A sermon offered at St. Richard's Episcopal Church, Winter Park, FL on September 17, 2017 based upon the lections of Proper 19 RCL.
This
morning’s Gospel provides us with a difficult lesson. At the beginning of this
chapter, the disciples are fighting among themselves as to who would be the
greatest once the Kingdom of G-d was established. Apparently, things got pretty
ugly and in today’s lesson an impetuous and prideful Peter, asks Jesus “How
many times must I forgive these boneheads who appear to exist solely for the
purpose of annoying me?”
Forgiveness: There is no Quota
Jesus
offers two responses to Peter’s question. The first is fairly straightforward. You must forgive 7 x 77. If you are like
me, by now you’re employing the math skills you learned in third grade and,
after arriving at the answer of 539 times, are congratulating yourself on being
an effective forgiver. I’m sure we’ve all forgiven people at least 539 times in
my lifetime. So, we’ve met our quota, right? We’re off the hook for forgiving
this numbskull in front of me, right?
Wrong. Jesus’ reference is not a mathematical equation, it’s a symbolic means
of saying “Peter, you have to forgive every time, just as your Father in heaven
forgives every time. There is no limit. There is no quota. Forgiveness is
always the right response to wrongdoing.”
Jesus
then contrasts the eternal forgiveness of G-d that his disciples are to practice
with a parable about a king who forgives his slave of a debt. The slave, in
turn, proves hard-hearted with those who owe him money, and the king, upon
hearing it, calls the slave before him, revokes his pardon of the slave’s debt
and throws him into prison until it’s paid. The lesson: We only get forgiven as much as we forgive others.
There
is a very subtle contrast made here between the values of Jesus’ kingdom of G_d
and the kingdoms of Caesar and Herod in which Jesus and his disciples exist. In
the Kingdom of G_d, forgiveness is universal, inexhaustible, practiced without
exception. In the secular kingdoms, forgiveness has limits – seven or 77,
numbers that come from Hebrew Scripture. And in Caesar’s kingdom of Zero
Tolerance, there may be no forgiveness at all, a lesson Jesus himself will
learn very shortly at Golgotha.
So
why is forgiveness so important? Why is forgiveness a central value in the
kingdom of G_d that Jesus is proclaiming? What might it tell us about the G-d
that Jesus is revealing?
Those Were My Children, Too…
In
our Hebrew Scripture lesson this morning, the people of Israel are finally
making their Exodus from Egypt to a land they will eventually invade to
displace the residents there and create what they believe to be a Promised
Land. As they approach the Red Sea, they realize they are being pursued by
Pharaoh’s army intent on taking them back into slavery. Just at the crucial
moment, Moses is instructed to lift his staff and the Red Sea separates just
long enough to let the Hebrew people escape to the other side but then closes
just as suddenly, drowning the Egyptian army and its horses.
It
is easy to read this story from a tribalistic perspective. G-d is on the side
of his chosen people and intervenes to save them. The result, from the
perspective of the Egyptians is catastrophic. And the implications of such a
reading can be very disturbing: G-d
punishes those who oppose G-d’s people. It lends itself to a wide range of
abuses from justifying the near annihilation of the native peoples of the
Americas during its conquest to the antisemitism of the Second World War that
resulted in a Final Solution. When G-d is on your side, virtually anything you
do can be justified. And when G-d is seen as having abandoned the Other, we
have begun a slide down a slippery slope that leads to places with names like
Wounded Knee and Auschwitz.
The
development of the Hebrew Scripture by Jewish rabbis led to a set of writings
called the Midrash. In Midrash Megil,
which interprets this passage of the Hebrew Scripture, the angels are watching
the events at the Red Sea from heaven. When the Egyptian army is drowned by the
returning waters of the sea, the angels burst into celebration, singing and
cheering. At that point G-d turns to the angels and says to them, “Why are you
celebrating? These were also my children that were drowned in the sea this
day.”
This was not a day of vindication or vengeance. It was a day of mourning.
Thinking in Tribal Terms
St.
Paul speaks to this very human tendency to think in tribal terms, us v. them,
in today’s lessons. In a dualistic perspective, there are always two sides,
ours and theirs. Ours is inevitably seen as right, theirs as wrong. We are
righteous and good, they are sinful and evil. The image of G-d beams brightly
on our faces but is absent from theirs.
Paul’s
letter draws this dualistic vision into focus:
We quarrel over opinions. We pass judgment on those whose opinions
differ from our own. Eventually we may even come to despise our brothers and
sisters. Anyone who is familiar with the culture wars which have raged within
our own church over the past half century knows that few people can despise
their brothers and sisters quite as effectively and as righteously as people of
faith.
So
why do we do that? What is it in us that drives us to celebrate vengeance and
vindication in the destruction of the other on whose faces we refuse to see the
image of G_d? What is it that prompts us to define ourselves against others,
judging ourselves to be righteous and them to be less than worthy of our
respect? What is it that prevents us from living into Jesus’ call to us to
forgive every time just as our Father in heaven forgives us?
No One Will Ever Love Me Again…
Let
me offer a possible explanation using an example from my own life history. When
I was a defense attorney, one of my duties was to represent parents whose
custody of their children was suspended due to accusations of abuse,
abandonment or neglect. One of my clients was a father accused of molesting his
teenage daughter. When I visited him at the Orange County Jail I braced myself
for the monster I thought I would encounter. What I found caught me completely
off guard.
An
obese, balding and rather unattractive man stood before me in his orange
corrections jumpsuit. When I introduced myself as his attorney, he began to
weep. He had an effeminate affect and as he crumpled into a ball on the floor
in front of me, he sobbed repeatedly, “I’m so sorry. No one will ever love me again.”
I did not have the heart to tell him that he was probably right.
While
his victim and his wife had no obligation to forgive him, my guess is that each
may have found their way to do so over their lifetime. But if I had to guess, I
would bet good money that this man never would find a way to forgive himself.
And he is not alone.
In
my now 22 years as an ordained priest, I have heard many confessions. I believe
confession is good for the soul and both confession and periodic visits to a
spiritual advisor is a requirement of my rule of life as a Third Order
Franciscan.
In
virtually every confession I have heard, it is my observation that perhaps the
number one sin with which my confessants present me is the inability or the
unwillingness to forgive themselves. They are happy to hear that G-d forgives
them and some may actually seek out those they have harmed to rectify their
relationships with them. But at a very basic level, they are unwilling to
forgive themselves. And some, I believe, probably suspect that if they can’t
forgive themselves, G-d can’t either.
Consider the ego implicit in the notion
that G_d couldn’t possibly forgive me of my sins.
Our Shadows Don’t Stay Put
Because
it is impossible for human beings to be continually aware of our own shortcomings,
we tend to repress them from our consciousness. Carl Jung speaks about the
formation of the Shadow, our own repressed personal darkness that collects in
the psychic sewer of our unconscious minds.
But
the Shadow does not tend to stay put once it has been relegated to the
unconscious. It erupts in unexpected behaviors that often leave our friends and
families shaking their heads and saying, “That just wasn’t like him at all.”
More often, however, it provides material for the creation of individual and
collective scapegoats upon whom we project our Shadow content. Franciscan
Richard Rohr reminds us that the suffering in our lives which we do not
transform we inevitably transmit. It’s always a lot easier to see our own
darkness on the face of the Other than in a mirror. And it is often our own
unforgiven, disowned darkness that we see in the other, about whom we make
judgments and whose misfortunes we celebrate as something they somehow deserved.
What Part of Us Does G-d Actually Love?
So
what part of us does G-d actually love? I believe the answer to that question
is all of us. G-d loves the light,
bright socially acceptable aspects of the persona we display to the world and
G-d loves the dark, disowned Shadow that we repress and hide from it. And I
believe that G-d calls us to do the same, to own our darkness, to love all of
who we are and to forgive not just those who trespass against us but ourselves
as well when we fall short.
In
the trial services our general convention is creating in preparation for our
next prayer book revision, one of the invitations to the general confession reads
like this:
That
might be a good beginning point for becoming conscious of our need to forgive
ourselves. I pray we take this bidding seriously. Perhaps the liturgy
commission will also consider the absolution offered by the New Zealand Prayer
Book to those who have just confessed their sins. I believe it reflects the
holistic approach to forgiveness to which Jesus calls us this day and I end
with it:
G-d forgives you.
Forgive others.
Forgive yourself.
Be at peace.
AMEN.
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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
frharry@cfl.rr.com
harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
© Harry Coverston 2017
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