A worship service was held at 10.30am in the church building on Sunday 13 September.  The service was simultaneously broadcast on the Church Facebook page.  For the next four weeks, you can catch up here.

The Bible passage was Matthew 18:21-35, and Gillean Maclean led the service and preached, assisted by Sheena Thompson.  Sheena read the Bible passage in the vivid, contemporary language of the Message translation.

We saw a light-hearted sketch from Gillean and Sheena, focussing on the burdens we all bear from which we can be set free – things like guilt, worry, fear, the pretence of being OK when we’re anything but – burdens from which we can find freedom in entrusting them to God. (Although in some of us the burdens are deeply ingrained and to find deep, lasting healing we may need the touch of God which comes through professional care as well as through the support and prayers of our Christian family.)

See here and below the Stephen Fischbacher children’s song ‘Bag of Worries’ which covers the same ground as Gillean and Sheena’s sketch from a child’s perspective.

Gillean’s sermon explored the theme of forgiveness – the challenges of forgiving others, and forgiving ourselves.

Here’s part of the sermon:

Factories of Forgiveness

It was interesting when I first read Sheena’s very clever sketch, how much of it actually was about me, how much of it resonated about me and my life. Some years ago I was talking to my congregation in Aberdeen about the things that we carry around with us, the burdens that we do not need to carry. and I won’t ask you to do this today, but I asked those in the congregation who brought a bag with them to empty the bag. How much of what was in the bag did they actually need? Now it wasn’t just informative, it was also hilarious. You have no idea how many people had in their bag. You know one of these little pots of jams you get with the scones and you only use half of it but you don’t want to leave it because you know they’ll put it in the bin. So you take it home and it ends up in your bag for goodness knows how long. Pats of melting butter. Anybody ever had those? They give you too many bits of butter with your scone and you might use it and you’ll take it home. You might use it. And even a chicken leg wrapped in a napkin. Quite what she was going to do with the chicken leg wrapped in the napkin. I do not know. We all carry around a whole lot of stuff, literally, and in our hearts that we do not need to carry.

Today we’re focusing on forgiveness. Just as in the sketch, we are all carrying all sorts of feelings and worries that we don’t need to have. And these things hold us back. They load us down. Guilt, worry, ‘I’m fine’ How many people have you asked, how are you? And they’ve said, I’m fine. And you know perfectly well that they are not.

These things keep us awake at night. And you know, if you’re preaching to a congregation, you are always preaching to yourself. These things keep us awake at night. And God tells us not to hold on to them, to bring our burdens to him and to leave them where they belong at his feet.

The late George MacLeod, who founded the Iona community, called the Church of Jesus Christ the ‘factory of forgiveness’. And he said this:

As deep as God’s love comes down to us, so broad should be our forgiveness to our fellows. How often should we forgive? Till 70 times 7. And the area of forgiveness from the North Pole to the south and all around the equator. This is what the church is, the factory of forgiveness. You call it weak? Of course it is. It’s the weakness of God that is stronger than men.

We do not live in a forgiving world. We live in a world where it’s so-called normal to be strong, to resist, to take revenge. The old adage that says to err is human but to forgive is divine is absolutely true. We can only truly forgive others and ourselves (because that’s often much harder) with help from Almighty God because it’s too hard to do it on our own.

This story that Jesus told is a story all about human nature, all about us. Of course, not everyone would be like the grasping servant who’d been offered a wonderful chance by his king. Incidentally, the debt was ridiculously enormous, equivalent to millions of pounds today. Not everyone would have gone out and refused to pass on his good fortune to the one who owed him such a small sum in comparison.

But the world in general is a place where every advert, every possible message tells us to look out for #1. Look out for #1. The worst slogan I ever saw on a t-shirt was ‘Iff it feels good, do it’. The Church of Jesus Christ says exactly the opposite. We’re not looking out just for number one. …

Our theme is forgiveness, but not just any kind of forgiveness. It’s the forgiveness that’s rooted in the knowledge and the power of God’s ultimate grace. The kind of forgiveness that pays it forward. The kind of forgiveness that’s completely different to the rules of forgiveness that are currently recognised by this world. I always remember my mother-in-law telling the story of the broken plate. She stood one day and watched her youngest son wilfully smash a dinner plate. Who did that? she said. John replied, it was James. She asked him time and time again, reminding him that she saw him break the plate. Still he replied, James did it, wasn’t me. Even when she reminded him that James wasn’t even there, he persisted almost as if he believed it himself.

As human beings, we are really, really good at that. We’re superb at self-justification. When we do something patently wrong as far as everyone else is concerned, we manage to construct a wonderful fiction around our action that allows us to continue to live with ourselves and our sin.

What our Lord Jesus is asking us to do is to enter into a process of self-examination that might actually be quite painful. There was a scientist who was also a priest, John Pockinghorne, and he said this of forgiveness:

We all know something of forgiveness in our daily lives. It’s a costly business. It’s not enough for forgiver or forgiven to pretend that it did not matter. It did matter. The hurt was real, some of the consequences may be lasting. The digestion of that hurt and the acceptance of those consequences are the cost of forgiveness. But that cost is not a punishment in which the forgiver exacts a shameful remorse from the one forgiven. It’s a cost in which both share.

It’s hard to forgive a real wrong. and it’s hard to accept the real forgiveness of our own. We are a Church here in this place, but also as we go home to our families and whatever we do out in the world, we are called to be that factory of forgiveness wherever we are.

And if we in our Christian fellowships and families don’t model that way of doing things, then how are we to offer a witness to the secular world around us? How many churches have fallen apart because people disagreed about something? And sometimes when you ask the question years and years and years later, nobody can remember what it was all about. The same thing happens in families. and between friends.

Sheena read from the message version of the Bible today, and one of my favourite lines from that modern version is from Romans chapter 14, and I think it’s verse 12, and it says, ‘Tend to your knitting. You’ve got your hands full just taking care of your own life before God’.

And if you are a knitter like me, that if you don’t tend to your knitting, you will make a mistake. Tend to your knitting. You’ve got your hands full just taking care of your own life before God.

There’s a song I heard first in Iona Abbey that stuck in my head when Sheena and I were talking about what we were going to do today and when she was telling me her ideas:

 Come bring your burdens to God for Jesus will never say no.

The Christian life and community require some thought and some prayer, humility, integrity, hospitality, tolerance, kindness, love and self-awareness. And it’s so easy to say, but it’s so difficult to do. It’s only possible with help from the Holy Spirit.

And so for our own benefit and that of our fellow Christians, God is telling us to look after ourselves. to take time to take care of our own spiritual health, not just become a holy huddle, but to do that so that we are fit to serve our sisters and brothers in Christ, in love and forgiveness, so that we can take that out into the world, to all of God’s creation, to heal, to help, to be agents of the peace that passes all understanding. Just to conclude, George MacLeod again:

This is not a forgiving age. And why should it be? The question we have to ask is whether we are a forgiving church, a forgiving people, whether the church practices enough of the essential madness for which it was put into the world. Madness, yes, and the world is sane? And is our sane world in so happy a plight? Would it not be worth trying God’s way from pole to pole and round the equator wherever Christians are?

Peace, love and forgiveness begins at home in our own hearts and in conversation always with our God. Amen. Thanks be to God.