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Sunday, March 14, 2010
Guilt
Fourth in the Series: Where is God When It Hurts?
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Matthew 26:31-35; 57-58; 69-75 New Revised Standard Version
31 Then Jesus said to them, "You will all become deserters because of me this night; for it is written, "I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.' 32 But after I am raised up, I will go ahead of you to Galilee." 33 Peter said to him, "Though all become deserters because of you, I will never desert you." 34 Jesus said to him, "Truly I tell you, this very night, before the cock crows, you will deny me three times." 35 Peter said to him, "Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you." And so said all the disciples.
57 Those who had arrested Jesus took him to Caiaphas the high priest, in whose house the scribes and the elders had gathered. 58 But Peter was following him at a distance, as far as the courtyard of the high priest; and going inside, he sat with the guards in order to see how this would end.
69 Now Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard. A servant-girl came to him and said, "You also were with Jesus the Galilean." 70 But he denied it before all of them, saying, "I do not know what you are talking about." 71 When he went out to the porch, another servant-girl saw him, and she said to the bystanders, "This man was with Jesus of Nazareth." 72 Again he denied it with an oath, "I do not know the man." 73 After a little while the bystanders came up and said to Peter, "Certainly you are also one of them, for your accent betrays you." 74 Then he began to curse, and he swore an oath, "I do not know the man!" At that moment the cock crowed. 75 Then Peter remembered what Jesus had said: "Before the cock crows, you will deny me three times." And he went out and wept bitterly.
Three weeks ago I had a conversation that was unusual in my years of ministry. One of our church members called me at nine one evening and asked if I could meet with his friend the next day because his friend was about to be sent to Afghanistan and needed to talk with a pastor.
I made some time the next day and met for about an hour with the gentleman we will call Mike. Mike works for a private contractor doing work in Afghanistan and Mike was about to be deployed there for a year supporting our war effort. Mike was dealing with a painful ethical dilemma.
He is a devout Christian. He has never been in the military. He was leaving a couple of days after meeting with me to go to three months of weapons and combat training because his job will take him into the combat zone and he needed, in a crisis, to be able to defend himself in a situation where his life or the lives of his coworkers and troops could be threatened. He needed to talk with a pastor because he was wrestling with the ethical question of whether he could take another person’s life even in self defense. He believed he could, but he was wondering about God forgiving him for that, and after God did forgive him, if God would continue to forgive him if he had to do it again and again.
We talked for a while and talked about the difference in the Hebrew Bible between the words for kill and the word for murder. We talked about the 1700 years of discussion in Christian theology about when a war is just and unjust and the fact that most Christians are not pacifists and can see justification, at times, for war. I commended him for his ethical sensitivity and for the fact that he was wrestling with his guilt. I said that I thought his soul struggle was a good thing because God would not want us to be callous or cold about so serious a topic.
We prayed together and I sent with him a copy of one of the small New Testaments and a copy of the small volume on Just War entitled, War: A Primer for Christians, by theologian and ethicist Joseph L. Allen who spoke at St. Andrew church several years ago as our nation was about to enter the war in Iraq. We had 300 people that evening wrestling with the same ethical question.
I asked Mike to stay in touch with me over these next few weeks, and I thought about him again when I saw the Oscar winning film, The Hurt Locker, where the protagonist, in that excellent movie, has to wrestle with his guilt as he is in the combat zone.
When Jerry Herships and I began this series on Burnout and Loss and Failure and Guilt and Suffering, one of our members wrote me, immediately, to ask that we remember the suffering and loneliness and guilt of our young men and women doing combat duty and who then have difficulty integrating back into society. She told me that her family is involved in helping one young man do this right now and how painful that re-integration can be.
Guilt is with us in many forms and sometimes that guilt is appropriate and sometimes it is not as appropriate. I dealt with the topic ten years ago when I met with some of our counselors and psychotherapists one evening and learned how frequently they have to work with people on issues of guilt, sometimes because churches have instilled chronic and inappropriate guilt.
I remember one woman who was joining our church in Colorado Springs who said that her rigid church background had taught her that she was just a wretch and a worthless worm and that she was being saved but JUST BARELY! AND, IT WAS ONLY BY THE SKIN OF HER TEETH BECAUSE SHE WAS SUCH A WORTHLESS WRETCH!
In a previous sermon, I mentioned an experiment that a New Jersey artist conducted marketing “guilt kits.” The kits consisted of ten disposable brown paper bags and a set of instructions which said: “Place bag securely over your mouth, take a deep breath, blow the guilt out, and dispose of the bag immediately!! He sold 2500 guilt kits at $2.50 each in just a short period of time—showing us how much free floating guilt people feel!
Guilt seems to be a stronger theme than I first thought and sometimes it can be unhealthy and sometimes it can be a motivator. In the other Oscar nominated film I saw last month, Crazyheart, the fellow in the film, portrayed by Jeff Bridges, finally begins to change his life - to repent is the Bible word - when he sees the tragic effects of his alcoholism. He is motivated by guilt over what he has done and who he has become.
On the other hand I just saw, on Thursday, an article from a research group in Spain that said women are more likely to feel guilt than men, and women can feel guilty about all kinds of things: children, stray cats, their work, and their husbands. Men, who are less empathetic, tend to feel less guilt and feel it less frequently.
The author of the piece, published in the Spanish Journal of Psychology, says that men are guilt deficient because we lack interpersonal sensitivity while women suffer from destructive guilt largely imposed by society. (MSNBC.Com website, March 11, 2010).
We can stop there and let that be a lunch conversation question for you today!!
Some of us are dealing with guilt because we have been raised to be perfectionists and do not yet know how to let go of that expectation that we be perfect. Some are still learning to forgive ourselves and to accept ourselves when we have given our best to something and it is still of course, not perfect.
Guilt and repentance and forgiveness are of course, frequent and serious themes in the Bible and we will look in a moment at two stories that can speak to us. The pattern in the Bible is simple when we realize that we have fallen short of our vision for our life and of God’s vision for our life - not easy but simple.
By the way, one of the words for “sin” in the New Testament is an archery term,“hamartia” in Greek, and it means missing the mark! I like that image a lot. Who of us has not missed the mark, missed the target, at times?
The pattern in scripture is that we look honestly at ourselves, admit how we have missed the mark, and confess to God and the ones we have hurt, then ask for forgiveness, and begin to change and to act in different ways. Once again we see that pattern not only in the Bible, but in Jeff Bridges character in the film Crazyheart.
Last weekend we hosted one of the foremost writers and thinkers in spiritual circles today, Dr. Brian McClaren. Brian spoke to our congregation last Saturday morning and at Montview Presbyterian Church the Friday evening before. All told about 350 people heard Brian. He said as he was leaving here on Saturday that being in places like St. Andrew Church, Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City and at St. Luke’s Church in Indianapolis, gives him hope for the United Methodist Church. You all need to feel affirmed by that compliment.
In his book there are several important one line quotes for me and one of them speaks to our topic of guilt and forgiveness and starting over. It is at the top of your bulleting today:
REPENTANCE DOES NOT MEAN BEING SORRY – IT MEANS BEING DIFFERENT!!
There is a story about guilt and insight and repentance and turning onto a new path that I like very much. It is:
Autobiography in Five Short Chapters
I
I walk down the street
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in
I am lost..helpless. It isn’t my fault
It takes forever to find a way out
II
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I pretend I don’t see it
I fall in again
I can’t believe I am in the same place again but it isn’t my fault
It still takes a long time to get out
III
I walk down the same street
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I see it is there
I still fall in..it is a habit
My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault
I get out immediately.
IV
I walk down the same street
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it
V
I walk down another street
Repentance means looking at what we have done wrong, feeling appropriate guilt, taking responsibility, and—taking a new path, walking a new direction – walking down another street.
There are two Bible stories I want to focus on. One is the story of Peter, the loud and brash and impulsive close friend of Jesus, who boldly boasts at the Last Supper Passover meal that even if all the others abandon Christ in his time of deepest need, he, Peter, would never do that and that he will stay with Christ even to the end. He does not do that; he fails of course. He refuses to say that he even knows this teacher and lord, with whom, he has just given up three years of life to be with every day. Jesus and his friends have just prayed all night in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus is arrested and now has been taken into the high priest’s house and thrown into a dungeon, all alone, waiting for a trumped up trial. Some of us have been to that very dungeon when we have gone to Israel.
Peter, waiting outside by the warm fire, fulfills Jesus’ prediction that Peter will, three times, deny even knowing Christ. When he realizes what he has done, he goes away to weep all alone, ashamed and emotionally destroyed.
What happens to Peter who is now dealing with this tremendous guilt of having let down Jesus Christ? Can you feel what he is feeling? Have you let someone down in this way: a loved one, a friend, a spouse, a son or daughter? Can you feel what he is feeling for a moment?
What happens to him is, of course, forgiveness. In the gospel of John, the resurrected Christ appears on a beach when his friends are fishing close by, and, as they all eat broiled fish together, Jesus forgives him and sends him in a new direction. Peter becomes, for a while, the most important leader in the Jesus movement, that is, until the next leader arises, the apostle Paul.
Here is one more Bible story about the impact of guilt, the paralyzing power of guilt.
Early in the gospel of Mark, chapter two of Mark – I hope you can read through this short gospel in the next couple of weeks – Jesus is in his headquarters town of Capernaum at the northern edge of the Sea of Galilee. He is teaching there and the crowds are surrounding him and pressing so hard that people can barely see and hear him. Four friends come with another friend who is paralyzed. They are carrying him on a stretcher but they cannot get past the crowds. Do you remember what they did? They broke a hole in the thatched roof to let the man down on his mat, through the hole in the roof, so that he could be right there in front of Jesus.
Jesus, seeing the compassion and faith of the four friends, says something very strange to the paralyzed man: “Son, your sins are forgiven.” The man immediately gets up, picks up his mat and walks out of the house.
Your sins are forgiven? Why does Jesus say that?
Can it be that guilt can actually paralyze a person, cause them to be stuck and unable to move forward and to make any progress in life? Do you know anyone for whom that has happened? Has that happened to you?
Let’s pray about that.
God we thank you that you are gracious. We thank you for the chances to look honestly at ourselves, to receive your forgiveness, to decide to change, and, in this Lenten season, to walk in a new direction. Give us your strength and comfort as we do this. Amen.