Chipped – Forgive and Remember

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.