July 28, 2013 | 9:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 4:00 p.m.

Forgiveness

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 85
Luke 11:1–4
Colossians 2:6–15

“Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus.”

Galatians 1:17 (NRSV)

“Forgiveness is the final form of love.”
Reinhold Niebuhr

You may have noticed, as I have, the increased use of flashbacks in television drama: one of the characters has a decision to make or hears a memory-triggering comment made by someone else, the camera pans to the thoughtful look in the character’s eyes, and suddenly the scene changes and you’re in a memory, usually a damaging one, from the character’s past. Perhaps it’s from childhood: a time when they were bullied by other kids or ignored by their parents. Maybe it’s a moment of betrayal by a lover or deception by a boss or a colleague. Regardless, the flashback always serves the same purpose: it explains the present. It tells you why the character behaves the way they do, what they are thinking and feeling, what baggage they are carrying. In most cases, the flashback does something else as well: it prevents you, as the viewer, from labeling the character as good guy or the bad girl; it forces you to acknowledge that perhaps there is some of both good and evil in them. It shows that there is something more complicated, more human, going on in all of the decisions they make and the emotions they feel. Screenwriters use this technique to great effect, because when they do, even if the particular problem the character is facing is nothing at all like your life, you will look at this person and the nuanced and complicated past they are carrying and you will think, maybe so quietly that you can barely even hear it, “Maybe that person understands what it’s like to be me.” The TV flashback is enticing because we’d all like for people to understand us, to be sympathetic to our faults and shortcomings, our actions that seem to make no sense, the grudges we hold because of the ways we’ve been hurt. Wouldn’t it be nice if other people had an appreciation for why we do the things we do? But this is unrealistic, because it will never be the case that everyone else can see your flashbacks, and let’s be honest, you don’t want them to.

So a different spin on the same idea: When I travel alone I write in a journal so that I’ll remember the little things that happen and how I felt about them. My journal includes quotations about what it means to travel, which are often good writing prompts for me. One evening, sitting in a crowded restaurant in the little town of Urgup in central Turkey, I turned the page and read at the top a William H. Moon quote about travel: “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do—especially in other people’s minds. [But] when you’re travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”

“Wow,” I thought, looking around. “There is no one in this crowded room who knows anything about me. There isn’t even anyone in this room who thinks they know anything about me. There are really no yesterdays on the road.” In its own way this travel illustration is as enticing as the flashbacks, because it would be nice if everyone’s misguided assumptions about you were suddenly swept away. But in the end it is as unrealistic as the flashbacks. It’s unrealistic because the only way for that to be true is if you spend your entire life moving from one small restaurant to another, always on the other side of the world and always requesting a table for one. There may be no yesterdays on the road, but if you don’t want to be alone, sooner or later you have to come home.

What is your own particular flashback concern or the thing you’d like for you and everyone else to forget about? What’s the thing about your past that keeps you up at night? It may be about any number of things: relationships, money, career, children—we all have things that we regret, memories of the mistakes that have shaped us, awful things we have done and awful things other people have done to us that play on “repeat” in our minds.

The travel quotation is powerful and the TV screenwriters have us pegged because we all have regrets: we’ve all made past mistakes. Regret and resentment and the back-breaking burden of the past are the currency of the human mind and heart. That is why God’s gift to us, God’s contribution to the human situation, is forgiveness. God gives us forgiveness because we need to know how to let go of the burdens we are carrying, and we need to know how to help other people do the same thing. For that reason, there is hardly anything I can think of that the Bible talks about more than forgiveness.

Many of you know we typically preach from a set selection of texts followed by most Presbyterian churches. There are five assigned Bible readings for Presbyterian worship today. Every reading in some way references regret and forgiveness.

The first two we didn’t read. One of them is the story of the prophet Hosea. Hosea marries a prostitute. He does this as a metaphor—a kind of biblical activist street theater—so that when the people in town see Hosea with his wife, knowing he is a prophet of the Lord they will remember that Israel has been unfaithful to God in the past and needs to be forgiven. That’s the first story about regret and forgiveness.

The other story we didn’t read is about Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities overcome with evil, and God—wondering if the cities should be destroyed—talks with Abraham. Abraham pleads with God, “Surely, Lord, if there are just fifty good people in those cities, you will forgive and not destroy them,” and God agrees to forgive. And Abraham persuades God further, “What if there are forty good people or thirty, or twenty, or ten?” Forgiveness. How much good does it take? Will we ever live down the mistakes of the past?

We read three passages together today. The Psalm says this:

You forgave the iniquity of your people;
you pardoned all their sin.
You withdrew all your wrath;
you turned from your hot anger.
Restore us again, O God of our salvation.
(Psalm 85)

The reading from Colossians that I read says:

And when you were dead in trespasses . . . God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us.
(Colossians 2:13–14)

And in the Gospel reading, the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray, and in this, the most basic and condensed version of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches them just four lines of prayer and the fourth one reads: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”

Forgiveness. Five readings, not chosen by me with intention for a sermon but selected for any preacher today who might choose to talk about any topic, and every passage at some point talks about forgiveness.

The Bible may not be a good place to look in order to find an accurate map of the solar system, a complete and reliable accounting of ancient history, or a good way to keep your risotto from drying out, but do not miss what I mentioned before and what the Bible says time and time and time again: regret and resentment are the currency of the human mind and heart, so forgiveness is God’s gift. It is the centerpiece of God’s plan for human life.

The Bible is an unparalleled record of stories about regret and forgiveness and how to think about both. Unfortunately, it’s a complicated record, because forgiveness is complicated. If there were one way of thinking about forgiveness that you could express to 800 people at the same time, the Bible would have just used that one; instead, the Bible talks about sin and regret and forgiveness over and over again, in many contexts, and with a variety of results. Forgiveness is complicated. When handed around too easily, forgiveness rarely results in positive change. Forgiveness is hard. In situations where forgiveness is most needed, it takes time and effort. For these reasons and many others, forgiveness is not a perfect recipe that always turns out in the way we intend it.

Forgiveness is complicated, but so is our world. We live in a real world that includes no public flashbacks and has lots of yesterdays. In the midst of such a world, forgiveness works because it recognizes that every one of us is caught in a complex web of our own past, successes and failures, good and evil. Not a one of us is a one-dimensional character.

God seems to understand that forgiveness is a complicated equation in which we are all on both sides. Hence, in the Lord’s Prayer, we say both: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” To be sure, in many situations there exists one party who has been wronged and another who is at fault. “But,” argues theologian Lewis Smedes, “when we look at the whole picture, we always discover that . . . even when we are the hurt party, we are seldom a completely innocent party” (Lewis Smedes, Forgive and Forget, p. 147). We have all been, at one time or another, on both sides of the need for forgiveness.

Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about this in The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn served in World War II with another officer he felt was completely like him. They had the same convictions, same hopes, same feelings about everything. But following the war, Solzhenitsyn’s writings landed him in a prison camp, subject to atrocities that are horrible just to think about; his friend was an interrogator in the prison, meting out the punishments. In reflecting on their friendship, Solzhenitsyn always refused to believe that he was an entirely good person and his friend entirely evil. He wrote,

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. . . . During the life of any heart, this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil, and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various stages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

In the larger picture, we are all on both sides of forgiveness. So Jesus taught his disciples “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”

Appreciating the complex of good and evil in each of us is helpful but also leads to a difficult reality: forgiveness isn’t fair. Truly appreciating the complex of good and evil in every human heart means that you will never get to a point where the scales of right and wrong are balanced between you and me, and that’s what so many of us want. Fair play is important. We should be able to get even. That formula seems to make sense, so when we are hurt by someone or when we hurt someone else, the assumption is that revenge will work. But even though that’s the conventional wisdom, I find myself at a loss for examples of when it works. What marital indiscretion or family feud, what political campaign or partisan squabble has ever been advanced by revenge? Revenge seems fair; moreover, revenge is perceived as a sign of strength, but that’s just a lie. The truth is that revenge hasn’t been working so well but continues, because with forgiveness everyone is afraid to go first.

So here is the good news about going first, from the letter to Colossians:

As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith . . . [for] when you were dead in trespasses . . . God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us.

Christians believe in forgiveness not because it’s fair or makes sense. Christians believe in forgiveness because God did it first. You are not solely responsible for forgiveness; you need only hand the gift of forgiveness on to someone else, because God has already given it to you.

Forgiveness does not happen overnight. It does not happen easily. It does not even happen in a way that is fair. But forgiveness is God’s gift because it is the one thing that advances the impossible task of living in this complicated world. Forgiveness works because our past is a part of who we are, and forgiveness shows us how to rebuild our present and live toward an uncertain future.

There is an old Dutch fable I read once. The story is of a man named Gregor, a righteous man, tall and lean with a long, thin nose and a pointed chin. His righteousness was apparent to everyone who came near him, so most people chose to stay away.

Gregor’s wife was named Hilda, and she was short and round. Her arms were round and spread out toward all who came near her, as did her warm heart, and so people loved to be in her presence.

Hilda respected her righteous husband, and she loved him. But she could only do so as much as he allowed her to love him, and the distance at which he kept her caused an overwhelming emptiness in her heart and led to a day when Gregor came home early and found her in bed with another man.

Hilda’s adultery became the talk of the village. Everyone knew and assumed Gregor would cast her out, but he surprised everyone by saying that he forgave her, as the Good Book said he should.

In truth he did not forgive. Gregor could not forgive the shame Hilda had brought upon him; he hated her for betraying him after he had been such a good and faithful husband. He only pretended to forgive her so that he could punish her with his righteousness.

Gregor’s hatred did not sit well in heaven, so each time he would feel his secret hate toward Hilda, each time he would look at or think of her and remember the pain of her betrayal, an angel would come down and drop a pebble into his heart. Over time, the weight of those pebbles became too heavy for him, bending him over from the righteous place in which he once stood.

The angel came to him and told him how he could be healed from his hurt. The remedy was to look at Hilda through magic eyes, eyes that would allow him to see her not as the wife who betrayed him but as a hurting woman who needed him. And all he needed to do in order to get these magic eyes was to ask for them. Gregor protested that he could never ask for such a thing: how could he look with magic eyes upon the one who had betrayed him? But his pain finally overcame him, and he asked the angel for the gift of the magic eyes.

Soon Hilda began to change in front of Gregor’s eyes, wonderfully and mysteriously. He began to see her as a hurting woman who needed and loved him instead of a wicked woman who betrayed him. The angel kept her promise; she lifted the pebbles from Gregor’s heart one at a time, and though it took a long time, Gregor gradually began to feel lighter; he began to stand and walk straight again, and even other people said that somehow his nose and chin seemed less sharp than before. He invited Hilda to come into his heart again, and she came, and together they began a journey into their second season of life.

Amen.