Becoming the God We Worship

A Sermon Preached by the Reverend Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on July 29, 2007.

If you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, you can behold images of the gods of the ancient world, imposing statues of warrior gods, threatening gods, gods that fill your heart with terror. Strapped to the belts of these gods are swords that are ready for battle. To these idols the people of the ancient world fell down in worship. They would offer sacrifices of animals to these statues to satisfy the desire of these gods for satisfaction of wrongs committed against them. And for the ancients, all the gods were warrior gods, ready to march against the enemy, engage in combat and carry home the booty of battle. It is little wonder that the ancient people were constantly at war with one another for they worshiped gods who constantly were at war with each other. As psalm 115 puts it: Those who make them are like them. Or in other words, we become like the God we worship. The ancient people worshiped warrior gods and became warriors.
What about us? But who is the God whom we worship? And are we becoming like that God?
For us Christians, we believe that our image of God is the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The God whom we worship in Christ Jesus is the God who is working in the world the work of reconciliation, restoring the brokenness of the world to order, bringing about our restoration. That restoration comes into the world through the work of forgiveness. God has forgiven all of us our offenses. God has taken away the guilt of our sin. God forgives us so that we in turn can forgive others. So that we can become like the God we worship. For that forgiveness we not only ask God to give to us, but to give us in the measure that we give that gift to others. Those words we pray whenever we say the Lord’s Prayer.
You probably noticed that the version of the Lord’s Prayer we heard today from the gospel according to Luke is somewhat shorter than the version we shall pray later in the Eucharist. Perhaps we might have wished that Luke would have forgotten that problematic phrase. Perhaps we might have desired that the biblical scholars would have said that the phrase was only included in some of the later texts of the gospel and we could delete it. But no such chance. We are called to that difficult task of forgiveness.
I wonder if Jesus invites us to be persistent in prayer because he knew how difficult it would be for us to let loose of the sins that others commit against us.
You know those hard things you have endured from others, the pain, the betrayals, the rejections, the times you were used by someone else, the times you were treated like a thing and not a person. And to those painful situations, Jesus asks that you go and forgive those who have offended you. Now if Jesus were Dr. Phil, he would say that you should forgive others so that the weight of holding on to those offenses would be lifted from you and that you can go on with your life free of that heavy burden. But no.
Not Jesus. He invites you to forgive so that you can be a part of his own work of forgiveness in the world.
If this work of forgiveness seems impossible, I would like you to hear the lesson from a girl made famous during the Vietnam war. Some of you might recall the Vietnam war and the horrible pictures that flashed on the nightly new of the horrors of that war.
I am sure that all of us here will recall the picture of a young Vietnamese girl running down the street, her clothing burned away by the napalm bomb dropped by an American plane on Saigon, the pain of her burning flesh and streaming down in her face in tears.
That young girl’s name is Kim Phuc. After the war, some Canadians brought her to Canada for reconstructive surgery and she still lives in Canada.
Another person is a part of that story and his name is John Plummer. John is an ordained minister in the Methodist church. He is also a Vietnam Veteran. He piloted the plane which dropped the napalm on Kim. When he saw that picture of a child so mutilated by his action, John became an alcoholic until he was able to find forgiveness from God for the deed he did. He met Kim at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. and asked for her forgiveness for the pain he caused her. Even though she still suffers from the pain of the scars of that attack, she found it in her heart to forgive John. She said to him: “Let us live in love.” She forgave John, not to ease the burden of her heart but to ease the pain in John’s heart.
That is the way God forgives. God forgives us to ease the burden of guilt only God can ease. We too are called to forgive others with the gift only we can bestow on them: the restoration of the hearts who have offended us.
I know that I am inviting you to a task that is hard and difficult, the very task that Jesus invites you to do. If you find this forgiveness too hard to do, then ask Jesus to help you to do it. Knock on the door of heaven constantly until you heart is moved to that forgiveness. As Jesus says to us: “Ask, and it will be given you, search and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds and for everyone who knocks the door will be opened.”
Pray that you might become the Christ you worship: the Christ who opened his heart on the cross for love of you.