What Forgiveness is Not

Here is my message from Sunday. The scripture was Matthew 3. We also did a reaffirmation of baptismal vows.

At 3 am on Monday, October 2, 2006, Charles Carl Roberts finished his rounds collecting milk from surrounding farms and parked his truck and then went home to catch a few hours of sleep before he had to wake up and get his children ready for school.  After his wife had taken their youngest child to a mother’s prayer group, he walked his two older children to the bus stop, then went back home.  He wrote out four letters, one for his wife and each of his children, then he loaded a truck with supplies including a 9-mm handgun, 23-guage shotgun and 600 rounds of ammunition and he drove to the little Amish schoolhouse down the road in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania.  And most of you know what happened then.  The sense of shock that struck us all in that moment was not just of the five little girls who lost their lives and the 5 others who were wounded, as it was the third school shooting that week, but the shock was also about how the Amish community and the parents of the victims responded to this senseless act of violence.

Forgiveness came to be one of, if not the, dominating storylines of this senseless tragedy.  Because on the same day of the tragedy, members of the Amish community, including relatives of the victims went to see Roberts’ widow and his children to tell them that they forgave him and them for what had happened. They took food to the family. They attended his funeral and burial at Georgetown United Methodist Church, and when a fund was established to help support the families the members of the trust who oversaw the disbursement of the funds, most of whom were Amish, made sure that Roberts’ family received some of those funds.  This was not what people expected, because this was not what people normally saw nor what they thought they would do in the wake of such a tragedy, and I can say from personal experience it was not what happened just 3 months later at the high school in the community where I was soon to be appointed.  There a student stabbed another student to death, and in the wake of that tragedy as the community rallied to give support to the family of the victim, one of the members of our church tried to get help for people to provide meals for the family of the perpetrator and she was met not only with resistance, but even outright hostility, that they were not going to do anything for that family.  It should also be mentioned that the reason Roberts gave for why he did what he did was because of guilt for an alleged crime he committed that he could not forgive himself for, and because of the pain he felt after losing his infant daughter 9 years before and the fact that he could never forgive God, two of the issues we will try and tackle as we begin a seven week journey through forgiveness.

In its most basic form, “forgiveness is the act of setting someone free from an obligation to you that is a result of a wrong done against you.” Now perhaps it may come as a relief to some of us that the desire for retribution is part of the evolutionary process, and so the fact that we want to strike back when someone has harmed us, to be filled with anger and hatred doesn’t make us bad people. It makes us human. But, forgiveness is also programmed into us as part of the evolutionary process. The desire to forgive, to heal, to reconcile and to move past tragedy are just as much, if not more, a part of who we are as our desire for revenge. And the reason why forgiveness is part of us is because we live in community, and thus simply in order to survive we have to have the ability to forgive wrongs in order to stay in relationship with others.  If we clung to every hurt that is given to us every single day, we wouldn’t be able to go on.  But on the flip side of that we also tend to hang on to a lot of those hurts for many reasons, and I’ll be honest and say that I am really good at holding grudges, and I’d be willing to be that that is true for many of you as well. 

And so today as begin, we’re going to look at the things that forgiveness is not, because there are lots of misconceptions about forgiveness, and the first is that forgiveness is not easy. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, forgiving is hard. Now there are some things that are easy to forgive, but for others it is really hard. The reason why the Amish community was able to respond the way they did was not because forgiveness is easy for them, but because it’s something they work on all the time. The actually do forgiveness exercises to teach it and learn it. They practice forgiveness every single day, for big things and for small things, and so it might be said that they had been training for this even their entire lives. But, even though forgiveness was part of how they lived, the more painful the event the harder we must work at forgiveness. and when we first start it’s going to be even harder, because even though forgiveness is in our DNA, it’s still a learned skill, and like any learned skill it’s hard at the beginning but the more you work at it the easier it becomes.

And so second to know is that often forgiveness is not a one-time event, again, especially for those major wounds we have received. Now, I would also be willing to bet that while the Amish community said they forgave that day, and I am not in any way questioning their integrity about that, but that they had to continue to work and work on practicing forgiveness for this incident, as well as other major events in their lives. There is a reason why Jesus says that we have to forgiven not seven times, but seventy-seven times is because forgiveness is a process, and you might think you’ve done all the work and you’re past it, but then something comes up and you have to start all over again.

The third one, and this is a big one, is that forgiveness is not about dismissing the pain or saying it didn’t happen or that it wasn’t important. In fact, the process of forgiveness does exactly the opposite. In order to be able to forgive you have to name exactly what it is that happened and how it hurt you and impacted you or changed you. Forgiveness is not about the denial of the event, it’s the upfront naming of the event, and we have to be aware that that can bring forth all the pain and suffering again, but it’s necessary in order to bring proper healing to the wound. If it didn’t hurt, or it wasn’t important then forgiveness wouldn’t be necessary, and we’ll talk about ways to make the small things not need forgiveness in a later message.

Forgiveness is not about condoning or enabling the behavior of the perpetrator. If someone is stealing from you to feed their addiction, you have to stop them. If someone is abusing you, you need to get out of that situation. Forgiveness, in many ways, forces us to create appropriate boundaries for ourselves in order to stop others from hurting us, or continuing to hurt us. And that leads into the fact that forgiveness is not about reconciling yourself with the person who hurt you. It may, and we’ll talk about reconciliation as its own message, but if you have broken off relationship with someone because of what they did to you, forgiving them does not mean that you have to be back in relationship with them. They may still be too unsafe for you, and part of the process is to name that. Similarly, if what happened was a breach of trust, you do not have to immediately trust them again. Trust has to be built up over time, and it is absolutely dependent upon the actions, not the words, of the other person.

Forgiveness is not about forgetting. We have that saying to forgive and forget. That’s not true. While we are told that God forgets our sins, we do not have to do that. There are some smaller ones that we probably will, and should forget, but the larger ones are almost impossible to forget, and remembering them can help us to live better, but we don’t have to remember them and continue living the pain of them.

Forgiveness is not about saying that we deserved what happened to us. While it is possible that we played a role in what happened, and we’ll come back to this, it does not mean that we deserved to be hurt. We don’t deserve to be hurt, and taking the blame for it will make forgiveness impossible to actually do.

Forgiveness is not about pardoning the other person, or not still seeking some degree of justice, and there are multiple forms that this can take from retributive justice, which is what the criminal justice system does, to restorative justice, and we’ll talk more about that as an alternative. But you can call the police, and testify in court, and still practice forgiveness. The parents at Nickel Mines cooperated with the police and all of them said that they would have wanted to see Roberts put in prison if he had not taken his own life.

Forgiveness is not a leverage of power in which we say that “I am forgiven you and now you have to do everything I tell you to,” or bringing up the fact that you have forgiven them again and again.  That’s not forgiveness it’s just another form of retribution.

Forgiveness is also not about changing the past. There is nothing we can do to fix what happened to us. Forgiveness is about the future, about saying that what happened is not going to control my life, and it also says that the person who hurt me is no longer going to control my life. Forgiveness then is not about losing power, it’s about reclaiming our power to control our lives and to approach the future with healing and hope.

Forgiveness is not about dehumanizing the other. If you have to make the other person less than human in order to forgive them then you are doing exactly the same thing to them that they did to you in hurting you. In forgiveness we have to see and treat the other person as a fellow human being, worthy and deserving of forgiveness. Remember I said this was going to be hard. And forgiveness is also not about their remorse for the situation, or lack thereof. It doesn’t matter if they are begging at your feet to be forgiving, that should make no difference, or if they say they did nothing wrong. Forgiveness is an act we choose to do for ourselves, not for the perpetrator. It’s not also about what others think about it or what they have chosen to do, forgiveness is our decision.

And so, then we can say that forgiveness is not required. And that may sound strange, so let me qualify that. Forgiveness is a commandment given to us by God. That we are to forgive because we have been forgiven. And I believe that you should forgive. But, it has to be a choice that we freely take on. You cannot forgive someone grudgingly. You can’t say “I’m only forgiving you because I have to.” Well you can say that, but I can guarantee that the forgiveness process won’t work if you do that. Forgiveness has to be freely chosen and freely given by you. I cannot make you forgive. No one can make you forgive, not even God. But I would add that the final piece is that I don’t think this process can be done without God. We can do the small things, but the big hurts in our lives, those large wounds we carry that need to be forgiven, can only be done with God carrying that weight for us and helping us to remember that we too not only need to be forgiven, but that we have been forgiven through the waters of baptism, which we will remember today.

And so, let me close with this. First there probably could be lots more things we could say that forgiveness is not, so don’t take this as a comprehensive list. And then we return to what forgiveness is, or what it looks like. As I already said, forgiveness in its simplest terms , “is the act of setting someone free from an obligation to you that is a result of a wrong done against you.”, or scripturally we are going to wipe clean the debt that someone else owes us, that whole eye for an eye thing. But in doing research on forgiveness a number of years ago, I can across a definition for forgiveness, which I actually used when we did the fruit of the Spirit, and it comes from philosopher Dr. Joanna North who said “When unjustly hurt by another, we forgive when we overcome the resentment toward the offender, not by denying our right to the resentment, but instead by trying to offer the wrongdoer compassion, benevolence and love.”  When I first read that, I didn’t really agree with it because I don’t want to extend compassion, benevolence and love to the person who harmed me, I want to dislike them and wish for bad things to go there way, thank you very much.  But the more I’ve interacted with it, the more I think she might be right, and that’s going to be one of our guiding principles in this series, and so we will come back to this again and again.

We need God to help us to forgive, and it starts with remembering first that we are a forgiven people. That God has already forgiven the mistakes we have made, and God will forgive the mistakes we will make, and that happens here at the baptismal font. It happens as we are washed clean and made new creations in Christ, and God calls for us to participate in this process of being forgiven and giving forgiveness, because all of us need to do both. And so, forgiveness begins at baptism and it continues through prayer so that we may put on the clothes of Christ and live lives of forgiveness, and be known as a people of forgiveness. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.