James T. Cleland - "My Name Is Jim C.: I Am a Sinner" (February 25, 1968)
MP3
Loading the media player...
Transcript
- Download transcript as:
-
Text
-
PDF
-
WebVTT (includes timecodes)
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| - | Joining together our hearts and voices in prayer | 0:03 |
| saying our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. | 0:06 | |
| Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth | 0:13 | |
| as it is in heaven. | 0:17 | |
| Give us this day, our daily bread, | 0:19 | |
| and forgive us our trespasses | 0:21 | |
| as we forgive those who trespass against us. | 0:24 | |
| And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. | 0:27 | |
| For thine is the kingdom and the power, and the glory, | 0:32 | |
| forever, amen. | 0:36 | |
| Peace be unto you in this house of God, | 0:59 | |
| and to all who worship with us. | 1:03 | |
| Do not allow the title of this sermon | 1:09 | |
| to fool you with wrong anticipations | 1:14 | |
| of what you are going to hear. | 1:17 | |
| There is nothing of the sawdust trail | 1:21 | |
| or the mourner's bench, or the testimony meeting | 1:25 | |
| about the subject matter. | 1:31 | |
| If you are on tip toe, expecting a spiritual strip tease, | 1:34 | |
| then you're going to be disappointed. | 1:41 | |
| The title was suggested by an experience | 1:45 | |
| at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. | 1:49 | |
| Have you ever been to such a gathering? | 1:52 | |
| It has all the fervor of a revival, with more fun. | 1:57 | |
| It is clouded in tobacco smoke, awash with coffee | 2:04 | |
| and shot through with laughter. | 2:11 | |
| And each speaker begins in the same way, | 2:15 | |
| with the Christian name and the initial of the surname, | 2:20 | |
| followed by the constantly repeated, never varying sentence, | 2:27 | |
| "I am an alcoholic." | 2:33 | |
| Now notice the tense of the verb, "I am an alcoholic." | 2:37 | |
| He may not have touched a drop of alcohol for a week, | 2:47 | |
| a month, a year, 10 years, but the affirmation is not, | 2:51 | |
| "I was an alcoholic," | 2:59 | |
| it is the ever present recognition of a flat fact, | 3:03 | |
| "I am an alcoholic." | 3:09 | |
| And this morning I would look with you | 3:14 | |
| at a parallel statement, a basic affirmation for Christians. | 3:16 | |
| My name is Jim C. or Mary D., I am a sinner. | 3:24 | |
| Now let us see where this idea starts | 3:36 | |
| and where it leads us. | 3:38 | |
| It may tell us something about ourselves | 3:41 | |
| and about the Christian faith. | 3:45 | |
| In a previous sermon, | 3:49 | |
| we compared and contrasted three words, vise, crime and sin. | 3:50 | |
| By definition, we concluded that sin is a theological word. | 4:00 | |
| No God, no sin. | 4:07 | |
| Sin has always a vertical reference, | 4:12 | |
| whereas crime does not and vice may not have | 4:17 | |
| any religious connection. | 4:22 | |
| A sinner is one who is disobedient to what he believes | 4:26 | |
| to be the will of God. | 4:32 | |
| Moreover, he knows that he is somewhat responsible | 4:37 | |
| for that disobedience. | 4:43 | |
| The recognition that one is a sinner | 4:47 | |
| is the first step toward becoming a Christian, | 4:50 | |
| and it is our regular step thereafter in the Christian way. | 4:56 | |
| Just as the first prerequisite | 5:03 | |
| to being canonized as a saint is that one be dead, | 5:06 | |
| door nail dead. | 5:12 | |
| So the first prerequisite to being a Christian | 5:16 | |
| is the recognition that one is a sinner. | 5:20 | |
| Now, many Christians don't like this, my own mother didn't. | 5:24 | |
| Neither do some of us here this morning. | 5:32 | |
| We're decent, God-fearing, law-keeping, | 5:35 | |
| Bible-reading, church-going protestants. | 5:40 | |
| Maybe it was because Jesus knew good folk like us, | 5:46 | |
| that he told the parable of the pharisee | 5:50 | |
| and the publican, which was our morning lesson. | 5:53 | |
| The pharisee was a pillar of society, | 5:59 | |
| the kind of man who upheld the religious and civic order. | 6:03 | |
| He even disciplined his own hungry appetite | 6:10 | |
| by fasting twice a week. | 6:14 | |
| He disciplined his acquisitive instinct | 6:18 | |
| by giving away 10% of his income. | 6:21 | |
| The Loyalty Fund is gasping for alumni like that. | 6:26 | |
| The other character on the parable started | 6:34 | |
| with two strikes against him, two and a half. | 6:37 | |
| He was a publicanist, | 6:41 | |
| that is a Jew who collected taxes for the Romans. | 6:44 | |
| And do you remember his prayer? | 6:53 | |
| Let me paraphrase it. | 6:56 | |
| "I am a publican and a sinner, God, be merciful." | 6:59 | |
| And Jesus said that one of these men | 7:08 | |
| went down from the temple to his home justified. | 7:14 | |
| That is accepted by God, nearer to God. | 7:20 | |
| Can you guess which one it was? | 7:28 | |
| There's another saying of Jesus help you to a decision. | 7:34 | |
| "I did not come to invite virtuous people, but sinners." | 7:38 | |
| What do you make of the fact that Jesus was baptized | 7:48 | |
| by John the Baptist, | 7:54 | |
| whose mission was preaching the baptism of repentance | 7:57 | |
| for the remission of sins? | 8:03 | |
| The church has had a rough time with that story. | 8:08 | |
| What do you make of it? | 8:14 | |
| Some time ago, three of us sought to answer the question. | 8:18 | |
| What is the salient moment in the service of worship, | 8:23 | |
| in a service like this? | 8:28 | |
| I came out for the offering. | 8:33 | |
| Not because of my native background, | 8:40 | |
| but as the symbolic rededication of ourselves to God | 8:47 | |
| as his servants. | 8:54 | |
| Here, we offer and present unto thee | 8:56 | |
| our minted and our printed blood, that's what our money is. | 8:59 | |
| The second man chose the scripture lesson. | 9:08 | |
| The reading and hearing of the word of God, | 9:11 | |
| the weekly reminder of God's revelation | 9:16 | |
| of His will to us and for us. | 9:20 | |
| The third voted for the prayer of confession. | 9:27 | |
| For him, the essential part of every service, | 9:32 | |
| I, A, B, I'm a sinner. | 9:38 | |
| Now I know that a proper service, a fitting service, | 9:44 | |
| a Christian service requires all three elements and more, | 9:48 | |
| but one constituent is that there'd be an opportunity | 9:53 | |
| to remember and to confess that "My name is Jim C., | 9:58 | |
| I am, am a sinner." | 10:06 | |
| Let me take a second step with you. | 10:13 | |
| I am a persistent sinner. | 10:16 | |
| Now I had trouble with the adjective before sinner. | 10:22 | |
| So let me huddle some synonymous | 10:26 | |
| or analogous adjectives at you. | 10:29 | |
| Recurring, continual, perpetual, | 10:33 | |
| constant, perennial. | 10:40 | |
| Despite prayers of confession and comfortable words, | 10:44 | |
| I am still a sinner. | 10:49 | |
| One who is disobedient to what I believe | 10:53 | |
| to be the will of God for me. | 10:56 | |
| Now, theoretically, this should not be so. | 10:59 | |
| Baptism and confession, and intention | 11:05 | |
| should have delivered me from this bondage to sin, | 11:10 | |
| but they haven't. | 11:15 | |
| Now why? Oh, it's partly my creaturehood. | 11:18 | |
| I don't have the physical and emotional makeup | 11:26 | |
| to be always as good as I know I ought to be. | 11:30 | |
| Hunger thwarts me, desire walks me, | 11:36 | |
| weariness shortens my temper, | 11:43 | |
| original ignorance leads to sinful ends. | 11:48 | |
| Again, there's something in me which leads to sin. | 11:55 | |
| Most of us enjoy rebelling. | 12:00 | |
| Moreover, we are not sure that the ecclesiastical norms | 12:04 | |
| for the holy life are really valid. | 12:07 | |
| Sin seems to be anything we delight in. | 12:12 | |
| We've a sneaking admiration for the man who, | 12:17 | |
| when asked to be sent his sins, troubled and replied, | 12:19 | |
| "No, I rather enjoy them." | 12:23 | |
| Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said, | 12:29 | |
| "As long as war is regarded as wicked, | 12:31 | |
| it will always have a fascination. | 12:38 | |
| When it is looked upon as vulgar, | 12:42 | |
| it will cease to be popular." | 12:47 | |
| Now that's a hippie point of view, | 12:50 | |
| but Oscar Wilde was the original hippie | 12:52 | |
| who walked down Piccadilly with a tooler for a lily | 12:56 | |
| in his medieval hand, you remember? | 12:59 | |
| And let's admit that we, as university people, | 13:03 | |
| are somewhat hippy-ish, as heirs of the renaissance | 13:06 | |
| and the enlightenment, | 13:11 | |
| as well as of the Christian tradition. | 13:12 | |
| So we are split personalities, | 13:14 | |
| sinful saints are simply sinners. | 13:17 | |
| But there's another reason for our continuing in sin. | 13:22 | |
| The high, high norm of Christian love, | 13:28 | |
| the impossible possibility. | 13:36 | |
| It's easier to live under the rule of law | 13:41 | |
| than by the principle of love, | 13:46 | |
| even more so when that principle has been incarnated | 13:49 | |
| in a person like Jesus. | 13:55 | |
| Paul knew that. | 13:57 | |
| Regarding his behavior as a Jew, | 13:59 | |
| he could write, publicly defying contradiction | 14:03 | |
| in legal righteous and legal rectitude, thoughtless. | 14:08 | |
| The Greek word is amomos, without spot or blemish. | 14:15 | |
| Philip paraphrased it, | 14:21 | |
| "As far as the law's righteousness is concerned. | 14:22 | |
| I don't think anyone could have found fault with me," | 14:26 | |
| and that is written in an open letter. | 14:32 | |
| That was quite a statement. | 14:35 | |
| Then he became a Christian. | 14:38 | |
| Now it's not certain according to many objective scholars | 14:41 | |
| that Paul wrote the first epistle to Timothy, | 14:46 | |
| but I'm sure, psychologically, that he did pin one verse. | 14:50 | |
| "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners | 14:56 | |
| of whom I am chief. | 15:02 | |
| Regarding the law, blameless, and chief of sinners." | 15:08 | |
| Paul had always to be first at either end. | 15:15 | |
| My name is Paul, I am a sinner. | 15:23 | |
| That is a persistent Christian confession. | 15:28 | |
| And in Paul's case, the confession of a man | 15:33 | |
| who had been in Christ for a long time. | 15:38 | |
| Yes, we are continued perennial sinners. | 15:43 | |
| That's why we must never say as so many protestors do, | 15:48 | |
| "You, sinners." | 15:53 | |
| The pronoun is always the first, "We, sinners." | 15:58 | |
| And especially the first singular. | 16:05 | |
| "My name is Jim C., I am and will always be a sinner." | 16:07 | |
| "You, sinners" is not prophetic, it is pathetic. | 16:16 | |
| The anger of a tired young idealism. | 16:23 | |
| There's a third state. | 16:29 | |
| "I am a forgiven sinner." | 16:33 | |
| Now, both the Old and New Testaments knew that. | 16:39 | |
| Both, this is not a New Testament discovery. | 16:44 | |
| The very words this morning of comfort to us | 16:49 | |
| as read by the chaplain, were from the Old Testament, | 16:54 | |
| from Micah. | 16:57 | |
| Listen, "Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, | 16:59 | |
| whose sin is covered." | 17:04 | |
| That's from the Psalms and Paul quotes it | 17:06 | |
| in his letter to the Romans. | 17:10 | |
| Jeremiah speaks of God as saying, | 17:13 | |
| "For I will forgive their inequity, | 17:16 | |
| and I will remember their sin no more." | 17:20 | |
| And Jesus regularly comments, "Your sins are forgiven." | 17:23 | |
| Why? Because that's just the kind of God God is. | 17:30 | |
| "A God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, | 17:36 | |
| slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love," | 17:42 | |
| is how our leading laymen in the Old Testament | 17:48 | |
| by the name of Nehemiah, put it, | 17:51 | |
| but also because deep down, | 17:56 | |
| the sinner loves God more than he loves his sins. | 18:01 | |
| Robert Burns, the Scottish poet senses both reasons | 18:08 | |
| in the last verse of one of his early poems, | 18:13 | |
| it's a prayer addressed to God in prospect of his own death. | 18:16 | |
| Where with intention, I have erred, | 18:23 | |
| no other plea I have, but thou art good, | 18:29 | |
| and goodness still delighteth to forgive. | 18:36 | |
| Yes, for a Christian, adjective and noun go together, | 18:43 | |
| are inseparable, forgiven sinner. | 18:48 | |
| If you want a quick proof of this, | 18:53 | |
| read the first letter to the Church at Corinth. | 18:55 | |
| Now there was a ragamuffin bunch of scallywags | 19:00 | |
| who got drunk at The Lord's Supper | 19:07 | |
| and fought one another in lawsuits, | 19:10 | |
| where one was living with his father's wife | 19:13 | |
| and no one worried about it, | 19:16 | |
| where the local church was split into at least four cliques, | 19:19 | |
| no united christian movement here. | 19:24 | |
| And do you know how Paul addressed them? | 19:28 | |
| He called them saints, that is accepted of God. | 19:32 | |
| Now most of them were junior varsity saints, | 19:42 | |
| in fact, some were just scrubs. | 19:47 | |
| In fact, they whole gang of them were just red shirted. | 19:51 | |
| But they were within the beloved community. | 19:56 | |
| If, as Luther said, | 20:01 | |
| "The recognition of sin is the beginning of salvation," | 20:03 | |
| the assurance of a God who forgives is the next stage. | 20:08 | |
| That is why the comfortable words | 20:14 | |
| or the words of assurance are a necessary follow-up | 20:18 | |
| to the prayers of confession and forgiveness. | 20:22 | |
| It's not enough to know that one is a sinner, | 20:27 | |
| it is essential to know that prodigal sons and daughters | 20:31 | |
| are welcomed back by a God who runs to meet them. | 20:37 | |
| So all our pain is touched with joy. | 20:43 | |
| (indistinct) said that | 20:49 | |
| "Tragedy arises when we're given a choice | 20:52 | |
| between right and right, and we choose only one right." | 20:56 | |
| But the situation is not always as simple as that. | 21:08 | |
| Today, we are sometimes given the choice | 21:12 | |
| between the wrong and wrong, | 21:15 | |
| and must choose one of the wrongs. | 21:21 | |
| Then it is wise to remember our own mistakes | 21:29 | |
| and rebellions, and failures, and that God forgives. | 21:34 | |
| Then we, too, forgive those who trespass against us | 21:43 | |
| politically, ecclesiastically, spiritually. | 21:49 | |
| When I judge and condemn, | 21:55 | |
| I should do so from the standpoint that "My name is Jim C., | 21:58 | |
| I am a persistent but forgiven sinner." | 22:05 | |
| That is a last step. | 22:13 | |
| "I am a semi-victorious sinner." | 22:19 | |
| Theoretically, I opt to be a winner, | 22:25 | |
| victor, conqueror, all the time. | 22:29 | |
| Actually I'm not. | 22:33 | |
| This is where Easter enters the theological picture, | 22:37 | |
| as a fact and as a hope. | 22:43 | |
| You know, Paul's problem wasn't forgiveness, | 22:47 | |
| he had that as a Jew. | 22:52 | |
| He didn't become a Christian | 22:56 | |
| so as to have his sins forgiven. | 22:57 | |
| Paul's problem was deliverance from the power of sin. | 23:01 | |
| From the awful fact that the good that I would, I do not, | 23:07 | |
| and the evil that I would not, that, I do. | 23:14 | |
| His body is an arena of conflict | 23:20 | |
| between the good intentions and the wrong desires. | 23:22 | |
| He's wretched, miserable, quite distraught. | 23:27 | |
| And what steadies him is the resurrection | 23:30 | |
| plus a quite pharisaic argument. | 23:35 | |
| Here's the argument arising | 23:41 | |
| from his belief in the resurrection. | 23:43 | |
| "The wages of sin is death." | 23:46 | |
| In the resurrection, death is defeated, | 23:53 | |
| therefore sin is defeated, | 23:58 | |
| therefore Satan is defeated. | 24:03 | |
| "Therefore," says Paul, "I'm a member of a winning team. | 24:07 | |
| Thanks be to God who gaveth us the victory | 24:12 | |
| through our Lord Jesus Christ." | 24:16 | |
| However, the final victory is not yet. | 24:18 | |
| Reminds me of a Scottish minister | 24:26 | |
| trying to encourage his congregation by telling them | 24:29 | |
| that the devil was chained. | 24:33 | |
| And a skeptical and uninhibited member of the congregation | 24:38 | |
| interrupted the sermon by brashly asking | 24:43 | |
| how long the chain was. | 24:47 | |
| The minister said, "Oh, about 5,000 miles." | 24:53 | |
| And the questioner's answer was, | 24:59 | |
| "Ah, he might as well be loose." | 25:01 | |
| But nevertheless, the two facts are true. | 25:09 | |
| There is the Easter story as a sign of ultimate victory, | 25:14 | |
| and there is the indwelling Christ, | 25:20 | |
| the spirit of the resurrected Christ as an ally | 25:24 | |
| in the minor skirmishes | 25:28 | |
| and the major battles along the road. | 25:30 | |
| And don't overlook those minor engagements. | 25:32 | |
| A down and out alcoholic who was restored | 25:38 | |
| and his home and his family with him, | 25:44 | |
| was once asked if he really believed | 25:47 | |
| that Jesus turned water into wine at Cana of Galilee. | 25:49 | |
| And he replied that he didn't know about Cana, | 25:58 | |
| but that in his own case, | 26:05 | |
| Jesus had turned whiskey into furniture. | 26:08 | |
| Yes, thank God for Alcoholics Anonymous, | 26:15 | |
| but thank God also for sinners unanimous, | 26:17 | |
| which is the true body of believers. | 26:24 | |
| Sinners, persistent sinners, forgiven sinners, | 26:28 | |
| sinners who, even here, have the foretaste of victory. | 26:34 | |
| My name is Legion, we are sinners forgiven | 26:39 | |
| and on our way to triumph. | 26:45 | |
| Father Damien was the Catholic priest | 26:53 | |
| who volunteered for service among a colony of lepers | 26:58 | |
| in a segregated part of the Hawaiian islands, about 1864. | 27:03 | |
| His sermons always began in the same way, "My brethren." | 27:10 | |
| But one Sunday, some 10 years after his arrival, | 27:22 | |
| he changed the opening words to, "We, lepers." | 27:28 | |
| We, lepers. | 27:37 | |
| Our identification as Christians is we, sinners, | 27:42 | |
| persistent, forgiven, semi-victorious, | 27:50 | |
| servants of the one who came not to call the righteous, | 27:58 | |
| but sinners who ate with sinners | 28:03 | |
| because he liked them. | 28:09 | |
| Who called them his friends, | 28:12 | |
| who gave himself on their behalf. | 28:16 | |
| It is the goodly company of the reconciled | 28:22 | |
| to which we belong. | 28:28 | |
| Let us pray. | 28:32 | |
| Almighty God, our father, whose son came, | 28:36 | |
| not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance, | 28:40 | |
| except us, a company of sinners, | 28:47 | |
| who loved thee more than we love our sins | 28:50 | |
| to the end, that we may more and more live | 28:56 | |
| as thy faithful children in the spirit of thy son, | 28:59 | |
| even Jesus Christ, our Lord, amen. | 29:06 | |
| (gentle music) | 29:35 |
