The power and problem of forgiveness
#5 - accepting forgiveness
RUMC 3/25/18
She sat in my office, in my grandma’s rocker, her knuckles white as she clutched the arms of the chair as if it was an electric chair. She had cancer at the age of 35, and might not live. She stopped by to talk and reflect on her life as one does when they face their mortality.
the cancer and she deserved to die. I invited her to explain what she meant. That is when she grabbed the chair as if for dear life.
She began to tell her story. She became pregnant at the age of 16. When she told her parents they screamed and yelled about bringing shame to the family. “Don’t you care anything about us?” “How could you do this?” And then they put her in “exile.” They took her out of school and kept her at home because she was an embarrassment.
In the hospital they would not allow her last name to be put on the door of her room; just her first name. They forbade her to name the child and forced the nurses to remove the baby before she saw it or held it. (And I say “IT” because they wouldn’t even tell her what the gender the baby was.) She was a disgrace, a shameful blot on the family name, a whore, a tramp, stupid, foolish and everything else they could think of. She had been carrying this with her for almost 20 years. Is it any wonder she had cancer? The studies prove unforgiveness will kill us. I am sure that being unforgiven and its twin siblings guilt and shame are just as deadly. Guilt and shame metastasized in her body first, long before cancer.
The woman who sat in my office that day is among millions of people who live with toxic and maybe even deadly levels of guilt and shame. No matter how many times they hear “God forgives sin” “You are forgiven” For God so loved the world” it doesn’t penetrate to the cellular level and they live in their own personal hell.
But the Bible says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Easy peasy right? Confess it, God forgives it, and we are back to normal. Metastatic guilt does not go away that easily once it invades every cell of our body.
Now I hope you are not as bad off as that woman. I thank God that I am not, but I carry my share of guilt and shame, and you probably do too.
So what do we do?
First, let’s differentiate between guilt and shame. Guilt comes from wrong actions, Guilt is about what we have “done or left undone” as the prayer of confession says.
Shame, on the other hand, has nothing to do with behavior. Shame is embarrassment about who we are on the inside
I can be ashamed that I like cookies a little too much… ok a lot too much.
I don’t feel guilty until I have eaten the whole package and Noah asks, “Do you have any cookies papa”… or worse, Robyn asks “What did you do?!” See the difference? Shame comes from who we are. Guilt comes from what we do.
But the good news is that Jesus died on the cross for our guilt and our shame. Today we will read the story of Jesus’ death on the cross. We think of Jesus sacrifice on the cross as addressing the sins we commit. In other words, letting us out of our prison of guilt. That is also what animal sacrifices were for. That is what the scapegoat was for when you put the guilt of the nation on a goat and drove it into the desert never to be seen again.
That is part of what Jesus did. But there’s more. Jesus also went to the cross to free us from the prison of shame.
You see crucifixion is a terrible thing! It is a slow painful, torturous death that could take 3-4 days, it was designed to torture, and kill… but it was also designed to shame. ..Totally shame the person. Now we have a pretty sterile image of crucifixion because we love Jesus and don’t want to think about this. But join me for a minute. When a person was crucified they were stripped naked, nailed to a cross, and left there. They hung there in all their glory for all to see. They lost control of their bowels and bladder for all to see. They fought for breath and screamed in pain for all to see. They died a shameful death for all to see. Jesus took that shame upon himself in order to show that he loved us that much. He did that to set us free us from the prison of shame. Shame says we don’t deserve love… the cross says, you’re right, but I love you this much anyway. He not only let us out of the prison of guilt, he set us free from shame.
So Jesus died for our guilt and our shame. Accepting forgiveness is hard. Mostly because our shame tells us that we don’t deserve it. And we are right. On the cross, however, grace won the victory over shame, guilt, and death.
This follows the same outline we used when we are forgiving someone so do you remember what I said the first step in forgiving someone is? To re-humanize them. To see them as a child of God.
The first step to accepting forgiveness is to rehumanize yourself and claim the truth that you are God’s beloved child. You are not a slob, or a whore, or an idiot, or an adulterer, or a thief, or a liar, or a monster of any kind. That kind of thinking is dehumanizing, reducing us to a caricature of who we are.
Our shameful feelings are right in as much as NO ONE deserves forgiveness. But grace happens anyway. But Jesus died for us anyway. God loves us anyway. And God wants to forgive us anyway.
But the first step in receiving forgiveness whether from God or neighbor is to let go of our shame so we can be open to forgiveness.
Do something with me. Read these statements that are extrapolated from scripture with me.
1. I am a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17).
2. I am a child of God (John 1:12).
3. I am God’s handiwork (Ephesians 2:10).
4. I am a citizen of heaven (Philippians 3:20).
5. I am more than a conqueror (Romans 8:37).
6. I am Christ’s friend (John 15:15).
7. I am the salt of the earth (Matthew 5:13).
8. I am complete in Christ (Colossians 2:10).
9. I can be forgiven. (1 John 1:9).
Those are on your Know, Grow, Go sheet. That is the way God sees you. If you don’t see yourself like that, you have some shame and perhaps you can begin to leave it at the foot of the cross by reading them aloud every day as a reminder of who you really are in God’s eyes.
Second, when we are forgiving I said we had to give up our right to justice and not expect them to make it right. In accepting forgiveness we have to release out guilt that makes us think that we have to fix everything. Guilt is based in part on the belief that we screwed things up and have an obligation to fix them. You can’t. You can’t unsay, un-lie, un-hurt, or undo your wrong behavior. There is nothing you can do to earn forgiveness.
Now, sometimes we have to apologize, or pay damages, or go to jail, or lose a friend, or suffer other consequences for our behavior. I am not saying that we should not. I am saying that there is nothing we can do to make what we did go away so we have to let go of the idea that we can. There is no way for us to fix it. We have to rely on forgiveness.
Which brings us to the third point. If we can stop shaming ourselves and admit that we can’t fix it, we can confess our sin and throw ourselves on the mercy of the court.
With human beings that is always a gamble. You can confess and ask forgiveness, but there is no guarantee how they will respond. You may not receive the forgiveness you are seeking from a person. That is unfortunate. And it is hard to accept. They are essentially compounding the wrong that was done. At those times we rely on God’s forgiveness.
…Which is guaranteed and absolute? “Confess your sins and God, who is faithful and just will forgive your sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness.” Grace guaranteed. “If you forgive the sins of others your sins will be forgiven.” Grace guaranteed.
Not remembering guaranteed. Remember God can’t forget our sins, but God graciously chooses to not remember them, not to hold on to them, not to hold them against us.
If only my friend sitting in my office had known that: forgiven, loved, and free.
If only I could remember that: forgiven, loved, and free.
If only you could remember that: forgiven, loved, and free.
Let’s watch a video about a man accepting forgiveness.
Not shame and guilt but forgiven loved and free.
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