Proper 18: Why Forgiveness is Hard
Introduction:
Good morning friends. I’m Fr. Morgan Reed, the Vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church. This morning’s Gospel reading teaches us something very important about how God draws us into life with him. It is a passage that is quite easy to understand, but incredibly difficult to put into practice. It teaches that if we press into productive conflict in Christian community rather than run from it, reconciliation might occur and would become for us a grace in which God delivers us from our worldly attachments and brings us to a fuller maturity in the work of his kingdom.
Kids Sermon:
Kids, I’d love for you to join me up here. How many of you know what these are? These are some of the flowers from our meadow again. I have cut them so they won’t go to seed. What purpose do they serve now?
The longer I hold these flowers in the vase the less valuable they’ll become. If I don’t change the water, but I leave them in here for at least a month, what will happen? That’s right, the water will change colors, the flowers will wilt and the pedals will fall off. It will start to stink. Eventually, not only is it ugly, its smell will begin to permeate the whole room unless I get rid of it.
This isn’t a perfect analogy, but as you grow up, people will make you angry, you will do something to someone that you know you shouldn’t have done and it will make you feel guilty. These emotions are really useful. Anger tunes us in to something that should have gone differently. Guilt can tune us in to what is not safe. Sadness tunes us in to what is really important to us. But when it comes to relationships, when we are hurt, angry, and sad, we can hold the emotion too long so that it becomes resentment or a desire for someone else’s hurt. The longer we hold them, the less helpful the negative emotion becomes. Eventually it starts to permeate other areas of our life if we aren’t careful. Did you know that sometimes if your parents overreact and get really angry at you, it is often telling you about something that they are still angry about that has nothing to do with you? Parents, can I get an ‘Amen’?
Forgiveness happens when we refuse to hold onto our resentments and desire for someone else’s harm any longer. We allow God to hold us and to hold the ways we have felt hurt and sad and angry. God loves to take these things from us and redeem them. Today, Jesus is going to teach his followers how this community of the church is supposed to be a community marked by forgiveness. It is simple to say, but really hard to do. He gives us his help to do it. He forgives us the things we have done wrong when we ask for his help so that we can do the same for others.
Can you please pray with me? “Dear God...thank you ....for a fresh start....when we ask for your help...Help us ...to love others...like you love us...Amen.”
Love by desiring the best for one another (Matt 18)
We see God’s heart of love in the Old Testament today. God does not desire the death of sinners, but that they would turn and live.[1] Our Gospel and New Testament passages continue this theme today by exhorting us to pursue what is best for one another in love. In today’s passage, Jesus gives his disciples a method for thinking about restoration to communal life when someone has sinned against another and the community. The goal is never to ostracize, isolate, and condemn someone. The goal is someone’s healing and restoration. This is why in the very next passage, which we did not read today, Peter asks how many times we need to forgive someone. Certainly 7 should be good enough! But Jesus says, 70x7, in a hyperbolic way of saying that actually the extension of forgiveness from a person who has been forgiven much is actually a hallmark of following our Lord. We should not count the number of times we have forgiven someone. That is far too transactional and limiting.
When Jesus talks about the assembly of faith, it is not like large churches we think about today. In Jesus’ day, a synagogue, or assembly, was often small. The picture here is a cohort of Jesus followers probably no bigger than most of our Formation Groups. When someone in that group has caused an egregious offense, it is hard to hide it. And if someone in that group egregiously sins against another, it is hard to avoid the tension now present in this group. Everyone knows that something is wrong.
He tells them to go directly to the person who caused the offense. Notice how hard that is even though it is simple. It is easier to complain in a veiled way on facebook and create a group of people who will support me against this injustice. It is easer to talk to someone in the group and share my frustrations under the guise of desiring empathy or calling it a prayer request; but actually all I’m doing is indirectly communicating and triangulating. It is costly to have to face someone directly and tell them our experience of harm. This requires us to take stock of what happened in us so that we can name that accurately and name what someone else did that harmed us. If this falls on deaf ears, we are encouraged to bring someone else from the community. The ideal person is not just someone who will agree with us, but someone who will shoot straight and tell both of us hard truth equally. Finally he says to bring the whole community into this if the person who has caused harm refuses to change. The ideal scenario, according to God’s heart, as we have come to understand it, is that this person is drawn back to repentance and following the Lord. When this happens, the bonds of relationship grow deeper. In psychology they call it rupture and repair. Cycles of rupture and repair build stronger relationships. What keeps us from doing this though is how much it costs us. We risk losing a dear friend. I have had to do this and I have lost dear friends, and it is costly. If we have named the harm accurately, and begun to forgive them by relinquishing our resentment, we can approach them with God’s heart for healing. It’s the very way we hope to be approached.
A community marked by this deep authenticity and devotion is still filled with flawed people who will do harm to one another. The question is whether they will stay tender and compassionate. I realize that talking about forgiveness might feel tangential to the passage, but if we cannot forgive, then we run the risk of driving people away from community with our unexamined, harbored, resentments. And right now, as a culture, resentment and hatred are the currency of our social capital. We monetize it, politicize it, weaponize it even sometimes in the name of God. Heaven help us.
Jesus tells us to forgive one another as God forgives us.[2] This is something that characterizes the community of Jesus. Forgiveness opens us up to this amazing possibility that wrath, vengeance, and resentment are not ours to hold. In other words, forgiveness is mostly for our good.
Forgiveness, though, needs some nuance so that it is not weaponized to alleviate the conscience of offenders by papering over real problems. If we ignore real harm, the offender has no possibility of real reconciliation. Forgiveness is difficult because to do it well we have to name harm for what it is. Because of abuse, power differential, or other factors, it may not be wise or safe to confront the person who caused harm. Forgiveness does not mean re-platforming famous preachers or politicians who have caused egregious scandal, and it does not mean trusting an abusive family member again. Trust, responsibility, and forgiveness are not the same.
Jesus’ scenario is not speaking with that kind of nuance. His scenario here is about a two good-willed, Jesus-following people in a community who have a dispute. For example, maybe during the after service prayer time someone shares something with a prayer minister about something deeply personal. Then the prayer minister says something to the person needing prayer that isn’t appropriate. Perhaps they begin to give a bunch of advice rather than actually pray. The person coming for prayer will feel appropriate feelings of shame and anger, perhaps even betrayal. Rather than sit with that resentment, Jesus is giving us permission to say to that person, “what you said felt very out of bounds and I felt deeply hurt.” In an ideal scenario this prayer minister would humbly receive that, be able to speak back the ways this caused harm, and apologize. The person naming the harm has given this person a gift of grace in their boldness and honesty. The person receiving it needs to die to themselves, ask for the Lord’s grace, process it, and then apologize. I’m not exempt. I hurt people too, and in many ways, I am called to exemplify receiving critique, processing it and asking where the Lord is healing me. I remember in another church a long time ago I told someone they couldn’t host a small group because they lived so far away. They were deeply hurt and I didn’t know how deep the offense was that I caused. As a result, I went to their house and sat in their living room with them for two hours, listened to why this was so deeply hurtful, acknowledged how deep the pain was that I’d caused, and genuinely apologized. We were reconciled over time as they learned that I was for their good, but it did take time.
Conclusion:
Our passages today show us a beautiful truth about God’s heart for humanity. He does not long for our destruction, but for our repentance, renewal, and perfect communion. As we live into the grace and forgiveness we have in Christ, we are invited into a courageous and bold witness to the fact that Jesus has good things not only for us, but for others as well. We want what is ultimately good for our brothers and sisters. We are here to bless others and call them into the beauty that Jesus has for them. We grow when we learn to apologize well for the wrongs we’ve done, make restitution, and amend our lives. To long for the good of others we need to learn and practice forgiveness and get good and paying attention to anger, sorrow, and guilt, while at the same time learning to relinquish our resentments and desire for vengeance. This will give us eyes to begin to see ourselves, others, and the world around us as God does.
Let us pray:
O Lord God, grant your people grace to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and with pure hearts and minds to follow you, the only God; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
[1] Ezekiel 33:11
[2] Matthew 6:12
