March 20, 2019
Hope Lutheran Church
Lenten Service
Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians 5:14-21
Hope for Remorse
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
The movie Winchester came out last year. Helen Mirren played the real-life Sarah Winchester. Sarah was the widow of William Winchester, heir to the fortune of the Winchester repeating rifle. Sarah and William had one child, a daughter named Annie. But Annie died very shortly after being born.
Then William Winchester died from TB at age 43. Sarah found herself grieving the death of both her daughter and her husband. She moved from Connecticut to San Jose, California. There she bought a farm house on a sprawling acreage.
Sarah was the heir to the great Winchester fortune. She inherited an amount that would be worth over a half-billion dollars in today’s money. That, in addition to a staggering pension. But money can’t buy peace of mind.
Then began her truly bizarre activity. Sarah launched an unending sequence of additions to her home. One wing was added after another. Stairways led to nowhere. The house turned into a sprawling, seven-story labyrinth.
No one is quite sure what prompted this bizarre behavior from Sarah. But the best guess is that she was plagued by guilt. She felt that she had been cursed, cursed by all who had died from the Winchester repeating rifle. That curse led to the death of her daughter and her husband. It led her to flee the East Coast and travel cross country to California. And as a final effort to hide from the ghosts of the dead, she built her never-ending house.
Here she was one of the wealthiest women of her time. But she was imprisoned by guilt in a labyrinth of her own making.
It’s a story of extremes, but we can all relate to it. Who among us is not haunted by the regrets of past deeds? The uncaring statement that crushed someone; the deeds we have done; the actions we should have taken but didn’t.
When we feel remorse over something we did long ago, it’s like we’re chained. We march forward day by day, but we haul with us that long, long chain tethering us to the past offense. We can never be free.
But we have hope, for the chain has been broken! It was broken by our savior, Jesus Christ. In his death and resurrection, he has carried away all our sins. As we dwell in Christ, we live in his newness. Paul says it so beautifully: “So if anyone in in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”
We have been made new in Christ. Our “old self” has been washed clean. We live in Christ’s new creation, fully redeemed and made righteous.
We KNOW it, but that doesn’t mean that our thoughts still aren’t plagued by a lingering sense of guilt and remorse over past events.
A story about Martin Luther sheds some light on this situation. Luther was no stranger to feelings of guilt. Legend has it that one night Luther had a dream in which he was visited by the devil. The devil challenged Luther’s adequacy to lead his reformation movement. Who was he to be at the helm of this spiritual awakening? Then the devil pointed out Luther’s shortcomings.
Luther told the devil to write down all his sins. The devil happily set about the task. The list grew longer and longer. At last he finished and showed the long roll to Luther. Luther acknowledged that he was, indeed, guilty of all the sins listed. And then he said to the devil, “But you need to add one more thing to this list. At the end, add these words from 1 John 1:7: 'The blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”
Just like Luther, there’s something about the darkness and the quiet of night. We wake up and we rehash all the events where we’ve missed the mark. The old sins rear their ugly memory. We exhume them from their grave and allow them to foul our hearts all over again.
How Luther responded is exactly what we need to do when we find ourselves revisited by the sins of the past. Feelings are fickle. They can fool us. But the word of God is sure and reliable – it does not lie! When the sins of yesterday rise up to haunt you, look to the promises of God as written in the scriptures. And there, read again how you have been made new! Take heart in the promise of God’s forgiveness.
The promises of grace in the Bible restore peace to our soul. They keep us rock-steady on primacy of God’s love. Jesus has overcome sin, death, and the power of the Devil.
Besides our peace of mind, we can also turn over a new leaf. When Jesus forgave someone, he often said, “Go and sin no more.” We may not be able to make reparations for the sins of our past, but we can learn from them. Everything in life is a learning experience. We can learn from our past sins and make efforts to change, to walk the way of God’s love.
Christian author C. S. Lewis put it beautifully: “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” May we all learn from our past sins and walk towards the light.
In our reading from 2 Corinthians, Paul tells us of something else we can do. We’ve been called to be ambassadors of grace. We have been made new in Christ’s redeeming love – and our neighbor has, too! Paul calls us to a ministry of reconciliation. Paul tells us to regard no one from a human point of view. We are to view all people through the lens of Christ’s redeeming love.
It’s a powerful ministry. We are called to lift up one another. When we see someone else struggling under the weight of past sins, we can assure them that God is good – all the time!
In his book God Came Near, Max Lucado tells a powerful story of reconciliation. The Wycliffe Bible Translators have ministries the world over. To travel to remote sites, they need air service. So they use JAARS – Jungle Aviation and Radio Service. JAARS had a tremendous safety record. Over a 25-year period, they hadn’t had a single accident.
That changed in 1972 in Papua, New Guinea. A small plane went down, killing all seven people on board. The chief mechanic was devastated. He had just completed a meticulous 100-hour inspection of the plane! In his mind he reviewed every step of his inspection.
And then, the sinking feeling hit him. While tightening a fuel line, he’d been interrupted. He never returned afterwards to finish tightening it! Fuel had leaked out while the plane was in flight and caught fire.
He was crushed by guilt. He realized that he was at fault for the deaths of his seven colleagues and friends. He was inconsolable in his grief.
The pilot of the plane had been a man named Doug Hunt. Doug’s family travelled to New Guinea to retrieve his body and return him to New Zealand, where they were from.
When the mechanic heard that the family had arrived, he knew he had to see them. He met with them and told them all that had happened. He confessed how he had failed to tighten the fuel line and he was responsible for the crash of the plane. Through is tears, he held up his right hand, “That hand there took Doug’s life.”
Doug’s widow, Glennis Hunt, went over to him and hugged him. She sat by his side and held his hand. She held the very hand that had failed to tighten the fuel line. Another JAARS pilot flanked him on his other side and comforted him, too. Their actions initiated his healing process.
Friends, there is something stronger than our sin. It’s called forgiveness. Christ’s reconciling love has made us whole. It’s light to our soul. And we can share that same promise of forgiveness with others. Take heart, for the love of God through Christ Jesus our Lord cannot be quenched.
