July 8, 2007 Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 42; 2 Samuel 11:26-12:9, 13-14; Matthew 18:21-35
The Prophet Jeremiah said, “For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I
mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no
physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?”
(Jeremiah 8: 21-9:1)
“Is there no balm in Gilead?” Jeremiah was asking a question with an
obvious answer. Gilead was a region east of the River Jordan that was famous for
its aromatic balm that helped ease and heal painful wounds. But the sins of his
society were inflicting wounds of violence and injustice that went untreated, met
by apathy or despair. The people suffered, and he saw greater suffering ahead.
Looking at our own world, we can feel some of what Jeremiah was feeling,
and what God must feel. A society can be judged by how it treats its children.
Today children are still beaten, still sexually abused. Half a million American
children are born without health insurance every year. Our children feel despair
about a future overshadowed by climate change and the promise of endless war.
Meanwhile our bombs are killing children in other countries. And as many of us
are painfully aware, we live in a time when within a mile or so of this church
children can witness their mother being beaten and burned within an inch of her
life by a jealous man.
“For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken
hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead?” The good news is yes, there is hope of
healing, but it is not found in the remedy our society often uses. To the poor
mother whose boy died of a brain infection because she could not afford the
treatment for his abscessed teeth, society says shame on you. Why don’t you get a
job with health insurance? Confronted with the children we bombed in
Afghanistan last week, our leaders blame our enemy for unfairly sleeping among
children when we chose to kill him. Confronting the attack on Carmen Tarleton,
society publicly blames and punishes Herbert Rodgers, the man who did it, but
privately whispers its doubts about a woman who would associate with such a
man.
“Is there a balm in Gilead?” Not when blame is the balm we use. Not
when we use blame as a balm to cover with its righteous aroma the scent of our
shared humanity, the truth of our own shared guilt. We will not be completely
healed, we will not be a healthy individual or healthy society until we stop using
blame as the balm to soothe our wounds and instead address the true, deep root of
our sickness.
In the meantime many of us feel that we are passive bystanders who have
caught the shrapnel of violence around us. We feel like collateral damage every
time we catch the news. We are haunted by images of brutality. There are some
things besides blaming that we can do to ease our pain. We can find another way
to release our rage or grief or despair—whatever negative emotions we feel in
response to injustice and violence.
The police officers who burst in on the Tarleton crime in progress
processed their trauma primarily by talking about it in a structured, therapeutic
context. If you are carrying negative emotions or trauma around, the first thing to
do is talk about it with a pastor or therapist or a friend who is a good listener. Get
it all out. Do not let it remain festering in the dark within you or it will grow and
come out in unexpected, unintended ways—in violent thoughts or actions, in
mental or physical illness.
One of the best things you can do is talk to the people who deal with the
aftermath of violence all the time—agencies like Safeline in Chelsea, which got
thirty-one calls from Thetford last year from people suffering from domestic
violence. They have experience in helping people work through this. Even better,
you can volunteer to help them help others. Doing something positive for others
can transform your negativity.
A grief therapist, Richard Groves, says, “Pain that is not transformed will
be transmitted.” It is important that we resolve each wound of violence in us
before it comes out in a harmful way, but to break the cycle of violence and truly
heal ourselves and others and create a healthy society, there is deeper work that
needs to be done. Therapy for our wounds treats the symptoms, but to get at the
root cause we need something more. True transformation requires that we face the
violence within ourselves, and our shared condition with every person who
perpetrates an act of violence.
Like many of us, I have been haunted by images of the Tarleton attack, and
so I was grateful that Eleanor Zue helped organize a community gathering for
healing that took place ten days ago. Earlier on that day I was walking through a
field with two dogs from my neighborhood when a little spotted fawn jumped up
out of the high grass only a few feet in front of one of the dogs. The dog was
bigger than the fawn and sprang after it. The fawn dodged left and right, bleating
like a scared lamb. The dog was gaining on it. Then the fawn took off down into
a marsh, the dog right on its heels. I lost sight of them. For a few seconds I heard
the fawn crying out and then suddenly the bleating stopped. My throat was sore
from screaming at the dog, my heart felt sick, but rage was pounding through my
veins. It was so strong that I knew if the dog came back with blood on its snout
right then I could actually kill it for killing the fawn. That violence took a long
time to subside in me.
All the while I was telling myself that I was being irrational, that it was just
the dog’s instinct, that it made no sense to kill it for killing. I was even praying
not to be violent. All the while I was remembering that Herbert Rodgers who
attacked Carmen Tarleton said that he also had been praying to God not to be
violent. My rage was out of control, just like his. I saw in myself the same ability
to do violence and the same inability to stop myself. For someone whose heroes
are Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and Jesus Christ, it was extremely humbling.
The passage in Second Samuel shows David in a similarly humbling
moment. The prophet Nathan comes to him and tells him the story of the rich man
with many flocks who takes his poor neighbor’s one pet lamb and slaughters it to
feed a guest. David is filled with violent outrage, saying the rich man ought to be
killed for that injustice. Nathan then points out that David is that man, guilty of
injustice and violence in stealing Bathsheeba from poor Uriah and then having
Uriah killed. That shock of self-recognition leads David to confess the truth of his
guilt, and his confessing the truth leads to forgiveness and restoration.
We need to see our own truth if we are going to be healed. We need to see
that we have in our own heart the same human weakness that makes for all the
violence in the world. We need to confess that truth or else we will never
recognize that we are forgiven, that the love of God extends to us and surrounds us
even as violent as we can be. Christ forgives not only our mean thoughts and
unkind words, not only our beating of our dog or children or spouse, but also
forgives us for living in a society full of violence that we do nothing to stop, and
forgives us for burning oil and enjoying the security that our armies are killing
children to obtain for us. We live in constant need of forgiveness for our tolerance
of and complicity in violence—as well as our own forms of violence—and Christ
gives us the forgiveness we need.
We have to see this because when we do, we will see that we are like the
slave in Jesus’ parable today. We have been forgiven, and so it is our duty to
forgive others around us. The slave who would not forgive lived in torment,
which is the punishment for not forgiving.
If we want to be truly, deeply healed of the violence we carry in us, if we
want to be free of the torment of violence that enslaves us, we need to hear what
Jesus is calling us to do. We cannot help establish a nonviolent world, we cannot
establish God’s realm on earth until we can learn the way of Christ’s humble love
that begins with the knowledge of God’s forgiveness of our own guilt and then
turns to forgive everyone everything.
“Forgive everyone everything” is hard for me to say as a pastor, and it must
have been just as hard for Jesus to say, looking out on a congregation, knowing the
unbearable violence many have suffered or witnessed. How can we ask you to
forgive everyone everything? Let me explain some of what Jesus meant and did
not mean.
He calls us to forgive as we have been forgiven, but that does not mean we
do not grieve an injustice or act of violence. He said, “Blessed are those who
mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Matthew 5) We need to mourn and be
comforted even when we forgive.
Nor does forgiving mean acceptance or apathy. We need to oppose evil
with our entire lives, as Jesus did. Jesus forgave his own torturers, but he never
took back what he did and said to incur their cross.
Some evil is so awful that it may seem inappropriate or impossible for us to
forgive. Why should we forgive unrepentant abusers of the innocent? Why did
Jesus?
The reason is that Christian forgiveness is not so much about the other
person as it is about us. Forgiveness as Christ teaches it is a liberating letting go
of our blame or rage or despair. It is taking power away from the violent by
saying we will respond on our own terms, not on terms dictated by the violence
that their violence provokes in us.
Christian forgiveness is one half of a transaction that is completed when the
other person repents their wrong and seeks forgiveness, but it is an independent
half of that transaction. We do not wait for the other person to repent before we
forgive. Nor is our forgiveness incomplete until an apology comes. We may
oppose or avoid the person we forgive, but we are at the same time free from
depending on them for anything to release us.
We forgive because Christ calls us to love and have compassion, and we
cannot obey that calling without forgiving. Christian forgiving can be defined as
the healing and transformation of violence within us that frees us to be loving.
“Is there no balm in Gilead?” Yes, there is, and it begins when we treat the
wounds that violence inflicts on our souls, talking through our rage or grief or
despair and doing something to help other victims of violence. But our work does
not end there. Christ calls us to break the cycle of violence, to break free of its
hold. We do this by seeing the truth of our own violent thoughts or acts and our
own tolerance of or complicity with the violence around us. We progress further
when we accept that Christ loves and forgives us even as we are. We go further
still by repenting, turning away from our violence as we are able, working against
it. We complete our work by forgiving others as we have been forgiven ourselves,
and by confronting evil with the Christ-like, humble love that Dostoevsky called
so powerful that it could overcome the whole world, the most powerful force of
all.
“Is there a balm in Gilead?” Yes, and it is when we who are wounded
become healers, when we become the Balm of Gilead ourselves, defying violence
by our striving to forgive and love.
Let us pray in silence…
Sermon 07/08/2007