Lent Midweek: “Forgive us our sins”

We come now to the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” We heard, as I read a moment ago from the text of Matthew’s gospel, that immediately after Jesus teaches the disciples this prayer, he goes on to expand on the importance of this one petition: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” This is the only petition that he reiterates in this way—and then, of course, he reiterates it again in parables such as the one we heard from Matthew 18. It seems quite clear to me that Jesus saw forgiveness as one of the central aspects of the gospel—and as perhaps the central focus of this prayer.

There are so many ways we could approach it tonight; really it would be worth a whole Lenten series just to talk about forgiveness. But I’d like to stick closely to the petition itself, and make three points.

First, let’s think about what it means that Jesus bids us pray “forgive us our sins.” It’s in the first person plural. “Forgive us.” Now I think we normally consider sin and forgiveness in a pretty individualized way. I ask God to forgive me my sins. Truth be told, when I pray this petition, I usually am thinking about my sins. That’s not a bad thing, and I’ll say a bit more about that in a moment. But first, notice that really, when I pray this petition, I am talking about more than just my sins—I’m praying God’s forgiveness for the sins of the world.

Now for Christians, the fact that the world is full of sinners is no surprise. We can turn on the evening news, and if we haven’t become too hardened to these things, we can see countless examples of sin and brokenness. War, poverty, hatred, violence, greed, lust—all are on full display, all proclaiming the truth of the Psalmist’s assertion that “there is none that does good, no, not one.”

And of course we can see the same vista close to home. All people are sinners. The theological term here is “total depravity”—all of us, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And that means those close to us, as well as those we watch from afar. Henry Ward Beecher, the great 19^th century American preacher, allegedly once commented, “I don’t need John Calvin to tell me about total depravity, I have my congregation to show me that!”

So the world is full of sinners. And here we are, in this petition, asking God to forgive them—to forgive us, of course, each of us sinful individuals, but also to forgive them. Helmut Thielicke puts it this way: “When I pray these words I am bringing into the light of God’s countenance the guilt of all the world, war and rumors or war, every conscious and every unacknowledged wickedness.”

Does that surprise you? Remember that this Jesus who is teaching this prayer is also the one who said things like “forgive your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” He’s also the one who said, on the cross, “Father, forgive them.” There’s a theme going here: we are to ask forgiveness, not merely for our own sins, but also for the sins of others; even those others whom we really might think are unforgivable, or might even hope are unforgivable. They are included in our prayer when we say “our sins.” They are part of the us.

Now I just don’t know if I like that. I can sometimes bring myself to pray for my enemies. Usually it goes something like, “Make him a better person so that he won’t bother me so much.” But asking God to forgive that person—that’s harder to do. How about asking God to forgive Osama bin Laden, or any of the other global bad guys? Are we up for that? Probably not, at least not too willingly. What we really want to pray is not “Forgive them” but “Give them what they deserve.” But Jesus seems to have left that petition out of the Lord’s Prayer. Instead, he asks us to pray for forgiveness for them—for the whole world.

But there’s a second thing. Once we recognize the global implication of praying “Forgive us,” once we recognize that the “us” includes a lot of people who don’t normally populate our prayers, then we also have to come back to the harsh reality that “us” also includes “me.” To quote Thielicke again, “I cannot simply look out the window and be morally indignant over the great Babylon that lies spread out before me in all its godless darkness. No, what I see out there in its global proportions must only remind me of my own ‘Babylonian heart.’ . . . What is happening ‘outside’ is nothing but the macrocosmic reflection of the hate, envy, lies, adultery and murderous impulses in your heart and my heart.”

We began this Lenten season on Ash Wednesday by singing together Psalm 51, David’s prayer of forgiveness, and part of that prayer has been a part of our Sunday liturgies as well: “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” Let me remind you of the context of that Psalm. David has committed adultery with Bathsheba. His friend Nathan the prophet has come and told him a story about a man who has stolen a neighbor’s sheep. David is indignant, and orders the man punished. Nathan looks at him and says simply, “Thou art the man.” We look outside ourselves, and we see so clearly the guilt and sin of others; but we need constantly to hear those words of Nathan: “It is you. You are the sinner.” Luther puts it this way in his explanation to this petition: “We sin every day and deserve nothing but punishment.” Or, in the Large Catechism, “Although we have God’s Word and believe, although we obey and submit to his will and are nourished by God’s gift and blessing, nevertheless we are not without sin. We still daily transgress because we live in the world.” And so indeed this petition stands as a reminder that we in fact sin every day, and we need to ask God’s mercy and forgiveness every day.

Now the third thing, and we’ll see in a moment how this ties the other two together. This is the only petition in the prayer that makes explicit reference to our response in the world. We ask God to “forgive our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” There’s a connection here between God’s forgiveness of us, and our forgiveness of others. The nature of the connection is complex, but at the very least we could say that that God’s forgiveness of us must get played out in our daily life. Thielicke again: “In the Christian faith nothing remains shut up in the ghetto of our inner life. Everything in it immediately thrusts out and seeks to become an action.” In other words, God’s forgiveness of our sins, if we have truly received it, results in our forgiveness of others.

So the petition challenges us to consider just how well we embody this forgiveness in our daily life. Do we, in fact, forgive others from the heart? Or do we simply stifle our anger and bite our tongue and hope we don’t explode? Some of us get very good at hiding resentments, concealing hurts, and pretending that this means forgiveness. Of course it doesn’t, and it is ultimately doomed to poison both our relationships with others and our relationship with God.

But now this is just how it all gets tied together. When we have difficulty forgiving another, we can go back to my first point tonight: that in praying “Forgive us our sins,” we are asking God to forgive not just ourselves, but all the rest of us poor miserable sinners. We are asking God to forgive that one whom we have difficulty forgiving. Sometimes we may have to say something like, “Gracious God, I cannot find it in me to forgive so-and-so, but you are so much bigger than I, and so much more patient and merciful, that I ask you to forgive him or her.”

And then we cycle on through the second point, remembering that we, too, are sinners. So perhaps our prayer is expanded just a bit: “Forgive so-and-so, whom I cannot forgive; but forgive me, too, for I know that I am not guiltless. Forgive me my sins, and especially forgive my sinful unwillingness to forgive so-and-so.”

And then, you see, we’ve begun down the road of forgiveness. By admitting that both we and so-and-so are part of what one writer called the “community of sinners,” we begin to find the way to forgive. We begin, as we embrace God’s mercy for ourselves, to let that mercy mold and form us in a way that enables us to forgive others, even old so-and-so. To quote Thielicke just once more: “We are always echoes. The only question is, echoes of what? Either we are echoes of the injustice, the intrigue, the chicanery, the meanness that is around us, and then we ourselves become scheming, cheating, and mean. Or we are echoes of Jesus Christ and therefore echoes of that forgiving, renewing, creative love that comes to us from the Father.”

Or Luther puts it this way: since we do in fact sin every day, “we pray that he would give us everything by grace.” That includes the will and the heart to forgive. The strength and patience to forgive old so-and-so doesn’t finally come from us, but from God. It comes from God, along with his mercy toward us. And so we can pray with confidence and faith: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”

Thielicke quotes are from Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father: Sermons on the Lord’s Prayer (Harper & Row, 1960).