Hilton Head Island, SC – November 15, 2015
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 32:1-7; Matthew 18:21-35; Mark 11:20-25
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.” – Mark 11:25
The Wisdom Of Jesus: Forgiveness
A funny thing happened on the way to giving this sermon a title. A couple of weeks ago I started an intermittent sermon series called The Wisdom of Jesus. The first one was about adversaries, and this one is about forgiveness. I had not actually decided on any scripture passages when I announced today’s sermon, but I thought that Jesus frequently spoke about forgiveness in his wisdom teaching.
However, as I discovered to my chagrin, he didn’t. In only one place did Jesus refer to the concept of forgiveness in what is truthfully a wisdom passage of his sayings. Curiously, it is in the Sermon on the Mount at the end of what we know as the Lord’s Prayer. In the prayer, as all of you know very well, Jesus said that we should pray, “Forgive us our sins” (or debts or trespasses) “as we forgive those who sin against us.” Then, as a final comment on the prayer, Jesus said, “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matt. 6:14-15).
That idea is reiterated almost verbatim in the 11th chapter of Mark (11:20-25). Jesus told the disciples, “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses” (v. 25). That is almost exactly what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount immediately following the Lord’s Prayer, but the context is obviously quite different.
Our responsive reading began with the first verse of Psalm 32: “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.” This proclaims that everyone is blessed by God whose sins against Him are forgiven. Jesus expands on that that concept by stating that if we are forgiven by God we need also to forgive those who sin against us. He even implies, via his words in the Lord’s Prayer, that if we do not forgive others for what they do to wrong us, God will not forgive us for whatever infractions against Him or others that we commit.
For many years Nelson Mandela was a political prisoner on Robben Island off the west coast of South Africa. He was forced to engage in hard labor for much of that time. When at last the long-enduring foundation of apartheid began to crumble, the President of South Africa, F.W. DeKlerk, freed him. As soon as he was liberated, Mr. Mandela publicly forgave those who had treated him so badly. And from that moment until his death years later, and after he had become the South African President himself, he assured his prison guards that he held no grudges against them. He wanted to do whatever he could to heal the wounds of racial discrimination which had for so long disadvantaged the large majority of black South African citizens. Nelson Mandela wryly observed, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”
If we do not forgive others for what they have done to hurt us, we allow the poison of their sins against us to eat away at our bodies and spirits. Forgiveness is more than a kind gesture; it is a necessary step in maintaining good health. If we do not forgive the hurtful words or deeds that other people commit against us, then we allow the damage of those actions to fester within us. Instead, we must negate its noxious brew in order to achieve the maximum level of mental and spiritual health.
In the Victor Hugo novel Les Miserables, as well as in the famous musical based on the story, the main character, Jean Valjean, stole some silver candlesticks from the palatial home of a bishop who had shown him compassion. When he was arrested by the police and brought back to the bishop, the wise and kindly prelate realized instantly what had happened. In the presence of the gendarmes, the bishop told the would-be thief that he had forgotten to take some of the other silver he said he had given him, and he gave Valjean yet more valuable silver pieces.
Jean Valjean perceived in a blinding flash how much he had been forgiven by a man whom he had just met, and who owed him nothing. As a result of that act of singular Christian charity, Valjean’s life turned around, and he resolved to do whatever he could to help other people in trouble as he had been so greatly assisted by the bishop. In the musical, Valjean sings, “Yet why did I allow that man/ To touch my soul and teach me love?/ He treated me like any other/ He gave me his trust/ He called me Brother.”
None of us shall ever forget the killing of The Charleston Nine several months ago. Whether the shooter was mentally ill or was consumed by racial hatred, by the next morning after the killings, the families of those who had died expressed forgiveness for the murderer of their loved ones. That is truly amazing. It illustrates the power of Jesus’ insistence that his followers must forgive those who do them grievous harm. To err is human; to forgive, divine.
At the trial of the man who killed so many people in the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, several family members asked before the shooter was sentenced that he not be executed. They believed justice would not be served by killing the killer. That also is a remarkable expression of forgiveness. Forgiveness, especially when it is obviously difficult to offer, can have a profound effect for making the world a much happier place in which to live.
Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland magazine. He is an outstanding writer, and occasionally he has one-page articles in Christian Century. A few months ago he had a piece there entitled On Laurel Street. He said that near their family home there is a very narrow road that runs between a high bluff and a precipitous cliff. The only way to negotiate Laurel Street is to go very slowly.
Years ago, he said, one evening he was driving his family home from an event at the elementary school. On the worst section of Laurel Street a car came roaring up behind them, honking at them either to go faster or to stop so the other driver could pass. Brain Doyle thought it would be too dangerous to do either, so he kept on going, but doing so very slowly, as conditions demanded. Finally the other car raced by them on a curve, and fortunately nothing happened. The Doyles soon turned off Laurel Street onto their street. But the next morning they learned that the other driver, a young man, drove into an intersection without stopping at the bottom of Laurel Street. He was killed when another car hit him. Fortunately, the driver of the other car was not seriously injured. Had things turned out differently, it might have been the Doyle family who died at the bottom of the Laurel Street cliff.
Thinking back on that terrifying incident, Brian Doyle wrote, “(T)his morning I find myself remembering that he was young, and suicidal, and addled, and dark, and probably lonely, and probably frightened. He was somebody’s boy. Probably people loved him and feared that he was lost and feared that no rope or hand or word could reach him anymore….The idiot who came within inches of killing my children was a rattled child himself. A good dad would pray somehow for that child, if all children are our children, which of course they are; and so yet again I have tried to find mercy inside pain, which is, as we both know, the work of a lifetime.”
Forgiveness requires the work of a lifetime. It is easier to forgive some misdeeds or some thoughtless people than others. What really tests us is when someone has done something that greatly hurt us, and nothing can rectify the situation. Do we forgive under such circumstances, or don’t we? If we don’t, our Laurel Streets loom large in our lives, and we can never dislodge them from our bruised psyches. Bottling up grievances within us is guaranteed internally to shred us.
Still, it is obvious that some grievances are very hard to forgive. Recently the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report which revealed that in the 1990s a coalition of fossil fuel companies and trade groups were told that unquestionably heat-trapping gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, are causing climate change. To discredit the report, Exxon Mobil, the Southern Company (a large coal-mining corporation), and Charles Koch, the billionaire oil tycoon and industrialist, funded research which declared it is the sun that is the cause of climate change. They also have paid lobbyists millions of dollars to try to prevent Congress from enacting laws or regulations dramatically to slow down the process of climate change.
It is infuriating to me that there are still many corporations and millions of people who deny the growing and virtually incontrovertible evidence of human-caused increases in global temperature. It is such a crucial issue for the survival of this planet that it is very difficult to forgive the brazen attempts to thwart efforts to curb climate change. Nevertheless, for the good of the body politic and for the sake of continuing to make progress in the struggle against climate change, the stubbornness of the resistance must be overlooked if we are to move forward. But, as Jesus said to the woman who had been caught in the act of adultery, we must declare to the climate naysayers, “Go, and sin no more.” Forgiveness is intended to issue in changed behavior in the perpetrators as well as changed hearts in those who are damaged by the perpetrators.
One time Peter asked Jesus how often he was required by God to forgive someone who had wronged him. “As many as seven times?” Peter asked. “No,” Jesus said to the Prince of Apostles, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.” Seventy times seven equals four-hundred and ninety. In other words, Jesus implied, we must always forgive everyone for everything. Forgive to infinity, and you will be forgiven eternally.
Then Jesus told the disciples one of his many parables of the kingdom of God. He said there was a king who wanted to collect the debts owed him by some of his wealthy subjects. One man, whom we shall call Aaron for purposes of clarification, owed him ten thousand talents, which was a huge amount. In today’s money it would be millions of dollars. When Aaron said he couldn’t pay his debt, the king forgave him. But then Aaron demanded that he be paid a hundred denarii, or a hundred pennies, which another man, whom we say call Balaam, owed Aaron. That would be worth more than a mere dollar, but probably well less than a hundred dollars in today’s money. When Balaam couldn’t retire his debt, Aaron had him thrown into prison. Debtors’ prisons were common up into the 19th century. When the king heard what Aaron had done to Balaam, he had Aaron sent to prison until he could pay off his enormous debt. Jesus ended his hard-edged and very pointed parable by saying, “So also my Father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”
Jesus was and is no pushover. When he talks about forgiveness, he is referring to what, of necessity, must be a radical decision on our part. Not to forgive is deliberately to allow wounds to fester and painful memories to gnaw into our inmost being.
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Tempelman, Ph.d., was a colleague of mine when we both were assistant pastors on the staff of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago back in the Sixties. We kept up with one another for years, but then I lost track of Andy. Several months ago his wife somehow found me via the Internet, and ever since we have been in touch frequently. I email Andy my sermons, and he responds with observations about them and with things he has written about this or that. I am convinced the man has a dozen new serious ideas every day, or perhaps every hour, and he sits down to put them in writing on an astonishingly frequent basis.
A few days ago he sent me a poem he had written. The greeting said, “For your Sunday reflection.” The title of the poem is Anwqen, spelled A-n-w-q-e-n, which he explained means “From Above.” I have no idea what language the word Anwqen is taken from, or how it should be pronounced. Maybe it is Tempelmanese, or possibly Japanese. Anyway, in words both profound and pensive Andy wrote,
We apologize for Hiroshima
If you apologize for Pearl.
You started it, we finished it.
You lost. We won.
Nay, we all lost; yet, perhaps yet, we all won.
For as fire fell from above
At both Pearl and Nagasaki,
As the fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom,
So now we pray that the Love that is God is Wisdom’s End and Point,
That the wisdom and peace of Jerusalem
May settle upon the brokenness at Damascus and Pyongyang,
At Kunduz and Donetz.
If everyone wants to nourish grudges within themselves, there are more than enough instances over battle sites for us to feed those grudges. But if we want to live in peace with God and our neighbors, we must learn to forgive: honestly, quickly, and without reservation. It is the best way to heal a world which gets broken daily, not 490 times, but millions of times over.
Whatever else forgiveness may provide to others, it is a necessary antidote to the poison of resentment we keep within us until we forgive the damage inflicted on us intentionally or unintentionally by a fellow sinner. No one is capable of not sinning. But everyone, by the grace of God, is capable of offering forgiveness for every sin against us.
“Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I must forgive him?” We must forgive others, not because it is a commandment to do so, but because it is a commitment, to God and to others but equally to ourselves, to do so. Resentment hurts; forgiveness heals.