Hilton Head Island, SC – January 27, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 6:32-36; Matthew 18:21-22, Luke 17-3-4
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Texts – Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.” (Matthew 18:22; “And if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” – Luke 17:4 (RSV)
The French have a proverb, “To know all is to forgive all.” It also can be translated as “To understand all is to forgive all.”
What does that mean? It does not refer to academic knowledge or understanding. Rather it has to do with a knowledge or understanding of people’s behavior, and in particular the behavior of people other than ourselves. If we knew the complete life story of everyone we encounter, we might more readily forgive their failings and foibles.
For example, a teenager bullies everyone around him: boys and girls, friends and foes, small children and complete strangers. But he has been raised, or more accurately spawned, by two parents, both of whom themselves are bullies --- to one another, to their son, and to everyone else. In his situation, to know all is to realize that he is simply re-enacting the only behavior he has ever known. He is like the person raised in a home of alcoholic parents who becomes an alcoholic, or those children who are verbally, physically, or sexually abused who grow up to abuse their own daughters or sons. They are exhibiting the only behavior they have ever seen.
To know all is to forgive all, but is such behavior forgivable, either by the original perpetrators or their original victims who themselves turn into perpetrators?
Robert Burns is Scotland’s best-known poet. Indeed, he is one of the best-known poets in the English language. The main problem with Burns, however, (one of many), is that he wrote his poetry in the English used at the time in the late-eighteenth century Lowland county of Ayrshire in southwestern Scotland. It is called “Braid Scots.” Translated into 21st English, it means “Broad Scottish Dialect.” It was the dialect of the crofters and farmers and mill hands, not the eighteenth century Scottish social swells. And much of it sounds almost like a totally foreign language to the untrained ears of contemporary educated Scots, English, Irish, and especially Americans.
Forty or fifty years ago I read a biographical trilogy about The Plowman Poet. It portrayed Robert Burns like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s short poem. “My candle burns at both ends/ It will not last the night/ But ah, my friends, and oh, my foes/ It gives a lovely light!” Burns lived only 37 years, but he lived every day to the fullest, and then some. Some would call him “extremely excessive” in his behavior, and others merely a “woeful womanizer.”
Address to the Unco Guid is Burns’ broadside against puritanical excoriators of human foibles, whom he calls, in the subtitle of his poem, “The Rigidly Righteous.” Here is the first verse of his poetic treatise. “O ye, who are sae guid, yoursel (good)/ Sae pious and sae holy/ Ye’ve nought to do but mark and tell/ Your neebours’ fauts and folly/ Whase life is like a weel-gaun (well-going) mill/ Supplied wi’ store o’ water/ The heapit happer’s (hopper’s) ebbing still/ An’ still the clap (clapper) plays clatter!”
In five more verses he continues to skewer the errors of the self-righteous. Then he gives them advice of how to overcome the hard judgments they make on everyone other than themselves. “Then gently scan your brother man/ Still gentler sister woman/ Tho’ they may gang a kenning wrang (go knowing wrong)/ To step aside is human/ One point must still be greatly dark/ The moving why they do it/ And just as lamely can ye mark/ How far perhaps they rue it.”
The apostle Paul wrote, “I do not understand my own actions. I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate (Rom. 7:16).” Is there anyone who cannot identify with that sorry situation? “And just as lamely can ye mark/ How far perhaps they rue it.” Although I greatly admire Robert Burns and his poetry, I suspect he may have had a hard time understanding how --- or why --- many of the rigidly righteous may also rue their righteous rigidity.
To know all is to forgive all. To understand all is to forgive all.
There was a boy in my fourth and fifth grade classes in Fort Scott, Kansas. I shall call him Tom Brown, because I knew him in his schooldays. . He moved to town with his mother. There was no evidence that he ever had a father. He was the only student in our class without a dad. I later deduced, on the basis of genetics and obstetrics, that he must have had one at some point. His mother worked hard, but she had few skills, and life for them seemed far too grim.
Tom Brown was a hard boy to get along with. He was demanding, devious, and self-centered. He was the least popular child in our class. In his flawed humanity, he stepped aside every day. I don’t know what became of him, but short of a miraculous behavior overhaul, he probably was not very successful in life. Through the years I have wondered about him. I came to believe he acted the way he did because of circumstances in his very early childhood, and it became almost impossible for him to overcome those debilitating factors.
My favorite parable of Jesus is the one universally known as the Parable of the Prodigal Son. I have long thought it should be called the Parable of the Father and the Two Wayward Sons. However, what I have thought about many things shall not change any of those things. Anyway, in the parable, both of the man’s sons had major flaws. The younger one had some of the weaknesses of the Plowman Poet, and the other one was like the Unco Guid. The father, understanding both of his sons very well, forgave them both. To know all is to forgive all.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Judge not, that you be not judged.” A corollary of that saying is to say that if we truly try to understand why anyone goes wrong or does wrong, we are far less likely to judge them harshly.
In the Lord’s Prayer, which is also located in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said we should make this petition to God: “Forgive us our sins [or debts, or trespasses] as we forgive those who sin against us.” That is a prayer with a corollary. We are asking God to forgive our sins to the same degree we forgive those who sin against us --- or who sin against anyone else. If we are stellar forgivers, God will forgive us. If we are stingy forgivers, God may not be so forgiving. That, at least, is what Jesus seems to imply.
Jesus was a stellar forgiver. From the cross he said, not only of the Roman soldiers who had nailed him to the cross, but also of the other nameless but influential people who were primarily responsible for putting him there, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Today we had three scripture readings where normally we would have two. In the first short one, Peter asked Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus told the reputed Prince of Apostles, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven (Matthew 18:21-22)”. Seventy times seven is four hundred and ninety. Was Jesus was suggesting that the greatest number of times we are required to forgive somebody is 490, and after that, watch out? No, he was saying that we must always forgive, because to know all, or to understand all, is to forgive all. If we knew “the moving why” anybody does anything, we would forgive them.
Luke must have heard a story similar to the one Matthew told, because in his Gospel he wrote this short saying of Jesus. “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him; and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him” (Luke 17:3-4). It isn’t the same thing that is stated in Matthew, but it is certainly very much like it.
Again, in Luke, Jesus said something like what Matthew said he said (5:44-48). “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same” (Luke 6:32-33). If we’re interested in achieving credit points from God, Jesus seems to be implying, we should forgive those who wrong us and mistreat us and abuse us. “Be merciful, even as your (heavenly) Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36).
To know all is to forgive all. However, even when we know all, there are certain sins or infractions or illegal actions for which we all must be held accountable. We can’t murder with impunity. We can’t steal, and be allowed to get away with it. Extortion is unacceptable under all circumstances, fraud must not be allowed, and so on and so on. Society cannot hold together if everything is allowed to tear it apart with no accountability.
Nevertheless, even with the worst of crimes, Jesus seems to be commanding us to forgive the criminal or sinner, as difficult as that may be. A while back a man killed a beautiful young woman in cold blood. In his trial, her mother forgave the man. He was held accountable for his act, and was justly convicted, but she forgave him nonetheless. A few years ago a deranged man with guns went into an Amish school in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, killing and wounding many children. The very next day, as I recall, the parents of those children publicly expressed forgiveness for what he had done, as atrocious as it was. Forgiveness could not bring back their children, but their forgiveness of their child’s murderer enabled them to be free of the bitterness and animosity which otherwise might have gnawed at their hearts and minds for the rest of their lives.
To know all may be to forgive all, but everyone needs to be held accountable for breaking the laws of God and humanity. Sometimes a price must be paid for the infractions, but sometimes they may be forgiven without penalty.
Pastors have the privilege --- and also sometimes the burden --- of hearing many kinds of stories from many kinds of people in many kinds of situations. People who have lived charmed lives are less likely to tell their stories to parsons than those who have lived difficult or trying or burdensome lives. Charmed livers don’t feel a need to unburden themselves of their stories, because their stories are not a burden to them. On the basis of the nature of many of the life stories I have heard, I am not so struck at how badly people turn out but how well they turn out. Everybody has a story, and for many people, their stories make their lives smooth. For others, however, their stories make their lives very rough and rocky, and yet they persevere.
People have told me they did some terrible things. Nevertheless, hardly anyone has ever admitted to being an unregenerate racist or sexist or misogynist, because most such people don’t see themselves in that light, even though that is who, in reality, they may be. If that is true, we must still learn to forgive them, even if they never repent or alter their behavior. I think that is what Jesus would tell us. I think that is what Jesus did tell us. Forgiveness is love in action.
Willa Cather had a story called The Burglar’s Christmas. It told of a boy who failed at everything he tried to do. Finally he left home for Chicago as a teenager, where eventually he engaged in a life of crime, becoming a burglar. He became quite successful at that.
Unbeknown to that young man, his parents, who never learned what became of him, also moved to Chicago. Late one Christmas night, he broke into a house. As he was rummaging through a jewelry box in the darkness, a woman approached him. With the greatest depth of a mother’s emotion, she threw her arms around him. “Oh, my boy,” she said, overcome to see her son again, “we have waited so long for this!”
At first he did not recognize his mother. Then, when he realized who she was, he regained what little composure he was ever capable of having. He stammered, “I wonder if you know how much you pardon?” “Much or little,” she exclaimed, “what does it matter! Have you wandered so far and paid such a bitter price for knowledge and yet not learned that love has nothing to do with pardon or forgiveness, that it only loves, and loves – and loves?”
To know all is to forgive all, and to forgive all is to try to love as unconditionally as God always loves all of us. One of the greatest people of our lifetimes is Pope Francis I. We should ask, as he asked about certain people who were reckoned to be great sinners by the Church of which he is the earthly head, “Who am I to judge?”
If we try to understand the entirety of everyone’s story, we may become enabled to forgive them for all their faults. That is a radical notion. It was to radical forgiveness that Jesus entreated his followers. To know all is to forgive all.