photo by: Yolanda Kauffman
Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past...
- Jack Kornfield
Shalom Mennonite Church
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Don't Forgive Too Soon – Part 1: Denial
Texts: Psalm 51 and John 21:15-19
Eric Massanari
“calling a spade a spade”
Forgiveness.
It lies at the heart of Christianity,
and yet it can be one of the more
difficult things to talk about in the church.
Forgive us our sins—our debts, our trespasses—
as we forgive those who sin against us, we pray
knowing from experience that
it is easier spoken of than done.
To be human is to experience wounds in relationships.
Such pain is compounded when
someone doesn't claim responsibility
for the hurt they have caused us.
We feel the sting of pseudo-apologies like,
"I'm really sorry that you feel I have hurt you."
We also live in a world where we
experience and witness hurts that
are unimaginably traumatic and terrible.
In the face of atrocity, one can be left
to wonder if it is even appropriate
or morally acceptable to speak of forgiveness.
Still, something in the human heart understands
that love and forgiveness have the power
to releases us from bondage to past hurts,
so that we might live into a life of greater
healing, wholeness and freedom.
Hannah Arendt, a 20th century political theorist,
once wrote a book called The Human Condition,
in which she observed that human beings
are created with the power to remember the past,
but left powerless to change it.
We are created with the power to imagine the future,
but left powerless to control it.
She concludes that forgiveness is the only
effective response to the past.
Contemporary writer Jack Kornfield puts it this way:
"Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past."
We cannot make the past better. Nor can we make it worse.
However, we can transform
our relationship with the past,
and this is what forgiveness is about.
It is about making a journey from our past,
through the present moment,
toward a future of greater wholeness and freedom.
For the sake of these reflections this morning,
I want to make two basic assumptions
about the Christian practice of forgiveness.
First, I assume that forgiveness is a process—a journey.
It is a process that may have stages to it,
like the ones we will be reflecting on in
our worship series these next few weeks,
but they do not necessarily unfold
in a neat chronological or linear fashion.
As a process, forgiveness does not happen quickly.
It cannot move superficially over
what has happened in the past.
Forgiveness is a process of remembering, not forgetting.
It is a process of remembering, integrating, and transforming,
and this journey requires great courage.
The second assumption I will make
is that forgiveness is a journey into freedom.
Forgiveness is a process of liberation
and emancipation from the binding grip
that the wounds of our past can
sometimes have upon our lives.
In order for this journey of freedom to unfold
it is necessary for truth to be told.
Forgiveness requires truth telling
and a movement through the denial
that can sometimes grip us when
we are wounded or when we have wounded someone.
As Christians, we follow one who
did not shy away from telling the truth,
and speaking with sharp honesty
especially when he encountered
people who were in some way
denying their own pain or the pain of others.
Take for instance the resurrection story
from this morning's gospel reading.
Jesus' interaction with Peter is the
final vignette of this gospel
and it begins with some gentle but direct honesty.
Three times Jesus asks Peter:
"Peter, do you love me?”
The repetition might seem strange if we didn't
know what happens earlier in the story:
following Jesus' arrest, Peter adamantly
denies any association with Jesus, three times.
Three times he betrays his friend and teacher.
It is not hard to imagine that
Peter is meeting the risen Christ
and feeling ashamed of his betrayal.
I hear Jesus' three questions to Peter
as being a gentle way of calling
direct attention to the betrayal
but also providing Peter with a way
to repent, to confess and to
proclaim his love for Jesus once again.
"Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”
Though words like “I'm so sorry”
and “I forgive you” are not spoken
in this exchange, the sense is that
denial has been released,
that forgiveness and restoration of relationship
have happened here, and that Peter
is once again prepared to respond to
the invitation Jesus extended to him
at the beginning of their journey together:
"Follow me.”
A second gospel story that illustrates
the power of honest naming and truth-telling
is the story of Jesus going to
the land of the Gerasenes.
There, among the tombs, he encounters
a man who is tormented by an “unclean spirit.”
The people of the town have locked him up
out there, not knowing what else to do with him.
He is a menace, a threat to their lives.
There are probably all sorts of names that they call him,
and all manner of violations for which they have blamed him.
As I read this story I begin to
wonder if it is best understood
as a story more about the possession
of a whole village by the demons
of fear, hatred, and prejudice
than it is about one man's illness.
It's about a whole community's denial
much more than it is a story of
one man's brokenness.
Consider what happens in the story.
Do you remember what Jesus asks the man?
“What is your name?”
He responds,
“My name is Legion, for we are many”
This man bore the sins of
a whole community—a “legion” of sins.
The man is freed, his healing comes,
when the demons are honestly named
and the truth of his affliction is told in love.
And do you remember what happens then?
The entire town begs Jesus to leave.
They cannot bear to see what has happened.
The man's healing has confronted them.
Their denial had been more comfortable
than the truth Jesus exposes.
Sometimes we're like that crowd,
and like Peter, living with a sense
of shame, and denying
the extent to which we have hurt
or betrayed our neighbor.
Sometimes we are like the man
amongst the tombs, living alone with our wounds,
perhaps pretending we haven't been hurt so bad.
We might presume no one really cares anyway,
or even that we somehow deserve our pain.
Either way, as the wounded or the wounder,
we can be bound by our past
in ways that make it difficult
to grow free and become more whole.
That binding can be enforced by
our denial of the hurts we have experienced or inflicted.
As we see in Christ,
it is love that allows us to
move through denial
and it is love that gives us
courage to speak the truth
and call things by their true names.
It is love that allows us
to face what we have done
to hurt our sister or brother.
It is love that allows us to honestly
name and claim the ways we have been hurt.
May we know how much we are dearly loved.
We are loved enough to speak our stories of truth.
We are loved enough to forgive as we are forgiven.
Amen
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