Immanuel Lutheran Church - Benson

“Love covers over all wrongs.”
Proverbs 10:12

So I’m sitting in my office on the Tuesday of Holy Week, trying to distract myself enough so I can hear God’s Word in the readings for Maundy Thursday so that I can compose a sermon.

See, if I concentrate on myself too much when I’m trying to write a sermon, then the sermon just ends up being about me: what I want, what I think, what I feel.  So, every time I get to this point, I have to read these lessons every 10 to 15 minutes, and then distract myself from my own thoughts, so that I can try and tease out even a little bit of what God wants, what God thinks, and what God feels as revealed in these lessons.

So as I’m sitting here, I thought, “You know, maybe you should write on your blog about something totally unconnected to Holy Week at all.  That will distract you!”

Well, that’s what I thought.

I pulled out this little verse from Proverbs (one of my favorite books of the Bible by the way) and lo and behold, I think that it has everything to do with Holy Week.

After all, this verse tells us simply that, “Love covers over all wrongs.”  That is what Holy Week is all about!  This week is about God loving us poor pathetic little human beings so much that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was not only willing, but actually did get killed to save us.

This is the type of love that covers over all wrongs.  Not like our human love for one another, that can cover over a lot of wrongs, hurts, betrayals, and all the other horrible things that will happen to us in this life.  This is a type of love that only God can give: a love so pure and right that it won’t just cover over the wrongs that happen to us, but the wrongs that we do to others!

The blood of the Lamb, shed for you and for me, covers over all the wrongs, all the hurts, all the betrayals that we have committed.  And yes, to some of us, this just means that we will do them all over again.  But then the blood of the Lamb will cover them over too.  And to some of us, we will accept being covered over by the blood of the Lamb and turn from our sins - although most of the time it’s just to turn to another sin.  But the blood of the Lamb will cover them up too.

Our sin is like a chasm, separating us from God.  Only the love of God, made human in Jesus Christ, made suffer under our sin and die on the cross can cover up the chasm so that God, who loved us from the beginning of the world, can come be with us - Immanuel!

As we sit and ponder what this week means for us, what the stories of Jesus betrayal, passion, death, and resurrection matter for our lives today, please don’t forget the reason behind all of this: God just wants to love you!

Thanks be to God!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 at 7:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.