Sermon — April 2, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“‘This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord:
I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds.’
he also adds, ‘I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.’”
(Hebrews 10:16-17)
It sometimes feels as though the days since last April have been not just one long Lent but one long Good Friday. It’s been a year of extraordinary suffering and death. It’s been a year in which many people have felt betrayed and abandoned by the very institutions that were supposed to care for them or their parents or their children; a year of isolation perhaps less intense than Jesus’ deep loneliness on the cross, but a thousand times more prolonged.
But there’s another, less-obvious way in which we’ve had a Good-Friday year, and that is the profound sense that so many people have had of constantly letting someone down. If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to read the New York Times’s “Primal Scream.” In a stroke of brilliance the journalists set up a voicemail box with the invitation: “Are you a parent who’s tired as [heck]? Call us and scream after the beep.” And boy, did people call.
The callers’ emotions range from anxiety to frustration to exhaustion; from despair at the public-health situation and anger at their employers to rage at their spouses and exasperation with their beloved children. But there was one quotation that particularly struck me, because I’ve heard it from others, and felt it myself: “I wish I had the energy to scream. All my energy just goes into getting through every day, until I can go to sleep. I have three kids,” the caller adds for context, “all in virtual schools since March, and work full time. And it just feels like failing, every day, at everything I do.” And whether you’re a parent or not, working or not, I imagine you’ve felt, at some point, that feeling—that you don’t have enough right now, you are not enough right now, to handle all of this.
There is, as the author of Hebrews puts it, quoting the prophet Jeremiah, a law that is written in our hearts and on our minds, a law that is exacting and demanding; a law that allows no wiggle-room and gives no warnings; a law that commands us, to borrow Jesus’ words from the Gospel of Matthew: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)
Our society’s form of perfectionism is different, of course, from this Christian perfection; but Christian perfection is equally demanding and equally unattainable. While perfectionism demands that we juggle a dozen glass balls at once and never break a single one, Christian perfection insists that we see the world with God’s eyes and respond to the world with God’s patient love at all times. Jesus commands us, as I noted at our Maundy Thursday service last night, to “love one another; just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13:34) But this is a man speaking who’s about to give his life for you, and he demands that you show that same self-sacrificial love.
The story of Good Friday is the story of the disciples’ failure to love as Jesus has loved, the story of their betrayal and denial and abandonment in the face of his patient and enduring love. But every day is the story of our failure to love one another as God has loved us. In the new covenant that we’ve received in Christ God has put the law of perfect love inside our hearts and written it on our minds. We love imperfectly, all the same.
But then, “he also adds, ‘I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.’” And what a gift this is. In the very same breath in which God promises to write the law on our hearts, God promises to forgive our lawlessness and forget our sins. “Love one another,” God commands us, “as I have loved you”; “love your neighbor as yourself”; “Be perfect!”— but I won’t remember if you’re not.
It’s a juxtaposition that the Lutheran tradition often abbreviates as “Law and Gospel.” The “Law” is all the burden of expectation and commandment and measurement that holds us to a standard we can never hope to achieve. The Law is a good and inspiring and beautiful thing—“love your neighbor as yourself,” it commands—but for imperfect people, a perfect law is always and impossible thing. The “Gospel,” on the other hand, is the good news, the liberating grace of God, the promise that in our darkest moments, as surely as in our brightest ones—in our most quotidian mediocrity as in our most inspired aspirations—God is there, forgiving us and loving us all the same.
The Good News of Good Friday is not that, with a little prayer and some good old-fashioned elbow grease, you can become a more perfect person. The Good News is that you’re never going to fail, or that your failures aren’t real. It’s precisely that you are, and always will be, imperfect. You can have the closest relationship with Jesus that anyone could imagine, you could have the strongest faith in the world, you could be a saint as holy as Peter himself—but in real life you will inevitably fail, again and again, and again, sometimes three times before breakfast. But God will forget it, again and again and again, and again and again and again, and again, and again…
This “good news” is profoundly different from the forces that shape our psychology, whether religious or secular. Maybe your struggle isn’t perfectionism, per se. But everyone one of us has been given a law, by our parents or our preachers or our peers, that puts us to shame; every one of us has been taught a standard by which we sometimes judge ourselves a failure. If you never feel like you’re failing, in fact, it may be a bad sign; in an imperfect and unloving world, it’s often been observed, the people with the highest self-esteem turn out to be the sociopaths.
And when we arrive at Good Friday, carrying the baggage of a lifetime of the laws that tell us that we fail, we find a very different story: an innocent God the law says ought to die, laying down his life for us in the ultimate forgiveness of all our lawlessness. There is no day that better shows our human failure to love God than the day on which we nailed God to the cross; there is no day that better shows God’s love for us in all our brokenness than the day on which God died to set us free.
The law that is written on our hearts demands perfection, and we fail. But the Gospel, the good news, is that Christ takes for granted all our failure and imperfection, and he forgave it already long ago. Christ our great high priest has entered into the heavenly Temple and “opened for us the curtain” that separated us from God, making one final offering and sacrifice for sin. All our sin—all the burden of the shame of our imperfection—to paraphrase one of my favorite hymns, “has been nailed to the cross, and we bear it no more—praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!”
We don’t have to be perfect. So then, what do we do?
Like all good writers, the author of Hebrews concludes with a list of three strong verbs: “let us approach,” “let us hold fast,” “let us consider.”
“Let us approach with true hearts in the assurance of faith.” (Heb. 10:22) Let us come before God, in other words, not distracted by the anxiety of our imperfection, but reveling in the vastness of God’s love. In worship and in prayer, at home and at work and in the church, let us rest in the assurance that God knows and loves us in all our imperfection, that God forgives us in all our failures.
And “let us hold fast to the confession of our hope.” (Heb. 10:23) In the stormiest days of our lives, when the wind and the waves of world events or family feuds or our own minds threaten to sink our little rafts, when all we can do is to utter that “primal scream” into the void of a voicemail box, let us hold fast to the anchor of our hope; let us remember God’s promise of resurrection, God’s promise to transform the world into the kingdom of God’s love. For “the one who’s made the promise is faithful.”
And “let us consider how to provoke one another,” not to irritation or to anger, but “to love and good deeds…encouraging one another all the more.” (Heb. 10:25) Let us remember, in other words, that the story of sin and redemption, of Law and Gospel, of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, is not a private or a personal story; it is our story, a story we live together. Our shame isolates us from one another. Let our forgiveness draw us closer to one another. We need one another’s encouragement; we need one another’s provocation to love. We need one another’s hope when we are hopeless; we need one another’s prayer when we cannot find the words to pray.
So, imperfect as we are, let us approach God in the assurance that comes from faith; let us hold fast to the confession of our hope; and let us provoke one another to ever-greater acts of love, remembering always that when our faith fails, God is faithful; when our hope fades, God is hopeful; when our love for God is dim, God’s love for us shines more brightly than we can imagine—even on the darkest day of his life. Amen.