Scripture: Matthew 25:1-13
You may have noticed that there was a prayer of confession in the service today. I have a kind of confession of my own to make about the fact that there is a prayer of confession in the service today. I was going to use the prayer of confession today as a kind of experiment and illustration, which means that in addition to offering it as an opportunity to approach God in a spirit of seeking forgiveness, I was also considering using it partly in a kind of insincere way—not only to offer confession to God but to see how you would react to it.
I actually backed off from my original thought which was to print a prayer of confession in the bulletin which we would all say together, as we most often do with the prayer of invocation. I was going to use words that are found in our UCC Book of Worship, which are based in turn on words from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer and other traditions. They would have gone like this: Almighty and most merciful God we have erred and strayed from your ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against your holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done and we have done those things which we ought not to have done…” Or this: “Almighty God we confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, against your Divine Majesty. We do earnestly repent and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings. The remembrance of them is grievous to us. Have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us most merciful God.”
I typed these words into the bulletin for this week and I looked at them and I said…”I don’t think so.” I tinkered with them a little bit. It didn’t help. They still didn’t feel at all right to me. Pretty jarring. Pretty something anyway that didn’t seem to fit well at Sojourners. Though we’ve said confessional words together in the prayers of invocation from time to time, we’ve not said these formal, harsh, liturgical words of confession together. And I decided not to start now. Instead, I turned to a poet I like to find a more lyrical approach to this matter of our need for confession and forgiveness. At least for me, his words summon me to confession better than the standard confessional formulas.
But I tell you all this because it still illustrates the point I was wanting to make when I was considering using one of the standard confessional prayers this morning. This whole business of confessing sin and seeking God’s forgiveness, this whole matter of forgiveness in general is very complicated and very contextual. I’m thinking about forgiveness this morning because I’ve come to the point in the Lord’s Prayer where it says, “And forgive us our trespasses—sins—as we forgive those who trespass—sin—against us.” But it’s not easy to think about forgiveness because it can mean so many different things, we can relate to it and react to it in so many different ways, it can have so many different angles to it, because it is so contextual.
For instance, how we respond to something as simple as a prayer of confession in worship depends almost entirely on the context each of us is operating out of. Maybe somewhere in one person’s background is a church experience where God was presented as threatening and judgmental and people were constantly being beaten up with their sinfulness. Not only will that person probably have a negative reaction to some liturgical prayer that minces no words about how sinful we are in every way, but even the word or concept of forgiveness may have little meaning, or at least little positive meaning, only serving to remind us of how much in need of forgiveness we supposedly are. The equivalent of this dynamic on a human scale would be when someone puts another person down by saying in a condescending way “Oh, I forgive you,” thus making sure that the other person understands both that they are in need of forgiveness and that the person offering this forgiveness is a person of exceptional virtue. Sometimes, for some of us, speaking about forgiveness in church may only serve to remind us of how deserving we are of God’s wrath, and how the goodness of God is based on the idea that God doesn’t actually carry out the judgment that we deserve. That’s one kind of context for how we deal with forgiveness in church.
Another person’s church background may lead them to have no problems with prayers of confession. Those prayers have always been just part of the rhythm of ritual in a church experience that has been generally positive and therefore there is nothing particularly difficult about saying prayers of confession or receiving assurances of forgiveness. But then in that context, where confession and forgiveness are part of the scenery of church life, even if the scenery is pleasant, God, far from being angry or judgmental, becomes a sort of a kindly, easy-going, laid back being who doesn’t expect too much and never gets very upset, and forgiveness can take on the aspect of something that comes easy because all you have to do is ask really and before the words are out of your mouth, God is just bestowing forgiveness all around. We ask for forgiveness and we expect God to say, “Whatever…” We ask and right away it’s granted, and we take it for granted. In that context of church life forgiveness becomes part of a general portrayal of a god who is so non-judgmental that God may seem to just not care very much what goes on in our souls or in the world, a god who looks at our private lives and our public lives and says “whatever…I forgive you”, a god who doesn’t weep or rage over the violence we do to each other or to creation. Sometimes speaking of forgiveness in church may be part of a total approach to God and to faith that uses forgiveness so often and so glibly to speak of God’s love that we sacrifice any real passion for change in ourselves or in the world around us. That is another context for how we deal with forgiveness in the church.
A word about the scripture for this morning, which I suspect many of you did not find very nice. It surely does not seem to be very much about forgiveness. Which in a way is why I chose it. I could have chosen something obvious like the story we usually refer to as the prodigal son about the father who generously and lovingly welcomes his wayward son home, even though he has left home and squandered his inheritance and lived a dissolute life—but when he finally returns home the father is not only willing to put the past aside but actually is overjoyed to see this son he thought he might never see again. That would have been a scripture passage with lots of material for a sermon on forgiveness. The one I actually chose doesn’t have much in it about forgiveness. The bridesmaids who didn’t think ahead or prepare well enough are not forgiven. They are not welcomed to the party, not even grudgingly, much less with the overflowing joy of the father in the other parable. In fact they have the door unceremoniously slammed in their face. In fact, the host, the bridegroom—who we presume stands for Jesus or God—says that he does not even recognize the women who are wanting to come to the party. This is not a comfortable story for people who want to talk about forgiveness. It isn’t a comfortable story for Sojourners who believe in inclusiveness and want to welcome everyone, certainly don’t want to be shutting the door on people just because they weren’t such good planner-aheaders.
Well, I’ll deal with the details of that specific parable some other time. For now, the reason I chose it was to illustrate that Jesus himself does not have a single, straightforward, uncomplicated approach to forgiveness. It is not always the same thing, and depending on how you understand it in any given context it may not even be always a good thing. God is not either a judgmental and demanding taskmaster, constantly ready to point out our sins and maybe or maybe not forgiving our sins, nor is God a completely undemanding random dispenser of forgiveness with a “whatever” attitude toward her sons and daughters.
But of course all of this that I’ve been saying about how the meaning of forgiveness depends on the context and sometimes it can be taken to one extreme or another—all of that does not mean that forgiveness has no meaning or that it is not a good thing. Quite the contrary. On a human level, there are some things we know about forgiveness. On a human level we know forgiveness is fundamentally a good thing, more than a good thing, a necessary thing, as necessary really as daily bread. In the Lord’s Prayer the prayer for forgiveness I don’t read as entirely separate from the need for daily bread but more like an example of it, because there is never a day to go by that I don’t need forgiveness as part of my daily bread.
On a human level there are things we know about forgiveness. We know that it is necessary, and necessary not just because we often need to be forgiven but because we often need to forgive. We know that forgiveness can be as important, is often more important for the one doing the forgiving than for the one being forgiven. In fact sometimes that is the precise issue. Can I let go of a hurt done to me in the past? Not so much as an act of generosity toward someone else but as an act that allows my own healing to take place.
Which brings up something else we know about forgiveness on a human level. Real forgiveness where real forgiveness is needed is almost never a matter of saying, “Oh, that’s all right”. That is a way of saying that something is trivial and doesn’t really need forgiveness. When real forgiveness is needed it is usually because something has happened that is not “all right” or “okay”. And offering forgiveness is not a matter of coming to the point where you can say that something was okay. It is a matter of coming to terms with what has happened, of being able to not let the past undermine the future, of being at peace with the past, of allowing some process of healing to happen.
In human terms we seek a context in which true forgiveness may take place. It is not a matter of just saying something was okay when it was not okay. It is not a momentary process at all. Consider the process of forgiveness that has been going on, as I understand it, in South Africa. Seeking the right context for forgiveness there has meant first of all bringing an end to apartheid. Letting go of the past, making peace with the past, means that the past has to be past, not present. In South Africa the context of forgiveness includes the empowering of black South Africans and a “truth and reconciliation” process, and who knows what else. I am in no way an expert on South Africa. It is just a clear example of how forgiveness depends on the proper context and is not a momentary, one time event but part of a long process of healing.
Or consider a situation of domestic violence. Again forgiveness is clearly not a matter of saying “that’s okay”. It was not, never will be, okay. And again the context of forgiveness requires that the violence stop. One cannot think, speak, or imagine forgiveness while the violence continues. And again any real forgiveness is not something that happens one day and it’s over and done with. It is part of a long and painful process. In human terms there is always lots of work to be done in trying to provide the proper context in which real forgiveness can take place.
In religious or church terms there is also lots of work to be done in creating a proper context to speak and work toward forgiveness. Jesus helps us. In the Lord’s Prayer he invites us to pray for forgiveness, what we receive from God and what we offer to one another, to pray for forgiveness in the context again of praying for the reign of God to come on earth. Here is my paraphrase of the forgiveness part of the Lord’s Prayer:
Dear God, work among us to tend the wounded places within us, for we have places that only you can tend. Work among us to mend the torn fabric of our common humanity so that we can heal from our wounds rather than keep on with the hurting. Do this, we pray, dear God, even as we work among ourselves to restore the broken pieces of our lives and try as best we know how to make the circle of our humanity whole once more. Amen.
A Prayer of Confession: “Restore Our Souls to Singing” Ted Loder
Please do not weary of us, O God, as yet again we open before you
The dark places of our lives, and seek the healing of your light.
Forgive us for the pace that forgets you and snarls our days
In a faithless scramble to make more ends meet
Than we can imagine or than You intend for us.
Lord, we lose the piping of your kingdom in trumpeting desires that mislead
And leave us vexed by disappointments that make us bitter…
In strumming arrogance that twists us away
from our own and each other’s face and truth
and muffles the cry of our deep need for you.
So do we corrode love, bruise those closest to us,
Turn cowardly at the summons of justice,
slow leak our lives of hope and joy, fray the ties of community, forsake the peace the world cannot give
for the loneliness, anxiety, and emptiness it can.
O physician of our souls, heal us of our self-inflicted wounds
And the several hurts others have thoughtlessly bequeathed us,
And we them.
Use us as instruments in healing those we have hurt.
Mercy us into humility and gratitude, restore our souls to singing,
Our hearts to loving, our hands to doing justice.
So, by your grace, shall we be mercifully set free to join with you
in healing the broken heart and broken circle of your human family and find our lives stretched to joyful proportions.
Empower us to press on still and sturdily
in the way you have shown us in Christ
until we know in our blood and bones
that nothing can separate us from your love. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 29, 2004