Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 15, 2002, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Exodus 14:19-30; Ecclesiasticus 27:30-28:7; Matthew 18:21-35

Remember the end of your life, and set enmity aside.

                      Ecclesiasticus 28:6 

     Life is too short to spend it on bearing grudges. Tell that to Osama bin Laden! Or, for that matter, tell it to the people whose loved ones were murdered on 9/11.

     What would they say? They might very well say that in their case the crime, the sin, the offense is just too outrageous, just too monstrous it's literally unforgivable. It's one thing for you to forgive me if I don't show up for the appointment you made with me or don't pay back the money you lent me. It's a whole 'nother thing to forgive a mass murderer.

     The problem is, where's the line between forgivable and unforgivable? And is there a universal standard of forgivableness that applies to everyone, or is it a matter of personal choice, so that the distinction between forgivable and unforgivable is different for me than it is for you?

     The Jews, who have had reason to think much about these things, have made the excellent point that one person or group has no business telling another person or group when to forgive some wrong that has been done to them. Only those who were actually harmed by the wrong have the right to decide when forgiveness is appropriate or possible. For anyone else it's just cheap talk. Jesus puts it another way when he says forgiveness has to come from the heart. I reckon there are some evils that the heart cannot forgive even if the head can.

     I suppose those who make this argument might be willing to pay attention to other groups who, like themselves, have been targets of genocide, such as native Americans or Armenians or Bosnians. Nobody can accuse them of cheap talk. So that makes the circle wider: These different groups of people have enough in common so that they can learn from each other about what forgiveness means and when it should or should not be extended, and they might hope to reach some shared understanding about it. All the rest of us are still outsiders to that conversation; we have nothing to contribute to it. We don't have the credentials. We can only listen.

     That seems to makes sense, but I don't like it. It divides the world into insiders and outsiders, us and them. Once you've done that, even if you have very good reasons for doing it, you have created a very dangerous situation a situation of not noticing, or caring about, or seeing any validity in the other's perspective or experience or pain.

     And that very dangerous situation originates in, of all places, the Bible. The Lord rescued the oppressed Israelites from the oppressive Egyptians. The Bible says so. That Exodus story has incredible power: It has controlled the way Jews and Christians and, yes, even Muslims experience life itself. Because of it we all know that God hears the cries of God's people in their pain, and God has compassion on them, and God's business is liberation, deliverance, salvation, rescue, the elimination of injustice, the righting of wrongs and the calling of wrongdoers to account.

     This is very good. But in the course of that same story the people of God listen to the cries of all the Egyptians whose first-borns have been killed on Passover night, and they can see the corpses of all the Egyptians dead on the Red Sea shore, and they do not grieve over the suffering of the Egyptians. That is not so good.

     I know: the Egyptians were the bad guys. But does that make their suffering or their loss less real or less worthy of our attention, let alone our compassion?

     I don't regret the Exodus. I celebrate it. It sets the pattern for our whole faith tradition, including the Gospel of Christ. But it also sets the pattern for denying and discounting your enemy's pain, and that disturbs me.

     The Bible is the Word of God; I believe that and I teach it. But that word of God is set down by human beings as limited as you and I are, and we have to remember that, or we will make the mistake of attributing our attitudes and actions to God, which is something we all like to do anyway.

     The whole human race has this in common: We have a higher awareness and better memories for the wrongs that others have done to us, and for the way we have suffered as a result, than we have for the wrongs that we have done to others and the way they have suffered as a result. This is true even for neurotic people like me and you who are totally guilt-ridden and go through life thinking that everything is our fault.

     This is a human limitation. We have no business laying it on God. It surfaces all over Scripture, to be sure: the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Romans, eventually even the Jews themselves are cast as the villains in the cosmic drama, as if they have forfeited whatever claim they had on our sympathy or God's, or else they never had any claim on them in the first place. But the same Scripture also tells us over and over again that God's ways are not our ways, God's ways are beyond us, and therefore we'd do well to be worried about discerning the one from the other. Permanently worried.

     When the Egyptians were pursuing the Israelites into the Red Sea, they weren't doing it to ask forgiveness for oppressing them. But so what? There are two schools of thought about that. One says it's impossible to forgive or sympathize with someone who isn't sorry, isn't asking for forgiveness, because forgiveness and compassion are transactions that happen between two parties; it takes two to make it happen. The other approach says forgiveness is a change that happens inside the aggrieved party, and it makes a huge difference to that party, whether or not the wrongdoer participates in the process.

     I devoutly hope that the aggrieved party can do it on his or her own, because my father has been dead for 35 years, and I don't remember him ever asking for my forgiveness, which he sorely needed. If I can't forgive him posthumously, then my grievances against him are an albatross that I'll carry around my neck for the rest of my life, and I'll never know him or care about him for what he was: an ordinary sinner stumbling through life, doing the best he knew how and not having an easy time of it.

     Jesus told Peter that he must forgive without limit, without keeping score, but Peter was only asking about relations within the church, within the circle of those who follow Christ. Does that mean Jesus would not ask us to forgive the outsider who sins against us? What do you think? Who is it that benefits from the act of forgiveness, the victim or the wrongdoer or the community or all of the above? And how large is the circle, how large is the family, from Christ's perspective? Who is inside it to deserve our understanding, and who is not?

     These are hugely difficult questions, especially when you've got terrorists on your mind, as we all do now. It seems almost obscene to talk about forgiveness in this context, and I won't presume to answer for you. But remember that forgiving has nothing to do with excusing or justifying. It calls murder murder, and it calls the murderer a murderer. If the wrongdoer has not done something terribly wrong and offensive to God, then there's nothing to forgive.

     Forgiveness isn't the same as understanding, either. I can understand the greed of Dennis Koslowski, the Tyco CEO, and various others like him, because I harbor something very like it in my own breast, but I'm not at all sure I can forgive their contempt for the rest of us and the incredible damage they have done and are still doing to the commonwealth.

     What forgiveness is is, it's a difficult and costly decision, a decision that we will not allow our life or our death to be determined by the wrongs that have been done to us, real and grievous though they may be. We have better things to live for. We can learn and practice forgiveness and still be just as valiant against evil as we ever were, possibly even more so. Revenge and blood-lust are not the same things as justice and righteousness, in the end, and you can defeat evil without dehumanizing the evildoer.

     Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. We and billions of others have said that week and week out for two thousand years. It's the only line in the Lord's Prayer that makes any demands on us. But it sets no limits on who is to be forgiven, for what sins, or with what attitude on the part of the sinner.

     Tall order. Obviously we will never practice it the way we say it. We will never even be able fully to make ourselves wish we could. But we go on saying it. because God has made us citizens of a kingdom where God's will, not ours, is done. That is our first and last loyalty and our best hope, no matter how often or how deeply we betray it.

     Amen