This morning we are continuing our series on the Apostles Creed. Our hope for this series is we will move from simply reciting the Creed as words on a paper to more deeply understanding how it gives shape to our lives.

Rich Mullins wrote a song called Creed, which is about the Apostles Creed, and the chorus goes:

And I believe what I believe
Is what makes me what I am
I did not make it, no it is making me
It is the very truth of God and not
The invention of any man.

So far in our series we've reflected on the faith statements of believing in…

God the Father
Jesus Christ his only son
Holy Ghost/Spirit

Then last week Pastor Dan preached a great sermon on the church – reminding us that we are a family – with all our differences in backgrounds and personalities. We’re a family-- whether we like it or not.

The Apostles Creed says a lot about the relational nature of our faith.

** God created us to be in a joyful relationship with him and with each other.

In the prologue of 1 John, leading up to today's passage, John says:

“We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.”

It’s very interesting to me that in the Apostles Creed – right after the lines about believing in the church and the communion of the saints we have the line about believing in the forgiveness of sins.

It’s very fitting – because if a family is going to stay intact, there must be forgiveness.

Forgiveness is at the heart of the Christian faith. We need it -- but do we reallybelieve in the forgiveness of sins? What are our lives saying about what we believe about forgiveness and God's power to do a transforming work in our lives?

Today's passage offers a wonderful promise to us about forgiveness and gives us some great imagery to think about as we go through our days and work on being in fellowship with God and with each other.

When I first saw the part of the Apostles Creed I'd be working/preaching on, I thought: "Forgiveness – oooh, this is a huge and a hard topic." Going to the place inside us where we have to think about asking for forgiveness–or forgiving others-can stir up the deepest of emotions when we think about the pain that we’ve experienced.

It can be a difficult topic to bring up with friends... with anyone ..who might respond by saying that we have no clue what they’ve been through, or that we have no idea what they’ve done to someone else...We are delicate creatures.

My husband Jim every once in a while will say, "You hurt my feeling." (implying he has just one feeling) But I know he has more than one. We all do, and they are usually quite fragile. And then there's our pride, our defensiveness, our desire for justice... The list goes on and on… which is why we need forgiveness so much.

Someone once said...

“If our greatest need had been information, God would have sent us an educator.

If our greatest need had been technology, God would have sent us a scientist.

If our greatest need had been money, God would have sent us an economist.

And if our greatest need had been pleasure, God would have sent us an entertainer.

But our greatest need was forgiveness – so God sent us a Savior.”

(author unknown)

We need forgiveness in our lives -- every day! Every day relationships are strained, painful things happen from things as minor as when someone looks the wrong way at us, to things as major as horrible atrocities committed against whole communities. Minor or major, often we’re usually talking about complicated, multi-layered messes –stuff people would rather not deal with...I remember being confronted with one of those major situations in the world…

It was the summer of 1998, and a group of us traveled to Croatia to work with an organization whose mission was to minister to those who had been traumatized by the Balkans War.

Most of our time was spent in beautiful small town of Fuzine, helping restore a big, old building to be a retreat center.

To better understand the war, one day, we drove to the city of Vukovar to visit an evangelical seminary and to witness first-hand some of the horrible devastation that the people there had experienced during the war.

You see, from 1991-95, the city of Vukovar had been surrounded by the Serbian army – with no way at all to escape. Encircled, they were pounded with artillery. Every building in the city was damaged if not completely destroyed.

Our hosts took us to a mass grave -- the first I'd ever seen up close. So very sobering. After visiting the graveyard, we went to see the town’s water tower. While I was talking with Steve, from the seminary, something caught his eye, and he bent over and picked up a big piece of shrapnel off the ground and handed it to me. I didn’t know what to say... “Thanks” didn’t quite seem to fit...So I stashed away this symbol of hatred and destruction in my pocket.

The next day we were driving to church – about a 30-45 minute drive–and I remember this deep sense of heaviness of having this piece of shrapnel in my purse.

What do I do with it? What do I do with the pain of this world?

There are many – way too many – huge issues like this in our world – that seem far away and overwhelming. It’s hard to know what to do with the pain.

And then there’s the stuff -- the shrapnel of daily life-- that hits us and that we fling at others (with varying degrees of force), which affects our:

• relationships with friends
• relationships with people with whom we serve on committees
• relationships with people we’re dating
• relationships with our parents, siblings
• relationships with spouses and children...

The shrapnel flies -- it hits, it burns, it hurts. We often don't know what to do with it.

• Sometimes the shrapnel just nicks us – and we try to ignore it.
• Sometimes it hits harder, causing us to limp.
• Sometimes it hits so deeply that it has to be surgically removed.

In any of these cases, if not treated, the wounds can get infected and become more and more painful. It can be easy to become despondent about what to do with the sin in the world, where to begin to respond…

The good news is that God offers hope – a way out of the darkness. In our passage, John calls us to start by looking at ourselves. Are we walking in the light of God? Can we see the sin in our own lives? Are we asking ourselves,“What might I have done to contribute to the mess we’re in?

(And please don't hear me say that we need to figure out why we might have done to deserve bad treatment – any bad/unjust treatment in cases of abuse.)

Every week we have time in the service to confess our sins... We don't just do this every once in a while. We have time every week to confess. It's a time we can ask God to shine light on our sin. It's an opportunity to come to grips with the things that are keeping us separated from God -- from having fellowship with our God who loves us so very much.

God knows if we’re telling the truth about our lives. We might be able to fool others into thinking that we’re walking in the light, but we can’t fool God.

Lewis Smedes was a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary for many years. He wrote a book called Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve that has many, many good things to say about dealing with variety of issues involved with asking for forgiveness and forgiving others. In it he says:

My own guess is that God asks us to repent, not as a condition God needs, but as a condition WE need. What God wants is not only that we be forgiven in his heart and mind. He wants an honest coming together with his children. Asking for repentance is only a way of asking for truthfulness.

To live in peace with God and others we must be willing to confess our wrongdoing. 1 John says that ifwe confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins. Then the path will be clear to have fellowship with God. We say, "But oh, i've done some bad stuff. I've really hurt some people...I don't think God -- or the people I've hurt -- will take me back."

In response to this concern we can turn to the parable of the prodigal son–who took his father's money so that he could go walk in his own way, which was in darkness...

Finally he realized how destructive he was being… and how lost he was…

and he planned how he would crawl back to his father and ask to be taken back.

His father not only took him back, but ran out to meet him

and welcomed him home with a feast...

As God’s children, we belong to God. God offers a feast to those who return. Isn’t that amazing – that we belong to God? What can be even more amazing (or difficult) to accept is that those who hurt us also belong to God. As our passage says: “…Jesus Christ the righteous… is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”

So this moves us from dealing with our own sin to now dealing with other people's sin – and the pain and heartache they have caused us and the people we love.

We remember Jesus' words from the cross,

"Father, forgive them for they know not what they do."

And we're called to follow Jesus' example of forgiving others, which isn’t easy -- as a matter of fact it’s costly because it goes against the grain within us that desires vengeance.

Where's the justice, we ask?? So often we hold onto the memory of the hurt–and fantasize about ways to get even.

The problem with this is that it will never feel like the scales are even–because people have their own scales for weighing pain. And then the pain keeps eating away at our soul.

David Augsburger, a professor of pastoral care and counseling at Fuller Seminary, addresses this question about justice in a book he wrote called The New Freedom of Forgiveness. He says that

“The Christ of the Cross is God’s final work, not just of love, but of justice. There is a baseline of justice; and God is a God of faithful, radical fairness and redemptive justice who loves that which is the good. God cannot either permissively or explicitly overlook human inhumanity, murder, rebellion, selfishness, and all the rest of the evil we do and are. …He deals with evil with no evasion.

When I was in the car that morning in Croatia, driving to church with the piece of shrapnel weighing heavily in my purse/pocket.... I was feeling overwhelmed by the horrible things that we humans do to each other. I was wondering what I was going to say at the church service...and all of a sudden God planted a picture in my mind.

I saw the piece of shrapnel, and then I saw a long, shiny nail (like the ones we had been using in our construction work all week) placed on top of the shrapnel so that it formed the shape of a cross. It was as if Jesus was saying,

"Lynne, I came to the world to carry the weight of the world's sin and pain. I came to bring healing and hope for those who are willing to turn to me... Give your burdens to me...I will take care of the justice."

And suddenly I knew what I was going to share at church that morning.

But, you might ask… What about forgiving those who are unrepentant?

I agree with Lewis Smedes who says… we need to forgive the unrepentant for our own sake. We need to forgive people who do not care if only so that we do not drown in our own misery.

So how do we do this? How do we deal with the pain?

Some wounds might need professional counseling to deal with to help us walk through the forgiveness process -- and it is a process.

There are a lot of good resources available to help us work through the tough issues...I came across so much more than I could ever share in one sermon, and I ended up leaving pages and pages of notes on my desk. I would really recommend those book I mentioned earlier by Lewis Smedes and David Augsburger.

How can we tell when forgiveness happens?

You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.

Forgiveness is love’s antidote for hate, beginning with passive hate, the loss of energy to wish people well. So when we feel the slightest urge to wish that life would go well for them, we have begun to forgive...

It reminds me of one of my college dating dramas…I had been going out with a hockey player goalie guy for not a real long time before I went to study abroad for a semester. While I was away he wrote and said he wanted to break-up and date other people, which I didn’t think was very fair because I had gone to Mexico with 7 other young women.

When I got back he was ready to get back together, and I – wanting to have a little power/control in the situation -- said, “Oh no, I’m not ready for that.” Then a month or two later when I was ready to get back together, I discovered that he had started dating someone else, which was really hard.

This discovery happened in the middle of his hockey season, and not too much later his performance went into a slump.

I confess that I probably took a little too much pleasure in his struggle. I thought it served him right – and hoped that his slump was because deep down he was pining away for me.

But somewhere along the line forgiveness and healing happened. I realized this when I found myself wishing him well – and feeling happy for him when he started playing better.

It’s such a freeing thing when a relationship is restored. It doesn’t mean the relationship will be what it used to be, but at least when we can sincerely wish each other well and know that the past isn’t in control of our present and future lives.

Practicing forgiveness is the only hope we have for truly being God’s family together.

• We do this by walking in the light of truth.
• We do this by confessing our sins before we come to the communion table together to remember what Jesus has done for us.

After God gave me the picture in Croatia of the piece of shrapnel being covered by a nail, and after I had a chance to share that in the church service...

We returned back to the big building that we were renovating, and I found a shiny nail and a piece of wire. I wrapped the pieces together in the shape of a cross and found a small piece of wood to use as a stand.

A few days later our group gathered in the building to celebrate communion. We didn't have an alter, so we found two walkers and a piece of plywood to make a table. We used a mug as a chalice and an old plate to hold the bread. And I brought out the little cross I made.

As we stood around in a circle and we thanked Jesus for coming to walk this earth, for being willing to go through the most unjust pain and suffering so that we could know forgiveness of sins.

There really is so much of it to me that remains a mystery–how God can forgive us over and over and over again...What I have learned from people, from life and most importantly from Scripture is that if we reflect deeply on all the ways that God has forgiven us for turning away from him, then we find that our gratitude for God’s mercy in our lives will empower us to extend forgiveness to others and walk in the light of God.