How Do We Forgive? (Final Draft)

Below is my sermon for Sunday, September 14, 2008 (Proper 19A, Ordinary Time 24A, Pentecost 18A).  It is based on Matthew 18:21-35.  Comments welcome, but if you’re coming to church tomorrow, reading this is a no no until after the service (This means you, Jim P. : )

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How Do We Forgive?

When I read today’s gospel lesson,
one of the first things that came to my mind was the movie Smoke Signals,
Though the movie received several awards,
it did not make a lot of money at the box office,
and I’ll bet that not many of you saw it;  am I right?

Well, I have a DVD of the movie and it will be the next film we watch in our Faith and Film series in October.
Smoke Signals explores the relationship between Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire, two young Indian men living on a reservation in Idaho. 
Victor lives with his resilient mother and his alcoholic father,
but when Victor is 12, his dad takes off for Arizona,
abandoning wife and son.
Years later, a now bitter Victor, grown into early manhood,
receives the harsh news one day that his wandering dad is dead in a trailer,
in the desert outside Phoenix, Arizona.

Should Victor care at all?
Well, he does care,
but he has no money to get from Idaho to Arizona,
and so though the stoic, athletic Victor wants little to do with the misfit and nerdy Thomas;
he ends up accepting Thomas’ offer to buy their bus tickets to Arizona so they can claim his father’s body and, maybe more importantly, his father’s truck. 

Their road trip becomes a kind of mythic pilgrimage or psychic journey.
Victor’s poisonous anger toward his father, toward everyone, is slowly tamed  by Thomas’s unwavering kindness, openness, and morality.
You see, Thomas Builds-the-Fire is a storyteller.
He is prone to close his eyes and weave weird and even surreal tales at the drop of a hat.
But as strange as they are,
Thomas’s stories are actually holy ones,
and they slowly make an impact on his reluctant friend Victor,
And it’s Thomas who, at the end,
is charged with dropping Victor’s father’s ashes off a Spokane bridge.

This is the scene I thought of after reading our lesson from Matthew.
And as one critic has said,
Here is where Smoke Signals soars to the universal,
a wailing wall of sorrow,
with Thomas reciting from Dick Lourie’s poem "Forgiving Our Fathers."
How do we forgive our fathers? 
Maybe in a dream. 

Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often
or forever when we were little?
Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage,
or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all? 
Do we forgive our fathers for marrying or not marrying our mothers? 
For divorcing or not divorcing our mothers? 

And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness? 
Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning?  For shutting doors? 
For speaking through walls, or never speaking, or never being silent?

Do we forgive our fathers in our age or in theirs? 
Or in their deaths? 
Saying it to them or not saying it? 
If we forgive our fathers, what is left?

If we forgive our fathers, what is left?

I like to think that I am a Christian,
a follower of Jesus,
and that I practice what I preach.
I like to believe that when Jesus tells us to do something or to act in a certain way, that I can do just that.
And yet, I must confess that for me,
forgiveness has been something I have struggled with in my life,
especially when it comes to my relationship with my father.

All of you who have listened to my sermons over these past seven years know a little about my life.
Many of you know that when I was in High School I struggled with the effects that an affair by my dad,
and his eventual desertion of our family,
had upon my mom, my brother and myself.
He eventually married the new woman of his affection,
and started a new life, without any of us in it.

What made it especially difficult was coping with the loss of the close relationship I shared with my father.
My dad was a preacher in the Church of God, and my entire life as a child and youth revolved around the church and him.
Whenever the doors of the church were open,
my dad would be there,
and I would be there with him as well.
Four or five or even six times a week my dad and I went to church together - Prayer meetings, Bible studies, worship services, revival times.
I was there for them all,
and my dad was the very image for me of what a Christian should be.

My dad was the apple of my eye,
and so you can imagine what his adultery did to me and my faith,
let alone to our family situation.       
And to make matters worse, I can remember his visiting with my brother and I only a half dozen times or less over the ensuing years.
My brother Kevin and I went to his new home for an overnight visit once.
It was all I could take.
He was all settled in with his new wife,
her two children - both boys, a little younger than we were at the time,
and I hated every minute I was there.
My dad had replaced my mom and brother and me with this new family,
and I just couldn’t handle it.

After a few months, my dad all but disappeared from my life,
and I mourned his passing.
No, he did not die,
but it was as if he had died for me.
Being the older brother I tried to be strong in front of my mom and brother,
but there were many nights when I cried myself to sleep,
weeping for my lost father,
and angry, oh so angry, at what he had done.

It was an anger that stayed with me for years.
And though after I had gone away to college,
my dad tried several times to bridge the chasm that was between us,
I was unwilling and/or unable to forgive him.
And then one night, long after my college career was over,
I had a dream - I was in a hospital room.
And looking around I saw my dad,
lying on the bed in front of me.
There were a multitude of tubes going in and out of his body.
Monitors surrounded him – keeping a running check on his heart beat, blood pressure, and respiration rate.
The incessant beeping of the medical equipment, the only sound in the room.
And in my dream, I knew that my dad was dying.
I had barely spoken to him in years,
and yet as I stood there in my dream,
my eyes filled with tears and I began to cry, to sob, actually.
I cried so hard that I woke myself up,
and discovered that my pillow was soaked with my tears.

How do we forgive our fathers?  The poet asks.
In a dream?
For me, the dream was a beginning, just a beginning.
And though my relationship with my father will never be what it once was,
it is better now.
That night I began to let go of my anger and hurt and started the process of forgiving him.

How do we forgive our fathers?
How do we forgive anyone who has hurt us, really hurt us?
It’s an important question,
and the answer to it is essential knowledge for us who claim to follow Jesus.

In Matthew 18:21-35, Jesus tells is of a servant who is forgiven a ridiculously large debt that he owes to a king;  and who is ridiculously unforgiving of a small debt that a fellow servant owes to him.
And in the end, the king becomes ridiculously angry with the servant for his lack of forgiveness to his fellow servant.
But the king’s anger is not so ridiculous considering how much the king forgave the servant and how unwilling the servant is to forgive another.

Jesus tells stories like this is because we quite naturally appropriate stories to our own lives.
Jesus never says, "I’m going to tell you a story about a man who had a couple of sons, but it is really about you."
He doesn’t have to.
We hear the story and we can see ourselves in it,
and we hear our names being called in the text.

Biblical scholar Dan Avi of Duke University once wrote
[as quoted by fellow pastor Janice Freeston]:
The parables of Jesus are like looking through the glass of a window.
We look through the window, looking for the world outside.
The window is clear,
but then there comes that moment when,
looking through the window,
we catch a reflection of ourselves.
The window becomes a mirror.

Last week we read and examined the verses immediately before today’s lesson which give instructions about what to do if a person against you,
if someone hurts or offends you.
We heard that when we have tried everything to make things right,
and the person still hasn’t responded to our efforts,
then we are to treat them as a tax collector or a gentile.
But again, how did Jesus treat pagans and tax collectors?
He ate with them, he spent time with them, and he offered them forgiveness.

When Peter asks Jesus how many times we should forgive another,
he offers up a suggestion of seven times.
Peter thinks he is being generous because the rabbi’s standard of forgiveness was three times.
So you can imagine his surprise when Jesus says 7 times 70.
Again, Janice Freeston, a fellow pastor states,
“Jesus reply is stunning in its comprehensiveness.
He is saying there is no limit, we are never to give up on anyone.
Just as vengeance once was unlimited (Gen 4:24),
so now forgiveness is unlimited.”

And unlimited forgiveness is the foundation of God’s good kingdom.
For the first servant in Jesus’ parable,
the debt is so large and burdensome that there is literally no way that he will ever be able to repay even a substantial portion of it,
let alone the whole thing.
The debt is, in a word, inconceivable,
and so the king is moved with compassion at the servant’s impossible plight and forgives the debt rather than exacting punishment.

And while we might expect that the king’s mercy and generosity would affect how the servant relates to others around him,
we soon see that this is not the case.
Rather than imitating the king, the first servant strikes out at a man who owes him, in comparison to what he owed, a pittance.
He demands instant repayment and when it is not forthcoming,
he exacts his pound of flesh from the other.
And lest we condemn this angry, judgmental man too quickly,
let us first consider how easily most of us fit in his shoes.

After all, we have, all of us, been forgiven.
We have, in fact, been forgiven time and time again.
We have experienced the mercy and grace of God all through our lives,
even, and especially, at those times when we least deserve it.
But despite our being forgiven,
we are not good at forgiveness.
The fact is that human being are not good at forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not some innate, natural human ability,
rather vengeance, retribution and violence are the more natural human qualities.
We see this in our own lives and in the life of our world,
and we all know that forgiveness is hard.
Forgiving another, especially when we have been hurt deeply,
can be next to impossible.
So how do we forgive our fathers, or our mothers, or brothers or sisters or our children or anyone else who has done us wrong?

There is only one thing that helps us to start down the road to forgiveness.
And that is to recognize the one thing that the first servant in today’s parable does not recognize.
We need to recognize how much we have forgiven by others and by God,
and in recognizing the debt of forgiveness we have incurred,
we are more able to forgive others.
In other words, knowing that we have been forgiven enables us to become forgivers.
And because forgiveness is not normal or natural, we need to remind ourselves that we have been forgiven again and again and again.
We need to do this because forgiveness is perhaps the most important thing that marks the lives of those who follow the one who from the cross itself cried out, “Father, forgive.”
We need to do this because for disciples of the Christ,
forgiveness is not an option.

And so I am trying,
trying to forgive my father,
and trying to forgive others who have hurt me.

It’s not easy, but it is what I am called to do.
And it’s something I have to work at every day.
Forgiveness is also your calling,
and you too will need to work at it every day as well.
And after we have completed the work of forgiveness,
After we have forgiven our fathers or mothers or children or anyone else who has caused us pain,
what is left?
The poet wants to know what is left?
What do you think?
I think we are left with life, full and abundant,
a life of joy and peace that only comes to those who are forgiven and who forgive.