September 14, 2008 Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 103; Romans 14:1-10; Matthew 18:21-35
How often should I forgive?
If I am a parishioner and feel my pastor or fellow parishioners do not
support me, how often should I forgive?
Or if I am an American whose nation was attacked on September 11th, or if
I am an American whose nation has killed tens of thousands of innocent children
in Afghanistan and Iraq, how often should I forgive?
Or if I am the victim of genocide, a German Jew or Rwandan Christian or
Tibetan Buddhist, how often should I forgive?
Or if I myself am the one who has done wrong and I keep on doing wrong,
how often should I forgive?
The answer to that recurring question can get quite complex. In Psalm 103
we hear a God described who offers steadfast mercy and love, who forgives all
our iniquity and does not deal with us according to what our wrongs deserve,
who removes our transgressions from us. But there are conditions. All that good
comes to those who fear God and keep God’s covenants and commandments.
The Psalm implies that those who fail to obey God’s laws do not receive the same
mercy. These conditions can complicate our thinking.
One of the greatest books on forgiveness was put together by the Jewish
holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal, entitled The Sunflower. In it he tells his
story of being a death-camp inmate and being brought before a dying member of
the Nazi SS. The Nazi had committed terrible war crimes against Jews, including
killing children, and now that he was dying he was repenting and asking
Wiesenthal to forgive him on behalf of all Jews. Wiesenthal responds
remarkably humanely and compassionately to this man who has burned alive
people Wiesenthal knew, but in the end he refuses to forgive him. Then he asks
us, what would you have done?
The revised and expanded 1998 paperback edition of The Sunflower gives
responses to that question from fifty-three leading theologians and religious
thinkers. It is fascinating to read how differently Jew, Buddhists and Christians
think about this. The Jews have a range of answers, some more forgiving than
others, but almost all approach the question of forgiveness legalistically. Jewish
teaching has rules for when to forgive and when not to forgive.
The Rabbi Abraham Heschel tells the story of another famous rabbi who
was traveling on a train. A Jewish man who did not recognize the rabbi treated
him extremely roughly, throwing him out of his car. When the train arrived at the
station and he saw the crowds greeting the famous rabbi, he realized what he had
done and begged three different times for the rabbi to forgive him, but the rabbi
refused. This shocked people, because the rabbi was a gentle and merciful man.
Finally his son asked why he could not forgive, when Jewish tradition says that if
someone asks three times you must forgive them. The rabbi responded, “I cannot
forgive the man because he did not do the wrong to me. He thought I was a
common person. If he wants to be forgiven, that is who he should ask.” Heschel
concludes the story by saying that, “No one can forgive crimes committed against
other people.” So no one can forgive the Nazi for those he killed. The ones who
could have forgiven are dead. These are some of the complex rules of
forgiveness in Jewish tradition.
On the evening of Sunday, September 28th, I hope you all can come and
watch the PBS documentary Valentina’s Nightmare. The following Sunday
October 5th, I hope you can be here to meet Valentina. She witnessed the
massacre of family and friends in the Rwandan genocide, and she herself was
attacked and left for dead. You will see the scars she still bears. At the end of
the film she says that she thinks those who did the killing should be killed
themselves. Today, several years later, she no longer feels that way. When I first
watched the film I remember feeling sad that she said what she said. Yet Rabbi
Heschel is right—who am I to tell Valentina what she should feel? Who am I to
forgive German or Rwandan perpetrators of genocide, when I am not the one who
suffered at their hands?
And yet at least one Jew in Weisenthal’s The Sunflower gives a slightly
different approach to forgiveness. Rabbi Harold Kushner is the author of the
best selling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. His response
includes a story about a woman whose husband left her. The woman struggles to
pay the bills and has to tell her children they cannot afford to go to the movies,
while their father is living the high-life with a new woman in a different state.
The woman asks Kushner, “How can you tell me to forgive him?” Kushner
answers, “I’m not asking you to forgive him because what he did was acceptable.
It wasn’t; it was mean and selfish. I’m asking you to forgive because he does not
deserve the power to live in you head and turn you into a bitter angry
woman…You’re not hurting him by holding on to that resentment, but you’re
hurting yourself.”
Kushner concludes that a Jew should forgive a Nazi not in the sense of
saying their actions were acceptable, but in the sense of undergoing an inner
transformation that enables the Jew to let go of the grievance and the role of
victim. He would leave the Nazi chained to his past and his conscience, but
through the inner letting go of being forgiving, the Jew would be free. The
difference is perhaps like that in Psalm 103. God offers steadfast mercy and
love, but not because our wrongs are acceptable. God does not deal with us
according to our sins, God just keeps steadfastly pouring mercy forth, but only
those who fear God and try to keep God’s commandments have what it takes to
receive that mercy. Sometimes our forgiving has to remain a one-way transaction
until something changes in the other person, but it still can heal and free us.
In The Sunflower Bishop Desmond Tutu talks about the extraordinary
forgiveness he has seen from countless victims of apartheid who suffered in
prison or whose families were murdered. Tutu says, “It is clear if we look only to
retributive justice then we could just as well close up shop. Forgiveness is not
some nebulous thing. It is practical politics. Without forgiveness, there is no
future.”
The Dalai Lama has seen 1.2 million of his fellow Tibetans die since the
Chinese invaded in 1949—massacred, executed or starved to death. The Dalai
Lama says, “I believe one should forgive the …persons who have committed
atrocities against oneself and mankind.” But he believes we should not forget,
and we should work to make sure they do not happen again. It is important to
keep the cause of justice alive, but equally important to preserve a culture of
non-violence and compassion.
The Dalai Lama tells the story of a monk he knew who escaped Tibet after
suffering eighteen years in Chinese prisons. The Dalai Lama asked him what he
had felt was the biggest danger to him. The monk answered that what he feared
most was losing compassion for the Chinese.
Another Buddhist explains that for them, forgiveness is not a matter of
absolution, but a matter of inner transformation of both victim and perpetrator.
A Buddhist has compassion for the ones who inflict suffering because they will
be locked in their own suffering until the inner transformation of repentance and
a return to compassion and kindness takes place in them. But a Buddhist also has
compassion because through it she herself is transformed and released from
suffering—from causing it or being captive to it. She breaks the cycle and is free.
Surprisingly, Jesus seems much closer to the Buddhists than the Jews.
Peter asks Jesus, “How often should I forgive? Seven times?” The number seven
was a symbol for completeness, so Peter is asking, “Should I forgive completely
and always?” Jesus says, “No, not seven times, but seventy times seven times.”
In other words, there is never any question. Forgiveness should simply be our
way of being. None of the complex legalities or conditions matters. A Russian
Orthodox monk who spent twenty years in communist concentration camps says,
“The whole secret…all the salt of Christianity is this; to forgive, to
excuse….People who do not forgive and excuse close themselves off from God.”
This is exactly what Jesus says the realm of God is like. Remember that
for Jesus, the realm of God is not a place, it is a way of being. He says that the
realm of God is like a king who forgave a slave a huge debt. But the slave turned
around and refused to forgive another slave’s small debt. Then the king revoked
his mercy and threw the unforgiving slave into a dark cell to be tortured until his
debt was paid off. Jesus warns that the same will happen to us if we do not
forgive in our heart.
This is about consequence, not punishment. God is compassionate and
merciful, and we need to be, too, and until we are, we will not have freedom or
peace, not as punishment from God but as a consequence of closing off our
hearts to God. To close our self off from God and the way of being that is God’s
realm is to condemn ourselves to captivity and torture, or, as the Buddhists
would say, to lifetimes trapped in suffering.
Forgiveness is complex and difficult if you come at it from the angle of
legalities and rules of whom to forgive when. It is simpler but even more
difficult to be forgiving as a way of life, regardless of what others have done—
forgiving because it will set us free and bring us peace, because it is practical
politics, because by being merciful we open our hearts to receive God’s mercy,
because by forgiving we are like Christ, we are in Christ’s sacred way and, we
enter the realm of God. As the Apostle Paul says, really, we can leave all the
judging to God. Our job is to love. It is that simple. But it is not easy.
Like Valentina, sometimes we may have to travel a long road before
forgiveness can be truly complete. But every step of that road is the sacred way,
as long as we are trying. The journey toward forgiveness transforms us, and it
gives life meaning and makes it holy.
It is painful, but I cannot help returning again and again to the thought of
what our nation could have done after September 11th, 2001. I will end with a
story I read somewhere recently that shows the practical power of living
forgiveness.
A woman’s only child was killed by a young man who committed the
random murder as part of his gang initiation. He was caught and tried and found
guilty, and at the end of the trial the victim’s mother stood up and looked him in
the eye and said, “I am going to kill you.”
One day after the young man had been in prison a while, the mother came
to visit him. After that she would occasionally write to him or visit. She gave
him advice. He had no one else, so she saw to it he had things he wanted or
needed that would help him have a life when he got out. When that day finally
came, she helped him get training and find a job, and she even let him stay with
her until he got on his feet. After almost a year, she called him into the living
room of her apartment and sat him down. She said, “Do you remember what I
told you in the courtroom that day?” The young man got nervous, because he did
remember. He said, “How could I forget? You said you were going to kill me.”
“That’s right,” the mother said. “And that is just what I have done.
Through my forgiving you and my care for you, I have helped that boy die. And
now he is dead, and you are a new man. And because of that, and because I live
here alone and have the room, I want to ask you now if you will live here with
me, and be my son.”
Imagine a world in which the most powerful nation on earth had that kind
of steadfast mercy and love. Imagine the freedom and peace that would flow
from it to its own people and to other nations. Imagine a community, a church, a
home where that kind of forgiveness was the practice. Imagine even a single
heart. It would be an outpost of the realm of God. It would transform the world
around it.
How often should we forgive?
Let us pray in silence…..
Sermon 09/14/2008