Forgiveness
Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32
A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart
(Preached by the Reverend Jim Lockwood-Stewart)
March 14, 2010

Our theme during this season of Lent has been turning walls into tables.  Our sanctuary art created by Clark Kellogg this morning offers us a glimpse of walls beginning to break apart and break open.  It’s a spirit vision.  It’s a cry of hope.  It’s a dream of restoration, of divisions healed, animosities set aside. It’s a vision of community.

There is perhaps no single quality more crucial in that process of healing and restoration at any level, from the most deeply personal to the most broadly global, than forgiveness.  Dag Hammarskjold wrote, “Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.”  It’s not just a child’s dream ... it’s our dream, our hope.  That what’s broken can be fixed.  What’s lost can be found.  What’s separated or estranged can be brought together again.  

This morning’s scripture reading is a parable about relationship broken and restored.  It’s known as the parable of “the prodigal son,” since most of the story has to do with the adventuresome but foolish young man who takes his share of the family inheritance, leaves the family farm, heads off to the big city and spends it all in what we are told is “loose living.”  When he finds himself basically digging into garbage cans for food he decides to go back home and try to get enough forgiveness to be allowed at least to live as well as the hired hands.

Upon his return, of course, we are told that his father joyfully embraces him and welcomes him home.  We’re also told about the jealous older brother.  This poor guy has done all the right things.  He has stayed home, worked hard, probably even had some extra duties when his brother took the money and ran ... and he’s understandably upset! Sure, let the kid return, after all, he’s family.  But what’s with the hero’s welcome?  Let him bow and scrape a bit.  Let him live with the implications of his choices.  Let him get at least a bit of the punishment he deserves for what he has done.

It’s a thought-provoking story, this multi-faceted parable of a wayward child, of a forgiving parent, and of a jealous sibling.  We can find ourselves in all three characters.  We are at times wasteful and irresponsible.  We are at times generous and loving.  We are at times jealous and punitive.

But the restorative force in the story is forgiveness ... the generous love of a father who doesn’t count one son’s irresponsibility against him ... and but who surrounds his hurting, jealous son with love as well.  It’s a story of forgiveness ... of healing ... of restoration.

The unrelenting breadth and depth of God’s forgiveness is a loving power that sustains us with its unfailing assurance ... but that also challenges us with its persistent and often unwelcome demand.

You’ve heard the saying “to err is human ... to forgive divine.”  It seems to me it might be more accurate to say “to err is human ... to forgive is tough.”

To grasp the power of forgiveness requires that we pay attention to what happens when we do not forgive.

Friend and colleague Lynn Rhodes, retired professor at Pacific School of Religion tells of a woman who came to one of her introductory classes one year.   The woman’s daughter had been murdered more than a decade earlier, and the woman said that at that time she had found herself consumed with rage against the murderer.  For ten years she harbored her pain and nursed her anger.  Then she started attending a Quaker meeting.  And after a year, with the encouragement of her Quaker fellowship, she wrote to her daughter’s murderer in prison. He said he would speak with her if she wanted to.  Finally she went to visit him, and said that somehow, through that personal contact, she was able, if not fully to forgive, at least to let go of the rage that had dominated her life.  She said she had worried how her other children would accept the fact of her having reached out in this way to their sister’s killer.  Their response?  “We got our mother back.”
 
We’re inclined to say we aren’t ready to forgive because we can’t bring ourselves to do something nice to the one who has harmed us.  But what we overlook is that whatever forgiveness may do for the one we’re forgiving, it does at least as much for us.

When we fail to forgive, we compound the offense.  We allow a one-time pain to become our permanent life condition.  We give to the one who has harmed us the power to continue to warp and twist our spirits ... to make us vengeful rather than loving, to make us more prone to punish than free to bless.  When we forgive we not only open possibilities of future relationship and healing, we free ourselves as well.

Jesus suggests that forgiveness is a starting point on the journey toward abundant living.  In the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus is speaking to them about anger, he says, “When you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the alter and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”  First be reconciled.  First forgive.

When Peter asked him, “Lord, if someone sins against me, how often should I forgive?  As many as seven times?”  Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you seventy times seven.”  First forgive.  Finally forgive.  Always forgive.

When we forgive we begin to let go of the animosities that leave their poison within us.  We begin to release our selves from the preoccupation with punishment that turns us into creatures of anger.

The expansive love of one father with two sons was expressed in his willingness to respond to estrangement and abandonment with abundance and acceptance.  It was that willingness that opened the door to a restoration of right relationship.

In the movie “Invictus”, we see the transformative spirit that Nelson Mandela brought to a racially divided South Africa when he was elected its President, after having been held in prison for 27 yeas by its former government.  In the movie we see his resolve not to return evil for evil, but to treat those who had imprisoned him with respect, and to enlist and value them as partners in a new national future.  If ever there were a time and place where retribution would have seemed justified, post-apartheid South Africa would have seemed to be it. But forgiveness ... forgiveness that was not forgetfulness ... forgiveness won out, and pathways to common purpose began to emerge.

Forgiveness isn’t easy.  But what we know for sure is that Jesus called us to it, he taught it, and he lived it ... and in its healing power we too will find hope and wholeness.  Thanks be to God.