The Major League playoffs are in full swing. Contenders for the World Series title have been narrowed down to four teams. Which of the four teams will win the World Series? The team with the best pitching will win. If you have good pitching, your opponents’ bats will be silenced so that even if you only score a run or two, you’ll still win games.
Now you may not care that good pitching makes for a good baseball team but you should be interested in what makes for a good Christian. A good Christian, Jesus tells us, is one who is watchful and forgiving; who knows that faith is more portal than power; and who realizes that doing God’s will is simply our duty.
Jesus begins our devotion with some plain talk about sin. He said: “Things that cause people to sin are bound to come, but woe to that person through whom they come. 2 It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin. 3 So watch yourselves” (Luke 17:1b-3a). As long as we live in this world, temptation to sin will bombard us. While we can’t stop these temptations from coming this is no excuse to rush headlong into sin. Jesus especially warns against doing anything that would lead others to sin. He says it would be better to have a millstone (a round stone as big as a boulder) hung around our neck and be thrown to the fish than to promote sin.
That’s a strong warning for us parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and older brothers and sisters isn’t it? When those younger than us watch and hear us what do they learn? Do they learn how to be patient and calm even when SuperStore has run out of yogurt and only has three cashier lanes open? Do they learn how to respect and honor teachers, or to make fun of them? Do they learn to tell the truth, or do we ask them to lie for us and say that we’re not home when someone calls that we don’t want to talk to? “Watch yourselves!” Jesus says. Don’t be the cause of someone else’s sin.
But don’t just watch yourselves; watch one another. “If your brother sins,” Jesus said, “rebuke him” (Luke 17:3a). We are to watch out for one another and call each other to repentance because sin damns and we don’t want anyone to suffer the eternal consequences of impenitent sin. Jesus, of course, doesn’t want us to do this rebuking in a self-righteous manner (Matthew 7:3 ff.). We should rebuke sin the way a doctor points to a tumor on her patient’s MRI. A doctor who says, “It looks like you’re getting what you deserve for your unhealthy life-style,” or “My MRI scan would never look like this” isn’t going to last very long in the profession. In the same way if we rebuke others without first humbly acknowledging our sins, we don’t show ourselves to be good Christians. Instead we show ourselves to be like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day: self-righteous and hypocritical.
Unfortunately our society has conditioned us to believe that any talk of sin is out of line. We’re told to mind our own business because the “sin” we see others committing probably isn’t hurting us anyway. But Friends, Jesus doesn’t just want us to rebuke sins committed against us, he wants us to rebuke any sin that we are aware of. Ignoring this command of Jesus is dangerous for all. Let me try to illustrate how that is. Everything was great on that flight to Hawaii until a passenger decided to cut a hole in his window. What was even stranger is how none of the other passengers said anything as the man sawed away at the Plexiglas. What could they do, the other passengers reasoned? If that man wanted to let everything not bolted down in the airplane fly past him out his open window, well, that was his problem, not theirs. Not their problem? Of course it was their problem! They should have tackled the man and taken his saw away, for the action of that one man would adversely affect all passengers aboard that flight (adapted from illustration in Concordia Pulpit Resources Volume 11, part 3, page 13).
Fellow members of St. Peter, when we think that the sin of another Christian is none of our business, in time our whole congregation will crash and burn. That’s why Jesus gives us steps to deal with sin (Matthew 18). The purpose of church discipline is to save souls. Therefore it’s worth doing the way God wants it done. Rebuking sin shows us to be good Christians because it shows that we care.
But now what should we do when the sinner repents? Forgive of course! Jesus went as far as saying, “If [your brother] sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him” (Luke 17:4). Forgiving sin may be even more difficult than rebuking it. Especially since Jesus wants us to forgive again and again, even if this means forgiving the same person seven times for the same sin in the same day! But that’s what makes for a good Christian, says Jesus.
Ahh forgiveness is a beautiful concept isn’t it…that is until we have to practice it, quipped C. S. Lewis. While we love to hear how God has separated our sins from us as far as the East is from the West (Psalm 103:12), we tend to forever identify another person by something they did or said against us. We say things like: “I’ve forgiven him but I can’t forget what he did to me. It makes me boil when I think about it!” Friends, according to Jesus, that’s not the way a good Christian talks. A good Christian forgives and extends the hand of love and peace. No, you may not be able to forget what someone did to you so whenever you see that person you think of the hurt they caused. But what you need to do is to forgive that person again, and ask God to help you forget the hurt. Why stew and boil anyway? That sounds like you’re holding a grudge. And holding a grudge has about the same result as drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
But isn’t Jesus expecting the impossible from us when he commands us to forgive again and again? That’s certainly how the disciples felt because they cried out: “Increase our faith!” (Luke 17:5) That sounds like a pious response, doesn’t it? But the disciples might as well have said: “Forgive my brother seven times in the same day for the same sin? Who has enough faith to do something like that? You’re asking the impossible, Jesus.” Haven’t we said similar things? “I wish I had the courage to talk to him about his sin, but I just don’t. Someone else will have to do it.” “I wish I could forgive her but I just can’t. My faith isn’t strong enough.” We, like the disciples, are good at blaming God for our inability to do what he wants us to do. But now listen to Jesus’ response to his disciples’ request for a super-sized faith. “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed” said Jesus, “you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you” (Luke 17:6). It does not matter whether your faith is super-sized or seed-sized, explains Jesus, any size faith will do great things because faith is more portal than power; it’s more wall-socket than battery. Do you get the picture? If we imagine faith to be a battery, we may be tempted to think that, like a small AAA battery, our faith doesn’t have the juice needed to perform the tasks God asks of us. Even if our faith were the size of a car battery, we surmise, we’d eventually run out of juice to do things like continually forgive. But faith is not a battery – a power stored inside of us that can only drain away each day. Faith is a portal, a wall-socket through which we connect to God’s ever flowing, omnipotent-a-watt power. Connected to this immense power that brought the world into existence, that calms storms, that raises the dead we could tend our gardens by commanding the weeds to be uprooted and be sent to the compost heap, if that were God’s will. What is God’s will is that we restrain, rebuke, and remit sin. Can we do these things? We sure can. When we remember that faith is more portal than power we will say with the Apostle Paul: “I can do everything through him who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:13). Through Jesus we can, no, we will forgive our brothers and sisters seven times in the same day for the same sin!
I hope the words of our text have fired you up to do God’s will – to restrain, rebuke, and remit sin. But watch out. When you forgive a particularly painful hurt, for example, don’t think you’ve done anything special. Jesus makes that point with a parable about a master who doesn’t thank his slaves for doing what he has commanded them to do (Luke 17:7-10). And so when we, with God’s help, restrain, rebuke, and remit sin should not think that we have done anything extraordinary and deserve a pat on the back for it. For we have simply done our Christian duty. In fact if we don’t bother holding our sin in check, if we refuse to rebuke sin, and if we don’t forgive, then we should not call ourselves Christians because these are things that all Christians, not just good Christians, will do.
Ouch! And how often haven’t I thought that God should hang a medal around my neck for being so forgiving? The truth is God should hang millstones around my neck, not medals, for the countless times I refuse to deal with sin the way he wants me to. I don’t deserve the title “good Christian” but “damned sinner” because that’s what I show myself to be everyday. But it’s for damned sinners like me and you that Jesus came. He took the millstones we deserve to have hung around our neck and placed them around his own. As a result Jesus was plunged into hell and took our sins with him. A “good” Christian, therefore, is someone who believes that in Jesus, and only in Jesus, we have forgiveness and eternal life. A good Christian also knows that Jesus’ forgiveness gives us the strength to do what God wants us to do. Therefore a good Christian is not someone with super-sized faith but super-sized faithfulness. And this super-sized faithfulness will come from people with seed-sized faith because faith is a portal through which God’s never ending power flows to restrain, rebuke, and yes, even forgive sin. Amen.
