I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 13 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, Ohio. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 18:21-35.
I’ve been thinking, lately, about forgiveness. I’ve been wondering what makes it so difficult—more difficult, even, than other tough things we have to cultivate in this life like courage, or patience, or sacrifice. Forgiveness, I think, is hardest of all.
Because when I consider the heaviest burdens in my heart—the ones I have carried for a long time, that weigh me down and trouble those lean, restless hours before falling asleep—they almost all have to do with something I struggle to forgive, even if its only myself that needs the forgiving. I wonder if you have ever wrestled in the darkness with those feelings, too: replaying old conversations, voices of indignation and regret whispering to you from the shadowy corners of the room.
In such moments I’m tempted to say to God, why must I forgive? It’s an honest question, even if it’s not nice to ask it. But why must we lay down our anger against the harms done, the neglect shown, the manifold cruelties which leave their scars upon us and our neighbors and our earth? Where is the justice in that?
Oddly enough, we don’t spend much time talking about this. We are just told to forgive—by our parents, by our teachers, by Jesus in today’s Gospel reading—but nobody really says much about why or how. Even Jesus resorts to a parable to make his point, and it’s a rather unsettling, strangely unforgiving parable at that. A slave is tortured for his lack of forgiveness by a king who previously forgave him but now rescinds his forgiveness until the first guy repays the thing that is now no longer forgiven.
Ok, Jesus. Help me out here! This is why I am tossing and turning at night. Are we supposed to forgive from a place of fear and self-preservation? That can’t be it.
We’ll come back to that parable in a minute, but I’m beginning to suspect that part of the reason forgiveness is so hard, so perplexing, is that we have the wrong idea about what it actually is and where it comes from.
I think when we hear the word “forgiveness” we often imagine it as a transaction—as one person saying “I’m sorry” and another person saying “I accept your apology” and that’s that. Sort of like Joseph, today, forgiving his brothers after they’d sold him into slavery in Egypt.
Those moments are beautiful and satisfying when they happen, but of course so often in life they don’t happen, or can’t happen, and we remain unconsoled. And yet I don’t believe we are meant to wrestle in the darkness with indignation and regret for all our days.
So I have to think that the forgiveness Jesus speaks of is something more than just accepting apologies when we happen to get them. This is the man, after all, who will soon say from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And nobody said “sorry” on Good Friday.
So I am starting to think that forgiveness is something deeper, and bigger, and more fundamental. Something we can participate in no matter what, even if we can never speak or hear an apology. I am beginning to think that forgiveness is a posture, an attribute of the liberated soul, a way of being and seeing formed by grace.
And a couple of people have been on my mind lately who have helped me think about forgiveness in this way.
The first is Dolly Parton. When Dolly died a couple of weeks ago, a flood of thoughts and songs went through my mind. I’ve always been amazed by the way she brought together people from all sorts of different backgrounds, perhaps more so than any other public figure in our time. How did she do this? I think part of the reason, odd as it might sound, was that she had a deep well of forgiveness within her.
Dolly grew up very poor and worked very hard and overcame a lot, but you get the sense, especially in her songwriting, that she didn’t begrudge those things. She wasn’t hard or bitter , because she could always see a bigger picture.
For example, in the song “Coat of Many Colors,” she writes of being teased by other children for the patchwork coat made by her mother, not unlike Joseph’s in the Bible, but she is unashamed. She is proud of that coat because she sees in it the love that stitches all things together and the richness that comes from compassion, not from wealth. And with that beautiful vision in mind, she can sing a blessing. She can forgive them, for they know not what they do.
If you listen to her music and look at her life, you will notice that forgiving perspective throughout—the laying down of anger, the taking up of joy, the freedom that comes from knowing, deep in your bones, that you are held fast by love no matter what, and so is everyone else.
My second helpful person, the author & environmental advocate Wendell Berry, also possessed a deep knowledge of being held by love.
When Wendell died, just a week after Dolly, I immediately fell back into reading his poems, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Mtr. Alane shared one at the end of her sermon last week. In another poem, written for his mother, he speaks specifically about forgiveness, saying about her (and weaving in God as well),
So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,
prepared ahead of me,
the way home,
or my bed at night
No lean, restless hours tossing and turning before sleep. Just forgiveness as rest. Just the kind of love that you can climb into under cool sheets. In all his works, Wendell, like Dolly, gives glimpses of this earthy, divine grace that stitches everything together.
And because he has seen and known this goodness, he remains hopeful about the earth and its people and its many creatures, and he himself can live from a posture of forgiveness, even while there is so much to grieve.
What Dolly and Wendell and, ultimately, Jesus have helped me to see is that real forgiveness, the kind that God offers, is not a favor dispensed to the appropriately remorseful. It is a way of seeing everything and everyone with gentleness and generosity. It is a hand of blessing laid upon the broken edges of life. In brief, forgiveness is God’s posture toward everything.
Forgiveness is the benediction of our incompleteness.
It is the unceasing praise of half-worthy things.
And maybe that’s why I have struggled for so long with forgiveness—because I thought you had to be fully worthy in order to receive it. But the good news of Jesus is that none of us are there yet, and yet forgiveness is still ours. Because it is a gift.
And through that lens, today’s parable makes a little more sense to me. The real mistake of the unforgiving slave is not so much that he failed to forgive a transactional debt—it is that he failed to understand the gift of mercy and peace he’d been given, and he failed to see that it was a gift meant to be shared. He was still thinking of life in terms of ledgers and receipts when, in truth, everything fundamentally important, like forgiveness, is utterly free.
And Jesus’ warning here is that until we can internalize this—until we can engage in our own unceasing praise of half-worthy things—our souls will be impoverished and we will remain enslaved, tortured in a hell of our own making, with indignation and regret always whispering and tempting us from the shadows. We will have missed the point of everything.
And of that sort of life, Jesus says, we should indeed be very much afraid.
So, as a form of resistance to that life, I would invite you to try to answer these questions for yourself:
Who or what do you think you can never forgive? Is it person, a circumstance, a memory? Is it yourself?
Whatever it is, how long have you carried that burden in your heart?
How do you think God sees that person or that situation? Can you find a way to take a step back and see it all through that bigger, deeper perspective in which all things are stitched together?
And even if there are wrongs that ought to be made right, will you, this very day, still choose to lay your hand in blessing upon the broken edges? Will you dare to praise the half-worthy things of this world?
Because the strange, holy teaching of Jesus is that, until we can do this, we will never be complete.
And perhaps what I have learned most of all in this wrestling with forgiveness is that I long to be complete. I long to see you and others feel complete.
And maybe forgiveness, if it is anything, is believing that someday we can be completed. That the patchwork will all add up to something perfect, and that the stitches will hold, and that God will take us beyond the lean, restless hours to that place where we are, as Wendell says, “safe found, within your love.”
If that is forgiveness, God help us to get there.
By Another Road 