Delivered Sunday, April 3, 2011
How do you forgive someone who has wronged you or wronged someone you love? That is the topic of today’s message. I am not going to talk about why we should forgive. I dealt with that topic this summer in a sermon called “The Top Ten Reasons to Forgive.” Today I am assuming today that you want to forgive, need to forgive, or feel like you should forgive, but you just can’t forgive. Perhaps you have tried, but failed. The thoughts of anger and retaliation return. You have not been able to really forgive. I am assuming in this message that you have a desire to forgive – perhaps for no other reason than to give yourself peace of mind and bring closure to something that happened in the past. You have heard the old phrase “Forgive and forget.” Well, how do you actually do that?
This sermon topic came out of the Lenten Bible Study that we are doing on Wednesday evenings in the Gospel of Mark. One of the passages caught my attention. Mark 11:25-26 “And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses. 26 But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.” It says “whenever you stand praying.” That means every day when you do your daily devotions. It means every Sunday we come to worship, and especially every time we come to the Lord’s Supper. “Whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him….” It also says that being forgiven by God is connected to us forgiving others. Therefore this is very important. How do we forgive? There are four steps to forgiveness.
I. First, we admit we can’t forgive. I don’t know if you have had much exposure to the 12 steps of AA and other similar groups. My former church in Lowell, Massachusetts, had some type of 12-step meeting every day of the week. Half my congregation and two thirds of my deacons were former addicts of some type. So I heard a lot about the twelve steps. The first step is: “We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable.” I am not going to take you through 12 steps but the first step in important for our topic. At some point we have to admit that even though we try to forgive some people, we just can’t. Perhaps you can say, “I will forgive, but I won’t forget.” If you won’t forget, then you haven’t forgiven. By that I don’t mean that you can’t remember what happened; I mean that you don’t think about it unless it is brought up, and even then you forget about it again easily.
When a great harm has been done to us, most of us can’t just forgive and forget. At least I can’t. The first step is to admit that. We admit it specifically and verbally to God. The religious term for this is confession. Confession is good for the soul. It turns our attention away from the offense that someone else has committed and turns our attention to our own offense. In the final analysis the problem is not the sin that someone else has committed against us; it is the sin we have committed. It is the sin of unforgiveness. This sermon is already getting heavy. So let me tell a humorous story.
A woman bought a parrot for a pet. All the parrot did was treat her badly. It insulted her continually, “You’re ugly. You smell like dirty socks. I can't stand you!" Every time she tried to pick it up, it would peck at her arm. One day she got fed up with the obnoxious parrot. She opened the freezer, threw it in and closed the door. From inside the freezer, the parrot kept insulting her for a couple of minutes, and then it was suddenly quiet. She thought, "Oh no, I killed my parrot!" She opened the door and the parrot silently looked at her. She picked it up. Then the parrot said, "I'm very sorry. I apologize for my bad behavior and promise you I will not do it any more. From now on, I will be a respectful, obedient parrot." " OK" she said. "Apology accepted." The parrot replied "Thank you." Then he added, "Can I ask you a question?" She said, "Yes, What?" The parrot looked back at the freezer and asked, "What did the chicken do?"
II. The first step is confession. Second, Ask God to forgive you for your unforgiveness. This is moving beyond confession to repentance. The word “repent” means literally to rethink, “to change your mind.” We have to change our mind about forgiveness. We tend to think that when we forgive someone, that we are doing them a favor. That we are the one who has been wronged and we are granting them this wonderful boon of setting them free from our wrath. The reality is that most of the time those who wronged us don’t really think they did anything wrong. Often they don’t think they need to apologize. Even if they know they did something wrong, they tend to dismiss it as no big deal. They justify their behavior to themselves, and forget about it. We may be holding a grudge for days, weeks, months or maybe even years, while the offender has forgotten about it and is not troubled at all.
When we forgive someone, we are not doing them a favor. We are doing ourselves a favor. Why carry around a load of resentment, anger and bitterness. All that does is poison our heart and soul. Let me make this clear: unforgiveness hurts us more than anyone else. When we do not forgive we are only hurting ourselves. More than that, We are hurting our relationship with God. To put it bluntly, unforgiveness is sin. That is what we hav to get through our brains and let it sink into our hearts. We are so obsessed with the sins committed against us that we are blind to our own sin of unforgiveness.
The greatest commandment in the Bible, according to Jesus, is to love; unforgiveness is a sin against love. It is a denial of love; it is a refutation of love. It is the opposite of love. Unforgiveness is hate disguised as righteousness. We say to ourselves that our cause is right and it would be unjust to let someone off the hook for what they did. But the reality is that we are the one on the hook. We have been hooked by sin.
The apostle Paul says in Ephesians 4 “In your anger do not sin. Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, 27 and do not give the devil a foothold…. 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31 Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. 32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”
Unforgiveness is a spiritual poison that can destroy our soul. It destroys marriages and families and churches. Sure, what that person did to us was terrible; it hurt us deeply. But that is in the past; our unforgiveness is continually hurting us now. It is like we are beating ourselves up for what someone else did to us long ago. Unforgivnessess is like spiritual cancer eating away at our soul until our soul is dead. First we need to admit that we can’t forgive. Second, we ask God to forgive our unforgiveness.
III. Third, believe that God can do the impossible. God can give birth to a beautiful spirit of forgiveness in our lives. Before our Gospel lesson today there is a story about a man who came to Jesus asking what he had to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asked him how he was doing on obeying the Ten Commandments. The guy said he was doing great; he had kept all the commandments since he was a boy. At that point, I think Jesus must have smiled at this man’s spiritual arrogance. But he bit his tongue and said, “Good job. Now there is just one more thing you have to do to have eternal life. All you have to do is sell everything you own, give the proceeds to the poor and come follow me.” The man would not do that, as most of us wouldn’t. If I told you today what Jesus told this man. That I knew for absolutely certain that you would be guaranteed of eternal life and have riches in heaven, and all you had to do was go home today and sell your house, liquidate all your investments and retirement accounts and bank accounts and get rid of every cent and send it to the relief effort in Japan. Would you do it? I venture to say not one of us here would do it. This rich man in the story did not do it either.
The disciples saw this exchange between the rich man and Jesus and exclaimed, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus answered, “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for with God all things are possible.” This is an important spiritual truth. It is impossible for mortal man to inherit eternal life. But with God all things are possible. It is impossible for us to forget about ourselves, our rights, our dignity and our pride long enough to unconditionally forgive someone who has sinned against us. “With men it is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
God can do it. God can produce forgiveness in your heart and soul. Believe that God can do the impossible. This is the step of faith. Immediately before our gospel verses for today are these words of Jesus. “22 So Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. 23 For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. 24 Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.” Forgiveness is an act of faith in God.
On Monday morning, October 2, 2006, a gunman entered a one-room Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. In front of twenty-five horrified pupils, thirty-two-year-old Charles Roberts ordered the boys and the teacher to leave. He tied the legs of the ten remaining girls, and prepared to execute them with an automatic rifle and four hundred rounds of ammunition that he brought for the task. The oldest hostage, a thirteen-year-old girl, begged Roberts to “shoot me first and let the little ones go.” Refusing her offer, he opened fire on all of them, killing five and leaving the others critically wounded. He then shot himself as police stormed the building. The motivation for the shooting? Unforgiveness. He told the children before the massacre, “I’m angry at God for taking my little daughter.”
How did the Amish respond tro this brutal act of unforgiveness? They buried their dead, and then fresh from the funerals of their own children, these grieving Amish families came to the funeral of the shooter. They accounted for half of the seventy-five people who attended the killer’s burial. Roberts’ widow was deeply moved by their presence as Amish families greeted her and her three children. The Amish people’s forgiveness went beyond talk; the Amish also financially supported a fund for the shooter’s family.
This is what Christian forgiveness looks like. It was headline news for weeks afterwards. The story of the forgiveness of the Amish eclipsed the tragic murders, trumping the violence and arresting the world’s attention. How I wish that this type of forgiveness was practiced in all Christian churches. As a Baptist I wish it were the headline news for Baptist churches. But what has been the headline news about Baptists in recent years? It is the Westboro Baptist Church - a hate group from Topeka, Kansas, which pickets funerals of soldiers with a message of hate and judgment. It makes me sick. That church is not Baptist or Christian in anything but name. The most recent headlines have been about Reverend Terry Jones and his church in Florida. He burned a Quran a couple of weeks ago, and that act of intolerance and hate has prompted outrage and violence in Afghanistan against UN workers.
How do we forgive like the Amish forgive? Only God can produce that spirit and faith in a community. It is faith that can move a mountain of hate and evil. The apostle Paul writes, “17 Repay no one evil for evil. … 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” How I hope that this church, the Federated Church of Sandwich, would have a reputation in this area, in this county, in this state of being a spiritual community of unconditional and complete forgiveness. Jesus said, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”
IV. Fourth, when you confess, repent and believe, then forgiveness happens. The secret of forgiving is that it is not something that we do. It is something that God does in and through us. That is what this passage, Mark 11:25-26, means. “And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses. 26 But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.”
At first reading this seems to be saying that being forgiven by God is conditional upon our forgiving of others. We might think that forgiveness is something we do and as a reward for our good work of forgiveness, then God forgives us. But I think what it really means is that if we have truly received forgiveness from God, then we will forgive ogthers. If we have not received forgiveness, then we do not forgive. . “1You will know them by their fruits “ as Jesus says. “Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? 17 Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit…. Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”
Forgiven people forgive. Unforgiven people do not forgive. Like maple trees produce sweet sap that can be boiled down to maple syrup, so does the true Christian produce sweet forgiveness for all to taste. Forgiveness is the fruit of faith. If faith is present, forgiveness will follow like a shadow follows a person.
How do we forgive? We don’t; God does. He does it for us, in us and through us. We just have to get out of the way. And let him do it We get out of the way by confessing and repenting of our unforgiving spirit. We surrender our hearts and minds to God by faith. Then the fruit of forgiveness is born in our lives.
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