Lent IV Grace Notes
Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 18, 2007Church of the Covenant
Robert J. Campbell, D. Min., D. D.
Printer-Friendly Version
The Scent of Scandal
Philippians 2:5-11
Luke 23:27-43My kids and my wife give me a hard time with the music I keep in my truck. “It's as old as dirt, Dad.” But I like music I can sing words to and it takes me fifty thousand miles to learn them. One song I was listening to recently, as spring tickled the air, was a Simon and Garfunkel lyric, “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio, the nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”
It's baseball season in the South and soon Jacob's Field will hope not to have to say, “Wait till next year” all over again. “Joltin Joe” was a hero to some in a time before steroids and in a world where no one seemed to care what people do. That's what the song from the 70s was trying to say. Joe DiMaggio was a little bit of grace in a sport that one time in our young lives was fun and now too often mimics our cynical culture of un-grace. The world of reality, where money is king and winning is everything and where one dollar is only good for making two. Into such a world, we look for “grace notes,” which are flourishes of meaning accompanying the mundane.
But grace has about it a scent of scandal. When someone asked Karl Barth what he would say to Hitler, he replied, “Jesus Christ died for your sins.” Hitler's sins? Bin Laden's sins? Judas' sins? In their book, If Grace Be True, Gulley and Mulholland writes, “I believe God loves everyone.” Has grace no limits? Has God no shame? In our world of balancing scales, that sounds a lot like blasphemy.
In his book, Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal tells of cleaning garbage in a German hospital. As a young Polish prisoner, he had seen his grandmother killed, his mother crammed into a freight car, and he knew of the slaughter of 89 of his relatives. While on duty, a nurse took him to a soldier covered with gauze and left.
The patient was an SS Officer who wanted a Jew to hear his deathbed confession. “My name is Karl and I want you to hear my horrible deed.” Three times Wiesenthal tried to leave but the patient grabbed his arm. Advancing on the Russian front the company had entered a village that had been booby-trapped. Thirty German soldiers where killed. As an act of revenge the SS rounded up three hundred Jews, locked them in a house doused with gasoline, and threw grenades. “The screams were horrible,” said the patient. “I saw a man with a child in his arms. He covered the child's eyes and they jumped to the street. We shot them. O God!”
Wiesenthal waited in silence until the officer finished by saying, “In these last hours of my life you are with me. I do not know you. I only know you are a Jew. In the long nights, I have waited for death, I have longed to beg a Jew's forgiveness, but I didn't know if there were any left. Without your response I cannot die in peace.” Wiesenthal sat in his rags for clothing, yellow star of David, watching a fly attracted by the stench buzz the patient's face. Then without a word he left the room.
That account takes any talk of forgiveness out of the theoretical and puts it four square into the middle of living history. What would you have done? To forgive such atrocity is beyond human capacity. The trouble is forgiveness by definition is unfair, it is scandalous. And yet, how else to halt the juggernaut of retribution that forever eats like cancer cells consuming all that is healthy and good in our world?
“Vengeance is the passion to get even. It is the hot desire to give back as much pain as you have been given. The problem with revenge is that it never gets what it wants. It never evens the score. The chain reaction always takes its un-hindered course tying the injured and the un-injured to the (same) escalator of pain.”(1) For every atrocity there is an equal and opposite atrocity. See our daily headlines.
But then remember the atrocity carried out upon God. Pilate and the Sanhedrin were just doing their jobs when Jesus, on the cross, stripped away their veneer and spoke to their hearts. “Forgive them, they don't understand.” It was atonement. It was “at-one-ment” that Jesus offered and not only for the perpetrators. The words were for all those who have acted, all those who act against fellow humans, and in turn against God. “Forgive them they just don't know. ” But when does ignorance of the law serve as reason for acquittal?
The injustice of forgiveness confronts anyone who agrees to a moral-cease-fire. Yet it is the gift that is at the heart of grace and it is the only lens through which we can observe God's love for us. The word “resentment” expresses what happens within the cycle of graceless existence. “Resentment” means “to feel again.” Forgiveness alone halts the cycle. The New Testament Greek translates it literally, to release, to throw away, to free yourself. So, the simple decision is to free ourselves or to choose to feel the pain over and over again?
Without forgiveness we yield control to our enemy. As one Rabbi said before coming to America, “I had to forgive Adolph Hitler because I didn't want to bring him inside me to my new country.” The first and often only person healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiving. We set the prisoner free and then discover that we were the prisoner.
Of course, forgiveness loosens the strangle hold of guilt on the perpetrator as well and there's the rub. We don't want that to happen. But see how it happens? Guilt does its corrosive work even when repressed yet, when it faces off against the forces of forgiveness strange things occur. Grand Dragon of the KKK, Larry Trapp, had plagued a Jewish cantor for years, threatening to bomb his synagogue and kill his family. But Trapp, a diabetic from childhood, confined to a wheelchair and going blind, was invited by that cantor into his home. The family cared for their nemesis. “They showed me such love I couldn't help but love them back,” said Trapp. Strange things happen.
Of course we say, “A deathbed change of heart is simply covering your bets.” So let us be clear, forgiveness is not the same as a pardon. You can still insist on justice for a wrong committed. When forgiveness releases its healing power upon both the victim and the perpetrator it is only the victim who is truly set free, because forgiveness breaks the cycle by placing the perpetrator and the victim on the same level and then, through the lens of grace, we realize that we are no different than that wrongdoer. Discomforting as it may sound, it is that truth that releases us. As my friend Kubler-Ross used to say, “There is a Hitler in everyone of us,” and there is. Every person has the capacity for evil, we all hurt one another. We all violate God's love.
But the “Good News” lays it out clearly. Our creator wanted so desperately to love us, wanted somehow to come to terms with us creatures; yet, there was this problem. God didn't know what it was like to be tempted. God didn't know what it was like to have a bad hair day. God didn't know what it was like to want what someone else seemed to get so easily. So God came to live on our street. God chose to level the playing field. That's what Paul was saying in his letter to the Hebrew people, “We do not have a high priest who can't understand our weakness, rather we have one who has been tempted in every way,” and it is from that vantage point that Jesus said, “Forgive them!” All of them, thieves dying, Roman soldiers laughing, religious leaders ridiculing, disciples hiding, and even you and me. “Forgive them they just don't know any better,” but they can learn.
A few years back, Mel Gibson made what in my opinion was a horrible film. It was lauded by a lot of Christians. What was wrong was its emphasis on violence and Jesus' death. The problem with atonement is that most of the time people see it as simply accepting “Jesus as Lord and Savior.” But long before Jesus, God said “yes” to love. What got Jesus killed was grace. It was the clash between God's unwavering love and unyielding pride and intolerance that always result in a cross, or an assassination, or torture, or imprisonment, or persecution. The cross is simply one more sign of human resistance to God's love, which means contrary to a lot of fundamentalist thought Calvary was not the fulfillment of some divine plan. It was not a final installment on some cosmic debt. It was not a necessary sacrifice to a bloodthirsty God. Rather, it was the cost of proclaiming grace to a frightened world. To focus on the cross, a dead Jesus accused and unjustly killed, is to miss the whole point. Without the resurrection, Christianity is an empty husk. Another sad story of a good person defeated by evil. “If there is no resurrection,” wrote Paul, “then we are all a bunch of fools.”
But the “Good News” says unequivocally that through Jesus Christ, God exposed God's self as pure love willing to go to any and all lengths to teach us how to be God-like. Therefore, Christianity built on its Hebrew foundations, says to the world; love is not just one of God's attributes, it is the chief attribute of God. God is love and atonement, at-one-ment means to be with God and love like God no matter the price.
We live in a grace-less world. But there are “notes” to a different tune. After the fall of communism, the first official act of the new government of West Germany was to vote on an unprecedented statement. “ On behalf of the citizens of this land, we admit responsibility for the murder of Jewish men, women, and children. We ask all Jews of the world to forgive us!” The statement was approved unanimously. What did it accomplish? It did not give life back to six million souls, but it did begin to loosen the stranglehold of guilt.
In South Africa, it was only by grace the atrocities of a lifetime of apartheid could be set to rest and a new nation could emerge. “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission” brought thousands of victims face to face with those who had done them evil. In that court setting confession was given without apology and received without condemnation and a new day began. (2) Tillich defined forgiveness “as remembering the past so that it might be forgotten,” so that together we can choose to walk beyond our pain.
Gordon Wilson, a Methodist, had immigrated to Northern Ireland to work. In 1987, an IRA bomb buried Wilson and his daughter under concrete. The last words he heard from her were “Daddy, I love you very much.” The newspapers later proclaimed, “No one will remember what the politicians had to say but no one will ever forget Gordon Wilson's grace.” “I've lost my daughter,” said Wilson, “but I bear no grudge. Bitter talk will not bring her back. I shall pray every night that God will forgive the bombers.”
Wilson led a crusade for Protestant-Catholic reconciliation. He wrote a book that carried the mantra, “Love is the bottom line!” He personally met with IRA leaders and forgave them. In the end, the Roman Catholic IRA made the Protestant Mr. Wilson a member of its Senate and when he died in 1995, all of England and Ireland honored him for his uncommon grace.
By human standards forgiveness and the grace that flows from it seems scandalous to us. Yet, like abused children we have to learn that without forgiveness we can never free ourselves from our past. The monsters will always awaken from hibernation to devour our present. Jesus said, “Forgive them, they just don't know,” because he knew that “God is love,” the bottom line. He knew that God truly does love everyone. Even me and even you! And even that person you don't like very much. That is the way it has to be, if grace be true.
1) Louis Smedes
2) Desmond Tutu, Without Forgiveness There Is No Future.
Back to Past Sermons