Advent Lutheran Church

"9/11, Forgiveness, and You"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            Do you remember how unreal it all seemed?  We knew that something terrible had happened at 8:48 that morning.  We began hearing news reports of a plane crash in New York City.  Then, it was more than a plane crash; a jetliner filled with passengers had crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.  And then we heard that a second airliner had crashed into the North Tower; in a little while we heard about a jetliner that crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth that nose-dived into a field in Pennsylvania. 

As the day wore on, we became increasingly a nation submerged in loss.  We had lost thousands of lives, to be sure, and that was bad enough; but as a nation we had also lost our innocence.  Always before, it had seemed as if the world’s evil had existed “out there,” in nations with names too difficult to pronounce and among people who seemed so different from ourselves.  We were separated from those nations and people by vast oceans of water and huge mountains of technological advances.  It seemed as if we were invulnerable.  But no longer.

That was 10 years ago.  Ten years is a long time, but it doesn’t take much remembering to start reliving a kind of hardened anger toward those who wished us such harm, and who did so much damage.  What a coincidence, then, that the Word of God that comes to us this morning is a word about forgiveness.  Religion scholar Leslie Newbigen has said that “Christianity is a friction in every culture in which it has found itself.”  That’s true enough, and here’s one reason why: We’re clear about our Lord’s command to forgive; we just don’t want to do it.  Indeed, forgiveness is one of the most difficult actions to accomplish, or even attempt.

That isn’t a new revelation for us; the disciple Peter had trouble with it over 2,000 years ago, in the first school of Christian discipleship.  Peter knew that forgiveness was essential as far as Jesus was concerned, that to him, it was indispensable to the Kingdom of God.  Peter had heart Jesus say things like: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy”; “love your enemies”; “pray for those who persecute you”; “if someone strikes you on one side of the face, turn to him the other side as well.” 

Peter accepts the fact that, in order to follow Jesus, forgiveness has to take the place of vengeance in his heart.  But he still doesn’t like it, so he wants to know the exact requirement, he wants to know the ancient variation on the modern T-shirt saying, “How much can I get away with and still go to heaven?”  He wants a number to work with, something specific; so he asks, “How many times do I have to forgive?  How about seven?  Seems like a lot to me.”  And Jesus says, “No, not seven times; but seventy-seven times.”  In other words, forgiveness is not a quantifiable commodity, like handing out Advil; it is a qualitative state of being, which flows directly from the being of God, whose nature it is to be forgiving.  

And just to make sure that Peter gets the point, Jesus tells a story.  A king wanted to settle accounts with his servants.  It was time to audit the books.  And he discovers that one servant owes him 10,000 talents.  In the ancient world a talent was a measure of weight, about 30 kilograms.  When the talent was used as a commodity, it was measured out in silver, so a talent was about 30 kilograms of silver.  It was thought that the average worker would have to work half his lifetime to earn a single talent.  This man owes 10,000 talents, which would amount to about 300 tons of silver.  When we hear that number we’re supposed to think of “zillions,” an amount that is simply too much to imagine.  This is a debt that is impossible to repay.

Since the servant can’t pay, the king decides to do what was customary in cases like this: assert his rights.  He’ll have the man, his wife, his children, and all their possessions sold so that the debt can be paid.  All of it won’t even begin to pay the debt, of course, and everyone knows that; but this is now a matter of the king’s honor; it’s about justice.  He can’t simply let the matter go without consequences.

The servant, however, pleads for mercy and asks that the king have patience, that he’ll pay “everything.”  And we might wonder, “patience, for more time?  Why?  He could work for the rest of his life and never make a dent in that debt.”  But that’s the system that this man has lived in all his life: if you have a debt, you pay it off, no matter how long it takes and no matter how ludicrous it seems.  You just keep at it.  It never would have occurred to him to ask for forgiveness from the debt, because that sort of thing never happened in his culture.  But the king knows the limitation of his servant, so he gives him not what he has asks for – more time – but what he needs: total, complete forgiveness and release from his debt. 

We can almost imagine what this servant feels as he walks away from the presence of the gracious king.  A 300-ton weight has just been lifted from his shoulders, and for the first time in his adult life he can breathe freely!  At least that’s what we like to think; but you have to wonder, because no sooner does he leave the presence of the king than he runs into a fellow slave, someone just like himself, who owes him some money.  Now, the forgiven slave wants what’s his.  “Pay up!” he demands.  But the second slave can’t pay on the spot, and asks for patience so that he can pay.  And in his case, he could realistically come up with the money: he owes a hundred denarii, which is about a hundred days’ wages, so he could pay it, given enough time.  But the first slave decides that asserting his rights is more important, so he has the man tossed into prison.  Word gets back to the king, of course, who reopens the case of The Forgiven But Unforgiving Servant, and now the first servant’s punishment is going to be far worse than it would have been in the beginning.

Jesus brings it all together as he makes his point, and it’s a sharp one: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” 

This is a hard word, a harsh word; but we do have a choice in how we hear it.  At first, it’s hard not to hear it as a threat: “So will my heavenly Father do to you” – you can almost see Jesus wagging his finger – “if you do not … .”  But we also know that you can’t force the heart; forgiveness that is forced isn’t forgiveness, isn’t genuine.  But the ability to forgive can be desired, and that’s at least a start.

One of the most enduring, powerful images of forgiveness that we have in our entire Christian tradition is the image of Jesus on the cross, the one we see particularly in Luke’s gospel.  Do you remember that image?  Jesus, this one who is both fully divine and fully human at the same time, is on the cross, facing those who are torturing him to death.  And he prays, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  It’s an image that we point to as the premier example of forgiveness.  But a careful reading of that verse shows that Jesus does not forgive; he asks his heavenly Father to forgive.

Sometimes, we can’t do it.  Sometimes the wound is too fresh, too deep; the pain too sharp.  We can’t forgive at the moment.  We can’t be like Joseph, in our first lesson, who looks back at his experience and sees the hand of God at work in the terrible things that have happened to him.  He seems so quick to forgive.  Sometimes we can’t be like that.  But the desire to forgive can itself be desired.

To that end, it helps to know what forgiveness is and what it isn’t.  Forgiveness is not putting up with abusive behavior; it is not remaining as a victim.  There is nothing virtuous or faithful about that at all.  Forgiveness is not pretending that we have not been offended.  It is not forgetting, as if we could develop our own case of amnesia.

No, forgiveness is about deciding that what has happened to us will not define us or how we live in the world.  Forgiveness primarily benefits the one who has been offended; it’s about freedom, about letting go.  It’s acknowledging the fact that no matter how hard you work for it, no matter how much you might want it, you will never, ever have a better past.  The past is not where life happens; it happens in the present, and as we lean into the future.

And as we lean into the future, we refuse to keep score.  I recently read about a couple in marriage counseling.  They had been married for 30 years, and her main complaint was that he had taken her for granted their whole marriage.  But, she added, she had forgiven him for that.  So in one of their counseling sessions she started complaining about the fact that for their whole marriage he had taken her for granted.  “But wait,” the counselor said, “I thought you said that you had forgiven him for that.”

“Oh, I have,” the woman said.  “But I reserve the right to bring it up now and then.”

That’s not forgiveness.  Jesus calls us to forgive “from the heart,” a heart that is so overwhelmed by grace, so accepting of the love of God that we look at the world and deal with the world differently, now not as a reflection of our own pain and desires and sense of justice but as a reflection of the God who is the source of eternal love and our eternal life.  There is a good deal of humility in St. Paul’s words to the Christians at Rome, our second lesson, when he asks, “Why do you judge each other?  There will come a day when you will all stand, not face to face but side to side in front of the judgment seat of God.”

It is significant that the 10^th anniversary of 9/11 falls within another anniversary: the Resurrection of Jesus: death and destruction swallowed up in the gift of new life.  It’s the same resurrection that swallows up your pain and shortcomings and hard-heartedness and in return gives you new life.  May God grant to each of us the grace to allow the seed of forgiveness to take root in our hearts, and may God’s love and healing and reconciling power be at work in the world through us.

Amen.