A Foray Into Forgiveness: Living Repentance

By Rev. William Dohle

“For God has bound all people to disobedience so that He may have mercy on them all.” Romans 11:32

Some things never seem to go away.

For the Roman Catholic Church, that thing is the pedophilia scandal. For the last few years it has been all the media has focused on. From one country to another, victims have come forth one by one to raise their voices against the priests who have abused them.

The Roman Catholic Church has taken a schizophrenic attitude toward them. On the one hand, Pope Benedict raises his voice against them. During his visit to the U.S. in 2008, Pope Benedict seemed, according to one commentator, “...genuinely pained and angered by the scandal. He repeatedly apologized and said he was ‘deeply ashamed’ of the abusive priests who had ‘betrayed’ their ministry.”(E.J. Dionne).

And yet, the scandal doesn’t go away. It only grows. Now the pope himself is said to have been involved in covering up the scandal in the years before he took office. And the scandal continues.

The only thing that can move the world past this is repentance. True, honest repentance. It needs to be repent of its own hierarchy, of the need to justify itself. It needs to repent of its every action, of the fact that, even when it tries to do good, it is marred by sin and death. It needs to ... As Dionne rightly says: “...show it understands the flaws of its own internal culture by examining its own conscience its own practices its own reflexives when faced with challenge. As the church rightly teaches, acknowledging the true nature of our sin is the one and only path to redemption and forgiveness.”

“God has bound all people to disobedience...” It’s kinda a hard thing to wrap your heart around. All people... does that include the Pope? The priest? The Bishop? Does that include the pastor I love? My own family? Who is included in that all people?

Quite simply... ALL PEOPLE! All includes all which includes the people at church as well as ourselves. As Jesus says: “No one is good – except God alone!”(Mark 10:18). Not the pope nor the priests nor anyone else, religious or otherwise, is good. Only God alone is Good! And there is a reason for this, for God sent Jesus to save us and to save our churches and our pastors as well. Christ died to forgive sins, and those include the sins of our religious leadership and our religious institution itself.

I know my church is in need of repentance. I’m a Lutheran and in serve a broken church. We are broken by scandals ourselves, the latest is the split between those who agree with the decisions to ordain practicing homosexuals and those who do not. Our congregations are breaking away from each other like little lone rangers on their quest for a religion that scratches their backs in all the right places. We are in love with being “right” and we worship our rightness in thought, word, and deed. We fail to serve our neighbor aright or join together with fellow Christians in serving them. We have made ourselves and our own agendas into a golden calf and are even now falling down to worship.

We need repentance! We need help! We are a church broken into a million pieces. And we need Christ!

And that is right where Christ takes us. Broken, shattered, confused, frustrated, lost, abandoned, and hopeless, Christ comes to us! Christ takes us and breathes new life into us. And each and every Sunday that we leave church we leave a forgiven church, strengthened to fulfill Christ’s mission in the world.

Christ made peace through his blood and Christ loves us. We needn’t do all this ourselves. We needn’t try to be perfect! Christ has redeemed us. And we are ALL, priests and bishops, popes and paupers, His children!

So, the next time as you go to your church, don’t expect it to be perfect! Don’t expect your leaders to be anything more than human beings, struggling themselves with sin and temptation. Don’t think that your church doesn’t need repentance and forgiveness because it DOES! Don’t see your pastors and priests as better than you, because they’re not. They, you, and all of us need the goodness and grace and forgiveness of God made alive in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen!