Good morning, everybody, welcome to church –

Let’s all get together and feel the guilt!

‘Cause, ready or not, here that guilt comes. Let’s all wallow in it like the totally depraved sinners that we are. Sure, we’ll get to grace later, but not after I’ve made sure we all feel thoroughly disgusted with ourselves.

*sigh*

Have you ever been subjected to preaching like that?

Too many of us have. If you haven’t, thank God for that.

But if you have been subjected to this kind of religious conditioning, you may have been left with such a strong association between God and guilt, and between shame and our sense of self, that maybe it’s taken years of love and growth and spiritual awakening for grace truly to get in.

It wasn’t until I had been a minister for a couple of years that I realized that this conditioning can be so strong that, as a minister, all I have do is just show up in a room and people start feeling guilty. Even if someone has nothing real to feel guilty about in the moment, when a representative of religious authority shows up, many folks reflexively feel guilty and then search for something to feel guilty about. And if we’re going out of our way to look, there’s always something we can find to prove our moral inadequacy.

“I should be doing more to be a good person.”

“I should be serving the community more.”

“I’m not doing enough for my church or my neighborhood or my school.”

“Look at so-and-so, look how much they do. I could be doing that, but I’m not, and that’s my fault.”

“Look at those folks running headlong into war-zones saving lives.”

“Look at those folks tirelessly helping refugees.”

“How many of the least of these have I passed-by?”

“I haven’t sold all my riches and given it to the poor and dedicated every waking effort to taking up my cross and following Jesus.”

“I was so mean to my ex, they’ll never forgive me and neither will God.”

“I don’t pray enough anyway.”

“If I’m honest, I’ve got my doubts about all this stuff I’m supposed to believe. The Bible is kind of weird. Am I terrible for thinking that?”

Yes. Yes, you are. And so am I.

Your fears are true: you are not the humanitarian-hero-saint-pious-true-believer that you should be. You blew it. You could have, you should have, won that Nobel Peace Prize by now. Or at least raised a kid who won one. Or you could have been an unsung servant of humanity laboring humbly out of view whose life would make a great biopic someday. At the very least you could have been someone who didn’t hurt anyone.

Instead, maybe you blew it. Maybe you’ve turned out kinda so-so, somewhere in the fat middle of the moral bell curve.

By definition most people are average … and in God’s eyes, extraordinary. In this world most people are kind of beat up … and in God’s eyes, beautiful.

My friends, we’re all limited human vessels for the limitless divine spirit, making our way as best we can (sometimes better, some times worse) through this troubled and wondrous world …

And at least we’re feeling guilty about it.

*sigh*

So, people talk about “Protestant guilt” and “Catholic guilt” and “Evangelical guilt” … “Jewish guilt,” that’s a thing … “white guilt” people talk about now … there are probably all kinds of other flavors of guilt …

I can speak firsthand about Protestant guilt. Specifically, Lutheran guilt. Lutheran guilt is: “You’re saved! By the Grace of God manifest in Christ Jesus: You. Are. Saved … But you sure don’t deserve it.  And look, you keep proving it over and over: You don’t deserve the good things that God has given you.”

Now, I can’t speak first-hand about Catholic guilt or Evangelical guilt or Adventist guilt or all the rich variations in our guilt-ridden Christian family tree. Those of you who are recovering Catholics or recovering Evangelicals, I’d be very interested to hear about the special flavor of guilt has left an aftertaste in your mouth.

From what I can see, there seems to be two related but different species of guilt in the Christian guilt ecosystem. One is: “You’re saved, but you’re depraved and you don’t deserve it.” The other amounts to, “You probably aren’t saved, you definitely don’t deserve it, so you ought to be very worried about the eternal hellfire awaiting your sin-sick soul.”

With that last one especially, by the way, there’s the flip side of self-righteousness: “But you don’t worry about that any more! You are saved, you made the right choice of accepting Jesus into your heart. You are justified in the eyes of God, and here’s a handbook to prove your righteous superiority above those wretched losers over there who don’t believe the right thing or act in the right way.” But there’s a lot of insecurity in this, among the so-called saved, because it means the stakes are very high for not falling off the bandwagon due to a stray doubt or a roving eye.

Anyway, for a lot of us raised in Christian worlds it seems in one way or another we worry that we’re not devoted enough or we aren’t helping enough people or loving enough or we aren’t pure-hearted or pure-minded enough, we don’t believe strongly enough, we have too many doubts, or in truth there is part of our heart we’ve held out on Jesus, we haven’t given it all over, or there’s just something fundamentally wrong about us, our psyche is just crawling with boobytraps set by the devil … I’ve had people tell me they’ve gotten baptized over and over because they felt like it didn’t quite take the first time – they’re still all-too-human.

What a long, strange guilt-trip it’s been.

But, my friends, the good news is: We can wake up from it.

Do you know that guilt as a feeling doesn’t even come up in the Bible? The Bible does not talk about anyone who is wracked with guilt.

I looked it up in a concordance of every word used in the Bible. Guilt as a feeling doesn’t come up.

What does get tones of mentions in the Bible is “Forgiveness.”

“Sin” comes up a lot. But when you actually read the Bible, you find that “sin” usually is spoken in the same breath as heartbreak. It is naming the tragedy of all the ways that human beings can violate a good relationship with our Holy Creator and with the sanctity of this good world that God has made. Sin speaks to the existential distress of realizing how out of joint we can be with our deepest and most sacred purpose.

“Repentance” comes up a lot in the Bible, turning away from sin and returning to God.

“Healing”, “Grace” – there are countless passages about healing and about grace. But “Guilt,” not so much.

All the words that are actually in the Bible are active words. “Guilt” is not an active word. But the words the biblical writers use are about things we go and do, things that require action: an act of atonement, an act of sincere repentance, an act of healing, an act of commitment, the proving grounds of conviction. These are all the actions of Grace. Guilt, and feeling guilty, is often the opposite: it’s paralyzing. Feeling guilty is just not helpful, usually. It usually doesn’t actually help us to be better or to do the right thing.

The Gospel story today is about Jesus healing a man who is paralyzed by guilt (Luke 5:17-25). Jesus heals him by forgiving him.

Now, at the time, physical ailments were seen as punishment for some sin a person had committed. And that’s not such a foreign idea. In our culture if someone is ill or injured or debilitated in some way or has any kind of diagnosis, there’s often judgment and guilt. Whether God comes into the picture or not, whether or not the person is actually responsible for their condition because of a moral failing, it doesn’t matter. We don’t seem to accept that humans are just imperfect, flawed creatures and that’s usually nothing to be faulted for.

So, this man, you could say, was paralyzed because of his guilt. Maybe this was not fair to him; maybe it was manufactured guilt used to explain a physical ailment. But it could be that he had indeed committed some wrongdoing that had him paralyzed by guilt.

(And, yes, I know, I just got through saying that the feeling of guilt doesn’t come up in the Bible, but our job is to hear how these stories speak to us, and the fact is that this dear child of God is under judgement because of his moral failing – real or manufactured – and this has him stuck, frozen, disjointed from his very body. If we imagine ourselves in his place, for us this is a story about guilt.)

But this man knew he needs healing. He yearns to be freed from what binds him. He yearns to be made whole. And the people who care about him yearn for that too.
From that need, from that yearning for healing, for freedom, they act. They come to Jesus.

What Jesus gives this man is mercy. He shows this man forgiveness. He releases this man from guilt.

The reality of God’s Grace dawns upon him. His soul is whole again, at home once more. It is well with his soul. And he is free to stand and move. He has been freed to be in the reality of Grace, the reality of God’s eternal spirit, in which we all live and move and have our being.

It’s always there, this reality of Grace.

By what authority could Jesus forgive? That was the scandal of this story. Jesus healed each and every person who came to him. He showed mercy and forgiveness to each and every person who came to him. Who did he think he was? Jesus was – is – intimately connected with God. And as such he knew that God nature is Grace – “Be merciful as Your Creator is merciful,” he said. Grace, mercy, these are by their nature always an open invitation. If someone seeks it they will find it. It’s always there and we can always just say “Yes” and be free.

Whether we deserve God’s Grace, is just not the right question. We can’t deserve it, we can’t not deserve it. Grace is the kind of gift that’s outside the economy of earning and deserving. It is a gift. Period.

Now, so much of the guilt-trip we go on at church is because of all the talk of sin. So, should we throw that out as well? Not so fast. Especially here we are at the end of another week that brought another horrific act of mass violence against innoncents, we do still need to be contemplating sin.

When we are free of the guilt-trip, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any reality to ethical standards, or that there isn’t any crisis to how much humans violate ethical standards.

It’s pretty amazing how consistent it is that when people have experiences of the Divine, when they are gifted with some intimation of Holy beauty or power, this motivates them to try to live more compassionate and more just lives, and to encourage others to do so as well. There is something about our relationship with God that calls us to higher ethical standards. In our tradition we see this in, for example, the Ten Commandments of Moses or the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus.

When we feel the pull of higher ethical standards, we at the same time feel the pain of our distance from them. This is why there is still great wisdom to Christian teachings about sin. Sin is real. When we take the sting of guilt away it actually helps us to just be more honest and mature about acknowledging the reality of sin.

“If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, the Holy One who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and wash away our injustice.” – The First Letter of John (1:8).

Human beings are indeed inclined to be petty and bitter, and when we get together in groups and throw out the hard-won wisdom of our ancestors we can be inclined to cause great harm to others, even atrocities. Being unspeakably cruel and feeling justified in it, I’m sorry to say, is not new in history, it’s not new in American history or in any one’s history.

Alexandr Solzehenitsyn said: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” That’s from someone who survived the Soviet gulags. He knew how collective insanity can take over.

We always must guard against our inclination to inhumanity, especially when a herd mentality takes over.

We’ve all got our blind spots, big or small, individual or collective, and sometimes other people get caught in those blind spots and get hurt.

But for however common wrongdoing is, whatever the banality of evil, however daily the reports of atrocities, we always should have a problem with it. The goal should not be to live guilt-free lives that are blithely naïve of the ways we can hurt each other, on the one hand, or cynical and selfish, on the other.

The goal, rather, should be to live grace-filled lives that are accountable to a higher standard, that seek to nurture the better angels of our nature and unburden us from the paralysis of guilt over our limitations as mere humans.

For that we need a Holy Source beyond human powers to feed the seeds of the good in our hearts, and to weed out the seeds of evil. This is why we need the spiritual disciple of returning always to God’s Grace, to saying “Yes” to the eternal invitation to come home and be well.

Sin is real. Grace is real. God forgives, because the truth is that God’s image is set in the depth of our souls. The truth is that human beings are always inclined to tremendous acts of love and beauty and courage. God created our souls as such and God loves us and is committed to our redemption.

Humans can’t become so depraved, try as we might, that God won’t always have the invitation open, always calling to the little glimmer of the Image of God within the human soul.

The Christian testimony is that humans can even try to kill God in the flesh and God still insists on forgiving and loving and inviting in. That’s why for Christians Christ is this open door to Grace. The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ reveals the power of God’s love over-and-above the power of human sin, which wishes to put God to death and put human power at the center of the universe. When we try to make ourselves gods in our own right we create hell for ourselves and hell for each other.

But human power is pathetic, just pathetic, when it comes down to it, when it comes up against the power of the Creator of the Universe. We don’t stand a chance against God’s covenant of love.

So, we might as well just surrender to God’s Love and let Grace in, the truth that sets us free. It’ll save ourselves a lot of trouble and definitely save a lot of trouble for those who get trampled underfoot.

The truth is we need God. Our need is deep, it’s a hunger at the heart of our existence, it’s a thirst deeper than the bones. We need God to be whole. We need God to be free.

God is always there for us when we are ready to say “Yes.”

For that I give thanks.

You can view video of Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg delivering this sermon here.