2nd Sunday of Easter
Texts: John 20:19-31;
Acts 5:27-32; Rev 1:4-8
You Tube: https://youtu.be/EuT_xYOUypQ
Sermon Take-Home Notes
WELCOMING LGBTQ PEOPLE AS THE KEY TO LIVING
CHRIST’S COMMISSION TO ENACT THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION
At our Annual Congregational Meeting three months ago, we elected to embark on what’s called the Reconciling in Christ process,1 where we examine the quality of our welcome to everyone. But especially by focusing on a sore spot across the church: how we welcome or don’t welcome LGBTQ people. This morning’s Gospel Reading helps, I believe, to more clearly understand what that’s about. The Risen Jesus appears to the apostles, minus Thomas, on Easter evening, he breathes the Holy Spirit on them, and he commissions them for ministry with these words: “Of whomever you forgive sins, they are forgiven them; whomever you hold fast are held fast.”
These words of commission call us, the disciples of Jesus, to what St. Paul calls the ministry of reconciliation. Four weeks ago, we read this crucial passage from 2 Corinthians 5:
So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. (2 Cor 5:17-19)
There you have it! The whole business of new creation, including becoming human in a new and better way, boils down to God reconciling the whole world in Christ Jesus. Reconciled in Christ. And when we figure in that God shows us this new creation in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, we might add that we stop counting our sins against each other with deadly consequences. It’s the harming of one another when we count sins against each other, like executing someone on a cross, that we need to stop. And it all begins by God not counting our trespasses against us.
Isn’t that what Jesus is saying on Easter evening in John 20? “Of whomever you forgive sins, they are forgiven them; whomever you hold fast are held fast.” We are held fast in community, we are reconciled with one another, when we begin by letting go of our sins rather than counting them against each other — especially when harming one another, like the cross.
Now, if you don’t count this against me, I have a confession to make. I asked Cathi to change the translation of that precise verse in our Gospel Reading. Just that one verse. “Of whomever you forgive sins, they are forgiven them; whomever you hold fast are held fast.” The rest of the reading is from our usual translation, the New Revised Standard Version (“NRSV,” for short). Here’s the NRSV translation of John 20, verse 23: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” In your Sermon Notes for today, I have the two translations next to each other. Look them over for a moment. And I ask you, don’t these two translations basically contradict one another? The translation I offer — which is from New Testament scholar Sandra Schneiders,2 by the way — is about a true ministry of reconciliation, in which we are held fast in community precisely by forgiving sins, never by counting them against each other. Whereas the NRSV translation seems to give us the opposite: we are precisely to play the game of either forgiving sins or counting them against each other, “retaining” them. Instead of truly being reconciled in Christ, we are to determine who’s in and who’s out of our community on the basis of either forgiving their sins or retaining them. Either letting go of sins or continuing to count them against each other.
What a difference the translation of one verse can make! Jesus either commissions us to be new creations for a ministry of reconciliation, or he sends us out for the same ol’, same ol’. The thing which has kept us human beings in deadly games of fighting one another for centuries. For millennia, really. It is the age-old game of all nationalistic empires: clearly define who’s in and who’s out. Who’s a friend and who’s an enemy. Who’s sins we forgive and who’s sins we retain. And if we retain them, watch out.
So here’s the question: if Sandra Schneiders is correct in her translation of John 20:23, then how does our standard translation still get it so-o-o-o wrong? Here’s my suggestion to you. After more than a thousand years of the church being allied with empire, it is still easy for us to sometimes think more in terms of the nationalism of empire. And so we make mistakes, sometimes huge mistakes, even in something like how we translate a crucial verse in the Bible. If we translate John 20:23 like the NRSV, we have a more nationalistic way of doing community. We are prone to deciding who’s in and who’s out on the basis of forgiving or retaining sins. Think of our past, even our lived past. Thing like how we’ve treated divorced people. We choose to retain the sins of some, like divorcees, and it hurts. So much pain caused throughout our history.
It’s because we are still so prone to thinking nationalistically instead of thinking as true followers of Christ, that this process on Reconciling in Christ can be truly vital to getting back fully on track with what we are in fact commissioned to undertake: a ministry of reconciliation. When we come to understand how to be more truly welcoming by not holding sins against one another, then we are reconciled in a life-giving community together. We are held fast to one another.
Let me give you a story that illustrates the difference. In the first three centuries of the church, followers of Christ did come to hold some different views — majority and minority opinions about things like how is Jesus Christ both human and divine. These differences of opinion were the occasion for further conversation, however, not the holding of sins against each other. But when the emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion, one of the first things he did was to hold a conference of bishops in the Greek city of Nicaea. By the time they finished, they had hammered out the Nicene Creed, a clear statement of belief for the early church which we still use.
But Constantine did something else, too. He used the creed as a measuring stick for who’s in and who’s out. Which then became a pattern through subsequent history, during things like the inquisition. Three bishops continued to dissent at the end of the conference. Constantine had two of them executed and the third exiled.3 Differences of opinion that occasioned fertile conversations became sins to count against each other with deadly consequences. That’s how nationalistic empires do things. They clearly define friends and enemies — and when mixed with the Christian message, they ignore Jesus’s clear teaching to love even our enemies. Even something like holding different opinions can become the occasion of counting sins against each other with deadly consequences. I submit to you this morning that the NRSV translation of John 20:23 still participates in that harmful way of thinking. It opens the door to that kind of behavior.
Here’s another quick example from the church in our lifetimes. I already mentioned how we treat divorced people. Think about the way alcoholics have been treated in church communities. Then think about how they are treated in Alcoholics Anonymous communities. There’s no counting sins against a person in A.A. Just simply the offer of a new life of sobriety should they choose to explore it.
But undertaking the reconciling in Christ process goes even deeper than that, I believe. It gets to the heart of why I think Sandra Schneiders is right in her translation of John 20:23. Her interpretation begins with the beginning of John’s Gospel. John the Baptist sees Jesus coming and proclaims, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). “Sin” not “sins.” Apparently, there is one sin above others that Jesus came to reveal to us as the lamb of God. “Lamb of God” points to the ending, where we sacrifice Jesus, sent by God, on the cross. We count sins against him with deadly consequences. Empires and nations do these things. It is the way they always train us to think. We must be clear about who’s in and who’s out, about who’s a friend and who’s an enemy. We must be prepared to count sins against others with deadly consequences. That’s what it takes to be a successful empire or nation.
But Jesus is the lamb of God who has come to take away that one sin above all others. In short, the sin of counting sins against one another with deadly consequences. That’s the sin which we need to leave behind. The chief of sins is itself our manner of holding sins against each other. Jesus makes this clear in John’s Gospel, when he says things like, “when the Holy Spirit comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment” (John 16:8). That’s how much we need to change our thinking. The Holy Spirit’s first task will be to help us see how we were wrong about sin, righteousness, and judgment when it came to executing Jesus on the cross. But it goes so much deeper than that one instance. Our whole way of thinking about sin, righteousness, and judgment is wrong when we use that way of thinking to count sins against each other with deadly consequences. The latter is the “sin of the world” which the lamb of God came to take away.
And in its place he leaves his followers a new creation, a new way of being human in which we leave behind the ways of counting sins against each other with deadly consequences. He breathes the Holy Spirit upon us to teach us a new way of being human which leads to reconciliation rather than estrangement. “Of whomever you forgive sins, they are forgiven them; whomever you hold fast are held fast.” When Jesus’s cross is the center of our life, we unlearn all the ways in which we count sins against one another with harmful consequences. And we learn the way of new creation which features forgiveness and reconciliation as the way to helping each other to more abundant life.
As we undertake the “Reconciling in Christ” process, we will learn to leave behind our ways of thinking that cause harm, as we learn renewed ways of working together make our lives more fulfilled. Especially that issue which has been the center of controversy in the church for the past forty years or so: how we welcome LGBTQ people. Do we somehow count their ‘sins’ against them? Or do we come to see that the sin involved here has been the rest of us counting their sins against them? In harmful ways that we need to unlearn? That’s the key to learning how to truly welcome one another. That Jesus’s invitation to “eternal life” begins here and now as we commit our lives to New Creation, as we commit this ministry to a ministry of reconciliation. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, April 27, 2025
You Tube: https://youtu.be/EuT_xYOUypQ
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. For more on the Reconciling in Christ process, see https://www.reconcilingworks.org/ric/
2. The original essay by Sandra Schneiders, “The Lamb of God and the Forgiveness of Sin(s) in the Fourth Gospel,” was published in The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 73/1 (January 2011): 1-29. It is available online at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/72851777.pdf. It is also available in a book of collected essays Jesus Risen in Our Midst: Essays on the Resurrection of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (Liturgical Press, 2013), as chapter 6. There is a slightly different version of the essay as ch. 5 of Jesus Risen in Our Midst, “Whose Sins You Shall Forgive . . .”: The Holy Spirit and the Forgiveness of Sin(s) in the Fourth Gospel.” Both essays center on the insightful translation of John 20:23.
3. The Wikipedia article has the three bishops only exiled. But it is clear about the main purpose of the creed for the empire: “In the Council of Nicaea, one specific creed was used to define the Church’s faith clearly, to include those who professed it, and to exclude those who did not.” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea.
