February 23, 2014 Matthew 18:15-18 Acts 5:27-32 Luke 17:1-4 THE PROCESS OF FORGIVENESS The concept of forgiveness is truly huge in the Christian Life. Once tuned to the topic, we realize that New Testament passages about forgiveness are scattered all through the text. It s kind of like getting interested in the birds. We all know they are there; we see them flitting about and hear them singing sometimes for years. Then one day we begin to pay real attention, and a whole new world opens up before us. The birds are everywhere, they are beautiful and different, and they do not all sing the same song. We wonder how it was possible that we didn t notice it more before. After all, Jesus did say to us, Consider the birds. But why is forgiveness so important in the Christian Life? It s obvious when we stop to consider it. We are not perfect creatures. We are not very used to Life yet. We are not whole or patient or wise. We are not yet fit for the Kingdom, even though we are invited into it. So we make mistakes, hurt each other, do things we are sorry for. And sometimes we still find ourselves far away from the goals and purposes and desires that are genuine. So the truth is simple: forgiveness is about getting back into a better relationship going back to love. Well of course! We all knew that. Of course forgiveness is fundamental and foundational to our New Life in Christ Jesus. No wonder Jesus was so adamant and insistent about forgiveness. Come to think of it, Jesus wasn t just talking about it. He was doing forgiveness, even with His twelve disciples, and all the time. There was no other choice for Him either, if He wanted to go on with His mission, and if He wanted to go on with His relationships with these twelve. How many times in the New Testament narratives do we see Jesus forgiving His disciples? I start to count but get lost because it is constant and continual. His best friends mishear Him, misunderstand Him, quarrel among themselves, and want to call down fire on the opposition. They argue about which one of them is greatest and which one will be in the seat of honor in the Kingdom. Get thee behind me Satan is said to Peter, not to some enemy or stranger! And there is The Last Supper, and then The Last Breakfast. Forgiveness is a major part of the unfolding story of Jesus and His disciples all through the Gospels. And what s more, BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2014 All rights reserved. PAGE 1 OF 8
everything we just mentioned is being reenacted on some level in every Christian church across the land, all the time. The followers of Jesus are still arguing, quarreling, getting focused on the wrong goals and purposes, and wanting to call down fire on those who don t agree with them. And if at any point along the way over the past two thousand years Jesus had stopped forgiving us, the entire Christian affair would have been instantly lost. I consider this to be overt and obvious. What is not so obvious what is rather subtle but still devastating is our constant tendency to overlegalize everything: to turn grace back into rules and laws; to turn principles into logical steps and precepts that we can feel certain and safe about. In short, we want forgiveness to be a formula we can apply so we won t have to pray about our relationships anymore. If we pray about other people and our relationships with them, the Spirit still has some chance to influence us, and them. If we get everything into rules and formulas, then we are back in control back to running things our way. That is ever so much easier, at least on the surface at least at first. While it may be true that the modern liberal church never forgives anybody because it is afraid to say that anybody is ever bad or wrong, it is nevertheless clear in our structures and creeds that the church did develop clear ideas and practices about the process of forgiveness. You feel remorse; you go to confession; you receive absolution; amends are set; and, properly cleansed and forgiven, you go back to life until the next time everything gets ruined. All very logical and proper and wooden, and sometimes even helpful. Except on this level, forgiveness rarely accomplishes its real purpose. Too often it does not return people to lives of genuine relationship and love. I think it can be helpful for us to know the steps and structures and to understand the logic of the processes of forgiveness. But knowing them frequently does not help the heart; it does not bring true forgiveness: the full restoration of our relationships. So once again we switch from Law to Gospel from rules to grace. That means we go back to prayer: We bring our real situations, our wounds, our caring, our doubts and fears into the presence of the Holy Spirit. And once willing to listen and obey, we ask for the Spirit s guidance in each situation as we are living it. We take our relationships into the presence of the Spirit and ask what we are supposed to do with them. Often that means we don t get exonerated by the church; nobody sees that we did the process BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2014 All rights reserved. PAGE 2 OF 8
right or congratulates us for being good. Sometimes we don t forgive people when everybody around us thinks we should; sometimes we forgive people and regret it. And only the Spirit whispers, Thanks. You did what I asked. And it will turn out fine, just not quite yet. Be patient a little longer. We do not follow Jesus for any of the motives or reasons that this world understands. It does not always make us look good. It does not always succeed according to this world s measuring rods. It does not always fail either. It is a New Life, a different WAY. We go on here just like we belong here, trying to look normal. But we belong to a different King, and we are citizens of a different Kingdom. At any moment, in any circumstance, we may suddenly feel called into choices and purposes that cannot be explained here, except perhaps to a few others who are walking the New WAY themselves. The truth is, forgiveness is about going on with our relationships whenever possible. Forgiveness is about living in the Way of Love to which we are called and invited. As we all know, and sometimes remember, He loved us first. That s not something we ever get over. It is not something we ever forget. So I have a few comments for your consideration. You may not think they are connected at first. We shall see. FIRST COMMENT: Everything that is authentic in Christendom is about relationship. Of course! How can we be part of a religion about LOVE and not know that the primary considerations and principles are always about relationship. The first and most important relationship is the one between you and God. Never mind your neighbor for the moment. We will always come to that God will insist; God wants the children to love each other. But first things first. If we ourselves are not reconciled to God, the chance of our loving a neighbor in any genuine or authentic way is zero. Some of you were perplexed at first because of the claim that only God can forgive sins against thee and thee only have I sinned, O Lord but then Jesus insists that we forgive others as God forgives us. A logical inconsistency on the surface. But being reborn, we start to see everything differently. It is not our forgiveness: it is not our life; it is not our love. We have a Creator. Life and love and forgiveness and grace all come to us as gifts from God. We do get to participate; we have some choices about BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2014 All rights reserved. PAGE 3 OF 8
how to use the gifts we are given. But none of it, strictly speaking, is ours. That is one of the big surprises of spiritual awakening. SECOND COMMENT: Satan s first and primary purpose is to disrupt and, if possible, to destroy relationships. It doesn t matter where, between whom, or who belongs to which country, company, political purpose, religion, or church. Satan knows what truly threatens his purposes, and he will go after any relationship anywhere, of any kind if he thinks he can disrupt or destroy it. And every time he weakens or wrecks a relationship, he is winning. Every failed relationship weakens the influence of love in the world. Every failed relationship weakens the trust we have in love... for everyone. If you fall in love in any way, with anybody you invite satanic attack. We need to look around and wake up. What is the divorce rate? All over the world, young couples are sincerely falling in love. Not all of them, of course, but great numbers of them. They want to have a good life together. They care about each other. They would do almost anything for each other, in the beginning. But a few years later, what has happened? Did they suddenly lose their IQ? Did they forget why they came together? How can we explain the mayhem? Are the trials of relationship only for the careless few? Satan works constantly to create suspicion and misunderstanding to cloud judgment and bring fear and insecurity into what started out as a wonderful, almost magical lovebond. Why does Satan love lies and lust and adultery and anger and fear and suspicion and jealousy? Simple: such things break relationships. But don t worry, we never catch on. Generation after generation wrestles with the same old problems, but we never seem to catch on to the real drama or awaken to the real plot. If you have a genuine friendship with someone who is Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or from a different race or sexual orientation, do you expect a satanic attack? Relax! Satan won t care. Satan likes understanding and genuine caring and affection. Is that what we think? Besides, anything we cannot see doesn t really exist, right? Yet we can see the results of Satan s efforts everywhere, all around us and all the time. When do we wake up? THIRD COMMENT: Lots of times I don t want to enter any formal or acknowledged process of forgiveness. The only reason I would consider forgiving someone is because I care about them, or at least I used to care about them. I don t want to lose them. I m not interested in Brownie points BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2014 All rights reserved. PAGE 4 OF 8
or playing saintliness games. The person is important to me and I don t want to lose them. But if we get focused on the process of forgiveness if we start going through the steps and the order in which they are supposed to be taken instead of focusing on forgiveness itself, it s easy to get so tangled up in verbiage and so mesmerized by who is doing which part of the process and how well, that we forget what it is all about in the first place. Whenever we get focused on the rules (the Law), we are heading into bureaucracy, not relationship. Is my wife really repentant for her last mistake? Did she complete the amend she promised? Will she ever make that mistake and hurt my feelings again? Yikes! Why would I want to get legal instead of graceful with my own wife? Whatever happened to for better or for worse? And why would I want any close relationship any true friendship bond to get fixated on the mistakes? Oh yes indeed, if we hit big issues that are threatening the relationship itself, then forgiveness is our only hope, and it needs to come out in the open and do its work where we both know it and claim it and feel its power to restore and to heal. But in the daily round and for the little wear-and-tear of life, there is a better principle: Cut each other a lot of slack. You don t have to be perfect to please me. It s important not to forget where we are, and so we expect a lot of flaws, we expect not to be totally adored all the time, we expect a few scrapes and bruises in the course of a normal day. And if I notice some of your shortcomings, I probably don t have to bring it up as if you have never noticed them yourself. You suffer over it more than I do, and you are trying to grow as fast as you know how. So I can get back to dealing with my own shortcomings, and I hope you will not bring them up too often either. Our shortcomings are not as easy to fix as we sometimes assume. Only when we are thinking about the shortcomings of others do they seem simple or easy to deal with. Harping on such things usually makes it worse. Focusing on the process of forgiveness frequently sidetracks us from real forgiveness. FOURTH COMMENT: Where there is life, there is always garbage. I was in Istanbul a few years ago when the garbage collectors went on strike. Even the first day was unpleasant. By the third day, large piles of stinking debris sat on every street corner, threatening to spill over into the traffic. It wasn t hard to realize that if this went on for a week or more, the whole city would come to a horrible and very smelly halt. BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2014 All rights reserved. PAGE 5 OF 8
We don t often think about it, but civilization (people living in proximity to each other) requires a good sewage system and some way to deal with all the trash. It doesn t mean that anybody is doing something wrong. You can make a moral issue out of recycling, and life does get more complicated all the time. But the fact is, there is no way to be alive without making garbage. And if nobody ever takes out the garbage, life very quickly becomes unbearable. When I was in high school, our family visited Mesa Verde for the first time. It was enthralling. At the evening program one night around the bonfire, we asked the Park Ranger why the site had been abandoned. It seemed like such a perfect spot in so many ways, it was so defensible, and so much work had gone into building things in all the caves. Why would people ever leave such a spot? Did the food run out? Could they no longer farm the fields? What happened? The Ranger said nobody knew for sure, but their best guess was that the trash had become unmanageable. The whole city threw its refuse down the bank from the main level of the cave dwellings. It was a long, steep drop, but after enough years the pile was so big and it smelled so bad that they finally couldn t stand it anymore. So they packed up and left. But wherever they went, it was probably far less desirable than Mesa Verde had been in its early days. So they lost their wondrous home indeed, one of the choice archaeological sites on the continent because they couldn t figure out how to deal with their garbage. Can we feel a sermon in that somewhere? There is more than one kind of garbage in this world. But if we let it build up and never clear it away, life becomes unbearable. Sometimes we move to places far less desirable just to get away from the trash. But no matter where we go, the garbage will build up again, unless we learn how to clear it away. Forgiveness is the way we take out the trash that accumulates in relationships. So there are still some steps some parts of the process of forgiveness that can keep our relationships clean and healthy. We don t have to go wooden or legalistic about them, but we need to know them and use them. When was the last time you said I am really sorry to a person you care about and spend considerable time with? Some of us don t like to say we are sorry; it hurts so much to realize that we have done something careless or wrong again! We try to hope that if it goes unmentioned, it will soon be forgotten. But if you rarely say I am sorry to the people BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2014 All rights reserved. PAGE 6 OF 8
you love, you are in denial. This is a broken world, and we don t go for very many days without hurting those we care about. If somebody does say I am sorry, do you say back to them I forgive you? They need to hear it if they really are sorry. They need to know that you still love them, that they are okay with you again, that the relationship is restored to fullness again. And I do hope and suggest that none of us should ever say I forgive you not ever again unless we really mean it: unless we mean that this person is fully restored to the place in our minds and hearts that they were in before the damage was done. By the way, you are not restoring them to the place of God or of Jesus, just to the place they were in before the damage was done. All relationships still have lots of room to grow and develop. That s part of the fun. Finally, if you say to a person I am sorry, please know what it is that you are sorry for. And if you are serious, then you need and want to set an amend. You think about what that amend might be, and then you say to the other person: I want you to know that I am serious. This is the amend that has come to my mind. If I make this amend, will that let you know that I really am sorry, and that I really am trying to learn from this mistake, and that I truly want things to be better between us? If they agree to the amend, make sure you come through in performing it, whatever it is. If they do not agree to the amend but suggest a different one that makes sense to you that is, it is not punitive but corrective then agree to the new amend and perform what it asks. If the amend they suggest seems really out of line that is, not appropriate to the offense in most cases you should simply say: I withdraw my apology. There is more wrong between us than I realized. I think we both need to pray about this a little longer. Then get patient and watchful. And wait for the Spirit s next suggestion. By the way, do you ever make amends with Jesus? Among other things, every time I get into a forgiveness situation coming or going I end up with great appreciation and great gratitude for the love I keep receiving from Jesus. But that never means I am not sorry for my Sin, or for my sins. They are never okay with me. BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2014 All rights reserved. PAGE 7 OF 8
Finally, I think we all need to realize and admit to ourselves that RELATIONSHIP IS ALWAYS A RISK. All true relationship is dynamic. It is alive, so it moves in ways we cannot predict. It often moves in ways that surprise us, and in ways we cannot always keep up with. And if it is a relationship with the Holy Spirit of our Risen Lord, you can put a little ten beside that: it is carried to the tenth power. Or even better, if you know how, make the mark for infinity. BRUCE VAN BLAIR 2014 All rights reserved. PAGE 8 OF 8