RCL Proper 24C (Series 2)
15 September 2013
Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
Exodus 32.7-14; Psalm 51.1-10; 1 Timothy 1.12-17; Luke
15.1-10
One day
two monks, one an older man, the other quite young, were walking from their
monastery to a nearby town. As they were
walking, they came to a stream that was swollen with water from several days’
worth of rain falling in the mountains.
There had never been a bridge over the stream, so travellers normally
crossed at a ford where the waters were quite shallow and easy to wade.
Even
though the waters were high and the current stronger than usual, the stream
posed no obstacle for the two monks, even given the difference in their
ages. Years of hard work in the
monastery’s fields and of walking with heavy loads had given both men more than
enough strength to cross at the ford.
However,
at the ford the monks met a young woman bound for a different town whose
strength was not equal to the force of the stream. Her size and weight posed no problem for
either monk, but her gender did. These
monks belonged to an order that maintained a strict rule regarding contact
between men and women. Picking the young
woman up and carrying her across the stream would be a serious breach of the
Rule.
Nevertheless,
the older monk’s offer to carry the young woman across the stream was
gratefully accepted by her. Through the
waters the trio passed and, on the other side, they parted to continue their
separate journeys.
As they
continued their journey, the older monk became aware of the younger monk’s
troubled silence. “What’s bothering you,
Brother Thomas?”, asked the older monk.
“You carried that young woman across the stream, Brother Michael,”
answered the younger man, “that’s against the Rule.” “That’s true,” responded Brother Michael,
“but you have forgotten two things.
First, her need was great and we are pledged to help others as best as
we can. Second, at least I put her down
after we crossed the stream. You’ve
carried her every step since then!”
My friends,
all of our readings from the Scriptures today tempt us to focus on sin, on our
human failings, on our lapses in faithfulness to our understanding of what God
is calling us to do and to become. But
to focus on sin alone would be, I believe, missing the real focus of the
Scriptures today. The real focus is on
forgiveness, the process by which we are liberated from the prisons of our
pasts and empowered to imagine a new future.
We live
in a world that is filled with people who are more committed to remembering
past wrongs, ancient sins, than they are to forgiveness.
i) Thirteen years ago the tragic attack on New
York and Washington DC set in motion a wave of conflict and violence across the
globe, a wave that does not appear to be diminishing.
ii) Sixty-five years ago Jews and Arabs entered
into a conflict which continues to this very day with both sides remembering
ancient wrongs, some real and some perceived.
iii) In our own country we are confronting the
dark deeds of our colonial past and their lasting consequences for First
Nations across Canada.
In these
and in other similar stories too numerous to recount today, there are people
held hostage by their own past sins and the sins of others. Some of these hostages, I know from my own
experience, are afraid to let go of their pasts because they have no hope in
the future. Their pasts, they believe,
define the future and that future is rather bleak. Still others harbour desires for vengeance,
the opportunity to visit upon their oppressors, their abusers, any who have
wronged them, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. There is an old saying that vengeance claims
two victims.
I
understand such feelings and I am sure that many of us, if not all of us, know
these feelings all too well. But at the
heart of the Christian gospel is not the cataloguing of sins and wrongs but a
call to forgive, one of the more difficult acts a human being can
undertake. Forgiveness requires courage
and hope.
In the
week to come the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada will be in
Vancouver to listen to the stories of the survivors of the residential
schools. I will join a group of my
clergy colleagues in being present at these hearings. We will sit in a ‘listening circle’ and be
prepared to hear the stories of any who would like to speak a word to the
church and, I hope, be prepared to hear a word in response. For that reason, I want to share with you
what I believe forgiveness means.
1) Forgiveness does not mean forgetting the
past. Part of forgiveness is the courage
to tell our stories, both the sorrows and the joys. We cannot forgive if we are not willing to
give voice to the dark secrets that may have held us in thrall. Untold stories can hold us hostage, sometimes
hostage to shame for fear of what someone may think of us, sometimes hostage to
hopelessness because we believe that our present and our future are solely
shaped by our past.
2) Forgiveness means telling our stories so that
they no longer have power over us. In
telling my story of being wronged and, perhaps, of wronging, my past loses hold
over me. While it is true that our pasts
shape us, for good and for ill, they do not define who we might become in the
present and in the future. In the week
to come, we shall be hearing the stories of people who have lost language and
culture, knowledge and skills, innocence and childhood. But we do not listen to those stories solely
to lament what has happened, we listen because we live in the hope that the
future can be one in which all God’s peoples can live in dignity and justice in
this rich and fair land.
3) Forgiveness means liberation from the prison
of the past in order to envision a new future.
We cannot deny that the future would have been a different one had the
abuse and wrongs of the past not occurred, but we can dare to hope that a
re-visioned future can be shaped by people of good will and compassion. I recently heard an interview of a journalist
who had been kidnapped and abused by her kidnappers. She said that she tires of hearing herself
described as ‘a brutally raped’ woman.
While she was brutally raped, this journalist reminded her interviewer
and those listening that ‘brutally raped’ does not define who she is nor who
she seeks to become. From this past she
has risen to create a foundation to help the people of the country in which she
had been held and tortured. While her
story is dramatic, it illustrates what I mean by being liberated from the
prison of the past in order to re-vision the future. She carries the scars of that past, but they
do not form the contours of the future she wishes to live into.
4) Forgiveness only takes one to tango. While all of us might wish to have that
moment of confession where those who have wronged us seek our forgiveness, there
are people I know who have lived their lives limited by this desire. “When that person asks my forgiveness,” they
seem to say, “then I can move on.” My
friends, this is another form of bondage.
Sometimes that person is dead or so estranged from us that the
likelihood of such a moment is remote.
We cannot control their behaviour nor their choices, but we can take
control of our own lives.
I do not
believe that forgiveness, whatever the past cause, is easy. I know this because there are still aspects
of my past that have some hold on my present.
But I do find some hope in the fact that I know these aspects and I also
know the joy that I have experienced when I have been able to forgive those who
participated in the hurts and darker episodes of my past. I have also known the freedom that
forgiveness brings, a freedom which opens my eyes to the graciousness of God in
my past. That graciousness gives rise to
thanksgiving and I have always found in thankfulness an antidote to the bondage
of sin.
“Or what
woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp,
sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her
friends and neighbours, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin
that I had lost.” (Luke 15.8-9) My friends, the courage to forgive is the
lamp that casts its light on our past so that we can find the silver coins of
God’s love, compassion and presence in our stories. Those coins become the capital by means of
which we can build a future in which we and all God’s children can be free, a
future in which the dignity of every human being, including ourselves, is
honoured.
May God
give us the courage to build such a future and the grace to forgive in order to
become more fully alive, more fully the persons God means us to be. Amen.
