4th Sunday of Lent Theme “Blessed Hunger, Holy Feast”
From Alienation to Reconciliation
March 18th, 2007
Gary Harder
Text:
Psalm 32:1-5
2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Introduction
Our Lenten texts for today focus on two huge, humongous, words. The first one is the word forgiveness. The second is the word reconciliation. These two words belong together. But they are both so big we can take only a very small bite out of them in one sermon.
Forgiveness
Part one – Forgiveness comes in two parts. The first part is that we need to be forgiven. There are times when we need to ask for and receive forgiveness – whether from others whom we have hurt, or from God whom we have hurt – have sinned against.
Psalm 32 shoots straight as an arrow on this. “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered”.
And then the Psalmist continues with a profound personal insight. “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of the summer”.
When we try to hold our guilt, our sin, inside, it festers there and robs us of our energy and our spirit and our joy in living.
The idea of the Catholic confessional is, I think, a very good one, despite how it is often trivialized. “Name a sin, name a penance – a punishment – and go on doing the same thing again”. But it can be a very powerful thing to have a place, and a person, to confess to – to pour out what is on our heart that cries out to be forgiven.
Our Mennonite tradition, at an earlier point in my life, insisted that introspection and forgiveness be a central part of each communion service. Before each communion you needed to examine your own heart and ask whether there was anyone you had offended, and if you had, you needed to go to that person and “make it right” before you could take communion. You could not take communion with some barrier between you and another person. Ask for forgiveness first. Only then could you come to the communion table.
Continues the Psalmist, “Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.’ And you forgave the guilt of my sin.”
It is an immense relief to be forgiven. It is an immense relief to make something right again with God or with another person.
Part two
The second part of forgiveness is that we need to be ready to forgive those who have hurt us. But this forgiveness – forgiving others – has become kind of complicated. Forgiveness is such a complicated thing. So much so that we preachers have sometimes become a bit too cautious, or even silent, on the topic.
It has become complicated because of what we have learned about abuse, especially abuse that happens within a family. For so long women who were abused by their husbands were told – by society and the church – to either be silent or to just quickly forgive them and stay together. Or children who were abused by their parents were told to be quiet about it and just forgive them and life would go on – in secret. And we learned that these women and these children couldn’t heal if they forgave too quickly. And so we have learned that forgiveness is far more complex than we thought it was. Especially a forgiveness that is forced, or given too quickly.
Do you, for example, forgive someone who has hurt you if that person has not repented, and has not asked for forgiveness? I share several stories where forgiveness was offered very, very quickly.
West Nickel Mines School slaughter
But in the face of all this new awareness comes the story of the West Nickel Mines School in Pennsylvania. A neighbour, Charles Carl Roberts 1V, goes into the Amish school and kills five girls and critically wounds five more, before killing himself.
The whole world looked on in astonishment at the Amish response. Writes Donald Kraybill, “The blood was hardly dry on the bare-board floor of the West Nickel Mines School when Amish parents sent words of forgiveness to the family of the man who had killed their children.
Forgiveness? So quickly and for such a heinous crime? Why and how could the Amish do such a thing so quickly?…
Make no mistake. The pain of death is sharp, searing the hearts of Amish mothers and fathers like it would any other parents. But why forgiveness? Surely some anger – at least some grudge – is justifiable in the face of such a slaughter.
A frequent phrase in Amish life is ‘forgive and forget.’ That’s the recipe for responding to Amish members who transgress Amish rules if they confess their failures. Amish forgiveness also reaches to outsiders, even to killers of their children…
The Amish try to practice Jesus’ admonitions to turn the other cheek, to love one’s enemies, to forgive 70 times 7, and to leave vengeance to the Lord…
Forgiveness is woven into to fabric of Amish faith. And that is why words of forgiveness were sent to the killer’s family before the blood had dried on the schoolhouse floor. It was just the natural thing to do – the Amish way of doing things.” (Willow, winter 2007).
A watching world is astounded. Amish neighbours attend the killer’s funeral in large numbers to show their support of his family and to express their forgiveness. This witness to forgiveness runs deep.
CPT Hostages
A second story is similar. Four Christian Peace Maker Team members where held hostage in Iraq for 118 days. One of them, Tom Fox, was killed by his captors. The other three, James Loney, Harmeet Singh Sooden and Norman Kember, where asked to testify at the trail of their alleged captors. Instead they issued a joint statement of forgiveness. And they appealed for clemency from the Iraqi courts and objected to the death penalty for those who had held them hostage.
They said, “We have no desire to punish them. Punishment can never restore what was taken from us.” (Sojourners magazine, March 2007).
This too caught the attention of the world media, another powerful witness to forgiveness. This too flies in the face of what people would expect of these three who were terrorized and whose lives were irrevocably altered. How can you forgive so soon, especially when there is no sign that their abductors have asked for forgiveness?
Wilma Derksen
Another story suggests caution in a too quick forgiveness. Many of you know the story of Wilma Derksen of Winnipeg. Her daughter Candace was murdered in 1984. The killer was never caught. Wilma has written much and spoken publically much about that experience, and about how she and her husband have tried to walk the journey of forgiveness rather than vengeance and bitterness. It has been a hard, hard journey, a journey which shows how complex a thing this forgiveness really is – a complexity greater than the Amish and he CPT stories would on the surface indicate.
Recently Wilma wrote the book “Unsettled Weather: How do I forgive?” (Mennonite Central Committee and Home Street Mennonite Church). She explores the path to forgiveness.
She writes, “When my daughter was killed in 1984, my husband and I chose the word forgiveness, hoping it would somehow spare us the horrors of the aftermath of violence and the ensnaring justice issues. But I soon came to resent anyone who said, ‘just forgive’, as if it was that easy.”(p.v).
She continues, “Anger is a natural response to being hurt, violated and betrayed…Denial is another way of dealing with victimization…(but) emotional wounds can become infected or won’t heal properly and will fester and bother us until they receive attention…Before we can heal and begin the forgiveness process to find peace, we need to identify the source of our pain. We need to tell the story of our injustices.” (14-15).
Wilma is clear that forgiveness comes form God, and the strength to forgive comes from God. She continues, “In the end, forgiveness defies definition. Words can’t quite describe the process, the actual act of forgiving and that miracle of change. The act of forgiveness needs to be guided by our spirit, which is in tune with our God.” (53). “The only way to promote and spread the healing that happens in forgiveness is to practice it and model it constantly. Forgiveness needs to be learned through experience.” (63)
The forgiveness journey and way of life is not an easy one. It may be enormously difficult, in fact. But not forgiving will in the long run be much harder on us. Back to Psalm 32. “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.”
When our anger gets locked inside, when we get stuck in our grudges and our anger, we will destroy ourselves. We will become bitter. We will dry up as by the heat of summer. It is for our own sake, as well as for the other’s sake, that we need to forgive. If we don’t forgive, it may destroy us inside.
Forgiveness – Part one is asking for and receiving forgiveness. Part two is being committed to the journey of forgiving – with God’s help
Reconciliation
The second word for today, reconciliation, is every bit as big and as complex as is forgiveness. The two words – forgiveness and reconciliation – do belong together. Our text from 2 Corinthians brings them together.
Reconciliation – setting things right. Restoring a relationship. Bringing together again what has gone apart.
Part one – Reconciliation also comes in two parts. The first part is that we need to be reconciled. “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ…”
Earlier English translations of this text, especially the King James Bible, constricted its meaning to personal conversion. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature”. At conversion you personally are transformed. You are made new. That may very well be, but the Greek does not support this translation. Paul does not use a personal pronoun. Paul rather embraces a cosmic vision here. In Christ God is creating something new, is doing something new in this world; is in fact creating a new world. In this new world reconciliation is central, forgiveness is central, renewing your covenant with God is central.
Truth and reconciliation Commission
In South Africa, following the collapse of apartheid, Bishop Desmond Tuttu insisted that there could be no genuine reconciliation between the races unless there was first a gut wrenching truth telling. And it was not enough for individual whites here or there to have a change of heart and to stop being racist. There had to be a national scope to the truth telling and the reconciliation.
The truth and reconciliation commission spent years holding public hearings where the painful truth of those apartheid years was told, confessed, for everyone, white and black, to hear. The point of this truth telling was not to inflict punishment on the offenders. The point was to create the possibility of reconciliation between the races. Bishop Tuttu looked at the work of this truth and reconciliation commission through the lense of his faith – in Christ there is a new creation where reconciliation is central. Surely not all South Africans saw the thing through these faith glasses. Surely not all Whites and blacks were thus reconciled. Surely South Africa continues to have immense problems. But Something very deep changed in South Africa through the work of that truth and reconciliation commission.
Paul insists that “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation”. If you are in Christ you see the world, the whole cosmos, with new glasses. You see what God is doing through new glasses. You see your fellow human beings through new glasses. Redemption and reconciliation, not destruction, is the new vision you see through Christ. This new creation re
places anger and hostility and estrangement and enmity with forgiveness and love and friendship and intimacy.
“All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ”. God is doing it. God is at work through Christ inviting us back into relationship with God. That is what reconciliation means. A restored relationship. The enmity is gone. The Estrangement is gone. There is a restored peace, a restored embrace of love.
Part two
Part two of reconciliation, according to Paul, is that God gives us a job to do.
“All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”
That is our job. We have been given the ministry of reconciliation. We are ambassadors for Christ. Because we look with new eyes, we look for possibilities and opportunities to bring people together, and to entreat people to be reconciled with God.
And so we get involved in many practical things. Like working with and supporting many MCC sponsored programs. Community justice initiatives. Victim-Offender Reconciliation Programs. Circles of support. Refugee sponsorship and support. Peace work in many arenas. Christian Peace Maker Teams as one of those arenas. Lazarus Rising, working with homeless people. We speak out on behalf of our environment, our physical world. We try to mediate issues in the office, or in our communities. We get involved in Muslim/Christian dialogue.
And we commit ourselves to mending relationships within the church. To live in any community – including the church – is to realize over and over again that we do, either intentionally or unintentionally, sometimes hurt each other, sometimes misunderstand each other, sometimes alienate each other. Living together is often hard work.
But seeing our world, seeing each other, through the lense of being in Christ, we are committed to reconciliation. We are committed to trying to set things right. We are committed to work hard at bringing together what has gone apart. We are committed to bringing forgiveness and reconciliation into the centre of our lives.
But we are also challenged by Paul to invite people outside of our community to be reconciled to God. Challenged to share our faith stories, challenged to articulate our vision of God’s new creation – this cosmic vision – that we see through the lense of our faith in Christ. God is at work reconciling the world to himself. We become God’s ambassadors sharing that story.
Conclusion
I close with a final story that has made a rather profound impact on our family. It’s the story of my mother-in-law and a very hard forgiveness.
My father-in-law, a lay minister in his church, was quite deeply embroiled in a conflict that threatened to split the church apart. Angry words, accusations, suspicions became loudly public. But at one point the church leaders, lay pastors mostly, made a huge effort to resolve their conflicts with each other and make peace. They gathered together, with their spouses (who often feel the hurt as much or more than do the ones shouting at each other), and spoke words of confession and forgiveness to each other.
My Mother-in-law also participated. She also spoke the words, “Yes, I forgive you”.
When Mom and Dad got home from the meeting, Mom turned to Dad and said, We have to go back”
“What do you mean, we have to go back”?
“I haven’t really forgiven him in my heart. I said the words, but I didn’t mean them. We have to go back.”
Mom and Dad got right back into their car and drove to the home of the minister with whom they had the most conflict, had been hurt by the most, and were most angry with. There Mom confessed that her forgiveness had not been real, had been nice words only.
An amazing thing followed. Something so deep and powerful happened with that confession that evening that these two couples did, genuinely, forgive each other, and in fact became fast friends for life. That evening forgiveness and reconciliation were brought beautifully together.