Scriptures for today are Here
Human memory is a very strange thing. You may not remember what you wore yesterday or where you left your keys, but probably everyone here could tell detailed memories of where you were and what you were doing 10 years ago today. I was getting my children ready for school when Tom called and told me to turn on the TV. He told me a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, and I asked if it was an accident, and he said no.
And I still remember odd little moments from that day. The crossing guard at school who was helping kids cross the street with tears streaming down her face; the smell of candles in a church service that night; my 5-year-old daughter Julia asking me, “Mommy, why do you keep watching TV and crying?” The feeling of shock and utter disbelief that everyone shared.
And if I asked you, most everyone here could tell me the same kinds of memories. Somehow our memories of significant events exist for us in a whole package of facts, details, sensory images, faces, emotions. This is how our memories as human beings work: not linear reconstructions of facts, like computers that store strings of data, ones and zeros of equal weight, but bundles of human memories that are charged with emotional significance, which is why people never forget where they were and what they were doing when a tragic event happened: Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, 9/11.
Because human memories work this way: factual details tied up together with our senses and our emotions and our interpretations of their meaning, we humans can move beyond mere memory to something more important: remembrance. Remembrance is a word which means to re-member – to put all the members back together, to bring something together in a new way. When we re-member something, Episcopal author Diana Butler Bass says, we “rearrange the pictures of memory in order to make meaning, to heal, to forgive, or to inspire … Remembering is the hard work of seeing, understanding, making sense of, and learning from the past.”
Forgiveness, it seems, is a type of re-membrance – a way of understanding, making sense of, and learning from our memories, a way of re-imagining the past in order to bring ourselves to a place of wholeness and healing. We hear challenging words from Matthew’s gospel today: Peter came and said to Jesus, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” This number could also be translated seventy times seven times, 490 times, basically over and over and over.
Jesus brings his point home with the parable of a slave whose master forgives him an unimaginable amount of money – 10,000 talents was something like 150,000 years of wages for an Israelite wage-earner, or the entire Gross Domestic Product of Israel for ten years – but the same slave is unable to forgive another slave 100 denarii, basically 4 months’ living wages.
Clearly, Jesus wants us to understand that God has forgiven us everything, has made it possible for us to live healed lives, reconciled to God and others, has even offered us eternal salvation. Yet he says we often turn around and refuse to offer even a small portion of that same grace to others. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we express something similar, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”
It’s not so much that our receiving forgiveness is contingent on our giving it. It’s more of a recognition that our ability to live reconciled lives is dependent on our willingness to both receive forgiveness for ourselves and offer it to others. Jesus is asking us to move beyond our simple memories of sins past, into a new realm of re-membrance – putting back together a new self, and a world we can imagine of reconciliation and wholeness, a world of God’s love.
Now I am completely aware of how difficult a lectionary text this is to hear on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, a day when our memories of a sin done against people like us are so strong and overwhelming. And by the way, I didn’t choose this gospel for this day, no one did – the lectionary texts are set in stone decades in advance, and all over the world, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox churches are struggling with this same text today. And the question of forgiving others over and over, as God does, brings all kinds of difficult problems to our human minds.
I think it is helpful to start by talking about what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness is not forgetting – our humanity does not allow us to simply forget memories of events that carry emotional significance. Forgiveness is not saying it was all right – some things will never be all right – sin and evil are real, and forgiveness does not change this fact. Forgiveness does not mean we allow the same thing to happen again – our responsibility to forgive is not an obligation to accept abuse. Forgiveness does not mean that we just let it go – there may be significant work to do to bring a relationship to healing and wholeness. Forgiveness does not mean that every relationship can be salvaged – sometimes as a last resort a relationship has to come to an end. Forgiveness does not mean that there are no consequences to sinful or evil actions – in a world that is short of the kingdom of heaven, a world where sin still reigns, justice must happen.
So that’s what forgiveness is not – let’s talk about what forgiveness is. I think that forgiveness is this: it is allowing God’s grace to move through us so that we can begin to release the sins that are keeping us separate from God and from our neighbor.
Forgiveness includes our own sins that we can’t forget, and our tendency to clutch tightly to the memories of other people’s sins against us. Many of us have trouble with both ends of this spectrum. We have trouble accepting forgiveness for ourselves, we hang onto our memories of our own failures, the whole package of facts and feelings, shame and guilt, and we have trouble letting them go. What we need to understand is that when God offers us forgiveness, God doesn’t so much forget our sins, as God re-members who we are. God imagines us whole and complete and reconciled, the children of God we were created to be – in re-membering us, God makes us whole. This is the great truth of reconciliation – in God’s love, God restores us to who we were created to be. Forgiveness is God’s self- giving act of love for us.
This remembrance of who we truly are is what God asks us to extend to others too – God asks us to imagine the other as God does, to see them as God’s beloved children, to work toward reconciliation, to realize that our hard and challenging call as Christians is to love even those who have hurt us. After all, Jesus forgave his killers as they nailed him to the cross. It’s a hard thing to ask humans to do, and I think most of us will never completely succeed, because we’re not Jesus – yet it’s our work, our calling as followers of Christ. Not because what others have done to us is all right, or excusable. But because forgiveness is the ultimate act of love, love in action.
And we should realize that forgiving others, allowing ourselves to become reconciled to them, becomes a path to healing for us too. If we hold onto toxic memories, if we treasure them and nurture them and allow them to grow into smoldering resentment or hurtful action, then we are the ones who will suffer. You may have heard the old saying: resentment is like taking poison yourself and expecting the other person to die.
One of the great spiritual truths that Jesus understood, that he asks us to understand too, is that forgiving others is the first step to healing for ourselves – if we can’t forgive, if we hold onto wrongs so tightly we can’t let them heal, then we become prisoners of our own memories, condemned to continue living in the world of sin. Letting go of a toxic bundle of memories means letting God transform them into holy re-membrance of God’s world as it should be, God’s children as they were created to live; it becomes our path to healing and to a transformed world.
We followers of Christ will not, by ourselves, be able to transform this world into a place of healing and forgiveness, where senseless acts of violence do not occur. Someday God’s kingdom will come in its fullness, and God will make this happen. What we can do is model an alternate way of living within the Christian community – a way of reconciliation that becomes a beacon for the world to see. We can choose how we respond to the sins of others, we can live a life of active love, we can transform our memories of past to different kind of remembrance.
Which is the kind of transformation that happened at St. Paul’s Chapel, a ministry of Trinity Episcopal Church on Wall Street, one block from the site of the World Trade Center. The little chapel built in 1766, where George Washington once owned a pew, became a headquarters for feeding recovery workers, offering them medical care, toiletries, eyewash, foot care, massage, a pew or cot to sleep on, and prayer. Firefighter John Misha, one of the recovery workers served by St. Paul’s, told a reporter: "'Every day, I spend most of my time on my hands and knees’ [at the site]…. he went on to describe [the work], in all the vivid language of somebody … who knew hell. Then, like he was rising out of hell, he stood up as straight as he could, threw out his chest, sucked in air, threw his arms into the air, and with a huge grin on his face and tears running down his cheeks, he said to her, 'And then I get to come here…When I walk in the front door of this place… they hug me, they kiss me, they bring me in and treat me like I'm a member of the family. I have never known such respect anywhere ... And I sit and cry and weep, and I am born again." In loving action, the compassionate witness of the Christian community, a new way of life becomes possible – where love transcends evil and violence.
Another worker at St. Paul’s, Courtney Cowart, in her book An American Awakening described the daily Eucharist that happened at a side altar in St. Paul’s while the ministry to recovery workers went on: on one side of the chapel, weary backs are being massaged; in pews and cots, firefighters are sleeping after 24-hour shifts, with teddy bears donated from all over country tucked under their arms; some people unwrap the cellophane on sandwiches, while others sit and stare blankly; an ironworker gives the sermon while a bishop mops the floor.
Into this holy space, a priest speaks the ancient words: Take, eat; this is my body, given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.
As the Eucharist is shared, at St. Paul’s Chapel, and here every Sunday at Nativity, and in Christian churches all over the world, Jesus is more than a memory. Jesus is re-membered; Jesus is truly present – his love, his forgiveness, his healing. Jesus is re-membered, and Jesus re-members us – calling us into wholeness and healing, and promising us eternal life.
And as we re-member him, Jesus calls us into a way of life. In this holy space, we come together in his name, to remember the one who has loved us so much, has forgiven us everything, has called us to share his love with the world. In his name, we remember. We remember the world as it was created to be. We remember to Love.
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