Guilt

​Proper 5
Year B
AS
 
 
 
Guilt
 
 
 
          I don’t know if I can remember the first time I felt guilt. I do remember the overwhelming feeling of guilt which comes. I remember many times when guilt and shame has overwhelmed me. When I was about 9 or 10 years old, I remember the feeling of overwhelming guilt.  I have told you before about my parents telling me not to throw the ball in the house; it was one of their favorite lines because I did not listen. This day they were gone from the house. I was home alone. I was watching TV and behind the TV was a brick wall. I found that I could play catch with myself if I threw a tennis ball against the wall. I was pretty good at it.
          But sitting on the TV was my great grandmother’s oil lamp.  This is what was used before they had electricity.  My mother had inherited it after her grandmother died.
          After throwing the ball hundreds of times I finally missed and knocked the globe off.  Of course, it broke.  I couldn’t fix it.  I couldn’t hide it.  I did it.
          What I did was something like Adam and Eve.  I left a note.  My father remembers the note because my words were simple. “I broke grandmother’s lamp. I am sorry and am running away.”  I went outside and hid in the bushes until my parents came home.  I don’t remember a punishment but I do remember my guilt and being ashamed.  It was overwhelming.  I knew my sin.
          I have been playing hide and seek with God, others and myself for 60 years. At times, because of my shame, I try to blame others or figure out how to get out of those feelings of guilt; excuse myself; rationalize, whatever it takes to fix the problem.
          Guilt is a peculiar emotion.  The guiltier I feel, the harder I am on others.  It probably ought to work the other way but it does not.  So, I keep returning to Baptism.  It was the moment which changed everything for you and for me.  It is the outward sign of cleansing, but it is more.  It is the literal washing away of sin. The only thing I can’t be forgiven for is the refusal to accept God’s forgiveness.
          The lessons we share this morning are quite wonderful. The Old Testament is a reminder that in creation, we all join in our humanity.  Before the fall, before Adam and Eve’s sin there is a wonderful passage in which Adam and God walk together in the cool of the afternoon.  I love that passage.  God and Adam walking and sharing.  But after the fall, when they knew their sin and they knew shame, when God came, they hid.  We all share a need, like Adam and Eve, for forgiveness.  We all need the same forgiveness because we have all eaten of the fruit.
          The Gospel brings with it a simple understanding; God’s forgiveness through Jesus Christ.  It brings the truth that we can know the healing power of God not just in the physical healing of disease, but in the healing of dis- ease, the power which sin should bring uneasiness to each of us.
          So, this morning we are called to know something wonderful.  We are called and reminded that we can know the healing power; the restoring power of God today.  We do not have to wait.  We can know it and we can share it.  It requires that we know our sin and seek God’s healing. It requires that we know that healing power which comes in forgiveness and we share that with others who do not deserve it.  Just as we don’t deserve it.  That is the power of what this gathering, this Eucharist is about.  It is about transformation; it is about restoration; it is about knowing health found only in God.  It is about us being part of that truth when we are willing to forgive the unforgivable, just as God has forgiven us.
          What Jesus brings to each of us is the healing and restoring power of the Good News and at the heart of the Good News is forgiveness.  It was what the families of the victims of the shooting at Mother Emanuel in Charleston knew on the day after the shooting.  That is at the heart of what we do together each week.  That is the power of what this gathering is about.  It is about being transformed by God’s grace.  It is what we are called to be and do in life.  You and I are called to be forgivers even if the person does not deserve it or even ask for it.  It is what God did for you through Jesus Christ.
          Evelyn Underhill wrote these words, “Some people are rather troubled about the space the healing of the sick takes in the Gospels … This is because we are apt to think of healing as getting rid of people’s normal pain, disease, and distress.  But healing is really restoring to true normality, mending the breaches in our perfect humanity, and making us again what God intends us to be. It shows us his Life-giving Spirit; the Lord and Giver of Life is ever at work producing and restoring fullness of life.” She goes on to say, “It means bringing back to what it ought to be, giving strength to the weak, new purity to the tainted by the action of his charity.”
          Jesus’ redemption of the world is complete and it rests in him.  The task remains for us to share the Good News.  We are called on to join with Christ through our baptism as reconcilers and healers.  We are called to forgive the unforgivable, love the unlovable.  It is our work.  It is our joy and by it the world will be changed.