Another Way to Walk: the Way of Forgiveness in a Vengeful World

ANOTHER WAY TO WALK: THE WAY OF FORGIVENESS IN A VENGEFUL WORLD

Rev. Karen Pidcock-Lester

First Presbyterian Church, Pottstown, Pa.

Lent 2015

Matthew 5: 43-48

Matthew 18:21-35

Colossians 3:12-17

Introduction to the scripture:

During Lent, we are paying attention to the way Jesus walked through this world to the kingdom of God, and we are considering what it means to walk the same way. As we prepare to hear these words from Jesus’ sermon on the mount, and from one of his outrageous teaching stories, I invite you to think of someone who has hurt you. Perhaps someone has betrayed you, disappointed you, rejected or injured you, someone you are angry with or resent (these feelings often arise out of something that needs to be forgiven). You might find yourself thinking of one person, or a group of people. Picture them as we hear the scripture reading for today.

These verses may be a difficult word for you to hear as you think about this person. You may now be sitting there with anger or resentment which closes your heart towards this person. I understand that, and I am confident God understands that too. But I urge you, do not close your heart to God. Open yourself to the Word of God, because the Holy Spirit has something to give you in this hour of worship, something to lead you into life. I don’t know what that is, but you will know.

Let us pray.

Give us, O God, ears to believe, minds to conceive, and hearts to receive what you want to give us.

Amen.

Jesus walked this way of forgiveness. We see this throughout his ministry, but most clearly on the cross, when he prayed for those who were killing him, prayed for us: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

And he taught his disciples to walk this way as well.

Matthew 5: (Common English translation)

To help us hear this outrageous story as Jesus’ first audience would have heard it, we need to know that one talent was a unit of money equal to over 15 years of a laborer’s wage. 15 years. A denarii was a unit of money equal to a day’s wage.

Matthew 18:

Well, what do you think of that?

Sounds pretty harsh, doesn’t it?

Especially in this translation when it says ‘torture,’ rather than ‘punishment,’ as the word can also be translated.

So, let’s remember this is a dramatic tale, full of hyperbole – the servant has debts of over 150,000 years wages, after all…that’s ridiculous! The king wipes the slate clean – that’s even more ridiculous. Jesus tells this exaggerated tale, this parable, to shock us into thinking – and what are we to think?

Well, not that the king is brutal and capricious. The king is acting fairly, according to the law. The servant receives the legal punishment due because of his massive – over 150,000 years worth of wages -- debt.

The king is not unfair, but he is angry. Why? Because after the servant is set free by unimaginable generosity and grace (notice that the king clears the debt before the servant does anything to earn or deserve it. The king sets the servant free out of the goodness of his heart…) after receiving unimaginable grace, the servant chooses to give out judgment.

The servant cannot have it both ways: he cannot walk the path of grace when it benefits him, and then walk the path of law when he is the one who is owed. If he chooses to live by the code of debits and credits, keeping score and exacting payments, then that is the code by which his life is measured and treated. The destination of a journey depends on the path we take.

The moral of this story? Do unto others as you would have GOD do unto you.

Jesus walks the same path through this world as this gracious king. The bedrock of that path is grace. As one Biblical scholar says, the entire Bible can be summed up in one sentence: “There is forgiveness.” (quoted in Michael Lindvall, The Geography of God, p. 98 ) You and I are servants whose debt has been cleared, massive debt that we could never settle on our own –Christ has wiped it clear from the cross! As the graphic on the bulletin cover illustrates, God has stopped keeping score. All the marks against us have been crossed out, and we are free of them! You and I have been forgiven. Now we are to walk the way of forgiveness in the world. Forgiving those who hurt us is a requirement. Over and over again. 7 times, 77 times, 70 times 7 – there will be no end to the need to forgive, Jesus says, because there will be no end to the things that will need to be forgiven,

and because God’s forgiving has no end.

We cannot walk in stride with the forgiving God without forgiving those who have hurt us.

Does this requirement offend you, when you think of the person who has hurt you? Does this requirement raise all kinds of questions about fairness, and justice? Does it weigh you down because you do not see how you can forgive, and you feel guilty? Perhaps it would help us to think about what Jesus is telling us to do – and what he is not telling us to do --when he says forgive one another.

Jesus is not telling us to excuse or deny the wrong done to us: we blame the person, we do not excuse him or her.

And Jesus is not telling us to say, “that’s alright,” or “it doesn’t matter.” It isn’t all right. Sometimes it’s very, very wrong. And it matters very much.

And by all means, Jesus is not telling us to allow another person to keep on hurting us 70 times 7. If someone is hurting you now, God isn’t telling you to put up with it; God wants to help put an end to it. And Jesus wants his church to help put an end to people hurting one another.

Neither is Jesus telling you to forget what’s happened. “Perhaps the small indignities that prick our pride we can [and should)] simply excuse and forget. But for major assaults that leave us gasping for breath, reeling with rejection, bowing under oppression, or aching with loss or grief, we will find ourselves unable to forget. …Some things must be well remembered if we are to find our way to a life-giving future. Some things cannot, humanly speaking, be forgotten.” (Companions in Christ: The Way of Forgiveness, p. 61)

And forgiveness is not putting someone on probation until they apologize or change. “When he comes crawling to me, I’ll forgive him.” Reconciling and repairing the broken relationship requires two parties, but forgiveness can happen ‘alone in our heart and mind’ (Smedes, The Art of Forgiveness, p. 178) without their cooperation. Forgiveness can happen without even talking to the person.

What does it mean to forgive?

Forgiveness is choosing to wipe the debt clear. Crossing out the score. What Jesus is telling us to do is choose to “leave behind resentment and the desire for retribution, however fair that punishment might seem.” (Companions in Christ, p. 61) This is what Jesus does with us, what he requires of us, not only for our opponent’s sake, but also for our own.

Forgiveness is not a feeling, but an act of will, a choice. The so-called black and colored native people of South Africa did not necessarily feel benevolent towards the white dealers of apartheid when they released them from the horrific debts incurred by years of dehumanizing, brutal treatment;

the father of the girl killed by a drunk driver did not necessarily feel tenderness towards the young man when he testified on his behalf at the trial or visited him in prison. But these people chose to live with an uneven score, knowing that such a score could never be settled, and if they wanted a future without the corrosive burden of resentment and anger and hate, it could only be found on the path of forgiveness. God knows the world is aflame with the consequences of people and communities and countries who are walking the way of revenge and retribution: Gaza, Rwanda, Ferguson, Mo. But the world is also aflame with the light of those who have chosen to walk Jesus’ way in the world, and are free.

Forgiving is a journey that may take a long time: “the deeper the wound, the longer the journey”, (Smedes, p. 178) but Jesus tells us to begin the walk, which has three stages: we have to first rediscover the humanity of the person who wronged us, to see him/her again as someone who is flawed, perhaps even trapped by evil, but is nonetheless a child of God. (Flora Slosson Wuellner, quoted in Companions, p. 61)) When we have done that, we have to surrender our right to get even – yes, we may have the right, as did the king in Jesus’ parable, but he surrendered it to walk another way. And third, we come to wishing the person well. (Smedes, p. 178)

We cannot walk the way of forgiveness on our own – nor do we need to. We walk with Jesus, and other pilgrims on the path of grace, and we talk with him as we grope to find our way. We pray. We start praying ‘where our hearts are, rather than where we think they ought to be.” (Jane Vennard, Companions, p. 50) “Begin by praying any way you can,” writes one pilgrim, (Wm. Meninger, Companions, p. 50) “Bring your hurts, your sorrow, your…loneliness to the Lord. If this is what you have, this must be the gift you bring to the altar.” Sometimes the only place we can begin to pray is for the desire to forgive because we do not even have that. But even that is a starting point on the way.

As we draw near in prayer to God, we will be drawing closer to the source of mercy. Someone has said, “How is it possible to forgive? Forgiveness exists already – now, and eternally. We do not create it, we enter it.” (Flora Slosson Wuellner, Companions, p. ) When we pray alone, or with God’s people, we enter the mercy of God which already exists, and it covers us. The longer we spend in it, the more we soak it up, the more our souls are steeped in it, the more we will know that we have enough …enough love, enough humility, enough grace for our own sin, enough to realize that life will be good, good enough without evening the score.

“Forgiveness is a door to peace and happiness,” writes Johann Arnold. “It is a small, narrow door, and cannot be entered without stooping.” In time, we will tire of dragging the record books around with us and one day let them fall away. When we do, our walk through this world will get lighter, and we will be the ones who are set free.

I have a thousand stories I’d love to tell you that I’ve read in the past two weeks, stories from Desmond Tutu’s book No Future without Forgiveness, about reconciliation in S. Africa; or the story of the wife of the shooter of the Amish schoolchildren as she stood at her window and watched the Amish farmers approach her house on the day of the shooting; or personal stories of forgiveness that you’ve entrusted me with….

stories that prove it is possible with the Holy Spirit’s help to forgive even the most heinous things. But I’ll save them for another time ( perhaps we could read them in future book circles.)

Instead, I want to close with a story that sheds light on another question someone asked me this week. The question was, “how do I know when I’ve forgiven someone? I think I have, she said, I do not wish them harm, I wish them well, but then I’ll remember the hurt, and feel angry again.” Good question.

Corrie ten Boom, you may remember, was part of a family in the Netherlands who hid Jews in their home during WWII. She was caught and sent with her family to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. Her sister Betsie died there. After the war, Corrie diligently sought to walk the way of forgiveness. She felt she had forgiven someone who had hurt her during the war, but she kept rehashing the incident and so couldn’t sleep. Finally Corrie cried out to God for help in putting the problem to rest.

She writes, “God’s help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor,” she wrote, “to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks. ‘Up in the church tower,’ he said, nodding out the window, ‘is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what? After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding, then dong. Slower and slower until there’s a final dong and it stops. I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive, we take our hand off the rope. But if we’ve been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn’t be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They’re just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down.’

“And so it proved to be,” continued Corrie. “There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in my conversations, but the force – which was my willingness in the matter – had gone out of them. [When I stopped pulling on the rope,] they came less and less often and at the last stopped altogether.”

Jesus says to you, and to me, “Come …let go of the rope, and walk free, with me.”

Amen.