OUTRAGEOUS GRACE

November 8, 1987, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service

John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

“Scripture
Matthew 18:21-35

“Lord, how often shall I forgive him?' Jesus said, ‘seventy times
seven.'" -Matthew 18:21,22(RSV)

“There is more nonsense spoken during the hour of eleven to twelve on
Sunday morning than at any other time during the week."-. So says a friend
of mine, Eric Dean, Chaplain and Professor of: Humanities at Wabash College.
Eric is a bright, salty, properly irreverent English Presbyterian - of
which there are all too few. He wrote a book several years ago under the
intriguing title Good News About Sin. [In it he observes that there is a
iet of nonsense spoken from the pulpit:

"A nonsense — proposition of wide acceptance is that when a man knows
he has wronged another person, he wants to be forgiven. 'Please forgive
me' is a phrase that comes readily to the lips of each of us, but it -is
rarely said with much sincerity. When the minister says in the sermon that
men and women long to be forgiven for their sins, most members of the
congregation know that he is wrong, but they won't hold it against him.
After all, one of the prime characteristics desired in a minister is that
he be as naive as our language suggests we think God also to be."

Then Dean gets off what I thought was a very provocative
observation... ;

“One .of the hard facts of life, well-known to most people, is that
forgiveness is pretty hard to take."

Well, now, that's a twist. isn't it? I'm more inclined to assume that
guilt is our problem. I've read, adnauseam, about the heavy load of guilt
modern Americans carry around with them; that guilt is endemic to the: human
condition. I've read the Freudian proposal that the potential for self=
imposed guilt feelings exist in each of us if and when we do experience
rejection. I've read a lot about the way religion manipulates our
vulnerability to guilt, by teaching that we are sinners, condemned to

punishment and that the only way out is to play by the rules religion lays
down.

My personal religious pilgrimage took a major turn when I heard about
grace, when finally it got through to me that God's love for me does not
depend on anything in me; that God - like that wonderful father in the
parable of the Prodigal Son - comes down the road after this lost son or
daughter with arms open wide; that there is a divine embrace for me and you
before we can even mumble our carefully rehearsed apologies. My personal
spirituality was enormously energized by the discovery that religion is the
joyful celebration of Ged's love. It is the way I have of saying "thank
you" for what God has done, a corporate shout of praise and adoration for
God's grace - and not, as it sometimes appears, the grim, tight-lipped
effort to live primly and properly enough to persuade God to let me into
his apparently high-walled, and tightly secured and virtually inaccessible
Kingdom.

Forgiveness, I assume, is at the very heart of the matter. The high
point of worship comes when I've had opportunity to acknowledge my less-
than-perfect state and I hear —- “Friends, believe the Good News. In Jesus
Christ we are forgiven."

And here comes my friend Eric down at Wabash saying “forgiveness is
pretty hard to take."

Yet when we do probe a bit beneath the surface of what seems to be a
fairly simple matter, we discover that Eric Dean is not alone. “In fact,
maybe. it isn't simple at-all.

.€,..S. Lewis, for instance, whose book: Mere Christianity has
introduced the faith to countless inquiries, wrote, “Everyone says
forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive... And
then to mention the subject at all is to be greeted by howls of laughter."
[p.-89] It may be hard to acknowledge our need for forgiveness, but it may
be even more difficult and costly to offer forgiveness to others.

The whole of history after -all has proceeded on the basis of
retaliation as the normal and most effective response to personal: or
corporate offense. It's there in the Old Testament - “an eye for an
eye"... never mind the fact that the obvious result is that now there are
two blind people instead of one and that everyone around them will now feel
the effect of and pay for their mutual blindness (which may be what it
feels like to live in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf).

In any event, deep in-each of us is a sense of self which is offended
and angry when it is invaded and which, it seems to me, automatically
strikes out and back at the offender. Push us hard enough and we'll push
back. Do you remember that wonderful sequence in Witness, when the tough
Philadelphia cop, posing as a. gentle Amish farmer, is accosted and verbally
abused by several young punks, while he's sitting in his buggy inthe
middie of town?. Do you remember how that dynamic literally gets inside you
and in spite of your better judgment you want very badly for that cop to
teach those punks. a lesson; and how, as he does it, you start to cheer and
as. he pounds them around, you feel deeply that justice is being done? And

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then do you recall how you probably miss the fact that this retaliation is
the first step in a descent into bloody violence that will explode in the
midst of Amish culture and very nearly destroy it?

it is deep in us. And t have learned about it personally. I
confess - with no pride ~ that when [ am invaded - my first response is. not
forgiveness but retaliation. In one of the slickest scams I have. ever
seen, I had my wallet taken recently ~- by three young men. I was not
harmed, at least physically. It was so smooth L almost have to admire
their skill, in retrospect. ‘It was quick, painless, and when I discovered
what had just happened, it was altogether too late - and a good thing it
was, because my initial response was anger, rage. [ wanted very much to be
able to retaliate. And I felt like that for a long time afterward...
humiliated, invaded and very angry. What Bernard Goetz did cannot ever be
condoned or excused, because if you've had your wallet lifted, or purse
snatched, or worse, you know the dynamic. You know how close to the
surface his mentality is in all of us.

Christian faith teaches that we live in God's kingdom where we
forgive each other; that our health and wholeness as human beings depends
on our knowing that we are forgiven and accepted by our creator. ‘The part
of the equation that is virtually ignored, is that this divine forgiveness
is not without cost. It costs God something to extend forgiveness and it
costs us something to experience it. The cost ~ is that we must forgive: in
order to experience forgiveness. The cost of grace, that is to say, is.
grace... which is a wonderful irony only God could think up.

One time Jesus told a story about it. Actually the story. isa .
response to Peter who, with characteristic short-sightedness but a bit of
style, said one time: "Jesus, if my neighbor wrongs me, how many times
should I forgive him? Seven?" The rabbis taught that there was the _
appropriate limit to forgiveness. If your neighbor offends you three
times, forgive him. On number four, let him have it! How expansive, _
therefore, of Peter... who, no doubt, expected to be commended by Jesus for
his mercy and generosity.

The trouble is that Peter hasn't heard the Gospel yet. Peter is
still counting. It's still quantitative: ~- seven instead of three. Jesus!
response... “not seven times but seventy times seven," quite simply alters
the ground rules. He has used an idiom: seventy times seven means, not
four hundred ninety; but infinity. There are no limits, no restrictions,
no conditions when we're talking about forgiveness. Then the parable.

A servant owed his King an enermous debt: (10,000 talents. The King
prepares to exercise his normal option of selling the man and his family
into slavery to recoup a bit of his loss. The servant begs for mercy,

“I'll repay everything," he says. That's supposed to make you laugh. | Gne
talent ~- is a day's wages... This man owes 10,000 talents and is proposing
to work everyday for twenty-five years with no weekends, vacation or-sick
leave, to pay his debt. It's hyperbole. ‘This is not a payable debt. But
the King doesn't laugh. Incredibly, he does it; cancels the debt, forgives
the man. It's unheard of - until you think about it a bit and then what he
did begins to look like the one creative option he had, i.e. now he has a
forgiven servant, rather than a very angry slave and a few dollars. The

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King's behavior is radical only because it is so uncommon. Actually it is
practical. The King will be ahead if he forgives, except for the fact that
the forgiven servant now does something embarrassingiy human.

On his way home to tell his wife the incredible good news that they
are free, he runs into a fellow servant who had. borrowed about twenty
dollars from him. Our man seizes his debtor by the lapels, demands his
money and when the poor soul asks for a little time, our man calls the
police and has him thrown in jail. The news gets back to the King who
becomes very angry at his ungrateful and unforgiving servant, changes his
mind, has him thrown in jail too. "So also God will do to you" Jesus said,
"if you don't Forgive your brother or sister from your heart."

That's one of the most provocative things he ever said, I believe.
You can't separate being forgiven from forgiving. There is a profound and
almost mystical connection between experiencing divine grace and extending
it to others. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors," he taught
them to pray. The experience of grace and the discipline of grace are not
separable.

Let's start with our own reluctance to forgive others. What is there
about us that makes us so adept at keeping track of the wrongs we have
suffered, almost savoring them and then, when the time is right, opening up
the shoot and dumping the whole load of resentment and anger on our spouse or
colleague or friend? Frederick Buechner says that of the Seven Deadly
Sins, anger is the tastiest - that we love to savor its delicious flavor.
Whe here hasn't kept account of the offenses and like Peter, settled back
to wait until the final straw in order to even the score? Who hasn't
rehearsed the speech for that glorious moment when we open up full barrel
on the person who deserves what we're going to give them? Relationships
sometimes accumulate this stuff for years and when the time comes the
aggrieved can recite the offenses with such accuracy that you know that
this person has been Waiting and planning for this moment for a very long
time. Who hasn't done it? Or, or least, who hasn't waited, in a kind of
regal, righteous, indignation for the other to come to his or her senses
and apologize? It's the way we are apparently, but according to Jesus,
it's not the way we have to be.

There is an alternative. It is far more creative. It is restorative
rather than destructive. It is called forgiveness. His insight was that
it belongs to the offended one. The offender can apologize, make amends,
do penance..., but forgiveness is the offended one's to enact and give and
make happen... Nothing is more meaningless, I suppose, then forgiveness
that is neither wanted nor needed. The very worst line ever spoken in a
motion picture was —- "Love means never having to say you're sorry." That
is baloney, absolutely and utterly wrong. Love means knowing that human
intimacy always produces reasons for people to be angry. If a couple tells
me they have not yet found anything in each other to be angry about, have
never had an occasion to be just a little put off, they probably don't yet
Know one another. Good human relationships depend on the strength and
honesty to say - "I was wrong. I was stubborn. I was mean. I'm sorry.’

But that alone does not produce healing. If there is not another
factor in the equation, the apology becomes simply a bargaining chip. The

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necessary word belongs to the offended. It is the word of grace. It says
“I forgive you. What you have done need not keep us apart.” And there is
a sense in which we have trouble forgiving others because we have trouble
hearing that’ word.

There is no doubt about our need. The Freudians are right, of
course. We carry deep within us the suspicion that we are not loved-and
forgiven and accepted. There is a sense in which we live out our lives
trying to earn and demonstrate our worthfulness,. our acceptability -~
sometimes to parents who may have been dead for years, sometimes to spouses
and lovers and friends, sometimes to God. There is no doubt about our
need. In an age that no longer confesses its sin, an age that is offended
by the very concept of sin, and therefore finds it very difficult to say
“I'm sorry" for anything, physicians and psychiatrists serve as priests,
hearing confessions and assuring guilty, hurting people, that they are
acceptable, worthy, forgiven.

There is no doubt about our need. But there is misunderstanding
here. In our eagerness to say the Good News - that God forgives and
accepts - we sometimes make it sound as if our misdeeds don't ultimately
matter, that God's mercy is so abundant and free that our own side of the
ledger is irrelevant. Heinrich Heine quipped, “I love to sin — God loves
to forgive sin. Really this world is admirably arranged." [see William
Muehl, Why Preach ~ Why Listen?, p. 60]

The Gospel is that God is capable of outrageous grace, that God loves
us with an everlasting love. The Gospel is not that this grace doesn't
cost anything. Grace cost God the life of an only son... It is a gift, a
very precious, costly gift - for which God has paid.

The good news is that it comes without condition. The radical,
liberating good news is that all the devices religion thinks up to persuade
God to be gracious - are useless. God has paid the price. Jesus died to
set us free.

The cost is that to enter into that grace, to be forgiven, you and I
have to let go of guilt, let go of a whole way of thinking about ourselves
and about other people, - and live as God's gloriously free and forgiven
children. The cost of grace is grace.

The cost is that we have to live forgiven ~- which means forgiving.

It is stunning to behold. The New York Times Magazine last Sunday
reported the powerful story of Beulah Mae Donald whose son was senselessly,
and without provocation, lynched in 1981 by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
At the trial, one of the young men, who had confessed and was about to be
sentenced, in an unlikely scenario, turned to her and begged her
forgiveness. "J can't bring your son back," he said, sobbing. “Gad knows
if I could trade places with him [ would. I can't. Whatever it takes...

I will have to do it..."

And Mrs. Donald, a very modest woman of very modest means, who
doesn't have much education or money, or sophistication but who clearly
knows more than a littie gospel and a lot about grace, said to the man who

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kilied her young son, “I do forgive you. From the day I found cut who you
all was, I asked God to take care of y'all, and he has." [New York Times
Magazine, 11/1/8]

The defendant, the jury, the judge - ail wept, the Times reported.
Forgiveness, you see, frees the offender - and the offended.
Forgiveness frees the forgiver. Forgiveness frees the one who has done
something wrong from guilt. But it also frees the one who is wronged.
That's the miracle of it - and that is what we-see in Jesus Christ...

- a love with the power to restore instead of destroy...

~ a love with new possibilities...

—a powerful love that can actually pick up the broken pieces of a
precious human relationship and mend it, put it back together...

We dare to say it, after our own corporate confession...

“In Christ - we are new people altogether. The past is finished and
gone. . Everything is fresh and new."

For generations we have tried to sing it, because we can't. fully
explain it intellectually.

“Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.

T once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see"

Believe it. Trust it. Live it. Sing it.

Amen.

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