A Sermon for
Proper 19A,
Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, if another member of the Church
sins against me, how often should I forgive?
As many as seven times? Jesus
said to him, “Not seven times, I tell you, but seventy-seven times!”
Seven years ago this week, two planes slammed into the WTC,
one into the Pentagon, one into a field on
Three years ago, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita slammed into
the
As priest and pastor,
I’ve had the painful privilege of listening to people tell stories of suffering
and sin. I will never forget hearing one
woman recount years of horrific abuse suffered as a child at the hands of a
parent. The lasting wounds to her body,
heart and spirit were many and the struggle to make a whole life while living
with those wounds has been enormously hard.
The evil done many years ago has its lasting human costs. Others have told me of their own failings,
how they are burdened by guilt over things done and left undone: actions that
have damaged others – and themselves -- deeply.
And today, I suspect,
some of us have walked into this church carrying hurt and resentment at wrongs
done to us by others; others carry guilt over wrongs we ourselves have done;
and many of us carry both. Wrongdoing of
many sorts is loose in the world – on scales both global and personal, all of
it with its human cost. Some of its
petty; some of it horrendous; some of it so evil as to seem utterly
unforgivable.
Yet with one voice the Christian tradition calls God’s people to forgive. In the center of the prayer Jesus taught us are these most famous words: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
In today’s Gospel, Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, if another member of the Church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Now Peter thinks seven is a big number, but Jesus responds, “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times!”’ – in other words, Peter, don’t even start counting. The call to forgive is clear and non-negotiable: God commands that we forgive.
But how are we to forgive when wrongdoing and evil has caused grievous and lasting harm?
How to forgive when the wounds are still sore to the touch? Last week, I said that forgiveness is part of how we love one another in the Christian community. What I didn’t say much about is how hard real forgiveness can be. Often, it does not come easily.
That is especially true when we understand what forgiveness is and what it is not. Forgiveness is not minimizing the wrong that has been done: It is not saying, “Oh, what you did really wasn’t so bad; we can just sweep it under the rug and pretend it was no big deal.”
No, forgiveness is the much harder work of looking the wrong that has been in the face; being honest about what the real costs have been, and then saying from the heart, “I am ready to release that past; I am ready to release my hurt, my anger, my resentment; I am ready to release you, who harmed me, from that past; and I am ready to release myself from carrying the burden of my resentment and anger.
A brief aside here – but a very important one: releasing a wrongdoer from the past in forgiveness does not mean you should put yourself or others at risk of future harm. Forgiving an abuser does not mean returning to the situation where abuse can happen again.
Still we are called to get to that place of forgiveness and release. Getting to that place of being ready to release the past is often not easy. It takes time, effort, prayer – and above all God’s help. Getting to that place of forgiving release involves a journey similar to the now famous process of grieving that Elizabeth-Kubler Ross first identified in 1960’s. First comes denial -- “I can’t believe that he did that!” Bargaining coupled with anger – otherwise known as the desire for revenge – may be next: “Boy, am I going to make them pay for that!” Sadness comes as we discover how hurt we are by what another did.
And then, only then, can acceptance/release/forgiveness become possible. Only when, by our personal spiritual work and God’s grace, we have moved through our honest human reactions to being harmed can we move beyond those reactions to the release of forgiveness. Real forgiveness takes time – our time and God’s time.
When I was in my 30’s, I was talking to my then spiritual director about some issues from my childhood and adolescence. Something I said made him look up at me and say, “You haven’t forgiven your father, yet, have you?” The moment George spoke those words, I knew he was right.
It was not that my father was a bad or abusive parent – but like many in early adulthood, I’d become aware of the ways it seemed to me he had failed me, and I was caught up in anger and resentment. I happened to be in therapy at the time and, quite independently, my counselor told me at the same time she thought it was time I dealt with my father issues. God, it seemed, knew it was time I faced my anger at my father – and released it.
And so through some months of prayer, spiritual direction, therapy, and conversation with my father, the hard work of moving towards forgiveness took place. And one day at the Eucharist, saying the Lord’s Prayer, I realized when I got to those words about forgiving those who trespass against us that somewhere along the line I had come to that place of forgiveness and release for my father – and for myself. I had forgiven my father. My anger and resentment were gone, and that was a great gift. It turned out that my father was in the first stages of the cancer that would kill him a few months later. Before he died, I could accept and love him for the man he was – wonderful and flawed, as are we all.
Time and human processes can lead us toward the place of forgiveness, but more is needed, as I hope my story shows. God’s grace, God’s work in us, through prayer and the ministry of others, is essential.
Essential, too, is our awareness of God’s forgiveness of us. We need to know that God has forgiven us; that we have been offered a gift beyond our deserving and prior to our forgiveness of others. In the parable in today’s Gospel, Jesus teaches that God’s forgiveness comes first. A servant who owes a colossal debt is brought before the king. When he is unable to pay, the king at first orders the standard punishment – that the servant be sold with his family and possessions. Absurdly, the servant begs for more time to pay off the debt – something he’d never be able to do. In mercy, the King forgives the debt: he releases the man from the weight of the past and sets him free for the future.
The problem comes when the servant doesn’t understand what has happened to him. He doesn’t realize that he has been forgiven! He tries to collect a small debt owed to him – as if that would help him pay the huge debt he still thinks he owes! But here he crosses a line. The King condemns the man now for not forgiving others as he had been forgiven. “The stupendous generosity shown in the cancellation of his own gigantic debt should have led the servant to be as large-hearted as the king and to cancel the [tiny] debt owed to him.”[1]
In
Jesus’ story, the King’s forgiveness --
God’s forgiveness – comes first. God’s forgiveness is not a reward we are paid
for forgiving other. Rather it is the
source, the gift that frees us to forgive others. When we understand how generously we have
been forgiven by God – and at what great cost -- we can be freed to forgive
others.
I have said that much of what makes forgiveness hard for us is the injury, loss, & pain we suffer. But if wrongdoing to ourselves causes us pain, how much more so for God – God, who is so intimately related to us and so deeply affected by who we are and all we do. Our lives are so rooted in God’s life that our thoughts and our acts touch and move God – sometimes to joy and delight, and sometimes to grievous pain.[2]
We see that pain in Jesus’ body on the Cross – pain that Jesus chooses to bear for our sake in order to give to all –even his own killers -- the release of forgiveness: “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing.” That freeing, forgiving, releasing love of God in Christ flows out from the Cross to embrace us – to embrace all, even the most humanly unforgivable of sinners. It teaches us how much God suffers for us and how deeply God loves us. As the hymn we just sang says:
In blazing light the Cross reveals the truth we dimly
knew;
How small the debts owed to us, how great our debt to you.
As we become aware of
God’s love embracing and forgiving us in our sin, we catch a glimpse of God’s
love and mercy for others. Glimpsing the
wideness of God’s mercy to us and to all can awaken mercy in our own hearts.
Receiving the gift of God’s forgiveness of us can make it possible to do what
God commands: the hard and essential
work of forgiving others.
The Rev. Jack Zamboni
September 14th, 2008
St. Francis’ Church,