Reflections on "Gifts You Can't Buy at the Store: Forgiveness" Colossians 3: 12-17; Jeremiah 31: 31-34

Getting near the end of the series.  I have noticed that preaching without my notes in front of me on the pulpit has impacted my style a little bit.  I think I have always had good eye contact, but it is much better now.  It also makes the transition to the notes a bit harder.  

I have tried doing three specific points the last couple of sermons (in speech tournament jargon from high school that would be a "three-point ramble!").  not sure if it helps the sermon or not.  

I liked this sermon.  I did reflect later if I should have made a biblical rationale for Move 2 a bit more obvious.  Sometimes the line between pop psychology and preaching can get blurred.  I think forgiving ourselves is a natural extension of the biblical note that God forgives us, so we ought to do the same.

This sermon left out repentance.  I did that on purpose to give a clear argument about God's forgiveness without cluttering it up with other things that could make forgiveness seem conditional. But, to take God's forgiveness and not have it change how we are living our lives is probably not the best response to God's forgiveness!

“Gifts You Can't Buy at the Store: Forgiveness” 1st Sunday of Christmas; FPC, Troy; December 30, 2012; Colossians 3: 12-17; Jeremiah 31: 31-34

Introduction: Did you get some gifts? Gifts given out of love.

God gives us the gift of forgiveness out of love.

Move 1: God forgives

a. “Christ the Savior is born; Christ the Savior is born”

1. not Christ the Superhero.
2. Not Christ the great leader.
3. Not Christ the star athlete
4. Christ the Savior. The one who saves us, who save the world, from our sinfulness

b. The prophet Jeremiah shares the word of the Lord to God's people generations before Christ is born.

1. “Surely the day is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sins no more.”
2. The day has arrived.
3. The baby in Bethlehem brings to us from God the gift of forgiveness.

Move 2: Share the gift of forgiveness with ourselves

a. How much of our lives are spent dealing with what we call “baggage” these days.

1. If I had done this, my life would have been different.
2. If I had not done that, my kids' lives would have been so much better.
3. If we do not forgive ourselves, we hold ourselves to a higher standard than God does.

b. By not forgiving ourselves, we make the world about us.

1. Everything revolves around what we have done or not done.
2. Give it up.
3. Forgive yourself.

Move 3: Share God's gift of forgiveness with others.

a. In the passage to the Colossians, Paul tries to describe for the early Christians what it would be like to live lives that would be pleasing to God.

1. As God's chosen ones, “Forgive each other.”
2. Simple enough.
3. But Paul goes on to write, “just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”
4. The gift of forgiveness demands the giving of forgiveness.
5. As followers of Christ, we must (note the must) be people who respond to God's forgiveness by forgiving.

b. Forgiveness frees us.

1. Nelson Mandela. A friend of mine who knows him well said, "Mr. Mandela, when you were released from prison, when you were let out of that cell block, you marched across the yard to the gates of the prison. I got my daughter up in the middle of the night to see the scene. As you were marching across the courtyard, the camera zeroed in on your face and I'll never forget your face. It was full of anger and hatred, animosity. I have never seen so much anger and so much hatred written on a man's face. That's not the Nelson Mandela I know today."

Mandela said, "It's interesting you should say that because as I left the prison block and marched across the courtyard, I thought to myself, 'They're letting me go, but everything that was important is taken from me. My cause is dead.'" He did not know that it was not dead. He had been kept in solitary confinement. He did not know he had become a folk hero. "My cause is dead," he said. "My wife, they have taken her from me. My friends have been put to death. Everything and everybody that means anything to me, they've taken away. It's all gone and I hated them for it. Then I remembered what Jesus said about forgiveness and God spoke to me and said, "Nelson, for twenty-seven years you were their prisoner but you were always a free man. Don't let them turn you into a free man only to make you into their prisoner.' And I realized the importance of forgiveness." Tony Campolo, “the hope that Came from Faith,” sermon and interview broadcast, Chicago Sunday Evening Club 30 Good Minutes, November 7, 1999. www.csec.org.

1.

2. Nevada Barr, in her book Seeking Enlightenment Hat by Hat (20, 21), comments on the passage where Jesus tells the disciples that if they forgive, then sins are forgiven. If they do not forgive, the sins are retained. “to me it sounded not as if a power to forgive or not to forgive was being bestowed but rather the apostles were being reminded, perhaps warned, that every transgression they did not forgive would be retained. Retained by them, by us, by me. Carried by me, fed by me, watered, hauled from place to place by me. Or I could forgive and be free….I realized what had been alive and biting was not the original evil, but my oft-rehearsed, dearly held memory of evil”

3. forgiveness frees the person being forgiven and the it frees the person who forgives.

Move 4: Do not wait to give the gift of forgiveness.

a. pat Conroy, south of Beach: Chad Rutledge, the wealthy Charleston son has hurt Trevor and Niles, two of the orphans. When Chad asks forgiveness, Sheba, Trevor's sister, says Leo King has to forgive him first. Leo ponders forgiveness: “ 'Father,' I[Leo] asked, 'do I have to forgive Chad tonight? Or can I go on hating him for another month or two?' 'Here's what yo don't know about time, son,' Father said. 'It moves funny and it's hard to pin down. Occasionally time offers you a hundred opportunities to do the right thing. Sometimes it give you only one chance. You've got one chance here. I wouldn't let it slip out of your hands.'” (401)

b. We found the box at the very back of the bottom shelf of a basement storage area.

“Wonder what’s in there?” we asked as we blew the dust off the unmarked cardboard box.

My brother-in-law pried back the cardboard flaps to find Christmas gifts from 1954, still wrapped. Labels indicated that the presents were for my husband’s parents and his older brother—the only sibling born at the time—but they had never been opened.

“Huh,” my husband said. “These must be from the year of “the falling out.”

The gifts were from family members that I had heard about but never met, because after “the falling out” the relationship had never healed properly and soon was irrevocably broken. “The falling out” in 1954 had obviously happened at some point between the delivery of the presents and Christmas Day.

“What did they fight about?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” my husband said.

We looked down on 57 years festering resentment stored up in a dust-covered box. What’s more, the family had moved in 1965, so they had packed up this box 11 years later and moved it from one house to another.

“What should we do with them?” I asked.

“It’s about time we opened them,” my brother-in-law said.

We found two shirts for my father-in-law, a dressing gown for my mother-in-law and a little shirt and pant set for the then 2-year-old brother. Of all the poignant moments that we experienced when we cleaned out my mother-in-law’s house, that stays with me as the saddest.

*http://scienceandstory.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/forgiveness-at-christmas/)

Conclusion: Christ the Savior has given God's gift of forgiveness. Receive it. Give it.