The Freedom of Forgiveness Matthew 18:21-35 Sunday, September 14, 2014 Forgiveness... Great word... Great concept... We believe in it... and we love it. But the real question will always be... do we LIVE it? You may have heard the story of the man who professed to love dogs... Avid supporter of SPCA... regularly speaking to civic groups about Animal advocacy... He was known far and wide as a dog lover. But then, one day, just after pouring a concrete sidewalk from his house out to the street, just as he smoothed out the last square foot of cement... a curious dog walked right across his fresh concrete, leaving footprints in his wake. Muttering something under his breath, he smoothed out the footprints. He then went inside, and after coming out with some twine, so he could rope off and protect his fresh sidewalk from anything getting into it... he discovered that this dog, while he was inside getting the twine, had made tracks in two directions on his new sidewalk. Again disgruntled, he smoothed-out the unwanted paw-prints and put up the twine.
2 About five minutes later, he looked out from his house and noticed that the dog was back, this time, stepping in all different directions in his fresh sidewalk. The man, angrily ran out of the house to scare off the dog, and, once again, smoothed out the fresh concrete. But no sooner was he back to his front porch that the dog come back over and sat right in the middle of his fresh sidewalk. The man had it! He went inside, got his gun, came out and shot at the dog to, hopefully, scare it away from ever coming back. The man s neighbor witnessing this scene, rushed over, and said, Hey man, what s up?... I thought you loved dogs?! The man responded: I do... I do love dogs. But that's in the abstract... I hate dogs in the concrete! You re right, you re right... awful story... I ask for your forgiveness in telling you that corny joke... will you please forgive me? But I wonder if that story says something about our forgiveness. How we love it in the abstract, but when we really have something or someone to forgive... how we hate it in the concrete. <P> I remember a person comparing the concept of forgiveness to having a brand new Cadillac. He said that you open the door, get inside and look around at the luxury of the interior.
3 You turn on the CD player and the eleven speakers pour forth music that sounds like you re on the front row at a concert. You start the engine, move out of your driveway, and as you put the car into drive and press the accelerator... this beautiful, brand new car begins to take off... but then sputters, and finally stops in front of the neighbor's house blocking his driveway. You look around the console to see what the onboard computer has to say... And after punching some buttons, it simply reads that YOU RE OUT OF GAS! There you are, sitting in the driver's seat of a perfectly good car... and you can t go anywhere. And not only that... but you re blocking someone else's ability to go somewhere. People are walking by and looking at you wondering what kind of person would get this kind of vehicle but fail to give it what it needs to make it go? So there you are... stuck... looking good in this fine Cadillac but going nowhere... just sitting there... blocking the way. And the same is true for the Church... because the fuel that drives the Church that Jesus established... is forgiveness. There s no Gospel without forgiveness... There is no relationship with God without forgiveness... And there s no relationship with each other... without forgiveness.
4 And of all the places where forgiveness should flow freely... it is in and through the Church... the Body of Christ. And so the real question we must always ask ourselves as Christians is... how are we doing in expressing and seeking forgiveness? Is the Church known as a forgiving place? To see true real-life stories for why Millennials (those in their 20-30 s) have left the Institution of the Church, you can read more at: http://redemptionpictures.com/2013/08/01/why-we-left-the-church/ Do we really want God to forgive us of our sins as we say in the Lord s Prayer... as we forgive those who have sinned against us? <P> I know I ve spoken on this topic before, and even this text before, but that s because the reality of FORGIVENESS is such a VITAL aspect of our ability to be who and what God calls us to be. In our scripture text this morning, I think we get the impression that Peter was genuinely trying to be generous in his quest for guidance about forgiveness, when he said, Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times? And before we move too far from this... let s be honest, seven times?... That s a lot of times to forgive someone! Isn t it? I doubt that many of us have had to forgive someone who s sinned against us ~ SEVEN TIMES!
5 After-all, isn t our national motto: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me! I mean... after three or four times, I doubt that we d want to get anywhere NEAR the person! Even rabbinical law, in Jesus day, taught that three times was sufficient. So, here we have ole Pete not only doubling that number, but then adding one for good measure! But Jesus says, I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven! Or seventy-seven times as other translations render it. Either way... suffice it to say... Jesus was stressing that there is NO LIMIT to forgiveness. <p> And then comes this strange story about the king and his slave. And how the slave owes the king an incredible amount of money... By way of information, the annual tax revenues that King Herod collected were about 900 talents, so the 10,000 talents would have been the amount he would owe for more than eleven years! But the king forgives the debt, just writes it off when the slave pleads for mercy. But then the slave confronts a person who owes him the equivalent of $16 bucks, and ignoring his request for mercy, has the man thrown in jail.
6 Of course the rest of the slaves can t believe what s happened, so they tattle-tale to the king, and the result, as we all know, it isn t pretty. <p> The point? A forgiving spirit is crucial to life together... and especially our life together as the church... If you ll recall, it was Jesus hypothetical sin of a member of the church, from last week s scripture lesson in Matthew 18:15, that prompted Peter's question. And that s because forgiveness is at the heart of the Christian message. And the reason it is, is because forgiveness is FREEING, and God desires that we not be in bondage in any way... That we not be enslaved to anything or anyone. And if we re unforgiving, then we re the one that s being held in captivity. Christian Author, Lewis Smedes, once had the greatest quote related to forgiveness when he said: To forgive is to set a prisoner free... and only to finally discover that the PRISONER WAS YOU! <P> I m reminded about the story of a man by the name of Ron Cotton. Ron went to prison in 1984 for two rapes he didn t commit. Sentenced to life plus 54 years, Ron was angry at police, prosecutors, his own lawyers and even the victims.
But after three years in prison, he began to change. 7 He said, I learned that I couldn't continue to live with the hatred and the bitterness. He spent nearly 11 years in prison before a new lawyer, using DNA evidence, won his release. Ron realized the FREEDOM that s in FORGIVENESS. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyid=101469307 <p> But that s hard, isn t it? It s easy in the abstract... but hard when it happens to us and we re the ones called to forgive. Unfortunately, the stories of real or imagined hurts in churches could fill libraries. Someone gets upset because they weren t recognized for bringing a package of napkins to the church dinner. Someone else is angry that this or that person failed to say Hello. Another is mad because no one came to see them in the hospital (despite the fact that no one bothered to let the church know that they were there). Someone gets upset that they re always being asked to help... while another s angry because they re never asked... and the list goes on and on. Even my feelings get hurt! And that s because the Church can be a tough place... But for what it s worth... this isn t new... Even in the earliest days, church folk had their problems.
8 No doubt that s what prompted Paul to write to the Romans telling them to stop quarreling with one another and criticizing each other's way of observing the faith. Saying, You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. 2 Now we know that God s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. 3 So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God s judgment? 6 God will repay each person according to what they have done. Rom 2 I wish the church had taken his advice, but it s over 2,000 years later, and the record isn t pretty, is it? And if we can t do it here, in the Church, how will we ever expect to extend forgiveness out there? <P> We would do well to learn from the children s Sunday school class in which the teacher asked her students to write a one-sentence definition of forgiveness. And the teacher said that one response has stuck with her over the years, when one young boy said that Forgiveness is like meeting someone for the first time. She asked the young boy what he meant by that, and he replied, Well... if you meet someone for the first time, there /s nothing they could ve done or not done to make you mad.
9 So... he said, forgiveness is like meeting someone for the very first time. <P> I ll never forget the story of Chris Carrier... some of you may have seen Chris and heard his story... he was on several talk shows like Oprah, Sally Jesse Raphael, and he was one of Tom Brokaw's final stories. On Dec. 20, 1974, Chris Carrier was an excited fifth-grade boy. He had been released at noon for the Christmas holidays. Even these few days before Christmas, the Coral Gables, Fla., sunshine had warmed things up enough that he was carrying his blue windbreaker. The school bus had dropped him at the corner, and he approached his house in the middle of the block as carefree as any child could be. He looked up to see a man approaching him. The man was smiling and seemed very friendly as he said, You must be Hugh Carrier's boy; you look just like him. Carrier remembers feeling proud that the man could see the resemblance to his father, and as they talked, the man referred to his mother by her nickname used only by family and friends. He told me he was giving a party for my father and asked if I wanted to help him decorate, Carrier recalled. He walked with the man to a nearby youth center where his motor
10 home was parked, and they began traveling north out of Miami into a rural area. When the boy was finally found, he had been burned with cigarettes, been stabbed numerous times with an ice pick, and shot in the head. The bullet went in behind the left eye and exited out the right side through Carrier's forehead, severing the optic nerve of the left eye. He was left in a rural part of Coral Gables, Florida, for dead. Miraculously, 6 days later, he came to. And the only permanent physical damage, was blindness in his left eye. He recalled, I thought I had fallen asleep for a short nap and I had better get out by the road because my dad was going to be there soon to pick me up." And so there he was, in that remote area, a place he might ve sat on the rock next to the road for days before anyone came by, but a man on a hunting trip with his two children soon came by in his pickup truck. There he sees this little boy with two black eyes, bloody clothes, and disoriented... just sitting by the road. He took me to his hunting trailer and fed me some soup and called the sheriff's office, Carrier said.
11 A few weeks later, a police sketch artist was called in and drew a man's face from Carrier's description. Immediately his father and uncle identified the man as someone they had hired to care for a great-uncle who had suffered a stroke. They had fired the man six months earlier. Police went to David McAllister's home and found a motor home and a gun of the caliber used to shoot Carrier. But forensics of that era were unable to give police the evidence necessary for a conviction, and Carrier wasn t able to make a positive identification. Police were certain McAllister was the person who committed these atrocities, but they lacked the evidence to take him to trial. But here s the amazing ending to this story... as 22 years after the kidnapping, David McAllister, now 77-years-old, blind and dying in a nursing home confessed to the crime. Chris Carrier, now a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, had the opportunity to meet his abductor. Chris said, I told him that I forgave him and all there was between us now was a newfound friendship... and I also told him that I had a relationship with Jesus Christ and that I wanted our friendship to extend beyond this life. After they built their friendship... Carrier introduced his abductor, the man who stabbed and shot him, and left him for dead in the country... to Jesus Christ.
And three weeks later, Mr. McAllister died. 12 I can t explain with adequate words the change in that man who had been a prisoner to his memories, Carrier said. Chris says, I became a Christian when I was 13. That night was the first night I was able to sleep through the night, without waking up from my nightmares. He says, it would be selfish not to share that same peace with David McAllister." <P> http://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/06/us/forgiven-and-befriendedby-victim-attacker-dies.html All this was made possible because Chris Carrier realized something that s extremely important about forgiveness, which is, that there IS freedom in forgiveness... and the prisoner that is set free... is not just the person who has wronged us... it s us... those who are holding onto that bitterness. This is why Christian recording artist, Matthew West s song: Forgiveness is so powerful. To listen to this song please go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1lu5udxezi Jesus knew that... and He taught it to His disciples, not only in our scripture text, but even in those last awful moments, hanging on a cross to die... when He said, Father, forgive them... Is there someone you need to forgive? Is there someone you need to meet again for the very first time? Is there someone or something that YOU RE allowing to HOLD YOU IN CAPTIVITY?
13 I can t encourage you enough... to extend... or to seek... their forgiveness today. Believe me... this isn t EASY... it sometimes means we are called upon to forgive what we would consider the unforgiveable... but that s the place where we re called upon to allow Him, who is Forgiveness, Christ Jesus Himself, to forgive... through us. This isn t pie-in-the-sky Christianity... This is down-to-earth practical stuff... and this is how we live God's kingdom, here, on earth. Forgiveness makes us different... forgiveness truly makes us free to BE who and what God created us to be, in Christ Jesus! Let us pray. This prayer was written by an unknown prisoner at Ravensbrueck concentration camp and left by the body of a dead child. O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will, but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us; remember the fruits we have bought, thanks to this suffering -- our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all of this, and when they come to judgment let all the fruits which we have borne be their forgiveness. This comes from The Oxford Book of Prayer (George Appleton, general editor) In the name of Jesus. Amen! Hymn of Invitation: I am Praying for You No. 431 (1 & 4)