• "Standing Blameless Before God"
• Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity
• October 10, 2004
• The Reverend Stephen C. Scarlett

Today's epistle (1 Corinthians 3-8) describes the goal of the Christians life: "...that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. The day of our Lord Jesus Christ is when "He shall come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead." To be blameless means that we will stand before him with no one able to bring an accusation against us. A similar thought is expressed in Colossians 1:22, which says that Jesus has reconciled us to God "to present you holy and blameless, and above reproach in his sight."

The thought of standing blameless before God in the judgment may seem fanciful to those of us who are only too mindful of our sins of thought, word and deed; but blamelessness is inherent in the concept of forgiveness. The Bible presents a courtroom image: God is judge with the devil as our accuser or prosecuting attorney. The devil's accusation is that we have broken the commandments and are worthy of death. But Jesus appears as our advocate, our defense attorney. As Romans says:

"Who shall bring a charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us" (8:34, NKJ).

This is our experience in the Eucharist. We come before the altar and throne of God conscious of our sins and unworthiness. We plead the merits of Christ's sacrifice before the throne. His intercession for us avails. Our sins are forgiven. We are reconciled with God. We stand blameless.

Or, to put it another way, is forgiveness merely a legal fiction in which God doesn't count our sins against us-and punish us for them-even though we still have them? Or does the act of forgiveness actually change us so that we no longer have sin? This was a central issue in the Reformation. Are we justified solely because the righteousness of Christ is applied to our account? Or are we justified because, through our encounter with Christ, we are made to be actually righteous?

If we say, on the one hand, "We are righteous only because Christ's righteousness is applied to our account in a legal sense," this seems to belittle the teaching that we are actually transformed into the image of Christ. As 2 Corinthians says, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation." (5:17). If we say, on the other hand, "We are righteous because Christ has actually changed us into righteous people," this seems to overlook the continued existence of sin in our lives.

The way to reconcile the tension is, first, to understand the Christian life as a process, and, second, to understand things from the eternal perspective of God. Through the baptismal gift and the conversion of our hearts, something changes in our lives. Those of us who know Christ are not the same people we were before we knew him. We are observably better, but not yet perfected.

Through the life of prayer, through the sanctifying activity of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we grow in holiness. We see our sins in ever-clearer light; we make better confessions; we experience forgiveness more deeply; we grow in the practice of good works. There is an organic process of growth that will be completed on "the day of the Lord Jesus Christ," when the last vestiges of sin and mortality are to be removed in one final transforming encounter with Jesus Christ.

Change takes place in time. But God lives in eternity. From eternity, God sees the past, the present and the future as if they were all now. Thus, God sees us now, as we will be then. We are in the middle of the process, but God sees the finished goods. We are blameless before God, even now, because God already sees the end result of Christ's redeeming work in us.

The Sacrament of the Altar links the present with the past and future. We remember the past event of Christ's death. It is applied to our lives in the present moment so that we are cleansed of sin and reconciled to God now. And we are given a taste of the future consummation when we will stand eternally blameless before God.

Blamelessness, then, is the consequence of Christ living in us. We cannot make ourselves blameless. We cannot atone for our sins. We cannot do what we ought without the Holy Spirit. Yet, we must participate in that work. We must submit to operation. We must persevere in the process. That is why we come to the altar of God. We present ourselves before God so that he can do his work in us.

As Philippians says, "Being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ" (1:6, NKJ)