An Unworthy Servant, Part 1

Only once in my life was I actually fired from a job.  I was very young and completely unaware of the politics in the office where I was working—or that they were turning against me.

Forgiveness—or Not

I thought I was doing fine. I had people even tell me so, including my boss. But I heard rumors, and I went to him and said, “I hear you’re not happy with the way I’m doing things.”

He had a shocked look on his face (like “How did you find out?”). But he quickly recovered himself and said, “Oh no, I think you’re actually doing a really good job.”

And so I walked away thinking to myself, “Maybe the rumors are wrong.”

I was naïve. And then one day, a letter appeared on my desk, telling me I was no longer needed. No reason given. And an end date.

I knew that the Christian response in that moment was to forgive my boss. And I really worked at it: Gotta forgive him, you’ve gotta forgive him. And I really did work at it, because I felt like I’d been treated completely unjustly. And every time I thought I would get there, what would happen was that while I was trying to say, “I forgive,” I’d get still inside, and what image would come to my mind? Him dying.

And I would be so shocked I wouldn’t know what to do. And I continued this circle for a while until finally—and I can only really attribute this to the work of God—I was able to really let it go. I no longer wished him ill.

But did I at the beginning? Absolutely.

In Need

If you spend time in the psalms, you’ve no doubt noticed many places of comfort and solace. But you’ve also noticed many that make you feel profoundly uncomfortable.

Psalm 137 is one such place. Israel is under judgment by the Babylonians, who are mocking them, making fun of them. It gets so bad that by the end of the psalm, the writer is wishing the Babylonians’ children were dead.

Is there any solace in that? The only comfort I find here is that the Scripture really does know we can be that ugly, we can treat each other that badly. And the psalm itself is not an acknowledgment that the cry of revenge, murder and retribution is a good thing. But it does acknowledge that such a cry exists—that, in fact, we all feel those feelings as a part of what it means to be human.

Because, you see, if I’m honest with myself, I’m in the presence of God as someone who really does need mercy and forgiveness. I need his reconciling love. If I don’t have that, I don’t have anything.

Unworthy

God knows that. It’s that extraordinarily either awful or deeply comforting line, “Before whom all hearts are open, all desires known, from whom no secrets are hid.” And a part of what’s happening in that passage in the psalms—and all the psalms are like that—is that it is a profound knowledge of all the best and worst that exists within human beings—and, most important, the fact that we can take all those things into the presence of God. That God never says, “Ohhh, you can’t talk about that in here!” That we really can share all with God, all that is in our heart: good, wicked, wonderful and the things of which we are profoundly either ashamed or afraid.

The temptation in those times, when you’re feeling the shame and the fear and the things inside you that you wish weren’t there, the thoughts that come unbidden, and pop up and “Ooh!” you wish that wasn’t happening, is to allow those things to affect how I see myself as a Christian: “Am I really who I say I am? Has my heart actually been changed by the Gospel? Am I just the same old so-and-so that I’ve always been?”

“Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock” (Ps. 137:9). Yikes! And is that inside of me? Boy, it sure is. Even though I wish it weren’t. Even though I know there are parts of me that still desperately need the redemption of Jesus, the fact of the matter is that the eternal work of God in me, the eternal work of God in you, is not predicated on whether I am worthy of it. It is in fact given to me as a gift of grace, based on, as it says in the Collect, “the merits and mediation of Jesus” (BCP, Proper 22, p. 234).

In other words, it is his worth and it is his prayers that got me here. It was the death and resurrection of Jesus and him saying, “You belong to me” that invited me in, not because, “Oh, you’re really handsome. Maybe I ought to make you one of mine. You’re rather extraordinarily gifted and you’re so bright. You come from a great family. Welcome home.”

No, not that at all. When it comes to the kingdom of God, it’s not my worth that counts, but his. We’ll examine that more closely next week.

And in the meantime, remember—we’re not worthy. But our great God is.

Do you think of yourself as worthy of God’s love? Why or why not? Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer.

(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer’s sermon on October 2, 2016, at Church of Our Savior in Palm Bay, Florida.)

Unless otherwise noted, scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.