Friday in the First Week

Ezekiel 18:21-28; Psalm 130; Matthew 5:20-26

I didn’t grow up with a punishing God.  (I didn’t grow up with much of a God at all, though we went to church each week.)  I met this punishing God when I got sober in 1985.  All around me were lesbians and gay men trying to get sober, who couldn’t trust that God loved them and wanted to help them.  They had been told all their lives that God hated them, that God was eager to judge and condemn and punish us.  I was grateful for my lukewarm upbringing; I eventually found a God who loves me.

Ezekiel is quite clear that the hating God is not the true God.  “Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says God, and not rather that they should turn from their ways and live?”  True, when we turn away from God and one another, we die; our spirits shrivel, our bodies suffer from excess, our minds close.  But God does not will this so much as announce it.  It’s what happens when we cut ourselves off from the source of life.

God wills forgiveness.  “If the wicked turn away from all their sins that they have committed . . . none of the transgressions that they have committed shall be remembered against them.”   That simple.  If I turn and stop what I’ve been doing, God will start over with me.  If I forgive, God forgives me.  If I turn and repent, God forgives me.  God is more desperate to forgive than I am sometimes to be forgiven!

That’s not just a good idea.  That’s my experience in life.  If I will turn, God hits the reset button.  I won’t give the whole testimony here, but let’s say I have traveled pretty far down the road of transgression.  When I asked for help, God showed up.  Over and over and over, God shows up when I stop barring the door.

Open the door today.  Let God forget the past.  Turn, and live.