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NRS
Luke 17:3 Be on your guard! If
another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is
repentance, you must forgive. 4 And if the same person sins against
you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, 'I repent,'
you must forgive."
NRS
Ephesians 4:31 Put away from you all bitterness and wrath
and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, 32
and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in
Christ has forgiven you.
Today I want to
talk about forgiveness and reconciliation. Are they the same? Does one require
the other? What is the right answer? In the coming days these questions are
going to need to be answered as we come to grips with differences of
understanding, disagreement and anger and potentially the loss of
relationships. My hope is that last week when I talked about building bridges
you heard that our purpose is not to join the fray of argument but rather to
wade into the water so that we can find common ground to stay in relationship.
Today the General Conference is doing just that and I hope that within our
church family those abilities exist and thrive. We are family and more than
anything else, we are here for each other regardless of the world around us.
So I begin today by
telling you that God loves you more than you can ever love God. Would you want to argue that
statement? What if I said to you that God’s love for us is so great, that no
matter what we do it never leaves us. I believe that scripture tells us how
much God loves us over and over again. In fact, God loves humanity so much that
God has spared humankind on three separate occasions, at the garden, during the
flood and on the cross.
An American soldier is
on duty in Iraq with his Iraqi counterpart. They are in an area that has shown
itself to be friendly to the forces of democracy. The soldier says to the
guard, let us go over and say hello. The guard replies, I cannot do that. Why
not says the soldier. That man’s family did a terrible thing to my family. Oh,
said the soldier, when did that happen? In 1389 says the guard.
A new pastor to the
community notices that the two families of the church sit on opposite sides of
the pews on Sunday morning and never talk across the aisle to the other family.
When he has the congregation pass the peace, a time of sharing and hugging and
handshaking, he notices that no one crosses the aisle. One day he asks them to
explain why they do not talk to one another. Why young feller, says the
patriarch of the one family. They committed a grievous crime agin' my family
some years back. Oh, says the pastor, when was that. Why in 1837 says the
patriarch.
In both stories, the
center focus is on the refusal to forgive and forget some terrible thing one
person or one family did to another. The punch line is the length of time that
pain still carries the same weight it carried when the crime was committed.
Our scripture today is
about forgiveness. Jesus preached on forgiveness and relationship more than any
other subject. When Jesus preached on forgiveness, he wanted us to understand
that forgiveness is about us, not the one who wronged us. Forgiveness is about
seeing the example that God gives us that sets how we are to forgive. Finally,
forgiveness is a demand from God, not an optional one. If the God of creation
can forgive the sins of the created, then who can enslave us but ourselves?
Jesus in Matthew the sixth chapter tells us that if we forgive the sins of
those who sin against us, then God will forgive us our sins, but conversely, if
we cannot forgive, then we will reap that which we sew and God will not forgive
us. Jesus reminds us of this not once in the bible, but at least five times.
Forgiveness and reconciliation are practices that give concrete expression to
our calling as disciples of Jesus. Why is it important to
understand forgiveness in order to be a good disciple? What does it mean to
say that one must heal before they can become a healer or one must forgive
themselves before they can learn to forgive others? If we cannot find ways to
forgive others, then we are the ones who fail to heal. In that lies an
important aspect of forgiveness.
- Forgiveness is
possible only when we acknowledge the hurtful impact of a person’s actions
on our lives, whether or not the offender intended harm.
- Forgiveness does
not mean accepting behavior or allowing relationships without rules.
Forgiveness does not excuse.
- Forgiveness is the
act of releasing your own guilt, shame or anger for the acts you did or
were done to you.
Forgiveness
in the bible is a way to healing self and re-establishing relationships.
Without forgiveness, healing can never happen between you and the ones who
wronged you. Ephesians tells us, “31
Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander,
together with all malice, 32 and be kind to one another,
tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” This
is the focus of who we are to be. So how does it work? We start by reminding
ourselves of all those people that we have thrown in debtor’s prison in our
lives. Whom
have we thrown in the debtor’s prisons?
Every one
of us has a dungeon inside where we hold captive those who owe us for
aggravation, insult, cheating, lying, manipulation, or any form of harm. We
begin by creating the list of those who are still in the dungeons of our lives.
The way we get to them is by realizing that if we still remember the wrong,
then we still harbor the anger, fear, or vengeful feelings. Some may disagree
with me that we can forgive but not forget. So who is still in the dungeon? Are
there any we want to add? We will know they are there if we go in every so
often and ‘beat them up’ with angry thoughts, vengeful fantasies, bad wishes
and curses, and resentful replays of conversations in which we really ‘tell
them off’. We will also know they are there if we are still treating them differently
now.
Forgiveness
is about letting go of the hurt that others may have caused you, not to excuse
them for the thing they did to you, but to let yourself stop suffering from the
effects of the thing they did. We can only do that when we acknowledge that the
thing they did hurts. Forgiveness is not about excusing the behavior or about
saying that the behavior is ok.
I have said
in the past that peace at any cost is suicide by proxy. What I mean by that is
that if we forgive the deed by allowing the person to believe that we accept
the deed as ok, then we give them permission to do it again. Forgiveness is
about letting go of the hurt caused by the deed, without accepting the deed as
ok. It may mean that we establish rules if the relationship is to go on. Finally,
forgiveness is releasing ourselves from the chains that we impose because of
the anger and the hurt. Are you holding onto anger and hurt for something
someone did to you yesterday, a week ago or even longer? Realize that if this
is true, the person in the dungeon is not the person who did the act against
us. The person in the dungeon is ourselves imprisoned by the bondage of that
hurt. In order to set ourselves free, we have to forgive the person and the act
and let it go. Not just forgive, but also forget.
Flora
Wuellner, in her book Forgiveness, the Passionate Journey tells us that,
“The basis of healthy forgiveness consists of asking these four questions
honestly within the presence of God’s love:
1)
What
happened
2)
Who
is responsible
3)
How
do I feel about what happened
4)
What
is my need right now
As
children of God, we are to forgive all sins against us, regardless of how much
it may have hurt us and move on with our lives.
This understanding will lead us to a better understanding of Jesus
himself. He not only forgave those who
continued to follow him when he was on the cross, he forgave us all.
I believe
there are three main points to this act of forgiveness. The first point is that we are directed. That means that we have a choice, and yet our
choice is whether we will be Christians, not whether we will forgive. Jesus says to us, seven times seven is the
number of times we must forgive those who have hurt us. Forgive or take the
chance that we may not be forgiven.
Those are powerful words spoken by Jesus.
The
second point to forgiveness is that we must not judge while forgiving. Knowing that we must forgive in order to
continue to be thriving, growing Christians, we begin to follow Flora
Wuellner’s advice. We first evaluate
what happened and who is responsible.
Not in the role of judge, but in the role of analyst. For you see, in order to forgive, we must
first understand. We must set aside our
need for revenge and begin to understand what happened and who the responsible
person is, and then we can truly begin to heal.
It may be necessary to evaluate how you feel about what happened and
what its impact on your life is. Often I
have prayed to God, God I will forgive him if you just make him pay! Have you
said this prayer before? You see God has
been very direct about our roles and his role.
God is the Judge and Jesus will return to judge us all for our
actions.
Finally,
there is reconciliation. Reconciliation can only happen after you have forgiven
the hurt and moved past it. Once in that new place then the person who caused
the harm must do something. Reconciliation cannot happen if the person who
harmed you does not see that they hurt you and want to change that.
Reconciliation cannot happen when both sides cannot agree to rules and
boundaries about behavior. I often tell victims of abuse, forgiveness sets you
free from the bondage of that abuse, reconciliation only happens when the other
side wants to have a genuine authentic relationship with healthy boundaries and
rules.
Today we
come to a place where we may need to love one another even as we disagree with
one another. Let us learn to interact with love, not hate, with hugs not anger
and with understanding not becoming polarized and building walls between us.
Jesus said that we should forgive one another as Jesus forgave us on the cross.
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