St. Andrew's Episcopal Church
Ayer, Massachusetts
Faith, Community, and Love
We Believe: A Simple Exposition of the Creeds
CHAPTER VII. WE BELIEVE IN FORGIVENESS AND LIFE EVERLASTING
"The Forgiveness of sins"
SIN IS THE WRONGNESS in us that separates us from God. Since God is a perfectly good Will the wrongness in us which separates us from Him is a wrongness in our wills, in what we seek to do and to be. Just as we come near to men by agreeing with them, by sharing their thoughts, by caring for the things they care for and working with them, so we come near to God by sharing His thoughts and willing what He wills. Jesus was very near to God because He agreed with God. He saw things as God sees them. He did His Father's will. Sin is disagreeing with God. To think of ourselves as the most important beings in the world and act that way is to disagree with God. To care more for possessions than we care for people is to disagree with God. God is a lover of truth. So when we lie, we work against God. God is clean. When our minds are not clean we are shut off from God. God cares as much for our neighbor as He cares for us. When we treat our neighbors as less important than ourselves we show our unlikeness to God.
At first our wrongness seems to be what we do and say that is against God. When we look deeper we see that the greatest wrongness lies in what we are. Jesus said that wrong acts and words come out of our hearts just as fruit grows from a tree. A tree bears the kind of fruit that is natural to it. The things we do and say show the kind of people we are. The real trouble is that we care for the wrong [gap here] we need a "change of heart," a new spirit in our lives.
We say in the creeds that as Christians we believe in "the forgiveness of sins." What does that mean? Suppose you lend a friend a tennis racquet you particularly like and he carelessly leaves it out in the wet and ruins it. Suppose you tell a friend a secret that you very much want him to keep and he tells it to another. Suppose you go on a camping trip with someone and he is so disagreeable during the whole trip and so lazy about doing his share of the work that he nearly spoils all your pleasure in it. Suppose you invite someone to your house and find later that he has taken advantage of being alone in your room to carry off your favorite knife. Suppose you take pains to do much for someone and he takes it all as a matter of course and shows no gratitude. Suppose someone you try to play a game with always shows himself a poor sport, is angry whenever the game goes against him, and claims every doubtful point for himself. In all those cases wrong has been done to you. You have been hurt. Things you care about have been hurt. The other person has made himself your enemy in little ways or large ways. What can you do about it?
There are very different ways of dealing with a person who has done wrong to you. You can say, "He hurt me, I'll hurt him. He broke something of mine, I'll break something of his. He was mean; I'll be mean." Then you go down to the level of the person who has done you wrong, and add a second wrong to the first one. Probably the other person will give more of the same kind in answer and a small war will be started. Or you can say, "He hurt me. He took advantage of me. He wasn't square with me. I'll have nothing more to do with him." If the man who has done wrong were treated in this way by every one, he would soon be shut out from the companionship of all good people and his chance of "coming back" would be very small.
When people do wrong to us, we often treat them in one of these two ways, but not always. If a person who has hurt us is someone we care a great deal for, an old friend or a brother or a son, we often say, "It's true that he did me wrong. But I care for him still. I don't want that wrong to stand forever between us. I am ready to start afresh with him and be friends again." And very often when we act in this third way, the person who has hurt us says that he knows that he was wrong and is sorry for it and will do all he can to repair the damage he has done. He dislikes the thing in himself that we dislike and joins us in putting it aside. That is what we mean by forgiveness. Forgiveness is keeping the will for friendship in the face of wrong. Forgivenness is holding the door open for a new start. When Jesus told the story of the father who received the Prodigal Son home again with open arms and a feast of welcome, He was not talking about a very rare father. He was speaking of what quite common human affection does many times. His point was that if quite ordinary human fathers do that, how much more will God do to those who have wronged Him!
Men have often wondered how God deals with their wrongness. They have sometimes thought that He would deal with us as we frequently deal with one another, that He would meet injury with injury and hurt us for hurting Him, or that He would shut the door against us forever because of the hurt we have done to His cause. Christ taught us that because God cares for us and looks upon us as His sons He always looks beyond our failures and holds the door open to us. He made that real by the way He dealt with men Himself, offering His companionship to men who least deserved it. He did not let men off easily or say that their failures did not matter. He knew that they could not really enjoy His companionship until they saw with His eyes and hated the things in themselves that He hated. He taught them to face their own wrong-doing squarely, to be openly sorry for it and "turn about." But He made it clear that before they "turned about" God was waiting for them and offering them the chance for a new start.
In the prayer which we have learned from Christ we say many times, "Forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us." That prayer shows the close connection between God's way of dealing with us and our way of dealing with our neighbors. When someone wrongs us, he does not wrong a person who has never done wrong himself. If we act as though we were perfect and could shut our neighbors out from the company of good people, we act a lie. We need forgiveness ourselves, the forgiveness of God and men. If we are not forgiving to those who injure us, we set ourselves against God and refuse the companionship of the forgiving God. To say "I believe in the forgiveness of sins" is first of all to declare our faith about the way God deals with us, but it carries with it a renewed pledge to deal with our neighbors in the same way.
"The Resurrection of the body: and the Life everlasting"
In an old chronicle of English history, written about A. D. 700, we are told of a speech made by one of the nobles of King Edwin of Northumbria when the king and his councilors were considering whether they would become Christians: "The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdorman and thegns, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out of another, whilst he is within is safe from the wintry tempest; but, after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter into winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine (Christianity) tells us something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed."
The old Saxon noble was pondering a question which men have wondered about for thousands of years. What lies beyond this life we know here on earth? Is there more beyond death? What is it like? We know a great deal more about the long life of mankind in this world that has ever been known. We have reasons to think the world will last much longr than men used to expect. But the mystery of death is always with us and the world will not last forever.
We can reach into the future only by the power of imagination. That is true of tomorrow and of next year. It is true of life beyond death. We cannot know tomorrow in the same way we know today or yesterday. That does not mean that our imagination has nothing to work with and can find no truth about the future. Just as we can draw a short line on a piece of paper, and then say where it will go if it is carried further; just as we can aim a shot from a gun and imagine where it will fall; so we can see where things are heading today and imagine very truly how they will be another day. Among the things we find about us some strike us as changing and on the surface, others as lasting and deep-lying. That is true in what we find in the people around us. We say of the feelings that a friend may show that they are only "a passing mood" and expect that tomorrow his real character will show itself again because it lies deeper and is more a part of him. The ripples on the surface of a river may be moving in a different direction tomorrow from today, but we are sure that the main current will be moving the same way. Even among the changing things of a world that is always changing there are some things more abiding than others. Our imaginings about tomorrow are built on the things we believe will be strong and lasting. We come home from a long journey confident that we shall have a welcome at home because we are sure of the lasting love of those who live there. We go to sleep expecting to wake up in a world which is at bottom the world of yesterday.
As was said earlier in this small book, our religion has to do with what we believe is the rock-bottom truth about the universe we live in. It means believing not only that some things last longer than others, but that there are everlasting things. To believe in God as He is shown to us through Christ is to believe that there is a Person, a Spirit, who is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, who is forever living and does not die. Through the great prophets and teachers He has sent us, above all through Christ, we find ourselves called to love and seek things which are eternal, things which do not pass away. The sureness grows in us that how we live makes an everlasting difference. The companionship into which Christ invites us to enter is not for today or tomorrow only. It is forever.
Our faith that God offers us eternal life, life beyond this life that ends in death, is built altogether on our faith in God and His caring for us. When Jesus was asked whether men would live again He answered that "God is the God of the living, not of the dead." He was sure that those whom God had granted companionship with Himself would be kept forever in God's company. God made men for Himself and God can be trusted to keep His own.
When we try to imagine what life out of this world will be like our imaginations have a hard time. We see that our bodies die and turn again to the earth from which they came. Some men have thought that the "life of the world to come" must be a life without any bodies, a life of pure spirits, of minds and wills having communion with God and with one another without any bodies in which to live and through which to meet one another. The men who gave us our Bible, men who thought as the Jews thought, felt that a picture of life without any bodies is too thin and ghostly and shadowy to describe the fullness and realness of the life that God has in store for us. They knew that the bodies we have here belong to this world of time in which death is the rule. But they could not think of a real life, in which what we are here truly goes on, the very "you" and "I" that are now, as a life without any body. They imagined God giving us a new body, a mysterious, heavenly body, as our dwelling place and means of living beyond. They believed that just as our bodies carry on the record of all we have been and done and thought in this world, so all that we have been and done and thought is taken up and given a new form in God's heavenly kingdom. Our creeds speak the language of the men who gave us the Bible. They speak of the "resurrection of the body," the lifting up again into life of the real you and me that we find it so hard to think of without our bodies. The important thing as we say these words is not that we think in exactly the same pictures that those first Christians used, but that we enter into their faith that Gods holds out to those who put their trust in Him the promise of full, real, life everlasting. That faith is not merely a comfort when we face the death of those we love or when we think of our own. It opens before us a larger life than we can dream of. It is like coming from a cramped place into a great unexplored country that offers us possibilities of life that pass our understanding.
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