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:
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.
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.
posted by J. Christy Wareham at
11:32 PM
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