SPEAKER_01: Good morning.
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to our Redeemer.
SPEAKER_01: Today prepares us for our celebration of Holy Week, which begins next week's Sunday, by reviewing the basics that God sent his one and only Son, who did not spare his life but gave him up for us to purify us and make us his own.
SPEAKER_01: That'll be the theme of our service.
SPEAKER_01: We'll begin now with our opening hymn.
SPEAKER_01: Grace and peace to you from God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Guilt is not the kind of thing that you can wash off in the shower.
SPEAKER_01: Guilt adheres to your conscience.
SPEAKER_01: That's where it operates.
SPEAKER_01: And your conscience is not reachable by soap and water.
SPEAKER_01: Now, to be sure, you can wash off the external evidence of what was done, like in the movies where the murderer washes the blood off of his hands and down the drain.
SPEAKER_01: And yet you know that long after any tangible evidence of what you did has disappeared, guilt still remains.
SPEAKER_01: And in fact, it can lie dormant for years until something triggers your memory and calls to mind what you did, and you feel it all over again.
SPEAKER_01: That guilt makes you cringe and wonder, how could I possibly have done such a thing like that?
SPEAKER_01: Guilt's not so easy to get rid of.
SPEAKER_01: And so, since, like Lady Macbeth, you can't just wash it off your hands, you resort to one of several strategies for coping with it.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe the most common strategy is to hide.
SPEAKER_01: No, not you, you don't hide yourself.
SPEAKER_01: You still go about your life.
SPEAKER_01: You do things like you come to church and you come to church clean behind the ears.
SPEAKER_01: But you go to great lengths to make sure that your guilt-inducing behaviors are hidden out of sight so that no one else will see them.
SPEAKER_01: Think of the ingenuity that is poured into the construction of leading a double life.
SPEAKER_01: Think of the ingenuity that's applied when you come up with elaborate hiding places for your stash where you know mom won't look.
SPEAKER_01: Or setting up a user profile under a false name so your spouse doesn't know what you are doing when you're online.
SPEAKER_01: Or fabricating inventive tales that explain innocently where you were for those several hours a couple days ago.
SPEAKER_01: All this ingenuity is poured into hiding, hiding the behavior under the premise that if it's hidden and nobody else sees it, then we won't get found out.
SPEAKER_01: And if we don't get found out, then we won't be shamed, shamed by others.
SPEAKER_01: But this is the problem with this strategy is that it only deals with others.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't hide the guilt from yourself because that guilt resides within you.
SPEAKER_01: And so you have to go looking for something else.
SPEAKER_01: So maybe you adopt the strategy, the common one, of looking for something that you can do to make up for your wrong actions.
SPEAKER_01: A guilty person you see is starving for a to-do list, a list of things that they can undertake in order to bring redemption to themselves.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, you might even get this list handed to you, and actually a pretty decent list if you join something like a 12-step program.
SPEAKER_01: But because it requires somebody to be in pretty desperate circumstances before they take that step, most of the time we try to do this DIY.
SPEAKER_01: Try to find things to balance out the teeter-totter.
SPEAKER_01: Actions we can take that prove to ourselves, we hope, that I'm not actually the kind of person who does those things that I did in my very worst moments.
SPEAKER_01: We all play this kind of mental balancing game, but but this strategy has a flaw in it as well.
SPEAKER_01: Since it doesn't actually take away the guilt, it leaves us with the tension of wondering which way that teeter-totter is balanced and forces us to continually keep working at doing things that we think will weigh down the side that says good and not the side that says guilty.
SPEAKER_01: And in fact, this strategy can even backfire and lead to the worst of all strategy for dealing with your guilt, which is to come to the conclusion that since you're already guilty, you might as well dive in full on and indulge yourself.
SPEAKER_01: After all, by indulging yourself, you can distract yourself from your guilt or numb yourself so that you don't feel the guilt.
SPEAKER_01: And my goodness, think about all of the things that we have available at our fingertips today that we can access to deal with this kind of coping strategy.
SPEAKER_01: Whether it's the online world with online betting or ordering things or virtual sex, or it's the in-real-life standbys of food or prescription meds or street drugs or alcohol, to name just a few.
SPEAKER_01: Strategies are not lacking.
SPEAKER_01: Things that we can do to numb ourselves, to numb the conscience, so for a moment we might not feel that guilt.
SPEAKER_01: Though, of course, you know, on the backside of that, the result is even more guilt heaped up than we had at first.
SPEAKER_01: That one backfires too.
SPEAKER_01: What we don't often do, though, is to bring a guilty conscience out into the open.
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm not suggesting that we should have something like open mic time, time where people could share their deepest, darkest secrets.
SPEAKER_01: That seems to me to be a strategy that oftentimes is employed as a means of redeeming myself.
SPEAKER_01: They call it the drunkalogue, where I feel that by telling my story I can in some way, shape, or form distance myself from the guilt that it brought on, or tell myself that I'm helping others.
SPEAKER_01: But it seems to me that if we have gathered together in the church of which Jesus Christ is great high priest, then we have come together in the absolute best possible place to bring our honest selves, guilt included, without fear of shame, without fear of shunning or condemnation.
SPEAKER_01: The writer to the Hebrews certainly would tell us that this is the very best place where our guilt can be handled.
SPEAKER_01: Since in this church, Jesus Christ and the power of his blood is at the center of it all.
SPEAKER_01: Look at today's second reading, and you will see that the writer to the Hebrews there lays out an argument from the lesser to the greater.
SPEAKER_01: He describes these sorts of rituals that may sound to our ears as relatively odd or strange.
SPEAKER_01: The blood of bulls and goats, for example, or taking the ashes of a sacrifice and mixing it with water and sprinkling it on a person.
SPEAKER_01: The writer to the Hebrews says, all of these rites were given by God and they did something.
SPEAKER_01: They brought about a purification of the flesh.
SPEAKER_01: That is, they took the ceremonially unclean person and they made that person clean.
SPEAKER_01: But all of those rites, the writer says, were given to show the people how God intends to deal with them.
SPEAKER_01: That theirs is a God who brings purification to them, and that what was done there for the mere purification of the flesh externally would one day be brought to its utmost fulfillment by the purification that reaches down into the deepest depths of who we are, and is brought into effect by the blood of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Look at what the writer to the Hebrews says.
SPEAKER_01: He says, The blood of Jesus, the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, will purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus has blood that is so powerful that it reaches deep down into that place that is impervious to soap and water.
SPEAKER_01: That conscience which has a knack for playing those moments back to us and cause our skin to crawl once more.
SPEAKER_01: The fact of the matter is, we can't purify our conscience on our own.
SPEAKER_01: Try as we might.
SPEAKER_01: You know, there's an awful lot of talk in our world about learning, as they say, to forgive myself.
SPEAKER_01: But the straight truth is that you can't forgive yourself.
SPEAKER_01: That's not the way it works.
SPEAKER_01: The conscience stands as the accusatory voice inside of you.
SPEAKER_01: And all of these strategies that we adopt, all of them turn out at the end of the day just to be dead works.
SPEAKER_01: You see, the picture here is that this conscience of ours is always driving us to do something.
SPEAKER_01: And if we do not have the blood of Christ, if we have just that load of guilt, then it's going to drive us to do whatever we possibly can to quiet conscience's voice, to set aside that accusing accusation, that voice that says guilty.
SPEAKER_01: And yet try as we might, at best we can get only temporary relief.
SPEAKER_01: Our efforts at forgiving ourselves, at letting go.
SPEAKER_01: You know as well as I do from bitter experience that things that you thought you were over have a way of coming back and sometimes coming back worse than they were at first.
SPEAKER_01: It's because here we're dealing only with dead works.
SPEAKER_01: But Jesus and his blood, well, Jesus' blood can and does get all the way down to the root of the issue because Jesus, by his blood, can and does remove guilt.
SPEAKER_01: He removes it, he purifies the conscience, he takes guilt away so that without guilt in the conscience, the conscience is no longer driving us towards dead works.
SPEAKER_01: Instead, it's freed from that burden so that we might joyfully and cheerfully serve the living God.
SPEAKER_01: This is the great and awesome news that the writer to the Hebrews says is what we cannot accomplish, Christ has.
SPEAKER_01: And so he has brought us purification in the deepest depths of who we are, the very thing that we long for more than anything else.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I suppose it could be the case that as I say that, you're thinking, well, okay, I've heard all of this forgiveness talk.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, I've heard it a lot here in church.
SPEAKER_01: So then why is there still that voice of guilt nagging in my conscience?
SPEAKER_01: If that's you, then here's a couple of things.
SPEAKER_01: First of all, think about how very thorough God is in giving and demonstrating his forgiveness to you.
SPEAKER_01: He has set it up so that there can really be no mistaking it, that when he says he removes guilt, he means it.
SPEAKER_01: And I would direct your attention to those external, tangible means by which he delivers this purification of your conscience and all of you.
SPEAKER_01: The sacraments.
SPEAKER_01: He's given us two, one, which touches us externally, in the water of holy baptism washing over our skin.
SPEAKER_01: Here we have the saving, cleansing bath in the blood of Christ to cover us.
SPEAKER_01: But then he's also given us another sacrament that works from the inside out, one that we consume, one that begins internally, so to speak, and once again delivers to us that purifying, cleansing blood of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: So that if you have one that washes you on the outside and one that brings cleansing from the inside, God could hardly be more clear in demonstrating to you that He has purified the whole of you, all of you, all the way down into the deepest depths, body and soul, mind and conscience.
SPEAKER_01: That's how thoroughly he wishes to impress upon you that your guilt really is removed and taken away.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe, though, sometimes the reason why there's still guilt nagging in the conscience is because you've done such a good job of hiding that guilt that nobody else knows of it save but you yourself.
SPEAKER_01: And that puts you in this very lonely and isolating position in which you can never just quite be sure if you are actually at the end of the day just trying to convince yourself that your guilt has been removed or if it actually has been taken away.
SPEAKER_01: And if that is the case, that is a very dangerous position to be in indeed.
SPEAKER_01: It brings us back to this problem we have, which is that we can't forgive ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: But once again, where could we come?
SPEAKER_01: That would be a better place for reckoning with guilt than in the church where Jesus Christ is great high priest.
SPEAKER_01: When we come together, we offer at the beginning of the service a general confession of our sins, a place where all of us say, I am guilty.
SPEAKER_01: My guilt, O Lord, I set before you, and God, in His grace, answers us week in and week out with that word of comfort and absolution and forgiveness.
SPEAKER_01: I forgive you.
SPEAKER_01: Your sin is taken away, your guilt is removed.
SPEAKER_01: The Christian Church has always offered an opportunity to do that, but more individually and specifically in the practice we call confession and absolution, or individual confession and absolution, a chance for you to meet with a Christian, maybe your pastor, your called servant of Christ, and in a moment of radical and transparent honesty to speak aloud the guilt that still haunts and plagues your conscience.
SPEAKER_01: You could think about this in the way that it worked when you were a child, and you were refusing to own up to something that you had done.
SPEAKER_01: You thought that if you put it off enough or denied it long enough, it would go away, but you learned that it was actually the opposite.
SPEAKER_01: The more you put it off, the longer you held out, the bigger and bigger the thing seemed to grow.
SPEAKER_01: And that actually, when you finally had to own up to what you did, you found relief.
SPEAKER_01: See, that's the power of coming clean.
SPEAKER_01: It's the power of radical and transparent honesty, and that's the way that the conscience operates.
SPEAKER_01: Guilt that is brought out into the open is guilt that stands as unmistakably true.
SPEAKER_01: That's the scary part.
SPEAKER_01: But if it is guilt that is brought to the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ, well then our fear is not met with damnation, but rather with removal of guilt, forgiveness of sins, and the comfort and consolation that your God has this favorable disposition towards you.
SPEAKER_01: He loves you so much that he would purify your conscience and give you cleansing in the blood of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: So you can make an appointment with your pastors, you can come to individual confession and absolution, you can name your sin aloud, and you will hear that word of absolution spoken to you.
SPEAKER_01: Now I get that that's not easy.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't feel like a really exciting thing to go and be radically, transparently honest.
SPEAKER_01: I know that feeling when I go to my pastor and confess my sins to him.
SPEAKER_01: But if you can think about that relief that stands on the other side, that is grounded in the blood of Jesus, you can recognize what a freeing act this is.
SPEAKER_01: It's the gift that God has given to his church so that as we gather together, we really do come to the place where we are best situated to deal with guilt.
SPEAKER_01: Not on our own, but by bringing our guilt before our God where the blood of Jesus can wash it all away.
SPEAKER_01: See, God hasn't gathered for himself in his church a group of perfect people or nearly perfect people.
SPEAKER_01: What he has gathered here is a group of purified people.
SPEAKER_01: It is removed.
SPEAKER_01: You stand pure and holy.
SPEAKER_01: There is nothing that condemns can condemn you anymore.
SPEAKER_01: No accusations that will stick.
SPEAKER_01: They have all been washed away in my blood.
SPEAKER_01: So, as we gather together in this Christian church, and the blood of Christ stands at the center of all we do.
SPEAKER_01: We come clean before our God.
SPEAKER_01: And the blood of Jesus brings about that purification that takes our guilt away.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Good morning and welcome once again to you all.
SPEAKER_00: It was a delight to see you in God's house today and to sing God's praises together.
SPEAKER_00: There are a range of announcements in the blue sheet that you can look over today, but I want to just highlight one that next Sunday there will be a confirmation reception between the services.
SPEAKER_00: So next Sunday is confirmation Sunday for those who are completing their catechesis in our new Connect Catechumen.
SPEAKER_00: And so between the services, we like to celebrate that milestone.
SPEAKER_00: There'll be a cake and punch reception.
SPEAKER_00: If you're interested in pitching in and helping out, there's a sign up on Church Center.
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, all are invited to come and celebrate that day next Sunday, the 29th, between the services, the confirmation reception.
SPEAKER_00: You can look at the rest of the announcements for yourself in the blue sheet.
SPEAKER_00: And with that, I wish you God's blessings on your Sunday.