Living Forgiveness

A sermon preached by Ray Anglesea at Stamfordham Local Ecumenical Partnership

Stamfordham, Northumberland, 14^th September 2014

I cannot imagine owing many years’ worth of our current salary or pension but that is the situation Jesus asks Peter and those gathered around him to consider, as he leads them into this rather unusual and curious story - the parable of the unforgiving servant who is let off the 10,000 talents he owes. Jesus exaggerates for effect. Peter wanted to know what the limits were to the forgiveness he should offer to his fellow Christians in his community. Should he forgive as much as seven times?

Jesus’ answer goes beyond what can be measured. The answer in this story is that God’s abundant forgiveness just has to be lived, not quantified. There are no limits to ‘how often’ or ‘when’ or ‘under what circumstances.’ God’s generosity and mercy know no bounds. He calls us to respond in loving generosity ourselves. God’s forgiveness is communal. It’s not just for us, but to be shared with others too. When the forgiven servant, instead of passing on the abundant forgiveness and mercy he has received, reacts with a hard heart, he meets the outrage of his fellow slaves and the severest of responses from the king. To live with a forgiving heart means experiencing being forgiven ourselves and forgiving others in return.

Sadly the unforgiving servant in our morning gospel had closed his heart to this possibility. He therefore excluded himself and others around him from entering into this generous life of forgiveness. As we are forgiven we find that we respond with forgiveness. As we forgive, we find that we are forgiven. …’forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’

I want to suggest to you this morning that forgiveness is the most radical power in the world. There are all kinds of power – the power of love, the power of money, the power of the market, the power of armies, the power of a little child. But none of these has the power to get a person out of prison of our guilt. They can blow the prison away, or make life in prison sustainable, or offer hope or a future. But only one power can get you out of prison. And that’s the power of forgiveness.

Because when you can’t forgive, or find forgiveness, you’re in a kind of prison. Make no mistake about it. Think about how much energy we exhaust in sleepless nights of guilt or resentment. Dwell for a moment on the effort that goes into avoiding particular people because of our anger or theirs. Recall the earnest attempts to avoid difficult subjects with friends or strangers. Be mindful of how many of us change jobs or even move across the country because a particular person is an intolerable presence in our life. When that store of energy is released, we find ourselves free, we find ourselves at peace, we find ourselves joyful, … we find ourselves running around a church three times.

And it’s precisely that radical power, and that overwhelmingly energizing feeling, that Jesus came to bring and he exemplifies in this reading. And he didn’t just limit that power of forgiveness to individuals and their feelings. Because forgiveness isn’t just about your feeling of bitterness toward the physician who failed to diagnose your father’s cancer, or your feelings of guilt toward the late friend you never visited because you didn’t realize she was so ill. Forgiveness is also about the jails whole peoples put themselves in, the paralysis of guilt felt by a whole race or a whole city or a whole gender. Imagine what that feeling of running round the church would mean when translated to a whole population. That’s what the kingdom of God means.

But what about the circumstances where what we are living with is like a bottomless pit, with seemingly no limits either? Like the experiences of violent terrorism. How do we bring forgiving hearts into that experience?  Remind me how the families of the late David Haines, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, a British humanitarian and 2 American journalists can forgive the murderers who executed their sons?

Some of you may have been to see the film or read the book The Railway Man, the story about Eric Lomax, the young British Army Officer from Berwick upon Tweed who was captured and tortured horribly by the Japanese when Singapore fell in World War II. One of the points of the film is the long hard process of what it takes to forgive, of what it costs. Lomax’s conclusion at the end of the film is to say “Sometime the hating has to stop here.”

The story is also told of Leonard Wilson, former Bishop of Singapore who at the fall of Singapore ended up in a Changi  jail as a prisoner of war. Along with the many others he suffered terrible beatings. He shouted “Father forgive them,” attempting to imitate Christ. He said that even as he did so he wondered whether he really meant it. But something drove him on. He survived the war and came back to England to be a well-love Bishop of Birmingham. One day he returned to Singapore for a confirmation service. He felt a wave of fear as one of his tormentors came forward to kneel before him to be confirmed. The man later told the bishop at first you made me angry, then I became curious and now I hope I’m a different person.” Even without such an amazing outcome Bishop Wilson said that his determination to forgive kept his mind and soul sane. He refused to surrender. But that day this man’s change of heart, the profoundest apology of all, brought fresh healing.

Or to take another film Philomena. Philomena Lee was an unmarried teenager in Ireland in the 1950’s and sent to a church home to have her baby and care for him until he was three when the child was taken away from her and sent abroad to be adopted. She stated at the end of the film that she forgave the church for what had happened with her son. When the film was screened in the Vatican she said that Pope Francis “really made me feel so good inside.......I had a sense of relief that I had been forgiven.” The late Nelson Mandela’s life was a testimony to an indominatable spirit that would not give in to despair, to revenge; his dark moments and lonely courage were surely tested, his spirit remained undiminished.

Of course there is a deep ambiguity in our attitude to forgiveness, We speak with awe of figures such as the Eniskillen bomb-victim Gordon Wilson, or the mother of the murdered Liverpool teenager Anthony Walker, who emerge like lonely milestones in our nation’s history. We have perhaps more fellow feelings with those like the Revd Julie Nicholson, whose daughter Jenny was killed in the 7/7 London bombings, who say that they cannot forgive. As we begin our commemorations of the Great War we hear dreadful reports of the continuing slaughter of innocent people today, of revenge killings of more innocent people, of the brutal killings of journalists, the persecution of Christian communities in the middle east.  And when we read that there are more refugees now than any time since the Second World War, today’s readings confront us.

As America again remembered the anniversary of 9/11 this week Reflecting Absence is the name of the two waterfalls at the September 11 Memorial that opened in New York on the 10th anniversary, 2011. As I showed in my pictures of my recent visit Ground Zero, water cascades down the four inner sides of a square, on each of the huge footprints where the Twin Towers stood, down to a pool below. It then drops further into what looks like a bottomless abyss at the centre - water seeming to gush down as far as the Twin Towers went upwards - an endless flowing down into somewhere unknown, that we cannot see. The designer Michael Arad says of them; ‘One of the things I wanted the water in this design to do is to really mark this continuing sense of loss and absence. The notion is that time moves forward, but this absence in so many people’s lives is persistent, it doesn’t go away.’ These water sculptures are sombre and stir something deep in us and reflect that sense of loss and absence of those caught up in those terrifying events. They also reflect for us the loss and absence felt by so many in our world, that pours down as a result of the conflict and violence that we have all experienced that has led on from that day in 2001, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria, in London, and in all those places where terrorism and conflict have been experienced in the last 12 years.

Perhaps as well as reflecting this absence and loss, this moving water sculpture at Ground Zero gives us an image for the endless, boundless mercy that is needed for this atrocity and all those actions that have stemmed from it, to be forgiven. Water cascading, like the words from our call to worship this morning speaks of a God who pours own upon us the abundance of his mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, a God who is more ready to hear than we are to pray, to give more than we desire or deserve.

‘Living forgiveness’ requires us to focus not on what divides us but on what holds us together, in our local communities, in our society, in our global community and across the different faiths. It calls us to recognise the dignity and preciousness of others and it invites us to live beyond ourselves with open rather than closed hearts. Forgiveness doesn't change the past. But it releases us from the power of the past. Forgiveness doesn't rewrite history. But it prevents our histories asphyxiating us. Fundamentally forgiveness transforms our past from an enemy to a friend, from a horror-show of shame to a storehouse of wisdom. In the absence of forgiveness we're isolated from our past, pitifully trying to bury or deny or forget or destroy the many things that haunt and overshadow and plague and torment us. Forgiveness doesn't change these things: but it does change their relationship to us. No longer do they imprison us or pursue us or surround us or stalk us. Now they accompany us, deepen us, teach us, train us. No longer do we hate them or curse them or resent them or begrudge them. Now we find acceptance, understanding, enrichment, even gratitude for them. That's the work and power of forgiveness. It's about the transformation of the prison of the past.

This isn't about willpower or determination or self-help. This is the work of Jesus. Jesus walks beside us, and the negative aspects of those past experiences he takes into his body, leaving us with the memories that can strengthen, deepen, and ennoble us. That is the perpetual work of Holy Week. Jesus takes upon himself the evil that we've done and that's been done to us, facing the unimaginable agony of it all, and thereby literally gives us back our past as a gift and not a threat. Our chains fall off, our heart is free. Nothing, in the end, is wasted. All is redeemed ...

Forgiveness isn't the fixing of a problem. It's not a tricky equation or a broken window. It's the healing of a wound. There may be a scar for a long time, even permanently. But the scar can become part of your beauty. The scar says that you're a survivor not a victim, you've taken ownership of your story rather than let yourself be defined by what others have done to you, you're older and wiser. God doesn't destroy us or throw us away. That would fix the problem. God intricately weaves us back into the story. And that's the mystery of salvation.

The cross, the life of Christ offered out of love for the world, upholding the dignity of human life, offering a sign of hope that reconciles those that are divided across boundaries of hate and fear and resentment, that offers forgiveness ‘to those who do not know what they are doing,” the source and inspiration for our own attempts to live forgivingly in our lives, has found its rightful place in our hearts. It is like those waterfalls, an endless source of love pouring down upon us, the abundance of God’s mercy, a generous love that we are invited to receive and share, that will heal our world.

Romans 14 v1-12

Matthew 18 v21-35