Your Sins Are Remembered No More; You're Free!
Sermon
A Word That Sets Free
First Lesson Sermons For Sundays After Pentecost (Last Third) Cycle C
Have you ever felt weighed down by your sins and shortcomings? Have you ever despaired over your ability to live up to expectations -- God's expectations, society's expectations, your own self-expectations? Do you wish that you could have a fresh start? The Prophet Jeremiah was proclaiming a Word to sinful, insecure people like us, to people whose confidence in the future had been badly shaken.
Have you ever made a big mistake in your life, a mistake for which you paid for many years? Maybe you are still paying for those mistakes. That was the situation of the ancient Hebrews in Jeremiah's day. They were a conquered people, both the Northern Kingdom of Israel (by Assyria) and the Southern Kingdom of Judah (by the Babylonians). They had come to understand their present political plight as a consequence of their sin (Jeremiah 2; 25:1-14).1
When you are in a mess, when life is not turning out as you had hoped it would, and you feel that it is your fault, life can be a living hell. The memories of what you have done wrong to put yourself in the situation you are in do not die. They are brought to the fore daily. Perhaps you are still making those same mistakes.
For the addict who has lost family, job, and hope because of that addiction, the sins of the past are still alive. The patterns of addiction continue. The partners in a shattered marriage relationship, one destroyed by selfish behavior and a failure to forgive, are still living with the consequences of such behavior. So are their children. Neglectful parents and their children bear the scars of such parental neglect. Our nation still bears the scars of our earlier behaviors, of slavery and of sexism. (Those behaviors are still transpiring.)
How is it with you? Have I named any of the "exiles" in which you find yourself? Are you castigating yourself for any of these indiscretions? Do they explain your present unhappiness? I certainly have named one, when I spoke of the scars of slavery and sexism. These social maladies plague our nation, and so they plague you and me to this very day.
All of us are plagued by our mistakes of the past in our spiritual lives. Who of us here today has no spiritual flaws, no doubts, no skeletons in the closet? Certainly I am not innocent. Old sloppy habits of prayer (or the lack of it), regrets about moral lapses (many when we were younger), have a way of haunting you in later years.
We really are "hurting dudes." Like the Hebrew exiles we are a long way from home (from where we should be in life). This community, this nation, you and I are haunted by mistakes of the past. In ministering to our despair, God has Jeremiah tell us about a fresh start he is going to give us, a new covenant that he will create (Jeremiah 31:31). And in that new covenant, the one that we Christians believe has been instituted by Christ, God will forgive our iniquity and remember our sin no more (v. 34)! God no longer remembers the sin that you and I commit. He remembers your failures no more.
Forgiveness is a beautiful reality. Its dictionary meaning connotes pardon and giving up resentment. In the languages in which the Bible was written, Hebrew and Greek, forgiveness literally means "sending away" (aphesis and selichah) or "lifting away" (nasa) and "covering" (kaphar). Our mistakes and sins are sent away or covered. Is that not what happens when you are forgiven? Your mistakes do not count anymore; they are pardoned or overlooked.
Jeremiah adds one other nuance in our First Lesson. Yahweh says that he will remember our sin no more (v. 34). The errors of the past are forgotten and forgiven.
Forgive and forget. Can you really do it? Of course we forgive the wrongs done to us. That is the Christian way. But do you really forget the indiscretion? Do you not keep your eye on the one you forgave, just in case, even if you sincerely forgave them? On this side of the Fall into sin, only a "rube" acts like the indiscretion done to you did not happen. Even when you forgive yourself for a bad decision or a bad habit, you do not forget it. Your memories are scarred by it. That is precisely why you and I, why our society, is in such bondage. We cannot get past our bad memories.
Oh, but that is not the way that God forgives. He wipes the slate clean! God remembers your sin and my sin no more. We really are forgiven. Our sins are forgotten!
Can you feel how freeing this Word is? The sins of the past, the misdeeds of the past, and the bad habits that may still be plaguing you, God has forgotten them. And if God has forgotten them, all those wrongs do not have ultimate meaning any more. They have no eternal significance. If God has forgotten them, perhaps you and I can too.
What a liberating Word! All the burdens which have worn you down, all the regrets, all the suspicions, all the bad habits do not count anymore. They do not exist in the memory of God.
Think of it: When you forget something, it no longer exists for you. An ancestor forgotten, remembered by no one, no longer exerts a meaningful impact among the living. A great recipe forgotten no longer can make mealtime better. A friend forgotten is no longer a friend (and never really was). And a pain which is forgotten is no longer painful.
That is the way our sins are with God. All the things that have caused you pain, all the dead ends you have had in your life, they do not exist for God anymore. They do not exist, because they were not made by God, and so we might say that they and all sin are "non-being," nothingness.2 Why, then, do you keep on clinging to the bad memories of the past, to the regrets, to the suspicions, to the bad habits? God has forgotten them; you can too!
Are you concerned about what other people or what society says about you, what your image in the community is? That does not matter either. God does not count such views. He has forgotten them along with the sins you have committed.
What a freeing Word! All the behaviors and memories or the slanderous impressions others have of you, that have held you captive, no longer matter. Even more glorious is that we do not have to do anything to earn this kind of forgiveness. It is a free gift of God!
I could just end the sermon at this point, and let you reflect on the goodness of God, and how his love for you has set you free from all the old claims that have enslaved you. But Jeremiah did not stop at that point, and so I will not either.
Besides proclaiming that God would no longer remember the Hebrews' and our sin in God's Name, Jeremiah also proclaimed that the new covenant made by Yahweh would be one in which he would put his Law within us, write it in our hearts. What does this have to do with you and me and God's blessed forgetfulness?
Sometimes when God's forgiving love gets stressed, people say that it just encourages permissiveness. Such people claim that too much stress on God forgetting our sin may send a message that we can go out and sin, since it will be forgiven anyway. The sixteenth-century reformer Martin Luther had a great response. He wrote:
For our sins are not forgiven with the design that we should continue to commit sin, but that we should cease from it. Otherwise it would more justly be called, not forgiveness of sin, but permission to sin.3
Jeremiah's reflections on the Law that God has written in our hearts serve to underline Luther's claim that God's forgiveness has not given us permission to sin. "But wait a minute," you say. "I thought that forgiveness was by grace, that we are free from the Law" (see Galatians 3:10-12).
Recall that Jeremiah is talking about a new covenant, which we Christians believe is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Do not forget what Jesus says about the Law of God. He claims that he did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17-19). If Jesus fulfils the Law, and we are to read Jeremiah as pointing to Christ, then when Jeremiah says that God will put his Law in us, this must also be seen as a prophecy of what will happen to us in Christ. To say that God puts the Law in us, and since the Law is fulfilled by Christ, it seems that we can read our First Lesson as a prophecy of Christ (the fulfillment of the Law) living in us.
The New Testament refers to Christ taking up residence in the believer. Paul says that Christ is within him (Galatians 2:20), that Christ dwells in our hearts (Ephesians 3:17). Martin Luther picked up this theme to explain why salvation by grace does not lead to a lackadaisical attitude to Christian living. He spoke of Christ living in us, so intimately that Christ and our conscience become one. Living in us, Christ abolishes the demands of the Law along with sin and death, just as he did on the Cross. All the evils that torment and afflict us are absorbed by him.
Of course when Christ comes and lives in us he comes with all the marvelous characteristics he has. He brings to us his grace, his righteousness, and his perfection in fulfilling God's Law. Those good qualities become part of us, part of who we are.4 Get that, Christ's fulfillment of the Law lives in you, Christian. In that sense, the Law of God is within you, written on your heart.
Elsewhere Luther calls this relationship that believers have with Jesus when they are saved (justified) by grace the "blessed exchange." His words are powerful and often quoted. Here is how he put it:
The third incomparable benefit of faith is that it unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united with her bridegroom. By this mystery, as the Apostle teaches, Christ and the soul become one flesh [Ephesians 5:31-32]. And if they are one flesh and there is between them a true marriage -- indeed the most perfect of all marriages, since human marriages are but poor examples of this one true marriage -- it follows that everything they have they hold in common, the good as well as the evil. Accordingly the believing soul can boast of and glory in whatever Christ has as though it were its own, and whatever the soul has Christ claims as His own.5
Luther says that when we are forgiven by God (justified by grace) it is like getting married to Jesus. In a good marriage the partners share everything in common. Those of you who have been happily married have some sense of how the "blessed exchange," the sharing that goes on between spouses, changes lives. The lovers in a long-time relationship are not the same persons they were when they first fell in love. Could you say that love has made them forget themselves? That is God's style for setting us free and changing lives.
I have a friend who talks of his marriage this way. He says that after 27 years of life together with his wife, sometimes he catches himself thinking or acting in ways he never did before they met nearly three decades ago. He says that when he thinks more about those behaviors, he realizes that his new cautiousness is really an emulation of her style. Not that he is really imitating his wife self-consciously, but he says that he can see her style and thought patterns in what he is doing. It is not "her" style that he is embodying in those instances. It is now he. Her style has rubbed off on him.
Likewise when he observes his wife's style in recent years, he notes that she is not always so cautious in expressing herself as she was typically. Sometimes she speaks her mind publicly. It is almost like he can see himself in her in those instances. But his wife is not imitating him. It is just that some of his qualities have begun to get in her blood. Close human relationships work that way. They change us.
We return now to the idea that we have been married to Jesus in faith. This is the new covenant about which Jeremiah spoke. God has written his Law on our hearts by wedding us to his Son, the One who perfectly fulfilled the Law. Jesus' characteristics, his righteousness, his love and his ability to fulfill the Law, are rubbing off on you and me.
How long have you been a Christian? How long have you known Jesus? Over the years his passion for the Law has gotten to you. Just as he fulfills the Law without anybody having to teach him how to do it, so you and I have the Law in our guts. The real you and me who want to please Jesus, our divine spouse, also love keeping God's commands. Jeremiah promised it would happen.
Remember that I talked about how good marriage relationships change you? It is obvious that our new covenant relationship with the Messiah, getting married to Jesus, changes us. The sinner in me hates the Law. I am selfish and want to do my thing. But in that marriage with Jesus, now the Law is in me, who I am.
Sometimes when I think of my marriage, I am so changed that I have almost forgotten who I was before my wife and I met. God's love is more powerful than that. He not only forgives our sin and changes you and me so much that we can hardly remember who we were before He came into our lives, but also he even forgot the old destructive way we used to be.
Is not God's love breathtaking? In forgetting our sin, the Lord sets you and me free. He changes us so much that we begin to forget the old self-destructive people we used to be. Remember that new covenant word the next time that you are depressed about life, friends. The old behaviors and attitudes that have haunted you are remembered no more. As you get wrapped up in Jesus' life, in the relationship he has with you and as his Law gets written on your heart, you will begin to forget the old wounds and destructive behaviors too. God's love truly is miraculous! It sets us free from what has been haunting our lives.
____________
1. There is much scholarly debate over whether the prophecy in the First Lesson and others in Chapters 30-33 were directed to Israel or to Judah. Many scholars believe that subsequent editing led to the application of these prophecies to both. See Claus Westermann, Handbook to the Old Testament, trans. and ed. Robert H. Boyd (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1976), pp. 164-165; Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), pp. 350-352, 353-354. Childs' reflections imply that insofar as the process of composition of the book of Jeremiah may have involved revising Jeremiah's original prophecy to apply to another situation, so what I am doing in this sermon, applying Jeremiah's prophecy to twenty-first-century Christians, is appropriate.
2. For this idea of sin as nothingness, I am indebted to Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. IV/1, pp. 408ff.
3. Martin Luther, Exhortation to Live in the Spirit Since We Have Become the Children of God, Sons and Heirs (n.d.), in Sermons of Martin Luther, Vol. VIII, pp. 168-169.
4. Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1531/1535), in Luther's Works, Vol. 26, pp. 166-168.
5. Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (1520), in Luther's Works, Vol. 31, p. 351.
Have you ever made a big mistake in your life, a mistake for which you paid for many years? Maybe you are still paying for those mistakes. That was the situation of the ancient Hebrews in Jeremiah's day. They were a conquered people, both the Northern Kingdom of Israel (by Assyria) and the Southern Kingdom of Judah (by the Babylonians). They had come to understand their present political plight as a consequence of their sin (Jeremiah 2; 25:1-14).1
When you are in a mess, when life is not turning out as you had hoped it would, and you feel that it is your fault, life can be a living hell. The memories of what you have done wrong to put yourself in the situation you are in do not die. They are brought to the fore daily. Perhaps you are still making those same mistakes.
For the addict who has lost family, job, and hope because of that addiction, the sins of the past are still alive. The patterns of addiction continue. The partners in a shattered marriage relationship, one destroyed by selfish behavior and a failure to forgive, are still living with the consequences of such behavior. So are their children. Neglectful parents and their children bear the scars of such parental neglect. Our nation still bears the scars of our earlier behaviors, of slavery and of sexism. (Those behaviors are still transpiring.)
How is it with you? Have I named any of the "exiles" in which you find yourself? Are you castigating yourself for any of these indiscretions? Do they explain your present unhappiness? I certainly have named one, when I spoke of the scars of slavery and sexism. These social maladies plague our nation, and so they plague you and me to this very day.
All of us are plagued by our mistakes of the past in our spiritual lives. Who of us here today has no spiritual flaws, no doubts, no skeletons in the closet? Certainly I am not innocent. Old sloppy habits of prayer (or the lack of it), regrets about moral lapses (many when we were younger), have a way of haunting you in later years.
We really are "hurting dudes." Like the Hebrew exiles we are a long way from home (from where we should be in life). This community, this nation, you and I are haunted by mistakes of the past. In ministering to our despair, God has Jeremiah tell us about a fresh start he is going to give us, a new covenant that he will create (Jeremiah 31:31). And in that new covenant, the one that we Christians believe has been instituted by Christ, God will forgive our iniquity and remember our sin no more (v. 34)! God no longer remembers the sin that you and I commit. He remembers your failures no more.
Forgiveness is a beautiful reality. Its dictionary meaning connotes pardon and giving up resentment. In the languages in which the Bible was written, Hebrew and Greek, forgiveness literally means "sending away" (aphesis and selichah) or "lifting away" (nasa) and "covering" (kaphar). Our mistakes and sins are sent away or covered. Is that not what happens when you are forgiven? Your mistakes do not count anymore; they are pardoned or overlooked.
Jeremiah adds one other nuance in our First Lesson. Yahweh says that he will remember our sin no more (v. 34). The errors of the past are forgotten and forgiven.
Forgive and forget. Can you really do it? Of course we forgive the wrongs done to us. That is the Christian way. But do you really forget the indiscretion? Do you not keep your eye on the one you forgave, just in case, even if you sincerely forgave them? On this side of the Fall into sin, only a "rube" acts like the indiscretion done to you did not happen. Even when you forgive yourself for a bad decision or a bad habit, you do not forget it. Your memories are scarred by it. That is precisely why you and I, why our society, is in such bondage. We cannot get past our bad memories.
Oh, but that is not the way that God forgives. He wipes the slate clean! God remembers your sin and my sin no more. We really are forgiven. Our sins are forgotten!
Can you feel how freeing this Word is? The sins of the past, the misdeeds of the past, and the bad habits that may still be plaguing you, God has forgotten them. And if God has forgotten them, all those wrongs do not have ultimate meaning any more. They have no eternal significance. If God has forgotten them, perhaps you and I can too.
What a liberating Word! All the burdens which have worn you down, all the regrets, all the suspicions, all the bad habits do not count anymore. They do not exist in the memory of God.
Think of it: When you forget something, it no longer exists for you. An ancestor forgotten, remembered by no one, no longer exerts a meaningful impact among the living. A great recipe forgotten no longer can make mealtime better. A friend forgotten is no longer a friend (and never really was). And a pain which is forgotten is no longer painful.
That is the way our sins are with God. All the things that have caused you pain, all the dead ends you have had in your life, they do not exist for God anymore. They do not exist, because they were not made by God, and so we might say that they and all sin are "non-being," nothingness.2 Why, then, do you keep on clinging to the bad memories of the past, to the regrets, to the suspicions, to the bad habits? God has forgotten them; you can too!
Are you concerned about what other people or what society says about you, what your image in the community is? That does not matter either. God does not count such views. He has forgotten them along with the sins you have committed.
What a freeing Word! All the behaviors and memories or the slanderous impressions others have of you, that have held you captive, no longer matter. Even more glorious is that we do not have to do anything to earn this kind of forgiveness. It is a free gift of God!
I could just end the sermon at this point, and let you reflect on the goodness of God, and how his love for you has set you free from all the old claims that have enslaved you. But Jeremiah did not stop at that point, and so I will not either.
Besides proclaiming that God would no longer remember the Hebrews' and our sin in God's Name, Jeremiah also proclaimed that the new covenant made by Yahweh would be one in which he would put his Law within us, write it in our hearts. What does this have to do with you and me and God's blessed forgetfulness?
Sometimes when God's forgiving love gets stressed, people say that it just encourages permissiveness. Such people claim that too much stress on God forgetting our sin may send a message that we can go out and sin, since it will be forgiven anyway. The sixteenth-century reformer Martin Luther had a great response. He wrote:
For our sins are not forgiven with the design that we should continue to commit sin, but that we should cease from it. Otherwise it would more justly be called, not forgiveness of sin, but permission to sin.3
Jeremiah's reflections on the Law that God has written in our hearts serve to underline Luther's claim that God's forgiveness has not given us permission to sin. "But wait a minute," you say. "I thought that forgiveness was by grace, that we are free from the Law" (see Galatians 3:10-12).
Recall that Jeremiah is talking about a new covenant, which we Christians believe is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Do not forget what Jesus says about the Law of God. He claims that he did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17-19). If Jesus fulfils the Law, and we are to read Jeremiah as pointing to Christ, then when Jeremiah says that God will put his Law in us, this must also be seen as a prophecy of what will happen to us in Christ. To say that God puts the Law in us, and since the Law is fulfilled by Christ, it seems that we can read our First Lesson as a prophecy of Christ (the fulfillment of the Law) living in us.
The New Testament refers to Christ taking up residence in the believer. Paul says that Christ is within him (Galatians 2:20), that Christ dwells in our hearts (Ephesians 3:17). Martin Luther picked up this theme to explain why salvation by grace does not lead to a lackadaisical attitude to Christian living. He spoke of Christ living in us, so intimately that Christ and our conscience become one. Living in us, Christ abolishes the demands of the Law along with sin and death, just as he did on the Cross. All the evils that torment and afflict us are absorbed by him.
Of course when Christ comes and lives in us he comes with all the marvelous characteristics he has. He brings to us his grace, his righteousness, and his perfection in fulfilling God's Law. Those good qualities become part of us, part of who we are.4 Get that, Christ's fulfillment of the Law lives in you, Christian. In that sense, the Law of God is within you, written on your heart.
Elsewhere Luther calls this relationship that believers have with Jesus when they are saved (justified) by grace the "blessed exchange." His words are powerful and often quoted. Here is how he put it:
The third incomparable benefit of faith is that it unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united with her bridegroom. By this mystery, as the Apostle teaches, Christ and the soul become one flesh [Ephesians 5:31-32]. And if they are one flesh and there is between them a true marriage -- indeed the most perfect of all marriages, since human marriages are but poor examples of this one true marriage -- it follows that everything they have they hold in common, the good as well as the evil. Accordingly the believing soul can boast of and glory in whatever Christ has as though it were its own, and whatever the soul has Christ claims as His own.5
Luther says that when we are forgiven by God (justified by grace) it is like getting married to Jesus. In a good marriage the partners share everything in common. Those of you who have been happily married have some sense of how the "blessed exchange," the sharing that goes on between spouses, changes lives. The lovers in a long-time relationship are not the same persons they were when they first fell in love. Could you say that love has made them forget themselves? That is God's style for setting us free and changing lives.
I have a friend who talks of his marriage this way. He says that after 27 years of life together with his wife, sometimes he catches himself thinking or acting in ways he never did before they met nearly three decades ago. He says that when he thinks more about those behaviors, he realizes that his new cautiousness is really an emulation of her style. Not that he is really imitating his wife self-consciously, but he says that he can see her style and thought patterns in what he is doing. It is not "her" style that he is embodying in those instances. It is now he. Her style has rubbed off on him.
Likewise when he observes his wife's style in recent years, he notes that she is not always so cautious in expressing herself as she was typically. Sometimes she speaks her mind publicly. It is almost like he can see himself in her in those instances. But his wife is not imitating him. It is just that some of his qualities have begun to get in her blood. Close human relationships work that way. They change us.
We return now to the idea that we have been married to Jesus in faith. This is the new covenant about which Jeremiah spoke. God has written his Law on our hearts by wedding us to his Son, the One who perfectly fulfilled the Law. Jesus' characteristics, his righteousness, his love and his ability to fulfill the Law, are rubbing off on you and me.
How long have you been a Christian? How long have you known Jesus? Over the years his passion for the Law has gotten to you. Just as he fulfills the Law without anybody having to teach him how to do it, so you and I have the Law in our guts. The real you and me who want to please Jesus, our divine spouse, also love keeping God's commands. Jeremiah promised it would happen.
Remember that I talked about how good marriage relationships change you? It is obvious that our new covenant relationship with the Messiah, getting married to Jesus, changes us. The sinner in me hates the Law. I am selfish and want to do my thing. But in that marriage with Jesus, now the Law is in me, who I am.
Sometimes when I think of my marriage, I am so changed that I have almost forgotten who I was before my wife and I met. God's love is more powerful than that. He not only forgives our sin and changes you and me so much that we can hardly remember who we were before He came into our lives, but also he even forgot the old destructive way we used to be.
Is not God's love breathtaking? In forgetting our sin, the Lord sets you and me free. He changes us so much that we begin to forget the old self-destructive people we used to be. Remember that new covenant word the next time that you are depressed about life, friends. The old behaviors and attitudes that have haunted you are remembered no more. As you get wrapped up in Jesus' life, in the relationship he has with you and as his Law gets written on your heart, you will begin to forget the old wounds and destructive behaviors too. God's love truly is miraculous! It sets us free from what has been haunting our lives.
____________
1. There is much scholarly debate over whether the prophecy in the First Lesson and others in Chapters 30-33 were directed to Israel or to Judah. Many scholars believe that subsequent editing led to the application of these prophecies to both. See Claus Westermann, Handbook to the Old Testament, trans. and ed. Robert H. Boyd (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1976), pp. 164-165; Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), pp. 350-352, 353-354. Childs' reflections imply that insofar as the process of composition of the book of Jeremiah may have involved revising Jeremiah's original prophecy to apply to another situation, so what I am doing in this sermon, applying Jeremiah's prophecy to twenty-first-century Christians, is appropriate.
2. For this idea of sin as nothingness, I am indebted to Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. IV/1, pp. 408ff.
3. Martin Luther, Exhortation to Live in the Spirit Since We Have Become the Children of God, Sons and Heirs (n.d.), in Sermons of Martin Luther, Vol. VIII, pp. 168-169.
4. Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1531/1535), in Luther's Works, Vol. 26, pp. 166-168.
5. Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (1520), in Luther's Works, Vol. 31, p. 351.
