Dr. Mark Owen Fenstermacher FIGURINH OUT FORGIVENESS: Taking the First Step January 26, 2014 Matthew 5:21-26 First United Methodist Church 219 E. 4 th Street Bloomington, IN 47408 Ernest Hemingway s short story, The Capital of the World, tells the story of a father who was estranged from his teenage son. The boy, named Paco, had done something to hurt his father. And so, out of shame, he had decided to run away. The father searched all over Spain for his son, but he could not find the boy he missed so much. Desperate to find his son, the father finally decided to put a notice in a Madrid newspaper that said: Paco, meet me at the Hotel Montana. Noon Tuesday. All is forgiven. The notice was signed Papa. The father prayed that his boy would see the notice in the newspaper. The father hoped that his son would go to the Hotel Montana. So on Tuesday the father went to the Hotel Montana early to see if his son might be there. He was stunned to see that a squad of policemen had been called in to handle the crowd of young men who had suddenly appeared in front of the hotel. In the story eight hundred boys, all named Paco, had shown up at the Hotel Montana. Each had come to see the father they missed. And each had come to the Hotel Montana looking for forgiveness. There is a story behind the story. There always is. Those of you who know Hemingway s story better than me can say more about it. What I have read, though, is that Hemingway -in the words of one author- knew about the ungrace of families. His parents were devout Christians of a very serious sort. They hated the lifestyle their son had chosen to live. At one point in his life his mother refused to even allow Hemingway into her presence. One year she mailed him a birthday cake with the gun his father used to kill himself. Hemingway s mother would write to him and list all the things he should be doing to replenish his emotional account with his mother. She thought he should send her flowers, fruit or candy. She thought he should surprise her by paying some of her bills. She told him he needed to stop neglecting his duties to God and your Saviour, Jesus Christ. I ve read that Hemingway never got over his hatred for his mother and her Saviour. And so Hemingway wrote this short story about a father and son who were estranged from one another. The father places an ad in a Madrid newspaper in the hopes that his son, Paco, might see the notice and show up at the Hotel Montana. All of this so that there might be forgiveness, and instead of being apart they could be together. We re beginning a several week series of messages on the subject of forgiveness. We re calling it FIGURING OUT FORGIVENESS. Along with the sermons we re going to have small groups looking at forgiveness and reading L. Greg Jones book on forgiveness. If you haven t yet signed up for a small 1
group, I hope you ll do that. You can do that by going to our web site at www.fumcb.org, or you can sign up using one of the registration forms you have been given today. Those of you who are good at remembering preaching themes from past years may be thinking, Heh, we had a series of messages on forgiveness a few years ago. Yes, we did! I m so glad you remember. And we ll probably look at forgiveness again in the future because it is such a key part of our faith and the art of living. The subjects of grace and forgiveness are at the heart of what it means to be a Jesus follower. Both are essential elements if we are to live well with one another. Even after we ve worked through the book by Greg Jones, and been blessed by honest conversations in our small groups, and been in worship for this series of messages, we will have just scratched the surface. There will be so much more that could have been said but wasn t. Life happens. Relationships get twisted inside out. We hurt someone or someone hurts us. And we end up trying to figure out, again, what God s call to forgive means right now in this moment this relationship. It is hard to believe but in a few months some of us will be jumping off the back of a boat with a ski jacket on our back and a water ski in our hands. We ve been water skiing for years, but we ll jump in the water and -for skiers like me- we ll have to concentrate. Remember what it is we need to do for this to work well. Lean back, arms straight, ski tip up, resist the temptation to pull ourselves up but let the power of the boat lift us up out of the water. We ve done it so many times before, but this is a new season and we need to work on it again learn again. out. That s the way it is with forgiveness. We re always learning -again- what it is and how we live it Jesus was often dealing with the subject of forgiveness in his sermons. People came up to him with questions about forgiveness. When Jesus teaches the disciples how to pray (Matthew 6), he includes the phrase And forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us. At the end of Jesus sermon on what to do when someone in the church sins against us, Simon Peter comes up and asks (Mt. 18:21) a question: LORD, how many times shall I forgiven someone who sins against me? Up to seven times? Jesus responds by saying, I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times. What Jesus is saying is that forgiveness is to be a way of life. His way of living is our way of living, and that means forgiveness will be a way of life with us. So, yes, we re talking about forgiveness again. Do you remember, last Sunday, we talked about the public opinion survey where people were asked what three statements they most wanted to hear? The first was, I love you. The second 2
statement they most wanted to hear was, I forgive you. And the third statement was, Supper is ready. So we re going to look at the mystery, the power, the experience of forgiveness. Today s scripture reading comes from the very middle of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus talks about what we need to do when we realize a relationship has broken down. Jesus says this in verses 23-26 (The Message): 23-24 This is how I want you to conduct yourself in these matters. If you enter your place of worship and, about to make an offering, you suddenly remember a grudge a friend has against you, abandon your offering, leave immediately, go to this friend and make things right. Then and only then, come back and work things out with God. 25-26 Or say you re out on the street and an old enemy accosts you. Don t lose a minute. Make the first move; make things right with him. After all, if you leave the first move to him, knowing his track record, you re likely to end up in court, maybe even jail. If that happens, you won t get out without a stiff fine. There are several things I would like you to notice about this passage of scripture. First, Jesus connects our life in worship with our life outside the place and time and rhythms of worship. What we say in here should be reflected in how we try to live out there. There should be a seamless unity between our life in worship and our life at home at work in the way we handle money and relationships and sexuality and power. Jeremiah, the prophet, talks about this in his 7 th chapter (verses 8-11, selected verses): Get smart! Do you think you can rob and murder, have sex with the neighborhood wives, tell lies nonstop, worship the local gods, and buy every novel religious commodity on the market and then march into this Temple, set apart for my worship, and say, We re safe! thinking that the place itself gives you a license to go on with all this outrageous sacrilege? A cave full of criminals! Do you think you can turn this Temple, set apart for my worship, into something like that? Well, think again. I ve got eyes in my head. I can see what s going on. Jesus gives the example of someone in worship, ready to make their offering to God as one way of making right their relationship with God, when they remember someone has something against them. Right then, in the middle of worship, Jesus says we need to get up and go do our best to make it right. Talk of grace, talk of forgiveness, in our worship life, our faith life, needs to be lived out. Our life and worship should resemble one another there should be a seamless unity about what we say we believe and how we live. The second thing I would like you to notice is that Jesus puts the responsibility for making the first move to make things right on us. When we realize a brother or sister has something against us, we are drop whatever we are doing and go to them to begin working through the hurt the sin the misunderstanding. 3
Now, if I were in the class when Jesus was teaching this lesson on forgiveness and grace and reconciliation, I would have held up my hand because I have a couple of questions. Here s my first question: What if I didn t do what that person thinks I did or I didn t say what that person thought I said, and so they may have something against me but the thing they have against me is wholly unjustified? I learned a long time ago that people hear things we never said. People make assumptions about us and have something against us. Now and then what someone has against us isn t grounded in reality. I was once talking with the pastor of a struggling, smaller church. I mentioned to the pastor that if they ever wanted to partner with us, the congregation I served in those days would love to talk with them about a partnership. I suggested we might be able to help with their youth program, and together we could figure out some new ways to reach to the neighborhood. Let us know how we can help, I said. We could talk about what that might look like. The pastor told her congregation that our larger church wanted to take them over. In fact, several years ago, I was sitting with some folks from that church at a conference. They didn t know who I was. And one of them said, You know, there is a guy named Fenstermacher who wanted to take over our church a couple years ago. I smiled and said, I m that guy. And we didn t want to take you over we wanted to work together. So I want to hold up my hand and say, What if they have something against us, but they don t really have a right to have something against us? Jesus ignores my question. Go see what you can do to make things right, Jesus. You take the initiative. You go first. Whether or not what the other person has against you makes sense to you. My second question would be this: The person I am supposed to approach sounds like a cranky, quick-to-take-offense kind of person. Does someone like that deserve me taking the first step to make things right? Does someone like that deserve my forgiveness? Jesus says, in the second part of the reading, that if we don t make things right then this person may hand us over to a judge. File a lawsuit against us. Escalate the whole thing. Doesn t sound much like someone I want to deal with. Talk with. Approach. Doesn t sound like someone who deserves forgiveness. Sounds like a cranky, critical, stinker to me. A friend of mine was watching the local news in South Carolina. A man was interviewed who had wrecked his company by siphoning off funds for his own use, lied and stolen and broken promises, destroyed his marriage, shamed his family, and then caused scores of people to lose their jobs when the company closed. Then, when he was on trial, the man began talking about his new relationship with 4
God. How he had been saved, and how he was a new person. So this rascal was talking about God and his faith and how everything was different now, and my friend grumbled about how amazing it was that just when he was about to be sentenced to prison he suddenly had this story of a life changing encounter with God. My friend grumbled to his wife, as he watched this interview, and said, When that guy talks about God it sounds like he has come up with just one more new con. His wife said, Yep. Jesus loves creeps. Does someone like this cranky, quick-to-escalate-the-situation deserve me taking the risk to make things right, do they deserve my forgiveness? I would ask. Jesus would hear my question, I m sure, and just shake his head. Forgiveness isn t something we offer only to the deserving or the people we like, he would say quietly. Grace isn t grace if it only comes to those who deserve it. Which means it wasn t really grace at all My third question -by this time I am sure even Jesus might be running out of patience with me- would be this: You say we are to abandon our offering, leave immediately, go to the friend and make things right. But do we really have the power to make things right? I can t make things right if the other person doesn t want to make things right. I don t have control over what other people think or do, Jesus. It sounds like you are setting us up for some kind of co-dependent relationship. What if the other person doesn t want it to be right? I can t make it right if the other person doesn t want it to be right? Jesus would -and I don t want to put words in the mouth of the LORD God- say, Work on yourself. Take responsibility for your own part in what has gone wrong. Offer grace. By now it is becoming clear to me that I am ready to manufacture all sorts of reasons why I shouldn t take the first step. I didn t realize how much of a struggle it is for me to take the first step in making things right, in working through painful stuff, in offering forgiveness. But as I look at my tendency to hold up my hand and ask one more clarifying question of Jesus, it sure looks like I am searching for any good reason not to do what Jesus is telling us to do. Maybe you think I am crazy. Or maybe you are about as enthusiastic as I am about the whole idea of taking the first step to reconcile, to work through, to offer forgiveness. I can keep coming up with questions. I can keep explaining why this isn t a good time. I can keep telling Jesus that no matter what I say or do this other person isn t going to let things ever be right. I can gently suggest that my forgiveness, God s grace working through me, shouldn t be wasted on a cranky, ready-to-escalate-things-and-go-to-court kind of person. (Of course, the person down the hall, or the colleague, or the church member I have disappointed, or the family member whose heart I have wounded, is probably having the same conversation with God: Do you really want me to waste grace on that prickly, self-righteous, all-sorts-of-sharp-edges rascal? 5
And Jesus says, If someone has something against you, drop what you are doing and go take the first step. You may have other reasons for not taking the first step to make things right in a relationship. You may have other reasons for not taking the first step in offering forgiveness. What s keeping you from taking the first step in making things right? What s keeping you from taking the first step in looking for a way through the misunderstanding and hurt? What s keeping you from taking the first step in offering forgiveness? I wonder if you might not be thinking, right now, about someone. About a particular someone. About a specific situation. I wonder if you might not be, right now, considering what it would look like to take the first step in doing what you can to make things right and offer forgiveness. While you re wrestling with whether or not to take the risk, let me say a couple of things as we get ready to wrap up this morning. First, forgiveness is -more than anything else- releasing yourself from a burden. Some of us go through life with this hard knot in our gut. This small, distorted place in our soul. There is this anger, this desire to get even, this need to punish someone for what they did to us. And carrying around that stuff makes us miserable. In fact, it can make us sick. In the weekly email I used a quote from a therapist David Semands. He writes: Many years ago I was driven to the conclusion that the two major causes of most emotional problems among Christians are these: the failure to understand, receive, and live out God s unconditional grace and forgiveness; and the failure to give out that unconditional love, forgiveness, and grace to other people We read, we hear, we believe a good theology of grace. But that s not the way we live. (pg. 15 in What s So Amazing About Grace? by Philip Yancey) I ve seen people make themselves sick because they refused to forgive. They would rather hold onto the hurt, the grudge, the wound, than offer forgiveness. They think their refusal to forgive punishes the other person but they are actually punishing themselves. To forgive is to let God help set us free. Second, time moves quickly. You may think you have forever and somehow things will sort themselves out. But time moves quickly. There is a sense of urgency in what Jesus is telling us. Someone I love very much died with an unresolved, bitter wound. I didn t know that until after they were gone. I don t even like thinking about that. It cracks my heart wide open even to think about it. I don t know if they thought they would hurt us, in the family, if they raised the issue or asked the questions. Maybe working through the wound, the hurt, would have been painful but I wish we had risked that before she was gone. There is an urgency to this call to take the first step. To do what we can to make things right. To offer forgiveness so that we -at least- can move on. 6
Third, whether or not we will take the risk of taking the first step has a lot to do with whether or not we have had a genuine encounter with grace in Jesus Christ. Now and then I make the comment to people that we worship in spaces with a cross at the front of the rooms. That cross is there as a reminder of many things, but it is at some level a reminder that in Jesus God has graced us. Loved us with more love than we deserve. When I look at the cross this morning, I remember the words of Jesus after nails had been driven through his wrists and ankles. Abba, Daddy, forgive them because they don t know what they are doing. We re loved like this by the Carpenter. Do you know how God loves you? Do you do you know? And if we have been loved with this kind of radical grace, this kind of forgiveness, then doesn t that experience shape how we love and forgive one another? The One who loves us from the cross, the One who utters a prayer of forgiveness for the whole, broken, undeserving world tells us to take the first step in forgiving. Making things right. Will we be obedient to the One who loves us best or not? Frederick Buechner, in his book Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, includes a section on forgiveness. I ve read it to you before, and I want to again read several sentences from what he says about forgiveness: To forgive someone is to say one way or another, You have done something unspeakable, and by all rights I should call it quits between us. Both my pride and my principles demand no less. However, although I make no guarantees that I will be able to forget what you ve done and though we both carry scars for life, I refuse to let it stand between us. I still want you as my friend. To accept forgiveness means to admit that you ve done something unspeakable that needs to be forgiven, and thus both parties must swallow the same thing: their pride. When somebody you ve wronged forgives you, you re spared the dull and self-diminishing throb of a guilty conscience. When you forgive somebody who has wronged you, you re spared the dismal corrosion of bitterness and wounded pride. For both parties, forgiveness means the freedom again to be at peace inside their own skins and to be glad in each other s presence. Take the first step. God gave you a gift. Forgiveness is a gift to another. And forgiveness is a gift you give yourself. 7
Sometimes we forget how outrageous, how scandalous, how unexpected, forgiveness can be. Stephen Frears film Philomena is based on Martin Sixsmith s book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee. It s a true story of Philomena Lee s fifty year search to find the son she gave away long ago when she was a young pregnant girl housed in a Catholic convent in Ireland. Unmarried and pregnant, young Philomena was told to sign away her parental rights to her son, Anthony. Still, though, she would help care for him up until he was three. Philomena s best friend in convent had given birth to a girl she named Mary. Mary and Anthony would play together. They were inseparable. Philomena and the Mary s mother would work in the laundy, and then have a bit of time each day to play with their children. One day, without a word of explanation or the chance to say goodbye to her son, Philomena looks out a convent window and sees both Anthony and Mary being carried to a very nice automobile, by a well dressed couple, and then driven away to the children s new home. Philomena is heartbroken. She lives her life. She leaves the convent. She is married and has a daughter. And then, fifty years later, she decides to try and find her son. She has asked before at the convent and she has been told the adoption records were burned in a fire. Philomena is assisted in her search by a British reporter named Martin Sixsmith. He signs on to help her and tell her story. Martin and Philomena end up in America. Mary and Anthony were adopted by a wealthy couple living in the States. By the time Philomena and Martin get to America, he discovers that her son has died several years before. They still, though, want to find out more about him. And, eventually, they have a conversation with Anthony s surviving partner. Philomena and Martin discover that Anthony had gone to Ireland looking for his mother. The officials in the convent said they had no idea where she was although Philomena had come there looking for her son. Anthony was dying, and the nuns never told him about his mother. They never let her see her son. But Anthony had asked to be buried on the grounds of the convent. It is a stunning, utterly heartless deception on the part of several older nuns. Martin and Philomena return to the convent. Martin forces his way into the room of a nun who had been at the convent when Philomena was a young woman. The older, retired nun had orchestrated the deception and kept Anthony and Philomena from ever meeting. The reporter demands to know why the mother and son were kept apart, and this aging nun hisses that not getting to meet her son was Philomena s punishment for the sin of fornication. Martin, the reporter, tells the nun that if Jesus were here he would knock the older woman out of the wheelchair in which she s sitting. The reporter is in a righteous fury (as were most of the people in the theater with us). He wants Philomena to unleash her own hurt and fury on the deceitful nun. 8
Philomena is standing there, looking down at the older nun, and she says, I forgive you. She speaks these words of grace, and grace totally disarms the older woman. She sits there stunned. She didn t expect that response. And in a place where faith has been so twisted and misused, the director lets us see a glimpse of the glory that is Christian forgiveness grace. Grace comes so unexpectedly, so powerfully, that it is breath-taking. The reporter mutters, Well, I can t forgive her this! Someone sitting in the theater with us said out loud, Neither would I! That s the first thing Jesus says to us: Take the first step. Take the first step What does that mean for you today? 9