September 14, 2008
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Year A)
Exodus 14:19-31; Psalm 114; Romans 14:1-12;
Matthew 18:21-35
As you are all aware, I hope, there is going to be a short course on forgiveness called “Forgive and Get Your Life Back” which will be based on the bible and a book by priest Dennis Maynard. – It’s not too late to sign up!
I give this plug not only so more people may avail themselves of this opportunity; but I do it also because I have been reading about forgiveness a lot these weeks. Many of the lessons we will have between now and Advent deal with the whole topic of forgiveness. And one of the best things I have found as a resource that I will rely heavily upon for my thoughts this morning is the book, A World according to God: practices for putting faith at the center of your life by Martha Ellen Stortz.
In this book there is a chapter called “Forgiveness” that I found succinctly and clearly articulates what I have come to know about forgiveness, both as a pastor who watches healing in those for whom I am pastor and in my own life. Though I won’t quote you page by page, chapter and verse, I just wanted to be clear that I am relying heavily this morning on this chapter of the book for my thoughts.
When I was a little girl, we said the Lord’s Prayer each night – after Mom read to us (and, yes, Mom always read. Daddy, if he was home and had bedtime duty, told us stories about an imaginary family called the Fourshoes who were remarkably like all of us). After stories we prayed together. Each night as we prayed I would invariably yawn during the Lord’s Prayer and somehow I got it stuck in my mind that God was coming into me for the night through the yawn, to sleep with me for the night. I didn’t have language about who the Spirit was or is or how God might be, but from an early age I saw that yawn as a sign of God’s presence. So if I yawn during prayers, you know it’s just the spirit working on me!
Anyway, the Lord’s Prayer itself then took on an incredible power for me, a talisman, if you will, that God was real and present as I prayed those words and as I slept each night.
And it is those words of that prayer that Stortz uses to draw our attention to the meaning of what it is to forgive, to truly forgive, and to reconcile with those we feel absolutely unable to forgive, let alone allow ourselves to be healed from the pain they have caused.
Each time we pray, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” each time, with God’s very self embodied in our breath, we begin the process of true forgiveness. Forgiveness that frees us to “get our life back” as the course we will travel through together would imply.
In the world of psychology we are told often to forgive and forget in order to get our life back, but Stortz suggests that we cannot do that. For when we “forget,” it is really more a matter of stuffing the pain down to some other place where it can eat at our innards and come out in ways that are not only destructive to us, but to everyone we encounter. What we need to do is remember, not forget, but to remember in the context of this line from the Lord’s prayer, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” That context says we have all sinned, and like children who come crying to their parents saying, “Tommy hit me,” the truth is “me,” whoever “me” is, egged Tommy on. Very few of us are ever truly not in some way accountable in every conflict in which we find ourselves. And when we remember that we too are accountable and have sinned, and we know that God has forgiven us, we must, unlike the servant in today’s parable, we must forgive others, not because we forget, but because we remember our own need to be forgiven and pass that along to someone else, even if they do not ask for our forgiveness. And we give it even if they, whoever “they” are, never know it. Which means the very first step toward forgiveness is our own repentance, not the demand of another’s apology or repentance or guilt. It is our own mirror of self examination into which we should be looking, and it is that authentic repentance of our own wrong doings, our own sin, our own accountability in the “Tommy hit me” scenario that is the first step toward forgiveness.
When we begin with our own repentance, then what is lost is our own deep desire for retaliation and getting even, “doing unto them as they did unto us.” And, is that ever hard to let go of! The human inclination is to want revenge. We don’t just want an “eye for an eye.” We want the whole face bloody!! And two eyes to make up for the pain we are suffering, have suffered, will suffer. “Misery loves company” is never more true than when vengeance or the punishment of the offender is what we seek.
So when we begin with our own need for forgiveness, it becomes harder to demand such retaliation. We have been, by grace, given forgiveness ourselves, forgiveness from a loving God who never treats us as we deserve and who, in fact, forgives us far beyond our wildest expectations. So it becomes important when we think of what vengeance God might demand of us, that we demand about the same as God has demanded: nothing. No, if vengeance is God’s, then it must not lie with us to try to extract it. Or so the parable would say to me this morning!
And the sad thing is, if we opt for vengeance instead of forgiveness, we further victimize ourselves. Being the victim becomes something we tend like a garden of weeds. It controls us, makes us speak of it to others, constantly reshapes all our interactions, and causes us to become people who sour others, turning them into imitations of our own dour, angry selves. Nurturing our own victimhood may even cause us to do to others things far worse than have been done to us. Most victims tell their story over and over, and over and over, and as they do, their faces and demeanor change. Their voices tremble, the injury is opened anew, and the hurt becomes deeper and rawer with each telling. So instead of becoming healed, the gulf between the victim and the offender becomes wider and more impassable, and the victim more victimized. The victims become paralyzed and trapped in their own anger. But if we learn to remember in a new way, through the lens of forgiveness, and if we do not allow ourselves to be the victim any longer, we will not need to tend that “shrine of tangled weeds” which we have come to treasure in our victimhood. We are no longer deformed by anyone, and God is allowed to be the only One reshaping our life after a desperate hurt.
A victim can refuse to allow him or herself to be a victim any longer by forgiving. Forgiving is to renegotiate one’s memory. It is to find a new way of telling the story, a new way of living. It is to acknowledge that one has been hurt, but that the hurt does not control our life. It is the healing from it that does, and that healing comes by forgiving, not by forgetting.
For the step after making the conscious will to forgive is not to forget at all, but to “re-member,” to reconcile and be in community with the one by whom we were hurt. Such powerful “remembering” is truly the work of the Holy Spirit, and it is the primary work of disciples and followers of Jesus. It has been the work of the Jesus followers since before the church was formed. It is the evidence, “the sacrament” if you will, of the act of forgiveness, “the outward and visible sign” that God’s grace has worked within the follower of Jesus and that the follower has become as the one followed, a true forgiver, unlike that servant in the gospel this morning.
Christian forgiveness, then, is way beyond therapy, way beyond an eye for an eye, way beyond any other mediation practice or arbitration practice that I know of in the world. It is to live the words of the Lord’s Prayer every day, “Forgive us as we have been forgiven.” It is to embody those words with the whole of our lives.
It’s not easy of course. But it is (as the title of the book that we will be using for the course that starts this Thursday at 7:00 pm says), it is to get your life back, a life made whole and holy by the power of God working in you and through you.
And how many times must we forgive? Seventy times seven or seventy-seven or more than we can count or keep track of! Forgiving is what we do as Christians. We do it by faith because by God’s grace, we can.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd