Barriers

I don’t like this passage. Frankly, I don’t think many of us do if we’re honest. We need to fix this.

How often should I forgive, Jesus? Seven times?

And Jesus said, “That seems about right.”

There. Fixed it. Not 77 times. Just seven times.

We don’t want to seem soft on sin. Or that we don’t have any standards. Or that we’re someone else’s doormat to be walked all over, right? We have to take hard stands. We draw a line and when someone crosses it, we take action. We can’t appear to be weak.

Seventy-seven times to forgive someone, that seems excessive. Other translations have it seventy times seven which is way worse. I’m glad we fixed it because forgiveness is hard enough to do seven times.

Let’s be honest, we are in church after all. By a show of hands, how many of us have someone we haven’t forgiven? Okay. Maybe an easier question: How many of us have done something we haven’t forgiven ourselves for? Okay.

Peter askes, “If another member of the church sins against me…” that’s hard. We trust one another and sin is a hard thing. Yet churches are places that often harbor resentment over long periods of time. We’re supposed to be the place of forgiveness and oftentimes we end up being the warehouse of grudges.

I once heard of a church getting ready to celebrate a big anniversary. Preparations were well underway, everything was looking positive. People were getting excited. The finale would be this big dinner that the whole church would sponsor. It would be held right in the sanctuary. The pews would be removed and tables set with white linen, finest silverware, bone china, and sparkling crystal. It would be resplendent. Two days out, the pastor gets word that the whole thing is in danger of being cancelled.  The chef is out.

The pastor meets with the chef to figure what’s going on. After hours of talk, the pastor figures out that the chef is the grandson to a woman who was wronged by the member who is heading up the event. It was never his intention to ever cook a meal, just sign up for it and cancel at the last minute.

Forgiveness is hard inside the church. It’s hard outside the church.

When I was an outside construction salesman, I was asked to pick up some screws. Our location was out of stock of this certain screw, so my manager asked me to pick it up at another location. But I couldn’t get to the other location because of a traffic accident ahead of me. So I told the manager that I would get there extra early the next morning and get the screws on the delivery truck before it left. Which is what I did. Two days later, I was brought before the yard manager and handed a pink slip to sign for insubordination.

I was so mad. I still am. This was nothing more than slapping the new guy around so he’ll get inline. I can’t honestly say I’ve truly forgiven that yard manager. It’s been 13 years, and I have so many reasons to still be angry. I’m a rule follower. I like order. I like for my yes’s to mean yes and my no’s to mean no. I do what I say I’ll do, I am a man of my word. I was met with a challenge, I couldn’t do the job as they requested, but we still reached the same goal by a different route. That’s not insubordination, that’s creative problem solving.

I’m sure many of you know what I’m talking about. No good deed goes unpunished. I’m supposed to forgive that guy? No! I did nothing wrong. I don’t need to forgive that guy seven times, I don’t even need to forgive him once. I’m resolute. I’ve done nothing wrong. I don’t need to forgive. I’m right. They’re wrong. I’m sure we each have a situation like this. I’m sure we each have a long list of people we are justified in not forgiving. Yes, we can’t appear weak or soft on sin. We can’t risk forgiveness. We put up all sorts of barriers, make all sorts of excuses.

“What if someone cheats us? What if someone would murder our kids?” We ask. We love to run to extremes in these hypothetical situations. These are barriers as well. If we jump to the worst possible outcome, then the argument falls apart and we don’t have to do it. This is a trick we learn when we’re teenagers.

“I want to do this trendy thing, mom.” We say.

“Just because everyone’s doing it?” our moms reply. “If everyone jumped off a cliff, would you do it?”

I’m sure I’m days away from saying that same thing to Sam or Eve. We love to run to extremes… but then we hear something…

I once counseled a woman who had just learned of her husband’s adultery. She had done nothing wrong. He just up and cheated. I guess he wanted to jump off a cliff with his friends. After a few sessions she said, “Pastor, I’m going to forgive him.”
“What, why?”
“Because I love him. We’re high school sweethearts. We’ve been through so much together, I think we can get through this.”
“Why would you condone his behavior?” I asked.
“I’m not. I said I’m forgiving him, not condoning his actions.”

That stopped me in my tracks. The couple is still together. They worked through it. And I’ve witnessed so many couples forgive addictions and work together to keep them from relapse. I’ve witnessed couples do the hard work of coming to terms with debt, with bad decisions, of poor wording choice, of all sorts of things. Forgiveness is a necessary part in any relationship, especially marriage. I’ve also met divorced people who have forgiven their spouse. You can forgive and still get divorced. I’ve also met a few who didn’t do the process of forgiveness and it affected their next marriage. I view forgiveness as a process. One day you wake up and find that you’ve been in a jail that’s been locked from the inside. Forgiveness is more for yourself than for the other person.

Well, what about murder? I heard a story once of a mother who met with the man who murdered her son.[1] An argument at a party resulted in her son being shot. He was twenty. The shooter was sixteen. The shooter was tried as an adult and was sentenced to 25 years. She went each week to visit him in prison. He got out of jail, and he moved back to the old neighborhood. And the shooter lives next door to that mom.

The mom said, “Not forgiving is like a cancer. It will eat you from the inside out. It’s not about the other person, it’s about myself. Yes, he murdered my son. But this is for me.”

In the face of that type of forgiveness, the shooter is working hard to repay. He says he still hasn’t forgiven himself, but he’s learning to. And he’s trying to be a contributing member to society. “I may have lost a son,” the mom says. “But I have gained another son.”

Jesus tells us to forgive seventy times or seventy times seven. To forgive boundlessly. We have to be clear about what we’re being asked to do. We put all sorts of barriers to this without understanding why. I think these barriers are here because we simply don’t understand forgiveness. We like cause and effect. We like stories where the bad guys and good guys get what they deserve: bad guys die, good guys ride off into the sunset. Cause and effect. There’s a term for that, it’s called Karma. But we’re Christian. We believe in Grace which is counter to karma. You DON’T get what you deserve.

I like how Rob Bell talks about what forgiveness isn’t[2]. Forgiveness is not condoning what happened. Forgiveness isn’t saying that what happened didn’t matter or affect us. Jesus still bore the scars of the crucifixion. You can forgive and never even tell the person or see them again. Forgiveness isn’t reconciliation. Forgiveness isn’t waiting for the other person to say they are sorry, we could be waiting forever. Forgiveness isn’t enabling the behavior to continue, it often comes with boundaries.

Forgiveness is a part of who God is. Forgiveness flows directly from the center of God’s heart. What forgiveness is and how we practice it is what we will explore in the coming weeks. Jesus is shocking us with a new equation. Christ is inviting us to be brave enough to risk forgiveness. We’ll explore forgiveness and why it’s so important to our lives of faith.  And maybe you might hear something in this series… maybe even today… and find that forgiveness is something we can do seven times and seventy times and seventy times seven times.

We’ll take the next few Sundays and try to figure out what forgiveness is, how to get past our barriers, and how to get in the practice of forgiving ourselves and others. Forgiveness is a process and we put a lot of barriers: excuses, our own innocence, and the need for revenge or to show how hurt we are… Instead of trying to fix the passage, maybe we can try to fix ourselves and do what Jesus teaches. If Jesus can teach this… If Jesus who endured a sham trial, unearned torture, and a cruel death by the crowds who shout “Hosanna” on Palm Sunday and “Crucify” on Good Friday… If his last words as he hung nailed to the cross is “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” If Jesus can do it from there, we can attempt it from wherever we are in our life. If we can learn how to forgive, then we just might be able to bear the title “Christian.”

 

[1] https://youtu.be/o2BITY-3Mp4

[2] http://robbell.podbean.com/e/episode-38-the-forgiving-flow-part-1-what-it-is/?token=f4638f348458a95f87091b25f2b97c37

Comments

  1. Great sermon! We were home sick today – keeping our germs to ourselves. But we’re able to still hear. And able to say oops, gee that sounds like me. And say I gotta stay tuned in because I gotta learn to forgive too. I’ve been locked in that cage too long, I’ve been locking myself in too long.

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