"God Forgives You, Forgive Others, Forgive Yourself." A Sermon for Proper 19 Matthew 18:21-35
There is a long time honored tradition in the church of preaching on the liturgy. I believe that it is a good thing every so often to take a good hard look at exactly what it is that we are doing on a Sunday morning. Often times, we just like the words of the service flow around us, never breaching our inner monologues. We know what we’re supposed to say, and we know when we’re supposed to say them. We say these words over and over again every Sunday.
It makes total sense to me that we should take some time to stop. Dust these words off, and take a look at what we’re saying.
In a few minutes, after I’m done talking and we’ve all enjoyed open space, we are going to say the words of the confession and Demery is going to pronounce the absolution. The words that Saint Julian’s uses for the absolution during this long season we call ordinary time come from the New Zealand Prayer Book. I had never heard them before I started worshiping here.
We say: We need your healing, merciful God:
Give us true repentance.
Some sins are plain to us;
Some escape us,
Some we cannot face.
Forgive us;
Set us free to hear your word to us;
Set us free to serve you.
Then we hear:
God forgives you.
Forgive others;
Forgive yourself.
Through Christ, God has put away your sin: approach your God in peace.
This is a remarkable interchange. The confession is painfully honest. “We need your healing, because we can’t do it ourselves. We need your healing, because we can’t even recognize our own wrongdoings. We can’t even look at our wrongdoings honestly, face to face, without collapsing in grief, guilt, and fear.” This is a cry to God from a very deep, vulnerable place. We are begging with God to set us free from all those things that imprison us, all those things that keep us from being the people that we were made to be. It’s a summary of our human fallenness in clear, simple words. Even when we are so filled with shame that we can’t lift our faces to God, we still lift up our hearts for help.
It’s beautiful.
But perhaps more compelling are the words of absolution that follow. God forgives you. Forgive others. Forgive yourself.
These words are short and to the point, yet comprehensive and powerful.
Let’s start with the first and go in order.
God forgives you.
We get a glimpse of the scope of God’s forgiveness from our Gospel reading. Peter approaches Jesus with a seemingly innocent question, “Jesus, how many times should we forgive another member of the church? As many as… seven? Seven times?” This follows on the heels of last week’s conversation about settling disputes in the church. When put in that context, Peter’s inquiry seems an innocent clarifying question.
Peter wants to put a value on forgiveness. In Peter’s world, there is a transaction happening. Forgiveness, after all, costs something to the one doing the forgiving. Peter figures that eventually human capacity for compassion crumbles when faced by repeat offenders. Surely, Jesus recognizes this and knows the perfect amount of forgiveness to fairly handle wooden headed members of the church.
Jesus handles this inquiry by turning the whole concept on its head. Not seven times, Peter. Seventy seven times. God’s forgiveness doesn’t fit into this transactional system that Peter is trying to preserve. In response to this transactional worldview, Jesus answers in an economic parable.
This parable has it all- a merciful king, and unmerciful servant, and vast sums of money.
In the world of the parable, the king had every right to sell the slave, with his wife and children and all their possessions in order to pay back the exorbitant sum of 1000 talents that the slave owed the king. Instead, the king listens when the slave begs for mercy. Not only did he release the slave, his debt was also forgiven.
The king is setting a precedent, one where lives are valued over transaction. One where power is turned towards sacrificial mercy instead of greedy self-preservation. In this world, mercy is the norm and seemingly reasonable economic decisions are harshly punished. It is the vision of a world that is at the same time both comforting and terrifying.
God’s forgiveness is not economic. It is not transactional. It is not valued in such a way that Peter can dictate simple rules about when compassion runs out and condemnation starts. It springs from a place of abundance.
When we hear the words, God forgives you, it is the sign of a world that is transformed from an economy of scarcity to an economy of gift.
We hear it in our liturgy: God forgives you.
The next is Forgive Others.
In May, I attended a conference in Richmond, Virginia. The theme of the conference was forgiveness, and the key presenter of the week was a man named Dr. Everett L. Worthington, Jr. Doctor Worthington’s life work (and passion) in the field of forgiveness. He researches forgiveness. He creates programs, and he presents for groups about the importance of forgiveness for both good social order, but for great personal benefit as well.
According to Doctor Worthington’s research, adopting a lifestyle of forgiveness leads to a whole slew of beneficial results. It turns out, people who forgive are healthier, happier, and have more stable relationships then those who don’t.
Doctor Everett even developed a whole system for teaching people to be more forgiving. It’s called the REACH FORGIVENESS SYSTEM and you can explore all six steps on his website. His system is good psychological training that enables one to forgive another whether or not they deserve forgiveness.
I think Doctor Worthington’s life work is a worthy pursuit. I think the research is valuable, and we could all learn to be a little more forgiving.
I am suspicious, however, of a concept of forgiveness that (once again) seems transactional. I forgive, because I benefit. I forgive, because I want to feel happy and satisfied and I don’t want to have heart disease.
The forgiveness that our liturgy entreats is one that is modelled on the forgiveness that we receive from God. It is not transactional, it is a gift that we give to each other. That we benefit from giving the gift of forgiveness is yet another gift from God. Forgiving others is a process of both personal and communal reconciliation that is imbued with God’s love, and a sign that in Christ God is setting all things right.
So listen hard when we hear it in our liturgy: forgive others.
God forgives you. Forgive others. This leaves us with Forgive yourself.
Before I moved to Austin to attend the seminary of the southwest, I worked as a youth minister at Saint Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Buda, TX. Saint Elizabeth supported me through my discernment process, and they affirmed my call toward ministry.
During this time, I also worked in a food truck in San Marcos to make ends meet. Cooking in a professional kitchen, if you’ve never done it, is tough work. It is hot, loud, and constantly dangerous. In a small operation like a food trailer, you have to constantly balance the tasks of talking to customers, preparing food, answering the phone, and attempting to avoid cutting or burning yourself. It is often desperately stressful and frustrating work. When things started to pile up, everything started to break down. My ability to smoothly flow from one task to another, my ability to be friendly to customers, my ability to keep a level head in a stressful situation.
I was living this weird double life, one where half the week I dedicated my life to a beautiful Christian community, and the other half of the week where I felt like a jerk a lot of the time and I struggled not to yell at my co-workers or customers.
At the time, as a part of my discernment process, I visited with a psychologist the Diocese had on retainer. After the initial round of testing to ensure that I was both emotionally stable enough and just crazy enough to consider going to seminary, he called me back to his office. He told me that he was concerned that I was too anxious, and he handed me a book called Self Compassion by Kristen Neff.
This book changed a lot of things for me.
The basic premise is this: We are really bad at managing our emotions. That’s okay, we’re only human after all. However, instead of allowing negative emotions to feed off themselves and spiral into a self-perpetuating black goo, we forgive ourselves for having negative emotions. We refocus and acknowledge that everyone has negative emotions, and if I am willing to forgive my neighbor for their shortcomings, I should extend myself the same compassion.
I read the book between orders at work. I found that the hard situations still came up, and from time to time the work was really stressful, but I wasn’t going into the death spiral of negativity that sent me home feeling defeated every night. When I forgave myself for not being perfect, I found that I was a better cook, a better manager, and better with my customers.
God’s forgiveness isn’t transactional, it is generous and abundant. We are to follow the example of Jesus Christ, we are called to be a people of forgiveness. Often, this needs to start with ourselves. We are not perfect, and that’s okay. We’re in the process of being made perfect in God, and that takes time. To extend to ourselves the same compassion that we extend to each other places God’s plan for creation at the very center of who we are.
Where Peter tries to turn forgiveness into a transaction, Jesus turns it into grace. This grace transforms everything- how we relate to God, how we relate to each other, and how we judge ourselves. It is grand, ridiculously generous, and it springs from abundance rather than scarcity. In Christ, God is calling us to speak this grace in the stories of our lives. We are called to this grace in our liturgy:
God forgives you.
Forgive others.
Forgive yourself.
Three small phrases that encompass God’s incredible plan for creation. And after?
Through Christ, God has put away your sin. Approach your God in peace.
We join the great throng of the faithful, enlivened by the work of Jesus Christ, ever drawing closer and closer to God in love and in peace. Thanks be to God!