Part of my sermon on the baptism of Jesus talked about John the Baptist teaching baptism for repentance of sin. My spouse and I talked about the idea of Jesus having sins he needed to repent. He was partly human, after all. It wasn't hard to come up with a few times where he could have behaved more perfectly; the interaction with the Canaanite woman comes to mind (Matthew 15: 21-28).
Then I went back to revise and came up with these lines:
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If Jesus has sins to confess,
Jesus who is part of the Triune God, do we also feel that God has need of
confession? Could we believe in an
imperfect God?
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My spouse read the revised sermon and declared I had written a whole different sermon. He advised taking these lines out. I did, but mainly because I thought the idea of a God who sins, the Creator who sins, was too provocative. Plus, I didn't develop the idea. I don't want to throw out ideas that are bombshells and just leave them there, not when I'm preaching. I don't feel like I have to answer all the questions, but I do feel like I should give a range of answers. These questions felt more like the kinds we'd explore on a retreat.
Still, they intrigued me, so I wanted to record them. Maybe I'll return to them. Maybe another theological world is about to open to me, like when I first started thinking about rejecting God's omnipotence.
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