Embodying Forgiveness
Revd. Mark Waters’ sermon on Embodying Forgiveness from Sunday 2nd August, part of our August series ‘What is Church?’
Reading: 2 Corinthians 5.1-20
From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. 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, 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.
Sermon
The theme for sermons during the month of August 202 is ‘What is church?’
My answer to that question is that the church is a community that ‘embodies forgiveness’.
I want to start with a story.
Christabel Bielenberg was a Jewish woman living in Germany with her husband during the Second World War. She, along with many of her friends resisted the Nazi propaganda and were opposed to everything that was being done in their name. Many of the people they knew were arrested and their two close friends Adam and Carl were executed. After the failed plot against Hitler, Christabel’s husband Peter was arrested because of his association with those implicated in the plot. He was sent to Ravensbrück.
With great courage and fortitude Christabel asked to be interviewed by the SS believing that it might help gain her husband Peter’s release. And amazingly it did. On her way home from that interview, completely exhausted by the event, and at the point of collapse, she found herself sharing a railway carriage with a senior SS officer. The carriage was dark and she could only barely make out his face, which was distorted by a twitch. Something about Christabel’s character must have communicated itself to the SS officer, because as the night wore on during the long train journey, he told her, as a voice coming out of the darkness, of all the atrocities he had committed as an SS officer. How he was haunted by what he had done, including his treatment of a little Jewish boy who asked if he was standing up straight enough – as the SS officer was about to shoot him. The officer said he had tried to get himself killed, by putting himself as much as possible in the way of danger, but each time it was his fellow soldiers who had fallen in the gunfire and he had been left standing.
‘You are silent madam’ , he said, ‘are you horrified by my story?’
‘No, no’ said Christabel, her own voice sounding from somewhere far away, and seeming no longer her own, ‘I am not horrified. I think I pity you, for you have more on your conscience than can be absolved by your death’
‘And suddenly’, she recounts in her book, ‘the fogs in my mind seemed to clear, and it was as if Adam and Carl’s dying, and Peter’s imprisonment seemed a splendid, glowing, real thing, absolutely right and necessary.’ She continued speaking to the SS officer:
‘But others have died and may have to die for you’.
After that she fell asleep, and when she woke she realised she was warmer and that her head was resting on something hard and uncomfortable. The SS officer had moved and was sitting beside her, his greatcoat over her knees and her head and fallen onto his shoulder in her sleep and his SS shoulder tabs had been pressing into her cheek. In the half light she saw his face again, looking peaceful and childlike. His hand, with the signet ring of the SS, was resting on hers and as she moved it closed in an almost desperate grip and then relaxed.
In this story – just as in the story of Jesus – we step on the edge of a great mystery and a great horror. And that’s why imaginative language is so much needed so we can catch the meaning of something that is beyond our understanding.
The story speaks to us about God’s strange and liberating economy for dealing with the mistakes we make and the horrors we commit. It speaks of the need – even in the most appalling circumstances – of finding a way of dealing with the past in order that it may be redeemed, so that a new future can be imagined, and if possible, lived.
It is a story which affirms the church’s task, its whole reason for being, is to find ways of acknowledging and attending to the reality of sin and evil which is all around us – in our world, in our communities, and in our own lives. It is about proclaiming that forgiveness and its partner repentance is right at the heart of the power of the love which moves towards communion and reconciliation in the face of all that attempts to divide and alienate and break and destroy.
Here’s another story. This one told by the theologian Gregory Jones. He says:
I knew a woman who had been raped. She wanted the person who had raped her to go to hell, literally. And I understood that. But after a meeting one day she said to me, ‘Will you pray for him for me?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I will’. She came back in a couple of weeks and said, ‘Are you still praying for him?’ I said, ‘Yes’. She came back a couple of weeks later and said, ‘Are you still praying?’ I began to think God was sending her just to reform my prayer life. But she kept asking if I was praying for him on her behalf. Was the church praying for him? And after about a year, she said, ‘Well, I am too.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘I don’t know what I mean. I just call out his name in prayer. I’m not sure I want him to go to hell anymore. I just don’t want to have anything to do with him’. I could tell the thaw in her own heart. In her life, growth and healing was occurring.
Both of the stories I have told are about people at the very sharp end of suffering in accounts that could be set alongside the sufferings of Jesus. They take us into the mystery of that love which moves – sometimes in the most terrible circumstances – towards communion, towards reconciliation. But for most of us, the need to give and receive communion will be in matters much less dramatic but no less significant. But it is where we need to start.
Richard Rohr said recently:
Our secret inner attitudes are often cruel, attacking, judgemental and harsh. The ego seems to find its energy precisely by having something to oppose, fix, or change. When the mind can judge something to be inferior, we feel superior. We must recognise our constant tendency toward negating reality, resisting it, opposing it, and attacking it on the level of the mind. This is the universal addiction.
A brief look at much of our culture shows how true this is. For example, the bile and hatred shared every second across the world on social media unmasks our ugly human underbelly.
A temptation in the Church is to make Christianity just about being nice and by extension turning God into some cosmic nice guy. Deep down we are not very nice at all. So there is a crucial moral recognition to see that we have enemies. This is real life. We have enemies. We have enemies we do not even know. People whose ideologies and mindsets would condemn us out of hand and would have no compunction in doing us harm. They are not wholly enemies, because if we make that mistake we deny their humanity. But we need to make this basic acknowledgment and then follow Jesus’ teaching and learn to love them. Not just once, not just seven times, but seventy seven times. One welsh writer said: Forgiveness isn’t all that difficult. It’s just walking through thorns to stand at your enemy’s side.
We need to do this forgiving because the world we live in needs this more than anything else. There is nothing in this world that is more important or which is key to all the many dilemmas facing our planet.
None of this is about self-flagellation. It is simply recognising something about our human condition. But it is not easy. We are often more ready to hold on to and live in the brokenness of the past than risk the vulnerability of the future to which God calls us. It has been said that every church has a ‘Back to Egypt’ committee, a group of people who – like the Israelites – can’t cope with the risk of travelling to the promised land and want to go back to Egypt! Most of us have a Back to Egypt committee living somewhere deep inside us.
Our main task as Church as the Body of Christ, is to unlearn all of our habits of fragmentation and brokenness and division, in order to bear witness to the Spirit who makes all things new. Because unless we do this work on ourselves there are huge consequences for how we live with each other in this world.
Without forgiveness, and its partner repentance, cycles of violence continue, and the memory of being sinned against becomes the source for mobilising new political violence. We see this in the Middle East, we have seen it in former Yugoslavia, in Northern Ireland and so many other places where lack of forgiveness has been passed down the generations and where people have got totally stuck.
This is what we need to learn – The only way the past can ever be the past is through forgiveness. We do this by locating our painful memories in the wounds of Christ, in which lie our hope. God’s ever presented gift to us is to free us from the burden of the past as a broken past, so that we can begin the complicated, difficult process of reclaiming and then redeeming the past, because that is what God in Christ is all about. Our layers of trauma and suffering make that hard because of the haunting and ambiguities of memory, but it is our crucial task as people who claim to live in the freedom of the Risen Christ.
The task of embodying forgiveness and changing the dynamic between the past and the future is told hauntingly in that brilliant and searing novel Beloved by Toni Morrison. In that book she tells the most horrific stories of people who are caught in cycles of violence which have become almost unbearably self-destructive. At the end of the novel Paul D says:
Sethe, me and you, we got more yesterday than anyone.
What we need is some kind of tomorrow.
So, forgiveness isn’t some form of words spoken by a church official on a Sunday morning only to be left at the church door on our way out. Forgiveness is the way of life we have inherited from our founder, Jesus. And the church provides us with a whole set of Christian resources for us to us. And using these resources potentially does something vitally important. And here’s the crucial thing – our church resources school us in a different kind of memory than is available in our broader culture and in the political and economic dimensions and systems which dominate our world. And that’s what we’re doing on a Sunday morning – being schooled in that different kind of memory.
To do that, we have Scripture – the whole bible is about how a community of people redeem their past in order to create a new future with God and one another. It helps us shape our memory.
We have Intercession – faithfully praying for each other like the woman who was raped.
We have The Eucharist – as we share bread and wine with one another in memory of Jesus – the Greek word is anamnesis – meaning re-membered. We are put together again in a different way in our worship so that we leave a different community than we arrived – healed, restored and forgiven.
We have Friendship – a healthy church has a dynamic of friendship which crosses all sorts of lines that can often be barriers to communion. In these friendships we have the opportunity to listen to different kinds of stories of one another. This is why the Soul Friends groups have so much potential and importance for building a different kind of community.
We have Singing – joyfully recalling the Christian story through communal singing is a most powerful way of re-shaping memory and also crucially of establishing hope as the lodestar of Christian faith.
We have Hospitality – offering lavish and outrageous welcome to all.
All these things provide us with an alternative mindset:
If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.
The call of the gospel, the call to be ambassadors for Christ and ministers of reconciliation – to embody forgiveness – is not given to us as an option, but as a responsibility of our own forgiveness by God in Christ. It is the vocation of all Christians.