One of our care connectors at St. Clement’s reported that some of her contacts in the congregation would like to have access to sermon texts in addition to the sermon videos we have posted on youtube. So, beginning with the first Sunday of our program year (Sept 13th, 2020) I’m going to be resuming this practice. The first sermon of this program year centers on forgiveness. The following texts are those assigned for proper 19A: Genesis 50:15-21; Psalm 103:8-13; Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-25. I highly suggest reading these passages before reading the sermon.
On Forgiveness
There are so many pressing events in this world, crowding in on my being. I feel as if, no words I can say can ever adequately convey my deep concern, fear, and hope regarding the state of our planet, our people, and our communities.
What to say? How to say it? It stymied me and mid-day on Saturday, while chatting with Seth Baker, a member of our community, I mentioned that I was struggling with a sermon on forgiveness. Seth, ever quick with a come back, quipped
“Wait, isn’t forgiveness a really important thing in Christianity?!”
Just as quick, I retorted, “I know, right? Who’d have thought! That’s actually my whole sermon for tomorrow…Forgiveness is really important.”
The end.
Hah! If only it were that easy.
If only, it were as simple as saying, the rote formula “forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us”
But, it’s not simple. It’s not easy. It is in fact, one of the most challenging pieces of life’s work that any of us will ever undertake.
And, in these difficult yet defiantly hopeful times, the theological concept writ large, becomes a means by which we can apply our faith to every single issue that confronts us.
So, this is a sermon about forgiveness. But, it is also a sermon about EVERYTHING.
Since Cain slew Abel, the human story has, all too often, been one in which perceived threats to honor are met with physical, emotional, and even spiritual violence. This has led to cycles of violence whose only victors have been the powers of evil that seek to divide us as each emotional, spiritual, and physical offense is met with an ever exponential, increasingly violent, response. These cycles of violence have plagued humanity and the earliest forms of governance that we know of sought to manage vengeance in order to keep interpersonal strife from becoming exponential threat.
Many of us have heard the saying, “an eye for an eye” used as colloquial shorthand for the concept of retributive justice—a form of human justice in which the consequence of an offense is to have that same offense visited upon the original instigator of the act. My eye for yours. My limb for yours. My life for yours. And, many of us have found this notion abhorrent—gauging out someone’s eye because they gauged out someone else’s? First of all, how barbaric. Second of all, how gross!
But, in the time in which this form of retributive justice was established, it would have been understood to be a progressive and liberal move—a progressive and liberal move in a world where a seemingly small offense could lead to intertribal warfare. Hammurabi the Babylonian prince whose reign oversaw the recording of a system of retributive justice, created a stable and long lasting regime throughout Babylonia in the 1700s because of his creation and perpetuation of a system that limited retribution. We still live in a society that allows and even extols retributive justice as a means to break cycles of violence—the death penalty is a form of retributive justice that comes straight from that stone stele upon which Hammurabi’s scribes chiseled his edicts.
But, retribution has no interest in restoration or reconciliation and, in this, retributive justice is inconsistent with Christian life. Building on the teachings of Jesus such as those we heard in the Gospel today, and the scriptural tradition of their Hebrew forebears, the earliest Christians understood justice as “a power that heals, restores, and reconciles rather than hurts, punishes, and kills,” (“The Mission of God, Restorative Justice, and the Death Penalty” Kerri Pickel, page 5). From the Christian perspective, God’s justice is a“dynamic, active power that breaks into situations of oppression and evil in order to bring liberation and restore freedom. Its basic concern is not to treat each person as each deserves but to do all that is necessary to make things right.” (Pickel, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57e96bea725e2558ab336c4a/t/5ebdc1db28551d04fdfadfdc/1589494235485/Pickel+%282019%29+Missional+Theology.pdf)
Reconciliation not retribution. Restoration not retaliation.
God’s dream for us is not the captivity of our sin. God’s dream for us is our liberation from captivity and our restoration to each other through the gift of grace and the action of forgiveness.
Our human story of revenge is met with God’s story of yielding power.
God said, “never again will I destroy all living creatures”.
Joseph said to them, “have no fear, I myself will provide for you and your little ones”
Jesus said, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do”
In the upside down economy of Christ, the powerful are not those who exact vengeance, the powerful, are those who yield their power to punish and extend the power to forgive.
Vengeance, in this economy, is an act of weakness.
For, only the truly powerful, can forgive.
The relinquishment of power is an act of power.
Can you sense what this change in perspective can do for us? Can you feel the hope that rises up in response to God’s unceasing mercy?
Imagine. Imagine what this current election cycle would look like if this was the kind of power we lauded in our world. Imagine, the humility, the compassion, the self knowledge and awareness that it would take to see true power as the relinquishment of the power to destroy, judge, or condemn. Imagine, what it would mean to vote for the Christian hope that death is not the end of our story.
We serve a God, who is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness—and in our personal, civic, and communal life, ought we not strive to be like God?
We’re going to shift a bit here, from the big to the small—from the structural and systemic to the interpersonal and discrete.
And, we’re going to do so because the Christian value of forgiveness has been perverted by those who have used our faith’s emphasis upon forgiveness as a means of leveraging their own power to commit abuses. There are those who claim to share our faith who use the passage we heard from the Gospel today as justification for why the abused must stay in relationship with their abuser. But, this kind of interpretation is a perversion of Christ’s teaching, because it is an interpretation that deals in death and captivity. It is an interpretation that denies the law of love and the nature of God—it is, in fact, heresy.
What then to make of the Gospel appointed for today? The Gospel which extols a kind of limitless forgiveness and illustrates its import with the torture of the merciless slave.
Girardian theologian, Andrew Marr, writes that “living without forgiveness, which is tantamount to living by vengeance, is torture. It isn’t God who is unforgiving; it is the servant. Clinging to vengeance in the face of God’s forgiveness tortures us with our [own desire for] vengeance for as long as we are imprisoned by it (Marr, Moving and Resting in God’s Desire, 119)
The torture undergone by the unforgiving is a product of the self and not the judgement of God. God is merciful, and the merciless can create their own hell just by rejecting the mercy of the God of love. I know this full well, for have I not lain sleepless in rage or anxiety, because the one who has caused me harm still holds me in their power? Not through their presence, but through the burden I persist in carrying in my soul.
In this I have come to understand that forgiveness can mean releasing the one who has done us harm from having power over our body, our mind, or our spirit. It can mean walking away and shaking the dust from our shoes. God would never ask us to sacrifice ourselves in body, mind, or spirit, for the sake of those whose desire is destruction.
Imagine, if we set ourselves free through forgiveness? Imagine if we were to seek a better way, through forgiveness? Imagine, if we relinquished our power for the sake of a higher power?
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