Forgiveness

Proper 19 A RCL

Genesis50:15-2; Ps 103; Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35

                                                           Rev. Adam T. Trambley                                  

September 17, 2017, St. John’s Sharon

This morning’s readings speak of forgiveness.  Our first reading from Genesis is the end of the Joseph story.  Joseph is the son of Jacob the Patriarch and he has eleven brothers.  He is Jacob’s favorite and gets special signs of love like a cloak that either has long-sleeves or is many-colored, depending on how you translate an obscure Hebrew word.  He has a number of dreams about how his brothers and parents are going to bow down and serve him, which would not have been a problem except that he decided to share them with his family over dinner. Since everybody likes their annoying little brother to let them know how he is going to be the boss of them when he gets older, his brothers did what any jealous siblings would do: they planned to kill him, but decided to sell him into slavery instead so that they both get rid of him and make a profit. 

We are now a couple decades later and Joseph has had some adventures, spending time as a common household slave, becoming a household manager, being falsely accused of attempted rape, sitting in jail, and eventually interpreting dreams for Pharaoh and becoming the second most important person in Egypt.  He predicted a famine and prepared for it, so his family comes from Palestine to Egypt to buy food.  After toying with his brothers a bit, we have a grand reconciliation.  After the reconciliation, Joseph’s whole family moves to Egypt.  But then Jacob their father dies, and his brothers are scared that Joseph was only being nice to them because of dad.   Since they are a scheming family, Joseph’s brothers get together and hatch another dishonest plan.  They tell Joseph that before he died, Jacob told him to forgive them, and then they do some serious groveling. 

But guess what, Joseph doesn’t care whether his father said to forgive them, or whether the brothers are seriously repentant, or even if they agree to be his slaves forever.  His response is, “Do not be afraid.  Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.”  This narrative about Joseph and his brothers offers a couple of important insights on forgiveness.

The first point to be made is that forgiveness allows us to be who we are.  Joseph has just spent years making sure that there is enough food for all of Egypt and anyone else who comes to him.  He is a visionary manager who has secured a very nice life for himself.  He is not about to mess things up by having his brothers killed because of an ancient resentment.  Just because they are still scared, bitter, and petty doesn’t mean that he has to be.  He did toy with them a bit, but, in the end, he is fundamentally focused on something much bigger than sibling payback.  Forgiving his brothers allows him to continue to live his life on his terms.  Not forgiving them would mean that they continue to exercise power over him.  Not forgiving them would mean that he was willing to give up what was important to him to be caught in the traps they set.  Not forgiving them would mean that even as the ruler of all Egypt, he would still be wrapped in the bonds of slavery that his brothers tied him with all those years ago.  Forgiveness for Joseph means, first and foremost, that he is free of the slavery his brothers tried to sell him into. 

Joseph express this sense of freedom from the bonds of the past by saying that what his brothers meant for harm, he meant for good.  Others have said that forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past.  Joseph is saying that where he is now is OK.  Obviously, Joseph is OK as ruler of Egypt.  But more profoundly, Joseph is OK because God is with him and at work in his life.  Paul writes that all things work together for good for those who love God.  At a deep level, forgiveness is knowing that we can be grateful for where we are, even though it may not be the same place we would have been had things gone differently.  Joseph was able to help people that could not have been helped because of what his brothers did to him.  At this point, he wouldn’t change having lived the life he has for some other life where his brothers had a bit more brotherly love.

When we forgive people, we are saying that we can trust God, and even be thankful with where we are in life right now.  We may have to grieve losses.  We may also have to come to terms with the fact that life isn’t fair.  We most certainly have to accept that we aren’t entitled to everything we want or even everything we think we need.  We may have to learn to say with Job, “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord.”   

Sometimes we are called to forgive in the midst of the difficult consequences of what others have done to us.  We may not yet have made it through our time of slavery or imprisonment to being ruler of Egypt.  In those times especially, forgiveness stems most directly out of our faith in God, and especially out of our faith in God’s resurrection of Jesus Christ.  If God can raise Jesus from the dead, he can raise us out of whatever pits we have been pushed into.  Whatever pain, whatever suffering, whatever loss we are experiencing, God is working to transform it into new life.  We can be pretty sure that no one has done worse things to us than they did to Jesus, or even then sometimes we do to Jesus through our own sins and betrayals.  Yet even death did not stop God from bringing new life in that situation, and he will bring new life out of whatever situation we are in, as well.   

I’m assuming, of course, that the things done to us are pretty significant.  Most of us have things in the past, like Joseph did, where we have been hurt in deep ways by people that were supposed to be loving us.  Maybe it was parents who were seriously struggling and flawed themselves; maybe it was significant others who were particularly unworthy of our hearts that we entrusted to them; maybe it was siblings whose resentments or power plays left lasting damage; maybe it was church ministers caring more about something than God.  Often those scars have caused us to be in places in life we didn’t plan to go, and that we had probably hoped to avoid.  Yet, like God did for Jesus and for Joseph, we can trust that God is with us wherever we are, and that there is good to be done in that place, both for ourselves and for others.

Of course, sometimes the offences we need to forgive are pretty small ones.  Someone was short with us.  We didn’t get our way in a situation.  Rudeness reigned at home, or on the road, or even in church.  Something we valued was lost due to carelessness, callousness, or ill intent.  Yet the less important the situation, the more we want to be free of the bonds tying us to those unfortunate situations.  Is it really worth being upset the rest of the day because someone cut us off in traffic?  Do we really want to get sent into a tizzy over something we could pretty easily replace, or even improve?  Do we want to say fixing our little problem is too much for the creator of the universe?

Now it may seem surprising that I’ve been talking almost exclusively about God, and very little about the people who have sinned against us.  Too often, conversations about forgiveness end up worrying about issues like if the person who sinned is truly sorry, or if they really understand what they did, or if they have made it right.  But scripture never says anything about that.  In today’s gospel, Jesus tells a parable about forgiveness, and he makes it pretty clear that forgiveness is all about us and God, and not at all about us and the other person.  Paul writes in Romans today that we aren’t supposed to pass judgment or despise our brothers and sisters because we will all stand before God who judges.  Scripture says in another place that we can’t judge the servants of another, and we are all God’s servants.  Other people are answerable to God, not to us, for what they have done, and for whether they are truly sorry or have made things right.  We are answerable to God for whether or not we have forgiven them. 

Jesus drives this point home for us.  Peter asks Jesus if he has to forgive as many as seven times, which seems like a lot.  But Jesus says, no, forgive seventy times seven times.  Four-hundred-and-ninety-times really is a lot, at least on some level, although, when you are living with people – spouses, siblings, parents, children, or even good friends -- that’s probably only a couple months’, at most, worth of mistakes.   Then Jesus tells a story about a man who receives forgiveness, but then doesn’t forgive someone else.  Needless to say, it doesn’t end well for the unforgiving person.  Nor does it go well for us when we don’t forgive.  In addition to the issues we talked about earlier, unforgiveness puts a significant barrier in the midst of our relationship with God, and it is a barrier that we put up and that we need to be responsible for taking down.

The underlying point that Jesus is making is that God has forgiven us, so we should also forgive others. On a most basic level, the instruction is not to be hypocrites.  At a deeper level, however, being unwilling to forgive puts us at odds with God’s desire for us and for the world. 

God’s wants to reconcile all of creation back to himself.  When we are unwilling to forgive people, we are basically saying that we are unwilling to be eternal citizens of the New Jerusalem with them.  If we don’t forgive, we are saying that someone is outside of the scope of God’s redemption.  We are telling God, on some level, that it is either them or us.  We are saying, in effect, that if God is going to take them to heaven, we’d rather stay in hell.  Now, obviously, we generally don’t think that way about what we are doing, but that’s the implication of refusing to forgive.  And when we hold on to resentments and injuries with such vigor, we put barriers up to God’s power to save and redeem and heal, and if we refuse to allow that power to reach others, we deny it to ourselves, as well.  This link between forgiving others and being able to be forgiven is something we pray constantly in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  To be forgiven, we have to forgive.  We either believe in God’s redemptive power to save or we don’t.

Now saying that we need to forgive does not mean that we need to forget or to stay in an abusive situation or allow ourselves to be easily hurt again.  Forgiving someone does not mean we are going to be friends, or even that we ever want to see someone again.  Forgiving someone means that we are not going to deny, based on what they have done to us, that the love and power of God can work in them.  Forgiving someone means that we believe that God’s purpose for our life is going to be stronger and better for us than whatever harm they did to us.  Forgiving someone means that we truly hope that God will touch their lives, heal their hearts, and bring them restored and renewed as the person God created them to be into the eternal Kingdom of Heaven. Forgiving someone means that we can say, with Joseph, that whatever those around us intended, God will use it in the end for good.  Forgiving someone means that we break free of whatever pits others have thrown us into so that we can be like our heavenly Father who forgives us and longs to reconcile the whole world back to himself.

Jesus, the Canaanite Women, and Overcoming Internalized Prejudice (Matthew 15:21-28)

Proper 15 A RCL

Matthew 15:21-28

                                                           Rev. Adam T. Trambley                                  

August 20, 2017, St. John’s Sharon

This morning’s gospel has a lot to say to us about the some of the issues that have been filling up our newsfeeds over the past week. 

Before this morning’s gospel, Jesus was busy.  He fed five thousand people.  He healed the crowds.  He had a fight with the Pharisees and the scribes, and then he had to explain what he meant to his own disciples.  So Jesus decided to get away.  He goes to the district of Tyre and Sidon, which are on the Mediterranean coast.  Personally, I think preachers getting away for some time on the Mediterranean coast should probably happen more often than it does. Tyre and Sidon are Gentile territory. Nobody is supposed to recognize Jesus there, so he can have a little time to recharge.  In the middle of his “me” time a Canaanite woman of Syrophonecian origin starts crying out to him for help.  She is literally shouting, “Have mercy on me Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”  Jesus goes through a series of four responses to her, which are not dissimilar to the responses any of us might make to people that we don’t want to deal with, especially when they are different from us.

First, Jesus just ignores her.  The Bible says, “But he did not answer her at all.”  Maybe if I pretend I can’t hear her, she will just go away.  We know that strategy never works, and it doesn’t here, either.

Then Jesus says, “Not my problem.”  The woman keeps screaming, and Jesus’ disciples tell him to deal with her.  Of course, they want him to deal with her by sending the woman away so they can get some peace.  Hard to chill with your hummus margarita when some hysterical mother is shrieking about her demon-possessed daughter.  Jesus says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”  Jesus is not saying that no one will be sent to her.  He’s only saying that it isn’t my job.

Of course, this Canaanite woman isn’t having any of these theoretical distinctions on the nature of Jesus’ vocation.  She gets right in front of Jesus, kneels down, and says, “Lord, help me.”  She’s not going to be ignored, and she now is Jesus’ problem, one way or the other.  Jesus finally responds to her, and he responds with probably the hardest saying of his in the entire Bible.  He says something we all wish he hadn’t said.  He says, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  Yep, he just called her and her daughter dogs.  Apparently in his mind, like in the minds of many at the time, there were the children of Israel and there were the gentile dogs.  He’s trying to recover his strength to do his work for the children of Israel, who are his people whom he loves.  Still, we don’t expect this kind of prejudiced, bigoted dismissal of someone in extreme pain from Jesus.

Gratefully, this name calling is not Jesus’ final response.  After Jesus says this dog stuff, the woman gets in his face.  “Yes, Lord,” she says, “yet even the dogs eat crumbs falling from their masters’ table.”  This response is not necessarily a revolutionary manifesto of equal rights, but she doesn’t much care what Jesus thinks about Canaanites generally, or even what he thinks of her, she just wants her daughter healed. 

Now when people who are different, especially people who the culture tells us are inferior, make bold statements like that, we can generally make one of two responses.  One is to be affronted that someone would step out of line like that.  The dismissing term that often gets used is that someone is “uppity”, meaning they are speaking above the station we believe they belong in.  Usually “uppity” is a racist word, and if you disagree, think about the last time you heard a rich, white man called “uppity.”  In the gospel, Jesus could have responded with scorn to this uppity Canaanite woman who had the audacity to speak so directly to him.

But Jesus didn’t respond in that way.  Jesus responded the right way when people who are different than us make those kind of strong statements.  He listened, and he learned, and he loved more effectively.  Jesus acknowledges her strength by commending her faith and healing her daughter.  He sees the child of God before him, learns something about who she is, and about who he is, and loves her the best way he can.

Make no mistake, this episode was a turning point for Jesus.  Jesus learns and grows from this encounter.  His statement that he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel, implying that he can ignore all the Gentiles, goes out the window after this.  He heals this woman’s daughter, but he doesn’t just stop with her daughter.  The rest of Matthew chapter 15 talks about ways that he is ministering to a bunch of gentiles. 

After his Mediterranean vacation, Jesus goes to the Decapolis and the Sea of Galilee area.  That area is his home, but it is also an area that is filled with Gentiles.  When he goes back, he heals everybody.  Great crowds come to him and he heals the mute and the blind and the lame, and everyone is amazed.  Then Jesus performs a Gentile-focused miracle.  The crowds have been with him for three days and they are hungry.  We know how this goes.  The disciples tell Jesus to send them home.  Jesus says, “What food do you have?”  The disciples say, “seven loaves and some fish.”  He takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and distributes it.  Then the disciples collect seven baskets of leftovers from the four thousand people that were there.  We know that this feeding miracle is to the Gentiles because of where the miracle happened, but also because of the numbers involved.  Jesus earlier fed five thousand, and they collected twelve baskets, and twelve is always indicative of the twelve tribes of Israel, either as Israel or as reformed in the church through, for example, the twelve apostles.  In this second feeding miracle, however, we hear a lot of sevens, which was a number representing completeness or perfection.  Everything was brought together here.  The four thousand people reinforces that, since the implication is that people came from the four corners of the world.  To us, given how we write, we’d wonder why Matthew didn’t just say, “there were lots of Gentiles there,” but given the conventions of first century Jewish writing, Matthew is saying that.  The encounter with the Canaanite woman in some way caused Jesus to grow and develop his understanding of who he was and his ministry, such that he can go from saying, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” to telling his disciples to feed four thousand Gentiles beside the Sea of Galilee.

So what does this gospel encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman have to say to us this morning?  I think at least two important things.

First, this gospel says that we have to deal with our own prejudices.  We have them and they are wrong and we need to deal with them.  Jesus was by all accounts a whole lot better than any of us.  Yet even he had picked up the attitudes of his time and his people, and he had to overcome them.  We lie if we think we have haven’t internalized on some level the various prejudices, stereotypes, bigotries, and ignorances that form the racism prevalent in our day and age.  Jesus had internalized the ones in his day.  Anyone who says they aren’t on some level racist is saying that they are better than Jesus, and I doubt that.  Anyone who says that Christians wouldn’t be racist needs to read to our history alongside this week’s newspaper.  This gospel story isn’t in the Bible because we need to see Jesus growing in his understanding of his ministry.  This gospel story is in the Bible as caution for any of us who think we don’t need to deal with the ways we live out our own prejudices and hurt other people.

Second, this gospel shows us how we can begin to deal with our prejudices.  The best way we can recognize and deal with them is by encountering other people and listening to them.  Jesus learned by being confronted by the Canaanite woman who was in his face and totally honest with him.  We are only going to learn through some kind of dialogue.  Even with the best intentions, we will still probably say and do stupid and sometimes hurtful things, just like Jesus did.  While those bumbling mistakes are really not OK, they are probably the only way forward.  We have to get together with people who aren’t like us, bumble around as best we can, and really listen.  In that listening comes learning, both about them and about ourselves.  As we learn, we can ultimately come to love, and love is always the goal of Christian life.  This work of overcoming racism and building loving relationships is not easy – anyone who is married can tell you that getting to a deeper, loving relationship is hard work.  We might have to hear things about ourselves we don’t want to hear.  We might have to acknowledge the pain we have caused.  We might have to acknowledge that moving through reconciliation to love might cost us something, maybe a lot.  As one colleague said, if this work seems easy, we aren’t doing it right. 

As individuals, we are called to make the time to be with people who are different from us, especially those who are different from us that may not have their voices heard.  We are called to go across racial divides, cultural divides, linguistic divides, and even religious divides, just like Jesus did.  We are called to make time for people on their terms, to listen to them seeking not to be understood but to understand, to learn whatever we can, and to love them in the ways that they most need to be loved.  This work can happen in many contexts.  One of the reasons we take mission trips to places like New York City or the Dominican Republic is to be able to undertake this work, but it also can and should happen much closer to home.

As a community of faith, we are also called to undertake this work, which we do on a number of levels through different ministries. However, we are also going to do take a specific step next week as a response to the racism that has been proclaimed more openly of late. We know that racism has always been present, but in recent days it seems to be acquiring a sheen of acceptability that must be countered.  So St. John’s is taking a field trip.  Next Sunday, after the 10:00 service, anybody who can go is invited to join us at 11:00am at the Second Missionary Baptist Church in Farrell on Spearman Avenue.  The address and directions are in the bulletin.  The drive there is less than ten minutes, and we’ll streamline our 10:00 service next week so we can join them in a timely fashion.  The pastor at Second Missionary Baptist is Pastor Russell Penn who I’ve gotten to work with on a number of things over the years and is a true brother in Christ.  They are a very hospitable congregation and want to welcome us.  I don’t know where this will go, but hopefully we can start building deeper relationships that God can use for something good. 

Just so you have as sense of what will happen at the service, first of all, God will show up, because you can’t do this kind of thing without God showing up. They don’t have a liturgical service like ours, but there is about an hour of worship, singing, and praying, and then the sermon is at the end.  Usually Pastor Penn is in the pulpit by noon or so and preaches about a half-hour, which means you can expect to be done by around 12:30.  Some things will be different, some might be the same.  Our goal is to go, to listen, to learn whatever God has for us, and to love them as best we can.  Part of that love is just being present with them as brothers and sisters in Christ at a time when too many people are saying they aren’t really our brothers and sisters.  Another part of that love would be bringing something to put in the collection plate, because that is part of what we do in church, and we want to bless them every way we can.  If you have other questions, let me know, but I hope you’ll plan to come down with us next Sunday.  You can come to 8:00 and then go there at 11:00; you can come to 10:00 here and then go down to Second Missionary Baptist at 11:00; or you can just go there at 11:00, and your Sunday morning obligation is certainly fulfilled.  When you get there, just go in, find a seat, and join in.  We don’t all need to sit together or be in one place. Some things will likely feel uncomfortable, and that’s OK.  Our comfort isn’t nearly as important as God’s call to us or God’s love working through us.