Sermons
Seventy-Seven Times
September 11, 2011
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35
The Reverend Stephen P. Bauman
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You may know that in our worship at Christ Church we follow a three-year cycle of readings based on the church year called the lectionary. For those that might be unaware of this, an ecumenical committee of scholars and theologians has divvied up and organized a hefty portion of scripture so that over the course of three years churches that follow their pattern will have covered a lot of Biblical territory. We’re not a slave to this arrangement—we will from time to time deviate from this discipline—but the lectionary has a couple of advantages such as its close relationship to the church year, the way it forces us to attend to scripture we would otherwise ignore or avoid, and how it serves as a cross-denominational unifying experience among a wide variety of Christians. Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists and many others who follow the lectionary will likely share the same readings all around the world today. That’s pretty impressive when you think about it—millions of people reading the very same story in hundreds of languages over the span of 24 hours around the globe.
Now one disadvantage of the lectionary could be its potential mismatch for a given church’s or community’s current circumstance or focus. Of course in those timeframes it’s easy enough to come up with an individual pattern to fit the local need.
But then sometimes the assigned readings seem a startling serendipity with contemporary experience, such as today, the 10th Anniversary of 9/11. For those who doubt that God’s Spirit can operate within such human constructs consider today’s gospel. Peter addresses his famous question to Jesus, “‘Lord…how often should I forgive? As many as seven times? Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.’” Peter evidently thought he was being generous in answering his own question, perhaps even attempting to impress Jesus with how far he had come in his understanding. But in a typically disruptive fashion, Jesus blows the roof off of reasonableness to underline the radical nature of God’s ethics.
In this case, the serendipity doesn’t hit us like a happy coincidence, but more as a jarring reminder of how supremely different Jesus’ message sounds when hearing it in the midst of actual life circumstance. Granted, we can’t make a direct correlation in the specific details with Peter’s 1st century case from our 21st century perch. But we most certainly can sense the palpable challenge in the tension between Jesus’ way versus the world’s way and our precarious situation poised smack in the middle.
Human instinct hasn’t changed all that much in two thousand years. Our patterns for tribalism, vengeance and violence remain well-situated in our limbic brain which is the area that controls certain basic emotions like fear, pleasure, and anger; and innate human drives including hunger, sex, and dominance. That we are able to adaptively choose more thoughtful, nuanced responses beyond base instinct is part of our glory as humans. And it’s this aspect of our nature to which Jesus appeals. Evidently we are meant to evolve into better, more mature versions of ourselves.
Historically, and long before scientific notions of evolving human nature emerged, the church spoke of our capacity for adaptive change as a process of sanctification, to be made holy. This took time, likely a lifetime, and even then, never perfectly. But the process began when someone turned their allegiance in the direction of Jesus and the path he blazed during his lifetime. When such an authentic choice was made, when one chose to follow Jesus’ way in the world, a radical reorientation took place.
Jesus shifts the fundamental perspective from which we view the world and our position within it. For instance, to claim love of God and neighbor as our primary life-orienting perspective impacts the directionality of our “big” questions and the sorts of outcomes we strive after. Loving one’s neighbor as oneself leads to a different set of commitments than a life perspective of “every man for himself”, or “get all you can get,” or “eat, drink and be merry,” or any number of other life orientations.
And then loving people beyond the bounds of one’s tribe requires expanding one’s world-view, bracketing one’s personal predispositions in order to take in different data bits. When we do this, we change. We become larger versions of our former selves. In the old language, we’re being sanctified. Abraham Lincoln called it listening to the better angels of our nature.
In the manner after Paul we could say we’re putting an end to childish ways—we’re going to actually behave like fully functioning adults, embracing our impressive ability at transcending our lower, baser selves while recognizing that “faith, hope and love abide, these three. And the greatest of these is love.” Jesus reveals that a commitment to love in this broad and deep sense is the engine of transformation. But he also discovered the hard way that his was a minority perspective in a world still very much addicted to tribalisms shrouded in fear and hunger for dominance fed by bloodlust.
What happens when evil runs rampant? What then? How do love and forgiveness and their correlatives impact our response? Here’s how Christian apologist and forgiveness pioneer, Lewis Smedes, thinks about it: “When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look the evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it. …Vengeance is having a videotape planted in your soul that cannot be turned off. It plays the painful scene over and over again inside your mind... And each time it plays you feel the clap of pain again... Forgiving turns off the videotape of pained memory. Forgiving sets you free.”
There are other important things to be said here, such as;
forgiveness does not preclude justice;
to have an attitude of forgiveness does not mean everything should be tolerated or that we should let bullies win the day, that “doormat” is a synonym for “Christian;”
providing safety and protection are attributes of love;
forgiveness can only have real spiritual purchase when a wrong has been named and identified;
forgiveness is not a weakness, but a powerful tool for hopeful reconciliation, an engine of resurrection, a powerful intervention in ancient cycles of revenge.
Forgiveness is an essential component of the love through which God wrought all things—even ourselves—and exerts a demanding responsibility for those who would follow in “paths of righteousness all the days of their lives.”
Listen to Bishop Desmond Tutu’s recollection of a poignant moment during the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa. You’ll recall that Mandela had been imprisoned for 27 years prior to this. That’s a very long time. But when he arrived on the day of his inauguration “the various heads of the security forces, the police and the correctional services strode to his car, saluted him and then escorted him as the head of state. It was poignant because only a few years previously he had been their prisoner and would have been considered a terrorist to have been hunted down. What a metamorphosis, what an extraordinary turnaround. He invited his white jailer to attend his inauguration as an honored guest, the first of many gestures he would make in his spectacular way, showing his breathtaking magnanimity and willingness to forgive.”1
That little vignette holds overwhelming information about our human capacity for greatness. Mandela was not, is not, a perfect man of course. But somehow he came to listen to the better angels of his nature and discovered the astonishing power of forgiveness as a fundamental component of his leadership, let alone his individual humanity. You know the more normal drill on such a history as his. Revenge, violence, dominance, bloodlust are the more routine responses we could expect, and we would likely understand and empathize—if not entirely approve of—had those described Mandela’s emotional drivers post prison.
Still, forgiveness is not something that can be demanded of another. It must be chosen. Which, when you think about it, is very much akin to love. It, too, cannot be coerced. Coerced love could not really be love—coercion and love can’t stand together in the same equation. Jesus instructs us to forgive, just as he enjoins us to love, but an authentic version of either will come only as a result of our choosing it.
But how can we choose such a thing when we feel so utterly at odds with those who have wronged us? Surely you have very personal situations that have come to mind here. Powerful, painful, hurtful situations. And, oh, by the way, likely you’ve been on the delivery side of hurtful things too, where you were the perp in need of forgiveness. These more personal matters don’t match an outsized event like 9/11, but they help us understand our fear and anger and bloodlust and tribalism and desire for vengeance beyond justice. And they also help describe our often dismissive response to Jesus’ radical repositioning when we’re the ones against the wall.
Like you I find forgiveness a hard lesson to learn, a difficult life posture to adopt and maintain. It’s so much easier to situate oneself in self-righteousness. That’s a much less demanding posture and much tastier in the short run. And it’s such a close relative of all those intoxicating dark instincts that feel good to exercise. For these reasons I need help to forgive. And this drives me to prayer.
So at the end of these remarks on forgiveness prayer seems our oasis. Prayer is the appropriate place to bring our pain and hurt, to receive holy consolation. Prayer is the place for the healing of memory and loss. But prayer is also our place for listening to a voice that calls us into our greatness. Prayer is the place we lay down our arms and open ourselves to a power far larger, wiser, stronger than our own. Acknowledging our self-righteousness we approach God in humility asking to be received as we are overfull with our many needs.
1 Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, Image Doubleday, New York, 1999, p.10.
