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Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's September 11, 2005 Sunday worship service. Keeping Score? Genesis 50:16-21; Matthew 18:21-35 Bethel 9/11/05 Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD Amid all the news headlines of the past several weeks, there are a couple that might have slipped beneath our notice. One concerned the violent death of the founder of the Taize community in France, an ecumenical monastic community that sought to advance ecumenical dialogue. Taize is particularly well-known for its unique style of Christian music and as a place of pilgrimage for young people of all denominations who have sought spiritual meaning in our troubled world. Tragically, Brother Roger, the 90 year old head of Taize, was killed as he prayed during a gathering of 2500 young pilgrims in Burgandy by a 36 year old Romanian woman, thought to be mentally disturbed. Meanwhile, also in Europe, several weeks ago, the German and Austrian Adventist Churches issued a statement confessing and asking for forgiveness for their failure, sixty years ago, to oppose the sufferings and persecutions inflicted upon the Jewish people by the Nazis. They asked for pardon from God and the survivors of the Holocaust. In part, their statement read: “We honestly confess that in those days of distress we as Seventh Day Adventists did not act more courageously and consequently, in spite of our knowledge of the Holy Scriptures and the Prophetic Word, thus failed to follow our Lord. . . .” And then there is today, this 4th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, against the background of Hurricane Katrina and of some suffering and of some deaths that would not have happened had the response of government and rescuers been swifter. In these days, we, too, struggle with the meaning of tragedy and the question of forgiveness. After 9/11, our society was so gripped with a genuine sense of hurt, such a righteous fury and strong desire for retribution that any thought of forgiveness probably seemed out of place, especially for those directly affected. Furthermore, the issue of forgiveness is made all the more difficult when it is not even clear to whom we should direct our forgiveness, and made even more difficult when the guilty party is hardly interested in acknowledging or repenting from their wrong doing. Yet, in community, whether that community is specifically named Christian or not, forgiveness is perhaps the most fundamental practice, the glue, if the community truly wishes to hold or to be held together. Each of us has different layers of community that form and shape us -- work, school, social groups, family, volunteer network, church. If, in our various interactions in those communities, people choose not to heed the call to forgiveness, think of the impasse in maintaining all sorts of relationships that would ensue – life on a personal level would become unbearable without a willingness to acknowledge wrongs we’ve done and to seek restoration with the offended party. Even though it is critical to our psychic survival and peace of mind, it is not always easy to know how to practice forgiveness. It is not a practice valued in our larger society. You may remember the riots that erupted in Los Angeles, back in the 1990s, when Reginald Denny, a black truck driver, was assaulted and beaten by a group of four white young men. He was being interviewed on the Phil Donahue show a year later and Donahue asked how he was doing and how he felt towards those who had attacked him. When Reginald Denny said that he had forgiven them, the crowd in that TV studio audience booed loud and long. Now, maybe they weren’t so much booing because of the forgiveness part but because of their own perceptions about injustice in our society; but nonetheless, to acknowledge that one practices forgiveness with enemies or forgives those who have rendered us harm, does seem to make one vulnerable to the accusation of being weak or soft. And so, in the church, to practice forgiveness, whether it is in the morning ritual of praying together a prayer of confession or in the more private exchange with one another requesting pardon for specific wrongs, asking for forgiveness and receiving pardon from another might well be the most counter-cultural thing we do as followers of Christ. In our New Testament text, Matthew’s Jesus has been teaching the disciples that the kingdom of God works not as the world works, but as a new way to live based on forgiveness. The parable, as parables of Jesus so often do, says it all. This parable is prompted by a question from the disciple who is always ready with the first question. Peter wants to know about his personal obligation to forgive. That’s really where it starts for each of us, too, isn’t it. To forgive to practice it in relationships with people whom we know, on a personal basis, in the tug and pull of concrete situations and conflicts we face. And so, the passage is a passage directed to those brothers and sisters who live together in the community called the Church, and thus is a text directed to us as well. In our text, Peter specifically, wants to know, “Lord, if someone offends me, how many times must I extend a pardon?” Religious convention of that day, the contemporary parallel to those ancient conventions being the Miss Manners columns of today’s newspaper, ancient religious convention said, three times is the extent of your obligation. Three. A little more than zero tolerance. But, three strikes on the same offense and your out of pardons from the offended party. That was the standard expectation. Peter, seeking, I guess, to impress Jesus, knowing that Jesus often doesn’t operate according to the social or religious status quo of the day, ups the ante from three pardons to seven. Would seven pardons be good? Jesus responds in two ways: First, he says in effect, nice try, Peter! Try seventy-seven times or, the way the response is sometimes translated, seventy times seven or 490 times. Jesus’s real intention is to say, there is no upper limit to the number of times you are to forgive a brother or sister. How scandalous is that? More than letting Peter know that forgiveness in the kingdom is supposed to be infinite, this moment has become the proverbial teaching moment. That means its time for a parable to illustrate the point. In the parable, the king, wrathful at the man who begs for time to pay him back, relents, shows mercy, forgives the debt. In today’s numbers, the debt was equivalent to millions, a sum that could never be repaid, especially by a slave. Out of pity, the king forgave him his debt. That same slave, however, was owed a much smaller debt, say several hundred dollars, by a fellow slave. Ironically, just after the king released the first slave from prison and from his obligation to pay back his million dollar debt, this slave shows no mercy and demands his hundreds back from that fellow slave who owes him. The friends of the poorer slave go to the king and report what has happened, which infuriates the king, who then withdraws his earlier pardon and sends the slave back to prison where he is to be tortured until he can make restitution. Perhaps a rather unsettling decision by the king since it seems to go against the grain of the overall lesson about pardon and forgiveness. But the point is, forgiveness is not something to be mocked or parlayed into a practice of hypocrisy. Justice has a place, too, in the community. But I think the real zinger Jesus is throwing our way, the conclusion of the parable, is that we must forgive our brothers and sisters “from the heart.” We all know that Jesus is absolutely right when he says that without forgiveness, the Christian community cannot flourish. But that phrase, “from the heart,” reminds us that merely paying lip service to forgiveness, which is always the temptation that everyone of us faces, just simply won’t do. You say you forgive someone, but you keep in your heart a bill of particulars ready to be whipped out at the next infraction – this is not the forgiveness from the heart Jesus speaks of. Read in this light, it really is a terrifying text. Forgiveness is so severe a necessity for the early church that no wiggle room is given. Mouthing the words is not good enough. It has to be practiced, “from the heart,” that is, with the entirety of one’s being, from the depths of the soul, we might say, an authentic, sincere commitment. We can draw further lessons from this teaching about forgiveness. First, like God’s love for us, our forgiveness of others is to be unconditional. That is, we cannot withhold our forgiveness until the person who has offended us has demonstrated sufficient repentance, nor can we demand that he or she perform some sort of penance to “make things” even. That’s not forgiveness from the heart. Forgiveness from the heart has no strings attached. Restitution might well be in order, but any form of justice is not dependent upon the prior act of forgiving. Forgiveness can’t be tied to future reforms or promises to change behavior. Otherwise, the gospel’s intent behind forgiveness is lost. Second, forgiving doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting, nor does it mean being blind to continuing dangers such as the harm brought about by an abusive relationship. The old phrase, “forgive and forget” misleads us into thinking that true forgiveness is easy. In fact, forgiving and remembering, so that we understand the dynamics of what has happened, is often critical, so that memory itself can be redeemed. Consciously trying to forget some offense and the person who caused it rarely works, because the more we try to forget, the more we remember. The grace of practicing forgiveness, on the other hand, invites God and the other to release us from the burden of the guilt and the anger and the blame and all those emotions that can, right or wrong, get wrapped up inside of our own personal imperative to practice the healing art of forgiveness. Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said that we humans differ from other animals not so much in our capacity to think as in our capacity to repent and forgive. Only humans can perform this most unnatural act, which transcends the laws of nature. If we don’t transcend natural instincts, we remain [enslaved] to the people we cannot forgive, held in their vise grip.” “The first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiving . .. When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.” (Lewis Smedes) Third, it is perhaps all to easy to accept God’s offer of forgiveness to us through Christ and, then, to let that become a substitute for the harder work of forgiving those specific people who have offended us in some way. We can easily relativize our idea of forgiveness in difficult situations. We justify our failures to forgive in the face of another person’s unreasonableness. Or, we may go through the mental motions of forgiving, but sooner or later, in some vulnerable moment, our minds begin to wander down that path once again and we find ourselves chewing on it (chewing on ourselves) all over again . . . and once again, we are in the need of the grace to remember that we have already forgiven that offense and thus, we must forgive again. Forgiveness can be a long journey. Yet, life in the kingdom sets us free from the need to keep score. And the new math of the gospel applies to us too, even when we struggle ourselves to practice forgiveness from the heart. An elder of the tribe is teaching his grandson about life. A fight is going on inside of me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, ego.” The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, faith.” This same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too. The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “which wolf will win.” The grandfather replied: “The one you feed.” May God feed us with grace, for we know that by grace we have been pardoned and thus are we to grant pardon to others. Amen.
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