“Forgiveness: Another Flipping Growth Opportunity”
A sermon by Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman
June 1, 2008
READINGS ANCIENT AND MODERN:
Our ancient reading this morning is from Psalm 32, of Hebrew Scripture:
Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the guilt of my sin.
Our modern reading is from the 20th Century theologian and social analyst, Reinhold Niebuhr:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
SERMON:
The theme of this morning’s sermon was chosen by Anne and Michael Mernin. They won the honor by placing the winning bid for it at our Annual Service Auction this past November. “Something on forgiveness,” they said. “Whatever you’d like to do with it.” I’ve chosen to go with, “Forgiveness: Another Flipping Growth Opportunity.” It’s a lot easier to talk about forgiveness than it is to practice it. But let me assure you, it’s not all that easy to talk about either.
Nobody wants to be in the position of needing to ask for or to offer forgiveness. It means that the order in ones life has been disrupted. The prospect calls on us either to become entrenched in what has been – or what we might have thought to have been – or to give way to accepting a new version of reality, one that most typically calls on us to have a larger vision of reality than what we had previously held. Forgiveness is sort of like flipping; we have to flip ourselves, propel ourselves, into a new way of being in the world, a new way of being in relationship.
I need to make a disclaimer from the onset. I would not want anything I’m about to say to be misunderstood to mean that forgiveness is an action that requires or encourages anyone to subject themselves or loved ones to violence or abuse. Violence and abuse are dangerous; they need to be avoided in any way possible. Removing oneself from violent or abusive relationships or situations is not a barrier to forgiveness. To the contrary, it can often provide the first steps on the path to a safer, healing forgiveness of oneself and possibly of one’s abuser. With that said, I begin with a story.
“Here If You Need Me” is a brilliantly inspiring book by Unitarian Universalist Minister, Kate Braestrup. Kate chronicles the reclaiming of her life following the sudden and accidental death of her husband. She does this through the telling of her experiences as a mother of four and as a chaplain for search and rescue missions in the great Maine woods. The following is one of her reflective stories that provides an opening into our theme.
The stories we tell of heaven and hell are not about how we die, but about how we live.
Two summers ago, [two of my children,] Woolie and Zach were badly burned when the gasoline my cousin George was using to ignite a pile of backyard brush essentially exploded in their faces. Being burned in a fire is one of the classic images of hell, and it's a pretty powerful one. Being burned hurts a lot.
As I drove my burned loved ones to the hospital, I had the 911 dispatcher on the cell phone. She kept asking me whether anyone was having trouble breathing. What she knew and I didn't was that if George and the kids had inhaled the scalding air at the moment of ignition, the insides of their lungs would begin to swell and shred, and they could die very quickly.
So she kept saying, "Are they breathing?" And I would hold the cell phone up in the air, so she could hear the hellish sounds of them cursing and crying.
George was cursing and crying because his burns hurt and because he knew that the fire that had injured these children was his mistake, his fault. He was the adult who had decided to use gasoline to start the fire, and his was the hand that struck the match.
"Are they breathing?" the dispatcher said, and I held up the cell phone.
George, beside me in the passenger seat, said, "Oh my God. Oh hell. I am so sorry. I am so sorry."
Zach was sitting behind him in the backseat. In the middle of his own loud litany of "Oh God" and "Oh hell," Zach leaned forward. He reached out with his burned arm, an arm blistering and shredding before my eyes, and [he] put his burned hand on George's shoulder.
"It's all right, George," he said. "We love you."
If you are living in love, you are in heaven no matter where you are. May heaven hold you. May you always, always, live in love.
This is quite a premise on which to begin our exploration of forgiveness, “If you are living in love, you are in heaven no matter where you are.” Sometimes loves comes as a gift. Sometimes it comes as a result of tremendous effort. I suspect that forgiveness is much the same, and that forgiveness always has its roots in love. It’s as much or more about the forgiver than it is about the one who needs to be forgiven – unless of course, the one needing forgiveness is one’s self.
There are various perspectives to be considered when we think about forgiveness. The truth is that there are far more perspectives and dynamics than can possibly be addressed in the next few minutes. This will hardly be an exhaustive exploration, but Kate Braestrup’s story provides at least four perspectives that give us good entrée. There is Kate, the mother, faced with the prospect of forgiving her cousin for his carelessness that led to the serious injury of her children. There is Zach, who quickly responds with loving forgiveness towards his errant and hurting relative. And then there is George who holds two perspectives. He is in need of Kate’s forgiveness and that of the two children, and he’s in need of the self-forgiveness that only he can discover in his own heart. So, that gives us four different perspectives to consider.
We’ve all been in Kate’s position where someone who, through ineptitude or some kind of shortcoming, has done something – intended or unintended – that has caused physical, financial, emotional, spiritual or some kind of harm to us, or to someone we love. We have been hurt by their actions or their lack of actions. We harbor misgivings, distrust or resentment, or all of them. I’m not saying that Kate did this; I am suggesting that we have done it. Maybe some of us are in the midst of such an experience even now.
The dynamics of this particular perspective play out in relationships from the very personal to the very global and international. They can be found in relationships of various groups in society, like when communities of traditionally marginalized persons are harmed by others who are more closely connected to the dominant culture. I’m going to address this perspective of forgiveness though, the one that comes of having experienced hurt, on a personal level and hope that this will provide more universal applications in broader relationships.
Jesus said that we should turn the other cheek. Gandhi said that an eye for an eye makes for the whole world blind. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that there are certain things to which we ought to be maladjusted. There is a very delicate balance between forgiving someone and allowing ourselves to remain in harm’s way. Sometimes that balance is so delicate that we err on the side of creating an overly wide margin of safety. We’re not in it to take an eye for an eye, but we’re sure as hell not willing to turn the other cheek. Maladjustment comes all too naturally.
It’s helpful if the offender has asked for forgiveness. It’s helpful if the apology is not the payment of a debt, but instead is an expression of understanding of how one’s behavior has effected or brought hurt to the other person. It’s helpful because it is an admission of having broken faith; the accountability in that admission points in the direction of a hoped for future relationship by the offender. Sincere apology, or restitution or some kind of atonement can be helpful because, if we receive them, they reduces the threat that we are in harm’s way, should we extend our forgiveness. That doesn’t always make it easy to offer, but it is helpful. And then perhaps love can show us the rest of the way.
You really can’t always get what you want, though. Apologies are not always – and sometimes are rarely – offered. So then the question is, what is – where is – that point of delicate balance between forgiveness and inviting further hurt? While we might wish there were one, I don’t suspect there is a magic formula for an answer than can be calculated.
It’s not helpful or healthful for us to take the Nike approach and just do it – just go ahead and say, I forgive. Easy forgiveness does not run deep and often obscures unresolved resentments. The same is true for the opposite – never forgiving is always remaining stuck. The answer, as obscure as it might be, must lie in the heart, within our capacity to love – both the other and ourselves.
“Love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus said. Loving someone who has wronged us doesn’t have to be about accepting what has happened as just the way things are. It has more to do with being connected in a deep way with the well-being of the one who has wronged us. Allowing ourselves to be fodder for further wrongdoings by another does not promote the others’ well-being. It allows or might even enable them to continue or even accelerate their hurtful behavior. Maybe we can provide a more loving and sincere forgiveness by removing ourselves from being a target, maybe by disengaging from the process in which the hurting takes place.
How do we know if our forgiveness is real or if it is contrived? How do we know if it is really a part of our own acting out? I think it has to do with our motives. It has to do with our capacity to love ourselves enough to extend that love to another. And it has to do with the release of the burden of resentment that we should feel – if in fact we have laid that burden down. A good indicator that we might just have more work to do, would be, that if instead of relief and healing, we find ourselves feeling superior. Love isn’t about feeling superior; neither is forgiveness.
In Kate Braestrup’s story, her son, Zach didn’t have to look very far – or at least it didn’t seem that he did – to find the love that held forgiveness within it. I suspect that many of us have had similar experiences. Someone wrongs us, maybe incredibly, and in the same instant as their action, they have the devastating awareness of the impact of the action on us. And even in our own pain, our hearts are somehow opened to their pain.
Love comes tumbling out of us, uncluttered, and certain. It is not only a gift to the one we forgive. It’s a gift to us, and not necessarily one that we have merited but one that has been granted to us nonetheless. We try to put ourselves in the path of love and sometimes with fortune we are struck by it.
I’m reminded of the shootings a year and a half ago in the little Amish settlement of Bart Township, Pennsylvania. Five young girls died at the hand of a gunman who then took his own life. The world was astonished that on the same day as the shootings that community and those families spoke of compassion and forgiveness. A grandfather said, “We must not think evil of this man.” A father said, “He [too] had a mother and a wife and a soul…” A neighbor said, “I don’t think there’s anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive, and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in [this] way, but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts.”
Astonishing? I don’t think for one minute that these comments or the sentiments behind them were contrived. That doesn’t mean that the families and community weren’t devastated by their tragic losses. They were. It means that the gift of love found them. They were spared the further injuries of bitterness, hatred and resentment. We might acknowledge that the spiritual discipline of the community may well have gone a long ways towards their putting themselves in the path of love, making it easier for love to find them.
Astonishing? When the spirit of forgiveness comes to us quickly and naturally like this, like it did for Zach, we are being held by love, living in love. And when we are living in love we are in some kind of heaven, wherever we are.
And that leaves us with the perspectives of seeking forgiveness of others and seeking forgiveness of self faced by George. He cried out, “Oh my God… I am so sorry. I am so sorry.” He began by asking for forgiveness. How often is that our own starting position? Similar to Zach’s experience, beginning with the realization that we need forgiveness is something of a gift. Perhaps it’s the gift of another flipping growth opportunity, but it is a gift. It holds us in relationship with the one we have injured. It allows us, to some extent, to see the road toward mending the faith that has been broken.
Knowing that we have done wrong is a much more helpful perspective on the road to forgiveness than is being wrong and not having a clue of it. Though it wasn’t George’s experience, I suspect this is where many of us find ourselves often. I know it’s familiar terrain for me. You know the old adage – pointing a finger of blame at someone else leaves four fingers pointing back at ourselves.
It does sometimes happen that out of the blue someone, unprovoked, will act in a hurtful way to someone else. More often though, in the context of our personal relationships, we find ourselves dealing with relational and ongoing hurts that include responses that are also hurting. Chains of shared behaviors evolve – chains that often imprison us in resentment.
So this leaves entrée to that final perspective of forgiveness, self forgiveness, based in self-love. When we can love our self, when we can forgive our self, then we can find a way to love and forgive another. When we hide from ourselves though, hide from the truth of our own shortcomings, then we are so often left chained and clinging to our resentments over the shortcomings of others.
We live in a culture that is both debilitating of our human spirit and encouraging of our denial of that debilitation. The truth is that the human experience is rife with brokenness. That we hurt others and are hurt by them so much is evidence of that brokenness. It is by breaking the chains of denial, the chains of illusions of wholeness that gives us a chance at self-love. Love of self is not about the celebration of perfection. It’s about the capacity to accept our own imperfections, our own adequacies. It’s about our ability to accept our own misdeeds and misguided behaviors. When we no longer have to hide them and hide from them, when we can forgive ourselves, then we can be free to flip, or to change, or to grow by leaving them in the past and moving on to experiences of deeper and ennobling meaning.
And when we have better learned to love ourselves, we can better learn to love others. When we have better learned to forgive ourselves, we can better learn to forgive others. And when we have learned to grow in our own lives, we can help to create space for others grow in their lives.
Jesus once said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And Gandhi once said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
May we be strong enough to forgive – ourselves and others. May we be strong enough to love. It is another flipping growth opportunity. Nobody said it would be easy, and yet the payoff can really be very high. “We are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.” [Niebuhr]
"It's all right, George," [Zach] said. "We love you."
“If you are living in love, you are in heaven no matter where you are. May heaven hold you. May you always, always, live in love.”
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