[Parish] Forgiveness Sermon

Mon Mar 9 09:53:31 PDT 2009

Dear Friends,

Here's Sunday's sermon.  As usual I tried to put too much in.  I have  
so much more to say about forgiveness after my studying.  It would  
also have been nice to use the examples I had to cut for the sake of  
space.

I hope you discover how God is blessing you today and I pray for you  
as you do your own hard work of forgiveness.

Yours,

Malcolm

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This sermon comes to you from Christ Episcopal Church in Los Altos,  
California (www.ccla.us).  If you think that this would be helpful to  
someone you know please forward it to them.

Other sermons in written and audio form can be found at  
www.malcolmcyoung.com.

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_______________________________
Malcolm C.  
Young                                                                    
                           Gen. 17:1-7, 15-6

Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon  
P8                                                                       
                                      Psalm 22:22-30

2 Lent (Year B) Sermon – 8:00 a.m. & 9:30  
a.m.                                                                     
                    Rom. 4:13-25

Sunday 8 March  
2009                                                                     
                                                   Mk. 8:31-38

How to Forgive
“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who  
lose their life for my sake, and the sake of the gospel, will save  
it.  For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit  
their life?” (Mk. 8).

This is the first sermon in a series on forgiveness.  Each Sunday  
through the rest of Lent we will hear from a different preacher on  
this topic.  This all started last fall when Jim McKnight preached  
about how important it is to forgive even in the most extreme  
circumstances.  You might remember his remarks about forgiving  
Hitler.  This led to the beginning of a wonderful conversation.  We  
know that as Christians we are supposed to forgive, but in practice  
how do we actually accomplish forgiveness?  How can we become more  
forgiving?

Although my remarks will touch briefly on our readings today, they  
mostly will be about the special resources that we have as people of  
faith in trying to forgive.

Over time I have come to realize that a large number of the pastoral  
problems people face have to do at a basic level with forgiveness.   
Some kind of forgiving is involved in overcoming a history of  
childhood neglect or abuse, substance addiction, extramarital  
affairs, debilitating traffic accidents, lost friendships, crippling  
illnesses or family conflict.  As people here lose their jobs and  
millions of dollars in investments believe me there will be some  
forgiving we need to do.  In fact, we all constantly face challenges  
to our powers of forgiveness.  Learning how to forgive a minor  
offense helps us to forgive the big things.  The process of forgiving  
is the same in each case.

1.  I want to begin by being clear about what forgiveness is and is  
not.  Forgiveness is not simply accepting another person’s bad  
behavior, or denying that something has hurt us when it has.   
Forgiveness is not simply sweeping everything under the rug or  
struggling to forget the bad things that happened to you.  You should  
remember those bad things so that they won’t happen again and as a  
way of celebrating the way that forgiveness has allowed you to move  
forward.  Finally, forgiveness doesn’t require the other person to  
say she’s sorry or that you will be reconciled to the person who  
wounded you.

Instead forgiveness is a way of leaving the past in the past.  Hurt  
and anger are appropriate but only as fleeting emotions.  We don’t  
have to bring what wounded us into the future.  Forgiveness is a  
choice we make, a way of healing our spirit so that we don’t have to  
suffer indefinitely.  Forgiveness is not magical.  It is a skill that  
you can learn, a way of taking responsibility for your feelings.   
Social scientists who study these things point out that religious  
people live longer.  Part of the reason for this is that forgiveness  
decreases the anger and hopelessness which have such unhealthy  
physiological effects on us.

Ron Luskin directs the Stanford Forgiveness Projects.  In his book  
Forgive for Good he writes about three practical things we can do to  
forgive.[i]  But first he points out that we have work to do before  
we even begin forgiving.  This involves understanding why we feel  
hurt, articulating what went wrong and clarifying your story with two  
or three people whom you trust.

The remarkable thing to me is that this is enough.  When you tell the  
same story more than twice to the same person, or more than two days  
in your mind, or if it continues to upset you in a way that you feel  
it physically, or if you see another person as the villain, or you  
haven’t checked the story for accuracy, you should take these as  
signs that you need to start the hard work of forgiveness.  This is  
especially true if we are talking about something that happened a  
long time ago.

2. Everything having to do with forgiveness starts with a basic  
experience that everyone shares.  Fundamentally the world is not the  
way we want it to be.  We have expectations and they are not met.   
Not all people will like my sermons, or me for that matter.  The  
world will not always be fair.  Our lives will not always be easy.   
Other people will not always give us the benefit of the doubt or tell  
us the truth.  We won’t get the understanding, respect or love that  
we think we need from some of the people we care about. We won’t  
always be paid what we deserve.

In our efforts to be more forgiving we can begin by changing our  
expectations of other people and ourselves.  Christians believe that  
all people are constantly subject to sin, even after they begin  
really believing in Jesus.  This doesn’t mean that people are bad.   
God created us in his image and it is a beautiful and compelling  
image.  But every person, the people who hurt us and we ourselves,  
constantly fall short of what we were created to be.

I think that this makes the first of Ron Luskin’s three suggestions  
about forgiveness a little easier for us.  Luskin says that we need  
to stop taking what happens to us so personally.  Everything that  
hurts us involves both a personal and an impersonal aspect.  We tend  
to exaggerate the personal.  Although in some cases people do  
explicitly try to harm us, mostly they do it for reasons that have  
nothing to do with us.

I have a friend whose parents got divorced when he was in elementary  
school.  As the oldest of three children his overwhelmed mother sent  
him away to live with his aunt for two years.  For decades he took  
this in an intensely personal way as if his mother loved him less  
than his younger brothers.  Only when he was in his thirties did he  
begin to take this less personally and appreciate all the pressures  
on his single-mother during that time.  She didn’t send him away  
because she didn’t love him, but because in her poverty she saw no  
other alternative.

In contrast to people who believe there is nothing higher than their  
own self, people of faith cultivate a way of seeing things that  
reminds us that it’s not about us but about God.  I think that this  
is what Jesus means when he says that we have to lose our life in  
order to save it.  We have to stop seeing ourselves as the center of  
our life in order to be happy and to be the sort of creatures God  
created us to be.

3.  The second strategy for forgiveness that Luskin advises is to  
stop blaming others and to take responsibility for our feelings right  
now.  Bad things that we did not choose have happened to all of us in  
the past, but we are the ones who are the reason we continue to feel  
pain in the present.

We do this for a simple reason.  At first it feels good to believe  
that someone else is causing our suffering.  Almost all of the people  
we talk to reinforce our story.  They agree that we feel bad because  
of our cheating ex-husband, or the boss who us laid off, or our  
unsupportive mother, or our disrespectful daughter.  They don’t often  
point out that those are things that happened in the past.

Blame is a way that we explain how we feel hurt right now.  Although  
it feels good in the short run, in the long term it prevents us from  
getting better.  The problem with blame is that it places the  
responsibility for your feelings on someone other than you.  It makes  
our current well-being depend on someone else.  That other person  
does not care about you.  That person could be totally unaware of  
your suffering, or even dead.  In short, if the reason for our  
problem lies outside of our self, then the solution does too.

Doctors point out that our nervous system cannot tell the difference  
between something that is threatening us right now and our memory of  
something that we felt threatened us long ago.  Blaming others keeps  
our body under stress and takes away the power we need to feel better.

Christians also have powerful resources in overcoming this tendency  
to blame.  When Jesus was telling his friends that he was going to be  
handed over to the authorities and tortured to death, his best friend  
Peter said that this couldn’t happen.  You may think Jesus  
overreacted by replying “Get behind me Satan.”  But I think he was  
right.  A few weeks ago I talked about demons.  I described them as  
the voices that we hear in society, or our own minds, and even  
sometimes at church that say that we, or others, are something less  
than God’s children.

Blame is the voice of the demonic.  This is not just because it  
implies that the one who offended us is not one of God’s beloved.  It  
hurts us also and says that we don’t have any choice, that we will  
always be victims of our past.  Christianity has always resisted the  
idea of destiny or determinism.  It teaches us that freedom is  
sacred, that we always have choices when it comes to how we  
understand what is happening to us right now.  We choose how to see  
and experience the world.

4. Luskin’s last piece of advice for forgiveness concerns what he  
calls grievance stories.  We constantly tell stories to others and  
ourselves that help us to make sense of our lives.  When we do this  
by necessity we have to be selective and choose what we’ll  
emphasize.  Then when someone asks how we’re doing, where we’re from,  
what we do for a living, who our children are, we tell them a version  
of our autobiography.

A grievance story makes our experience of powerlessness permanent.   
In these stories we are the victim and the main character is the  
person we blame.  An important part of forgiveness is crafting a  
story of our life in which we see ourselves as the heroes, as people  
who overcome adversity and are in charge of how they feel right now.

Christians constantly struggle with an effort to replace the stories  
that the world tells us about ourselves with God’s story.  God’s  
story, which we inherit from the most ancient times, makes it hard  
for us to go on seeing ourselves as victims.  Brothers and sisters in  
Christ, we are God’s beloved children.  God blesses us with gifts of  
beauty and power that help us to prevail (if not in the short run  
then in the end).

God’s son Jesus gave us his life precisely so that we would be free  
from stories like “we don’t get what we deserve,” or, “we are  
prisoners of fate,” or “people will only love me if I succeed,” or,  
“only the strong survive.”  The power that we find in being children  
of God means that we go out in the world not just offering  
forgiveness, but actively seeking reconciliation.

Let us pray: Healing God, we know that our interior life is not  
totally under our own control and so we thank you for the way you  
miraculously answer our prayers.  Help us to experience our life out  
of a sense of gratitude rather than unfulfilled obligation, to seek  
how we might serve others rather than to dwell on the wrongs that we  
have suffered.  We pray this in the name of Jesus who gave everything  
so that we might have it all.  Amen.

[i] Fred Luskin, Forgive For Good: A Proven Prescription for Health  
and Happiness (NY: Harper Collins, 2002).
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