Forgiveness Speaks

At Palmyra Church of the Brethren (Find PCoB on Facebook also), we've been doing a series on powerful things that "speak." We have had sermons on several different topics:

-Hope Speaks
-Unity Speaks
-Wisdom Speaks
-Love Speaks, etc.

I was asked to preach this Sunday on Forgiveness Speaks. I have here the result of that! If you'd like to hear a recording of me preaching the sermon, check out the church website here. Also, here is the bulletin if you would like to see that as well.

I had two great worship leaders to help me out. My scripture was Matthew 18:21-22. For the 8am service I did the sermon and a prayer. For the 10:30am service I did the sermon, an invitation to sharing, and a litany of confession (which you can find here). Where the litany calls for silence, we sang Kyrie from the blue Brethren hymnal.

Side note: One of the highlights of the day was that my grandparents and a couple great aunts and uncles showed up to surprise me! And surprise me they did! If you listen to the recording, you'll hear it at the beginning, lol.

Scripture (Matthew 18:21-22):

21 At that point Peter got up the nerve to ask, “Master, how many times do I forgive a brother or sister who hurts me? Seven?”

22 Jesus replied, “Seven! Hardly. Try seventy times seven.

Sermon:

I would like to pose this theory to you: Forgiveness is love. Or at least, forgiveness is one of the highest forms of love. But, being similar to love, it is very hard to offer as well as to accept. It can speak as loudly or as softly, as easily or as hard as love. It speaks in words and in actions.

To help understand forgiveness better with this theory in mind, I decided to take one of the greatest love verses and swap out the word “love” for the word “forgiveness.” So here is 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, forgiveness style:

Forgiveness never gives up.

Forgiveness cares more for others than for self.Forgiveness doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.Forgiveness doesn’t strut,Doesn’t have a swelled head,Doesn’t force itself on others,Isn’t always “me first,”Doesn’t fly off the handle,Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,Doesn’t revel when others grovel,Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,Puts up with anything,Trusts God always,Always looks for the best,Never looks back,But keeps going to the end.

This is a hard, hard view of forgiveness to accept. “Forgiveness puts up with anything,” the altered verse says. If we’re going to take Matthew 18:21-22 seriously, though—forgiving others seventy times seven—this is what forgiveness really has to look like. It has to look like love. It has to speak like love.

If forgiveness is love, there aren’t many people who can grasp fully what it means to forgive and be forgiven, but we can start to put the puzzle pieces together, at least.

The first puzzle piece I remember is my mother telling me what it really means to say, “I’m sorry.” I was in elementary school and had learned, like most kids that when I did something wrong, I said I was sorry and that was that.

But after who knows how many times of me not cleaning my room, my mom yelling at me, and me saying just as loudly, “I’m sorry,” I guess I needed an updated version of those words.

“Rachel, when you say you’re sorry,” she said to me, “that means you won’t do it again.”

WHAT?!

“When you say you’re sorry, you’re apologizing for what you did but you’re also making a promise to try not to do it again. You can’t say you’re sorry and then keep doing the thing that is wrong, that is hurting someone.”

A light bulb went on and a puzzle piece fell into place.

Apologizing is more than just asking forgiveness. It’s a promise that you will do everything in your power to not hurt the person you love again.

My second puzzle piece came a little bit further down the road. Maybe high school. I was blessed not only with parents who love me deeply and listen to me when I need an ear but also, a father who has a degree in psychology and is an ordained minister.

Needless to say, I talk things out with him a lot.

I was realizing that I had been extra on edge and extra frustrated with my parents. I wasn’t sure why and I was starting to feel bad because I seemed to be taking everything out on them. I’m sure I was the only teen to ever do this.

I expressed my concern to my dad and this is what he said:

 “We don’t like when you yell at us, but we forgive you because we love you,” he said.

WHAT?!

“You take out the brunt of your frustration on us because you know that, no matter what you do, we’ll love you anyway,” he told me.

Another light bulb went on and a second puzzle piece fell into place.

Marianne Williamson said, “Until we have seen someone's darkness, we don't really know who they are. Until we have forgiven someone's darkness, we don't really know what love is.”

My parents had seen my darkness and loved me anyway.

Forgiveness equals love. Love equals forgiveness.

The puzzle’s still fuzzy but coming into focus.

So what did all this mean for me as a forgiver? I had learned what it really meant to apologize for something and what it felt like to be forgiven even when I hadn’t apologized enough. But how do I practice forgiveness? How does forgiveness speak through me?

Henri Nouwen said, “Forgiveness is love practiced among people who love poorly. It sets us free without wanting anything in return.” I think what he’s getting at is something great but, again, hard to swallow. We are only human. We love as best we can, but we are bound to hurt each other in some way. Forgiveness is one of the most important pieces to how humans love. If we say we love someone but aren’t willing to forgive them, what kind of love is that? One thing is for sure, forgiveness never has been and never will be easy. But God forgives us, no questions asked which means we should forgive each other, no questions asked.

Take the Lord’s Prayer as an example. Most of us breeze through one of the most important sections. The part that promises forgiveness and orders us to forgive as well:

“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Matthew 6:12

What does that really mean? We know that it can literally mean monetary debts, but Jesus talked in metaphor and this was no different.

This particular metaphor is explained a bit further into Matthew. After Jesus explains that we are supposed to forgive seventy times seven times, as was read for you earlier, he goes on to tell a familiar parable. Jesus’ parable about the King who forgave his servants’ debts, gives us a look at what exactly he means when he uses this financial language.

“The kingdom of God is like a king who decided to square accounts with his servants. As he got under way, one servant was brought before him who had run up a debt of a hundred thousand dollars. He couldn’t pay up, so the king ordered the man, along with his wife, children, and goods, to be auctioned off at the slave market. The poor wretch threw himself at the king’s feet and begged, ‘Give me a chance and I’ll pay it all back.’ Touched by his plea, the king let him off, erasing the debt. The servant was no sooner out of the room when he came upon one of his fellow servants who owed him ten dollars. He seized him by the throat and demanded, ‘Pay up. Now!’ The poor wretch threw himself down and begged, ‘Give me a chance and I’ll pay it all back.’ But he wouldn’t do it. He had him arrested and put in jail until the debt was paid. When the other servants saw this going on, they were outraged and brought a detailed report to the king. The king summoned the man and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave your entire debt when you begged me for mercy. Shouldn’t you be compelled to be merciful to your fellow servant who asked for mercy?’ The king was furious and put the screws to the man until he paid back his entire debt. And that’s exactly what my Father in heaven is going to do to each one of you who doesn’t forgive unconditionally anyone who asks for mercy.”

Again, this is a hard pill to swallow. Unconditional love equals unconditional forgiveness. Gary Anderson reacts to this story’s language of debts and debtors as a metaphor in his book, Sin: a history. He writes, “This parable brings stunning clarity to what Jesus meant when he advised his disciples to pray that their debts be forgiven just as they forgave the debts of others. According to the logic of the metaphor this prayer employs, we are in danger of becoming debt-slaves when we sin. Should the act go uncorrected, then one will have to “pay” for the “cost” of the misdeed through the currency of physical punishment. Fortunately God is merciful and will remit the debt we owe if we humbly beseech him.”

God forgives our debts, our sins, therefore, what right do we have to hold others debts or sins against them?

Sometimes it’s easier for me to process this kind of weighty information with lighter point of view. Recently I was introduced to a six year old’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. It may sound silly on the outside, but there’s a lot to unpack there.

The significant part goes something like this:

"And forgive us our trash passes, as we forgive those who passed trash against us.”

Silly, but rather profound. Forgive the trash we pass against each other, God. For we know not what we do.

Let me give you that Henri Nouwen quote once more: “Forgiveness is love practiced among people who love poorly. It sets us free without wanting anything in return.” We are human. We pass trash against each other. But we are also made in the image of God and we can forgive each other for the trash because we’ve been there. We’ve trashed others. And all we have to do is ask God and he’ll forgive us.

But it’s just not always that simple. We’d like it to be as easy as it was when we were little.

Someone hurts us. His mother tells him to say he’s sorry. He says, “I’m sorry.”

Our mother tells us to say he’s forgiven. We say, “I forgive you.” Then we go off and keep playing. The offense not completely forgotten but made better because of our easy understanding of apologies and forgiveness. When we get older, it only gets harder. We can think of a million reasons why we shouldn’t forgive someone for something.

However, this kind of thinking is never good for us. An old Buddhist saying goes, “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” What a powerful image. We think we’re hurting someone by withholding our forgiveness, but we’re mostly just hurting ourselves.

Love is never easy, though, and neither is forgiveness. Love is a concept that, in itself is unexplainable. If we can’t really grasp love, how do we say forgiveness is like love? That’s why, even though we have to sometimes say the words, “I forgive you,” out loud, we can’t always speak our forgiveness vocally. It speaks in our actions toward each other.

We have to have the wisdom to know when to forgive someone, the love to forgive them, and the hope that they will accept our forgiveness and forgive us as well.

I’d like to leave you with one more quote from H. Jackson Brown, Jr. “Never forget the three powerful resources you always have available to you: love, prayer, and forgiveness.”

So may we continue to ask God to forgive our debts, trespasses, sins and trash as we forgive the debts, trespasses, sins and trash of our brothers and sisters.

Invitation to Sharing:

I now invite you into a time of silent sharing. There are pieces of paper in your bulletin that you can use for this. I encourage you to write down a wound which you are carrying that you wish to offer up to the grace of God.

Once you have written it down, please take it to one of the stations and place it in the provided basket. Then, if you feel called, feel free to light a candle an offer up a silent prayer.

When everyone who would like to has had a chance, we will start our Litany of Confession. Eileen will play through the Kyrie once and then we’ll offer it as a response to the litany that Katie and I will be reading.

Let us share our wounds with God.

Prayer:

God, when we’re not quite sure how to forgive, remind us to turn to you for guidance. When we think there’s no way to proceed, open our eyes and ears that we may remember your love and your forgiveness so that we will show it to others. Heal our wounds and wrap us in your love. Amen.

Peace be with you,

Rachel