Pentecost 17, Year A
September 11, 2005
The Rev. Melissa Skelton

In a 1997 letter, Madeline L’Engle wrote the following: “The best way to help the world is to start by loving each other, not blandly, blindly, but realistically, with understanding and forbearance and forgiveness.”

Today, September 11^th, is a day that wants to be about big, difficult, world events. It’s a day that wants to be about articles in the New York Times, retrospectives with photographs and personal reflections and, especially now, this day wants to be about comparisons and contrasts drawn between the Sept 11^th act of terrorism and the natural disaster in the Gulf Coast.

And so some weeks ago when I realized that this year September 11^th would fall on a Sunday, I had imagined that today we would be looking back at the falling twin towers or the partially demolished Pentagon through a lens provided by our gospel for today.

But our lectionary had something else in mind. Yes, it gave us a gospel lens all right—in this case, the lens of a strong call to forgiveness, but that lens is not turned toward traumatic world events like the attack on September 11^th . Instead, its focus is much closer to home. In fact you might say that the focus is home—forgiving those who are right next to us.

For Matthew, this meant forgiving people within the church community. For us, it means forgiving those closest to us in our churches in our homes and in our workplaces—the people we eat breakfast with, the people we pray with, the people we share an office with.

But first a little background on our gospel for today. This passage, beginning with Peter’s question about how many times he should forgive, comes at the end of what some call the Fourth Discourse in Matthew, a body of material focused on life together in the church. It deals with such matters as who from God’s point of view is the greatest and least, how the community will deal with people who repeatedly engage in behavior that threatens community fellowship and, finally, the question of just how much one should expect to have to forgive another.

Given this context, Peter’s question of “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive..?” may have two different concerns—first, a concern about the offended party—how much he or she should be expected to extend himself or herself and keep forgiving, and second, about the party giving offense—how much forgiveness should be heaped upon a person who offends over and over again? That is, how much forgiveness is in their best interest?

Jesus’ response, however, does not deal with either end of Peter’s more pragmatic questions about the details of how Christian communities should function. Instead, Jesus’ answer—we are to forgive not seven times but seventy-seven times, that is forgiveness without limit—is about a kind of “kingdom” stance we might have toward forgiving others. And as the parable Jesus tells indicates, this stance is grounded in the very nature of God as the one who forgives without limit.

And so what is forgiveness and what is it not? And why, why, why is forgiveness so important to our life in God and with one another? What makes it such a vital part of the fullness of life to which Jesus calls us? Another way of asking this is what is the work God is doing in us, in others and in the world when we forgive?

What forgiveness is not:

• Forgiveness is not about dismissing—passing something off as inconsequential or insignificant

• Forgiveness is not about forgetting—does not mean pretending something hasn’t happened to us, or expecting oneself to have a kind of amnesia about it

• Forgiveness is not about condoning—does not mean approving of the hurtful thing that has happened

• Finally, forgiveness is not the same thing as reconciliation—does not necessarily require the knowledge or the participation of the one forgiven

So what is forgiveness?

Speaking about person-to-person forgiveness, some have defined forgiveness this way: Forgiveness is an unconditional gift given to one who does not deserve it. It is a person’s merciful response to someone who has unjustly hurt him or her. In forgiving, a person ultimately lets go of negative feelings (such as resentment), negative thoughts (such as harsh judgments), and negative behavior (such as revenge-seeking) toward the person who has created the injury.

And why is forgiveness so important in our life with God and with one another?

First, to borrow a bit of an image from our story from Exodus for today, forgiving someone allows us to walk out of a kind of bondage to the past, freeing us to live in the present and to move into the future. Another definition of forgiveness is ‘the ability to let go of the possibility of a better yesterday.” Think about that. Once we’re able to let go of the possibility of a better yesterday, the present becomes available to us and the future opens up before us. And so forgiveness is one of God’s ways of renewing our lives as we move through time.

Second, giving and receiving forgiveness allows us to gain greater access to our full humanity. A psychologist who worked reconciliation in South Africa said that he believed this was so because the forgiving person comes to understand that he or she could have done the same thing him or herself.

A story from the Nuremberg Trials gets at this: A man who had been a prisoner in one of the Nazi death camps was supposed to testify against another man who had been a guard in the camp. When the witness saw the guard in the courtroom, he fainted. All those around him thought it was because he was so horrified to see his oppressor again. But when the man regained consciousness, he said, “No. I fainted because I realized I could have been him.”

Where in your life are you being nudged by God or encouraged or even pushed a bit to forgive someone? Someone close at hand? Someone far away?

I had a brief conversation with a new friend last night who I had told I was preaching on forgiveness this morning. He immediately had something to say about it. He told me that in his experience he had to allow himself all the time he needed to have all the feelings he was having about a person or situation before he could get to forgiveness. This made me think about the mechanism of forgiveness in people’s lives—how for some it can come after years of hard work and for others it can come in a flash of insight. Both of these, it seems to me, are gifts from the Holy One whose nature is forgiving and renewing and whose forgiving energy we crave and we draw on, whatever our process of forgiveness may be.

I want to end this morning on that note, with a parable written not by Matthew but by Ernest Hemingway all about our own craving to be forgiven.

Hemingway wrote a story about a father and his teenage son. In the story, the relationship had become conflicted, and the teenage son ran away from home. His father then began a journey in search of his son.

Finally, in Madrid, Spain, in a last desperate attempt to find the boy, the father put an ad in the local newspaper. The ad read: "Dear Paco, meet me in front of the newspaper office at noon. All is forgiven. I love you. Your father." The next day, in front of the newspaper office, eight hundred Pacos showed up. They (like we) were all seeking forgiveness.

Peter asks, “How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” But Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times.”

For you are to be merciful as the Holy One is merciful to you.

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Works drawn on or cited:

• Madeline L’Engle, from a 1997 letter
• Matthew by Douglas Hare

• Ideas on the definition of forgiveness adapted and drawn from the work of Lewis Smedes and a study on forgiveness by Robert D. Enright.

• Definition of forgiveness found in Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott, p. 217.

• "The Capital of the World" by Ernest Hemingway