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"Do You Hear What I Hear?"
January 15, 2006
An Incomplete Feast
December 25, 2005
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December 24, 2005
Nothing will be impossible with God
December 18, 2005
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December 11, 2005
Comfort, comfort my people …
December 4, 2005
Advent begins in the dark…
November 27, 2005
Thanksgiving Day
November 24, 2005
It's All About Respect
November 20, 2005
The world is a better place because ...
November 13, 2005
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November 6, 2005
Promise and Presence
October 30, 2005
This is Only A Test
October 23, 2005
Made in the Image
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October 16, 2005
Finding Our Way
October 9, 2005
Our Lives Are
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October 2, 2005
It
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September 23, 2005
Whatever Happened to our Security?
September 11, 2005
Put on the Armor of Light
September 4, 2005
Giftedness and Identity
August 21, 2005
What about Respect?
August 14, 2005
Dean Lane's Final Sermon
July 31, 2005
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Sermon
Whatever Happened to our Security?
Matthew 18:21-35
Pentecost 17/Proper 19
The Venerable Richard I. Cluett
September 11, 2005
Cathedral Church of the Nativity
We gather this morning on the 4th anniversary of the attacks on 9/11/2001 and the holocaust in New York. Also, we gather in the midst of the gulf coast crisis. As I talk with people and read and listen, the prevailing feeling I get is one of impotent anger.
Anger that others would seek to destroy our people and our way of life; anger that we have become so vulnerable to the terrorist acts of others.
Anger, too, at the governmental response (or lack thereof) to a human tragedy that perhaps did not have to be as great as it is – the potential having been known for years, the hurricane having been forecast so far in advance, and the response to save and assist the victims having been so slow and so inadequate.
There is a national sense of vulnerability; vulnerability to human action and vulnerability to the forces of nature: hurricane, fire and flood. The sense of vulnerability leads to anxiety. And many of us respond to this anxiety with anger that it is so, that it could be so, that is should be so. Whatever happened to our security!? Many of us are old enough to remember the time of American Invulnerability. How did we get here? How did our leaders allow this to happen? Why are the forces of nature so seemingly and newly, powerful and dangerous to human life, property and commerce?
How is it that a person or a group across the country or half-way around the world can cause a job to disappear and a family’s future to be put in jeopardy or to make a whole company disappear and put the future of a whole town in jeopardy
Who’s in charge? Where are our leaders? Who can we count on? What can we count on? It can all be gone in an instant – a life, a way of life, a lifestyle. Poof! There one minute and gone the next. This is not how life is supposed to be!
Why shouldn’t we feel anger that it has come to this? Why shouldn’t we seek to lay the blame at the proper feet? Be it the feet of God, or the president, or Bin Laden, or the head of FEMA, or that corporate board, or whomever. We are being trespassed against! Someone should pay!
And then, and then… God, Jesus, Matthew, and Peter and the church calendar give us this gospel lesson on mercy and reconciliation.
And what a harsh story. Imagine, a story like this told by Jesus and yet surely he told it out of deep and abiding love, and out of a deep desire for people to wake up to the basic reality that divine mercy and human mercy are profoundly interrelated, intricately intertwined.
“Forgive us our trespasses even as we forgive those who trespass against us.” This is the only line in the Lord’s Prayer that has a condition upon it, which suggests that there is an intrinsic relationship between our ability to forgive other people and God’s willingness to offer forgiveness to us. In short, this matter of forgiveness is of eternal importance and consequence. And yet, how hard it is.
One theologian puts it this way: “We who follow Christ are always being commanded to do things we cannot do. We are commanded to love those who are not loveable. We’re called to serve without counting the cost. We are called to give ‘til it hurts or our hearts are warmed. But the hardest commandment is the commandment to forgive. We are bidden to do it, not because it is humanly possible, but because as we try to do what God commands us to do, the ability to do it is given to us by the God of Grace.”
Two illustrations.
Do you remember the autobiography written by Corrie Ten Boom, entitled The Hiding Place? She had been imprisoned by the Nazi regime for hiding and protecting Jews. She tells of her experience preaching at a church service on the subject of forgiveness after the war was over and she had been released from prison camp.
As she left the pulpit and came down to the center of the sanctuary, she noticed a man coming toward her with his hand extended and a bright smile on his face. She recognized him as the chief guard in the concentration camp where she and her sister had been imprisoned and where her sister had died. The guard’s face was beaming that night after the church service. “Oh, Fraulein,” he said, “How grateful I am for your powerful message. To think that Jesus washed my sins away.”
Corrie Ten Boom found herself paralyzed as the guard thrust his hand out toward hers. She could not raise her hand from her side. She writes, “Even as the vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. . . . and yet I could do nothing about it. I could not feel even the slightest spark of love or charity. And so I breathed this silent prayer. ‘Jesus, I cannot forgive him, please give me your forgiveness.’”
And with that prayer she was able to lift her hand from her side and touched the hand of the man who had persecuted her. “From my shoulder,” she writes, “along my arm and through my hand passed a current from me to him . . . and in that moment I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing depends, the world’s healing depends upon God. When our Lord tells us to love our enemies, he gives us, along with the command to do it, the love itself.”
And from a little different perspective. At one point in a family’s life, they were a family of an absentee husband and father, a solely present wife and mother, one hyper-active four-year-old and two two-year-olds who were being potty trained at the same time a young puppy was being housebroken. On the refrigerator door was a little paper on which was written a very simple prayer, “God, grant me patience...but I need it now!”
There was a bad day when for the “umpteenth time” [that's the modern equivalent of 70 times 7 times] someone had an “accident”. One too many accidents for that day. It was as if a holocaust had visited that house. Each child was huddled in his or her own room, the dog was huddled in a corner, and the mother was a puddle of guilt on the sofa. It was unforgivable. And the father coming home was soon reeling from the knowledge that he had not been there – for anybody, for too long. It was unforgivable.
Sometimes it is too much. Sometimes our mortal nature gives in before umpteen or “70 times 7” has been reached. What then? We deem ourselves to have done something unforgivable. At such times it would be very good if we could remember that forgiveness is not an act of will; it is a function of divine grace.
I remember reading Golda Maier’s confession, “I can forgive the Arabs for killing my son, but I cannot forgive the Arabs for teaching my son to kill Arabs.” An Arab mother can make the same confession.
Which is to say, some things cannot be done simply by deciding to do them. We will have to wait on many things, especially the big things.
Forgiveness is not forgetting. To forgive is not to deny the pain or the wrongness of an act. To forgive is not to excuse that which is unjust or cruel. To forgive means this: to make a conscious choice not to live bound by evil. We say, Lord, have mercy. We sing, Kyrie Eleison, which literally means, Unbind us, O Lord.
In time, in God's time, we will be able, with Jesus help, to receive and to offer forgiveness even beyond the umpteenth time. We were reminded today in Exodus that God delivered Israel from bondage. Will God do less for you and me?
In time, in God’s time all will be right with the world. In time, in God’s time all will live safe – with life and property and futures secure. Until then, Christians, you and I are to bring this kingdom into being where ever we are, whenever we can… and therein lies our security.
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