“The
Wondrous Nature of Forgiveness”
by Bruce J. Johnson
I want to
begin this morning by thanking everyone for all the kind and reaffirming
comments and e-mails that came my way this week in response to last week’s
sermon. Interesting, though, is the fact that while so many found it helpful in
better understanding Job and the challenge of suffering, most also included
some specific comment concerning my opening reference to the horrible tragedy
of Nickel Mines, Pa. and the inspiring example of the Amish.
For sure,
the entire nation was stunned and deeply saddened by the tragic news about the
schoolhouse shootings of those Amish children. I can still see those poignant
pictures in all our newspapers for the few days following the shootings,
pictures of horse drawn carriages amidst the satellite television trucks, the
faces of grief on Amish mothers and neighbors and even a mention of the sign
that once hung in the one room schoolhouse, “Visitors Bring Joy to Our
School.” The way in which this
community has handled this unthinkable evil is nothing less than remarkable.
One AP headline made the most important observation:
“Amid
the Anguish, Amish Able to Forgive.”
Frank
Harris III, the chairman of the journalism department at Southern Connecticut
State University, wrote a column for Monday’s Hartford Courant, titled “To
Forgive, Divine.” In it he said this:
For many who have inhaled the horror of another in a series
of school shootings, there is an awestruck exhale at the real-life capacity of
those who actually can forgive someone who has committed what some might
consider the ultimate trespass--- the taking of a child’s life.”
Then he
goes on to refer to what he calls: the wondrous nature of the Amish’s
response—“forgiveness.” – wondering throughout the article how it might apply
across the global board.
God
knows that we need to give it a try!
Gertrude
Huntington, an expert on children in Amish society has said the following about
those parents and herein lies the key to starting to
live a more forgiving life:
“They
know their children are going to heaven. They know their children are innocent…
and they know that they will join them in death … the hurt is very great. But
they don’t balance the hurt with hate.”
You know, as I look at our society,
indeed our world, in these angry and terrifying times, that’s the key to
understanding them. And being as we are, at the height of this political season
with the airwaves so filled with toxic stuff, we’re going to need it. That’s
what so many us do! We balance hurt with hate. I see it in politics here at
home and in all the troubled regions around the world—long memories of times of
great pain being dealt with only by hate and its outgrowth—violence.
I still have in my cardboard box of
newspaper clipping of a NY TIMES account of a drunk driving death. On the night
of December 22nd (does it matter which year?) a young man named
Tommy Pigage was on his way home from a party. He had been drinking. In fact,
he had an alcohol problem since he was 16 and this night he was loaded, more
than usual. Friends offered to drive him home, but he thought that he could
make it. He almost did. Just a mile from his home his car strayed across the
white line and hit a car driven by a young man name Tom Morris. The young man
died soon after and Mr. Pigage was arrested for murder after his blood level
registered three times the level the law defines as intoxicated.
Frank and Elizabeth Morris, whose
only son had been killed, dedicated their lives to punishing the young man who
had done it. “We wanted him in prison,” Mrs. Morris said, and then corrected herself with her true feeling. “We wanted him dead.” We
wanted the worst to happen to him.”
Well, you know as I know, that stuff
can eat you up and it did and it never brings any kind of healing or
satisfaction. In fact, a couple of years later. Mrs. Elizabeth Morris
recognized what was happening to her. “The hate and bitterness I was feeling
was destroying me… and she finally realized that she needed to forgive Tommy Pigage
in order to save herself.”
Lewis B. Smedes opens one of his books, Forgive and Forget:
Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve” with a fable entitled, “The Magic Eye.”
I have condensed the fable, but I hope that I am staying true to its
intent.
In a village in innermost
His wife, Hilda, was short and
round. Hilda did not keep people at bay with righteousness; her softness
seemed to invite them instead to come close to her in order to share the warm
cheer of her open heart.
Hilda respected her righteous husband, and loved him too, as much as he allowed
her; but her heart ached for something more from him than his worthy
righteousness. Hilda betrayed her wedding vows and her husband.
Hilda’s adultery soon became the talk of the tavern and the scandal of the
congregation. Everyone assumed that the baker would cast Hilda out of his
house, so righteous was he. But he surprised everyone by keeping Hilda as
his wife, saying he forgave her as the Good Book said he should.
In his heart of hearts, however, he could not forgive Hilda for brining shame
to his name. Whenever he thought about her, his feelings toward her were
angry and hard; he despised her. When it came right down to it, he hated
her for betraying him after he had been so good and so faithful a husband to
her.
He only pretended to forgive Hilda so that he could punish her with his
righteous mercy.
But his fakery did not sit well in heaven.
So each time that the baker would feel his secret hate toward Hilda, an angel
came to him and dropped a small pebble into his heart. Each time a pebble
dropped, he would feel a stab of pain.
Thus he hated her the more; his hate brought him pain and his pain made him
hate.
The pebbles multiplied. And his heart grew very heavy with the weight of
them, so heavy that the top half of his body bent forward so far that he had to
strain his neck upward in order to see straight ahead. Weary and hurt, he
began to wish he were dead.
The angel who dropped the pebbles into his heart came to him one night and told
him how he could be healed of his hurt.
There was one remedy, only one, for the hurt of a wounded heart. The
baker would need the miracle of magic eyes. He would need eyes that could
look back to the beginning of his hurt and see his Hilda, not as a wife who
betrayed him, but as a weak woman who needed him. Only a new way of
looking at things through the magic eyes could heal the hurt flowing from the
wounds of yesterday.
“Nothing can change the past,” the baker said. “Hilda is guilty; a fact that
not even an angel can change.”
“Yes, poor hurting man, you are right, “the angel said. “You cannot
change the past. You can only heal the hurt that comes to you from the past.
And you can heal it only with the vision of the magic eyes.”
“And how can I get your magic eyes?’ pouted the baker.
“Only ask, desiring as you ask, and they will be given you. And each time
you see Hilda through your new eyes, one pebble will
be lifted from your aching heart.”
The baker could not ask at once, for he had grown to love his hatred. But
the pain of his heart finally drove him to want and to ask for the magic eyes
that the angel had promised. So he asked. And the Angel gave.
Soon Hilda began to change in front of his eyes, wonderfully and
mysteriously. He began to see her as a needy woman who loved him instead
of a wicked woman who betrayed him.
The angel kept his promise; he lifted the pebbles from the baker’s heart, one
by one, though it took a long time to take them all away. Gradually he
felt his heart grow lighter; he began to walk straight again, and somehow his
nose and his chin seemed less thin and sharp than before. He invited
Hilda to come into his heart again, and she came, and together they began again
a journey into their second season of humble joy.
How many of are walking hunched over
because of great pain weighting down the heart?
Frederick Buechner once said this:
“When you forgive somebody who has wronged you, you’re spared the dismal
corrosion of bitterness and wounded pride. For both parties, forgiveness means
the freedom again to be at peace inside their own skins and to be glad in each
others’ presence."
That’s the key isn’t it—to somehow a
find the way to be at peace inside one’s own skin? The freedom to be at peace
in our own skins - that’s what forgiveness allows. We relinquish this freedom
when we hold onto anger and resentment. Enormous amounts of energy are wasted
when we hold back our love, hold onto hate, and harbor acrimonious feelings.
The only remedy is letting go, and being willing to forgive and most important
of all, to make a way of life out of it.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said,
“Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a permanent attitude.”
Now that’s quite a challenge but we
have the example before us at all times. There is a line in Paul’s letter to
the Ephesians in which we are told to forgive “one another, as God in Christ
has forgiven you.” (Ephesians 4: 32)
But it would be a mistake to hear
this as a straightforward command to bite the bullet in our personal conflicts
and to churn out some forgiveness. Note the tenses of the verbs--- we forgive…
God has forgiven. What is already true is that God has forgiven. That is the
given reality. We are not being called, then, to create forgiveness or even to
produce it in its fullness. We are being called to join in with that which is
already given as a gift, to cease swimming against the stream of God’s grace,
to lie on our backs and float with the current. God has already forgiven; and
you and I simply summoned to participate in the forgiveness that surrounds us
and pull others, some who may have hurt us, into its circle by practicing
forgiveness as the way of our life. (Indebted to
Thomas G. Long)
Life is full hurts for us all—and
maybe one of life’s greatest challenges is not to balance those hurts with
varying levels of hate. Rather, amidst the anguish, anger and acrimony, let us
practice wondrous acts of forgiveness.
Amen