The Easter bunny brought a trampoline last spring. Yet the dumb bunny left it unassembled. As we were putting it together, I had a random Spotify playlist playing music in the background. A song came on I had never heard before, and a line stopped me in my tracks. Eve and I just looked at one another. Good art can do that to you. It makes you stop and notice.

The lyrics are from the song Tarot Cards by the band Saturdays at Your Place. “You say your friends don’t like me, well I don’t like me, too.”

Man alive. That speaks to my soul. Forgiveness of myself is the hardest thing. I am my own harshest critic. The good news to me is not that God is disappointed in me and saves me from that through a sacrifice, but that God has such a high view of me that God’s love saves me from myself and the violence I do to myself and others because of my self-loathing and insecurities.[1]

I have such high standards for myself, it’s hard to forgive myself. Worse, I will often project these standards onto others and demand the impossible from them. It has been freeing to learn how to forgive myself and others in my life. It has truly been good news. I don’t have to carry the weight of the bitterness and anger anymore.

We’re talking about forgiveness today. Forgiveness of self. Forgiveness of others. Forgiveness is often misunderstood. Forgiveness is not saying what someone did, or what you yourself did, was okay. Forgiveness is saying what happened was so not okay that you refuse to be associated with it anymore. Christ forgave us from the cross for we did not know what we did. Yet his resurrected body still bore the scars. He responded in love to us, not in vengeance. While with us, he said to love one another as he loved us. We killed him for it. He came back and said, “As I was saying…”

Desmond Tutu gives us four steps of how to forgive in his book, The Book of Forgiving. Those steps are Telling the Story, Naming the Hurt, Granting Forgiveness, and Renewing or Releasing the Relationship.

Telling the Story and Naming the Hurt are self-explanatory. Telling the Story and naming the hurt helps us understand and begin to take back what has been taken from us. To get our story straight. Yet many stay stuck in these first 2 steps and remain a perpetual victim. They can’t get past this. Yet to forgive is to be free from that hurt. What happened is so not okay that you refuse to be connected to it any longer.

This can be done alone or in conversation with the person you need to forgive. You can write down the story and name the hurt and then burn it. You can post it anonymously on the internet. It all depends on what happened and how you want to confront it.

We then move into granting forgiveness. A victim is in a position of weakness and cannot determine what happens to them. A survivor is someone who determines their own fate and future. They say, “I had no choice in what happened, but I choose what I do next.” Forgiveness grants that freedom. Yet forgiveness also recognizes the humanity in others. We all mess up and will need forgiveness sooner or later in our lives. We are flawed fragile human beings who can be thoughtless and cruel usually because we’re in need of a nap or a snack. It’s amazing that most evil in the world are caused by that. We hope everyone will be thoughtful and kind, but we ourselves forget to do that sometimes. We forget to be present because we’re rushing past people and onto the next thing.

Then the final fourth step is to renew or release the relationship. Renewing doesn’t mean acting like nothing happened but being stronger because of what happened. Renewing is making the decision to reconcile. Releasing means to just let that relationship go. You’re no longer going to invest your time or effort into the relationship. When people show you who they are: believe them and change your behavior accordingly. For you can’t change them, you can only change how you react to them.

Once there was a man in my office wondering how to forgive a family member. He didn’t want forgiveness, he wanted revenge. He wanted to rub the family member’s nose in the harm they caused him. That’s not forgiveness, that’s a form of revenge. I told him so. He asked how to forgive. I said, you just forgive. It can happen right now, and the other person might not have any clue they were forgiven.

“But how will they ever change?” Was his response. I don’t have any insight on how to change other people. I can only seek to change myself. Yet I find that very hard. As Paul wrote in Romans 7:15 “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” I’m a work in progress, especially trying to forgive and change myself.

In a culture where a silver medal is failure, forgiving might feel like losing. The other person won’t learn their lesson. It’s why I have a lot of hope here in our Philippians passage for today. “Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as a loss because of Christ.” He writes a verse later, “I consider these things rubbish.” But the word in Greek he uses doesn’t mean rubbish. He uses a four-letter word here. I could go on a tangent about biblical cussing, but I won’t because that’s maturity. Paul is letting go of things (dare I say flushing things away) that have come before and is pressing onto the prize of heaven found in his call of God in Christ Jesus. He invites the Philippians to imitate him.

Forgiveness is a part of who God is. Forgiveness flows directly from the center of God’s heart. Jesus is shocking us with a new equation: to forgive instead of get revenge. The new equation as the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth said, “A handshake is more powerful than a fist.”[2]

I like how author Rob Bell talks about what forgiveness isn’t.[3] 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. Now that you know you can be hurt, you forgive but you don’t forget. You won’t fall for the same behavior again.

When we are truly present to the moment and able to forgive ourselves and others, we will be less burdened. We won’t be haughty, but humble. For what came before, we either succeeded in what we set out to do or we learned. All things before we count as a loss as we continue to gain a Christlike stance to the world.

What shall we do? How then shall we live? I have a final story for you.[4]

A traveler came upon an old farmer working in his field beside the road. Eager to rest his feet, the wanderer hailed the farmer, who seemed happy enough to straighten his back and talk for a moment.

“What sort of people live in the next town?” asked the stranger.

“What were the people like where you’ve come from?” replied the farmer.

“They were a bad lot. Troublemakers all, and lazy too. The most selfish people in the world, and not a one of them to be trusted. I’m happy to be leaving the scoundrels.”

“Is that so?” replied the old farmer. “Well, I’m afraid that you’ll find the same sort in the next town.”

Disappointed, the traveler trudged on his way, and the farmer returned to his work.

Sometime later another stranger, coming from the same direction, hailed the farmer, and they stopped to talk. “What sort of people live in the next town?” he asked.

“What were the people like where you’ve come from?” replied the farmer once again.

“They were the best people in the world. Hardworking, honest, and friendly. I’m sorry to be leaving them.”

“Fear not,” said the farmer. “You’ll find the same sort in the next town.”

The gift of forgiveness allows us to be more like the second traveler and less like the first. It allows us to view ourselves and others as hardworking, honest, and friendly. I believe that of you. It also allows us to be the farmer who knows that we don’t see things as they really are, we see things as we are. Lots of wisdom in that parable. As for me, I’m slowly starting to change my mind about myself. Being quick to forgive others gives me practice at forgiving myself and learning to love myself as God loves me. Having this Christ-like stance toward ourselves and others just might save the world. Thanks be to God. May you go and do likewise. Amen.

Bibliography
Our 2018 Worship series entitled RE:Forgiveness can be found here: https://www.uccmedina.org/series/forgiveness/

Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus by Robert Farrar Capon

The Book of Forgiving: the fourfold path for healing ourselves and our world by Desmond and Mpho Tutu

Forgive: why should I and how can I? by Timothy Keller

Rising Strong: How the ability to reset transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead by Brene Brown

Presence: Bringing your boldest self to your biggest challenges by Amy Cuddy

Works Cited

[1] This is from Why God Died, our class on atonement and an upcoming podcast series.

[2] Quote found in the Ohio Statehouse on April 10, 2024 on my trip with Leadership Medina County

^[3] http://robbell.podbean.com/e/episode-38-the-forgiving-flow-part-1-what-it-is/?token=f4638f348458a95f87091b25f2b97c37

^[4] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/quit-pointing-your-avocado-at-me_b_3492304