Key Verses:

Acts 3:19 - “Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, …”

1 John 3:4-7 - “Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.”

Luke 24: 46-48 - “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

Message

“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”[1]

He is Risen!

R: He is Risen Indeed.

Let us pray.

“May the meditations of my heart and the words of my mouth be pleasing unto you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”[2]

Amen.

Good evening. Today we continue our celebration of the Easter season as we carry along our way. We encounter again in the gospel lesson this week, a scene of the risen Lord coming into the very presence of the disciples and apostles. Last week it was about Thomas Didymus, this week is a collective meeting with instructions and confirmation, but also a core lesson to be brought out. But before I get into more on the particulars of the lessons, let me get into the thread that I think weaves them together.

To me this is two words: Repentance and Forgiveness

We hear these words specifically in the reading from Acts and in the Gospel lesson, but it is also indirectly within the epistle from John and in the Psalm. But do we understand these words? I ask this because I too many times and in too many places see them misused or abused. Perhaps we ought to know what these words actually mean before we presume to understand what the lessons are telling us this week.

Let’s start with the first word: repentance. For me I always like going back to the original language of the scripture to get a sense of the word being used. Luke, being a Greco-Roman physician was most likely writing in Greek, and we have solid manuscripts in Greek for both his gospel and for his book on the Acts of the Apostles.[3] So what is the actual word we render “repentance” or “repent”, in Greek? Well in the gospel for “repentance” the Greek word is metanoian and in Acts, it is rendered as metanosoate. The root of both, is simply metanoia, often simply stated as “changing one’s mind” or “to change one’s mind”.[4] This is a word that is not entirely unfamiliar for us in English and is used occasionally in such publications as Rolling Stone or Forbes.[5] According to dictionary.com this word means, “a profound, usually spiritual, transformation; conversion.”[6] A common analogy used for the meaning of this concept is taken directly out of nature/creation in what happens when a caterpillar is transformed in to a butterfly or a moth, called in biology metamorphosis, which is drawn from the same root word. So, when Christ in the gospel lesson, and Peter in the lesson from Acts, are speaking they are calling for a “changing of mind, that results in a fundamental transformation of our way of life”. That is what repenting and repentance is about.

The other word here is forgiveness. Again, let’s return to the Greek. Here for the gospel lesson the Greek that is translated as “forgiveness of sins” is aphesin amartion. Literally translated is “leave of sins”, but perhaps better verbs might be “remission” [7] or “release”. So, forgiveness is at its core about a release, remission, a “leaving” of sins. If you think a bit more on this, you will soon come to realize that “repentance” and “forgiveness” are a bit redundant. Because, what are we to “repent” from? What are we to be forgiven of? Answer: our sins. Both of these concepts are all about how we deal with sin. Thus, we now have third word we need to make sure we have a clear understanding of: sin.

What, then, is sin? Now this seems like I am going down a rabbit hole of things that you probably thought you had a good handle on, but please bear with me. Again, let’s go to the Greek in all three of our New Testament lessons today. We’ve already addressed it in the gospel lesson, but in John’s first epistle it is again amartion and in Acts it is amartias. From the root of this, you might gather that this has something to do with being “marred” as in “damaged or spoiled to a certain extent; made less perfect, attractive, useful, etc.” or “disfigured or defaced, as by scratches, nicks, scars, or discoloration.”[8] And to an extent that is getting at it. But to get a true sense of this, we probably need to go back to our Psalm, which was written in Hebrew, and try to understand this concept that is “sin”. Now while I can have a chance at navigating Greek, thanks to being an engineer that has seen a math equation with a few Phis or Omegas thrown in for good measure, Hebrew escapes me. That said, a Methodist pastor that I met in DC, Jason Micheli, provides a detailed analysis of this concept drawing from the Hebrew as well as numerous preeminent theologians such as Karl Barth, Robert Jenson, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others. As he offers in a recent post, “As a seventeen-year-old convert to the faith, I was taught that sin is ‘missing the mark.’ It was not until much later I realized how problematic it is that such a definition leaves God invisibly assumed.”[9] He goes on to say that, “[a]ccording to Karl Barth, the only possible definition of sin is that it is what God does not want done.” “… but the scriptures attest quite thoroughly that there are a good many deeds God does not want done.”[10] He boils it all down to the reality that “sin is idolatry.”[11] It’s taking other things as more important than God, in direct violation of the first commandment. As Jason puts it “[t]o say that to sin is to ‘miss the mark’, misses the mark. All sin is unbelief and idolatry; it’s a turning away from what the true and living God wants, to whatever else might make us more than a mere creature over and against our fellow creatures.”[12] He goes on to say that, “[j]ust as sin is not an ethical category [(it’s a theological category)], sin’s opposite is not morality but faith.”[13]

So, what does all this have to do with today’s lessons, or more importantly, the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ (aka the season of Easter)? Well, it is smack dab in the center of things. As stated in our gospel lesson today, “[t]hus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”[14] Jesus himself makes it clear that sin, our repentance, and forgiveness are at the very essence of his big “G” gospel in the world. This thing we call the Church, which is called to witness Christ, is not supposed to be a shiny city on a hill, nor a perfect court of kings and queens, emperors and empresses, or presidents or other civic leaders, nor is it a place of those that self-justify themselves as “saved” and “having a personal relationship with Jesus” as if that is a badge of honor. No, the Church, is first and foremost a hospital, a place where we are laid out plainly, our wounds for all to see. It’s a place where we first and always reckon with the fact we are idolaters and false, and rank with unbelief so that we can be the vessels ready to receive Christ and his grace and hope through faith. The Church needs to be a place to enable metnoia to happen on God’s terms, not ours. And where we are quicker to forgive before we are forgiven. We are to follow Christ’s example so that we do “what is right ([forgiving ourselves and those around us]) … just as he is righteous.”[15] We are people who lean into faith, not just mere morality, even as we must do both. We know that we must “metanoia therefore, and turn to God so that [our] amartion may be wiped out.”[16]

How do we do this? As Jason offers in his post, borrowing from Karl Barth, this is an “impossible possibility” that “does not lie in the possible possibility of the law, but in the impossible possibility of faith.”[17] It relies on the thing that is given to us to thwart our sin, to enable us to repent and receive our leave from our sins: faith. And this is the heart of the paradox that we must come to in our journeys with God. His call to us, his utter wooing of us, is for us to give up and give in to him and his love for us. That is what faith is about. It is about God and his righteousness over and against any self-righteousness we might pretend to have in this life, whether as a person or as a people or even as a nation.

This, then, brings me to a dialogue that I had this week as I prepared today’s sermon. A bible study partner friend posited on a social media site, the following question: “Isaiah 26:2 ‘Open the gates that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in.’ So, who is this righteous nation?”

Here was my response, which may require some after service reading/consideration on your part, but seems utterly relevant to both today’s lessons as well as the time and place we are living in: “…, this set of verses from Romans comes to mind in response to your post: ‘For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.’[18] The ‘righteous nation’ is the one which humbles itself through, with, and in Christ: his life, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. That ‘nation’ is what Jesus called ‘the kingdom of God.’ For those of us who abide by the two kingdoms principle, we are both citizens (here, now, and always) of our earthly dominion (in this case the USA, NYS, St. Lawrence County, etc.) as well as this heavenly kingdom. It is this [latter, preeminent] kingdom, the one that is God, that we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’[19]

We will not have, anywhere, a fully ‘righteous nation’ or much more of a shadow of one, until the work of his grace, as described in the latter two chapters of Revelation come to pass, here on earth, as a redemption and renewal of creation for all times and all places.[20] Could we and should we do more in the meantime? Certainly. Do we in the US have particular and weighty sins to bear? Absolutely. Does that mean that all is lost, or that there are not also redemptive aspects of who we are as an earthly domain? No, not at all. There is much good we can and often do in the world, even as the headlines sell you on us at our worst. It doesn’t mean we get off the hook for our worst, but we need to be careful to not go too far and forget who established things like the liberal international order in the first place, or the reality that we have a society that is so hyper-critical that makes it exceptionally hard to hide or screen us at our worst, or that while imperfect, we’ve aided in the development of numerous democratic, justice, and rule of law efforts in countries throughout the world. We are lost, no question, but that being lost doesn’t mean we don’t do anything good. But we can’t and shouldn’t get a messiah complex over our earthly goodness, to the degree we have it, because we cannot and will never be the ‘righteous nation’ of our own doing.”

To conclude, may we recognize and recompense with the realty that we need repentance, we need forgiveness and we need “leave from” our sins. This is true no more or less for ourselves as individuals, ourselves as neighbors and communities, ourselves as states and nations, and ourselves as a species on Earth. May we earnestly, as a result of a metanoia, do as Christ asks us to do today, through our mind, voices, and actions, to proclaim “repentance and forgiveness of our sins.”[21]

Amen.

[1] 1 Corinthians 1:3

[2] Psalm 19:14

[3] While we do not have originals, we have early papyri that are attributable to Luke in the second century AD/CE.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanoia_(theology), accessed on 12 April 2024

[5] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/metanoia, accessed on 12 April 2024; Cassady Rosenblum, Rolling Stone, 28 June 2022 and Elizabeth Edwards, Forbes, 12 October 2021

[6] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/metanoia, accessed on 12 April 2024

[7] https://biblicalprospector.blogspot.com/2010/04/remission-of-sins.html

[8] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/marred, accessed on 12 April 2024

[9] https://jasonmicheli.substack.com/p/christians-do-not-sin, accessed on 12 April 2024

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Luke 24: 46-48

[15] Cf. 1 John 3:7

[16] Cf. Acts 3:19

[17] https://jasonmicheli.substack.com/p/christians-do-not-sin, accessed on 12 April 2024