Sermon - February 19, 2006 - Forgiveness

7th Sunday in Ordinary Time
19 February 2006
Isaiah 43.18-25; Mark 2.1-12
Forgiveness
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

As L. Frank Baum was about to wind up The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the first of many books about the land of Oz, he included a chapter about fragile people and what it’s like to live among them. The called the chapter, “The Dainty China Country.”

Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion have already received their brains, heart and courage, but Dorothy has been gradually adjusting to the reality that the Wizard has sailed off in his balloon without getting her back to Kansas. Her last hope, she decides, is to seek out Glinda, the good witch of the north, and the four have struck out to the north country to find her. Their journey brings them to a high, smooth, gleaming white wall, and when they have surmounted the wall, the adventurers find themselves in a land where everything is made of china. The ground, the houses, the animals, and even the people are all made of china, painted in beautiful colors.

Here’s the situation, as L. Frank Baum tells it:

They began walking through the country of the china people, and the first thing
they came to was a china milkmaid milking a china cow. As they drew near, the cow suddenly gave a kick and kicked over the stool, the pail, and even the milkmaid herself, and all fell on the china ground with a great clatter.

Dorothy was shocked to see that the cow had broken her leg off, and that the pail was lying in several small pieces, while the poor milk­maid had a nick in her left elbow.

“There!” cried the milkmaid angrily, “See what you have done! My cow has broken her leg, and I must take her to the mender’s shop and have it glued on again. What do you mean by coming here and fright­ening my cow?”

“I’m very sorry,” returned Dorothy, “Please forgive us.”

But the pretty milkmaid was much too vexed to make any answer. She picked up the leg sulkily and led her cow away, the poor animal limp­ing on three legs. As she left them the milkmaid cast many reproach­ful glances over her shoulder at the clumsy strangers, holding her nicked elbow close to her side.

Dorothy was quite grieved at this mishap.

“We must be very careful here,” said the kind-hearted Woodman, “or we may hurt these pretty little people so they will never get over it.”

The milkmaid could not forgive. When a whole community of people becomes unforgiving, this is what they are like. Everything has to be just what is expected, though expectations are not obvious to the clumsy stranger. Even the animals are set off by any departure from the norm. A panicked reaction to the unexpected sets off a chain reaction, and there is breakage, injury and upset. The offending party apologizes and may even have the grace to ask forgiveness, but the injured party is “much to vexed” to think about forgiveness, being preoccupied with personal distress and reproach.

Maybe you have visited a community like this, where you quickly realize you dare not make any misstep, lest you disturb somebody’s fragile state and set off a chain reaction of reflex, injury, upset and reproach. Maybe you have inadvertently done something fairly innocuous, and someone has reacted so drastically and with such anger that you wondered what you could possibly have done that was so horrible. And in a community oriented around that kind of fragility, everyone else behaves as if the extreme reactivity and anger was perfectly understandable, even expected. It’s easy to feel as if there’s something wrong with you in a place like that, because you just had no idea.

Isaiah described Israel as a community like this, very stuck in its fragility and its determined unforgiving. Indeed, Isaiah shows us God as the chief unforgiver! He complains to Israel, “You did not call on me . . . but you have been weary of me. . . You have not brought me your sheep for burnt offerings, or honored me with your sacrifices.” And on and on it goes. “You have not bought me sweet cane with honey . . . or satisfied me with the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened me with your sins; you have wearied me with your iniquities.”

Israel is never going to dig out of this sad situation of disappointing God. And God is more than disappointed. He is ignored, taken for granted, disrespected, burdened and jilted. Israel didn’t even call on God anymore. God is not happy.

But God is a realist. God realizes when he’s seen a whole community so lost and disconnected and stuck that it cannot change. The worst thing God can do is refuse to accept the situation and let everything he loves and cares about degenerate into a repeating loop of offense, distress and reproach. God can choose to be rigid and fragile and firm about his righteous expectations—and miserable—or God can bend and forgive.

God decides to be somebody else, somebody besides the one who insists on being right, and who shows it by holding the offending party in reproach. God says—and he starts with a bit of a stammer, as if it’s a little hard for him to actually say what he finds he has to say—God says, “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake.”

Now, it’s easy, at this point—it would be very easy—to feature God, here, as a kind of enabling abused wife: “I’ll forgive him for my own sake.” God doesn’t at all deserve the way he’s being treated with disrespect and repeated injury, but he can’t stand the tension of alienation. So when God agrees, literally, just to forget all about it, it’s fair to think of co-dependency and a cycle of abuse. But there’s more to the story.

God doesn’t just forget everything. God does forget the damage done—he can’t undo it—but then he reorders things. If he’s blotting out transgressions for his own sake, he means to establish a new way for Israel’s clean slate to serve his intention. “I am about to do a new thing. . . I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. And the wild animals will honor me,” and so forth. People will get to walk a new path, on the one hand, and they will have to repeat, on the other, an old and very memorable path. The people will repeat the wanderings of Moses and those God liberated from Pharaoh in Egypt. They will have to find there way through the wilderness, again, but this time the blessing of God for everything will be more obvious, so obvious that even wild animals, jackals and ostriches, will honor God. God will be a companion along the whole hard way, every blessed step.

God wants to start over. For God, that means not to remember all the slams and slights and sins. For the people, it means wandering again in the wilderness. It isn’t a punishment. It isn’t a measure of humiliation to prove you’re really sorry. It isn’t even the regimen and restriction you place on your teenager to earn back the car keys. It’s just what comes next, if you want to start over. The people have to go through it, and, of course, God will have to go through it with them. It isn’t easy on either one.

So the path of forgiveness is hard, even for the forgiver. Think about it. When you forgive someone you really love for something that just wiped you out, isn’t what comes next just the most confusing, disorienting and difficult thing you’ve ever done? You know you can’t trust with the same naïve trust you once felt for this person, but you can’t move forward without trust, of a sort. You have to learn the meaning of trust all over again in the wilderness of a new relationship.

Or when you have been forgiven by someone who loves you, isn’t the journey that comes next frightening and full of unknowns? The first unknown is yourself. You had meant to be trustworthy, but something happened. You lost your resolve, or feelings overwhelmed you and you did things you hadn’t imagined you would do. And yet now you are forgiven. What does that mean? Will you feel as if you’re on a short leash forever? Or will you have all the freedom you ever had and still not know how to handle it? If you didn’t live up to expectations the first time, what will be different about you, now? If you miss—if you are imperfect again in just the way you were imperfect before—will you be cast heartlessly, if deservedly, into the outer darkness?

Or, if you consider your traveling companion to be God, how do you start the path again, knowing that last time, all your good intentions notwithstanding, you couldn’t hold up your end of the trust? How does anyone ever live up to God’s lofty standards?

But God’s way of forgiveness, according to Isaiah, is simply to start off again onto the path in the wilderness together. There will be unknowns. There will be threats. There will be certain deprivations, although, against intuition, a river of water will appear just where we are dying of thirst.

This is the work of forgiveness in community—in every community we’re part of: home, work, club, church. We live in community together. I have let you down. You have let me down. We have all let God down. What shall we do next?

Shall we be the “dainty china country,” where everything is so fragile that whenever someone does or says or leaves out just the thing that cannot be done or said or left out, it starts a chain reaction of damage and injury and distress and reproach? Shall we be that place in our home, our work, or our church, such that a visitor coming through must take exquisite care to get beyond us as quickly as possible on the way someplace else? Or shall we accept forgiveness—and afford forgiveness—that everyone might enter upon a way in the wilderness again, hard has it may be to imagine it? Might an interested visitor find this forgiving place safe and appealing? Can we, with Isaiah, possibly imagine such a wilderness journey as an opportunity and a blessing?

All this is forgiveness from the perspective of the forgiver. God forgives, he says, “For my own sake.” If we realize what we’re doing when we forgive, it is always for our own sake. Now, let’s give a little thought to the perspective of the one forgiven, in this case, by Jesus.

Some guys brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus to be healed. They couldn’t fight the crowd of people so desperate for healing, and they mounted an aerial mercy mission to Jesus, landing their friend through the of a house. They are black belts in optimism. Honestly, what could they really expect? But they honestly expected that between Jesus, their friend and their faith, a miracle might occur.

So here’s Jesus and this impossibly disabled guy plopped down in front of him, and the guy’s friends want Jesus to heal him. Jesus says, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

Oh, great.

Have you ever wondered how seriously a quadriplegic might be sinning, on a daily basis? But Jesus forgives his sins. Okay.

And then the scribes are all up in arms. This is the truly ridiculous part. You’d think it was a capital offense to forgive the sins of someone who couldn’t violate, with all his might, most of the ten commandments.

“Blasphemy!”

Maybe, but big deal. I mean, even George Wallace and Larry Flint have had kind of a moral pass since their paraplegia. The scribes are starting to look like those hysterical politicians who save their indignation for the occasional petty welfare cheat while tolerating the deadly lies and intrigues of the wealthy and powerful.

But Jesus forgives the paralytic’s sins, and, really, if you put yourself in the paralytic’s position, wouldn’t you feel relieved? You’re paralyzed. You understand disability, and you’ve in many ways accommodated to it. But sin and alienation—the sense of being spiritually lost, without hope, and beyond love and relationship—it’s such a frightening mystery that perhaps only the paralyzed and perfectly still might have been immobilized enough to realize what a predicament the lost sinner is in. To be forgiven—this could be the relief and the gift the paralytic would most prize. And now he was forgiven. And now, forgiven, if he was given his body back, he would know what he wanted to do with it. And then, only then, Jesus does give him his body back.

So I would like to know that. Wouldn’t you? I would like to know what to do, now, with my body and my mind . . . and my heart and my soul, if I could be forgiven and could realize what being forgiven meant and could be thankful to the heights of ecstasy and joy for what forgiveness has given me.

The cross of Christ means, if it means anything, that the most impossible forgiveness—the most disturbing, disgusting, unimaginable and unacceptable forgiveness—has been accomplished. So it really is simply the limits of my imagination that prevent me from experiencing it. And perhaps, if I could get in touch with my self-imposed paralysis of feeling and trust and hope, Jesus would tell me I am forgiven, and then he would heal me.

I would like that. I would like it very much, because I am tired of all the unforgiven-ness of my life and this world. Aren’t you? Wouldn’t you like to believe that you are as completely forgiven as you actually are, if the Bible is right? And wouldn’t you gladly strike out into some new path into a wilderness where God has gone ahead and awaits you, if you knew there was healing to be found?

These are the promises of Isaiah and of Jesus. They’re just two persons’ opinions, but what if you trusted them? Amen.

Sermon - February 12, 2006 - Finding your compassion

6th Sunday in Ordinary Time
12 February 2006
2 Kings 5.1-12; Mark 1.40-45
Being good, together
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006

Of the fifteen or so of us who went all the way through Ivanhoe Elementary School in Los Angeles together, I’d say about a third of us were people of color, so we sort of noticed racial differences, but racial differences also seemed pretty normal to us. That didn’t mean we didn’t notice someone who was different in other ways. We did notice David, for instance, who happened to be Hispanic, but being Hispanic is not what set David apart. Now, David’s speech did sound a little different. He had a slight accent, and he didn’t make conversation as easily as everyone else. Also, he was a bit unkempt. His shirts and pants and shoes usually looked worn and didn’t fit very well, and he wasn’t quite as clean as we were used to. You could see dirt, sometimes, under his fingernails. So that was a way David was different, if not very.

Here’s the pity of it. I was a kid and didn’t understand about social norms, or even my own needs and emotions, but there was something about the rest of us that couldn’t quite find a way to include David easily in our social life. Though he was accepted in class activities and in games on the playground easily enough, David was seldom to be found at one of our birthday parties. He wasn’t in Cub Scouts. That would have been his parents’ responsibility to act on, but I have the feeling no one encouraged them, or him.

As I say, I didn’t have much insight about my feelings at that age, but I can say that the reason I remember David is that the image of him in my memory leaves me sad. Watching him in school with us made that impression on me. He was a gentle person who smiled, cooperated, tried to do well and seemed to appreciate any friendship we might share with him. I think I remember a couple of times seeing a flare of temper rise from David, but, golly, how would that surprise you? Personally, I probably was kind to David, as far as that goes, since I was that sort of kid, but if I had those years back, I hope to think I’d take kindness a little farther than I did.

Anyway, David was never quite part of things, though he did his best. I wonder how I’d remember David differently if we had done our best.

One time, a girl did do her best, though I can’t explain to you why. If we knew her name, we’d build a monument to her memory, but people kept forgetting to write down the names of females in the Bible. This one lived in a country ruled by a king who was the enemy of another king. The enemy king had ordered a raid on the girl’s village, and all we know about the raid today is that they abducted this girl and enslaved her to the service of the wife of the commander of the army called Naaman. You only have to think of the Sudanese janjaweed militia raiding villages, killing most family members and maybe abducting a few, to know the terror of this girl’s life.

But there was something in the girl's heart that could not be moved. She had the capacity we are probably all born with to care for those who suffer, and even the terror of being abducted by an army couldn’t stop her from caring, even about Naaman, the army commander, who suffered with leprosy. By the judgment of the girl’s Hebrew religion, Naaman with his leprosy was unclean. She might well not only have ignored him but despised him, and yet the girl felt compassion for Naamen. So she referred him to a prophet of his enemy Israel for a cure, even though she must have known Naaman’s Aramean HMO would tell him the prophet was not in-network.

So Naaman goes to his king, the king of Aram, who wrote a letter to the king of his enemy, the king of Israel. Aram and Israel were enemies in the way most countries are usually enemies. They manage a kind of hostile truce that holds off expensive wars while despising each other enough to stay afraid—like Israel and Iran, like Japan and China, like the United States and Venezuela (though why we’re afraid of Venezuela is a little hard to explain).

When Naaman hands the king of Aram’s letter to the king of Israel, the king of Israel just about soils his trousers. He is so afraid, he can’t stop to notice that the man standing before him is really, really sick, so afraid that he can’t feel even as much compassion as a terrorized little girl for someone who is suffering, so afraid that he can’t trust the power of his own renowned prophet to cure. Why is the king of Israel afraid? Because, the author of Second Kings tells us, he thinks the whole thing is a trick by the king of Aram to ask for a favor impossible to perform. He thinks the king of Aram will attack him, the king of Israel, for failing to perform it.

The author of Second Kings knows that this is the way of the kind of king who only thinks about his claim to power and forgets his responsibility for blessing. He becomes so absorbed in his own place in the world that he thinks everything is about him. He thinks everything revolves around him and all threats are aimed at him. The reason the founders of America created our democracy is that they had finally learned this about kings, and they set up a system of checks and balances that would circumscribe the power of our rulers for just these situations when they become so preoccupied with anxiety about their own power that someone else would have to pull back the reins.

The king of Israel had no such formal authority to circumscribe his power—and heaven knows what he might have done, having so seriously mistaken the level of threat, and what kind of war might have come about because of his fear—but there was an informal authority that provided the check and balance, the spiritual authority of the prophet. The prophet was Elisha, and Elisha, having heard of the mission to heal Naaman, persuaded the king of Israel to let go of his fear, avoid an unnecessary war, and let a ministry of compassion come about through a work of healing. Israel’s king was not enthusiastic, but he went along, if fearfully.

It’s easy to ridicule this king of Israel for his fear, but give him credit. He listened to his prophet, and of how many rulers can you say that?

Now it was Naaman the leper’s turn to get caught up in his fear. He goes to Elisha for healing, but when Elisha tells him to go for seven dips in the river, he gets nervous. He’s sure his disease is more serious than that. “Come on!” he said. “Let’s have something spectacular, here, something worthy of my grave condition. I need atmospherics, Industrial Light and Magic, Cecil B. DeMille reincarnated in The Matrix. I am the commander of the army of Aram, man! Don’t let me just die here with your feeble immersion-in-the-Jordan mumbo jumbo! I can’t be healed by humble holy water!!!”

But that’s just it, isn’t it? Our healing is an exercise in humility. We can’t heal ourselves, not entirely. We’re sick because of all sorts of things life does to us, all sorts of things the world does to us, all sorts of things we do to ourselves, all sorts of things we have no idea of and no answer for. All the same, we can do a great deal about our healing. There comes a point, though, where we are humbled by how little whatever we do does anything to heal us, and all we can do is be humbled by the mystery of everything, by the powers that afflict us and by the powers that heal us.

Thus humbled, we can walk with Naaman to the Jordan, where all his six thousand shekels of gold and all his ten sets of garments and all his horses and chariots did him about as much good as your great-grandmother’s cure for warts. We just have to let go of all the medical magic—which, powerful as it is, understands a fraction of the miracle of life—and surrender our fate to the waters of Jordan, the river of life. Naaman did it, God bless him, Naaman did it. “And his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was made clean.”

So God used the prophet Elisha to show that God offers healing mercy to the outsider and the unclean, even the outsider who is the enemy. But people, even God’s chosen people, needed to have the outsider to keep as an enemy and the unclean to shun. Who knows why? There always seems to be a certain amount of fear inside us that we don’t know what to do with, and we find someone to attach it to. Or there’s always someone who’s sick and in need to remind us of our own frailties and our needs that aren’t being met, and like my schoolmates and me, who left David out of our circle, people leave out the sick and needy. Kids don’t need an excuse to be insensitive, but adults do. Otherwise, they’d feel ashamed. So they create an excuse like “uncleanness,” which puts the shame on the one in need.

This is the problem we have with the disease we call AIDS, today. Whereas Jesus looks at disease as an opportunity for mercy and healing, many people make it all about shame. “People who have AIDS,” they say, “wouldn’t have caught it if they hadn’t misbehaved. They injected drugs or had sex with someone they shouldn’t have. Shame on them. Don’t give them clean needles; don’t give them condoms.” That’s what many of our moralistic leaders say. Mercy doesn’t teach people, the wisdom seems to go; sickness and death teach people. So people keep dying, because they’re morally unclean.

I guess it’s okay to think that way. Maybe sometimes it works, I don’t know. But Jesus doesn’t think that way. Jesus heals first and asks questions later. Jesus believes in mercy. Jesus doesn’t leave people out of the lovingkindness of God, not for any reason.

We can’t be leaving people out of the lovingkindness of God. I realize, now, that my friends and I left our schoolmate David out, at least somewhat outside of our collective lovingkindness. I have to forgive myself for that, and I find that I do forgive myself . . . every time I think about it. We were kids, after all, and there were adults around to keep an eye on David and to help us learn about lovingkindness. Now, we’re the adults.

At the free clinic board meeting the other day, one of the hospital staff reminded us that the clinic would be seeing people who owned homes and nice cars but who frivolously overspent their budget. Such people think somebody owes them medical care, even though they could afford it if they were more responsible. Okay, that’s true. Shame on them, I guess. We could call them morally undeserving.

But what if we thought like Jesus, or like that little slave girl in Aram, and showed mercy first and asked questions later? We might be overwhelmed for a while at the clinic, and that’s a reality we’d have to reckon with. At least it’s a practical reality that can be fixed with practical solutions. What we don’t want to do is inflict spiritual damage by closing off mercy from our hearts. That would be disastrous, not only for others but also for ourselves. We need to be curing people all we can and then start working on moral and spiritual restoration. It may not always work, but it’s the way Jesus does it. So it’s the way I want to do it.

It’s hard enough looking back on my childhood, when I didn’t know any better, and seeing the missed opportunities to show grace. The last thing I want to do is look back on my adulthood, when I know full well what is good, and wonder what stingy spirit got into me.

I’m not saying I can’t get mad at people who make mistakes. If you believe what it says many places in the Bible, even God gets very mad at people who make mistakes, but God gets over it. Psalm 30, the one the lectionary prescribes for today, says, “For God’s anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime.” I invite you to see yourself this way. If you find yourself having a moment of anger, realize it is just for a moment. You are made in God’s image to show favor—to show mercy—for a lifetime. The spiritual purpose for the lepers in your life is not so that you can condemn them. It is that you may love them and show mercy. Amen.