Proper 19A

Sometimes it seems that the Sunday cycle of readings gets stuck in a rut. Or maybe, it is a less a case of the lectionary being stuck, than the gospel from which the readings is taken, repeating an idea or a story so that we will get its point. This Sunday is the third Sunday in a row that in one way or another the gospel has focused on forgiveness and restitution. It is sheer coincidence, of course, that we hear these words a few days after the seventh anniversary of the September 11th attacks that changed our own world-view. Yet I think there is a God-given wisdom in our having to hear such hard teachings about true forgiveness.

This gospel story presents a troubling tale. Jesus tells a story about a king who settles accounts with a debtor who cries out for pity. The king writes off the debt. The one who receives restitution turns around and throttles a servant who pleads for similar patience for a much smaller debt. The king, hearing of the incident, renounces the one he had forgiven and has him tortured until he repays. Jesus concludes that his Father in heaven will do the same.
So what happens to the seventy-times-seventy with which the teaching begins? The king’s sentencing the debtor to torture hardly seems forgiving, especially after one failing.

The key lies in radical unforgiveness or lack of forgiveness. It’s as though the refusal to forgive locks us into a tortuous cycle. Once we become unable to forgive another, we have sealed ourselves off from the very experience of pardon. If we cannot feel pardon within ourselves we cannot extend it to one another. The more distant we grow from forgiveness, uttered in words like, ‘I could never forgive him or her for that…’ the more distant we grow from the very One who forgives endlessly. Our hearts are sealed off, we can treat the other as an object and not a human being and we fail to see Christ in one another. As we get stuck in that vicious cycle, our hearts harden and reject love.

When Jesus answers Peter’s question with a number of seventy-times-seventy, he is not suggesting our keeping track of forgiveness; rather he is using extreme numbers to suggest the unbridgeable chasm between a forgiving and unforgiving heart. The question is: are our souls so hardened that not even a kind and compassionate God who forgives endlessly can touch us?

Jesus never promised that this life of Christian discipleship would be easy. I think extending and receiving forgiveness might be one of the most difficult but life-giving tasks we have. Forgiveness must be a mainstay of our Christian journey.

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Occasionally someone will say to me post sermon: Sounds as though you were preaching to yourself. I’ll let you in on a secret: every sermon is preaching to the preacher. The words that follow are words borne from experience, thoughts gleaned over the years of walking with people as they struggle with forgiveness. We like to focus on the mandate to ‘love our neighbour as ourselves,’ but sometimes fail to realise that part of that loving is also forgiving, by far the harder piece.

I invite you to think about a situation that needed forgiveness and how you handled it, or a situation that is ongoing and listen in on the conversation I have had with others and myself, practical words about how to begin living a life of forgiveness, a journey that is never ending.

The work of forgiveness — which does not happen overnight — I know from experience — is acknowledging the anger, the desire to have the other person ‘pay for it,’ and then finding a way to move beyond it. Sometimes it takes a short time, sometimes it takes a year, sometimes it takes years... sometimes never, though that sort of grudge can be death-giving to the soul. (The death-eaters in Harry Potter, these ghostly beings that chill the atmosphere and swarm over someone and suck their soul out of their body, always seemed an apt image of grudges and hatred.)

For starters, I would say that anger is a natural, understandable reaction to a perceived injustice. Feel it, let it be. But then, how to move on? It feels so good sometimes to gnaw that bone of anger, hatred and self-righteousness. But God really tells us to drop it, let go of it, move on. It’s not doing us any good.

Sometimes moving on means forgiving before we feel the emotion of forgiveness — in twelve-step parlance, ‘Act as if…’. Forgive the person even if you are still ticked at them. Then live with that statement, ‘I forgive you.’ Eventually the raw emotions will abate and the heart actually can move toward true forgiveness.

Or a lot of times it means simply praying through it, starting first with the prayer: ‘God, I don’t really forgive this person yet, but I know you have, so I place this person in your hands because that’s the best I can do right now.’ Sometimes it is just saying the person’s name, again, knowing that by placing the person in God’s hands, that is all you can do. You can offer that person or persons or situation up at the offertory on Sunday, knowing that you are giving them, you and the circumstances over to God. Receive communion, Christ within you, and trust that that presence can give you comfort. (Know that all times you are already forgiven and you are God’s beloved child even as you haven’t forgiven.)

I do believe that forgiveness also means accountability, when it can be sought. But, the fourth step of any 12-step program (‘make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves’) emphasises that the only person who can be accountable is oneself and sometimes one just has to let go of figuring out why someone else did what they did and holding them accountable.

Another thing is to ask someone else to hold you in prayer as you struggle with forgiveness.

Believe me, forgiveness is one of the hardest things we are called to do! I can’t tell you how many companion strugglers there are in this area.

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It’s idealistic perhaps to say this but what if we became a nation of forgivers? Life could be quite different. To arrive there, forgiveness has to start with each one of us and then ripple outward. Still, our collective life could vastly improve if we operated from a stance of forgiveness rather than retaliation or fear.

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Saint Francis’ prayer reminds us: ‘It is in forgiving that we are forgiven.’ It is in forgiving that we find healing and in healing we experience God’s grace. For grace, healing and wholeness are what we all seek. And by extending grace, healing and wholeness we bring God’s kingdom that much closer to us.