Grace Notes Part III, An Un-natural Act
Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18: 21-35
“They buried the hatchet,” how nice. Where did they bury it, in someone's skull? Forgiveness, it's a nice thing; it's the right thing. “Love means never having to say you're sorry.” We say it every Sunday, “Forgive us our debts, our trespasses, our sins.” But George Herbert wrote what is perhaps the greatest truth, “The person who cannot forgive another breaks the bridge over which he or she has to pass.” As Desmond Tutu so wisely put it following the death of apartheid in South Africa and the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “There is no future without forgiveness,” which means that forgiveness is much more than a nicety and it is an un-natural act.
Nature allows no forgiveness. Mice don't forgive cats and cats don't forgive dogs that chase them. What kind of a world would it is if an umpire said, “You're out, but because you tried really hard, I'm going to call you safe.” What if as the Amish did for the killer of innocent schoolgirls, we as a nation had said to the terrorist after 9/11; “You did a terrible thing but we understand that the real 'axis of evil' upon which we must wage war are 'pandemic poverty, environmental degradation, and a world awash with weapons.' (1) And we are not going to be a party to perpetuating generations of oil exploitation begun by the British after World War I. Instead, together we shall reason with the legitimate leaders of the Arab states and our world allies. We will build a better future for all of our children.” The nation that cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which it too has to pass, but forgiveness is an un-natural act.
The very taste of forgiveness seems wrong, especially when I have committed the wrong. We want to deny and obscure and somehow earn our way back into the injured party's good graces. Or we are content to walk away, never to look at that person again. “Out of sight out of mind,” but never quite. Like a lingering poison, Duncan's “damned spot” of blood haunts us. So we nurse our sores, go to elaborate lengths to rationalize, perpetrate our feuds, punishing others and ourselves. Or we wallow in guilt and then do our penance with religion all too willing to oblige.
Ask any bomb-throwing child in the streets of Baghdad why they do what they do. They will have no idea that it is because of a stream of un-grace and diplomatic blunders dating back to the Grand-Mufti of Jerusalem, between the world wars, when the Ottoman Empire was divided like poker chips.
Grace-less currents play like static behind the day-to-day broadcasts of our family, national, and institutional lives. The pressures of a grace-less world creates fissures between husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, between partners in any given relationship, workers and bosses, between fellow workers, tribes, races, and nations. Like some kind of spiritual defect encoded into our family trees, the DNA of a graceless world gets passed along from generation to generation. Ignored, the cracks widen until every person on earth falls into the chasms created from the earliest of time. That is, unless a frail rope bridge of forgiveness can somehow be constructed.
Forgiveness, let's be clear, is not some sweet, platonic ideal dispensed like air-freshener. It is hard work, like physical therapy attacking atrophied muscles that writhe with pain when forced to exercise. Long after an injury, the wounds are raw. There is no logic to forgiveness, except that it is the only way the victim can become whole.
Archaeologists have uncovered curses from the earliest of times that reveal our nature. “Docimedes has lost two gloves. He asks that the person who has stolen them loose his mind and eyes in the temple.” What could be more human?
Yet, while ancient Romans begged their gods to dish out punishment, Jesus exposed our God as one of compassion. In the only prayer we can call his, Jesus says, “Forgive us our wrongs as we have forgiven.” And as Charles Williams wrote, “No English word carries greater possibility of terror than that word 'as.' It is one thing to get caught in the cycle of un-grace with another human, but to be found in that position with God the prayer says it clearly, 'as we allow ourselves to let go, break the cycle, start over, God starts over with us.'” Forgive us our sins as we forgive, and lead us not....
The formula is quite simple, by denying forgiveness, we are determining someone else un-worthy of God's grace, and by doing so, we are rendered unforgiven because of our own stubbornness. It is not that God refuses to offer us grace, the hardness of our hearts render us incapable of receiving it.
Forgiveness contains the word “give.” It has about it that maddening quality of being undeserved. And the question is why would God expect something that flies in the face of human nature? Why is forgiveness so central to our faith? The Gospel's answer is blunt because that is what God is like! When Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” he continues, “so that you may become children of God.” “Anyone can love their friends and family,” said Jesus, “but the children of God are called to a higher standard.” We are to somehow exhibit God's likeness so that the rest of the world can understand its creator.
While being persecuted by the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer concluded that it was the extraordinary quality of loving one's enemies that set Christians apart.
Even as he worked to overthrow Hitler, he followed the command to “pray for those who persecute you,” writing “through prayer we go to our enemy, stand by (our enemy's) side, and plead for (our enemies) to God. Jesus does not promise that when we bless our enemies and do good to them that they will not persecute us. They will! But not even that can hurt or overcome us so long as we pray for them we are doing vicariously for them what they cannot do for themselves.” What made Bonhoeffer such a person of faith? He firmly believed, “God loves God's enemies and that is the glory of God's love.” If God in grace has forgiven me, how can I not forgive?
Helmut Thielicle, suffering through the same experiences, would likewise say, “the business of forgiving is by no means simple. We say, 'very well, if the other fellow is sorry and begs my pardon, I'll forgive; I'll give in.' We make forgiveness a law of reciprocity. But it never works! Because then both say, 'the other fellow has to make the first move.'” The only remedy is the realization that if God has forgiven our sins and given us another chance, what choice do we have but to take the incentive and break the cycle?
A dear friend and mentor whose ministry influences me every day of my life told a story on the occasion of 60 years of ordinations. It was about an event that profoundly influenced his life. The sermon was titled, “My Faith Is Running Over, My Time is Running Out.”
My mentor's father was older and when Davis was a senior in college his father announced his own retirement as a minister and then on the Thursday before his last sermon, he fell and broke his back. He was placed in the hospital in Columbus. The family had little money since his father was given a manse and paid very little. When it was learned that Davis' father was incapacitated the church met and two members were sent to the manse to tell his mother she had to be out of the house within six weeks. One of the women who came to the house as a messenger was the same woman who a few years earlier had a mother dying at home of stomach cancer. Davis' mother was the only person who would come and dress the wounds. The stench was overwhelming but she went day in and day out until the patient died. It was this patient's daughter who said to my mentor's mother, “You have six weeks to get out.”
An auction was held to get rid of most of the family's belongings and the rest were moved to a summer cottage in the middle of Indiana where the father eventually died and his wife became a bitter person. My mentor said in his sermon, “When I returned from college I found my mother, who once was so loving, a totally different human being.” So much so, that during his visit home she attempted to end her life by drowning.
A few years later when my mentor was to be married in the church in which he had grown, he asked his mother to come to the wedding and she refused, but eventually an uncle persuaded her to attend. In the reception line, after the wedding, Davis looked up to see the woman who had hurt his mother so deeply approaching her. “What would my mother do?” he asked himself. And at that moment both women embraced and he heard the woman say to his mother, “Belle, I've prayed for seven years that a moment like this would come.” And on his wedding day my mentor saw two women with tears of happiness and he saw is mother again undergo a great change.
It was a defining moment in his life, his faith, and because of his influence in my life, it has become a defining moment in my understanding of this faith of ours throughout my entire ministry. And because of my understanding, perhaps some of you listening today will also have new insight into your faith.
How does forgiveness work? At the heart of Jesus' parables of grace stands a God who takes the incentive
like a love-sick father who runs to meet a prodigal child,
like a landlord who cancels a debt too large to resolve,
like an employer who pays the 11th hour workers the same as the full day shift,
like a banquet host who goes to the highways in search of unseemly and undeserving guests.
God shatters the laws of sin, reciprocity, and retribution by invading earth, absorbing the worst we have to offer, and then fashions from the cruelest of deeds a remedy for our human condition.
"Forgiveness is love practiced among people who love poorly,” wrote Henri Nouwen. “I have often said, 'I forgive you' but even as I say the words my heart remains angry. I still want to hear apologies, excuses. I want satisfaction if only for being so forgiving. But God's forgiveness is unconditional! It comes from a heart that does not demand anything.”
The “good news” of the gospel is clear; God forgives my debts, trespasses, and sins– period. But the reverse is also true, it is only by living in the stream of God's forgiving grace that I can find the strength to exhibit that grace toward others and it is only in exhibiting that grace that we are truly free as God means us to be. It is an un-natural act but it opens the door to God's way for every life to be made new.