sermon by Torin Eikler
Matthew 18:15-22 Genesis 50:15-21
In April 1995, Bud Welch’s 23-year-old daughter, Julie
Marie, was killed in the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma
City. In the months after her death, Bud changed from supporting the death
penalty for Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols to taking a public stand against
it. Bud tells his experience of transformation with these words ….
Three days after the bombing, as I
watched Tim McVeigh being led out of the courthouse, I hoped someone in a high
building with a rifle would shoot him dead. I wanted him to fry. In fact, I’d
have killed him myself if I’d had the chance.
Unable to deal with the pain of
Julie’s death, I started self-medicating with alcohol until eventually the
hangovers were lasting all day. Then, on a cold day in January 1996, I came to
the bombsight – as I did every day – and I looked across the wasteland where
the Murrah Building once stood. My head was splitting from drinking the night
before and I thought, “I have to do something different, because what I’m doing
isn’t working”.
For the next few weeks I started to
reconcile things in my mind, and finally concluded that it was revenge and hate
that had killed Julie and the 167 others. Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols had
been against the US government for what happened in Waco, Texas, in 1993 and
seeing what they’d done with their vengeance, I knew I had to send mine in a different
direction….[1]
Carrie mentioned last week that
we arranged our preaching schedule for this series so that we each had an
easier topic and a harder topic. You may
have guessed that this is my “easy” one.
Forgiving others is a common theme in our church and in the larger
Christian community. There are any
number of scripture passages that talk about forgiveness in both the Old
Testament and New, from the story of Joseph forgiving his brothers to the
verses in Matthew that Linda read for us earlier this morning. And they all seem to say the same thing….
“Lord, if my brother [or sister] sins against me, how
often should I forgive?...”
“Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy times seven
times.”
There’s no getting away from
that. It’s not as limited as turning the
other cheek when someone strikes us, and it’s nowhere near as vague as loving
our neighbor as we love ourselves. Jesus
is very clear here that we should forgive and not just once but at least 490 times
(though I believe that saying “seventy times seven” was a way of pointing out
that if you are counting, you aren’t really forgiving). We are just supposed to forgive and forgive
and forgive without keeping an account.
You understand that already
though. We all know that we are supposed
to do it – to be forgiving people. We
all want to be just that – even strive to do it. We discuss how important it is all the
time…. We talk because it is easy to
talk about forgiving others. The truth
is that it is not always easy to do it.
No matter how much we want it to be … how much we think it should
be. It is not easy.
So why is that? Why is it so hard to forgive sometimes? ………
I say “sometimes” because as I
was ponder that question – why is it so hard to forgive – I stumbled on an
interview with Michael McCullough that helped me to see things a little more
clearly. McCullough is the author of Beyond
Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, and in that book he
points our that we actually forgive all the time … even if we don’t notice it.
He said in the interview:
This … was part of my attempt to [challenge] this
metaphor of forgiveness as this difficult thing that we have to consciously
practice and learn, because we don't know how to do it on their own. I forgive
my seven-year-old son every day, right? …
He's an active, inquisitive seven-year-old who sometimes accidentally
elbows me in the mouth when we're cuddling and sometimes puts Crayons on the
walls. And yet it seems demeaning to call it forgiveness. … I wouldn't dignify it with the term
forgiveness. It's just what you do with your children. You know, you — you
accept their limitations and you move on. He broke my tooth once when I was
drinking out of a water glass.
Parents have a million of
these stories, right? But you don't put
any effort into forgiving. It naturally happens and you move on. … [We] have
this natural tolerance for the misbehavior of our children. So it is, at that
level, incredibly mundane. We put no effort into it. It happens every day a
thousand times. We would never even give it a second thought. And yet we do it
over and over again.[2]
So, congratulations! You are already an accomplished giver of
forgiveness! You do it all the time,
even if you don’t notice it. I am
absolutely certain that if we spent enough time thinking about it, you could
all come up with at least three times this
morning when you freely gave forgiveness.
But even then – even if we take
the lesson from our natural instincts – it is still hard. There are just so many reasons why we don’t
want to forgive. Some of mine, strangely
mirror those reasons Carrie listed last week as hurdles that stand in the way
of asking forgiveness. Sometimes, I just
don’t want to let the other person get away with whatever they’ve done. I want some sort of justice. Or maybe it’s vengeance that I want because I
want them to suffer the same thing that I went through. I also worry that I am part of the problem
and that forgiving others lets them off the hook while I’m still dangling.
Then there’s my fears. I don’t want to be seen as too soft. I don’t want people to think of me as an easy
target. I’m afraid of how people might
judge me – might belittle me for my “weakness,” … and I’m afraid to make myself
vulnerable.
And, sometimes, I just don’t
even know where to start.
Here is where Bud started….
In December 1998, after Tim McVeigh
had been sentenced to death, I had a chance to meet Bill McVeigh at his home
near Buffalo. I wanted to show him that I did not blame him. His youngest
daughter also wanted to meet me, and after Bill had showed me his garden, the
three of us sat around the kitchen table. Up on the wall were family snapshots,
including Tim’s graduation picture. They noticed that I kept looking up at it,
so I felt compelled to say something. “God, what a good looking kid,” I said.
Earlier, when we’d been in the
garden, Bill had asked me, “Bud, are you able to cry?” I’d told him, “I don’t
usually have a problem crying”. His reply was, “I can’t cry, even though I’ve
got a lot to cry about”. But now, sitting at the kitchen table looking at Tim’s
photo, a big tear rolled down his face. It was the love of a father for a son.
When I got ready to leave I shook
Bill’s hand, then extended it to Jennifer, but she just grabbed me and threw
her arms around me. She was the same sort of age as Julie but felt so much
taller. I don’t know which one of us started crying first. Then I held her face
in my hands and said, “look, honey, the three of us are in this for the rest of
our lives. I don’t want your brother to die and I’ll do everything I can to
prevent it”. As I walked away from the
house I realized that until that moment I had walked alone, but now a
tremendous weight had lifted from my shoulders….[3]
We may be naturally prone to forgive, but that only comes
easily if we feel safe around the person we are forgiving. When someone apologizes in a way that seems
heartfelt and convincing, then we have an easier time moving past the
past. We don’t want to be push-overs,
after all, and there may be real danger in putting ourselves at risk with
someone who will continue to hurt us.
But if we are convinced that we don’t have to worry about being hurt the
same way again, then we feel secure enough to think about forgiveness.[4]
It may sound simple or obvious, but understanding that a
sense of safety is essential may hold one key to moving forward when we are
struggling with forgiveness…. What if we
change our focus when we find ourselves in those really tough situations? What if we let go of forgiveness for a time
so that we can work at creating conditions where we can feel safe and empowered
instead of feeling scared and weak?
That’s what Joseph did.
When his brothers came to see him, asking for help and begging
forgiveness, he found a way to discover that they were truly sorry for what
they had done to him. So, in the end, he
felt safe. He was free to heal the
divide that had been slashed through the middle of his family. He was free to forgive his brothers and
assure that his family would survive.
Bud offers these reflections at the end of his story….
About a year before the execution I
found it in my heart to forgive Tim McVeigh. It was a release for me rather
than for him. Six months after the bombing
a poll taken in Oklahoma City of victims’ families and survivors showed that
85% wanted the death penalty for Tim McVeigh. Six years later that figure had
dropped to nearly half, and now most of those who supported his execution have
come to believe it was a mistake. In other words, they didn’t feel any better
after Tim McVeigh was taken from his cell and killed.[5]
[1] http://theforgivenessproject.com/stories/bud-welch-usa/
[2] http://www.onbeing.org/program/getting-revenge-and-forgiveness/transcript/4575#main_content
[3] http://theforgivenessproject.com/stories/bud-welch-usa/
[4] http://www.onbeing.org/program/getting-revenge-and-forgiveness/transcript/4575#main_content
[5] http://theforgivenessproject.com/stories/bud-welch-usa/
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