WHO? ME? FORGIVE?
SCRIPTURE: Nehemiah 9:6, 9-10, 16-20
Matthew 18:15-22
Bud Welch lost his daughter, Julie, in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. In the aftermath he was consumed with grief and rage, smoked and drank heavily, and saw little purpose to life. Several months later he saw a TV interview with Bill McVeigh, the father of the bomber, Timothy McVeigh. Even through the TV set he could see someone who was haunted and who, in the end, was as much of a victim as he was. Ultimately, Bud got up the courage to visit Bill McVeigh, and as they realized their common ground – literally; they both have backyard gardens – Bud was able to begin a long journey to forgiveness. The pain of Julie’s death and how it happened will never be completely taken away, but as Bud came to realize that Bill would also lose a son when Timothy was executed, he started to find a commonality of grief that allowed forgiveness to take hold. This sense of forgiveness has led Bud to help other victims and to become an advocate for the end of the death penalty.
Bud Welch’s moving story is told in the fine documentary film, “Journey Toward Forgiveness”, which was produced by the Mennonite Church for the National Council of Churches five years ago and which aired on ABC-TV and the Hallmark Channel. It includes other stories, such as that of John Perkins, a black man whose brother was shot by a white marshal and who himself was beaten almost to the point of death by those in the justice system; or, Lawrence Hart, a Cheyenne, whose people were massacred in the mid-19th Century and the bones of those ancestors later uprooted causing deep suffering until the people finally had a chance to re-bury them. Each tell about how they have come full circle and now see the ability to forgive as crucial to the healing that they find in their lives today, despite the great injustices done to them and their people.
Now, my hunch is that these stories are not easy to hear. Most ministers find that forgiveness is one of the most difficult topics to try to introduce to a congregation. Accepted wisdom among Christians today seems to be that “turn the other cheek” just means you’re going to get two cheeks slapped! Most of us have some deep hurts that others have inflicted, and 9/11 is never far from any of our minds, as Ann discovered when we went to get drivers licenses and the increased security meant that her different name on her Social Security card stopped her from getting one. While the personal hurts we feel may not be as painful as the loss of a daughter in a bombing they are still deep enough to cause us to say and feel, “I will never forgive”. Two years age when Kathy Boudin, who abetted in the Brinks robbery 25 years ago, was released from prison, parents and relatives of the guards killed in the robbery spoke of never forgiving what she had done and wished her to be incarcerated for the rest of her life. There seemed to be little healing that had gone on in the lives of these people since 1981.
Why does Christianity place such an emphasis on forgiveness? On the face of it, it seems counter-intuitive: when a grievous wrong is done to us we want revenge and vengeance...or, at least that seems to be the initial, natural response, doesn’t it? Over-against that natural inclination, Jesus, at the end of the passage we read from Matthew tells Peter that he mustn’t forgive just seven times but “seventy-seven times”. Earlier translations have this as “seventy times seven” – but that really doesn’t matter because what Jesus is using here is code language. To forgive seven times in Jewish law was to fulfill all obligations in this regard; thus, to say you should forgive seventy-seven times or seventy-times-seven is simply to say that you should forgive endlessly and eternally – there is no statute of limitations on forgiving; there is no point at which you should stop forgiving.
But now look at the rather strange story that precedes this declaration to Peter. Jesus is telling the disciples (who, as usual, just don’t quite get it) about a process to follow when a fellow Christian sins against you – try to talk it out, but if that doesn’t work have a couple of other people confirm that a wrong has been committed, and if that doesn’t work make sure the whole church knows about the offense. Sounds quite legalistic, doesn’t it, with an emphasis on the wrong that was committed, not a healing process. Here in this church we know quite a lot about wrongs done to one another…but we also know something about healing processes.
The point of putting these two stories back-to-back is that forgiveness and justice exist together in a kind of creative tension. Forgiveness is not possible if justice has not been served. “Turn the other cheek” IS a wimpy philosophy if it does not also include Amos’s “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream”. Justice is not vengeance or vindictiveness, but rather a setting right so that the healing power of forgiveness can take hold.
Recall the stories I told at the beginning. For some, Kathy Boudin’s life in prison – both the time spent and the way it was spent – tells of a justice having been accomplished and the possibilities of new life. Lawrence Hart saw the ceremony of re-burial of his ancestors’ bones as necessary to end the cycles of hate against his people’s persecutors. For John Perkins it was feeling an acceptance from the white criminal justice establishment that triggered a sense of “rightness” in his world. And for Bud Welch it was finding comfort in the realization that two fathers were suffering equally because of what one son had done that brought him to peace and healing.
But sometimes...sometimes...forgiveness just wells up out of a life that has been lived in the grace of God and that has an impact far beyond what we can know. L. Gregory Jones, writing in The Christian Century, tells the story of Orelander Love who was robbing the house of 88-year-old Jeanette Aldred. He discovered her in bed and started beating her. She responded with words of forgiveness: “Jesus loves you. I forgive you. God bless you.” – which only enraged him more.
But the next day Love found himself haunted by Aldred’s words. When he was finally caught and sent to prison, after learning that Ms. Aldred was still suffering from the beating, he wrote to her pastor: “I was not saved from prison. She saved me from hell. After that dark criminal night in Ms. Aldred’s home...I have never been the same.” George Thompson, the pastor, who has had experience in prison ministry, and who is aware of how prisoners will use religion to try to get their sentences reduced, researched Love’s prison record and discovered he had become a model prisoner. His earliest scheduled release is 2018, so the letter was not a preface to a parole appeal. What Jeanette Aldred did to him appears to be genuine. Mr. Jones concludes his article with these sentences: “What could have led Jeanette Aldred to respond with words of forgiveness, blessing and love even as she was being robbed? I suspect it was a lifetime of faithful Christian living, the slow and often imperceptible development of habits of feeling, thinking, and living shaped by the love of Christ.”
For me, the key to this story – as it is the key to all of our thinking about forgiveness – is that no one can tell someone else that they must forgive. No one has to be coerced into believing that if they do not forgive someone else they are less of a person or less of a Christian – no, this is not Jesus’ way, at least as I read the Bible. When Jesus tells Peter to forgive seventy-seven times, it is his way of saying that as you grow in understanding of what I and my father-in-heaven want for you, forgiveness will become as natural to you as breathing. As with Jeanette Aldred, forgiveness grows naturally out of a life of Christian faithfulness. Or as with the others whose stories we have been telling, forgiveness grows out of a sense of justice having been done.
The other key to our understanding of the nature of forgiveness is that ultimately, ultimately, it is God who forgives. In fact, in the final analysis, it is only God who can forgive to the true heights and depths that forgiveness requires. When Jesus was on the cross he did not forgive his crucifiers; rather, he prayed “Father, forgive them…..” When Ezra speaks to the people of Israel about the hard-hearted ones, the stiff-necked, who did not obey God’s commandments, who did not obey and wanted to return the people to slavery in Egypt, he does not implore the people to forgive but rather says to his Lord, “But you are a God ready to forgive, abounding in steadfast love, and you did not forsake them.” That’s the nub of the matter: God will never forsake us. We sometimes all too blithely say as we recite The Lord’s Prayer, “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”. The expectation here is that God will and does forgive; that it is in God’s very nature to be constantly offering that forgiveness; that the crucifixion of Jesus is the supreme mark of the depth of God’s forgiveness to all of humanity; that when we eat this bread and drink this wine we affirm that we are receiving the mercy and grace God freely offers to us. We follow God’s lead, then, when we also forgive those who are indebted to us, who have grievously wronged us, who need our forgiveness.
But if we cannot so forgive – because, after all, we are not God – if the pain and hurt and resentment are just too much – then, what we can do is to place it in God’s hands. We can trust God to do the right thing; we can trust God to do the right thing. No one can tell us we must forgive, but we can tell God “here is my hurt; here is my resentment – I need you, out of the depths of your love, to offer the forgiveness that you offer to everyone.” And healing will take place. God will see to that.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, UCC
Las Vegas, NV
February 5, 2006