At another church, there was a member of the congregation who thought it was his job to cause conflict in the church. That’s not just my opinion, it’s what he said. He thought that causing disorder was good for the church and would cause it to grow. Now growth often does cause some disorder to happen, because of the changes that come with growth, but I’ve never seen disorder leading to growth. After several tries to get him to behave in healthy ways, the situation began to escalate, and he ended up making what many people considered a death threat against me. After spending a morning arranging for an armed security guard to be present at the church, and talking with our attorney about the possibility of a restraining order, and working with the police, you could say that I wasn’t having a very good day. But in the midst of it, as I was praying for the turmoil I was feeling, I knew that the other person was also in turmoil and so I stopped praying for myself and I started praying for the other person. I prayed that God would give him peace and calm, the same thing that I was praying for. I didn’t ask for God to show him the errors of his way, simply that God would be with him. and you know what happened? A peace came over me and my anxiety dissipated, and I can say that I’m still working on the whole forgiveness thing the stone is much smaller than it was before.
And so, we continue looking at forgiveness we now get down into the nitty gritty. we began by looking at what forgiveness isn’t, so we could get passed some of the myths of what forgiveness, and then last week we talked about why we need to forgive and also started with the choice to begin the process of forgiveness by dropping one of the stones that we carry. And before we move into the steps of forgiveness, let me give you one more reason why we need to forgive. We need to forgive someone is because we have been hurt. But what do hurt people do? Hurt people, hurt people. Often the reason someone else has hurt us is because they too are hurt. Hurt people hurt people. Brokenness leads to more brokenness. When we talked about the fruit of the Spirit, one of them was peace, the Hebrew word for which was shalom, which you may remember has a connotation of healing and wholeness. And so, if we want that peace in our lives, if we want healing in our lives, then forgiveness is one of the paths towards that, because often if we refuse to forgive we get filled with anger, amongst other emotions, for what happened to us and how it continues to haunt us. And rather than directing our anger at the person to whom it comes from, we instead direct it others who had nothing to do with it, because that anger will seep out in other areas of our lives. And our hurts then hurt others, others begin to carry around rocks with our names on them. Or as Richard Rohr says, and I’ve quoted before, “pain that is not transformed is transmitted.” Forgiveness is the process by which we begin that transformation, that process to healing and wholeness, peace and shalom.
