Matthew 18:21-35
May 17, 2009
Maybe you’ve heard the story of Ruby Bridges
the six year old girl who in 1960
walked into the William France Elementary school
in New Orleans
It was the first day after a federal judge mandated
the desegregation of the New Orleans school district
Ruby was the only African American student in the entire school
Every day she walked through the gauntlet
of angry adults who insulted her with
all kinds of nasty racial slurs
and foul language
Robert Coles, a Harvard psychologist
who has written books on the spiritual life of children,
interviewed Ruby Bridges in the midst of the pressure-packed situation
Coles had watched the little girl walking through the crowd
with her lips moving
He asked her, what was she saying?
Was she talking back to them?
“No!” she replied
“Then what were you saying?” he asked her
“I was praying!” she said, as if he should have known that
“Praying?” Coles said in a surprised voice
“why were you praying?”
Ruby told him, “I usually pray before I go to school
but this particular morning I forgot
so I prayed as I walked into the school.”
“What did you pray?” he asked her
Ruby said, “I prayed, God forgive them. That’s what Jesus did on the cross.”
Dr. Coles said that Ruby’s gracious act of forgiveness
transformed his own life
and she did it just because she knew
that Jesus did it
Forgiveness is one of those teachings of Jesus
that make most people nervous
Those of us who went to Sunday School
probably heard about this conversation
between Peter and Jesus
“How many times do I need to forgive?” Peter wanted to know
He wanted an exact number,
I guess, so he could know when he was covered
He threw out the number 7 as a possibility
7 was a number used often in Judaism,
the number of perfection
Three was usually the limit people went to
a precursor, I guess of our old three-strikes-and-you’re-out
mentality
but Peter perhaps thought he was being generous
with the number 7
“Not 7,” Jesus said, and maybe Peter sighed a sigh of relief
yeah, I thought that might be a bit much…
“but 77 times,” he says,
or worse yet, in other translations, he says, “70 times 7…”
And I think it really doesn’t matter
which it is, 77 or 490
the point is the same
there’s no limit to forgiveness, Peter
so stop counting….
But how seriously do we take that?
I mean the other stuff we can live with,
love your neighbor
be nice to them
feed the poor
try not to kill anybody
don’t mess with your neighbor’s spouse
we can handle that
But forgive?
We live in a world that says it’s alright
a world that says, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”
and for a lot of people who abide by that mantra
it’s the only line of Scripture they know
because it works for them
It works really well, in fact
You mess with me, I mess with you
It justifies our hate, our rage, and our embrace of violence
it’s a very convenient mantra to memorize
and you find a lot of people to agree with you
but if you try to listen to Jesus
who says, “you have heard it said, an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth,
BUT I SAY TO YOU, love your enemies,
pray for them…”
and here he takes it one step further
FORGIVE
forgive and forgive again
stop the cycle of violence right here
stop the cycles of hate right now
Man, that’s hard, isn’t it?
So we somehow disregard it
Seriously, he couldn’t have meant that, could he?
and it’s not one of the Ten Commandments
so really, how seriously do we have to take it anyway?
I recited the Lord’s Prayer for a lot of years
before I started really listening to what it was I was praying
After all, I learned it when I was 7,
after awhile, you can say it without even paying attention
but as I grew up, and life got more complicated,
I started realizing what it was I was praying
“Forgive us our trespasses..”
Trespasses? What kind of word is that?
I didn’t know what that meant when I was 7
Trespasses
When you trespass, you wander into a place
where you have no right to be
you cross someone else’s boundaries
You sin
Trespasses are sins
“Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us…”
I hear that now, every time I pray it
Forgive me, God, as I forgive those who hurt me
I’ve said it before
that I’ve served a lot of churches
in my 20 years of ministry
and without fail,
at every single church I’ve served
I am given the lowdown on people
And in every single church
there are stories
this person and that person on the membership list
they don’t come anymore, I’m told
because 10 or 15 years ago
they got mad and left
and haven’t been back since
Or I hear about this person who hates that person
because of a fight they had years ago
or somebody doesn’t come to church
because there’s one person there they can’t stand
Or a preacher said the wrong thing to someone
and 10 preachers later,
they still won’t come back
Every single church has those stories
every single family, I think, has those stories
A brother doesn’t speak to a sister
because of something that happened a decade ago
and they never come back for reunions
Fredrick Buechner wrote
“Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun.
To lick your wounds, to smack your lips
over grievances long past,
to roll your tongue over the prospect
of bitter confrontations still to come
to savor to the last toothsome morsel
both the pain you are given
and the pain you are giving back
in many ways it is a feast fit for a king.
The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down
is yourself.
The skeleton at the feast is you.”
Someone once told me
that resentment is like drinking poison
and waiting for the person that hurt you
to die
Not forgiving doesn’t hurt the person who hurt you or wronged you
they’ve most likely gone on with their lives
not forgiving, and harboring resentments
only hurts you
Only stifles YOUR life
and makes you into a bitter, ugly person
But we say, if I forgive that person
than it’s like condoning what they did!
But that doesn’t make sense
they are not waiting for you to approve what they did
forgiving them doesn’t make what they did right
but forgiving frees you to go on with your life
Remember one of the most famous pictures
that came out of the Vietnam War?
The picture of a small girl running naked down the road
with an expression of unimaginable terror
her clothes burned off, and her body scorched
by napalm?
The man who coordinated the raid on this girl’s village
in June 1971 was a 24 year old US Army helicopter pilot
and operations officer named John Plummer
The day after the raid conducted by South Vietnamese airplanes
Plummer saw the photo in the military newspaper
“Stars and Stripes”
and was devastated
“It just knocked me to my knees,” he said,
“and that was when I knew I could never talk about this.”
The guilt over the raid had become a lonely torment
He suffered periodic nightmares
that included the scene from the photo,
accompanied by the sounds of children screaming
The girl in the photo, Pham ThiKim Phuc, survived 17 operations,
eventually relocated to Toronto
and became an occasional goodwill ambassador
for UNESCO
In 1996, 25 years after the raid,
Plummer heard that Kim would be speaking at a Veteran’s Day
observance in Washington, not far from his home
“If I could talk face to face with the pilot who dropped the bombs,” she said
“I would tell him we could not change history,
but we should try to do good things for the present.”
Plummer, in the audience, wrote her a note,
that said, “I am that man,”
and asked an officer to take it to her
At the end of the speech, he pushed through the crowd to reach her
and soon they were face to face
“She just opened her arms to me,” Plummer recounted
“I feel into her arms sobbing.”
All I could say was, “I’m so sorry, I’m just so sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Kim responded. “I forgive. I forgive.”
I think all too often the price of forgiveness
is horribly cheapened
We see someone on TV whose child was murdered
and they say right away,
“I forgive that person who killed my child.”
I am usually skeptical
Forgiveness doesn’t happen that easily or quickly
most of the time
We have to feel the hurt
we have to feel the anger, confusion and pain
before we can let it go
If we say we forgive too quickly,
we’re only denying the truth of our feelings
our very human and real feelings
Forgiveness is something that we struggle for
pray for
every day
It is to be a way of life
When we are struggling with some pain or shame
or wrong that’s been done to us
we have to bring it to God every day
say, “take this. I can’t do it by myself. I’m angry.
I want revenge. I want to hurt them back.”
Why lie to God?
But then after being honest we can say,
“here, God, take my anger, take my pain, my shame
my sorrow. Help me to let it go, so it doesn’t poison my soul.”
And we do that day after day after day
and every time it creeps up, we offer it up again
because as Jesus said, “Nothing is impossible for God.”
We are all that unforgiving servant in Jesus’ story, every one of us
We have all been given mercy
but when rubber hits the road
when we are hurt, we want to hurt back
we don’t want to show mercy
and there are plenty of people in the world
that will cheer us on and say,
‘Of course you get them back! Of course you sue them for everything they’ve got! Blow them away!
Crush them! You deserve that privilege!’
and it is much, much harder, to do what Jesus would want us to do
to let it go, and to let it go again
and to move on, to become people of mercy
made in the image of our incredibly merciful God
who has not blown us away yet,
no matter how many times we have deserved it
But the truth is, if we don’t forgive
we will, in fact, be tortured
not by God, but by ourselves, by the pain, the hurt, the anger
the thirst for blood
We will become angry, bitter, ugly people
if we harbor those hurts
suck on them, go over and over and over again
the story of what’s been done to us
and we’ll become very much alone
and even cut off from God
not because God does the severing of the relationship
but we can’t harbor that nasty, ugly stuff in our hearts
and get anywhere near the presence of God
who wishes to wash it all away
It’s hard, it’s very very hard
but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing
And forgiving others does not mean that we become doormats
it doesn’t mean that we don’t acknowledge the seriousness
of what’s been done
and open ourselves up to more
If a woman is being abused by her husband
she doesn’t go back for more abuse
she gets out of his way, gets help
and goes on with her life
and hopefully finds healing
Forgiveness does not always result in a continuing relationship
with the one we forgive
sometimes we have to forgive even when they don’t ask for it
even when they don’t think they need it
WE need it
We need to forgive in order to live in peace
in order to know joy and freedom and wholeness in our lives
Sometimes the relationship is irreparably broken
because of what’s been done
forgiveness does not mean going back for more
it means moving on into new life and new beginnings
What happens to the person who wronged us
is up to God and to God alone
And it’s never about just you or me
but it’s about God’s community of faith
and what keeps the community going
If people in a community can’t forgive each other
that community eventually dies
it’s not just about you and me
it’s about all of us
Community can’t flourish and grow
if we harbor old hurts and resentments
if we just think about ourselves
Jesus is calling for us to live in way that is counter-cultural
the rest of the world will not stand up and cheer us
for being different
for doing what goes against the rest of the world’s
belief in an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth
We know, deep down,
that Gandhi was painfully right
when he said, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth
only leaves the world toothless and blind.”
We are God’s people
called by God and taught by Jesus
to be different, to be a community of weirdos, really
to live in a way that fosters life and goodness
and spreads the immeasurable grace of God
in the world
It is hard, no one ever said it would be easy
and we can only do it by the sheer grace of God
by daily surrendering to God the things that hold us down
and bind us up
It’s an everyday thing, this life with God
this following the teachings of Jesus
It’s downright impossible, really, to do what Jesus did
but he did tell us,
“all things are possible with God.”
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