Chipped – Forgive and Remember
Sycamore Creek Church
Matthew 6:9-15
Tom Arthur
May 8, 2011

Peace, Friends!

It’s hard to forget a moment when the windshield of your car chips, cracks, or shatters.  It includes all the senses.  You’re driving along minding your own business, and CRACK!  There goes your windshield.  A small pebble is enough to put a chip in the windshield, and of course, a big rock or even a boulder can do some pretty serious damage.

I was in a car accident back in July of last year when we were rear-ended by someone.  The force was pretty impressive.  My body was compressed into the seat.  Glass was flying everywhere.  The back windshield was in a thousand pieces scattered all over the car.  I even found glass down the back of my shirt.  It took a couple of months for my friend’s car to be repaired.

My car accident is pretty small compared to some experiences.  I found one picture of a car completely flattened by a huge boulder.  As flat as a pancake.  I don’t think that car will ever be a car again.

Our lives are like these windshields.  They get chipped, cracked, shattered, and sometimes obliterated.  Of course, the amount of repair work that is required to fix a chip is pretty small compared to the repair work to fix a shattered windshield, but in the case of our lives, all of the repair work begins with the basics of forgiveness.  No matter how much damage has been done to you or by you, nothing will be able to be repaired if forgiveness isn’t part of the equation.

We’ve been using as our text for this series the Lord’s Prayer.  The disciples came to Jesus and asked him to teach them how to pray.  This is what he said:

Matthew 6:9-15
Pray like this:
Our Father in heaven, may your name be honored.
May your Kingdom come soon.
May your will be done here on earth, just as it is in heaven.
Give us our food for today,
and forgive us our sins,
just as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us.
And don’t let us yield to temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.

If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you.
But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.

This is Jesus’ teaching for us today.  Thank you, God!

The last two lines of what we read aren’t the prayer but are commentary on the prayer.  This commentary makes me think that perhaps that while the explicit part of the prayer about forgiveness is only two lines long, the whole prayer implicitly is all about forgiveness.

In this series we began with the first line about forgiveness: forgive us.  We each have chipped, cracked, or shattered other people’s windshields.  We need forgiveness from people who we have harmed or wounded, but even more we need forgiveness from God whose image they bear.

The second sermon in this series was about the second line: forgive others.  Many of us look through the windshields of our lives and find a lot of chips and cracks.  Some of us don’t even have anything that resembles a windshield anymore.  There’s just shattered glass strewn around our feet.  If we’re going to find healing, we’ll need to learn to forgive others.  That’s what last week’s sermon was about.

Today we look at forgiveness and memory.  “Ok,” you say, “I get it.  I’ve forgiven that jerk who so badly hurt me.  But I can’t forget about it.  I’ve tried.  The situation just keeps playing over and over in my mind.  I must not have forgiven that jerk, have I?”  Or maybe you’re dealing with the memory of what you did to someone else.  That thing you did just keeps playing on a loop in your imagination.  You can’t get the loop to stop.  You think to yourself, “I must not be forgiven.  I can’t forget that horrible thing I did.”  Today we look at memory and forgiveness, and I have a simple suggestion for you about memory: forgive and remember differently; remember well.

Human Memory

When something traumatic happens in our lives, it gets sealed in our memories in a way that is often quite disconcerting.  In the movie, Dead Man Walking, we see a scene where Lloyd LeBlanc talks to Sister Helen Prejean about the murder of his son, David.  Lloyd details the havoc that his son’s death caused on his life.  He adds that the whole thing is sealed in his memory and he can’t get it out.

Human memory is a funny thing.  Often what we want to remember we forget and what we want to forget we remember.  Sarah’s dad has taken up drinking a glass of red wine with dinner each night for health reasons.  He was reading in the paper one day about the benefits of red wine on one’s heart and also on one’s memory.  Red wine apparently is supposed to help your memory.  Later that night as he was pouring himself a glass of wine for dinner he commented to Sarah’s mom, “Now I know that red wine is good for your heart.  What was the other reason?”

Recently I was listening to a workshop on how to memorize anything.  This was taught by someone who has memorized a dozen or so books of the Bible!  He certainly knows something about memory.  The instructor said that the more senses we involve in the process of memorizing, the more effective our efforts will be.  So say it out loud.  Use motions.  Imagine various sights.  Record yourself reading it and listen to yourself in the car.  Use all your senses.  No wonder it is hard to get something traumatic out of memory.  All our senses were engaged in a way that they rarely are.

But aren’t we supposed to forgive and forget?  Isn’t forgetting what forgiveness is all about?  Isn’t that what God does?  Well, yes.  In some ways God does forgive and forget.  We read in Jeremiah, “I will forgive their wickedness and will never again remember their sins” (Jeremiah 31:34 NLT).  I’m not sure that this actually means that God completely forgets.  Can God forget anything?  I think it means that God chooses not to remember.  God puts a limit on God’s own memory.  God chooses to not remember.  But human memory is much more complex.

Sometimes the situation has passed in a way that we can’t go back to.  I have a memory that I often play over and over in my head.  When I was in elementary school, I stole something from a friend of mine named Brad.  We collected ninja “throwing stars.”  I’m not sure they were actually throwing stars.  I think they were probably just necklace ornaments, but we treated them like they were the real thing.  One day as we were walking through the woods, I saw Brad’s throwing star drop out of his pocket.  I didn’t tell him.  Later I went back and picked it up.  I hid it.  The next day Brad found it among my things.  He accused me of stealing, and I blamed a mutual friend of ours suggesting that I was set up.  Our friendship survived that fiasco, but I never really confessed or apologized to Brad.  We remained friends until his untimely death in 1996 when his Value Jet crashed in the Florida Everglades.  Now it is impossible in this lifetime to reconcile with him.  The memory of my sin against him still haunts me.

There are also situations that happen to our loved ones.  These are particularly hard to ignore.  There is something about harm done to our loved ones that affects us even more than harm done to ourselves.  One time Sarah cut open her knuckle while washing the dishes.  We had been married for several years, and by this point, I had learned not to pay too much attention to everything she said about how bad something was.  So when she first told me she cut her knuckle, I mostly ignored her.  Then she really had to get my attention to explain how bad it was.  We needed to go to the ER.  When we got there the doctor thought it was a wonderful example of a deep cut and called in several people to take a look.  Now I’ve been around a lot of blood and guts, and rarely does this kind of thing make me woozy, but for some reason that little cut, deep though it was, was enough to make me get somewhat faint.  When the doctor saw my face, he stopped attending to Sarah and started making sure I was sitting down.  I recovered without fainting, but I learned something that day.   Harm done to our loved ones affects us deeply, and harm done to our loved ones is harder to forgive than harm done to ourselves.

There are also single traumatic episodes that will never be forgotten.  When I was in high school, I dated a girl who had been raped by a previous boy friend.  This traumatic event, this sin against her body and her humanity, colored everything about our relationship.  It was impossible to ignore.  She will never forget that moment.

Then there are the kinds of situations where someone is repeated traumatized.  I recently read about one such situation in a book titled, Unbroken.  Unbroken tells the story of Louis Zamperini.  Louis was an Olympic runner who was expected to break the mile record in the 1940s Olympics when they were canceled due to WWII.  He joined the air force, and one day on a search and rescue mission his own plane went down in the Pacific.  He and two others survived and floated for forty-seven days setting a new record, but not the one anyone wants to hold.  They were eventually picked up by the Japanese navy and taken as POWs.

Louis was bounced around from camp to camp.  At one camp he met the man who would terrorize him, Matsuhiro Wantanabe, nick named “The Bird.”  The Bird took a sadistic pleasure in torturing his prisoners.  He singled out Louis for special treatment.  Daily The  Bird beat, humiliated, and destroyed Louis.  Somehow Louis survived, and when the war was over, he went back home.  It quickly became evident that he was suffering from  PTSD (although not as well understood in those days).  He got married but sank into alcoholism and abused his wife and daughter.  The Bird showed up in Louis’ nightmares every night.  He hatched a plan to go back to Japan, seek out The Bird who had gone into hiding as a war criminal, and exact revenge on him by killing him.  Louis may have wanted to forget what had happened to him, but he could not.

Given the complexity of human memory, what are we to do?

Forgive and Forget?

Let’s go back to that passage in Jeremiah and read the bigger context:

And they will not need to teach their neighbors, nor will they need to teach their family, saying, ‘You should know the LORD.’ For everyone, from the least to the greatest, will already know me,” says the LORD. “And I will forgive their wickedness and will never again remember their sins” (Jeremiah 31:34 NLT).

If you look closely, you will see that the reason that the LORD forgets is because everyone already knows the LORD.  They have been converted.  You won’t have to teach anyone about how to know, love, and serve God because everyone will already know.  The LORD forgets because the context has changed.

In this sense, there is a kind of forgetting when justice is served, and justice at its highest is not retributive but restorative.  Justice at its highest includes confession, repentance, and forgiveness.  In that sense, what has happened this past week with Osama Bin Laden is not truly justice.  Yes, it is a kind of justice, but it is not an ideal justice.  An ideal justice would be that Bin Laden would have confessed and repented and been reconciled to those who he harmed.  This is what Martin Luther King, Jr. had in mind when he advocated the use of active non-violent resistance.  He desired reconciliation between whites and blacks at the end of the day.  He desired the possibility for friendship.  Had he used violent means to bring about civil rights, he would have put more obstacles in the place of this kind of ultimate justice, friendship between folks who were previously enemies.

Remembering Well

And so this brings us to what I think it means to forgive in the Christian sense.  It is not to forgive and forget but to forgive and remember differently; remember well.  If we look at the idea of forgiving and forgetting and take it literally, then we will end up not with forgiveness but amnesia.  We will have big patches our lives that just disappear.  Our stories will not have continuity.

The Bible presents a different way of forgiving than forgetting.  Consider Jesus’ own experience after being raised from the dead.  When he appears to his disciples after his resurrection, they are understandably stunned.  They don’t know if they can believe their eyes.  They think they may be seeing a ghost, and so Jesus says to them, “Look at my hands. Look at my feet. You can see that it’s really me” (Luke 24:39 NLT).  Why look at his hands and feet?  Because they still have the scars in them.  Even after forgiving the sins of the world, Jesus’ body still bear marks of the wounds that were inflicted upon him!  He still remembers them.  He just remembers them differently.

I have a big scar on my knee.  I got it when I was in second grade.  I was riding a little skate board down a huge asphalt hill.  As I picked up more and more speed, the skateboard began wobbling.  I decided to bail and jumped off.  The only problem was that in all my second grade wisdom, I had decided to wear my plastic baseball cleats that day.  Of course the plastic got no traction on the pavement, and I immediately found myself sliding down the asphalt on my right knee.  Did I mention I didn’t have knee pads on?  When I finally came to a halt, there was blood everywhere.  I walked the mile home with blood streaming down my leg.  When I got home, my mom was gone.  I got in bed and put a rag on my knee.  I was scared there was so much blood.  I prayed to God and made a pact.  I told God that I would read the entire Bible if he would just stop my knee from bleeding.  I got through two chapters of Genesis before giving up.  God kept God’s part of that bargain, and my knee did stop bleeding.  (I eventually did read through the entire Bible.)  I look back on that situation now and while it was very traumatic in the moment, I can really laugh about the whole thing now.  I didn’t forget it, but I do remember it differently.  It no longer hurts me to remember it.

Sara Groves has a wonderful song called Less Like Scars.  Part of the song goes like this:

Less like tearing, more like building
Less like captive, more like willing
Less like breakdown, more like surrender
Less like haunting, more like remember

And I feel you here
And you’re picking up the pieces
Forever faithful
It seemed out of my hands, a bad situation
But you are able
And in your hands the pain and hurt
Look less like scars and more like
Character.

Back to Louis Zamperini.  What happened to him?  Well, his wife decided to leave him.  That night she went to a young preacher, Billy Graham’s revival.  She decided not to leave Louis, and instead she came back and urged Louis to attend.  He did so reluctantly.  After a couple of nights of attending, he eventually gave his life to Christ.  He went home that night and threw all his alcohol down the drain.  He went to sleep that night and had the first night’s sleep without The Bird showing up in his dreams.  His life was so changed that he decided on a different scheme for his captors in Japan.  He would return and forgive him, especially The Bird.  And that’s what he did.  He traveled back to Japan, met his captors, and forgave each of them.  But The Bird was not there.

In 1998 he was invited to come back to Japan for the ‘98 Olympics.  A CBS reporter tracked down The Bird and found that he was still alive.  He attempted to arrange a meeting between Louis and The Bird, but The Bird never showed up.  Louis wrote this letter instead:

To Matsuhiro [sic] Watanabe,
As a result of my prisoner of war experience under your unwarranted and unreasonable punishment, my post-war life became a nightmare. It was not so much due to the pain and suffering as it was the tension of stress and humiliation that caused me to hate with a vengeance.

Under your discipline, my rights, not only as a prisoner of war but also as a human being, were stripped from me. It was a struggle to maintain enough dignity and hope to live until the war’s end.

The post-war’s nightmares caused my life to crumble, but thanks to a confrontation with God through the evangelist Billy Graham, I committed my life to Christ.  Love replaced the hate I had for you.  Christ said, “Forgive your enemies and pray for them.”

As you probably know, I returned to Japan in 1952 [sic] and was graciously allowed to address all the Japanese war criminals at Sugamo Prison…I asked then about you, and was told that you probably committed Hara Kiri, which I was sad to hear.  At that moment, like the others, I also forgave you and now would hope that you would also become a Christian.

Louis Zamperini

In this masterful letter, on which I based my own letter of forgiveness that I shared with you last week, Louis has not forgotten what The Bird did to him, but he does forgive him.

Louis’ life was shattered.  Like the back windshield of the car that I was in last July, shards of glass were everywhere.  You can’t piece back together something like this.  It will never be the same.  It will always bear the scars of the pain.  But those scars need not be open wounds.  We can remember differently.  We can remember well.  We can do this because God can reach down into our lives and take all those broken shards of glass and turn them into something new, just like God did on the cross in Jesus Christ.

It is my prayer that God would bring this kind of healing to the chipped, cracked, and shattered windshields of your lives.  Will you join in me in praying once again the prayer that Jesus taught us:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses , as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever.
Amen.

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Chipped – Forgive Others
Sycamore Creek Church
Matthew 5:9-15
May 1, 2011

Peace, Friends!

We continue in a three week series on forgiveness.  Have you ever had a chip in the windshield of your car?  Jeremy, our worship leader, had a chip in the windshield of his car.  We took it to have it repaired, and the repairman showed us another windshield that had a small chip that turned into a several big cracks.  If you don’t deal with the small chip when it comes up, it can spread.  And of course, depending on what hits your windshield, you may have more than just a chip.  The whole thing could shatter, or worse.  The bigger the rock that hits your windshield the more repair work there is to do.

Last July I was in a car that was rear-ended.  We were sitting still waiting for someone to turn left in front of us when someone behind us who didn’t notice that there were several cars stopped in front of him hit us at about 45 MPH.  The windshield was instantly shattered.  Glass was everywhere.  When I got out of the car, there was glass down the back of my shirt.  When something hits you that hard, there’s a lot of repair work to be done.  A lot more than a small little pebble.

Then there’s the kind of thing that happens to you that does damage to more than just your windshield.  This poor guy barely escaped some serious life-ending damage when a boulder hit the top of his car.  When something like this happens to your car, it’s likely that you won’t be driving that car again.

Life is the same way.  You do things that chip, crack or shatter other people’s windshields, and people do stuff that damages the windshield of your life.  The first is about the forgiveness that each of us needs.  We talked about that last week.  Today we’re talking about the damage that people do to us, and our need to forgive others.  Of course, the bigger the damage, the more repair work there is to do.  Someone lies once to you.  It’s a small pebble. No big deal.  Someone lies to you over and over or breaks the foundation of your trust by sharing a secret or committing adultery, we’re talking about a lot of repair work that needs to be done.  Then there is the really really damaging stuff that I hope and pray never happens to you.  These are the boulders that get dropped on our lives and our lives come to a grinding halt.  Things like torture or murder.  However much damage that has been done to your life by other people, the repair work of it all  begins with forgiveness.

Our text for this series is what is often called the Lord’s Prayer.  It is the prayer that Jesus taught to his followers when they asked him to teach them to pray.  Let’s read it.

Matthew 6:9-15 (NLT)
Pray like this:
Our Father in heaven, may your name be honored.
May your Kingdom come soon.
May your will be done here on earth, just as it is in heaven.
Give us our food for today,
and forgive us our sins,
just as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us.
And don’t let us yield to temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you.
But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.

This is Jesus’ teaching for us today.  Thank you, God!

Recently I was contacted by someone on Facebook that I hadn’t even thought about for many many years.  They saw a picture of my son, and they were congratulating me on a beautiful child.  This person is someone who hurt me significantly in the past.  They sent me a brief note to tell me that my son, Micah, was beautiful.  “Hmm,” I thought, “That’s interesting.”  I didn’t really feel like responding back.  It was a strange experience for me.  I didn’t think there was anyone that I couldn’t at least send a polite message to, but here I was confronted with someone I didn’t even want to respond to.  Of course, this all happened during the time that I was preparing for this series.  I was reading a couple of books about forgiveness and thinking through how to teach about forgiveness in ways that take into account the serious damage that we do to each other and the good news of forgiveness that we received in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and community of followers.  It was like God was putting before me the opportunity to test and see if I really believed this whole forgiveness thing.  Could I really forgive this person?  And if I did forgive them, did that mean I had to be their friend on Facebook?

Just in case one note wasn’t enough, I got a second one: “Your son is really cute.”  At this point I thought, “Come on!  God, this is silly.  Why can’t I at least respond with a simple ‘Thanks.’?”  So that’s what I did.  I sent a brief note back that basically said, “Thanks.”  But then I wrote a much longer letter based on some things I was reading about forgiveness.

One book that has been particularly helpful for me in thinking about forgiveness has been Forgiving as We’ve Been Forgiven by Greg Jones, the Dean of Duke Divinity School while I was there.  Greg has written several books and articles on the topic of forgiveness and is a regular speaker at conferences on the topic.  He presents what he calls six steps of forgiveness, but he emphasizes that they do not necessarily come in a linear fashion.  I like to think of them as pieces of a big puzzle about forgiveness.  Or maybe you can think of it as piecing together a shattered windshield.  Which piece do you begin with?  What ever piece you are able to begin with.

Piecing Together Forgiveness – Piece I

The first piece is that we become willing to speak truthfully and patiently about the conflicts that have arisen.  Truthfully has to do with not glossing over the pain that someone caused in your life.  Name it.  Don’t beat around the bush and try to cover up what exactly happened.  This doesn’t mean that you have a license to be cruel.  Truth can be communicated in gentle ways.

I like the encouragement to speak patiently.  I think this is important because speaking truthfully about a situation can be hard.  Often times when someone has hurt us, we find that it is very difficult if not even impossible to agree on what actually did happen!  We get into a “He said…She said” kind of argument.  This kind of argument can only be untied with patience.

I’m reminded of another book I read several years ago called Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott.  She encourages people to “interrogate reality.”  The key to this approach to conversations is being open to the possibility that someone else may have a perspective on reality that you need.  You look down and see that where you’re standing the world looks red, but someone else looks down and what they see is blue.  Who is right?  Well, both are right in their own way.

I’m not trying to suggest that there isn’t right or wrong, but rather that each of us only has a limited perspective.  We need patience to be able to listen to someone else’s perspective (especially someone who has hurt us!) and speak truthfully.

Jesus tells us that “If another believer sins against you, go privately and point out the fault” (Matthew 18:15 NLT).  This is instruction specific to other believers, but I think the basic principle is true no matter who you are in conflict with.  Just remember that when you go talk to them, if you are patient and really seeking truth, you may find out that they were not at fault!  One time I got upset because I had swaddled Micah and put him down asleep.  I left the room and heard him start crying.  I came back in the room and found Sarah hovering over him.  I immediately spoke what I was thinking, “Why did you wake him up?!”  I was really upset because it had taken me a long time to get him to fall asleep.  She retorted, “He woke up on his own, and I came over to see what was wrong!”  Um…oh…sorry.  Yeah.  Speak truthfully and patiently.  That’s the first piece of forgiving.

Piecing Together Forgiveness – Piece II

A second piece of the repair work of forgiveness is acknowledging both the existence of anger and bitterness, and a desire to overcome them.  There’s no use in pretending not to be hurt when you are.  That’s called denial.  I must admit that I try denial all the time.  I try to talk myself into thinking that something was no big deal and that it really didn’t hurt when it did.  Anger can be a “righteous anger” when we encounter injustice and oppression, and we’ll be looking more closely at anger in the fall, but for now, an important part of acknowledging that we really are hurt.

Acknowledging hurt isn’t the end of the story.  The key here is acknowledging a desire to overcome that anger and bitterness.  This acknowledgment doesn’t mean you have overcome them, but only that you desire to do so.

St. Augustine, a fourth century church leader, encourages his congregation in a sermon to pray for their enemies.  He goes on to add a clarification that was based on what his congregation was actually praying for.  He says, that we are to pray for our enemies, and that doesn’t mean praying for them to die!

Greg Jones tells the story of a student of his who was taking his class on forgiveness.  She told him that she was taking the class because she was having a hard time forgiving someone who had raped her.  Greg, in a less than faith-filled moment, encouraged her that maybe this wasn’t the right class for her at this time, but she insisted.  As the class progressed she met with him in his office and said that there was no way she could pray for her attacker.  Greg said, “Don’t pray for him.  Let me pray for him.”  She agreed.  A couple of months she met with him again and asked, “Are you still praying for him?”  He said that he was.  Again several months later, she asked, “Are you still praying for him?” and he said that he continued to pray for this person.  What’s going on here?  She is acknowledging the bitterness and anger and at the same time she is taking a step toward desiring to overcome them.  She wasn’t at a place where she herself could be concerned to pray for this person, but she could be concerned that someone else was.

I think of the man who came to Jesus asking him to heal his boy.  When Jesus said to this father that he must believe, the father responded, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24 NRSV).  Jesus then healed his boy.  While this response isn’t about forgiveness, I think that the basic honesty in it is applicable to forgiveness.  I am bitter and angry.  Help me over come bitterness and anger!  Be honest with God.  Then pray for transformation.

Piecing Together Forgiveness – Piece III

A third piece of forgiveness is to summon up a concern for the well-being of the other as a child of God.  In her book, Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean tells a heartbreaking story of Pat Sonnier who murders David Leblanc, the son of Lloyd Leblanc.  Lloyd is called to the crime scene to identify his son’s body.  When he arrives on the scene and positively identifies the body as that of his son, he kneels down and prays for the person who murdered him.  This act of praying for the murderer of his son is built upon years and years of practicing prayer.  Lloyd was a devout Catholic who prayed the Lord’s Prayer regularly both in and out of church.  His unnatural response to the murder of his son was the natural outflow of a life built upon prayer.

This moment of prayer did not remove the anger and bitterness that Lloyd felt for Pat Sonnier, but it did point him in the right direction.  One intermediate step that helped Lloyd summon this kind of concern for Pat was to pray for Pat’s mother.  Knowing personally what it was like to lose a child, he found that he could summon within himself concern for the mother whose son was soon to be executed.  Slowly Lloyd was able to take steps toward seeing Pat as one who bore the image of God.  James, Jesus’ brother, gives us helpful counsel about our speech in moments like this.  He says, “Sometimes [the tongue] praises our Lord and Father, and sometimes it breaks out into curses against those who have been made in the image of God” (James 3:9 NLT).  He encourages us to the former rather than the latter.  St. Augustine adds, “Let them not pray, then, that their enemies may die, but that their enemies be corrected; then the enemies will be dead, because when converted they will no longer exist as enemies.”

Piecing Together Forgiveness – Piece IV

A fourth piece of forgiveness is recognizing our own complicity in conflict and remembering that we have been forgiven in the past and taking the step of repentance.  The more damage someone does to us, the harder it is to remember our own need of forgiveness, but all of us are in need of forgiveness at some point in our lives.  And ultimately all of us are in need of forgiveness by God.  Jesus taught those who would follow him to pray, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”  Forgive us. We all need it.

Of course, there may be some situations where you were completely blindsided, but most situations that we find ourselves in are not like this.  We can usually ask ourselves, “Was there anything I could have done better?  Was there any other kind of response I could have had?”  I’m not trying to get you to blame yourself for what someone else done.  Remember, speak truthfully about the situation, but speaking truthfully usually includes admitting that we maybe weren’t at our best all the time either.  Jesus says, “Why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own?” (Matthew 7:3 NLT).  Jesus is using hyperbole or exaggeration to make a point here, but maybe you have at least a speck in your eye that you could confess.  I find that when I confess to having had room for improvement in my own responses, the door to an apology swings open rather than slamming shut.

Even if I did nothing wrong in any given situation, I have done wrong in the past to someone.  One time when I got back to my car, I found a note on the windshield.  It said, “I’m sorry I hit your car and put a dent in it.  My name is…and my phone number is…”  Wow!  Déjà vu!  Except last time I was in this situation, I was the one leaving the note on someone’s car.  I called the person who left the note and said, “Thanks for leaving a note.  My car has 150,000 miles on it and the part you hit was already rusted, so let’s call it good and not worry about it.  I appreciate your honesty.”  I didn’t have any trouble forgiving in that moment because I had done the very same thing to someone else!

Piecing Together Forgiveness – Piece V

A fifth piece of forgiveness is making a commitment to struggle to change whatever caused and continues to perpetuate our conflicts.  There is “no peace without justice” as the saying goes.  If the injustice continues, then how are we to expect forgiveness to come?  It seems nearly impossible, and so forgiveness always includes working toward changing the situation that caused the conflict in the first place.  We like to call this “role renegotiation” around here.  You meet with the person who you’re in conflict with and you renegotiate expectations.

We learn what God desires of us through the prophet Micah (not my son…the Old Testament prophet Micah who he is named after), “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8 NRSV).  In your place of needing to forgive, is there need for justice?  Is there need for kindness?  Is there need for humility?  Forgiveness includes working for these things.

Piecing Together Forgiveness – Piece VI

A last piece of forgiveness is confessing our yearning for the possibility of reconciliation.  OK, in the end you may not be able to reconcile, but are you satisfied with that or do you yearn for something better?  I think a lot of us get stuck in bitterness and anger and we just give up and decide to live in the bitterness and anger.  Those who follow Jesus are called to something more.  We’re called to help bring about the kingdom of God here on earth as it is in heaven.  We’re called to at the very least yearn for it.  God’s kingdom is already here, but at the same time it is not yet fully here.  Are you satisfied with the “already” or do you yearn also for the “not yet”?  We’re called to yearn and work for the “not yet.”

Maybe the damage to the windshield of your life will cost so much that you don’t have enough money to repair it.  So do you drive around life content with a cracked windshield or do you yearn for the day when the damage will be repaired?  Sometimes all we can do in this life is pray, struggle, and yearn for what seems like the impossible.    Paul tells us, “Do your part to live in peace with everyone, as much as possible” (Romans 12:18 NLT).  The key phrase there is “as much as possible.”  Maybe in the end forgiveness isn’t possible in this life, but yearn for a time when it will be.  You may eventually find that time has come.

Forgiveness

Back to my letter on forgiveness.  This person had truly hurt me in the past.  I decided to write a letter to this person.  I haven’t sent it to them, and I’m not yet sure if I will. (Will it do harm or do good?)  I began the letter thanking them for their compliment on my son.  I agreed with how beautiful he is!  I went on to say that I was surprised to get their note, and that it brought up some past pain that I was not aware of.  I went on to tell them in as truthful but as kind a way as I could the pain that they had caused me.  From there I moved on to forgiveness.  I reminded this person that I was in need of forgiveness too.  Probably not in this situation, but definitely in other situations.  I also told them that I was even in need of forgiveness by God through Jesus Christ.  I then forgave them.  I ended the letter expressing the hope that this letter would bring healing to both of us, and that perhaps they would also experience the forgiveness and mercy of God in Jesus Christ.

In writing this letter, I followed the pattern of another letter I had read while preparing for this sermon series.  It was the letter that Louis Zamporini, an American WWII POW in Japan, sent to his Japanese captor and torturer, Mutsuhiro Wantanabe.  Zamporini was daily tortured by Wantanabe for several years.  After some serious post traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, and violent abusive behavior with his wife and daughter, Zamporini had a life changing experience with God that led him to being able to forgive Wantanabe.  But to hear that story and read that letter, you’ll have to come back next week when I’ll be dealing with forgiveness and our memory.

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Chipped – Forgive Me
Sycamore Creek Church
April 24, 2011 – Easter
Matthew 6:9-15
Tom Arthur

Peace, Friends!  Christ is risen, he is risen indeed!

Chipped

Have you ever been driving along a road and some car kicks up a rock onto your windshield, and CRACK!  You’ve got a big chip in your windshield.  My wife had a rental car one time and was driving to a conference when a very small pebble from a dump truck in front of her hit the windshield and cracked it.  Yikes!  It was a not a happy moment for her.  Up to that point the car had been beautiful and flawless, but now it was damaged.

Life is like that windshield.  We’re driving along having a grand ole time when someone kicks a rock up in our windshield or when we kick up a rock into someone else’s windshield and these lives aren’t the shiny happy perfect lives that we had wanted at times.

Of course the size of the rock matters for the damage done.  A small rock can produce a small chip.  Although over time that small chip, if not treated, can spread out and destroy the whole windshield.  What are the small rocks we throw around in life?  Changing the story just a little bit to make ourselves look better.  Being impatient with those around us.  Ignoring an obvious need that we easily have the ability to meet.  Small white lies.

I was pulling out of a parking space one time and before I realized what I had done, I was really really close to the car behind me.  It filled the entire rearview mirror.  I pulled forward and looked at the car through the rearview mirror to see if I had actually done any damage.  I didn’t see any damage in the rearview mirror, but then I wondered if anyone had seen me.  I looked around to see if anyone had noticed.  Then I realized what I was doing.  I was more concerned if anyone had seen me than if I had done any damage.  So I parked the car, got out and looked to see if I had actually hit the car behind me.  Yep.  I had.  There was a nice little dent in it.  Nothing too big.  Their car would have worked just fine with that dent in it.  But I felt convicted, so I left a note even though no one had seen me.  I was tempted in that moment to just drive away, but that would have been a small chip I had made in someone’s life.  Later when I talked to the person on the phone, I came to find out that they had just bought the car that day!  They were glad I left a note.

There are small rocks that make small chips, but there are also medium size rocks too.  Telling a lie one time might be a small chip, but continual lies over time add up and break down trust.  Or verbal abuse by a spouse or parent can wither our spirits.  Or neglect can be a medium size rock that comes through our windshield.  We want and desire love but we don’t receive it.  We just want to a touch or hug or squeeze of the hand or encouraging word, but all we get is silence and distance.  These are the medium size rocks that we kick up at one another’s windshields.  Perhaps they go right through or crack the windshield so much as to make it unusable.

Then there are the really big rocks that shatter our windshields completely.  Last summer I was at a wedding down in North Carolina when someone rear ended the car I was in.  We had stopped to wait for someone in front of us to turn left.  The car behind us didn’t notice us stopped.  We were at a dead stop when we were hit at about 45 MPH from behind.  I was in the back seat, and all I remember was the impact and glass flying everywhere.  It was like an explosion.  My body immediately went into a state of shock, and I could barely think or act.  I was really dependent upon the people around me helping me to do what needed to be done.  The policeman, the EMT, bystanders, other friends in the car who weren’t in quite as much shock as I was.  Without these men and women who helped me, I would have had a hard time functioning at all.

It’s not just car wrecks that cause this kind of reaction in us.  Big rocks come through our windshields more often that we’d ever wish or hope for.  Someone we should be able to trust sexually abused us as a child.  Or we physically abused a child, spouse, or family member.  Or in the midst of what is supposed to be a trusting commitment of marriage, our spouse has an affair.  These kinds of things are not quickly fixed because the damage shatters our lives.

Beyond even these big rocks are boulders that come crashing down on us.  I’m talking about the kind of thing that totally destroys your entire life.  Like a boulder that doesn’t just shatter the windshield of a car but crushes the entire car.  I hope and pray that you will never have something like this happen to you.  Here we’re talking about things like murder.  The effects of murder are magnitudes beyond the small chips that we get in our windshields.  Life cannot go on in the same way.

The repair work from the smallest of chips to the crushing of a car is done through forgiveness.  It begins with forgiveness and it continues with forgiveness.

Forgiveness involves two things: chips in our lives and the chips we make in others’ lives.  Forgiveness has to do with the damage people do to us and the damage we do to others.  Today we begin a three week series on the repair work of forgiveness.  Next week we’ll look at the issue of forgiving others.  Today we’re looking at the repair work that needs to be done because of the chips, cracks, and crushes we’ve put in others’ lives.  Throughout the series, we’ll use as our guide the prayer that Jesus taught.  Will you pray it with me?

Matthew 6:9-15 (NLT)

Pray like this:
Our Father in heaven, may your name be honored.
May your Kingdom come soon.
May your will be done here on earth, just as it is in heaven.
Give us our food for today,
and forgive us our sins,
just as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us.
And don’t let us yield to temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you.
But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.

This is Jesus’ teaching for us today.  Thank you, God!

Forgiveness

So today we begin with our own need for forgiveness.  Our own forgiveness is about two things:

1. How can I make things right?
2. How can I be set free from the guilt I carry?

Of course when we begin talking about forgiveness we get very quickly into another topic that cannot be ignored: sin.  The Bible has two ways of speaking about sin.  Sin is straying from the path that we were supposed to be on or missing the mark that we were aiming at.  Of course, both of these things can be either intentional or unintentional.  We can intend to stay on the path but still stray.  We can intend to hit the mark and still miss it.  Or, if we are honest with ourselves, too often we intend to leave the path that we know is right and to miss the mark that we know is best.  In each of these instances of sin, forgiveness asks the question: how can I make it right and how can I be set free from the guilt that I carry?

Guilt can weigh us down and destroy us.  It can bend us so low with a weight that is impossible to carry.  In the book Atonement by Ian McEwan that was made into a movie by the same name, Briony is bent low by guilt.  As a young girl she has a crush on an older boy, Robbie, who is in love with her older sister, Cecilia.  When she sees him make some physical advances on her sister that she doesn’t fully understand, she becomes jealous.  Later that night her cousin is raped, and Briony “sees” the man who did it.  She tells the police it was Robbie to get back at him.  From this point on Robbie’s life is ruined, and so is Cecilia’s.

But it isn’t just Robbie and Cecilia’s life that is ruined.  Briony’s life is destroyed too.  She grows and realizes the mistake that she made, but there is no way to undo the damage that was done.  Her cousin ends up marrying the man who raped her, and Robbie and Cecilia’s lives are destroyed.  Briony becomes a nurse in a London hospital during WWII, and we see her trying to scrub her guilt away by attending to the needs of fallen soldiers.  She scrubs the floor.  She scrubs the bed.  She scrubs her hands, but she can’t get the guilt off of her body.  She sent a big rock through the windshield of too many people’s lives

The Bible tells us that when we sin against others we also sin against God.  Psalm 51:4 says, “Against you [God], and you alone, have I sinned” (NLT).  Psalm 51 is traditionally the psalm that David wrote after he had an affair with Bathsheba and had her husband killed in an attempt to cover it up.  Would you think that David would be praying that he had sinned against Bathsheba and her husband, Uriah?  I would.  But David sees deeper.  David realizes that when he has sinned against another human who is made in the image of God, he is sinning against God.  All our sin is a sin against God.  From the smallest of chips to the biggest of cracks, when we stray from the path or miss the mark in loving others, we also miss the mark with God.

I asked on Facebook this past week what guilt people carry around both big and small.  I heard stories about ignoring needs, especially those needs that were right there in plain view.  I heard stories about saving money by buying in big box stores rather than supporting small local businesses.  I heard stories about being impatient and disrespectful in tone and wasting resources such as time and money.  People carry around a lot of guilt when it comes to parenting.  Did I nurse my child long enough?  There can also be some big guilt in this arena like the decision to terminate a pregnancy.  There is a lot of guilt that we carry around in our marriages too.  Did I fight long enough and hard enough to save my marriage?  Why did I give into the temptation to infidelity?  There’s enough guilt here to crack and shatter a lot of windshields.  So what do we do with that guilt?  How do we make things right?  We may try to fix these things by ourselves, and while there are some positive and helpful things we can do, we can never totally repair the situation on our own.  We need help.

Into this complicated mess, steps God’s forgiveness, God’s forgiveness in the flesh of God’s son, Jesus Christ.  Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and community were all about forgiveness.

Forgiveness and Jesus’ Life

Jesus’ life teaches about forgiveness.  There are too many teachings to recount them all today.  Jesus forgives a paralytic man and then heals him to show that he has power to forgive (Matthew 9:5-6).  Jesus teaches his disciples to forgive seventy times seven times (Matthew 18:21-22).  Jesus tells a story about a slave who is forgiven of his debt but then goes out and demands repayment from those who owe him.  His master calls him back in to give an account of his unforgiving ways (Matthew 18:32-33).  Jesus teaches us not to judge but to forgive (Luke 6:37).  And while it may seem at first glance to be in contradiction to this teaching, Jesus also teaches us to reprove or correct one another then forgive (Luke 17:3-4).

Maybe though the most powerful teaching Jesus has on forgiveness is the prayer that he taught which we find in Matthew 6:9-15.  He teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our sins as we have been forgiven.”  He goes on to add some commentary at the end: “”If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you.  But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.”  Wow!  Our own forgiveness seems to be highly dependent upon our willingness to forgive others.

I did a bit of in-depth work on this prayer while I was in seminary.  I came to the conclusion that the form of this prayer was borrowed from the Psalms.  But not just any psalm.  The Lord’s Prayer is in the form of a cursing psalm.  Yeah, those psalms that you like to skip over because the psalmist vents and asks God to do a lot of bad stuff to the people he or she doesn’t like.  Jesus takes this form of cursing and turns it upside down and makes it a prayer about forgiveness.  Jesus’ life and teaching are all about turning things upside down by forgiving.

Forgiveness and Jesus’ Death

Jesus’ life isn’t the only thing that teaches about forgiveness.  Jesus’ death also teaches us about forgiveness.  He dies without retaliation and he forgives his executioners.  Don’t think that he didn’t have the power as the Son of God to wipe away everyone from existence who was torturing him.  Instead Jesus said, “Father, forgive these people, because they don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34, NLT).

Forgiveness and Jesus’ Resurrection

Thankfully it’s not just Jesus’ death that forgives us, although sometimes as Christians that’s all we focus on.  Jesus’ resurrection also has to do with forgiveness.  Easter has to do with forgiveness.  If Jesus just died for our sins, but wasn’t raised from the dead by God, then how would we know whether this whole forgiveness thing actually works in the end?  We wouldn’t.  Jesus’ resurrection shows us that forgiveness wins!  In the book of Acts we read about a sermon that Paul preached where he says that it was Jesus “whom God raised and whose body did not decay. Brothers, listen! In this man Jesus there is forgiveness for your sins. Everyone who believes in him is freed from all guilt and declared right with God” (Acts 13:37-39, NLT).  Yes, Jesus’ death forgives our sins, but Jesus’ resurrection also forgives sins.  In the resurrection forgiveness wins.

Forgiveness and Jesus’ Community

Jesus then passes on this message of forgiveness to the community of those who follow him.  He makes the rather startling statement that “if you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven. If you refuse to forgive them, they are unforgiven” (John 20:23, NLT).  What’s this all about?  I wonder if Jesus doesn’t understand our need to see and feel and touch forgiveness.  When we confess our sins to God, we are forgiven, but sometimes we don’t feel like it.  It is hard to confess to a God that we can’t see.  And so I wonder if Jesus understood that we need a kind of flesh and blood ambassador to really experience God’s forgiveness.  Of course that flesh and blood person was Jesus, but now that flesh and blood person becomes each one of us, the members of Christ’s body, the church.

Paul says, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18, NRSV).  Through Jesus, we are taught and shown how to make things right, and our guilt is forgiven, whether you feel it or not.  We as a community exist to help you fully live into that forgiveness.

This past week I talked to a woman who contacted me because she needed to confess some past sins to someone.  While she could have chosen anyone and any follower of Jesus could have been Jesus’ representative to her, she chose me.  I asked her if I could share this story anonymously.  And so we sat at the confessional booth of a local diner over coffee, and she told the story of things that she had done over the past several decades that she felt significant guilt over.  She had never told these to anyone else.  They had hidden in the darkness of her soul and the guilt was bending her down.

Adam Hamilton, a pastor at Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City says that “forgiveness is giving up the hope of a different past and taking on the hope of a joyful future.”  That’s what this woman was doing in that confessional booth of a local diner.  Giving up the hope of having lived differently in the past and taking on the hope of living joyfully in the future.  Recently she had been introduced to Jesus, and she had committed her life to follow after him.  She felt that part of this new life meant confessing these things.

As we sat and talked, and as she unloaded the guilt of her past, I could see through the tears a kind of new life in her.  I could see the darkness being filled with light.  I could see the weight of that guilt being taken off her shoulders and given to the only one who can carry it, Jesus, the Son of God who taught about forgiveness, died for our sins, was resurrected by God to show that forgiveness wins, and the one whose community follows in that path.  When she was done, I looked her in the eye as Jesus’ representative, and I told her what Jesus told me tell her, “Your sins are forgiven.”

Today on Easter we celebrate the resurrection and the empty tomb.  In the resurrection, Jesus rolls away the rocks that we have used to chip the lives of others, and the tomb of our guilt is empty.

On this Easter celebration day when the tomb is empty and forgiveness wins, will you join in me praying again that prayer that Jesus taught?

Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
the power and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.

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Ever had someone chip the windshield of your life? You’re going along minding your own business and CRACK!  Your perfect life now has a chip in it.  Some chips are bigger than others, but they’re all repaired through forgiveness.  Beginning on Easter, join us for a three week series on learning the repair work of forgiveness.

April 24, 2011 (Easter) – Forgive Me

May 1, 2011 – Forgive Others

May 8, 2011 – Forgive and Remember

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