one of the series 

of the children’s book that came out about 15 years ago

by an author who called himself Lemony Snickett. He wrote:

 

“One's home is like a delicious piece of pie you order

in a restaurant on a country road one cozy evening –

the best piece of pie you have ever eaten in your life –

and you can never find again. “

 

Over the next three weeks, we will be reading

a portion of John’s Gospel that is called the Farewell Discourse.

This is the last discussion, sermon, monologue, that Jesus

shares with his disciples.  This is what he says at his last supper.

He has already washed their feet, and Judas has gone out 

to betray Jesus to the religious leaders. He knew he was going to die

and that this would be the last time he and his disciples would talk.

 

Jesus disciples are worried.

They have left their own families and followed Jesus.

They left the places that they called home

because they thought they had found that capital H Home in Jesus.

But now Jesus was talking about dying and leaving them and

going off somewhere. Where would they’re Home be now?

But he tells them not to worry, believe in God and believe in Jesus

When he tells them that he will show them the Home again.

This particular part of the farewell discourse,

the beginning of it, has been read many times at funerals.

“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”

Many people use this text as a metaphor for heaven.

I have used it countless times. It’s very comforting.

And then Jesus says the line that has always bothered me:

“no one gets to the Father except through me”

 

Unfortunately, this part of the text has been used

as a proof text to show that the only way to heaven is

by being a Christian.

 

And that makes it tough for pastors, like me, because at a

funeral there are often people who are Christian and there are 

children and siblings and relatives and friends who are not,

and they hear this text and then instead of being comforted,

they’re concerned because it can sound like a threat.

 

Honestly, it has struck me that Jesus was being callous

to his disciples going from comfort for his disciples 

to salvation doctrine in the same breath and conversation.

 

Now some pastors will plow right through that and tell a

bereaved congregation that, basically, their mother is going to heaven

but you’re never going to see her again unless you change your ways.

Or, more horrifying, is that they tell a bereaved congregation

that they don’t really know if mom is going to heaven

because she didn’t change her ways soon enough

and then leave it for the first year associate pastor to clean up.

 

This is why it’s so important to ask, like I told you last week,

What is Jesus actually saying here? What’s his objective.

 

Krister Stendhal, was a very prominent Lutheran Swedish bishop,

of the 20^th century his son, who is a pastor in the ELCA, 

quoted one of his father’s lectures where he said this about this and other texts:

“when you apply the right answer to the  wrong question,

it will always be wrong, even if—or especially if­ the answer is God’s Word.”

We can’t apply, what might be the right answer, to the wrong

question and then question

“do we have to be Christian to go to heaven?”

is not the right question here in this Farewell discourse.

 

Stendhal said about John 14,

It strikes me very odd to take a passage from the most intimate and tender conversation  with the most intimate and closest circle of disciples, from a context in which their hearts  are full of foreboding with the imminent fear of relations about to be severed, to lift a  word from that conversation, and use it in answering the question of Christianity’s relation  to other religions. It is just not apropos.

 

So Stendhal is saying that Jesus is not being callous after all.

Jesus is not in a conversation with the disciples about how

people get to heaven. He is telling them, his closest friends 

and followers how to find their way back to him after he’s gone from their presence. 

There is no “must” in Jesus words here.

There is all grace and comfort. And that’s how we should read it.

 

The disciples are feeling lost.

They had found their home in Jesus,

and now they felt that their home was slipping away.

 

But Jesus tells them,

“I may be leaving, and you might feel lost, but trust me,

you already know what to do. I am the way. 

Do what I have been doing. You who believe in me will do greater things than I have.

Just keep following the way that I have been 

showing you while I’ve been here: forgiveness, healing, sacrifice, dying to yourself,

that is the way, and the truth, and the life.

follow the way that I showed you how to live.

That is God’s way. That is the way home“

 

He is telling them about that narrow gate again.

That is the way home for these disciples when they feel lost.

The way of living that leads to abundant life and Home.

  

When Jesus says there are many rooms in my Father’s house.

I don’t know that anyone really thinks that Jesus

is talking about a house, like the one I knew in Woodhaven

with skylights and dumb waiters,

or the one that you might have grown up in.

But it’s still a great image.

 

Jesus promises us Home. Home with a Captial “H”

Home for eternity, and a Home here on earth.

Whenever you’re feeling lost, just look for the rooms.

The rooms of assurance, grace, love, and forgiveness 

and you will find God’s house. 

There are many rooms in my Father’s house.

Enough rooms for everyone.

 

Soon after I moved back to New York,

I found Trinity Lutheran Church of upper Manhattan

a place where I heard for the first time out loud

about God’s unconditional love and grace for us,

and where I saw people try to live it out in their lives.

And since then, I have considered the ELCA,

this denomination, with all its faults and issues,

to be the place that I have called home.

 

Jesus life, death, and resurrection have made a community on earth

that is built around God’s promises and Jesus way of life.

 

The ELCA is Home for me.

Some people have found Home in other denominations,

some in other religions, some are still searching,

some have stopped searching all together.

But the rooms are still there for us.

 

Do not let your hearts be troubled,

believe in God and also believe in me.

In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.

 

There is a Home for all of us.

The Narrow Gate

 John 10:1-10 April 30, 2023

 

I was taught in preaching class in seminary

that when you look at a text, you should ask yourself:

What is Jesus doing here? What’s he trying to say?

What is he trying to get his audience to understand?

And what is John the author of the gospel, trying to say here

by the way that they’re recounting the story?

Sheep
Deliliah Smith

We’ll be asking that question a lot in the next couple of weeks

as the lectionary texts are of Jesus last sermons

and some of them can be pretty confusing.

 

So what is Jesus doing here? What is he trying to say?

Why does he tell his disciples and us about this sheepy stuff?

What does he mean when he says “I am the gate”, Jesus says

“whoever enters by me will be saved.”

 

Now traditionally in Christianity, people have, almost without question,

seen that Jesus wants to give us an invitation or maybe a warning -

that we need to know that Jesus and Christianity

is the only way to get to heaven.

We drove up to Columbia this weekend and there are a LOT

of billboards up on the side of the highway 26 that say that 

or something like it: Jesus is the only way to God. Jesus or hell, that’s the choice.

And that is the traditional understanding of Christianity.

You probably grew up with it, I know I did.

 

So Jesus MUST be believed, church MUST be attended,

doctrine MUST be believed, the sacraments – that are administered rightly –

MUST be taken regularly. At the very least, we MUST claim 

Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior. 

That’s the gate that we MUST to go through.

And everyone else gets who doesn’t go through that gate

gets sent to hell or Gahenna, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Belief in Jesus is the gate that Jesus we MUST go through for God to love us.

 

I also learned in seminary that if we say we MUST do something for

God to love us, we will get a bunch of red “X”s on our papers.

 

So is that really what Jesus is doing here?

Is that why Jesus came here on earth?

Was Jesus purpose in coming here to create a religion?

To establish an institution parallel to

other institutions, but just a little better?

Was God’s objective to put some of us inside the club

and to leave other people outside of this great plan of salvation?

 

I think for those of us who have professed Jesus Christ as

Lord and Savior and have a relationship with him,

we know that Jesus had bigger plans than that.

We know that Jesus didn’t really like clubs with exclusive memberships.

Jesus wasn’t big on putting people inside the circle and outside the circle.

He broke down those barriers.

 

And we remember that earlier in this Gospel, Jesus said

“God so loved the whole world that he sent his son.”

Christ died and rose for us. It is finished.

We don’t have to do anything for God to love us.

God just loves us.

So then, still, what is Jesus trying to say?

 

Jesus does tell us that this gate is the way to abundant life,

So we know Jesus objective is for us to have an abundant life.

 

Now quite a few Christians teach that when Jesus talks

about “abundant life”, he is talking about

having lots of personal wealth, comfort, and ease of life.

At least for us and our family.

They teach that living life the right way will result in good health,

and a large bank account, and a happy family life,

and that anything less than that

proves that you haven’t lived a good life.

Some Christians think abundant life is about

me not having to worry.

It’s about me building my wealth by myself,

and maybe giving some of it away if I feel like it.

 

But we who have a personal relationship with Jesus

know that he never said that. And he didn’t live that.

All Jesus had was the sandals on his feet

and the tunic on his back. He begged for places to stay

and his disciples stole ears of corn off of farmers’ land.

He never promised that his followers would be wealthy

or even comfortable. Take up your cross and follow me,

is what Jesus actually said. Not comfortable at all.

 

And we who know Jesus learned from him that

We can’t have a lot of stuff and comfort and watch

our neighbor have nothing and call that an abundant life.

Abundance is found in making sure that other people have abundance.

Abundance is having our hearts filled with the

care that Christ showed us and sharing that.

Abundant life is found in our hearts breaking for others.

Abundant life is found in giving our abundance –

ourselves, our time, and our possessions – away.

Abundant life is not lived alone with me and my family only,

it’s lived in community with others.

 

And this is gate that I believe Jesus is talking about.

The gate to abundant life that the Jesus, the Good Shepherd,

is trying to lead us his sheep through.

It is the way we live our lives: to model our lives after Jesus.

To sacrifice and share with others, to have compassion and love.

To not just live for ourselves, but for the sake of others.

 

In its early days, Christianity was called “The Way”

Christians marked themselves by the way that they

acted and cared for each other and the world.

Some say that’s why the religion grew,

because Christians behaved different than the rest of the world.

They went through that narrow gate,

they followed the way that Jesus lived and died.

 

They followed the way of radical, sometimes uncomfortable love.

They had compassion for the hated, serving the ungrateful.

loving their enemy, welcoming the outcast.

They treated society’s throwaways as equals.

They made sure that their neighbor was fed before they were.

They vowed not to take another life, but to lay down their life for others.

This is the gate. This is Jesus way.

This is the way to abundant life, here, now for the whole world.

 

Jesus says the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.

We live in a world where many try to pass themselves off

as saviors and possessing the only ‘right way’ and plenty of people follow.

 

We have preachers who are so convinced of their hatred,

that they call God’s children abominations

and they actually use threats of violence against

gay people and transgender people to try and change them.

And they call this righteousness.

 

We also have people in political power who are leading others

down paths of hatred, who are actually proud of their sexist,

racist views and want more people to share them.

They are often openly hostile towards poor people,

and pass laws that are designed to punish instead of help.

 

We have people in religion and politics who only want to defend

Christianity and Christian rights and institutions

and they look down on Jews and Muslims

and even want to cause them harm.

 

We live in a world of thieves and bandits,

And so many of them claim to be followers of Jesus,

and I don’t doubt that they identify as Christians

but are they really following Jesus?

They don’t want to enter the sheepfold by the gate,

the gate of self-sacrifice and compassion.

The gate of welcome and service.

They only want to jump over the fence.

 

And to be honest, as God’s sheep, we too have often rejected the gate

and we have adapted too well to the world.

We have demanded safety for only ourselves,

We have helped create more privilege for the privileged,

We build our own castles and forget about others.

We try to claim our abundant life in isolation,

and not worry about God’s other beloved sheep.

 

We try to jump over the gate too.

and not travel the hard road that Jesus showed us.

The road of love and sacrifice.

 

But we have a shepherd who is kind.

Who sets out a table of love, and invites all people to it.

Who is merciful and kind, who will show us the gate,

and help us find the path of righteousness again and again.

Even if it takes two thousand years for us to get it.

We have a shepherd who leads us patiently

and who will even lay down his life for us.

 

That is the way that Jesus has shown us.

That is what Jesus is doing here.

That’s what he’s trying to say.

That is the way of abundant life.

That is the gate that Jesus wants us to go through.

The gate that will save this world.

The Other Side of the Boat

 John 21:1-19  Easter 3  April 23, 2023

 
I knew someone who was working in customer service

in the same job I was working at for a few years after college

at a large beauty supply business.

She seemed happy enough at the job.

But she always dreamed of opening her own hair dressing salon.

So she borrowed some money and she opened

up the salon. She was very hopeful,

but there were some problems early on.

Stuff that the business couldn’t recover from.

 

After one year, she had to abandon the business

and she came back to work at the beauty supply place

in another department. It was actually a good job.

A better job than she had before she left.

But she was depressed. She hated it the second time.

 

She had a taste of her dream, then she had to go

back to life as it was before.

Even though the job itself wasn’t a failure,

and she would have been happy to have had it before,

now, going back to her old life, it felt like a failure.

Like my husband always says,

“You can’t reheat the soufflé”

 

I’m guessing this is what Peter was feeling

when he and the others decided to go fishing that day.

 

Even though he and the rest of them had seen Christ risen,

it seems like they didn’t truly grasp the reality of it.

He didn’t seem to be around them like he was.

How would they go on without his leadership?

The whole thing which seemed so promising and exciting

was ended and they thought they had to go back to their previous lives.

 

So, even in the face of the miracle of resurrection,

Peter returns to the comfort of what he knew before.

Before he was called to be a disciple of Jesus. 

He goes back to the safety of his fishing boat.

The Great Catch
John August Swanson

And even if he was okay with it before,

it probably seemed like failure.

 

Like so many times in the scriptures,

Peter’s actions are a metaphor for the church. 

The body of believers gathered in Christ’s name.

Not necessarily one congregation or

denomination,

but the church universal.

 

God has given us the gift of resurrection.

The gift of forgiveness and new life.

But time and time again, we choose to go back to our old life.

We seem to boomerang back to the safe and secure

instead of the call of the gospel.

 

Ed Friedman is a well-known writer who taught

about congregational habits and life.

He called our world today a “Seatbelt Society”

He said that we are addicted to caution and safety.

And churches are part of that.

We believe the thing that will save us is more safety

having more data, that we will rescue the world by

refining our technique and processes having an air-tight plan

and doing what we’ve always done before.

We just keep doing the safe thing.

We keep going back to what we know. 

 

We see this in a lot of churches, don't we?

An obsession with security and doing everything

the way we’ve always done it because it worked once upon a time.

“Because we’ve always done it that way.”

“Because we’ve always done it that way.”

We hear this call much more clearly and

loudly than we do the call of the gospel.

It’s a human tendency that congregations fall into, that pastors fall into,

that bishops fall into, I fall into. I think we all do to some extent.

 

Although Ed Friedman died almost 20 years ago,

he said that this was what was doing the most damage

in congregations of all kinds. He was a rabbi and he saw it there too.

Too much reliance on past things, on sure things, on safety and security.

 

But he said what churches need more of is to

to let go of the old, to be able to change our way of thinking.

We don’t need more security,

what he thought we really needed was a sense of adventure.

 

What we really need to do

is to believe in, and rely on,

resurrection and forgiveness of God.

Not to just give it lip service,

but to actually believe in it and act on it.

To believe that no matter how much

we might fail miserably, or how off the rails

things might go, there is forgiveness.

There is new life after death.

 

So, Peter and the disciples have seen

Jesus risen from the dead, just like he promised them.

They’ve seen God have victory over death.

They have seen the possibility of new life with their own eyes.

 

But he and the other disciples all go back to

their previous ways and what they

knew had worked before: Fishing.

But it really isn’t working.

They catch nothing.

 

But in comes Jesus,

he has risen from the dead and he’s not

just going to let them go back to the same old

things again.

 

He says to them, “Children, you have no fish do you?”

It’s not working out is it?

And they say to him, “No.”

And he tells them: do something different.

Just a little different at least to get them started.

Put that net to the right side of the boat instead.

Do something different.

 

And then there was fish.

And this is just the first step in

the new life that Jesus is calling them to.

 

We here at Christ Lutheran are dabbling

in the other side of the boat lately.

It takes our own courage and willingness to do it,

but mostly it takes faith.

Faith in resurrection. Faith in forgiveness.

Faith in new life.

 

Life is better on the “other side” of the boat.

The side we haven’t always tried before.

Things will not always be perfect.

Sometimes we will fail miserably.

But there is where we truly know the resurrection.

This is where we don’t rely on the same routine.

This is where Jesus leads our lives.

 

Let’s not go back to our old life again.

let’s take a risk and follow the risen Christ.

 

Forgiveness is our Business

John 20: 19-31 
Easter 2 
April 16, 2023

By Faith Not Sight
Alix Beaujour

 

The Resurrected Christ pays a visit to the disciples this week.

They are hiding together behind a locked door in fear.

And Jesus enters their locked room.

 

We read this gospel lesson every year on

the second Sunday of Easter and most of the time

we focus our time on Thomas and his doubt.

Now, I happen to like Thomas.

He left that locked room when no one else would.

He went out to get everyone coffee or lunch

or to try and find Jesus or whatever he was doing.

He was the brave one in the group.

He just happened to miss all the action.

And for the record, I don’t have a problem with his doubt at all.

I think doubt is perfectly normal in the course of our faith life.

But we can talk about him another year.

Because we do talk about him most every year.

And in all the hubbub about Thomas, we often of miss

a very important thing here:

The resurrected Jesus came to the

disciples and gave them a mission.

He says it plainly to the disciples,

“Peace be with you, As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

 

Jesus has returned to give

the disciples peace in their fear,

to give them the presence of the Holy Spirit

And at this point in the narrative,

he also gives them a clear mission:

 

If you forgive the sins of any,

their sins have been forgiven them;

if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained.

 

For a long time many in the church have believed-

or acted at least – that Jesus sends

our churches out primarily for two things:

For recruitment – so we can

increase the number of Christians in the world

And/or to tell people about

the rules and about morality –

and to scold people for getting it wrong.

 

Those are noble causes.

But neither of them are

what Jesus sends the disciples to do.

here at this very important moment after his resurrection.

He doesn’t say to the disciples,

“make sure you get a lot of new members,

OR make sure you teach

everyone what the rules are.”

 

Jesus sends the disciples out into

the world with one main purpose:

That is forgiveness.

“as the Father has sent Me, I also send you." He says,

"Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any,

their sins have been forgiven them;

if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained."

Forgiveness. This is what Jesus

sends the disciples out to do.

To forgive one another and to let others

know about God’s forgiveness.

This is Jesus’s gift to his disciples

and this is the disciples gift to the world.

And this is what we uniquely have to offer.

 

There is an Episcopal priest named Robert Capon

who writes wonderful thing

mostly about Jesus’ parables. He writes:

The world is in the morality and

rules business and they succeed at that.

What the world cannot get right,

however, is the forgiveness business –

and that, of course, is the church's real job.

She is in the world to deal with the Sin

which the world can't turn off or escape from.

She is not in the business of telling the world what's

right and wrong so that it can do good and avoid evil.

She is in the business of offering— to a world

which knows all about that tiresome subject –

forgiveness for its chronic unwillingness to take its own advice.

 

But the minute she even hints that morals, and not forgiveness,

is the name of her game, she instantly corrupts

the Gospel and runs headlong into blatant nonsense.

The church becomes, not Ms. Forgiven Sinner, but Ms. Right.

Christianity becomes the good guys in here 

versus the bad guys out there. Which, of course, is pure tripe.

The church is nothing but the world under the sign of baptism.

 

On this second Sunday of Easter, we and the disciples

are sent to the world to tell it of God’s forgiveness.

We are sent to act out own forgiveness of others.

We are sent to forgive.

And why?  Because we believe in the Resurrection.

Not just in the stark fact that Jesus was raised from the dead.

But we believe that the Resurrection of Jesus 

was just one big example of the new life that God offers the whole world.

 

The Resurrection tells us that God is not spending time

writing down when we’ve been naughty and when

we’ve been nice.

God is not saving up and will make us pay for them one day—

The Resurrection says that if God could forgive

the crucifixion, God can forgive anything.

 

We believe in the Resurrection which tells us

that God won’t check the list twice or once,

God has thrown out the list all together.

Resurrection tells us that no matter what has taken place,

God can and will create New Life.

God will forgive the old and make the new.

No matter how bad it has gotten, God will redeem the world.

 

And that is Forgiveness.  That is what the church is sent out for.

Because we believe that Christ is risen,

we believe that redemption is possible in all situations.

For decades, people suffered under the

horrible racist oppression of Apartheid in South Africa. 

The white government sanctioned stiff segregation, kidnappings,

killing and torture for anyone who rebelled against it.

 

After being released after 30 years in prison, once in power,

Nelson Mandela did not call for retaliation and 

uprising against the white government oppressors.

Although no one could have blamed him.

He didn’t even call for a Nuremburg type trial

like after WW 2 that ended in hangings –

although they may have deserved it.

With Bishop Desmond Tutu’s help,

he called for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

 

In this commission,

people would admit to being a party to the oppression,

then they would listen to the stories of the

horror told by the victims. In turn, they would be forgiven.

 

This commission did its work for two years.

It hasn’t been perfect in South Africa,

after decades of oppression, there is still

rampant inequality, poverty, and as a result, crime,

but there has been a noticeable absence of

bloody, civil wars which have arisen in other places in Africa.

There has not been an attempt

at ethnic cleansing which certainly could have happened.

And  there is a presence of justice.

Black people and white people are working together.

There is hope for that nation.

 

Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Episcopal

 archbishop who lead the commission:

“Forgiveness is an act of much hope and not despair.

It is to hope in the essential goodness of people

and to have faith in their potential to change.

It is to bet on that possibility.

Forgiveness, is not opposed to justice,
especially if it is not punitive justice, but restorative justice,
justice that does not seek primarily to punish the perpetrator, to hit out,
but looks to heal a breach, to restore a social equilibrium
that the atrocity or misdeed has disturbed.

Ultimately there is no future without forgiveness."

Jesus has come into the room. The pain is still visible,

the crucifixion has not been forgotten and swept under the table.

The wounds are still there for Thomas to see and put his fingers in. 

But Christ still comes with a word of forgiveness.

“Receive the Holy Spirit. 

If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them;

if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

The ELCA’s  former presiding Bishop, Mark Hanson asked:

“Do you think by that Jesus could possibly mean

that if I fail to tell my neighbor, my colleague at work,

my son or my daughter,

the Good News that God in Christ forgives you,

then their sins now belong to me?”

It’s an interesting way to look at what Jesus said.

 

Forgiveness is what we are sent out to share with the world.

God’s forgiveness and our own forgiveness.

Forgiveness is new beginnings. Forgiveness is hope for the future. 

Forgiveness means that the past won’t hold us back.
Forgiveness means relationships can start again.
Forgiveness means that life can start again.
Forgiveness is hope for all of God’s people.

When we share forgiveness with a friend or a relative

or with a stranger, or an enemy,

or with those who have done us harm –

it is the Resurrection of Christ made real to the world.

It is the hope and promise of New Life.

 

Resurrection is God’s gift to us.

Resurrection is forgiveness.

Forgiveness is our business