Forgiveness

Forgiveness is a tough topic.

It seems simple enough. 

Forgive others as you have been forgiven.

The Unforgiving Servant
Nelly Bube

But it’s hard.

It’s easy enough to say, “I’m sorry, and that’s okay.”

But to live those in the heart is much more difficult.

In the parable, A slave owes a king a ton of money.

10,000 talents a lot.

Remember, exaggeration is one method of parables.

One talent was 15 years wages

which for a minimum wage worker today it’s about $250,000

So, 10,000 times that -  is something like two hundred million dollars.

A hyperbole, an exaggeration for sure. In other words,

It’s a lot of money. More money than can be repaid.

And the King releases the first slave of the obligation of the debt.

All of it.

Then the first slave meets another slave who owes him

one hundred denarii.

A hundred denarii was a big debt too.

One denarii was a days wage,

and the other slave owed one hundred danarii,

so if you do the minimum wage thing again,

its about $6,500 today.

Not small potatoes, but the first slave had just been relieved of millions

compared to the thousands.

But the first slave demands that the second slave pay it

and has him thrown into prison for it.

The king finds out about this and has the first slave tortured.

You have to admit, that one initial reaction is that that first slave

really deserved what he got.

He had been forgiven so much, and then he turns around

and demands a debt from another person.

He needed to be taught a lesson right there in that story.

I’ve been struggling with the torture part of this parable.
But I think what it does is show how little forgiveness is in our own hearts.

As troubling as torture is,

it’s almost satisfying to see someone get just what they deserve.

For a minute, we almost relish in his punishment.

The parable about forgiveness,

reveals the lack of forgiveness that is in our hearts.

Jesus shows us how much we are like that first slave.

God has forgiven us everything.

everything we can think of ever doing in our entire lives.

Every  grumbly word and thought,

every wish of ill will to another person,

every inconsideration,

every time we walked around a person in need instead of helping them.

every thing we know we’ve done and don’t know we’ve done.

We have been forgiven, we live with that truth, that promise.

It is at the base of our faith.

But if someone does us wrong

or if someone violates a code or morality we hold dear,

we don’t always find it in our own heart to forgive.

We want them to get their just desserts.

We want them to learn a lesson.

When it comes to others, we want to we believe in Karma –

“what goes around comes around, You get what you deserve”

instead of what we rely on from God, which is grace.

Meaning we don’t get what we deserve,

We get God’s mercy and love.

We have been forgiven by God,

and therefore we are to forgive others.

A simple parable with a more difficult reality.

Forgiveness. Forgiveness is not easy.

Whether the debt be large or small.

Forgiveness can take a long time, it can go in stages, like grief.

Sometimes it just doesn’t come to us.

Sometimes we forgive one day and not the next.

I think one of the most common questions we ask

when we think about forgiveness is ,

“if I forgive someone, is that saying that what they’ve done is okay?”

Is forgiveness just acting like what happened didn’t happen.

The church has wrongly interpreted forgiveness this way,

the church is guilty of telling victims of domestic abuse

that they should go back into violent and deadly situations.

Have told victims of horrible injustice from their government,

that they should just go back and act like nothing happened to them.

I think we all know that this is not right, not what Jesus wanted.

Forgiveness should not be confused with being a doormat.

Forgiveness is not just letting a person just continue

Doing the wrong, but it’s also not relishing in the offender’s

punishment and pain.

Forgiveness is harder than both of those things.

It takes more time, more thought, more heart, more blood.

But it is also more freeing for the one who

is forgiving than either of those options.

On Thursday, I went to a meeting of a group called

Sandy Hook Promise.
At that meeting were several people from the organization,

which was started, as they say, on 12-16-12.

Just two days after the Sandy Hook shooting that took the lives

of 20 first graders and six teachers.

The executive director was a man who’s second grade child was at school

and is in the middle of his second year of intensive therapy for it.

And another gentleman was a guitar player and

father of three children, the middle one who was killed at Sandy Hook.

They came to talk to people in Ohio about their mission.

Their mission is to reduce gun violence in the US.
They have examined and researched the problem.

They know the statistics:

100,000  people a year are killed or injured by gun violence a year.

They know that most people who are victims or users of gun violence are between the ages of 12 and 24.

Here’s the interesting part.
To reduce gun violence, they have decided not to focus on the guns.

They say it’s a losing battle and it’s not working.

They say what they have decided to do is focus

on the days and years before the shooting.

And what they are focusing their time on is loving everyone’s children.

Parenting our whole community.

Basically helping the people who are like the young man

who shot all those children that day.

They talked about programs like

Mental Health First Aid, helping people look for 

the signs of Mental illness and mental mal-adjustment.

And other programs in schools

like No child Eats Alone, which encourages

children and staff to go and eat with other children who are eating alone.

And Know Me Know My Name an effort for every staff teacher and administrative person to know every child’s name and use it regularly.

The man who lost his son said that his son, Ethan, was a person who

would go and sit with a child who was alone or was crying.

And this father, who’s son was killed said

“if more children like my son were there for the person who did this,

maybe it wouldn’t have happened.” Which I thought was an amazing statement. This man who had every right to be bitter,

had compassion for the person who shot his child.

That is forgiveness.

It’s not being a doormat. Not doing nothing.

That’s not just letting it happen again.

And it’s not relishing in the pain of his offender,

but actually wanting to help people like him.

We who have been given so much,

have been asked to give the debts we hold back to God.

And in the process, the debts we hold

will no longer have a hold over us anymore.

In forgiveness, we are freed as well.

And our forgiveness can also show God’s grace to the world.

Can we have this kind of forgiveness personally?

Can we work on reconciliation instead of grudges?

Could we do it as a country?
Could we focus on rehabilitating people who commit crimes

instead of leaving them to be punished indefinitely in prison?

Could we do this internationally? Now that’s harder.

But can our country work on forgiveness, and reconciliation

and preventing further pain instead of “degrading and destroying”

as our president this week promised we would do with our enemy de jour?

Can we forgive instead of relishing in their punishment?

I know it sounds nieve. It sounds neive to me.

I can think of seventy seven reasons why forgiveness won’t work.

But I also believe that God can do what seems impossible.

and when we align with God’s will as individuals

as a community and as a country, I believe the impossible can happen.

We could see a lessening of gun violence in our country.

We could see peace happen in our world and in our hearts.

And God has asked us to forgive.

How many times should we forgive, Jesus?

Should we forgive Seven times?

Seven times might seem like a lot, but more than seven.

Keep doing it.

Keep practicing, keep trying and keep failing and keep trying again.

Do it with your family, your church, and community

and then do it with others.

Let’s keep doing it with the easy stuff and with the hard stuff

until, with God’s help, we get it right.

Power and Vulnerability

Matthew 16: 21-28

August 31, 2014

The world seems to be burning with conflict

these days. Russia has invaded Ukraine.

Israel and Gaza keep breaking cease fires,

attempting to obliterate each other off the planet.

Christians and minority Muslims in the middle east

are being starved and killed in horrible ways by Islamic militants.

A journalist was beheaded this week.

And each side of the war in Syria

seems more malicious than the other.

Each one of these conflicts is complex and has

years of history and emotional content

that most of us won’t ever understand.

But even the most complicated of international challenge

can be boiled down to one thing:

the innate human reaction to defend what is mine.

MINE.  It’s so visceral and human .

It’s the first word children use with regularity.

MINE.

Whether it’s taking back my toy truck,

or the land that I believe is rightfully mine.

Or defending my dignity, or my house, or my life,

or my family, or my people, or my country, or my way of life.

There is a feeling -- almost an obligation that we

need to meet any infringement on us

with force against anyone who tries to take it away.

Our country’s fascination with guns and especially assault weapons

comes under this banner of “self-defense” –

the logic goes, if “they” have it….

(This imaginary “they” who is going to come

and take what is MINE away.)

then I need to have it too.

We have people killing relatively innocent people

in the name of self defense,

The police have even sometimes ended up killing the people

they are supposed to be protecting.

There seems to be a rash of mistaken intruders killed.

On Facebook one of my very outspoken Christian friends,

put a meme, a little image with words that said,

“Hurt my kids and I’ll bury you where they won’t find the body”.

I’m sure this was kind of a joke, but kind of not.

The most disturbing though, were the comments that followed

in almost in some sort of “Christian honor and zeal” they were -

affirming her in that though, and trying to trump it with

the more violent reaction they would have

if someone “messed” with their kids.

It was almost as if violence was the honorable reaction.

Anything less proved you didn’t love your kids as much.

MINE. Don’t mess with MINE or I will get back at you.

But where has this gotten us?

We’re not safer, that’s for sure.

The problem is this cycle has no end.

An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind.

We get stuck in a repetition of violence.

We’ve seen it play out internationally and personally.

Maybe not always ending in killing or violence,

but in grudges, spite, hatred, anger, bitterness.

Where does it end?

Jesus tells us.
He says, “this ends with you, my followers.”

Jesus tells his disciples that he will suffer at the hands of the authorities.

His disciples knew him most, they knew he was innocent of any crime.

Any suffering that Jesus experienced would be unjust,

would be unfair, would be wrong.

And yet Jesus didn’t say,

“disciples, I need you need to get back at them for this.”
“Revenge my unjust death.”

Jesus did said, deny yourself, deny your ego,

Deny your own rage, your need for revenge,

deny the little power you have to add more violence to the world

and take up God’s power. The cross.

The cross was not Jesus being a door mat.

Jesus was stepping out of the cycle of violence.

It was putting the world’s senseless violence on display.

The cross was real power. God’s power.

Most scholars agree that the apostle Paul

never heard any of Jesus’ parables or sayings.

The gospels were written down and shared after his death.

He never uses Jesus words in his letters,

even when it would serve his purpose well.

From Paul’s writings, it is apparent that Paul only knows Jesus from

his own encounters with Jesus Spirit,

about Jesus death and resurrection,

from the fellow believers who traveled with him.

But still, Paul picks up on this important tenent of Christianity

without the benefit of knowing Jesus sayings,

Paul, tells the Romans in his letter:

“Do not repay anyone evil for evil”

He quotes this often forgotten section

from Proverbs in the Hebrew scriptures saying,

“if your enemies are hungry, feed them;

if they are thirsty, give them something to drink;

for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.”

And he says, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

With Paul, there is no MINE.

Everything about us - our whole lives - belong to God.

So then, even our revenge and anger aren’t ours.

Simon of Cyrenia Helps Jesus
Carry the Cross
Susan Cushman

The wrongs we suffer, we don’t own them, we don’t hold onto them.

They are not ours to keep. They belong to God too.

Paul says, turn them over, leave room for God to act.

If any want to be my followers deny themselves

and take up their own cross.

Do not be overcome by evil.

Overcome evil with good.

This is one of the main acts of our faith.

This is what should set us apart as Christians.

This is the example that Christians could offer the world.

It would have been interesting if Christians would have

practiced what Jesus preached for the last 2000 years.

But in this new millennium, we can still offer this to the world.

We can still be Jesus voice in this violent world.

Now maybe we won’t ever be in a situation of violence

or revenge, war or international conflict.

But I want to tell you a story that maybe you could see yourself in.

Someone at my previous church told me this story

about himself.

About forty years ago, this man told me he was

constantly fighting with his neighbor.

It started out with a tree dropping stuff in someone elses driveway. 

One neighbor demanded a solution

and the other didn’t like it

and didn’t like the tone of the others voice.

The argument escalated, then it was arguments about

garbage, then the dog, then the lawn, then the lights.

You’ve seen this kind of thing before.

shouts, nasty looks, small claims court,

police called on occasion.

It could have escalated or gone on forever until

one of them moved or died.

But one day mailman brought a package

meant for the parishoner to the neighbor’s house by mistake.

He would never have known about it,

but the neighbor came over and rang the bell.

The neighbor said,

“I’ve been sitting with this package for three hours.

I thought about burning it, stabbing it,

running over it with my car,

but I decided, just to bring it to you.”

And he gave him the package.

The parishoner said when he took that package,

and closed the door, all kinds of guilt came over him.

Everything that he had ever done or said to this man

washed over him and he felt sorry for it

and the anger he felt melted.

He had a change of heart. A heart transplant.

They worked on being neighbors after that and

They lived peacefully next to each other for the next thirty years.

Bringing that package over took courage.

And it was power.

Those who want to be my followers,

Deny yourself, your rights, your pride, your ego,

your complete legal justification to defend what is yours

and your moral justification to retaliate.

Deny yourself and your power

and take up God’s power.

Be the first to forgive, the first to say I’m sorry,

be the first to make the call,

send the e-mail, return the package unharmed.

It’s a very vulnerable place to be,

it may not go your way,

but it is also very powerful.

Absolute vulnerability and absolute power.

That is the cross.

That is the gift that Jesus has given us.

That is God’s power.