How Many Times?

HOW MANY TIMES?

Exodus 14:19-31

Romans 14:1-12

Matthew 18:21-35

My father’s first pastorate was a small church in Tampa, Florida. He was in his 20's and single. A member of the church started a rumor that he was inappropriately involved with a member of the church. It was not true, and it did not matter. He lost his job. He went home to North Carolina.

Someone he knew had a car they wanted to donate to one of the church’s missionaries in Mexico if someone could drive it down to them. Since Daddy was free, he offered to drive it to Mexico. He went through east Tennessee where one of his brothers was pastor of a church. (This is the same brother who named his first born son Ebenezer.) Daddy was, as you would expect, greatly bothered by what the church member had done to him. Uncle Boyce told him he had to let it go. It was not doing anything to the church member who had done the damage but was eating my father up. Holding on to the grievance was only hurting Daddy. Uncle Boyce said he had to turn it and the man over to God, to forgive the man. Somewhere between east Tennessee and Mexico, Daddy did.

* * *

Peter came and said to Jesus, “Lord, if a member of the church sins against me, how many times should I forgive? As many as seven times?"

Jewish law only required one to forgive a family member three times for the same offense. I suppose most of us would be inclined not to forgive a family member more than that if they kept doing the same thing over and over.

Peter has doubled the number, added one, and expanded it beyond family members to include members of the church. He may well have expected Jesus to praise him.

Instead, Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” The King James and Revised Standard Versions translate it as seventy times seven. The difference is in the manuscripts used in translation, and, given the significance of the number seven, the meaning is the same: always be forgiving, do not put a limit on it.

Seventy-seven is a good number. Four hundred and ninety is a good number. One is a good number, too. It was that one time that was enough for Daddy to relinquish the sin done to him.

Had he not forgiven, let go of the wrong, he could have nurtured the hurt, imagined opportunities for retribution and vindication where the lie was shown for what it was and the church member was exposed.

Frederick Buechner wrote, Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back – in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you. [Buechner, Wishful Thinking, Anger, 2]

* * *

Ten years ago today, we watched as two planes flew into the World Trade Center, one hit the Pentagon, and another, thanks to the courage of those on board, crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

Lord, if terrorists sin against me, against us, how often should I, should we, forgive? Or is forgiveness even an issue?

Desmond Tutu, a now retired archbishop in the Anglican Church in South Africa who sat on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which listened to victims of human rights abuses during apartheid and listened also to perpetrators who requested amnesty, wrote: "Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing."

When Westerners, when we, think of justice, we tend to think of retributive justice, where we identify the perpetrator, determine guilt, and punish in accordance with the crime, where it’s about keeping accounts and payback. There is another understanding of justice, restorative justice, where the goal is not so much to punish as to redress or restore a balance that has been knocked askew. [Desmond Tutu, "Recovering from Apartheid", in The New Yorker, 18 November 1996.]

When we read the Bible, we see a God who seeks to find and restore the sinner. God’s bias is in favor of the sinner. It’s about restoring a broken relationship to wholeness. It’s about restoring all of creation to the way God created it and us.

Jesus says, The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt.

The debt was about what a person could earn in 3,000 lifetimes, more than we can imagine a slave could borrow or a king would lend. The plea for patience to repay seems ludicrous, even comical. Suffice it to say that the slave owed more than he would ever be able to repay, just as, for example, our debt to God for our salvation is more than we could ever deserve or earn or repay.

The slave then turns around a refuses to forgive the debt of 100 denarii (about 100 days wages). Prior to having his debt forgiven, he had always lived in a world of indebtedness, where relationships were based on debts and who owed what to whom.

He chooses to live in this world rather than the world of forgiveness. The king accepts his choice, summons him, and says, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” And in anger the king handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt.

The slave is offered life in a world of forgiveness, and he chooses a life of keeping accounts and payback.

In the movie The Wizard of Oz, the scenes in Kansas are in black and white; the scenes in Oz are in Technicolor. It is as if the slave were offered a Technicolor life and chose to live in black and white.

Each week in the Lord’s Prayer, we pray, Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. The more modern version says, Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

Frederick Buechner wrote, To forgive somebody is to say one way or another, “You have done something unspeakable, and by all right I should call it quits between us. Both my pride and my principles demand no less. However, although I make no guarantee that I will be able to forget what you’ve done and though we may both carry the scars for life, I refuse to let it stand between us. I still want you for my friend.

To accept forgiveness means to admit that you’ve done something unspeakable that needs to be forgiven, and thus both parties must swallow the same thing: their pride.

This seems to explain what Jesus means when he says to God, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Jesus is not saying that God’s forgiveness is conditional upon our forgiving others. In the first place, forgiveness that’s conditional isn’t really forgiveness at all, just Fair Warning, and in the second place our unforgivingness is among those things about us which we need to have God forgive us the most. What Jesus apparently is saying is that the pride which keeps us from forgiving is the same pride which keeps us from accepting forgiveness, and will God please help us do something about it. [Buechner, Wishful Thinking, Forgiveness, 28-29]

I think we tend to think that forgiveness requires us to pretend that nothing happened. Forgive and forget, we say. To be nice, whether we feel like it or not, whether we resent what has been done to us or not. It doesn’t.

One step in forgiveness is, as Desmond Tutu put it, When we see others as the enemy, we risk becoming what we hate. When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others.

Another step is that forgiving is not forgetting; it’s actually remembering – remembering and not using your right to hit back. It’s a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important. Especially if you don’t want to repeat what happened. [Tutu]

In his book No Future Without Forgiveness, Desmond Tutu wrote: "In forgiving, people are not asked to forget. On the contrary, it is important to remember, so that we should not let such atrocities happen again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously and not minimizing it; drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens to poison our entire existence. It involves trying to understand the perpetrators and so have empathy, to try to stand in their shoes and appreciate the sort of pressures and influences that might have conditioned them. . . Forgiving means abandoning your right to pay back the perpetrator in his own coin, but it is a loss that liberates the victim. . ..we will always need a process of forgiveness and reconciliation to deal with those unfortunate yet all too human breaches in relationships. They are an inescapable characteristic of the human condition." (Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 1999.)

Will Willimon is the Methodist bishop of North Alabama. When asked for his reflections ten years after 9/11 by Christianity Today (2011), he responded: On 9/11 I thought, For the most powerful, militarized nation in the world also to think of itself as an innocent victim is deadly. It was a rare prophetic moment for me, considering Presidents Bush and Obama have spent billions asking the military to rectify the crime of a small band of lawless individuals, destroying a couple of nations who had little to do with it, in the costliest, longest series of wars in the history of the United States.

The silence of most Christians and the giddy enthusiasm of a few, as well as the ubiquity of flags and patriotic extravaganzas in allegedly evangelical churches, says to me that American Christians may look back upon our response to 9/11 as our greatest Christological defeat. It was shattering to admit that we had lost the theological means to distinguish between the United States and the kingdom of God. The criminals who perpetrated 9/11 and the flag-waving boosters of our almost exclusively martial response were of one mind: that the nonviolent way of Jesus is stupid. All of us preachers share the shame; when our people felt very vulnerable, they reached for the flag, not the Cross.

September 11 has changed me. I'm going to preach as never before about Christ crucified as the answer to the question of what's wrong with the world. I have also resolved to relentlessly reiterate from the pulpit that the worst day in history was not a Tuesday in New York, but a Friday in Jerusalem when a consortium of clergy and politicians colluded to run the world on our own terms by crucifying God's own Son.

I sent that quote to some friends of mine, one of whom is a conservative, devout Christian and was an Elder in the church I was serving on 9/11, and whom I respect very much. His response was: I remember my own emotions as I sat and watched the planes go into the twin towers that day. I was mad at what I had just watched. I was mad at the individuals that had done this to us. I did not want to wait for God to judge them. I had already done so. But I now am sad and want God’s Righteous Judgment, and not man’s, on them. But not on me. I want mercy and forgiveness, not justice. I need a Savior who will save me from myself. Thanks be to God. [God] gave us one.

A part of my response was: Since human justice is about retribution and punishment and God's justice is about restoration, God's righteous judgment is mercy and forgiveness.

On that Friday in Jerusalem, Jesus looked out on the Roman soldiers and the religious leaders and the crowd which had chanted, and Jesus prayed: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

I believe Jesus prayed on 9/11: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

I believe Jesus wants us to pray with him: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Jesus will pray that with us – and for us.

How many times should I, should we, forgive? Seventy-seven times. Seventy times seven. As many as God has forgiven us. Always. Always, at least, one more.