Proper 19
A RCL
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.
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