The power and problem of forgiveness: How? Carroll UMC 3/14-15 2020

The power and problem of forgiveness: How?

Carroll UMC 3/14-15 2020

Introduction

I never planned to preach this sermon.

Oh, I have preached many sermons on forgiveness… but not like this one.  It is hard to stand up and admit how hard forgiveness has been for me. Maybe it isn’t all that bad because as I have struggled, I have learned a lot. Let me share some of what I have learned from one situation a few years ago.

It all started a few years ago late one evening when I received an email that was devastating. It was from a parishioner and someone I considered a friend. We had, in fact, trusted her like family. I still don’t know what precipitated it,                                 and the details are not important, but because of the relationship I had with the author, it was one of the most gut-wrenching things I have ever read. And her timing was perfect.  It was late at night and I was taking off on a youth mission trip early the next day. I tried to push it out of my mind, but it was impossible.

When I arrived home, I tried to connect with her but she was unwilling to sit down and discuss it, let alone meet me part way.

 RT Kendall, the longtime pastor of Westminster Chapel in London, tells a similar painful story with a person he had considered a surrogate father figure.

He couldn’t talk to anyone in his church or family about it, so he talked it over at length with a friend who was visiting from Romania, an evangelist named Josif Tson. After he poured out all the sordid details of what his “so-called friend” had done to him, he paused, waiting for Pastor Tson to put his arm around him and say, “R. T., you are right to feel so angry. What happened to you was so awful it is unforgivable, and you have every right to spew venom right back at the man.”

But he didn’t. After listening to all the details, pastor Tson said, simply, Ray, “You must totally forgive him.” Pastor Kendall was dumbfounded so he started to tell the story all over again, thinking that his friend had missed the awfulness of what had happened.

 Pastor Tson interrupted with words that would change R. T. Kendall’s life, “You must totally forgive him. Release him, and you will be set free.”

“Release them and you will be set free.”  This whole series might be summed up with those words. “Release them and you will be set free.” For this series of sermons, I am defining Christian forgiveness 

 as “A decision we make to not imprison others or ourselves in the past, so we can be free today.”

It’s a decision, a conscious choice, to release others from their sins against us so that we can be set free. “Release them, and you will be set free.” Which sounds great until like Pastor Kendall we are faced with real hurt in our lives. Remember, CS Lewis said, “everyone thinks forgiveness is a great idea, until they have someone to forgive?”  It is much harder than it sounds.

Just a moment of review, I think this might be one of the most important and difficult series I have ever preached, so I left copies of the last weeks sermon on the table in the back in case you missed it.

 Last week I was teaching that unforgiveness will kill you physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  And as recipients of God’s wonderful forgiving grace we are commanded to forgive others. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,  so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” Jesus is very clear about the importance of forgiveness. Remember, to pray the Lord’s Prayer “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us” is to ask God to do unto us as we have done unto others.  To forgive us only as much as we have forgiven others.

  That’s Fair enough isn’t it?   But the question is how?  How do we forgive the person who hurt us so badly?  How do we forgive the spouse who betrayed us?  How do we forgive the person who took advantage of us a child? How do we forgive the person who took our loved one from us, or maybe worse did unspeakable things to our child?  How do we forgive the mass shooter, the drunk driver, the child pornographer, the child who broke our heart, or the preacher who failed us? 

To tell you the truth, I really thought I had forgiven the woman I talked about. At the Academy for Spiritual Formation, however. we were asked to write a letter of forgiveness. I thought I had this forgiveness thing all under control, so I wrote to that person. As I wrote, the deep wounds opened up again and I discovered that I had to forgive all over again.

In that process I learned some things that I later found in RT Kendall’s book.

So, today, I want to share what I and others have learned about the process of forgiveness. I hope it will help you too.

 I started my letter of forgiveness

that day probably three or four times. It seemed that it always started out something like, “Dear so and so… you can’t imagine how much you hurt me, how unfair and cruel you lies were…how it has affected my family” does that sound like a letter of forgiveness to you?  NO, it didn’t to me either, so I crumpled it up and started again.

As I sat in my favorite little corner in the small chapel I snuggled into the pillows and started again,  I read it back to myself something like “You lied, gossiped, after all we meant to each other you stabbed me in the back…” Well I realized that it was less a letter of forgiveness, and more a list of charges.  My pulse rate went up and I realized that I was trapped because I was STILL keeping that person the prison of her past behavior. Consequently, I was keeping myself imprisoned by her behavior as well.

I turned my letter into a “dialogue prayer.” That is a wonderful type of prayer I want to teach all of you someday.  As I dialogued with God, I could almost audibly hear God asking, “Do you understand how much she was hurting? Do you see how scared she was? Do you understand why she did that? Do you see that she too is my beloved child?” 

 Slowly the first step in forgiveness dawned on me. The first step to forgiveness is REHUMANIZING the person who hurt us. I had to stop thinking of that person as a knife stuck in my back and start thinking of her once again as a beloved child of God.

Our first step in forgiveness is admitting that the person who harmed us is a real person. We tend to label them in ways that make them seem less human; the enemy, the “perp,” the animal.  Childishly calling them names does not mean that they are any less loved by God.  We have to remove any attitude that keeps us from rediscovering or recognizing the other person’s humanity.

Let’s be clear that recognizing their humanity does not in any way diminish our pain.  Actually, recognizing their humanity… and affirming God’s love, for them reminds us that we are more similar than different. That may be hard to swallow. We are more similar than different. We are all sinners.  It acknowledges that at the root we are all brothers and sisters even when we hurt one another.

If you turn to Matthew 5 you will see that the first thing Jesus says is “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies.” He doesn’t say LIKE them.  He says “agape” them. Love them as God loves us, unconditionally, no matter what they have done, love them enough to see them as a brother or a sister created in the image of the one true God.

As I went back to my prayer, I found myself softening and starting to see that person from God’s perspective. 

 But something was holding my back,

 if only they would apologize, if only they would promise to act differently in the future, if only they would promise never to do that again.  I would have liked some justice.  But expecting justice or anything else form the other person prevents us from effectively forgiving.

Lewis Smeede says the second stage of forgiveness is “surrendering our right to get even.” I don’t think I wanted to get even as such, but maybe wanting an apology is a way of getting even. If we are to forgive, we have to give up any right we might think we have to expect an apology, repentance, punishment, or anything else of the other person.  The person might have consequences; like we may choose to no longer be friends, or they may spend some time in jail, but as far as our expectations they are off the hook.

 Jumping down to verse 45 we see Jesus says “so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

If we are both children of the same heavenly father, is it my job to punish them? How often does it work to let one sibling punish the other? Not very often.  It is our job in forgiveness to give up any claim we have to justice… and in so doing we let them out of the prison of the past.

So, the second step in forgiveness is letting them out of prison, or giving up our right to justice.

We start by seeing them as human, then we give up our right to get even, 

 I finished my prayer by praying for the same things for the other person that I want for myself.

I prayed for God to fill me with love, and I prayed the same for her. I prayed for God to release me from this, and for God to release her. I prayed for our trust to be restored. I prayed for God to repair the foundations of both our lives that had been shaken by this event. I prayed for God to heal both of us of our pain. I prayed for God to forgive both of us and fill us with joy and hope.

  And you know what… praying for blessings for that person started to change my heart toward them.  I started to let myself out of the prison of the past. Looking back, I did what Jesus said here, I “prayed for those who persecuted me,” I decided if I can’t pray for them, the same blessings I want for myself, that I had not really forgiven them. So, I did.

Notice I did not say it changed my feelings toward her.  I said it began to change my heart, my attitude, my mindset, my viewpoint.

 Feelings are feelings, we can’t really control them.  If we feel something, we feel it.   But think about our definition of forgiveness. Forgiveness is not feeling.  No Forgiveness is “A decision,” “A decision we make to not imprison others - or ourselves - in the past.”  Not a feeling… a decision. If we wait until we feel like forgiving, we will never forgive. I admit that my gut still gets knotted up thinking about the person of whom I have been speaking. Maybe my feelings will follow someday, but it may take a long time, or never.

Forgiveness, then, is a matter of the head… making a decision. So, we decide to revise our attitude about the person, we change our thinking up here and here, and pray that our guts will eventually follow our head and heart.

If we decide not to set them free, not to change our heart, the forgiveness cycle is broken and incomplete. WE can always pick it up where we left off, but until then we remain imprisoned with the person who hurt us, in the hurt of the past.

It is said that you’ll know you have reached total forgiveness when you are able to ask God to bless those who have hurt you so deeply. This is indeed a high standard, so high that without God it is impossible.  All forgiveness, whether we are the forgiver or the forgivee, ultimately comes from God.

I want to go back to feelings for a minute.   Because forgiveness is a decision, not a feeling, and because we cannot always control our feelings, we have to know that the feelings of anger, hurt, resentment, and fear, may very well come back. In spite of the decision we have made.  It is kind of like an onion. We take the outside layer off and push it away. At some time, maybe sooner, maybe later, the onion makes its way back in front of us. And we have to make another decision to forgive. So we peel off another layer and set it aside again. 

We can’t be sure that it won’t come back.  But if it does, we peal off another layer and set it aside again and again and again.

The bad thing is it keeps coming back… the good thing is we get lots of practice forgiving.

 So three steps to forgiveness:

Humanizing the other person, seeing them as a child of God.

Letting go of your right for revenge, or your right to judge.

Finally revising our attitude until you can pray for God to bless them. Over and over.

Let me end with another video.

 

https://www.charismamag.com/spirit/spiritual-growth/10629-10-reasons-why-we-should-totally-forgive-ourselves