If you feel that your life has been a disappointment to God you probably ought to read The Ragamuffin Gospel (Multnomah, 1990).  Brennan Manning says that he did not write it for “super-spiritual Christians who live only on the mountaintop and have never visited the valley of desolation, for the fearless and tearless, for legalists who would rather surrender control of their souls to rules than run the risk of living in union with Jesus.”  Manning wrote it, he said, for “the sorely burdened who are still shifting the heavy suitcase (of life) from one hand to the other, for the wobbly and weak-kneed who know they don’t have it (all together), for inconsistent, unsteady disciples whose cheese is falling off their cracker, for poor, weak, sinful men and women with hereditary faults and limited talents, for earthen vessels who shuffle along on feet of clay (and) for the bent and bruised who feel that their lives are a disappointment to God.”

If you are one of those people then you would do well to read Manning’s book.  You would also do well to study what happened when Jesus found the disciples after he had been raised from the dead.  They were huddled together in a locked room “for fear” that the people who had killed Jesus three days before might do the same to them.  These are the same disciples who had not done a very good job of standing up for Jesus when he needed them most.  Peter was there, the one who had actually denied Jesus three times the night of his arrest.  There was fear in that room, for sure.  But, there must have been some folks there who felt that their lives were a disappointment to God.  Shame, too, was in that room, locked away with the fear.  And, all of a sudden “Jesus came and stood among them.”  Remember, the door was locked.  No one opened it.  Jesus just made his way in.  What do you think he might say to the people in that room?  What would you say to people who had betrayed your trust?

It might surprise you to learn that Jesus actually said something to them about just taking a deep breath.  Good way to release the tension, don’t you think?  Standing among those you’d think he couldn’t stand to be with at all, “Jesus said, ‘Peace be with you . . . and with that he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’”  Do you see it?  Jesus exhaled the Spirit and then asked the disciples to inhale it.  To receive his gift of peace and presence and power.  That’s what Jesus said to the disciples.  He had not come to curse but bless them.  Not to get them but to gift them.  Yet again we have evidence that God didn’t make us just to finish us off at the first sign, or second or third sign, of our incredible incapacity to keep our promise to love him. 

The same apostle John who wrote this gospel later wrote a letter toward the end of his life encouraging Christians to live good lives.  Sin, he wrote, should have no place in the life of one who promised to be faithful to Jesus.  But, perhaps reflecting back on the night Jesus stood in that room and asked him to inhale Holy air, John went on to write.  “If anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense – Jesus Christ, the Righteous One (1 John 2:1).”  These are words written from experience with a forgiving God.  We shouldn’t sin, if we say we love Jesus, this same John wrote.  But, when we do sin, Jesus is the one who rushes to our defense, to be on our side.

Most people think that God only cares for good people.  To this day, most of us probably think that more than we care to admit.  It’s as if there are two categories of people.  Those whom Jesus loves because they are good and those who disappoint Jesus too much to ever be loved.  But, Jesus is on the side of those who sin, too.  In that room that night, Jesus came to offer his gift of peace of power and presence to those who had nothing but the shame of their own failure to offer in return.  It’s not that our sin doesn’t matter.  It mattered enough to get Jesus crucified.  It’s just that, to God, we matter more.  God does not wait on us to come clean.  He comes to us in our shame to bless and empower us because without his blessing and power we’ll never get out of that room.  God is on our side.  No matter what.  Until we get that right, nothing else will matter.  And, we’ll spend our lives locked away in shame and fear.

Most of my memories of my mother are of her being locked away.  Severe depression caged her in.  When she wasn’t depressed, she was lost in the fog of the heavy medications doctors prescribed in those days for what is now called clinical depression.  Like children almost always do, I stood at a confused distance afraid to ask why and then carried into adulthood no little amount of fear that maybe something was wrong with me, too.  It wasn’t until after her death fifteen years ago that my father was able to help me understand.  And, one of the stories he told was about a gold pocket watch.

My mother’s father died when she was only eight.  That alone put her family into a nightmarish tailspin.  This was deep southeast Texas during the depression when women who were widowed, especially the uneducated and unskilled, were in deep trouble.  My mother’s mother pawned her off on just about anyone who would care for her while she medicated her own pain in other ways.  One of the few possessions my mother had to which she could cling in all this was her father’s gold pocket watch.  In her teenage years, my mother ran up a tab at a local store buying hamburgers for all of her friends.  When it got too high the storeowner demanded payment.  The only thing my mother had of value was her dad’s watch.  So, she pawned it off to pay for the hamburgers.  My dad told me that she carried a profound sense of shame to her grave that, in selling the watch, she’d sold out her dad as well and betrayed his trust.  I didn’t know that story until she was gone.  But, now I understand what can happen when we stay locked away in places of hidden shame.  I didn’t understand until more recently than you would believe that it’s in those very places that Jesus comes to be on our side.  To love us.  To bless us.  To give us his peace.  To unlock the door.

Do you have a place like that in your life?  A dark room in the basement of your soul where perhaps, years ago, you locked away the shameful memory of your worst sin?  That one sin, perhaps, that you just know God cannot possibly forgive.  What’s behind that door?  What’d you do?  You might not have looked behind that door for a long time.  But, imagine yourself standing inside it for just a moment with the shame you’ve kept hidden for years.  All of a sudden Jesus just appears.  He didn’t even wait until you came out and confessed it to him.  You didn’t open the door.  He just appeared.  What do you imagine Jesus’ first words to you would be?  If this text we’ve read this morning is any evidence, he would say, “‘Peace be with you . . . receive the Holy Spirit.’”  What if he said that to you, in the place of your hidden shame?  Would it change your life?

Spiritual breathing is about inhaling the breath of Holy and amazing grace.  But, breathing is also about exhaling.  About releasing polluted air.  So, Jesus said, “‘If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.’”  Jesus isn’t saying that you and I have the power to impart or withhold a forgiveness that belongs exclusively to God.  What he is saying is that you and I have the power to impart or withhold a forgiveness that belongs exclusively to us by releasing our unforgiveness of others. 

If someone sins against me and I don’t forgive him that won’t keep him from heaven.  Only God gets to do that kind of forgiving.  But, until the day we forgive our sins against each other, then we are under the curse of them almost as though not even God had forgiven us.  Our sins still have power over us.  They keep us locked away in our mutual shame.  The poisonous air of unforgiveness stains our lungs black with its spiritual carcinogens until we cough up the bitter phlegm of anger and resentment and bitterness, spewing its lethal germs of discord and hatred on anyone who gets too close. 

Jesus picked forgiveness as the topic of his first and last words to the disciples after his resurrection.  Why not a good three-pointer-with-a-poem on tithing or evangelism?  Because God’s forgiveness is what both the crucifixion and resurrection were about.  That’s also what being one who is crucified and risen with Christ is about.  Sandwiched between his pronouncement of peace and his command to forgive is a word about missions.  “‘As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.’”  But, Jesus chose God’s forgiveness of us as the introduction to the sermon on missions and our forgiveness of each other as the conclusion because forgiveness is the first and last business of being a disciple and the business of every day in between.  We can’t go unless we know we’re forgiven.  And, if we have not forgiven each other our going won’t mean anything.  To be forgiven and then to forgive over and over again, like breathing in and out, is what it means to be Christian.  To breathe in God’s forgiveness and then to exhale the foul pollution of unforgiveness of others is what keeps us alive.  It’s all about letting go, isn’t it?  That’s the tough part.  Letting go.  

Cameron walked home from school Thursday afternoon for the last time.  For four years he has walked the two blocks from Williams Elementary to my house.  Every now and then, I’d get to watch him.  Even took a picture or two.  Next year he moves to seventh grade and another school too far away to walk.  The other day when he walked home for the last time I felt that little twinge in the tip of my right index finger, that hurt feeling, that one that almost always precedes a tear.  Because, Cameron walking home for the last time means he’s growing up.  And, I’ve got some more letting go to do. 

Stevie Nicks in her song, Landslide, sings some poignant prose that only makes my finger hurt worse.  “Well, I’ve been afraid of changing ‘cause I’ve built my life around you.  But, time makes you bolder, even children get older, and I’m getting older, too.  Can the child within my heart rise above?  Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?  Can I handle the seasons of my life?”  I don’t know how well I’m going to handle the changing seasons.  But, I do know I’m getting older.  That’s why Cam walking home from school hurt a little, too.  He’s getting older but so am I.  And, good parenting is about doing the letting go along the way that lets my boy grow into the man he can only be if he is eventually free of my sentimental need to hold onto him. 

Jesus’ words make me realize that being his disciple is not just about getting older chronologically.  It’s about growing into the maturity that forgiveness demands.  It’s about letting Jesus set us from our places of hidden shame.  It’s also about letting go of the need to shame others for the pain they may have caused us.  It’s about breathing in the gift of his Spirit.  It’s also about exhaling the foul, polluted air of unforgiveness.  When we do that kind of breathing, we don’t just get older.  We actually grow from the spiritual infancy of unforgiveness into the spiritual adulthood of forgiveness.

When he was all of ten, Cameron asked me one day if I knew how to live to a ripe old age.  Obviously, he thought he did.  So, I asked him, “How do you live a long and happy life, Cameron?”  “Just keep breathing as long as you can,” he said.