Last Week's Sermon: "Sunflowers"

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Candidate Sermon for Valley Christian Church, Birmingham, Alabama

I see sunflowers laid out for sale often at the Safeway here in Vancouver, bundled together in the same translucent plastic as all the other flowers, only far bigger and with the deep yellow of their petals offering a nice change of pace to the red roses and white carnations.

I buy them on occasion because they remind me of my home state of Kansas, whose state flower is the sunflower, and whose nickname naturally is the Sunflower State. The highest point in the state, which is basically the Kansas-Colorado border at all of four thousand feet, is “Mount” Sunflower (air quotes very much intentional, thank you).

The Sunflower is also the name of a book on my list of life-changing books, written by Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wisenthal. In it, Wisenthal tells the story of being a concentration camp prisoner and being summoned—under duress, of course—to the bedside of a dying Nazi soldier. The soldier, though Roman Catholic, opts to make his deathbed confession not to a priest, but to a Jewish prisoner because the crimes that haunt him are his murders of Jewish Holocaust victims. He makes his confession to Wisenthal and asks Simon for forgiveness and absolution.

Wisenthal withholds both, choosing instead to remain silent. He concludes his story by asking us, his audience, were we in his place, “What would I have done?” That question then gets answered in the rest of the book by dozens of clerics, authors, and public figures across religions and nationalities.

This conversation-in-a-book ended up being one of those books that genuinely changed my life, because it got me to begin to look at forgiveness differently, and to understand it more deeply. And that’s where I’m coming from today as I not only preach for you as a part of Pastor Edd’s sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer, but as I introduce myself to you as the candidate your search committee and official board have recommended as Valley Christian Church’s seventh senior minister.

I would like to thank those members of the search committee who have spent these past nearly four months diligently reviewing my ministerial profile, interviewing me, and introducing me to you all of you. Ed Guindon, Rev. John Gregory, Rev. Sarah Draper, Kaitlyn Clark, Terry Nunnelly, and Judy and Clarence Sellers have been thoughtful and considerate presences in my life these past few months as we worked through the search and call process together, and their service on the search committee reflects well on Valley as a congregation. I am also grateful to Rev. Edd Spencer and Marilyn Ireland for their graciousness in allowing me in to be an integral part of planning this worship service so that you might get to hear my voice and get to know me.

It was only after I told both Ed(d)s that I would be happy to continue the Lord’s Prayer sermon series that I went and looked up which line of the prayer this Sunday would fall on, and, naturally, it’s the line that mentions sin—always a winning strategy for a candidate sermon! But this line is as much about the importance of forgiveness as it is the pervasiveness of sin, and we can’t have the forgiveness without the sin, just like we can’t have the empty tomb of Easter without the cross of Good Friday. So, lets talk about these soul-sized things, sin and forgiveness, together for a bit today.

I include the empty tomb and cross imagery here on purpose, because the cross is at the core of Christian belief around atonement for sin. The Crucifixion was an act of preventable, senseless violence. The Roman Empire did not need to crucify its criminals; it chose to because they believed that doing so served their imperial aims. And Jesus did not have to be sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate; as prefect of Judea Pilate wielded immense power and could have used it however he wished.

And yet, the Crucifixion happened. It happened not only through personal, individual responsibility (in the case of Pilate), but through collective, social responsibility (in the case of the entirety of the Roman Empire). So it must have been for some purpose. Or, perhaps, for two interrelated purposes. First, the Crucifixion takes place because we are sinful. We as humans have, ever since the Tower of Babel story that Pastor Edd and I both preached on for Pentecost Sunday four weeks ago, tried to create and order systems in ways that elevate our own hubris and short-sightedness, and empire is one of those systems. People were not made by God to be ruled over with the iron fists of Caesars and slavers, people were made by God to live side-by-side in liberty and in liberation.

And therein lies the second intertwined purpose of the cross. If we crucified Jesus because we are sinful, we need liberation from that sinfulness. And that is where the forgiveness part comes into focus, because the Resurrection was an act of profound forgiveness. After we killed God’s Son, God gives that Son right back to us three days later. In the Resurrection, life’s victory over death is made complete, but so is God’s victory over sin. God is giving us a way forward from being ruled by sin.

To atone and receive forgiveness for sins can take place either individually or collectively—as an individual person, if I wrong you personally, I am expected to atone for hurting you and seek forgiveness. It is up to you to offer it; forgiveness is the sort of thing that cannot be demanded. And that entire process can take place privately—in fact, many times, it is healthier that it does. It can help that individual relationship move forward in a safe atmosphere of mutuality, privacy, and trust.

How forward we have come collectively as a nation, though, is belied by how much further we still have yet to go. The past month of protests of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery tells us as much. And I hope you hear me and my heart when I say this: I am coming to you from a different part of the country, but I have no intention of arriving with any preconceptions about any of this history being only in the Deep South. Just six miles up the highway from my home here in Vancouver is Jefferson Davis Memorial Park—even though Washington wasn’t even a state during the Civil War, and did not become a state until twenty-four years after the war’s end. So we are all in the same boat of having to address these public displays of racism and to hear the stories of inclusion and diversity that are being written now. And I think for those stories to be fully heard by us requires us to be a bit more open to what seeking forgiveness might look like.

The example of the Crucifixion coming before the Resurrection should teach us that reconciliation and forgiveness need to be built upon atonement for sin. In this way, we can see us atoning for our own sins as part of our own quests for forgiveness. That does not have to be an unwelcome burden; we can choose for it to be holy and sacred work that, through our faith in Jesus Christ, can set us free from sin. The cross is not, has never been, and will never be, a get-out-of-racism-free card.

If we treat the cross so shabbily, we run into the problem of what the Christian pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace, of grace, absolution, or forgiveness being offered without the work of atonement followed by reconciliation. Ultimately, I think a sort of cheap grace is what the dying Nazi officer in Simon Wisenthal’s story is seeking, even if he doesn’t think so because he is trying to confess to a Jewish man rather than to a Christian cleric. But the victims of the soldier’s personal crimes and sins are dead. He cannot find the peace of mind he seeks because his own sins prevent atonement to, and reconciliation with, the persons he has most grievously sinned against. His victims cannot, in any earthly sense, forgive him for having sinned against them.

Seeking forgiveness and reconciliation may or may not feel so dramatic in our individual lives. It very well might to you, depending on what you are seeking forgiveness for or are offering forgiveness for. But it doesn’t have to be. Forgiveness can be something private and low-key, just as it can also be dramatic or public. Either way, the church has an incredibly important role to play in both teaching and demonstrating the good fruits of seeking forgiveness. And you are listening to me preach to you today in the hope that you might also feel the Holy Spirit leading you towards having me do ministry alongside you, just as I feel the Holy Spirit leading me to you in Birmingham.

And as I shared with Valley’s Official Board, you are being asked by the Holy Spirit to consider a very real leap of faith to call me here, and please know that I appreciate the dimensions of that leap.

When your last two senior ministers stepped down from this office by way of retirement, you are considering a leap of faith to call a 34-year-old into this position.

When your last four senior ministers have all been southerners, you are considering a leap of faith to call a born-and-raised Kansas boy who has spent his entire adult life until now on the West Coast.

And you are considering a leap of faith to call a minister who, because of a once-in-a-century global pandemic, you have only gotten to meet so far through Zoom sessions and telephone calls.

But in faith, we find the courage to do things that amaze ourselves and confound what we might have thought was possible, or what we thought we were capable of doing. Forgiveness is like that, whether we did not know we were capable of giving it, or whether we did not realize how receiving it would change us. Forgiveness is not only lifechanging, it is lifegiving.

And we should expect it to continue to change us. May our forgiveness of others, our forgiveness of ourselves, and our very liberation from sin continue to remake and resurrect us in God as revealed through Jesus Christ so that one day we in our faith might live bright…like sunflowers.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Vancouver, Washington

June 28, 2020