Forgiveness is a choice
$3.48 billion dollars worth
We’re continuing our series on forgiveness. Here’s the last few posts:
Let's talk forgiveness
Desmond Tutu and his daughter, Mpho Tutu, wrote “The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World.” Awhile back I came across this book and immediately turned it into a sermon series at church. Walking with people through forgiveness is one of the most challenging and most profound things we can do.
Telling the story
There is an untruth that runs through most of our lives. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s called the myth of redemptive violence. This is the illusion that if somebody does something wrong to you, you can make it right by doing something wrong to them.
Naming the hurt
There’s a scar right below my left ring finger. Some 5th grade punk in my 4/5th split class dripped hot glue on my hand while we worked on a project. So annoying. I’m also amazed that my skin still shows the evidence of that moment thirty years later. A faint witness to a simple mistake.
Let’s talk money, love, Richard Nixon, and forgiveness. Super random, I know.
Much of Jesus’ teaching in the Bible has to do with debt - it’s pretty incredible. In Roman Palestine, debt was a very real, agonizing, often brutal reality. Forms were not mailed from the Roman Revenue Service, but strong men who could break your knees showed up and demanded payment. The unfairness of it all, the desperate craving for mercy, proved to be Jesus’ best window into the hearts of his listeners when he was trying to talk about divine and human forgiveness.1
This parable is the most absurd debt collection imaginable. One man owes 10,000 talents. One talent was the largest denomination of money in the ancient world. 10,000 talents = 60 million days’ wages - sixty million days? 165,000 years. This man owes the king more money than was actually in circulation at the time! In modern money, it’s $3.48 billion dollars!
Jesus is trying to astonish his listeners with the immensity of the heart of God. How much can be forgiven? Not manageable, believable amounts of wrong, but any, all, no matter how high the mountain, no matter how awful the infraction
It’s all quite absurd! Now the man who owes more than is humanly possible is given mercy and forgiveness. What does he do? Instead of passing it along, he turns to another and says, “Hey! You owe me money. Pay up!”
Failure to forgive is not just bad form or something Love frowns upon. Failure to forgive is failure to love. When we choose not to forgive, the flow of grace, forgiveness and love comes to us and then stops and doesn’t flow through us.
Love is meant to flow through us and onto others. That’s what love does.
Hubert Humphrey was a former vice-president of the United States. When he died hundreds of people from across the world attended his funeral. All were welcome, but one – former President Richard Nixon, who had not long previously dragged himself and his country through the humiliation and shame of Watergate. As eyes turned away and conversations ran dry around him Nixon could feel the ostracism being ladled out to him.
Then Jimmy Carter, the serving US President, walked into the room. Carter was from a different political party to Nixon and well known for his honesty and integrity. As he moved to his seat President Carter noticed Richard Nixon standing all alone. Carter immediately changed course, walked over to Richard Nixon, held out his hand, and smiling genuinely and broadly embraced Nixon and said “Welcome home, Mr President! Welcome home!”
The incident was reported by Newsweek magazine, which wrote: “If there was a turning point in Nixon’s long ordeal in the wilderness, it was that moment and that gesture of love and compassion.”
We don’t forgive others so that God will forgive us. We forgive others because we’re learning to accept the depth of Love that exists in us.
The question must be asked then - Can we even forgive others if we’re not in touch with how deeply God forgives us?
We continue to learn from Desmond Tutu on the deep value of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is a choice
We have a forgiveness muscle and it gets stronger over time as we repeatedly forgive the small things. Then the pattern is already in place when it comes to the big ones.
Raising children is like training for a forgiveness marathon. We forgive the infant for waking us at all hours of the night. We forgive a toddler tantrum because we understand they don’t have the language yet to express their big feelings. As children grow, they find new and creative ways to test our patience, but we learn to forgive them over and over, and fold them back into our embrace. We’ve been able to forgive them because we have known their humanity.
We love our children. We want the best for them. We also seek to love the people who annoy or hurt us. Desmond Tutu writes, “When my heart holds anger or resentment toward someone, I pray for that person’s well-being. It is a powerful practice and has often opened the doorway to finding forgiveness. People have sometimes expressed shock that I prayed daily for the president of South Africa, even during the darkest days of apartheid, but how could I not? I was praying for him to rediscover his humanity, and thereby for our country to rediscover its shared humanity.”
We choose forgiveness because it is how we find freedom and keep from remaining trapped in an endless loop of telling our stories and naming our hurts.
Saying “I forgive you” sounds simple but can be very hard to say and even harder to mean. Perhaps you believe you have already accepted what has happened and forgiven the person who harmed you. This is wonderful. In fairness, I must caution that many people, even very spiritual people, try to leap over their suffering in pursuit of their inner peace or they sense it’s the right thing to do. The words of forgiveness are said, but the reality of forgiveness has not taken root in their hearts and lives.
“I am so sorry. Do you forgive me?” says the contrite wife, walking in late from work and finding dinner cold out on the table. “Yes,” her husband spits back through gritted teeth, seeing his hours of loving preparation wasted. Without allowing themselves to walk the path of forgiveness, the couple establishes a veneer of peace that’s more of an uneasy truce than genuine forgiveness (Tutu).
How do you know when we grant forgiveness that we truly mean it?
There’s no one size fits all for this. For some it feels as if a huge weight has been lifted. For others it is an overwhelming sense of peace. Often it can simply be that you know you have forgiven when you wish the other person well, and if you can’t wish them well, you at least no longer wish them harm. There is freedom in forgiveness - and when you feel this new freedom - you’ll know you have truly forgiven (Tutu).
Ben Bosinger had heard a million times that he should forgive his father. But he didn’t really know what it meant to forgive. What would it feel like? What would it look like? His father was the angriest, most violent human he’d ever known. And Ben carried this trauma with him into every relationship for the next several decades.
“One day I drove up his driveway and he came outside and we talked about motorcycles. We both really like motorcycles. And in that instant, when we both were bent down looking at that greasy engine, side by side, I forgave him. I looked at his long gray hair, his wrinkled face, his obvious weakening from hard living and old age. He was human. He was so flawed. He loved motorcycles just like me, and somewhere in the middle of seeing all that, I simply forgave him. It was like this huge boulder was lifted off my chest and I could finally breathe again. He didn’t ask me to forgive him. He wasn’t sorry or remorseful. Still, I forgave.
We didn’t skip off into the sunset together. In fact, years later I saw him again and he said something to me that felt hurtful and critical, and for a moment I wondered if the forgiveness had worn off. Instead, I learned that I had an expectation that my forgiveness would magically turn him into a nice guy, a different guy, a better guy. And with this expectation I was making myself a victim to him all over again.
The magic didn’t happen to him. The magic happened to me. I felt lighter. The world seemed a more hopeful place. I learned not to take things so personally, and I learned that I was the only one responsible for what kind of father I turned out to be to my children. I wasted decades of my life reliving the victimization I endured as a child. When I forgave my father, it all melted away. I was free. Forgiveness didn’t save him or let him off the hook. It saved me.”
Forgiveness allows us to tell a new story
It’s no longer just about the facts of what happened, or about the pain and hurt we’ve suffered. It’s a story that recognizes our shared humanity. And shared humanity is what we celebrate at the table of God.We all have been harmed. We all harm. Grace is for all of us.
Friends -- I want to be clear that it’s one thing to write or listen to a sermon about forgiveness. It is quite another to bring this practice to our daily lived experience. When we wrestle with rage and anger that kids in our community have access to guns and then tragically harm other students, the idea of forgiveness might seem physically impossible. Who cares that we’ve been forgiven $3.5 billion dollars worth. But somehow, in the astounding and confusing economy of the Divine, even kids with guns are loved, worthy of grace and forgiveness. That all gets to be true alongside consequences, grief, fear, advocacy, and law changes.
Forgiveness doesn’t mess around. Love is tough and demanding and asks a lot of us, doesn’t it? There are days I’m nowhere near ready to forgive those who harm. Some days I can get there. The good news of Love is it is the very love of our Creator flowing through us that continues this economy of love. We simply try to stay open to its movement.
Maybe the next time you’re feeling that strong desire to hold a grudge or retaliate, may you remember Love sees your $3.5 billion dollars of debt and says, “You’re good. All is forgiven, my child.” May you offer that kind of love and grace to the people in your life. May forgiveness flow through you. May it be so.
Feasting on the Word
Just what I needed this morning. Thanks Jenny!