Forgiveness 07
Gary Hall
Seabury-Western
February 27, 2007
In his nightclub act, Woody Allen used to do a piece about being asked to portray God in a play and the kind of method preparation he was doing to get ready for it. “I acted like God,” he would say. “I took cabs all over New York. I got in a fight with a guy and I forgave him.” I always wondered what happened next. In my experience, telling someone you forgive them when they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong is not always the best interpersonal strategy.
The question of forgiveness is one that has perplexed me all of my working life. If there is anything a priest gets asked about over the course of a career it is forgiveness. And, as Nora Gallagher said in our conversation last Wednesday, in the church we talk a lot about forgiveness but it’s clear that we don’t really know what we’re talking about.
What does it mean to say that you forgive someone? And if you do forgive them, how do you turn that forgiveness into a lived reality? I can tell you that I forgive you, but what does that mean about how I feel about you? If you are anything like me, you find yourself constantly confronting these questions over time. People want you to teach them about forgiveness, and you discover you don’t know anything about it yourself.
I think we get stuck thinking about forgiveness because we usually approach it from the point of view of the forgiver. We are naturally inclined to see ourselves as the injured party. Of the many people who have, over time, made their way to my office to talk about forgiveness, very few of them came wanting to be forgiven themselves. Almost all of them saw themselves as the injured party and were seeking guidance in how to bring themselves to forgive someone else. I know this is true when I look into my own heart. It is easier for me to see myself as sinned against than sinning. That is true for us all both interpersonally and socially. We demand apologies from others but are slow to extend them ourselves. Everyone in this culture feels aggrieved.
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.–Matthew 6.14-15
When Jesus talks about forgiveness, though, he anchors that discussion someplace other than in my need to forgive. He grounds it, instead, in my need to take seriously the extent to which I have been forgiven. “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” If that means that I’m asking God to forgive me to the extent that I forgive others, then the game is up. As Reinhold Niebuhr said, we want mercy for ourselves and justice for others. What we have a hard time seeing, of course, is that mercy and justice are two sides of the same thing. I may want you to get what’s coming to you and for me to get of scot free, or as they say in traffic court, I announce myself “guilty, with an explanation.” I want the judge to take my circumstances into account. You, of course, should keep your explanation and your circumstances to yourself.
I’ve never been a big fan of the word “debtors” which the NRSV and the Presbyterians use instead of the old “trespasses” or the more modern “sins”. But there is a way in which “debt” makes more sense to me than “trespassing”. I don’t particularly care about trespassing, but I know I don’t want to be indebted to anyone. And I don’t want anyone indebted to me. My natural tendency is to want to avoid both sides of the debt ledger. I want to think of myself as autonomous and free.
But of course you and I and all human beings are enormously in debt from the very beginning. The givenness of our lives, the various kinds of social and economic privilege we enjoy, the life of the church itself, our relationships, ourcallings and our ministries–we start out with an enormous debt to God. The idea of a level playing field is a beautiful Romantic illusion. The field has been tilted in our favor from the beginning. But the God we’re coming to know in Jesus is not a God who wants us to wallow in the facts of our cosmic indebtedness. That God is a God who forgives that debt absolutely and then asks that we extend something like that same debt relief to others.
God does not account us righteous because we follow all the rules and do everything correctly. God accounts us righteous when we understand ourselves primarily as the recipients of a gift. We “get it” not by being pure or perfect or even successful. We “get it” by saying “thanks”, by acknowledging the generosity and forgiveness that God is constantly extending to us. We want, as both sinners and Americans, to think of ourselves as the authors of our own successes. We easily give ourselves the credit and God the blame. But Jesus is One who lived in the knowledge that everything he had and experienced was a gift. And because he knew himself to be the receiver of such abundant gifts, he found it rather easier than we do to forgive.
I still don’t quite know what to say when people come to me asking about forgiveness, but I do know this. The place to start when thinking about it is not with the enormity of what has been done to you. The place to start with forgiveness is with what has been done for you, with the enormity of what you yourself have been both given and forgiven. The experience of forgiveness is a mystery and a gift. Even at this late date in my own life, there are earlier injuries that will never finally go away. But I do know that they seem tinier and tinier as they recede in life’s rear-view mirror and as I face more daily into the abundance of the future hope to which God calls me. I can’t tell you how to forgive someone, but Jesus can tell you, as he does this morning, how to start. And that’s by seeing yourself, first and foremost, as forgiven. As a friend of mine says, “we’re all on cosmic relief.” And our righteousness will show forth as we live our lives in response to the accepting and sharing of God’s generosity.
Today, February 27, is the day on which we also give thanks for the life, ministry, and witness of George Herbert, the great 17th century poet and priest. Hidden among all the wonderful things Herbert wrote, here is this: “He that cannot forgive others, breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass if he would ever reach heaven; for everyone has need to be forgiven.” Forgiveness is not just about letting our old story go; it is about our openness to a new story. As Nora Gallagher said, “When you forgive a person, you restore that person to his or her humanity.” She could have added that the act of forgiving restores the forgiver’s humanity, too. We’re all on cosmic relief. We’re all the recipients of so much more than we ever give. That is why, as always, we move now, in the Eucharist, to give thanks. Amen.