In the name of God:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
If you’ve been a Christian for more than a few months,
you’ve probably noticed that sometimes the faith can seem a bit demanding.
You’re supposed to pray, you’re supposed to read the Bible, you’re supposed to
work for justice, you’re supposed to give money to the Church, you’re supposed to,
by word and deed, share the Good News. Faith though isn’t supposed to be a
series of obligations or things to keep you busy. Understood properly, faith is
liberating way of life, not a burden of things to do during your life. But
still, sometimes our preoccupation with being a “good” Christian can cause
stress.
Though, if we’re honest with ourselves, those things that
I mentioned really aren’t all that hard. It just takes a little
reprioritization of our schedule to find 10 minutes for prayer, or just
tweaking our budget to find some money to put in the plate. That isn’t to
belittle those actions, but overcoming inertia is the hardest part of those
practices. Instead, one of the hardest, if not the hardest, thing that our
faith demands of us is to forgive those who wrong us.
Today’s reading from Luke illustrates this difficultly in
forgiving. Jesus begins by noting that we should avoid, at all costs, causing
anyone to stumble. That is, do all that you can so that others won’t have a
need to forgive you. And Jesus doesn’t offer this as a mild suggestion, but
says that it would be better for you to swim in the ocean with a several
hundred pound weight tied to you than to cause someone to stumble. That’s a
tall task.
But then Jesus gives us an even bigger challenge: “If the
same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven
times and says ‘I repent,’ you must forgive.” Not that you should think about
forgiving, not that you are free to forgive if you want to, but you must forgive. This
isn’t how we’re trained to think. I can’t tell you the last time I heard
someone say “You must forgive seven times,” but we often hear the phrase “Fool
me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” We are not conditioned to
forgive, as someone who forgives even three times would be labeled as
“gullible” or a “doormat.”
The word “forgive” in the Bible means to “give up,” “let
go,” or “abandon.” So forgiveness isn’t about just saying “It’s okay.”
Forgiveness is actually much deeper, and harder. To forgive means that we let
go of our sense that someone owes us something for their wrongs against us. To
forgive means we let go of any sense that we are more righteous than someone
else. To forgive means that we put away our bitterness, our anger, or even our
pleasure in someone else being in the wrong. And this isn’t putting away like
we put away things in the back of the closet. It’s more like putting them away
in the trash can, and putting the can on the street, having the trash
collectors take it away from us.
And in that sense, forgiveness has to be something that
we have to do with God. I don’t know how getting the garbage out to the street
in your house works, but for me, I go around the house once a week and collect
all of the trash from the trashcans. In the work of forgiveness, this is the
work of prayer. We have to go into the different places of our lives and see
what needs to get “taken out.” Perhaps it’s something a coworker said to you
that’s starting to stink up the kitchen. Maybe it’s something older than that,
maybe something from your childhood that is going foul in the living room. It’s
been said that we hang onto our resentments as if they are our most valued
possessions. When we don’t forgive someone, we allow ourselves to stay in
perpetual judgment of them. But the longer that the rubbish of resentment or
superiority is allowed to fester in your soul, the nastier it’s going to get.
So in prayer or meditation, we need to figure out what
these things are that need to be cast out and let go. And then we can take them
to the curb in prayer. Tell God what you need help in forgiving. Now, I’ll
admit that sometimes God seems to operate like the bulk trash collection –
you’re not quite sure when the pick-up is going to happen and it sits on the
curb longer than you thought it might. But if we really have let go, God will
pick up the trash that we’ve put out of our hearts.
Just as
we struggle with this idea of forgiving over and over again, so do the
disciples. They say to Jesus, “Increase our faith!” The Biblical idea of faith
isn’t a series of thoughts or ideas that you think are true, but rather
Biblical faith is about trust and loyalty. In order to forgive someone over and
over again, or even once, it does take a lot of trust. It means that we need to
find our dignity not in our own sense of pride or being vindicated, but in
knowing that God gives us our true value, which can never be taken away by
someone else.
In the novel Pearl
by Mary Gordon forgiveness plays a central role. The story’s main character is
a young American woman who is studying abroad in Ireland. Pearl gets wrapped up
in the politics of Ireland when protest was in the air. The details of the
story don’t matter for the purposes of this sermon, but Pearl ends up blaming
herself for the death of someone else, and the novel becomes a story about her
struggle for life and forgiveness. At one point, Pearl thinks “Revenge is
comprehensible, forgiveness is not.” She can make sense of anger, resentment,
and revenge. But cannot fathom how someone could let her go of the wrongs she
has committed.
Pearl
then recalls from her Latin classes that “to comprehend” means to “enclose,”
and she struggles to comprehend, or enclose, how she could ever be forgiven for
her responsibility in someone else’s death. For Pearl, mercy and forgiveness
are harder to bear than the weight of her sin; sometimes, the “forgive us our
sins” part is harder than the “as we forgive those who sin against us part.”
Have you ever felt that way? Like what you have done
cannot possibly be forgiven? We all know that feeling of hearing the words come
out of our mouths, desperately wishing that we could pull them back. But we
can’t. We wish that we could go back in time just 3 seconds and make a
different decision. Our reality becomes the reality of the brokenness that we
have created or experienced, either through our own sin or that of others. And
sometimes it’s impossible to comprehend any other version of reality. We brand
others with searing hot labels of their mistakes – he’s a cheater, she’s lazy,
they are greedy. Forgiveness is such a struggle because it means that we have
to let go of the labels and order that we’ve constructed to make sense of the
world. Forgiveness might also mean seeing someone new when you look in the
mirror. You might have to stop seeing that person in the mirror as a fraud or a
failure.
As Pearl
struggles to understand the forgiveness that she is offered in the novel, she
wonders if perhaps she is not supposed to “enclose” or understand forgiveness,
but if rather forgiveness is supposed to surround and define her. Forgiveness
isn’t something that we earn, that’s the economy of debt. The whole point of
forgiveness is that we are released, and that we release others, from any sense
of owing something – whether it be restitution, an answer, or an apology.
Because what ends up happening when we withhold our forgiveness from others is
that we end up holding the garbage that stinks up our life. Grudges are heavy
burdens to carry. The grace of forgiveness is liberation, or in the words of
the Gospel, salvation. So in your prayers for finding the ability to forgive
others, allow God to enclose you in forgiveness. Invite God to help you see a
new reality, where that person who wronged you is a person before they are
their action. Allow yourself to trust God’s ultimate redemption of all things,
knowing that just as Creation came out of the love of God, that Creation’s
ultimate trajectory is into the fullness of God’s love. Know that you are forgiven.
And
while this work can seem to be quite the challenge, it is possible. Jesus says
to the disciples “If you had the faith the size of a mustard seed, you could
say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would
obey you.” In the Greek language, there are two sorts of conditional sentences.
One implies something contrary to fact, such as “If pigs can fly.” But the
other construction implies something according to fact, such as “If the Pope is
Catholic.” It’s that second type of conditional that Jesus is using here – he’s
not saying “Too bad that you don’t have enough faith to uproot a tree or
forgive people seven times,” but rather he’s saying “You have the faith, the
trust in God, within you to do this challenging work.” And if Jesus says that
we can do this hard work of forgiving, who am I to say otherwise?
May God
grant you the grace to see things in the light of forgiveness instead of the
darkness of sin. May God grant you the discernment to know what resentments
need to be “taken out” of your heart. And may God grant you to know that you
are enclosed in the forgiveness and love of God. Amen.
