Forgiveness, Part 1
Genesis 37: 1-4, 12-28 (NIV)
Jacob lived in the land where his father had stayed, the land of Canaan. This is the account of Jacob’s family line. Joseph, a young man of seventeen, was tending the flocks with his brothers, the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives, and he brought their father a bad report about them. Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age; and he made an ornate robe for him. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him.
Now his brothers had gone to graze their father’s flocks near Shechem, and Israel said to Joseph, “As you know, your brothers are grazing the flocks near Shechem. Come, I am going to send you to them.” “Very well,” he replied. So he said to him, “Go and see if all is well with your brothers and with the flocks, and bring word back to me.” Then he sent him off from the Valley of Hebron. When Joseph arrived at Shechem, a man found him wandering around in the fields and asked him, “What are you looking for?” He replied, “I’m looking for my brothers. Can you tell me where they are grazing their flocks?” “They have moved on from here,” the man answered. “I heard them say, ‘Let’s go to Dothan.’ ” So Joseph went after his brothers and found them near Dothan. But they saw him in the distance, and before he reached them, they plotted to kill him. “Here comes that dreamer!” they said to each other. “Come now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.” When Reuben heard this, he tried to rescue him from their hands. “Let’s not take his life,” he said. “Don’t shed any blood. Throw him into this cistern here in the wilderness, but don’t lay a hand on him.” Reuben said this to rescue him from them and take him back to his father. So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe—the ornate robe he was wearing— and they took him and threw him into the cistern. The cistern was empty; there was no water in it. As they sat down to eat their meal, they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Their camels were loaded with spices, balm and myrrh, and they were on their way to take them down to Egypt. Judah said to his brothers, “What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? Come, let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him; after all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood.” His brothers agreed. So when the Midianite merchants came by, his brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern and sold him for twenty shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites, who took him to Egypt.
Matthew 14: 22-33 (NIV)
Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd. After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. Later that night, he was there alone, and the boat was already a considerable distance from land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it. Shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost,” they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.” “Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.” “Come,” he said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!” Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?” And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. Then those who were in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”
So I'm taking a chance here and trying out something a little different with my preaching.
A little over a year go, when I was still interning as a chaplain at Strong Hospital, I was challenged by a few of my fellow chaplains about my theology on forgiveness--they thought I needed to put more thought into it and strengthen my thoughts about forgiveness. At the same time, I'm looking ahead in our lectionary, especially at the Old Testament lessons coming up, and I'm seeing some common themes. So, to those colleagues of mine, who wanted me to work on my theology of forgiveness: challenge accepted. For the next few weeks, I will be building a sermon series about--you guessed it--forgiveness. We've touched on forgiveness in sermons past, but, for the next few weeks, I'm inviting you to really explore this pesky word, "forgiveness", with me.
Forgiveness. I'm guessing I'm not the only person in this room who finds this word, "forgiveness", challenging. So, first of all, if anybody out there cringed in your seat a little when you heard me say I'm going to spend the next few weeks talking about forgiveness, then I just want to assure you, I'm right there with you. Forgiveness IS a tough concept. Forgiveness IS challenging.
Why? Well, I think one of the biggest reasons why forgiveness is so challenging, so hard to talk about, and so tough to preach about, is because we don't have a good working definition of what "forgiveness" actually means.
You can't argue that forgiveness is a good thing, and essential for living a healthy life, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. We've all heard the arguments in favor of forgiveness. To share with you one of the wittier, yet classic arguments, spiritual author Anne Lamott writes, "Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die." The point comes through loud and clear.
We also know that, as the people of God, we can't escape forgiveness. Our faith is all about forgiveness. We use that word all the time! And we can't get away with not forgiving--Jesus commanded us to forgive one another. Jesus commanded us to give to others what God gave us. Christian author CS Lewis, perhaps, put it best when he wrote, "To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you."
Yet, we have so many false definitions of forgiveness going around that we still find ourselves saying, Sure, forgiveness sounds like a great thing, but I'm not going to do it. So, let me be clear. When I talk about forgiveness, I mean two things: I mean giving up your resentment toward someone who has hurt you, and I mean letting go of the idea that someone owes you something.
And let me also be clear about what forgiveness doesn't mean. Our society gives us a lot of false definitions of forgiveness, but the one that I'm most concerned with this week is when we believe that "forgiving" means "condoning". That to forgive someone is to excuse what they did, or that to forgive someone is to say that what they did is okay, or really wasn't that bad, or that big a deal.
That is not what forgiveness means. And even if that's the going street definition of forgiveness, that can't be what forgiveness means here, to people of faith, and that's not what forgiveness is to God.
Forgiveness, true forgiveness--that is, letting go of your resentments and your expectations for others to pay you back--acknowledges, first and foremost, that what the other person did to you was absolutely wrong, and you deserved better. If that weren't true, there would be nothing to forgive!
One of the hardest parts about talking about forgiveness, as people of faith, is that the topic, in and of itself, makes us face something we don't always want to face. Even though we want to see the very best in people, even though we want to see God's light in all of our brothers and sisters, if we're going to be mature and realistic here, then we need to acknowledge that sometimes people that God created to be good, sometimes even people we love and trust, do horrible, horrible things. That's the nature of living in a fallen world. There is no excusing, there is no condoning, the terrible things people will do to one another. When we talk about forgiveness, first we need to talk about the original offense. First, we need to talk about how we were hurt.
So let's consider our brother Joseph. The youngest of Jacob's twelve sons, and the favorite. And the whole family knew it. And if that wasn't already perfectly clear just by the way Jacob treated Joseph, it became clear as crystal after Jacob gifted Joseph with a particularly ornate article of clothing. Broadway would call this article of clothing an Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat; the text just calls it a robe with long sleeves. Regardless, it was the last straw for Joseph's eleven brothers.
And this is where Joseph's story becomes very disturbing. Most of us can understand sibling rivalry, and, sure, Joseph was being kind of annoying. But the extreme length Joseph's brothers decide they will go to just so they don't have to see his fancy coat or hear about his dreams that he will be in charge someday...how do we even begin to wrap our minds around this?
First, they decide they're going to kill him, throw him in a well, and tell Jacob that he was killed by a wild animal. But then they realize that if they did that, they'd get their hands dirty. They can't have that. So then Reuben suggests they just throw Joseph in a well and leave him there for dead. Secretly, he wants to come back later and save Joseph--but he doesn't want his brothers to know that. But then Judah suggests, maybe they shouldn't kill Joseph, he is their brother after all. So they decide to have mercy on him and, rather than kill him, sell him into slavery to a caravan of Ishmaelites headed for Egypt. So they do just that--they exchange their brother for money, and tell Jacob he died.
Not to spoil the end of this story, which I'll be preaching on next week, but it's really, really amazing that Joseph eventually reconciles with his brothers. It's more amazing, still, that he forgives them.
This is the kind of unspeakable hurt that any of us, no matter how loving or altruistic we are, would be tempted to call unforgivable. And if we think forgiving is the same thing as excusing, then we'd be right--this is inexcusable. We are called, as disciples of Christ, to be loving, graceful people, but we're not any less loving or graceful if we call this what it is. You're not any less Christian if someone hurts you and you call them on it. Being a loving, forgiving person doesn't require you to say that it's okay for others to hurt you--it isn't. And forgiving someone who wronged you doesn't mean what they did was okay--it wasn't.
That's not what forgiveness is. The mature, Christ-led forgiveness that God calls us to goes much deeper than simply dismissing our hurt. Forgiveness isn't about excusing at all. It's about trust.
When we forgive, we acknowledge that sometimes things happen to us that are so terrible that we're powerless to make it right. We're powerless to make justice on our own. When we forgive, we don't brush off our hurt--we hand it over to God. When we forgive, we give our hurt to God, and trust that he will make it right in his time. When we forgive trust that God can heal our deepest pain, even in the face of all reason.
When we forgive, we act like Peter in this morning's Gospel story. Forgiveness should never be something we take lightly. Forgiveness is more than a word, and more than an attitude. Forgiveness is walking on the water. Holding onto our resentments and debtors means staying in the boat with the other disciples. Who can blame them? They're safe there. They're comfortable there. But forgiveness calls us to so give up our comfort and safety that we'd put even our lives in God's hand. When we forgive, we walk on the water, and expect, only because of God, that we'll survive.
But most of all, like Peter walking on water, forgiveness is something we can only do because we have God's help. If you think it's hard to forgive, you're right. It's actually impossible. On our own, at least. If we don't ask for God's help, we can't forgive. It's too great a task on our own. But that's why we pray for the strength to do it. That's why we say, every week, in the Lord's Prayer, "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us." We can't do it on our own. But with God, even in the face of all obstacles, all things are possible.
Amen.
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