LOVE'S EXTRAVAGANT DEMAND

September 16, 19990

8:30 and 41:00 a.m. Worship Services
Jobn M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Colossians 3:12-17
Matthew 18:21-35

"Forgive as freely as the Lord bas forgiven you."
-Colossians 3:13b (J.B. Phillips)

“Forgive as freely as the Lord has forgiven you..." Robert Coles,
Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard, in his fine book, Harvard Diary,
remembers a seminar conducted by Anna Freud. The case study was a woman
who had a life-long habit of making everyone around her very unhappy. She
had driven her husband and son crazy, spent her own unhappy life going from
therapist to therapist, kept her own family in a constant state of turmoil
and conflict.

Dr. Freud asked at the end of the presentation: "What would we want
for this old woman? I don't mean psychoanalysis... this poor old lady
doesn't need us at all. She's had her fill of us. She's been visiting one
or another of us for years, for decades... what she needs is forgiveness.
She needs to make peace with her own soul. There must be a god somewhere
to help her, to hear her, to heal her. We certainly aren't the ones who
will be of assistance to her."

Roberts Coles reflects: “When will some of us learn that... on our
knees, in prayer, we might at last find God's forgiving smile."
(Harvard Diary]

The real world, the frightening tough world of 1990, seems ta render
the idea of forgiveness obsolete, irrelevant, childish.

Who will ever forget July 1, 1988 when we heard that a guided missile
from a United State Navy ship, patrolling in the Persian Gulf, had hit an
Iranian airplane. It turned out to be an airliner filled with civilians.
The missile was efficient. The airliner crashed into the ocean. Two
hundred ninety Iranian civilians - women, men, little children, old people,
young people - died. No one ever apologized for that. We said we regretted
the loss af innocent life, but essentially hlamed the Iranians and then
gave a few medals to Navy personnel on board the ship. Six months later a
Pan American flight was blown out of the sky over Scotland and 259 American
civilians died.

Revenge, retaliation - the oldest, mast traditional human response to
injustice and personal offense - is prim business. It doesn't work. it

never has and never will. Two wrongs don't make a right. Your eneny will
remain your enemy, more bitterly and defiantly so, if you exact the last bitter
drop of retribution. This is not news. Everybody knows it. If you can
read history, you know that an eye for an eye doesn't do a thing except
leave two people blind. It doesn't work between nations. In facet, it
creates long-term suffering and historic evil which mounts and builds in
pressure until it erupts in ghastly violence. We know now that the

harsh treatment of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, exacted by the
allies in the name of justice, was what made the Second World War
inevitable, It doesn't work within societies. What after all was
satsafied when Charles Walker died of a lethal injection last week? Nobody
seriously argues that capital punishment will deter murderers. We know
that argument isn't valid. We did it to make ourselves feel better, to
express something deep inside us, something as ald as our history.

It is that something -- that something that refuses to apologize when
we kill civilians, that something that wants corporately to kill in
retaliation for killing. It is that self-destructive impulse in us which
always masquerades as justice and strength and honor; it is just that which
Jesus Christ came to confront and convert and challenge.

Every week we pray together. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our
debtors." Every week, every day, we pray revolutionary words Jesus taught
his disciples to pray, words which join together the basic good news of
the Gospel with a behavioral imperative so drastic that we don't, for a
moment, seriously consider actually living like it.

It is a complicated, difficult matter at every level ~ this business
of forgiveness. It is complicated because retaliation seems so fair.

The notion of retribution as justice is one of the oldest human ideas
of all. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Alife fora life. It's
in the Code of Hammurabi. It's in the Old Testament. It is elegantiy
simple. It is the ethical inversion of the Golden Rule: do unto others as
you would have them do to you: i.e. “do to others as they have done to
you." It feels right. It is intellectually and emotionally satisfying.
And it doesn't work - if your goal is something other than a perpetuation
of the conflict which produced the first offense.

Peter, Jesus' closest and strongest friend, expresses it. Peter, the
one we understand best because he sounds so like us, embarrasses us, evokes
smiles of recognition. He's the one who wants his religion without
discipline, wants Jesus to be the son of God without the cross; wants, this
morning, to see if he can't exact a little realism from Jesus, a little
compromise, a little loosening of these incessant, impossible ethical
demands of his, wants Jesus to be a little moderate; wants, most of alli,
just like us, ta hold on to the old, tried and true way of doing things.

Jesus has been talking about what to do if another person commits an
offense against you - a fairly common occasion in the human enterprise,
after all. Peter asks a good question: "How Many times should I forgive
someone who sins against me?" The religious—legal system suggested just
retribution for personal offense. The offender makes restitution, pays
back what he stole, restores the balance of justice. Rabbinic Judaism
moderated that by teaching that a righteous person will forgive the
offender three times. On the fourth offense, the old system activates, and

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you can let the offender have it. Sa Peter is actually being quite

magnanimous. "The tradition says forgive three times. How about we settle
on seven: that's twice as many as our Rabbi's recommend, with an extra
thrown in for good measure." Seven times. If the offender persists,

you're free to let him have it on number eight.

Peter misses the point. If you're counting, Jesus says, you haven't
heard me. Seven times seventy is a euphemism. It means "without
limits." If you're counting, you're waiting, probably eagerly, for the
eighth offense. In fact, if you're waiting for number eight, your sense of
justice with its basis in retaliation actually has a longer time to
anticipate, to ferment, to get up a good head of self-righteous, indignant
steam. When number eight happens, it's really going to he something.

Peter missed the point. The old way doesn't work if the purpose of
this dynamic is reconciliation, redemption, hope. For new life to happen,
someone has to think in an altegether new way.

"Forgive without counting," says Jesus. If there are limits, then we
are not really talking about forgiving, merely delaying retaliation.

And then he told a story, vivid, funny in a morbid way, ultimately
disturbing. A servant owed his King 10,000 talents. That's ten million
dollars. It's an enormous debt, an unpayable debt. He cannot repay what
he owes. The King prepares to exercise the justice available to him: he
plans to seli the man and his family as slaves and tao recoup a small
portion of his loss. The servant pleads for mercy. The King feels pity
and forgives the debt. Great story. Everybody should live happily ever
after. But then, this newly liberated servant who now has his whole future
given back to him, this man on his way out, bumps into a fellow servant
who owes him the equivalent of twenty dollars, grabs him by the throat,
demands repayment. The debtor, as cur man had done before the King, falls
on his knees, begs for a little patience. His debt is payable, but it will
take a while. Instead of forgiving the debt, instead even of agreeing to a
time payment plan, our man calls the police and has his debtor thrown in
jail. Justice is done.

The King, however, hears about it, becomes angry, summons hin,
reverses his decision. This time he doesn't sell the man into slavery, but
puts him in jail until he pays the debt, which means forever.

The man missed the meaning of forgiveness: missed his own
forgiveness and more: missed his whole life actually because of his
stubborn unwillingness to forgive his debtor. There is more at stake here
than a debt. This man is in jail forever, not because he got in debt,
committed murder, but because he neglected: to forgive.

There are, it seems, to me, several mistakes that we are inclined to
make when it comes to this topic. The first is to conclude that the Gospel
is easy: that it releases individuals from accountability for their
behavior: no punishment - no responsibility. The second mistake is to
conclude that we are guilty of no gross evil so all this talk about guilt,
remorse and forgiveness doesn't apply to us. And the third is the opposite
of the second, namely that we are so without value, goodness and worth and
have actually done so much that is wrong, that forgiveness is not for us.

Christianity is not easy. There is in Christianity a morality which
requires responsibility. For the same reason we value the integrity,
liberty and rights of the individual, we insist that individuals are
responsible for their behavior. Garrison Keillor wrote an essay, "The
Current Crisis in Remorse " from the point of view of the Director of
the Remorse Department in a modern American city. “We in remorse are a
radica] minority within the social work community. We helieve that not
every wrong in our society is the result of complex factors such as poor
early learning environment and resultant dissocialized communication. Some
wrong is the result of badness. We believe some people act like jerks."
[We Are Still Married, p. 22]

And Karl Menninger who wrote a blistering indictment of the
retaliation/revenge idea which is the heart of our penal system in "The
Crime of Punishment," also wrote an elegant book, Whatever Became of Sin,
in which he argued against the tendency to excuse individuals from
responsibility for behavior. When you reject retaliation as a way ta
establish justice, you do not have to release persons from accountability
for behavior. To be opposed to capital punishment on the grounds that it
represents a wrong notion of justice and ultimately demeans every one of
us, is not to condone murder or to suggest that people who commit serious
crimes should be free to live among us. To forgive someone for abusive,
hurtful behavior does not at all mean to return to the relationship merely
to submit again to the abuse.

Nor does the parable mean that forgiveness is cheap and therefore
trivial. Forgiveness is very costly business. C. $. Lewis quipped once
that “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 with
howls of anger." [Mere Christianity, p. 89]

What this parable teaches is that individuals are accountable, that
forgiveness is very costly business and that we experience forgiveness, not
as a theological or interpersonal abstraction, but we experience our own
forgiveness in the very act of forgiving others. There is no other way,
apparently, said Jesus. We experience forgiveness as we forgive others.

Paul Tillich, one of the mast influential theologians in our century,
wrote elegant and important books, but preached very simply. Ina
memorable sermon at Harvard he talked about the uniqueness of Jesus'
teaching about forgiveness. Religion, Tillich taught, often makes the
mistake of assuming that it must convict the sinner before it announces
God's forgiveness: must, that is to say, create sufficient guilt to
produce remorse to come up with a confession in order to activate
forgiveness. It is, Tillich says, simply a religious variation on the old
theme of making sure people pet what they deserve, in this instance, a full
measure of bad feelings about themselves. Much organized religion eagerly
accepts the responsibility for creating the pre-condition for forgiveness,
namely guilt. The preacher is the prosecutor, judge and jury. And so
religion, too frequentiy in the literature of our culture, is simply the
flip side of a puilty conscience.

But if you read the dynamic carefully, said Tillich, you notice that

forgiveness comes first. It's not that sinners are lovely that causes
Jesus ta love them. He laves and accepts them hecause that's how God's

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love is. And then, as they are loved and accepted they become aware of
their sin and know about forgiveness and new life starts to happen.

Forgiveness creates repentance, he taught, not vice versa. Remember
all the times Jesus forgives the sins of people who don't ask him to aren't
particularly aware that they have sins to be forgiven. The first thing he
says to the paralytic who is brought to him is “your sins are forgiven."

“Nothing greater," wrote Tillich, “can happen to a human being than
that he is forgiven. When you know yourself forgiven, the fire of love
begins to burn." [The New Being, p. 7,8]

My guess is that there are two things true about each one of us. The
first is that somewhere deep inside us we know we need to be forgiven by
someone else, by ourselves, by God. And the second thing is that each of
us needs to ‘forgive - needs to release the hold we have on some offense,
some wrong done, some betrayal -— needs to free the debtor and in the process
free ourselves.

The first is theological; the second is relational and inter-
personal. We have mixed feelings about the Prayer of Confession as a
regular part of worship. Sometimes we don't like it. Sometimes we feel
like we're being accused unjustly. We're not aware of having gone along
with warfare, prejudices or greed. We haven't knowingly hated or hurt
anyone this week. The older confessional language that “there is no health
in us" sounds like the kind of repressive religion we fled long ago. And
yet the more one thinks about it, if you will, knows about God... the
more one is aware of oneself, one's humanness, the more one is aware of the
need for something like acceptance, affirmation, grace, forgiveness. It
isn't that knowing God produces guilt, but it does produce a sense of our
finiteness, limits, and the occasional messes we make, It also, sometimes,
makes us a little defensive.

There is a wonderful "Peanuts" cartoon that penetrates our defenses.
"You know what the whole trouble with you is, Charlie Brown?" Lucy asks.
Charlie Brown responds, "No, and I don't want to know. Leave me alone!"
He walks away. And Lucy yells after him, "The whole trouble is that you
won't listen to what the whole trouble with you is."

My guess is that not one of us is perfect. That not one of us is
without untruth, betrayal, cruelty and that there are things we have done -
or lJeft undone known only to ourselves - that we cannot and will not
confess to another. There are betrayals which we need to take to God
alone; because if we confessed them to the one we betrayed, it might relieve
us of a burden, by placing an unbearable burden on the innocent other. We
don't have to. The good news is that forgiveness is there for us. A God
who is loving enough to take us seriously, to hold us accountable, to
understand our feelings of guilt, is there for us, always forgiving, always
loving. The good news is that there is a God who wants to heal and restore
us to normal wonderfully human relationships by forgiving us and in that
act, empowering us to forgive ourselves

William Mueh! writes bluntly and eloquently... "No one is truly
forgiven until he is treated as forgiven, until he is once again subjected
to the exploitations and burdens of normal human relationships, as well as
their privileges. The moment in which his wife tosses the guilty husband

the dish towel and says, “All right, Buster, it's your turn ta dry," that.
is when the penitent husband knows that he is once again a member and a
victim in goad standing within the human family." [All The Damned Angels,
p. 30]

And my humble estimate is that for every one of us there are people to
be forgiven. To put it another way, there are individuals and incidents in
which we were hurt, insulted, humiliated, slighted, betrayed, the harboring
of which has us in a kind of bondage. The extent to which we nurture
resentment, cling to past offenses, Jet our anger simmer and boil is the
extent to which we are not free, not in love, but in a hellish bondage to
the past. It's in every heart: a teacher who treated you unfairly, a
bully whose humiliating taunts you can stiJl hear across the years, an
unloving neglecting parent, an abusive parent, a professor, the supervisor
who drove you out of your job, the boss who fired you, a significant other
who betrayed you, and children who take you for granted, the spouse who
abuses your love, and exploits your kindness!

There aren't many of us who can't find ourselves somewhere in a list
like that.

There aren't any of us who don't need to be free of that.

You see, the one who is offended has to do the forgiving. The one
who has been wronged has to pay the price for forgiveness to happen. No
amount of apologizing, no amount of guilt or remorse can do it. Only the
offended can forgive. Only the one who was wronged can free the offender
and in the process free himself/herself from the prison of sin and guilt.

It is not easy. It is not easy because we cannot and do not forget.
Forgiving does not mean forgetting. It means the determination that what
was done and what will never be forgotten in the heart of the offended will
no longer imprison me. In the case of one we love, the wrong done will no
longer separate us. Forgiveness means that the will to live in freedon and
love is stronger than the power of sin.

When it happens, said the professor, it transforms everything.

The Good News of the Gospel is that in Jesus Christ it has happened.
We are forgiven, accepted, loved unconditionally by the one who created us;
the very one who taught us to experience that forgiveness, our forgiveness,
by forgiving: to experience God's love by loving: to know God's gracious
acceptance, by accepting.

"Forgive us our debts," he prayed, "as we forgive our debtors."

+ + + +

Merciful and loving God, we pray weekly our prayers of confession.
And we know that we have no secrets; that you know the recesses of our
hearts and minds and lives. We thank you for accepting us as we are, for
forgiving us even before we ask. And we do now ask you for the strength
and courage and grace to forgive those who have offended us: to free our
debtors, and ourselves, for new life in your love; through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen.

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