Saturday in the Octave of Pentecost

Trinity Episcopal Church, Cranford, NJ

Romans 8:12-17, 26-27; Matthew 6:5-13

“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

I grew up a United Methodist. My father was a pastor so we were in church quite often. I remember as a pre-teen being in a prayer meeting that I’m assuming was ecumenical, because of what happened. At some point during the meeting, we prayed the Lord’s Prayer in unison. When we got to this line, “Forgive us our…” I said, “Trespasses” just like I always had. But somewhere in the room, someone uttered the phrase, “Forgive us our debts”. What? I’m sure I looked around. “Who said that? Everybody knows it’s ‘trespasses’! Come on!”

Flash forward a few years to Greek class in seminary. Lo and behold, in Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, it could be translated ‘trespasses’ or ‘sins’ but here in Matthew’s gospel, the word is clearly ‘debts’! I have since pondered a bit on these two different words. “Trespasses” – we’ve all seen the signs “No trespassing.” Trespassing could be a mistake. Oops! I didn’t know this was your property. “Debts” on the other hand is a different concept. I dare say we all know what it is like to be in debt. Here, our sins are as real as money! “Forgive our debt, God”, we pray. But the next line is different in Matthew as well. “As we also have forgiven our debtors”! This implies that we have already done what is necessary to forgive those who owe us. It’s not a negotiation. God if you’ll forgive me, then I’ll forgive that person. No, it’s a done deal before you started praying, at least the way Jesus is teaching his disciples to pray.

And it gets more serious. The people who crafted the lectionary cut this reading off just as it gets more serious. The verse just after our reading ends tonight reads this way, “For if you forgive others, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive you.” Wow! If we listen to Jesus’ teaching on prayer, it would seem that forgiveness is a big deal. We ask for forgiveness nearly every time we gather for Holy Communion. It’s part of the liturgy.

Forgiveness. How many pithy little sayings can you think of about forgiveness? There are so many aphorisms and words of wisdom that we have about the importance of forgiveness, so much so that you’d think it was easy, second nature.

But we all also know how hard it can be. Forgiveness, true forgiveness, between people, is something that can take a lifetime, if even then. Lack of forgiveness has caused marriages to end and families to split. Do know people that still aren’t on speaking terms, years if not decades after one person wronged another? We know the complaints, “But, but. If I forgive that person, it will be like they got away with what they did!” “They haven’t asked me for forgiveness. They aren’t sorry. Why should I forgive them?”

Sometimes the wrong seems kind of petty years later. The grudge may well outweigh the original wrong done. Other times, however, the offense, the sin, the crime may be a big one, almost beyond our ability to grasp.

I was part of a community that experienced such a great crime. I was serving as the associate rector at a parish where one of our members, a local, beloved schoolteacher, who was also one of our Sunday School teachers, was arrested on charges of child molestation. Needless to say, it rocked our community. Later that year, we started planning our Lenten program. One member of the staff asked the question, “Could we talk about forgiveness?” When a topic that could be fairly abstract suddenly becomes one that our whole community could understand, intimately, we did not take this choice lightly.

We chose to show a series of films and discuss them over dinner. These were serious, heavy conversations as you can imagine. We never connected the dots directly to the member of the community, now in prison, but side conversations were happening, everything from, “We must have compassion” to “You bleeding hearts are ridiculous.”

Lent ended with the joys of Easter morning. Little did we know that our study of forgiveness was far from over. A week after Easter, on that Monday morning, a student at the university just blocks from our parish, did the unthinkable. He shot and killed 28 fellow students and four professors on the Virginia Tech campus that morning before taking his own life. Our already-traumatized community was faced with the unimaginable.

It was amazing to me how quickly questions around forgiveness surfaced in our parish. Some of our members had taught this young man in class. He was clearly troubled. He had easy access to guns and ammo. Had we failed him? What do we, the Church, say now? Is God calling us to forgive something this big?

Candlelight vigils on campus led to temporary memorials erected on campus. There were 32 stones set in place for remembrance. Then someone added a 33^rd. The outrage was palpable! The extra stone quickly disappeared. How dare anyone suggest memorializing him?

But the conversations continued. This unthinkable tragedy affected us deeply, all of us. That Fall, just before the next school year began, I preached a sermon on The Lord’s Prayer and openly pondered the question of forgiveness. One of the students who attended our parish asked to speak with me. We met privately the next day. He was furious with me. “How dare you?”

“Did you lose anyone in the shooting?” I asked.

“No” he said.

“Do you think his parents should have a place where they can come and grieve?” I asked.

“No way! They don’t deserve it.”

We went back and forth for a while longer, with no agreement or understanding. As we ended our time together that day, I prayed the prayer for our enemies from the BCP. I never heard from him again.

The reactions are predictable. You expect me to forgive and forget? If we forgive someone like that, they will have gotten away with it.

I never said forgiveness would be easy, but it’s the only option God gives us. The longer journey is one toward reconciliation, toward true restoration and rehabilitation. But that’s not always possible. The first journey I believe we each have to make is one to a place of being willing to forgive. It’s the refusal to even consider forgiveness that keeps us stuck in dark and hate-filled places.

When forgiveness is God’s idea, God’s way, we must look to God for the strength and the courage to make that journey, however long it takes.

As a child, I grew up hearing the story of a woman named Corrie ten Boom. The Ten Boom family had been part of the Dutch resistance in World War II. They had hidden Jews in their home, in fact her memoir was be called “The Hiding Place.” Because of their crime, hiding Jews, the whole family was sent to concentration camps. Corrie alone survived to tell their story.

After the war she toured war-ravaged Europe telling her story and speaking about God’s forgiveness.  “When we confess our sins,” she would say in her talks, “God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever.”

One night, a man approached her after her talk. He revealed that he had been a guard in the prison camp where she had been held. “Fräulein!” he said, “How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea! Since the war, I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fräulein,” he said and put out his hand to her, “will you forgive me?”

Her blood ran cold. In his hand all she could see was the leather crop with which he had once beaten her. She stood there, with what she described as coldness clutching her heart. How could she forgive this man?

“Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me,” she wrote, “I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Forgiveness is not an emotion—it is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.”

The reading from Romans reminds us that we must not live by the flesh, what Corrie calls the ‘temperature of the heart’, but by the Spirit. “The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words.”

“’Jesus, help me!’” Corrie prayed silently. ‘I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness.’ 

At that moment Corrie took his hand and cried, ‘I forgive you brother, with all my heart.’ She wrote, “And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on God’s. When he tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.” She wrote, “For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.”

“Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” We say the words so easily. The world may mock the very idea. How dare you? But Jesus’ very words from the cross call us to the harder choice, the longer journey, and it may take years. Forgive as we have been forgiven. Amen.