Meditation: Advent 1

by Carrie Eikler
Romans 13:11-14, Isaiah 2:1-5, Matthew 24:36-44

I love how the scriptures on this first Sunday of Advent can surprise us.
No lovely angel visitation. No mention of a baby.
We are, of course, shaped already by the tinsel and merriment of the season
and yet these scriptures,
[like a hairy dirty John the Baptist,
who crashes your dinner party by noshing on his locusts]
these scriptures shock us by speaking of
judgment
fury
floods
dare I say it…
rapture?

In a word, these scriptures tell us: prepare.

At its essence, Advent is preparation for meeting the
incarnate God.
The God not way up there
but the God that is among us:
walking, crying, needing.
It’s not just about recounting a story long ago
but welcoming Christ in: again, and again.

The scripture from Romans alludes to this, gives us a taste of what this means
What is it that we need to strip away from our hearts in order to
love more? Give more? Receive more from our God?
The artist Jan Richardson reflects:

“Advent beckons us beyond the certainties that may not serve us—those sureties we have relied on that may have no substance to them after all. Advent is a season to look at what we have fashioned our lives around—beliefs, habits, convictions, prejudices—and to see whether these leave any room for the Christ who is so fond of slipping into our lives in guises we may not readily recognize.”

You know, these scriptures don’t sound so Christmas-y, do they?
They sound a lot more like the introspection and confession-seeking
practices of Lent, don’t they?
Historically, Advent has—and still is, if we allow it to be--
a penitential season.
The church would save the Christmas celebration for…Christmas!
12 days of Christmas celebration, in fact, ending with Epiphany.
Where Lent is a time of preparation for the celebration for Easter,
Advent is a time of preparation for the celebration of Christmas.

Now, I have had my fair share of penitential Advent sermons. Lots of “no, no, noes” and “don’t do this, don’t do that.” Making you feel bad for indulging in that shopping, that rushing. Getting lost in “the trappings” of the season.  Those sermons about “the reason for the season” and all that.

So yes,
I really want to give you the message today to:

be still.
wait.
don’t run around with the shopping.
stop.
just be.
prepare your heart.
quiet your heart.
sssshhhh.
[whisper] quiet…

[pause]

But these scriptures today are anything but quiet!

I mean, the lection from Matthew’s, and the similar scriptures in Mark and Luke
are called “a little apocalypse”.
Think about that…Advent starting with an apocalypse. Even a little one!

No, these are not quiet scriptures
These are pointing to an event that would not be quiet.
A birth. A life of rabble rousing. A horrific death. An unthinkable resurrection

Even now, if we think we are four weeks before the birth of Jesus, Mary would be,
what…36 weeks pregnant?
That time when pregnant women are done with waiting.
Mary is probably groaning on her feet
shouting for Joseph to get her some ice cream
and furiously making plans for the confounded trip to Bethlehem
for this ridiculous census!

How do we hold these together?  The call to be still and wait,
while we are faced with scriptures that are anything but?

Again, Jan Richardson:
“Perhaps the preparation and expectation to which Advent calls us are not to be found solely in the spaces we set aside during this season. Although it’s important to keep working at finding those contemplative openings in these days, I suspect that Advent is what happens in the midst of all this. We find the heart of the season, the invitation of these weeks, amid the life that is unfolding around us, with its wildness and wonders and upheavals and insecurities.”

Finding God amid the life that is unfolding around us.
The wild, wonderful, chaotic, insecure life.
A birth-experience type of life.

Each year this gospel scripture challenges us to remember that Christ calls us to
keep awake
stay alert
be ready.

You may not find a quiet heart this season.
You may not find it easy to still yourself
or to have patience.
If not, you’re in good company.

But while you are doing whatever it is you are doing…

open your eyes.
Look with Advent eyes
Look to where the Spirit moves
in the midst
 your harried, everyday life.

In preparation, therefore,
let us pray.  And after the prayer,
I invite you into moments of silence…
silence you may not get much these days.

Let us pray:
Growing God,
getting ready to be born
to Mary.  to us.
We want to be still,
but we know it will be hard.
We will likely fail spectacularly.
So help us.
Help us to be still…

And when we are not still,
attune our eyes so in our movement
we see you around us…

But in these moments, we quiet ourselves
so you can work on our spirits, our eyes.
Come to us in this silence, waiting God.

[silence]

May our eyes see you,
our hearts feel you
our spirits meet your Spirit
as we move from this place, Growing God.

A Worthy Man ... Learns to be Better

reflective monologue in two parts by Torin Eikler

A Worthy Man
Ruth 2:1-13

I have seen many things in my long life, and I have tried many of the pleasures and luxuries that are out there for a wealthy and upright man to sample.  I mean … Bethlehem is not one of those huge cities filled with exotic people and strange sights.  Still I have wonderful memories from the years that I have lived here, … but all of them pale next to the day when I met Ruth….

I’m getting ahead of myself, I suppose.  (That tends to happen to me more and more lately,) I should introduce myself.  I’m Boaz.  You may have heard of me if you’ve been around here for a while, but I’m not as “famous” as I once was.  Back then, I had a farm outside of the city … a big farm that earned me wealth, respect, and power, and I tried to use my position and my money in a way that was worthy of a Jew of my standing.  You might say that I was a pillar of the community.

At the time, I had a respectable household with a good number of servants, and I hired others to help me in the fields during the busier seasons, especially at harvest time.  During those two months, there was just so much to do that we all had to be out there working from dawn to dusk just to get the grain onto the threshing floor where we could keep working for a couple of hours with lamps.  Hard to believe how much we got done in such a short time ….

One year, when I was going out to the barley fields at the beginning of the harvest – just to make sure, you know, that the new workers knew what they were doing and were following my instructions – I got out there and I noticed a new woman among the gleaners.

 

I don’t know how things work where you live, but in Bethlehem there are always gleaners.  They’re mostly widows and orphans from town although there are some foreigners every once in a while. They stay around the edges of the fields, of course, in the standing grain that we leave around the edges (just like Moses told us to).  Sometimes they come into the fields to pick up some of the grain that we have dropped or forgotten.  It’s not that any trouble, though, and they know better than to get in the way of the harvesters or try to steal grain from the middle of the fields.  We even set up a shelter so that they can rest out of the sun when they get tired.

Anyway, there was a stranger among the gleaners when I got to the field that day, and she caught my eye.  After greeting everyone and making sure things were going well, I went to the foreman and asked who she was.  He must have noticed her, too, because he knew right off that she was a Moabite woman who had come back to the area with her mother-in-law after both of their husbands had died.

I had heard about her in town, of course.  Everyone knows everyone else around here, and strangers stick out.  When they all found out that she was a Moabite, that opened a whole other can of worms because we have a history with Moabites around here. 

When our ancestors were still in the wilderness, they tried to attack us, and when that didn’t work, their women led many of our men to worship their false idols.  Even after we settled here in the Promised Land, they kept on harassing us.  Plus I’ve heard that they had “questionable” beginnings (let’s just say their family tree looks more like a bush) and everyone knows they’re generally pretty crude (though the ones that I have met have been nice enough)…. 

Normally, I didn’t pay much attention to the gleaners, and I certainly wouldn’t have associated with a Moabite like her.  (You know how it is, I’m sure.  You may not have Moabites around here, but there’s always someone like that around, am I right?)  So, like I said, I wouldn’t usually pay any more attention to her, but was pretty good looking, and I remembered hearing that she was taking very good care of my cousin Naomi, and the harvest was looking good enough that I was feeling generous.  So, I made an exception.  I went over and told her that she was welcome to stay here in my fields.  I showed her where the water was, and I assured her that my workers would not bother her.  Then, I offered a blessing to her and Naomi, and why not?  It didn’t cost me anything, and it sounded good.

                 
I’ll always remember what she said back to me: “May I continue to find favor in your sight, my lord, for you have comforted me and spoken kindly to your servant, even though I am not even one of your handmaids.”  I know it doesn’t sound like much, but you remember words that change your life, and those words did….


Learns to be BetterRuth 2:14-23       Leviticus 23:9-11, 21-23        

So how did Ruth’s words change my life?  It’s an excellent question.  Like I said, they weren’t really all that different from what I would have expected.  Nothing fancy or unusual.  Just what any gleaner might say to such a noteworthy man who took special notice of her.

No, it wasn’t what she said.  It was how she said it… or the way her face looked … or maybe the set of her shoulders or how she fell down on the ground at my feet.  I don’t know what it was, but her words kicked around in my head and I had the nagging feeling that I hadn’t quite gotten the message.

 

So, I invited her to eat lunch with us.  It was a little bit risky – socially speaking, and some of my workers raised their eyebrows.  Others whispered together, and I could imagine the speculations they were making.  But, her mother-in-law was a cousin of mine.  So, I figured I could pass it off as gratitude for the care Ruth had given her.  Besides, I needed to figure out what I had missed earlier.

 

As we ate, I thought about what she had said earlier, and it came to me that she had been just a little bit sardonic.  She had been mocking me despite the generosity that I had shown her which should have made me angry.  But as I watched her and listened to her conversations with the harvesters, she didn’t seem to be an ungrateful or mean-spirited woman.  “So,” I wondered, “why did she take that tone with me?”

After I spent the whole meal stewing on the question, the answer hit me.  Yes, I had offered for her to continue gleaning in my field … told her to get water when she was thirsty … and ordered my workers not to bother her, and that was all well and good.  I’m sure that she really was grateful – especially that I had said those words in front of the others, but none of that went beyond the requirements written in the Law of Moses. 

I had been all “magnanimous” when I offered her to take what was hers by right.  I had offered her protection that should already have been hers either as a widow or as a foreigner in the land.  I had stood there proud of myself and expected gratitude and praise for my words and actions even though I hadn’t really given her anything … even though my generosity had been empty and my words hollow … even though I had failed to embrace the spirit of compassion and hospitality that the law implied entirely.

 

I have to admit that I felt angry and ashamed.  To have a foreigner … a woman who had not been raised as a Jew … a Moabite even… to have her teach me about my own faith and our traditions took me down a peg, and I had to come to terms with my own inflated view of myself.  Boaz the great, generous, righteous man had some things to learn about real greatness, true generosity, and how to follow the heart of our covenant with God.

As I was struggling with this new understanding of my place in the world, I noticed that Ruth was getting up to go back to gleaning.  I was still a bit upset – with myself and with her for bursting my bubble and showing me my shortcomings.  But, I also felt like I wanted to talk with her more … to get to know this intriguing woman a little better.  So after she left our group, I told my workers to let her glean wherever she wanted to – even in the part of the field we hadn’t cut yet, and to leave some extra grain from our harvest on the ground so that she could gather that as well.  I hoped that would be enough to bring her back to my fields the next day.

It worked.  Ruth came back each day for the rest of the harvest season, and that meant that I got to see her and chat with her a little bit almost every day for about seven weeks.  It doesn’t seem like that long a time, but it was enough for me to know that I was interested in this woman… very interested.

 

If you haven’t guessed yet, I married her in the end.  Some people thought it was just because I was a close relative, and it was my responsibility to take care of her and Naomi.  But I didn’t have to do that.  In fact, I had to convince one of my other cousins who was a closer relative to let me have the privilege.  Even then, I wouldn’t have had to marry her.

But why wouldn’t I have married her.  She was beautiful.  She was witty.  She knew more of the world than I did … had experienced so much more grief and hardship in her life, and she still had the kindness and compassion to open my eyes gently when she could have thrown it in my face.

So, of course I married her, Moabite though she was.  I married her and I have never regretted it.  She still lets me know about my failings (more often than I might like to admit).  That hasn’t changed, but I see more easily now, and thanks to her, I have learned so much about how God really wants us to live. 

 

I think that we all need someone like that in our lives.  Someone who loves us enough to shine a gentle light on our failings.  Someone who can show us the way to change.  Someone to redeem us, to make us whole, and to help us become the best people we can be.  Someone who shows us the face … and the heart of God.

I thank God every day for all the blessings he has granted to me, but especially Ruth.  She may have come to our faith from outside, but she understands it better than I do sometimes.  Thanks to her, I have become a better Jew … and a better person.

 

Maybe… one day … I can do the same thing … shine the same light … for someone else.

The Faith of Job

sermon by Torin Eikler

Job 19:23-27a             Psalm 17:1-9

“Job is the most useless book in the Bible!” …

I was surprised to hear that sentence from my father about a month ago.  We were talking about the series on forgiveness that we have just finished up, and he suggested that we should have a Sunday on forgiving God.  He went on to recognize that there aren’t really any scriptures that talk about forgiving God.  “There’s just Job,” he said, “and I don’t like what it has to say … just, basically, that we have to accept whatever God sends our way and live with it.”

I think that is a common misunderstanding in our culture.  Thanks to the saying, “the patience of Job,” we have a sense that the book of Job is all about enduring the suffering that comes our way.  We may feel that it is unjust.  We may feel that it flies in the face of what the rest of the scriptures teach us about God’s compassion and care.  But we have come to believe (we may even have been taught) that this story shows us that we must just endure the unendurable without complaint.

That is most certainly not what Job is about, and a little background might be helpful in understanding what its message to us really is….

 

The book begins almost as if it was a folktale:

“There once was a man in the land of Uz….  That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.  There was born to him sever sons and three daughters.  He had seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred donkeys, and very many servants; so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the east.  His sons used to go and hold feasts in one another’s houses in turn, and … when the feast days had run their course, Job would send and sanctify them …; for Job said, “It may be that my children have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts.”

The scene is set.  Job was a pious man who kept the law scrupulously, taking care even to offer sacrifices on behalf of his family.  He was also a very, very rich man.  He had everything that he could possibly desire, yet he had resisted the corruption and decadence that often come with wealth and power.

From there, things get a little strange….  Satan challenges God to accept a little bet.  Take away everything from that upright man, and he won’t be so confident.  Instead of blessing and praising you, he will curse in your face.  God accepts and places Job and everything he has in Satan’s power to do with as he will – the one exception being that he cannot take his life.

And so the suffering begins.  Job’s flocks are plundered or killed.  His servants are killed.  His children perish in a freak wind storm that pushed the house down on their heads.  Then, Satan sends painful sores to cover the poor man, and his wife leaves him in disgust.  And despite all of this, Job remains steadfast in praising God.

Okay … that’s the first two chapters of Job, and if that’s all you read, then you have the image of the pious, enduring Job that gave birth to the saying.  But there are forty more chapters to go.  So, it seems like this picture must have been painted order to set the stage for something else, and as the story continues a very different Job comes out – Job the rebel.

This man rails against the unfairness of his experience.  When three of his friends come along and preach to him that suffering comes from wickedness and blessing from righteousness and, then, encourage him to repent his sinfulness so that he may return to God’s good graces, he debunks their false piety and flawed theology.  He even goes so far as to accuse God of injustice.  Even as he sits among the ashes of his life, he is, in spirit, rattling the cell bars of his fate.

 

For centuries, Jewish and Christian interpreters alike often seemed embarrassed by this transformed character with his anger and unrestrained blasphemy.  More recently, many people have been drawn to Job’s anger as a voice of moral outrage against a God who could condone his fate, let alone the atrocities of the 20^th century.[1]  But this story isn’t as straightforward as that either. 

At the very end of the book, God comes to Job in a great whirlwind and speaks words that are neither a comfort nor an apology.  Instead they are a simple statement that God is beyond the reach of humanity and shall not be judged by such a limited being, and while they might feel like a rebuke, Job responds by withdrawing his words against God and replacing them with praise and a reaffirmation of his faith.

 

It’s a strange book, I’ll admit.  Even knowing that Biblical scholars and theologians have come to the conclusion that Job was probably included to correct a misunderstanding of wisdom theology by making it clear that suffering is not punishment for sin, it is still hard to make sense of the story itself.  And I don’t blame anyone for wanting to throw it out altogether.  But I love it, and I am grateful that it has made its way into the Bible.

I love it because in all its complexity, it touches on many of the issues that are so important to our faith lives and our understanding.  It speaks to the reasons why we should try to live virtuous lives, the meaning of suffering, the nature of God, the place of justice in the world, and the relationship of order and chaos in God’s creation.[2]  But even beyond all those things, I treasure it because it gives me permission to have a faith like Job’s.

Everywhere else in the Bible – at least as far as I have found … everywhere else the scriptures give me the feeling that I should be praising God … that I should be thanking God … that I should be blessing the goodness and wisdom of the One who created me, redeemed my imperfection, and sustains my physical and spiritual life.  Even in the book of Psalms, where fully a third of the hymns are laments like the one we heard earlier, almost all the texts end with a return to praise.  Psalm 88 alone holds to lament until the end, and it certainly does not curse God.  It, like the others, only proclaims the feeling that God has abandoned us in the hour of our need.

Only Job … dear, pious, angry, blasphemous Job throws curses at God while his fists and his oozing wounds scream his anger at the injustice he suffers.

And it’s not just that he gets away with it – which he does.  No lightning bolt from the clouds.  No angel of death.  No poisonous snake or tormenting thirst comes to usher him into death and damnation.  In the end, after he heaps all of his anger and his suffering on God’s head in such a vicious fashion he gets exactly what he wanted and more.  God comes down to meet him face to face … well … face to whirlwind at least, and he gets it all back: new flocks, a new wife, seven more sons and three more daughters….

He gets away with it, yes, but what I find fascinating … what touches my heart is that in the midst of all his ranting and his rage, he still holds onto his faith.  He still has the space within himself to say “I know that my Redeemer lives…,” and to wish so fervently that his praise will be remembered.  If nothing else remains of his good and righteous life or his horrible suffering, he wants his words of praise and thanksgiving to be etched with iron into a rock to live forever.

 

On my bad days … or my bad weeks … when nothing seems to be going right … when my life seems to be falling apart despite everything that I try to accomplish and all my good intentions, that is the part of Job’s story that gives me hope.

It gives me hope because someone else has been there before.  I knew that of course.  All of us have been there before.  But here is someone whose story has been written down.  Here is someone whose experience has been made holy by having it inscribed in the scriptures.  And that makes my own experience holy … at least a little.

It gives me hope because it tells me that I am allowed to curse the injustice of my life.  I don’t have to sit there and take it, patiently claiming that I deserve it or that it must be for my own good.  I can scream at God.  I can let it all come out, and that doesn’t mean that I have a weak faith or that I can’t feel grateful at the same time.  It doesn’t mean that I am turning away from my Redeemer.  It doesn’t mean that I will be punished or that I am going to hell.

It gives me hope because it shows me that it’s okay.  It’s okay to feel abandoned.  It’s okay to feel persecuted.  It’s okay to demand that God come and answer for the injustices and the suffering of my life and yours.  And, … it is okay to let all that pour out instead of holding it inside.

 

God loves us all.  God cares about us all.  God moves through our lives and lives within our very souls.  And whatever we feel … whatever we need to say or shout or scream at God, it’s okay because she understands.

God will still care for us. 

God will still welcome us into her saving, soothing embrace. 
Even when we writhe in her arms and beat on her chest in our anger and our pain
            and our frustration, God will still love us.

---

[1] Newsom, Carol A. “The Book of Job: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections” in The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, Volume IV (Abingdon Press, Nashville) 1996.  319.

[2] ibid.

Forgiving Ourselves

Forgiveness Series 4
sermon by Torin Eikler
Matthew 27:3-5          John 21:15-17, 19b

“I would never have forgiven myself!”  Have you ever said those words?  I remember hearing them first when I was just a boy.  My brother had been left in the car with the engine running while the rest of us got the last few things together for a trip.  Somehow he managed to get his seat belt off, climb over the front seat, and move the gear shift in the car to reverse.  My grandfather chased the car across the parking lot, opened the door, jumped in, and got it stopped just in time.  My mother said those exact words awhile later … after all the hugging and the “thank yous” and the appropriate expressions of amazement at grandpa’s quick thinking and heroic actions.

I’m sure that I wouldn’t remember her words at all if it wasn’t for all the adrenaline that ingrained the whole event in my mind, but periodically … more often lately as I have my own close calls, the memory comes back to me, and the same words run through my mind as relief chills my body:  “I would never have forgiven myself!”

I understand now that while those are words may be an expression of fear at what might of happened, they are also words of joy – words of relief that something bad didn’t happen because of my own actions or my lack of attention – words of thanksgiving that the heart-sick suffering that could have been ours along with any one of those awful futures has passed us by … this time at least. 

But what happens when we are not so lucky – not so blessed?  What happens when something horrible happens because we failed to act?  Or worse … what happens when we are the ones who have done that horrible thing ourselves?  What happens when those words become “I will never forgive myself?”

 

We have talked about forgiveness for the past three weeks: God’s forgiveness, asking forgiveness, and forgiving others, and one thing that I have learned in that time is that I don’t know how forgiveness happens.  I couldn’t tell you how God forgives us or how I come to forgive others.  I certainly can’t tell you how to forgive.  It is a process that is unique to each person, and – I believe – it comes as a gift to us … a gift that we cannot understand through reason because it is a thing of the heart and the soul.  We must simply accept and embrace whether it involves forgiving others, accepting forgiveness in turn, or forgiving ourselves.

I think that really do need to embrace that gift because, as Hannah Arendt says, “Without being forgiven, [without being] released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to a single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever….”[1]  And that is a terrible thought … a terrible future.

Unfortunately, it’s not just that I cannot tell you how to embrace forgiveness.  Nobody can.  What we can do is tell stories: stories about forgiving, stories about being forgiven, and stories about times when we have forgiven ourselves.  That, in itself, will not teach us how to forgive, but it does inspire us to keep on struggling on through the process … at least it inspires me.  So, I’m going to tell you two stories….

John Plummer lives the quiet life of a Methodist pastor in a sleepy Virginia town these days, but things weren’t always so.  A helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, he helped organize a napalm raid on the village of Trang Bang in 1972 – a bombing immortalized by the prize-winning photograph of one of its victims, Phan Thi Kim Phuc.

For the next twenty-four years, John was haunted by the photograph…: a naked and burned nine-year-old running toward the camera, with plumes of black smoke billowing in the sky behind her.

Then, in an almost unbelieveable coincidence, John met Kim during an event at the Vietnam War Memorial on Veterans Day, 1996….  John had come with a group of former pilots unable to come to terms with their shared past, but determined to stick together anyway….

Beside himself, John pushed through the crowds and managed to catch her attention before she was whisked away by a police escort.  He identified himself … and said that he felt responsible for the bombing of her village….  He says: Kim saw my grief, my pain, my sorrow …. She held out her arms to me and embraced me.  All I could say was “I’m sorry; I’m sorry” – over and over again.  And at the same time she was saying, “It’s all right, I forgive you.”

John says that … without having had the chance to get that off his chest, he is not sure he could have ever forgiven himself….  Reflecting on the way the incident changed his life, [he] maintains that forgiveness is “neither earned nor even deserved, but a gift.”  It is also a mystery.  He still can’t quite grasp how a short conversation could wipe away a twenty-four-year nightmare.[2]

 

Pat, another Vietnam veteran tells his story with these words:

Death is on my mind a lot.  The deaths I have caused- and wanting my own death – are with me every day.  I joke around a lot with the people I work with.  I have to, to hide the pain and to keep my mind from thinking.  I need to laugh.  Laughing keeps the blues away.

            But I cannot love.  Part of my soul is missing, and it seems I won’t ever get it back.  I don’t know if I can ever forgive myself for all of my wrongs.  I live day to day, but I am tired all the time – tired.  Will it ever end?  I don’t see how.  It’s been with me over twenty-five years now.[3]

 

I chose these two stories because they are more immediate than those Perry read for us this morning.  Peter and Judas lived so long ago, and they are such extreme examples that it is hard for us to take their stories to heart.  John and Pat live in our world and in this time, and their stories can fill the same role for us that those long ago apostles did for the early church.  There are two choices, the stories say: forgive ourselves or don’t. 

 

We can follow in the footsteps of Judas and Pat, and we will find ourselves stuck in the moment or moments of our guilt, holding on to pain and unable to love.  Or we can find a way to let go of the pride and the grief that lock us into the past and join Peter and John, embracing life and serving others and ourselves with joy and compassion.  Both ways have their own consequences, and we should choose carefully … choose wisely.

“The longer we hold on to the old, …” says Robert Benson in his book Living Prayer, “the longer it holds on to us, and the longer it keeps us from hearing the Word that we so long to hear.  It becomes a matter of not being able to hear God’s voice because we are so full of our own.  We cannot hear the Word because our own words are in the way.

We cannot be filled with God until we are not so full of ourselves.  Our hearts and minds, wonderful as they are, are simply too small.  We cannot give our hearts to God, or anyone else for that matter, as long as they are too heavy for us to lift.”[4]

 

God has given us a marvelous gift in forgiveness.  It has the power free us from the failures of the past.  It has the power to heal the brokenness in our relationships.  It opens a clear space in the future before us so that only our own hopes, dreams, and creativity – ours and God’s – need shape what we do and who we may become.

But beyond all of that, forgiveness is the key to love.  Big or small, the moments that we hold onto … the mistakes that we hold ourselves accountable for – (going even beyond God’s judgment) – sap the joy and compassion from our living.  They build up leaving us dry husks wasting away in a spiritual desert, and only the water of life … only forgiveness can bring us back to life … and back to the love that gives life its meaning.

 

My prayer for you then … and for myself … is that we all will find the path to forgiveness.  That we all will hold onto the gift of love.  That we will choose life and joy and the peace that comes from letting go of the mistakes and struggles of our past.  That we will never let “I will never forgive myself” become the reality of our lives, and that in learning and growing from our experiences we will embrace the promise of a future lived in the light and love … the forgiveness of God.

---

[1] Arnold, Johann Christoph.  Why Forgive? (Orbis Books, Maryknoll) 2008.123.

[2] Arnold, Johann Christoph.  Why Forgive? (Orbis Books, Maryknoll) 2008.126-8.

[3] Ibid. 128.

[4] Benson, Robert.  Living Prayer (Jeremy P. Tarcher, New York) 1999. 26-7.

Forgiving Others

Forgiveness Series 3
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.

 

I don’t mean to belittle the struggle to forgive, though.  What McCullough is talking about is just the little things – the easy things.  It’s a lot harder to forgive – even our family members – for the bigger transgressions that come between us.  But I do think that it might be easier for us to manage if we started to recognize those little times of willful forgetfulness - the “mundane” moments of mercy - for what they are because they are important.  They are us … practicing forgiveness … practicing in preparation for the difficult times, and if we start to think of them that way, maybe it will help us understand how we can find forgiveness for the big things that people do to us.

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]

 

I think that feeling like that – like he wasn’t alone his pain and his grief … like there were others who were walking similar paths along with him – I think that might have given Bud strength and courage.  Strength and courage to risk the journey toward forgiveness … to risk the scorn of others?  It may have given him just enough of a sense of security that he stopped being too afraid to risk being vulnerable.  And that – that willingness to be vulnerable is at the heart of our struggle.

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]

 

Two things I learned from Mr. Welsh....  Vengeance doesn’t make us feel any better … no matter what we think.  It gives us a rush at first, but then it consumes us like an addiction.  The only real way forward is forgiveness … even when it seems impossible.  Only forgiveness can bring healing into our lives and our relationships.  Only forgiveness can free us to move on into hope.

---

[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/