A Lenten Sermon on Forgiveness and Reconciliation

18 March 2007

 

“If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:17-18)

The themes of reconciliation and forgiveness are central to today’s readings, but more than that, they are central to our understanding, as Episcopalians, of what the mission of the church as God’s people is all about.

Near the back of the Prayer book, on page 855, the mission of the church and the ministry of the people of the church are defined in this way: The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ…(and) the Church pursues its mission as it (1) prays and worships, (2) as it proclaims the Gospel, and (3) as it promotes justice, peace and love.

And then the catechism goes on to note that the particular ministry of the laity is to “carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation.”

So today’s gospel is intended for you, as it describes the sometimes long and painful work of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Today’s parable, of course, does not stand alone.  It is actually the third story, following the shorter parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, all three of which point to the joy that we can experience    and the rejoicing by God, when the lost is finally found, when the divided and separated are now reconciled.  But in this last story, it is the pain and the difficulty of true reconciliation that is highlighted.

 

As Bishop Theuner told those of you who were here last week, I spent eight days attending an international conference in South Africa on “Prophetic Witness, Social Development, and HIV and AIDS.”

South Africa, for several centuries, has characterized by war, slavery, and racism, by dispossession, oppression and injustice, by violence, hatred exploitation and conflict.  But finally, the sun dawned.   The release from prison and the election as President of Nelson Mandela in 1994 was the turning point in their long journey as a nation.

One of the speakers as our conference, Michael Lapsley, a white South African priest, said that at that moment, his nation faced two giant tasks, or put another way, the people of South Africa were given two very large questions.

“The first was “How would we deal with the legacy of the past - the need to provide water and electricity, education and health care to all our people, the majority of whom had been denied basic rights for centuries?” That question deals with the Millennium Development Goals, the subject of our gathering in Johannesburg.

 The second question was how would they deal with the past?”  How would they more forward from the past? And the answer was found in work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a lengthy and painful experience that gave many thousands of people the opportunity to tell their stories and to have their pain acknowledged.  

Lapsley quoted another South African cleric who said, “The time has come to forgive and forget.”   But he replied, “Why do you say that?”  The man said, “Because the Bible says so.”  Lapsley then said, “Please show me the verse.”  That man, he went on, is still there at his home searching the pages of the Bible looking for the verse. 

The Bible nowhere says “forgive and forget,” but instead calls for remembrance and reconciliation, the kind of forgiveness that is not without considerable effort or pain.

 

The first half of Jesus parable of the Prodigal Son is not unlike the two stories preceding it, describing how the son became lost (and then found himself) and the rejoicing of the father when the one presumed dead and permanently lost is welcomed home again.

The real, hard work of the parable begins with the entrance of the elder son, the one we might call the faithful, stay-at-home son.  That son would, I think agree, with the person who has titled this “the Parable of the Prodigal Father,” for not only did the Prodigal Son waste his inheritance, it was clearly neither just, nor right, for the Prodigal Father to lavish such a feast on this wasteful younger son.

The presence of the elder brother, the-stay-at-home son, is a reminder that the good-for-nothing son deserved punishment for the financial and emotional damage done to the family. But with his appearance, the story, which had been a life and death situation for the younger brother, now becomes a life and death situation for the faithful, older brother.  And just as the Prodigal had to “come to himself” and give up his image of the independent, self-reliant, self-made man, now the older brother, if he is to return to the family, is faced with the decision to give up his desire for justice and punishment and engage in the painful work of forgiveness and reconciliation. 

The work of forgiveness is usually more about us than it is about the other.

 

Let me share with you something of my time in Johannesburg this past week. 

Last Sunday morning, I began the day by having breakfast with the Anglican Bishop of Northern Uganda, whose diocese of 2,400 people was at the center of a brutal warfare between the Ugandan government and a rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army.  Ninety-five percent of his diocese now lives in refugee camps, but this bishop found a way to personally meet with the rebel leader, a man who kidnapped children for use as child soldiers and forced brides for his rebel forces.  Despite all the evil that the rebel, Joseph Kony, had done, Bishop Onono sought him out, and brokered an end to a twenty year war that is estimated to have cost 300,000 civilian deaths.  And now in that country, the difficult business of reconciliation can begin.

 

After breakfast, on our way to church that morning, I sat on the bus with a bishop from northern Japan, Nathaniel Uematsu, who the Primate of the Nippon Sei Ko Kai, the Anglican Church of Japan.   

As we shared stories of our past, he told me about coming to the United States after college to study audiology in Oklahoma, leaving his fiancée in Japan, waiting four years for him.  All this happened before he decided to study for the priesthood.  As a layman, Nathaniel joined an Oklahoma Episcopal Church, where he was welcomed by most.  However, the Senior Warden, a man named Bob, could not seem warm up to him.  For almost three years, they had a very tense kind relationship, because Bob had been a pilot in the American Air Force and was shot down over Japan in World War II.  There he had spent a difficult year and a half, nearly starved and regularly tortured in a Japanese concentration camp. 

Nevertheless, when Nathaniel’s studies were coming to an end and he brought his fiancée to the US to get married, Bob came to him to ask if her parents were coming for the wedding. When Nathaniel said ‘No,”  Bob asked it he could walk her down the aisle.  A bit confused, Nathaniel suggested that Bob talk to the rector.  Later, the rector reported back that Bob was serious, and indeed he did as he offered.

At the wedding, Bob, the former Air Force pilot, cried, and afterwards he said to Nathaniel, “Thank you.  I am finally free.”  Confronted every Sunday in church by the constant reminder of the evil that had been done to him so many years before, an experience for which no one had ever apologized, Bob was finally able to set the past aide and move on with his life.  As he said, “I am finally free.”

Giving forgiveness, you see, is often more about us than the other.

 

The man I quoted earlier, Fr. Lapsley, knows that all too well.  Michael Lapsley, I neglected to tell you, has no hands. Both of his hands were blown off by a letter bomb sent to him by some South Africans in 1990 because of his work to resist the evil of apartheid.  Michael has only one eye, and his hearing is severely compromised.  But he runs an institute for the healing of memories, a ministry that gives people the means to free themselves from the injustices that have been done to them.

Describing his work he said, “As I travel around the world, listening to the pain of the human family, people often say to me, ‘I would love to forget what happened, but I cannot.’   Indeed, he says, this is true of both perpetrators and victims.”

“Can we forget what happened?  As Christians are we supposed to forget?  No, as Christians, Moslems, and Jews, we, the children of Abraham, belong to the three great remembering religions. In the Hebrew Scriptures, whenever the Jewish people were misbehaving, the prophets would say:  Remember when you were slaves in Egypt.  Remember the God who walked with you, who talked with you. In the New Testament, Jesus says “Take, eat, this is  my body, this is my blood – do this in memory of me.” And we have done so for more than two thousand years.

Sometimes, even though we might have mainly been the victim, we need to travel the lengthy and painful journey of memory and forgiveness - for our own sake - as a form of healthy selfishness, in order to let go, so we too can be free, free to become wounded healers.”

 

Fr. Lapsley’s work in the institute for healing of memories, involves listening to the pain of the people of South Africa and providing spaces where human beings can begin to acknowledge what has happened to them, have it heard, reverenced, recognized, and then begin to let go of that in the past which would destroy them, and take from the past that which is life-giving.  That’s a painful task; that’s a long journey, both for nations and for individuals.  But it is necessary, if we are not to be left standing outside, unable to return to the family.

 

You and I, of course, are not just the Elder Brother of Jesus’ story.  We are also the Prodigal Son, and we are the Prodigal Father.  And we all stand in need of forgiveness. We all need to rejoice when the one who has offended us finally comes home.  And while we remember, we all need to let loose of past hurts - in order to discover the freedom of being wounded healers, bearers of the good news and ministers of reconciliation.

 

“If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! 

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself… and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.”      

Amen.

“Keep in Touch” A Sermon about Prayer

Wolfeboro October 21, 2007

 

I don’t think I’ll ever forget that morning. 

It was early, and Lynn and I were in Rome with our three adult children, being driven on a back street near the Vatican.  We entered through a side door away from the crowds already lined up, waiting for the first tour of the day.  We were escorted through some deserted hallways and then were invited to pass through a large door. 

Suddenly we were standing in the Sistine Chapel, the Pope’s private chapel, the place where cardinals gather to elect the pontiff.

For the next ten minutes we were almost the only people in the room, a beautiful space with marble tiled floor, a building about the same width and only a little longer than this church.

For those at ease with the internet, you can have almost the same experience, taking a virtual tour on line, scanning the room with no one else there.  At first your eyes are drawn to the massive dark blue painting of the last judgment, filling the entire wall behind the simple altar, opposite from where we entered.  But quickly our eyes shifted to the ceiling, to Michelangelo’s frescos and the one in the center: “The Creation of Adam.”

I think all of you can visualize it.  It is one of the most famous and most appreciated images in the world.   On the right is God, depicted as an elderly bearded man, floating in a swirling cloak that also holds numerous cherubim.

Adam, on the left, is leaning back on solid ground, muscular but without much life, seemingly strong, yet looking almost longingly to God.  Adam’s left arm rests on his knee, but is extended toward God, the hand almost limp.

And God’s right arm is powerfully stretched out toward Adam, with God’s index finger almost touching that of the first human. The characters are almost mirror images of each other, symbolizing Genesis’ statement that Adam was created in the ‘image of God.’  And we can see that almost infinitesimal space between the fingers, caught just at the moment when God would impart to Adam the spark, the breath, of life.

 

I wanted to recall that image for you, not for the beauty of that art treasure or for the implicit message that we all were created in the image of a creating God, and somehow given the means to be caring, compassionate and creative ourselves.

No, I bring it up because last week I was reminded by Thomas Troeger at our clergy conference of another version of that painting.  It’s a poster with exactly the same scene, perfectly reproduced, God’s and Adam’s fingers still almost touching.   But in this version, there is one of those cartoon bubbles   coming out of God’s mouth, and from it we can read what God is saying……

“Keep in touch.”   Keep in touch.

 

At first we laugh at that.  But as I think about it, keeping in touch is exactly what people need, what I need, most of the time.  It’s what the couple, sitting in my office, describing their anger toward one another, have lost.  It is what the mother, whose child has died, desperately longs for, some connection, some sign that her daughter is somehow all right. It is what each and every one of us needs at those moments when we feel anger, separation, or the sense of being lost.  

            Keep in touch.

However, contrary to our usual perception, the truth is that we can’t be out of touch with God.   As the 121^st Psalm reminds us today:

§         “The Lord shall watch over your going out and your coming in, from this time forth and for evermore.”

Or as we read in the 139^th Psalm:

§          “Whither shall I go then from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I go from thy presence? 

§         If I climb up into heaven, thou art there; if I go down to hell, thou art there also.

§         If I take the wings of the morning and remain in the uttermost part of the sea; Even there also shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.”

But yet that doesn’t seem to match our experience.  No, more often than not, we feel alone, we feel abandoned, cut off from God, if God is really there at all.   

 

And so we come to the words of today’s gospel, when Jesus, as Luke reminds us, told his disciples a parable about their need to pray and not lose heart.

Having said this, having reminded those first followers of their need to pray and not lose heart, then, and only then, does Jesus begin the parable.  “In a certain city there was a judge…”

I love this little parable, for with just a few words, Jesus has described the situation so well that we can immediately feel the insensitivity of the unjust judge, and we can sense the plight of the woman, even though we never learn the nature of her complaint.  

The judge, Jesus says, neither feared God, nor regarded human opinion.  But he was up against a widow who kept wearing him down with her constant demands for vindication.

Widows in scripture, as they often are today, epitomize those with neither wealth nor influence.  They symbolize all who are poor and defenseless.  In Ecclesiasticus, we read that the Lord “will not ignore the supplication of the fatherless, nor the widow when she pours out her story.” (Eccl. 35:14)

The judge in Jesus’ story hardly seems so receptive.    He was probably one of those municipal authorities, appointed by Herod or the Romans.  Those small town, so-called judges, were frequently ignorant and arbitrary, hardly the ones from whom you should expect fair treatment or justice.

But this widow, without clout, without the help of any man, is nevertheless undaunted.  She keeps on coming and coming and coming.  She badgers the judge every day, day after day.  Yet despite her persistence, the judge also perseveres in his stubbornness, refusing to accede to her request.

Finally, in Jesus’ story, persistence pays off.  Because of her constant asking, due to her continually coming, rather than the justice of her complaint, the unjust judge finally agrees to her request.  Like drops of rain falling on the surface of a stone, she has gotten under the surface, cracked open the situation, and gotten in.

And, in case we have forgotten the meaning of the tale (the necessity for our persistence in prayer) Luke quotes Jesus as asking, “And will not God grant justice to his chosen who cry to him day and night?”

 

But wait a minute. 

What if that’s not what Jesus meant when he first told this story, decades before it was collected and put in the Gospel of Luke?

Verna Dozier, a saintly Episcopalian and wise teacher of the Bible, used to say, “Pay attention to the first person mentioned in a parable.  That’s the one the story is usually about.  That’s often the one who will teach us about the kingdom of God.”

Jesus’ parable began, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.”

What if it is the unjust judge, not the nagging widow, that we’re meant to give attention to?

 

Parables, I’ve heard it said, are really mirrors, mirrors with which we are invited to view ourselves.     What would the story mean if we were asked to see ourselves  as that insensitive judge?   What if the widow represents not us, but the Kingdom of God, the grace of a loving God who watches over us night and day?  What would it mean if Jesus were saying that the grace of God constantly bangs on our door, morning, noon, and night?   What if the widow stands for God, continually pleading for us to do justice, to seek reconciliation, to be actively compassionate?

 

I find it hard to believe that Jesus told this story just to say, ‘Oh, God’s not like that uncaring man, but nevertheless, you ought to be as persistent in your prayers - just as she was in her nagging.’

No, it seems to me that God is more like the divine widow, pounding on the door of our hearts, day after day, night after night, pleading with us to “keep in touch.”  And we, like the almost deaf judge, barely seem to hear, let alone respond, until one day we cannot stand the continual bombardment of grace any longer and finally say, Oh, OK God. I give up.  Help me to accept your grace and begin to let your image live through me.

 

I have a feeling that this is what the strange wrestling match is all about in our first lesson.  Jacob cheated his brother Esau.  He fled from his homeland, and now, years later, his brother (along with an army) is coming to meet him.
            Jacob knows his own guilt, and he also knows the power of his brother’s army.  And after sending his wives and family and flocks ahead of him as a peace offering, Jacob tries to sleep by the riverside.  But sleep will not come. 

Instead, he spends the night wrestling with a stranger, struggling with one whom he imagines to be his brother, only to discover at daybreak that, all along, he has been striving with God – that it was not his brother who was pursuing him, but rather God himself.

 

How would your life be different if you knew that it wasn’t your personal worries,

but God who was wrestling with you in your dreams? 

 

How might your life change if you were to discover that you were the unjust judge, and God is actually coming to you, day after day, night after night asking for just behavior?

 

What would it mean to you, if Adam in Michelangelo’s ceiling represents you, and God was addressing you with the words “Keep in touch.”

 

                                                                        Amen