Sermon: 3/16/2025

Grace, mercy, and peace are yours from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.

My friends, if I were to title my homily today, I would name it, Our God is a Forgetful God.

If you, like me, have walked through the valley of the shadow of death with someone dealing with end-stage Alzheimer’s disease, you know a pain and an anxiety that only those who love someone in that state can understand.

It is an uncomfortable and difficult path to walk, but one that, when given to God, can be a blessing and a holy journey toward a deeper relationship with Jesus.

It’s common to say that Alzheimer’s and dementia and diseases like that take away personality and memory, but as I have at many times, at many funerals, and spoken here as well, with many walking that difficult road, I would remind you that our memories and our personalities and who we are is not something locked in our physical brain, but these are the truths about us, and all about who we are is housed in the soul, not the brain, of every person you meet.

So while diseases of the brain may take and affect the capability of accessing some memories, the person’s personality and who that person is is not lost to eternity because the soul never dies.

Alzheimer’s and dementia are a biological destruction of the pathways that link us to our true selves, and the moment our soul is freed from our bodies, who we are, our very memories, our loves, and our choices are freed again in the healing that takes place as we cross from this life into eternity.

But how does all of this work with today’s consequential gospel proclamation, a passage of scripture that says a hellish eternity is a real thing to shun, but heaven is the hope and promise of all who love God, that there is a reality for those who do not follow Christ’s way of love, a reality and an eternity that is void of all things good, and how does this all point to God being a forgetful God?

It’s the life of St.

Margaret Mary Alacoque that helps us see God’s call and his will for us in relation to these readings.

Back in that mid-17th century, Margaret Alacoque decided that her life would be lived fully for Jesus, and she became a nun in service for Christ.

Margaret had been a quiet and well-behaved child, and she was known to have a great devotion to the Holy Eucharist from a very early age, and it seemed just the perfect fit when she said she believed that Christ was calling her to the convent.

But Margaret was a unique young lady, and she took her vows extremely seriously.

She lived a life of prayer as a nun and lived always to be closer to the Lord.

One day, Margaret said that Jesus personally visited her in a vision.

She had been pondering the great love for us all and thinking of how big his heart must be to love all people in all the world at all times.

And she felt impressed by God that she should go to her priest and ask him to call the people of her parish and indeed the people of the world to devote themselves in prayer to this great loving heart of Jesus Christ.

She said to her priest, Father, I have been visited by the Lord, and it is his will that we meditate and spread the word about his great love for us and his sacred heart.

And her priest, unimpressed by her claims of visions and hearing from God and doubting that this peculiar nun was actually the recipient of God’s personal call, he sent her back to the convent, ordering her not to bring up these visions again.

But this did not satisfy Margaret’s heart, and she claimed that these visions of Jesus continued and that his request to her was that his people intentionally seek to understand his great love and the implications of that love, the love that he has for all people.

And Margaret continued to go back to her priest with her visions.

And finally, after a few attempts of speaking to the priest and only bringing this one concern to him over and over, the priest said, Margaret, the next time you talk to Jesus, you must prove to me that you have seen these visions.

I want you to ask him, what was the last sin that my priest confessed to you in private?

Thinking he had shut down this burdensome nun, he sent her away.

Not many days later, Margaret reappeared back at his door, saying, Father, we must speak immediately.

She said, Father, I have the answer.

When Jesus appeared to me, I began to ask him the question that you wanted me to present, but he stopped me, saying, Margaret, I know what the priest has asked you.

Tell him I forgot.

Whether you believe in private revelation and God’s directly and audibly speaking to some of his followers is not the truth to ponder here.

God’s will and his ways are higher and wiser than ours, and he can do anything.

But there is a great truth here that I hope touches your heart.

When we carry our burdens of sin to God and open our hearts in reliance on God’s grace and mercy to bring us the peace of forgiveness of sin, he is, as Scripture tells us, faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

In the power of the Holy Spirit, in the shed blood of Jesus, our sins are forgiven, and he not only covers them nor boxes them up for a later review, but in him our sins are forgiven and gone.

As far as the East is from the West, they are no more.

Is God forgetful?

Yes.

He chooses to forget your sins.

The priest was convinced by St.

Margaret Mary, not because he received some private answer recounting his confessed sin, but he was confronted with the truth of the gospel, that God chooses to forget our sins the moment he forgives them.

Our gospel passage today is one side of a trustworthy coin.

You see, there are only two possible judgments that will be placed on the soul that stands in God’s presence on that last day.

The court will not be one where my plead for mercy must come to God with an answer for what I’ve done throughout my life.

We must not plead our case or try to convince God to let us into heaven, for he already knows all we’ve done, and he already knows how well he knows us.

He knows our hearts.

As we stand before him, the one who has walked in Christ’s love, the one who has been open to doing good in life, and who has learned to trust the power of the Holy Spirit to make it through life in compassion, seeking God’s way over the way of the world, our souls will know the embrace of our Heavenly Father as he welcomes us into a blessed eternity with him with the words, Well done, my good and faithful servant, enter into your rest.

But his forgetfulness is well evident toward those who choose not to walk in God’s light.

For you see, hell is a choice, not a punishment for bad behavior.

Hell is simply a place, an existence, a state without God one chooses if they do not wish to follow God.

All that is good is wrapped up in being in God’s presence.

All that is opposite of good is where God is not.

And this is the truest meaning of hell.

If we go through life denying the God that has over and over loved us and called us toward himself, if we choose to be people of worldly hate and unholy passions, if we choose not to love our neighbor, and if we give no place to the goodness of God along life’s path, if we choose not to be part of the blessings of peace and an eternity with Jesus, God will force no one into a heaven they don’t want.

While every one soul not spending eternity with him is a pain to the sacred heart of our Lord, to the soul that wants nothing to do with God there will be only the judgment that we hear today in the gospel.

God will cause a holy forgetfulness of that soul and a tearful judgment from our loving Heavenly Father, saying, Depart from me, you worker of iniquity, I never knew you.

And their hell will be an existence without God.

Because the peace and the joy and the holy eternity that is offered by God over and over through life is not what that soul has chosen.

In Lent, we have a call, a call from God to root out the sin in our lives.

This includes three critical things to do.

Number one, know yourself.

The Holy Spirit will enlighten the dark and hidden corners of your heart so that even the most concealed secret sins are made known.

Facing these truths can be difficult, but keeping in mind that God knows best for us, rooting out the darkness only brings Christ’s light and peace.

Number two, confess your sin.

Asking God for forgiveness is the surest path to freedom from temptation.

It is the surest way to relieve guilt and anxiety about your sin, remembering the forgetfulness of God, His choice to remember your sin no more, as He gives you the power and fuels your will to amend your life.

Number three, repent.

Guilt and shame for our sin can make a difficult pillow on which to rest.

Our past, no matter how forgiven and forgotten by God, will, in our human frailty, be on full review each time the devil reminds us of our past sins.

But it is repentance, an intentional turning away from sin, powered to do so by the Holy Spirit, therein we are to not only replace sinful behavior with holy alternatives, but as Scripture says, we are to not even look in the direction of evil.

Guard what you see, guard what you hear, guard what you do, and thereby you will be practicing a life of holiness that is not only a blessing to you and a glory to God, but living in God’s will is how we make our world a better place, loving others, caring for those in need and on the margins of society, and sharing Christ’s peace with those stricken by the world’s anxieties.

Get to know yourself more fully, seek God’s forgiveness as it frees you from the eternal consequences of your sin, and make it your ambition, work to achieve the goal of turning away from your sin.

This is the meaning of repentance.

But remember that only in God’s power, and not that of yourself, will you win your struggle against sin, the flesh, and the devil.

To God only be the glory.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Amen.

Amen.