Creative Forgetfulness - Sermon

[Introduction – We’re coming up on the 22nd anniversary of my 22nd birthday; significant because just a few days later I had our first child. So he’s about to turn the same age I was when I had him. David caring for him while I was at work – visiting his parents and the baby wouldn’t stop crying. He asks his dad “How long can a kid keep crying?” And his dad answered “Longer than you can stand it.”]

It’s handy answer, “longer than you can stand it,” because it doesn’t really quantify your suffering or your patience. It doesn’t give you any easy outs at say, 10 minutes or 20. It pretty much says, “You’re in this for the long haul, buddy, no matter what it takes.”

One day Peter and Jesus had a conversation pretty much like David had with his father. Peter had been thinking, “These people out in the world - they can be pretty irritating.”

“Yup” says Jesus.

“But you say I’ve got to forgive my brother when he offends me or harms me. I’m even supposed to forgive my enemies and ‘turn the other cheek.’”

“So far so good.”

“So I’m thinking if I set a goal - if I knew what my limits were, I could handle it better.”

“Hmmm...”

“And most people wouldn’t forgive someone the first time, and at most a guy would give the other guy a second chance.”

“Okay...”

“So I’m thinking, seven.”

“Seven, Peter?”

“Yeah. How about if I am willing to forgive someone up to seven times. That’s good, right? And then I know where I stand. Because, you know, Jesus, you can’t just go on forgiving forever. So what do you think? Seven times?”

And Jesus says, “Oh Peter...try seven times seven times. Try 77 times. Try seven times 70 times.”

And I can hear Peter saying, “Are you kidding me, Lord?”

And then Jesus hits him with the truth: “The point Peter, is not 7 or 77 or 490. The point is - you’re going to have to forgive longer than you can stand it.”

So let’s just be clear, from the outset: Christians forgive. Christians are commanded to forgive. Forgiveness is what Christians do. Unfortunately, neither you nor I is any better at forgiving than Judy or Bob or Salim who live down the street, which is to say, we’re not naturally very good at it at all.

We even have trouble forgiving little puny things - in his book A.J. Jacobs whines about getting bumped from his position as garbage scraper volunteer at the soup kitchen. He refers to the guy ever after as “the soup kitchen Nazi.” We mope half the day when someone cuts us off on the freeway. We keep mental lists of the credit we did not get for the things we have accomplished at work. Your husband says something pretty unfortunate and you bring it back up to him in an argument two years later.

Jacobs, in fact, is concerned about his bad memory not enabling him to win arguments with his wife - so he keeps a handy list of offenses on his palm pilot. But he dares not tell his wife he’s got a list on her, so when they fight he has to dash off to the bathroom, quick look up the information, and then run out of there ready to yell all the things she’s done wrong in the previous months and win the day. Of course, when he does that, he doesn’t win anything except more anger from his wife.

Forgiveness is not natural; I don’t think Darwin would have argued that it was one of our evolutionary genes, and usually it grates on our nerves like a baby who won’t stop crying. And the necessity of forgiveness on and on and on...there are always new things happening, bothering you ,creating anger. It goes on longer than you can stand it. Jesus knew that. Seventy time seven: longer than you can stand it.

[Stopped here to talk about the length of the sermon and the two parts I cut out and put on handouts.]

All three of the things I’m discussing, either in person here or on paper, live on the edge between the psychological and the spiritual - because forgiveness challenges us in both areas. Good theology and good psychology always go together.

So the one important issue we have left is this: how do you do it? How do you forgive seven times? Or 70? Or 490?

The fact is, we can’t do forgiveness by ourselves. The only way we can forgive, ultimately, is when God gives us the grace to see things differently, to let the hurt go, and to move on. Forgiveness is a spiritual grace, a spiritual gift. You can encourage the development of this gift in your life however, and there are basically two ways to do that.

The first way to practice forgiveness, to put yourself in a position where God can work healing forgiveness in you, is to live reconciling action. Do something loving that is contrary to your angry instincts.

One of the best examples of this I’ve ever seen was how the Amish families responded when their children were executed in their school. What did they do? They made food and took it to the shooter’s family. They consoled his relatives and gave them comfort. Why? Because that’s what you do when someone dies – you offer comfort. You give love. In this community every memorial or remembrance of the dead always included everyone who had died – the school children and the man with the gun. This is a contrast with the first major school shooting on the national consciousness – in Columbine the first memorials had 15 crosses, 13 for the students shot and two for the boys who had taken their own lives. Within hours angry members of the community had removed two of the crosses, and those boys were never included in memorials again.

So one way to invite God’s power of grace in your life is to act out your forgiveness, even if you don’t feel it yet. God will, eventually, fill in the gaps of your actions with love.

[Illustration from the Richard Attenborough movie Ghandi, in which a Hindu man comes to the leader confessing that he has murdered a Muslim child, about 8 years old, after Muslims had killed his family in a riot during the time of the partitioning of the country. He says he is in hell and he knows he cannot be saved, but Ghandi responds that there is a way out of hell, if he will take a child orphaned in the riots, about 8 years old, and love him and raise him. BUT…make sure the child is a Muslim, and raise him as one.”]

In other words, live your forgiveness tangibly. Let your actions guide your heart, and not the other way around.
“Bless your enemies. Bless and do not curse them.”

Fortunately our lives and our hurts are not normally so severe or so dramatic. Perhaps you should try this method on something fairly simple, something not too significant. Does it always make you angry when someone cuts you off on the freeway? Then make it a habit to give way to drivers who are waiting to get into your road in front of you. Look for opportunities to give way. Whatever the habitual angers are in your life, find an action that is contrary to that feeling and live it out. Watch how God changes your heart over time. It will happen.

So practicing reconciling action is one option to encourage the growth of God’s forgiving power in your life. The other thing to do if you want to invite God’s grace and forgiving power into your life – and it’s the hardest thing to do, is pray about it.

Prayer, I’m thinking, is generally much more difficult than taking action. Because in prayer our thoughts wander, and we tend to justify our feelings to God. And I don’t know about you, whenever I try to pray for an “enemy” or someone I’m upset with, I catch myself getting more negative about that person.

“God, please help me forgive Jerry” becomes “God, please help me forgive Jerry, even though he doesn’t deserve it because he’s such a doggone jerk!”

My evangelical friends would say that the “evil one” takes advantage of us in our vulnerability. We mean to pray well, but we end up just more focused on what was wrong. Our thoughts wander back to our negative feelings and they are accidentally reinforced, just when we are trying to get over them.

This is why the quest cards for last week invited you to pray blessings for a person or situation where you have been grievously hurt or where you are seriously angry. If you want to pray for forgiveness, to have the power through prayer to forgive someone – don’t pray for that directly. It’s just too hard. Pray instead for blessings – for happiness and joy and wellbeing and health and every little thing that you can think of to make that individual’s life happy and holy and whole.

In the quest I suggested 100 blessings…because when you are really angry with someone, when forgiveness is most difficult, that’s about how many it takes. I stumbled into this technique several years ago…there’s an AA tradition of praying for someone you need to forgive for 21 days straight. The first time I heard that the individual talking about it said “I know, that’s really radical.” And I thought “What’s so radical about that?” And then I tried it once. Trust me, it’s radical.

At the time I was involved in a situation with a coworker – and I was continually angry with him, and since we worked together there were new problems between us and new offenses nearly every day. So I prayed for 21 days. I was still angry. So I tried another 21 days. I was still angry, in fact it was worse. I knew that I had to try something different, and God gave me this inspiration to write a list of 100 specific blessings for this individual I was so angry at. I put them in a notebook. It’s pretty hard to come up with 100 different specific blessings – I had to get really specific…

So after I had my list made, I took it places with me. And every time I thought of him, every time I got angry, I’d start at blessing number one and keep on praying for each of those blessings until the anger subsided. One time I got all the way to 72. That was a really bad day. But over the course of a couple of weeks, a miracle happened. When I thought of that person, my first impulse became prayer, prayer for joyful things. There was a radical healing in our relationship. It was truly amazing, and I knew it, and the person I was angry at knew it, although he had no idea what lay behind it. There was a total transformation of our relationship, a true healing. A new beginning.

Then something very interesting happened – the change in our relationship was real, and it was sustained. But then in another few weeks I suddenly found myself continually angry at someone else in my life, my brother, just as I had been angry with this first person. I had been so angry with my coworker day in and day out, and now I just couldn’t stand my brother. My brother wasn’t even living in the same state, I hadn’t talked to him for months, and yet every time I thought of him my heart raced and I just felt crazy with anger.

And that’s how I came to understand, clearly, that the anger was in me. It was my problem to begin with, and really had nothing much to do with how anyone else was acting. I was the one, in this case, who needed healing. Not him.

So how many times does a Christian forgive? 7? 77? Well, longer than you can stand it. Except that you can stand it, because God’s love gives you the power and the persuasion to act out your forgiveness and to pray your forgiveness into reality.

[Concluding words…]