Musings

Oct

01

Radical Forgiveness

A sermon preached at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Port Chester, NY on Sunday, September 17th, 2017

Readings: Genesis 50:15-21, Psalm 103:(1-7), 8-13, Romans 14:1-12, Matthew 18:21-35

The lectionary is certainly keeping us on our toes today. Today, in our Old Testament reading, we get the tail end of the Joseph story from the book of Genesis. Normally, when reading a story, one reads the ending only after having read the rest of the story. Well, not today. We haven’t heard ANY of the Joseph story! Last week, we were in Ezekiel, for heaven’s sake! At first I thought there was a mistake. It wasn’t. So what is this strange snippet of the Joseph saga doing in our readings today?

It turns out that this is one of those Sundays when all of our readings band together to shout a common message loud and clear: Genesis, the Psalm, Romans, and Matthew are all here to speak to us about forgiveness. Yes, forgiveness. That age old topic that we simultaneously know we need to care about and really struggle to put into practice. Forgiveness, the way it’s often talked about in church, can seem so impossible as to be quite off-putting. In today’s Gospel, we hear Jesus’ famous command to forgive those who sin against us, not just 7 times, but 77 times. It sounds lovely, until you actually imagine forgiving the idiot who always illegally parks in your parking spot 77 days in a row. Really, Jesus? 77? That seems like overkill.

Jesus’ commandment is memorable. It cuts right to the heart. It convicts us. But it doesn’t actually tell us how to forgive to the point where it feels absurd. The story of the king and his slave serves as a cautionary tale for how not to receive forgiveness, but it doesn’t really show us what forgiveness looks like when done well between humans.

That’s where Joseph comes in. So, since we haven’t had the pleasure of reading through the whole Joseph story, let me catch you up real quick. In the book of Genesis, Jacob has 12 sons. Joseph is the baby, and receives all the special privileges of a youngest child – including his brothers’ fierce jealousy. The brothers get fed up with Joseph, first try to kill him off, but then think better of it and end up selling him into slavery to some passing traders. Joseph ends up in Egypt where, to make a long story short, he makes himself famous by interpreting Pharaoh’s weird dreams, and ends up serving as a high level government official. Many years later, a famine strikes the land, and Joseph’s brothers make the trip to Egypt where – irony! – they find themselves begging for food at the feet of their brother, whom they no longer recognize. Joseph reveals his secret identity, they have a happy family reunion, the brothers go back to Canaan to get their father, and everyone settles down in Egypt to live. With me so far?

That’s where today’s story picks up. Jacob has died and, all of a sudden, Joseph’s brothers get nervous. What if, now that Dad is gone, Joseph decides he’s still mad at us for, you know, selling him into slavery? An understandable enough possibility, so the brothers scurry to cover their bases. They come to Joseph, claiming that, just before his death, Jacob told the brothers to beg Joseph to forgive them. Pause. The disadvantage to not having read the full story is that this seems plausible enough. But it never happens! The brothers are making this entire deathbed conversation with Jacob up. They’re not actually sorry. They’re just trying to protect themselves.

What does Joseph do? We don’t know whether or not he buys the story, but we do know that he responds with compassion. And something about his response seems to open up his brothers’ hearts too. What Joseph says in this moment is, to me, one of the most powerful statements in the Bible about how forgiveness really works: “What you intended for harm, God intended for good.” In one sense, this applies to the greater arc of the story: thanks to the brothers selling Joseph into slavery, an entire region was saved from famine. But I think the sentiment applies to the brothers’ imperfect “apology” as well. In other words: God can work with our imperfect human hearts to bring about love, and justice, and mercy.

The Joseph story tells us that learning to forgive is an imperfect process, full of ulterior motives, reluctant beginnings, and outright mistakes. We don’t have to get it right on the first try. In fact: it’s pretty much guaranteed that we won’t. Forgiveness, at least for us humans, is not a one and done affair. The important thing is that we start somewhere. The important thing is that we open up a conversation – with God and, if possible, with those whom we have wronged – so that we can start being honest. Because growth can only happen where there is honesty.

Asking for and receiving forgiveness is incredibly hard work. It’s a practice, something we have to commit to chipping away at day by day, maybe even moment by moment. Forgiveness is never about condoning abuse or violence. Nowhere in this story does Joseph say, “I know you didn’t really mean to hurt me,” or “30 years later, I understand why you did what you did.” No. What’s done is done, and it was evil. When we forgive someone, we do not change the past – but we do give ourselves an opportunity to let the past stop ruling our lives and our hearts. When we forgive someone, we are reclaiming our power, our authority – often the same authority that those who wronged us were trying to take away. When we forgive, we say, “what you did to me does not define who I am. My identity is secure in God.”

When we forgive, we break the chain, we refuse to return violence for violence. That doesn’t mean that we don’t speak out against evil or that we don’t seek justice; it simply means that we decide to take control of the only thing we can – our behavior – and refuse to put any more violence into the world. Yes, we receive harm at the hands of each other. But hurt and violence are not the only things we receive in this life. We also receive a constant stream of love and compassion from our God who, the Psalm promises us, is “full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness.” When we forgive, we actively choose what we’re going to pass on to the world. We choose compassion and mercy over revenge and hatred.

And that, really, is what Jesus is getting at in Matthew’s Gospel. Forgiving is not something we do on our own steam. We do it because God has first forgiven us. Because God has modeled the kind of behavior God wants from us. If we’re stuck in our own vicious cycles of retribution, then we have, in a fundamental way, lost touch with God, forgotten who God is. And Jesus is quite right to say, in the parable of the king and the slaves, that forgetting of that magnitude is a serious problem.

But God is well aware that our attempts at forgiveness will always fall short. God knows this, and God forgives us for it. Our job is to keep trying, to keep growing, to keep picking ourselves up when we mess up and not give up hope. Forgiveness usually doesn’t arrive in our hearts with fanfare and fireworks, but sneaks onto the scene, little by little. And so, to close, I’d like to offer a very simple, very effective practice by which we can begin to open the doors of our hearts to God’s compassion and mercy. Every day, take 5 minutes and call to mind a person who has wronged you. Instead of rehashing the story of who said and did what, simply say to them (aloud, or in your head): “I wish you well.” And then release them to God. Perhaps you will find that, like Joseph’s brothers, you don’t really mean it at first. That’s ok. God can work with it. Keep practicing. 77 times, if necessary. Keep going forward, knowing that our God is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger, and of great kindness. There is always more than enough forgiveness to go around. Amen.