A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

September 15, 2002 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

On Not Keeping Score

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 32:1–7
Micah 7:18–20
Matthew 18:21–35

“Then Peter came and said to him,
‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me,
how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’
Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.’”

Matthew 18:21–22 (NRSV)

And now, O God, we humbly ask that the peace of Christ might rule in our hearts,
that you would silence in our hearts any voice but your own,
so that hearing your word, we might also come to obey your will,
for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

A college professor reports that whenever she asks her undergraduate students in her religion class what they believe to be the most important element of the Christian message, they unfailingly respond by speaking of forgiveness. Jesus came preaching a gospel of forgiveness, they say. Some of the more thoughtful students remember to add that he came to teach us how to forgive one another.

Two thousand years ago in the original school of Christian discipleship, there was an apostle named Peter who was always trying to rise to the top of his class. He understood that from his teacher’s point of view, there was no way that one could overemphasize the importance of forgiveness. Time and again Jesus had emphasized its essential nature to the gospel he was bringing:

“Love your enemies; pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5:44)

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” (Matthew 5:7)

“When someone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other cheek.” (Matthew 5:39)

Peter accepted the fact that if one were to follow Jesus, forgiveness simply had to take the place of vengeance in the heart of every single disciple, but Peter still did not like the idea very much. He wanted to know how often he had to do it. He wanted a number to work with, because forgiveness does not come naturally to human beings. “If another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? Seven times?” While it seemed like a gracious plenty to Peter, Jesus answered, “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” meaning that forgiveness is not a quantifiable commodity, but a qualitatively different condition of being, drawn from the very being of God, whose nature it is to offer grace. “As far as the east is from the west, so far does God remove our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12).

Afraid that Peter has not quite understood the message, Jesus tells Peter a story. He tells him a parable in which God appears as a king who forgives one of his servants a very large debt. Yet, immediately after the servant has been forgiven, he encounters someone who owes him a debt. Instead of offering mercy, he grabs the other man by the throat and demands that payment be made. When the man cannot pay, the unforgiving servant has him thrown into prison. The news reaches the king, who calls the unforgiving servant in, withdraws his debt cancellation, and orders him to be handed over to be punished until the entire debt is paid, which is an impossibility since the amount that is owed is about fifty million times the ordinary daily wage.

What a harsh story for the Lord of grace to tell. Yet Jesus, because he loved those who would follow him, because he wanted them to know the core values of the kingdom of God, wanted to startle the Christian community awake to the reality that divine mercy and human mercy were profoundly interrelated. We acknowledge that ourselves every time we pray the prayer our Lord taught us to pray, saying, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” This is the only line in the entire prayer that has a condition upon it, suggesting that there is an intrinsic relationship between our ability to forgive other people and God’s willingness to offer forgiveness to us. The matter of forgiveness is of utmost and eternal importance.

I cannot tell you how difficult it is to preach on this subject today, to try to think about how we can even begin to forgive in a world like this one. On Wednesday afternoon of this week, the names of all those who perished in the terrorist attacks last fall were read in this sanctuary. One after the other, after the other. I sat in the rear of the sanctuary during the reading of the names that began with M. There were many Moores and Murphys. I remembered that every single name represented a human being of worth and inherent meaning. Every person was someone’s son or father, mother, or friend.

I resolved that afternoon that with God’s help, I was not going to let the terrorists have still another victory. I was not going to let them implant a spirit of hatred and vindictiveness inside of me where the spirit of God ought to be. I was not going to give up that territory to them. I felt a sense of spiritual freedom akin to that which I had experienced earlier in the day, at the beginning of the noontime service. The processional was led by a young woman from Holy Name Cathedral who had lost her father in the attack on the World Trade Center. With strength from above, she threw her shoulders back and marched silently down the center aisle, carrying a single candle, which illuminated the sanctuary throughout the day and into the night. As we walked, the only sound being the click of heels against stone, I found the words of John Calvin’s great hymn washing over me:

“Thou hast the true and perfect gentleness, no darkness hath thou, and no bitterness. O grant us the grace, the grace we find in thee, that we may dwell in perfect unity.” That was our prayer—Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Jew—all of us that day, trying to be respectful, to love across our differences, hoping together that the world we leave to our children will not be awash with vengeance and unresolved hatreds. We had come to receive a better and higher vision—and the resolve to follow it.

O how hard it is to hear the commandment to forgive. One theologian puts it like this: “We who follow Christ are always being commanded to do things we cannot do. We are commanded to love, to serve without counting the cost. The hardest of all is the commandment to forgive. We are bidden to do it, not because it is possible on our own, but because as we try what we are commanded to do, it is given to us as a gift from God.”

In her powerful autobiography entitled The Hiding Place, Corrie Ten Boom tells of her experience after World War II, of preaching at a church service on the subject of forgiveness. As she left the pulpit and came down to the center of the sanctuary, she noticed a man coming toward her, his hand extended. She recognized him as the chief guard at the prison camp where her sister had died and where both of them had been incarcerated. His face was beaming. “‘How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein,’ he said. ‘To think that, as you say, He washed my sins away.’” Corrie Ten Boom found herself paralyzed as the guard thrust out his hand to shake hers. She could not raise her hand from her side. “Even as the vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. . . . I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of love or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him, give me your forgiveness.” She was able to move her hand, and as she touched his hand, flesh to flesh, she writes, “from my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him . . . and so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges but on [Christ]. When he tells us to love our enemies, he gives, along with the command, the love itself” (New York: Bantam Books, 1971; p. 238).

Here is what I wish to say to you today. Forgiveness is not an act of will; it is a function of grace. You cannot make yourself forgive anyone, but you can at least make the intellectual connection between your own dependence on God’s acceptance of you and all your brokenness and inadequacies, and your reaction to those who have injured you, even deeply, terribly injured you. And if you cannot forgive, you can pray that the time will come when you can forgive (Garrett Keizer, Christian Century, 31 July 2002; p. 23). Even if you cannot pray that prayer, you can be honest before God in confessing that you cannot. God can take it.

I remember Golda Maier’s poignant confession, “I can forgive the Arabs for killing my son, but I cannot forgive the Arabs for teaching my son to kill Arabs.” Some things cannot be done by simply deciding. We have to wait; we have to open ourselves to receive from another realm that which we find humanly impossible to do on our own. And if we can receive the gift of finally being able to forgive another who has done us serious injury, a spouse who betrayed, a parent who abused, a careless driver who killed, we will want to remember always that to forgive is not to forget. It is not to deny the pain or the wrongness. To forgive is not to excuse that which is unjust or cruel. To forgive means this: to make a conscious choice to be unbound by evil. When someone does something evil to us, the first injury they do is their fault, but if we hold on to a feeling of vengeance and hatred in our own heart, then that person does a second injury, and the fault for that is ours.

God, if you will allow God, is willing to show you how to loose the bonds that will set you free, to loose the cords that bind us to the past so that we might someday be able to pray, “Lighten the load of our debts, even as we relieve others of their need to keep repaying.” This is the doorway to transformation.

Last evening as I was going to sleep, I watched a program on the British author C. S. Lewis, and I remembered a note that he had made in his journal. “Last week while at prayer,” Lewis wrote, “I suddenly discovered that I had finally forgiven someone that I had been trying to forgive for over thirty years.”

I close with a story that might well be as ancient as the story Jesus told about the unforgiving servant who grabbed his fellow servant around the neck and would not let him go. It seems there was a man who was a baker, and he was known in the village for his self-righteousness. He was a very righteous man. His wife respected her husband, loved him too, as much as he would allow, but over time her heart began to ache for something more than his worthy righteousness. So it happened that one day the baker came home to find his wife in the arms of a stranger. All the village assumed that the righteous baker would throw her out on the street, but he said, “O no, the Good Book tells me not to do that. I will keep her at home.”

Yet he could not forgive her in his heart for bringing shame upon their family. As time passed, his feelings grew angrier and more brittle. After a while, notice was taken of this in the high heavenly places, and every time he felt bitterness toward his wife, who had indeed betrayed her marriage vows, every time an angel would fly down from heaven and deposit a tiny pebble in his heart, and he would feel a little stab of pain. As the days passed, the pebbles multiplied, until soon he was bent over with the weight of them. Then one night the angel came to him and said, “You may be healed from all this hardness and heartache, but the only way for you to do this is to discover the gift of new eyes. You are going to have to look at your wife not just as one who betrayed you, but as a flawed, needy, imperfect person whom you with your own flaws and imperfection have betrayed in more subtle ways.”

“Nothing can change what she did,” the man protested.
“You are right,” the angel answered.
“You cannot change the past, but you can heal the past.”
“How?” the baker asked.
“Just look with new eyes.”

So the baker began to try to see his wife in a new way. Mysteriously, every time he tried, she became transformed into the woman he came to love again, the woman who needed him and whom he needed. Then he saw himself as he really was, not a perfect fellow by any means. Day by day, the angel lifted the stones out of his heart, and love moved back into his heart. Together the two of them began a journey into a new season of life, a journey of love, healing, and reconciliation.

What is the most important message of the Christian gospel? Forgiveness. Jesus came to forgive our sins and to teach us over time how to forgive one another. Thanks be to God.