Forgiving Ourselves for Being Imperfect: Sermon Preached on 7th April 2024 (Second Sunday of Easter)

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Readings – Acts 4: 32-35; John 20: 19-31

“There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold.”

Why can’t you lot be like those Christians in our first reading? They were “of one heart and soul”. They held all their possessions in common—even selling their houses and sharing the proceeds, so “[t]here was not a needy person among them”.

Now, I could go from here to say that while it was a pity that few of us seemed to be able to be really live like these first Christians, but if were even a little more like them, the world would be a better place; and afterwards you would say “What a nice sermon, Rector.”

As I preached it, I would also know that there wasn’t a cat’s chance in Hell of me giving my savings to a common fund, still less selling my retirement flat. I mean, who would control this fund? The Church of England’s central bureaucracy? No thanks. My PCCs? I love you all dearly, but, also, no thanks. I’d also know you weren’t going to sell your possessions, and if you were to sell your house and give the proceeds to a common fund, some of your children would have very angry conversations with you.

Now, this vision of the Church at its foundation has inspired some Christians in every generation since the dawn of the Church to live totally different lives from most people, and sometimes great things have resulted. And, I don’t know about you, but sometimes that leaves me feeling pretty inadequate. Then I also remember that some of the Christians inspired by this vision end up going a little crazy.

So with all that in mind, let’s return to this story and not over-romanticise it. Yes, it’s a wonderful vision, probably a time in the life of the early Christians when they experienced, here on Earth, a foretaste of Heaven. But let’s be clear, the apostles and their companions didn’t manage to live that way for very long.

The very next section of from Acts, directly proceeding from this morning’s reading, is the story of Ananias and Sapphira. Ananias and Sapphira were a couple who belonged to the early Church in Jerusalem. They sold some land and secretly kept back some of the proceeds for themselves. St Peter somehow knew about it, and challenged them in public. Then they dropped dead at history’s first church committee meeting. Interestingly, this story is one of those readings that never appears as a main Sunday reading at any point in our three-year cycle of Bible readings.

It’s almost as if we don’t want to talk about how transient this heavenly moment in the life of the early Christians was. If we find ourselves asking, “Why can’t we live that?”—the answer is that even the apostles didn’t manage to live like that for very long.

Remember too that this story is set in the immediate afterglow of the Resurrection, and also of the coming of the Holy Spirit at the first Pentecost. It is also set at a time of real persecution of what was still a tiny Church, entirely based in Jerusalem. Many members of that miniscule Christian group, the only one in the world, had known Jesus personally and encountered Him after the Resurrection. They lived with a particular intensity that made all sorts of things possible.

But nobody or no movement can sustain living as intensely as this for very long. Although it isn’t one of our readings this morning, the story of the Transfiguration always jumps to mind when I find myself feeling guilty about not being a more wonderfully perfect Christian—Peter, James, and John had to come down from the mountain, had to return to the mundane world, albeit changed forever by the their encounter with God up there.

And, actually, even if we could sustain living like this, I wonder how healthy that would be. It’s wonderful that “they were all of one heart and soul” – but it’s not always a positive if that sort of situation persists for too long. All sorts of problems end up being swept under the carpet. In fact, if a complicated and varied group of people agrees on too much for too often, we must ask ourselves whether we’re dealing with a Church or a cult. The apostles whom Jesus called didn’t all have the same temperament, and they didn’t always agree with one another, to put it mildly, even when He walked the Earth.

A culture where people are constantly feuding is not a healthy one, but a culture where everyone agrees all the time is probably even more unhealthy.

We need to remember that what the Holy Spirit leads us to in this life is just a foretaste of Heaven, not is fullness. The perfect communion with one another and with God that we will experience in Heaven is something we can only briefly glimpse in this world. That’s the price, firstly, of having free will—God gave us that free will; he didn’t make us to be His slaves or His robots. In Heaven, things will be different; but if I could explain to you the details of how they’ll be different, it could hardly be something worth believing in.

In this life, however, not only do we have to share a world with other people also blessed with free will, but each of us makes honest mistakes sometimes: none of us has perfect insight. And sometimes we do the wrong thing knowingly, whether in the heat of the moment, or in bouts of wilfulness that last a long time. All of us, sometimes do things that make us ashamed. Sometimes we’re going to hurt other people; and we’re going to pick up a few wounds ourselves as we journey through life.

So let us turn to our Gospel reading, and remember that it was because of His wounds that Jesus was able to convince Thomas that He had truly risen from the dead. Our wounds, although they hurt, are sometimes our best witness.

We have all inflicted wounds too. Nobody takes Christians who pretend to be perfect seriously—everybody knows us too well. Proclaiming the Gospel credibly means being candid about the fact that we are indeed sinners in need of God’s forgiveness; that we understand the need to find forgiveness because we ourselves need to be forgiven.

It’s telling that the instruction that Jesus gives to the disciples when they receive the Holy Spirit is “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them”. Forgiveness is thus at the start and finish of Christ’s earthly ministry – because at the start, Christ is baptised by John, who proclaimed “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” And God knows, the strangely brittle, angry, judgemental culture that has erupted out of nowhere over the last decade or so needs to learn the power of forgiveness.

Finally, for the Church to be an agent of forgiveness, I wonder if it needs to start by forgiving itself. That story of the first Christians living as if they were in heaven for a few brief months in Jerusalem can make us feel like we have failed. Seized with self-doubt as a result, the Church tries just a bit too hard to justify itself, shouting too loudly about its good works and repeating the mantras the secular world loves about promising to do better next time. But we know we’ll mess up again; we as individuals and the Church as a body of people. Everybody else knows that too. I think we would be far more convincing agents of the good news of God’s forgiveness if we just admitted that.

Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Top banner: Jesus Movement in Amsterdam, 1972, © Fotocollectie Anefo Reportage, used under Creative Commons CC-0.