Tiger

Why the big deal about forgiveness?  Matthew in his gospel makes sure that his readers know that in Jesus’ mind and teaching forgiveness was not negotiable.  In short, everybody needs it, and ultimately Abba is willing to give it.  But there is a catch.  In order to get it you have to give it, this forgiveness.  And that’s that.  The only petition in the prayer he taught his disciples that is attached to a condition is “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin again us.” 

"Forgive us our sins as we forgive."

Some years ago, a senior high Sunday school leader opened class one morning by saying something like, “You’ve all heard of the Ten Commandments, right?  Well, ten may be two too many.   Which two would you leave off if you were giving them to the world?”  There ensued a pretty lively discussion in applied moral theology. 

I thought so well of the notion that several years later when I was leading a senior high class, I recycled that question.  Much to my surprise the commandment that got the greatest number of votes for being eliminated was “Thou shalt not covet.”  When I asked at one point what made that one so unpopular, one kid said, “Well, isn’t that what you want people to do?   If you have a new skateboard or pair of shoes, don’t you want people to envy—covet—what you have?”  And so said they all.

What that discussion revealed in no uncertain terms was that beneath the varnish of a Christian morality lies an assumption shared by many, many people who are way beyond chronological adolescence:  that the way to live life is very different from anything that Jesus ever taught about the central reality that he posed as a distinct alternative way of living, a reality that he called the βασιλεια του θεου, the kingdom or reign of God.  It is a kingdom in which the puffed-up self, the inflated ego, the cutthroat competitor, the win-at-all-costs mentality, undergoes a death and resurrection.  The βασιλεια is a kingdom in which there rises to life a new self, as fresh as a newborn baby, grounded in valuing giving over receiving, sharing over accumulating, practicing lavish hospitality, prodigal love, and unmeasured graciousness.  Why?  Because that is what Abba the king of the kingdom loves and does.  And those who belong to Abba take on and live out the qualities of Abba.  This is what Jesus is and does.  His nature and essence is identical with Abba and thus he lives the life of Abba.  He practices open table fellowship with any and all, regardless of their social or moral standing.  He embraces the sick, includes the outcast, heals the helpless, frees the oppressed, and models a life of generosity.  To be sure, Jesus has a hard edge in some ways.  He is not namby-pamby.  He confronts oppressors, takes on authorities, challenges limits, redefines morality, and ultimately pays the price of getting killed by those who experience him as an intolerable threat to the established order.  Still, he boldly crosses boundaries separating male and female, religious traditions, ethnic identities, and even enemies.  He teaches the rich to sell what they have and give to the poor.  It is in the context of all of that show-stopping liberalism that Jesus says, when fielding a question about how many times one must forgive another, in effect, you never stop.  Not after seven or seventeen, or seventy, but so many times you can’t keep count.  In other words you can’t be stingy and forgiving at the same time, not if you are in the βασιλεια. 

Perhaps people in general, and clearly Americans in particular, are fond of finding easier, quicker ways to do almost anything.  Unfortunately, practicing forgiveness does not lend itself to quick and easy 1-2-3 steps.  It literally takes most people a lifetime of practice, and in this case practice does not necessarily make perfect.  We might as well know at the outset that forgiveness is something we’ll never get exactly right.  It might not be very complicated, but it certainly is challenging.  The countervailing force of self-protection is strong, and the energy demanded by the practice of forgiveness is considerable.    You tell me.  How many of you here have somewhere in your life one or more relatives or others that you are not on speaking terms with?  How many of us carry around one or more grudges?  How many people have written you off, cut you off, fired you from their lives, and how many people have you given up on?  If you can honestly say that there is no one in your life that you are at serious odds with, you are most blessed and we could probably use your coaching to great advantage. 

Jan van Hemessen, "Parable of the Unforgiving Servant," ca. 1556

Forgiveness cannot exist in a vacuum.  There is nothing to forgive unless there is a standard, such as a law or an agreement or a commandment, clear or implied, by which an action can be weighed and found faulty.  At that point, whoever is offended has to call the offender to account or the offender must come to realize that he or she has committed an offense and must take responsibility for it.  Then some sort of confession is in order, ideally a real and heartfelt confession, an admission of guilt, an apology, a willingness to make amends for the offense however it is appropriate.  The cycle is not complete until forgiveness is granted and, if appropriate, restitution is made by the offender.  That is how it works—ideally.

But the ideal isn’t always actually realized.  Sometimes the offender won’t budge.  Sometimes apologies are offered but are not sincere.  Sometimes the whole works are fowled up because something like addiction or illness gets in the way and subverts the process of reconciliation.  What then?  Ah!  We cannot say in a one-size-fits-all mode.  Sometimes it takes time, years maybe, decades, even centuries, as we are now experiencing as we slowly come to awareness in this country of the complexities of reconciliation and restitution regarding racism and the yet un-atoned-for sin of slavery in the American past.  Sometimes it means hanging in with openness and hopefulness when everything and everybody says, “Give up and go home.”  On occasion it means confronting hard realities and difficult people with a no-nonsense call to change.  Always it means never relinquishing one’s grip on love as an overarching  theme and practice.  In the βασιλεια one never stops forgiving because it hasn’t worked.  The reason is not that we beat up on ourselves for the fun of it but that Abba never withholds forgiveness except to those who themselves refuse to forgive.

Mochtar Lubis, an Indonesian author, wrote when he was imprisoned during  the 1970’s political struggles with the dictator Sukarno, a novel called “Tiger!” The story is about seven men who work in the forest collecting dammar, a resin.  After killing a deer and eating it, the men discover that they have killed prey being stalked by a tiger.  One of them convinces the others that the tiger has been sent by Allah to punish them for their sins.  Suddenly they are in a fierce battle on two fronts.  Outwardly they are terrified of being killed by the tiger who attacks them one by one, compounding their fear.  Inwardly, they struggle and wrestle with the sins and transgressions that each has committed, fearing to confess and fearing not to.  This pack of men devolves into near savagery, mad with fright.  Ultimately they come to realize that the tiger who prowls around seeking someone to devour is one of two.  The tiger that is harder to confront is the tiger within themselves. 

The tiger within ourselves:  that is the beast that stalks the world, and its den is the human heart.  We could shoot every tiger threatening our peace and security and still find that we were as vulnerable and fragile as ever, were we to carry within us the dead weight of collected wrongs and injustices that we never have forgiven.  And the fiercest tiger of them all is the fanged tormented monster crazed by the things we have never forgiven ourselves for.  Until we accept the grace to forgive ourselves we will not likely forgive much of anyone else.  And if we cannot find the way to forgive those who have sinned against us, we march on through all our days always wanting a place at the table in the βασιλεια, somehow never finding the way in.

Seventy times seven.  Does it seem impossible?  I think Abba means it to be impossible.  It is one of Abba’s ways of quietly beckoning us to give up the fantasy that we can fix ourselves and others.  Generally we turn to Abba when we figure at last that we might just give Abba the chance to do what we cannot possibly do alone.

A sermon based on Matthew 18:21-35

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© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2017

Good Behavior

Praying and Living Forgiveness

Genesis 50:15-21
Matthew 18:21-35

When I was in elementary school, we got report cards every six weeks. Six weeks zooms by now, but in those days it was like a semester, a term of months on end. As the weeks dragged by, I was never ever worried about what grades I would get; but sometimes I sweat bullets about what comments the teacher would write on the back. The word “conduct” named the category that was my greatest challenge. Teachers would threaten to write bad reports to parents if we talked out of turn, broke into line at lunch or recess, took up unnecessary class time with silliness, or were generally impolite to other students. I am not sure what would have happened had we spoken disrespectfully to a teacher herself. Such was so far from anybody’s mind that it was never discussed.

One grading period, my second grade teacher, Eva Stone Long, otherwise known as “Sister Long,” wrote a comment on the back of my report card. Among a couple of compliments, she noted, and I quote verbatim, “…likes to talk too much.” I was horrified. Not because it was not true, of course, but because I knew I would catch it when my parents read it. And I was totally right. Interestingly, I cannot remember what Mama said, although I am sure it was plenty. But Daddy, I recall, virtually came uncorked. The message I got from his protracted lecture was that it was fine to make any grade I made, but what would never ever do was to get a “conduct” comment. The least I could do, he pronounced, was to go to school and behave.

Good behavior generally means conforming to somebody’s idea of deportment, like Mrs. Long’s. Those of you who have grown up in a more permissive society probably have no idea of the weight that people my age and older (and maybe some a few years younger) carry around in the form of ethical baggage. It really isn’t ethical, of course. It is internalized fear of being called down for misbehaving. Now, to be sure, some people have escaped that heavy burden by kicking over the traces and becoming utter nonconformists. Such people are not likely to show up in church, not at least until they have made a bit of peace with social expectations, even in a rather freewheeling place like St. Stephen’s. And the reason is rather obvious. They see the Church as being in the business of policing people’s behavior, and they don’t necessarily want theirs to be policed. It is all right, of course, for the Church, like other institutions—school and court, for example—to nurture good behavior in other people (including our children) inculcating in them good behaviors and sharpening their distaste for bad. At the same time, this idea that the Church is all about making people nice and culture gentler is exactly what draws some people to it.

Something is terribly, tragically wrong with all this. And it is wrong not because there is anything the matter with being nice and well behaved (I want to say nothing to discourage either), but because we have somehow managed to warp the notion of good behavior to mean conforming to prevailing social expectations and specifically to exclude several kinds of behaviors that Jesus seem to think were pretty important. One of those practices is forgiveness, a theme that fills our scriptures today. I do not mean to say that forgiveness is not integrated into the fabric of societal expectations, because to some extent it is. Polite society expects that folks will apologize for oversights and mistakes, and that generally those apologies will be accepted. But forgiveness in the radical sense described in today’s gospel or in the Genesis story about Joseph and his brothers is far past anything that can be described as accepting an apology. It comes out of a different way of looking at reality. It reflects values so qualitatively different from our cultural norms that this kind of forgiveness can be rightly called subversive.

As some of you are aware, my sermons this year all look at the practice of prayer from some angle, and today’s focus on forgiveness is no exception. In its simplest state, prayer is practicing the presence of God. It is practicing being Godlike. Right there emerges some boundaries of what we do and do not pray for. To the extent that we know anything about the nature of God—and we Christians claim to know a right good bit, inasmuch as we have identified Jesus as the embodiment of God—we can say with assurance that one does not pray for the destruction of one’s enemies for example. No, one may pray for protection, for the enemy to have a change of heart, for strength to withstand the assaults of the enemy; but the Christian stops short of praying for the destruction of enemies for the simple reason that Christ commanded us to love them. He did not, by the way, suggest that we do so because it would be immediately rewarding or because it would save us lots of time resolving conflicts or yet because it would be a popular practice or easy.

The parable of the unforgiving slave is crystal clear. The slave is enjoined to treat his fellows as the master has treated him. God shows mercy on us, therefore we show mercy on others. “Forgive us our sins” is a prayer that is predicated on the assurance that we will forgive those who sin against us. Now how it is that we can pray such a thing day after day, week after week, year in and year out, while harboring grudges, driving wedges between ourselves and others, collecting injustices, hating those who have wronged us is, well, not so big a mystery. Quite simply, we do not believe what we say. We do not believe what we pray. And when we come right down to it, we don’t believe Jesus.

Need I point out that ten years ago today the People of the United States of America—certainly not without exception, but on the whole—gave to their government permission to wreak vengeance on our enemies. You may argue that the teachings of Jesus are no way to conduct a foreign policy, and I suspect Jesus would indeed agree with you, disinterested as he was in the foreign policies of empires. But that does not get us off the hook, because the hook is consistency and honesty. If you are going to wage war, wage war; but don’t try to baptize it and call it “Christian.” It you are going to hate your enemy, whoever he or she is, go ahead and hate; but don’t turn around and expect that God will show you mercy when you show none yourself. Punish your enemy if you must; but be aware that it leaves you defenseless when you pray a hollow prayer, “…as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

That is strong stuff! You will no doubt point out to me that nobody can live this way; that the nation would be in tatters if we tried it and your own life would be untenable if you risked it. Moreover, I suspect that some sitting right here could point out that the preacher today has no earthly idea of what it is to suffer untold abuse at the hands of tormentors, that your own experience of victimhood qualifies you as an exception to the ethic of forgiveness. Fair enough. I could respond by saying, “You know, you’re right. This is too hard a teaching to take really seriously. It is after all an ideal, one of those many that the gospel—indeed the Bible—is packed with. God, being really sweet, has no intention of making us feel bad about our propensity to hate, but wants us rather to feel quite affirmed. Thus, the notion of being forgiving is a nice one but altogether unworkable, a fact of which our Omniscient God must surely be aware.” And so forth.

But something else is in play here. Look at it this way. Why do you suppose that God would actually care whether we are forgiving or not? What does it matter? Why would Jesus have put so much emphasis on forgiveness? For an answer to those questions, I turn to the last chapter of the Book of Genesis, in which Joseph and his brothers finally come to terms about the brothers’ dreadful misbehavior in selling him into slavery and then lying about it, and Joseph’s response to it all. Years have passed since the brothers conspired to get rid of their pesky little arrogant sibling. Still more years have passed since famine had driven them from Canaan to Egypt in search of grain, only to find there that the presumably lost Joseph has become vizier to Pharaoh. All this while the brothers have had an uneasy conscience about their guilt, and now with the buffer of their old father gone, they wonder if Joseph will cash in on the grudge he might rightly bear against them. So they first send him a message, restating what the old man had said about how Joseph ought forgive their trespass. Joseph responds by weeping. They get up the courage to go see him, and kneeling down, present themselves as his slaves. Then Joseph says something profound. “What you meant for evil against me, God meant for good.” With that statement the story utters a profound truth. God is bigger than our projects and prejudices. In the long sweep of human activity—indeed of the world itself—the very guilt behind the heinous crime, the evil intention, the awful deceit: God has pulled all this together into the great pageant of salvation in which nothing is lost. Through the whole tragedy, God has caused a remnant to be saved, bringing long-term good out of short-term evil. Joseph thus has no effective choice but to forgive his brothers, for to do otherwise would be to pose himself against the very Word that God had already spoken.

We do, I hope, get the message: that forgiveness is the very nature of God, because God’s purposes are always to bring about good. That is what the world cannot give through the machinations of empire and the assertion of one group or one person over another. For God’s good to happen on a human scale inevitably entails more than a few Josephs who can see beyond the moment to the overarching Providence that holds all souls in life and all the world in its healing embrace.

That is the real ethical agenda of the Church. It is to continue to be the community that God has created to express this urgent push towards life, to embody the fierce compulsion to save. One cannot join or long belong to the forces of good if one’s focus shifts from forgiveness to revenge, from community to tribalism, from merciful to unmerciful. God’s work is healing and wholeness, and so the vocation of Joseph and of you and me is that same healing and wholeness that conquers hate and evil, bit by bit, when we live the words we pray, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”