Reconciliation

Here is my message from Sunday. The passage was on reconciliation from 2 Corinthians.

I have a clergy colleague who was sexually abused by her father when she was a child. As often happens, to help cover the pain, she turned to drugs and alcohol as a teen and in her young adult years. She also cut off all relationship with her father and had no intention of ever seeing or talking to him again. Although she and I have not discussed this part, I also imagine that she wanted really bad things to happen to him, and who could blame her? After she got clean, and as part of the 12 step program she was in started making amends to others that she had hurt, seeking their forgiveness, she also came to the realization that she had hurt her parents too, maybe not as much as she had been hurt, but that she needed to reach out to them, and she did. What she also did was to set parameters around that and tell her father that what he did was wrong, and how it had hurt her, and the levels of mistrust and pain it had inflicted in her life. He in turn made a confession of guilt and was ready to do whatever was necessary to help them have a relationship again, and also knew that that might not be possible and that he was responsible for that. But she was willing to forgive and they have reconciled their relationship. That is sort of the best case scenario of the forgiveness process, and it is not one that is possible for everyone. She does not have any children and I often wonder if she did if that would have changed that outcome.

In talking about forgiveness, Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, said “we can never say, ‘I will forgive you, but I won’t have anything further to do with you.’ Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again. Without this, no man can love his enemies. The degree to which we are able to forgive determines the degree to which we are able to love our enemies.” Now I don’t want to be one to disagree with Rev. King, but here I’m going to disagree with Dr. King. As I said in the first message on forgiveness one of the myths or untruths of forgiveness is that it has to lead to reconciliation, but I don’t think that’s the case because sometimes it’s just not safe to be reconciled, and sometimes it’s not safe for either party to be reconciled. And so how do we make that distinction? Some of that comes from what we hope to accomplish in a reconciliation process and that is something that can begin with us as part of our process of giving forgiveness, and it can also begin with a person seeking forgiveness, and that former is the way it has often been done.

Forgiveness in Families

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was from Genesis as Joseph forgives his brothers.

So far as we have walked this journey of forgiveness, we have looked at what forgiveness is not, some of the reasons why we need to forgive and then last week we looked at the steps of forgiveness, if ever so briefly, and we are going to return to that today as we move onto the idea of forgiveness in families. Now the steps to forgiveness in families are not different from those to forgiving others, but the hurts we have in our families are often bigger or deeper because we have greater expectations from those we love, or whom are supposed to love us, than we do for others in our lives. And so, when there are breaches of trust or loss, and most often that’s what happens with our family hurts, they dig deeper into our lives and the stones that we carry as a result and bigger and heavier, and so I thought it necessary to try and deal with these issues specifically. But, before we get into those hurts and how we forgive them, I wanted to switch things up a bit, because while we’ve talked about how to give forgiveness we haven’t talked about how to seek forgiveness, and while that too could probably be its own message, we’re not going to spend that much time discussing it, but it is important to at least talk about because as I said just as we carry rocks around representing the hurts that others have given us, so too others carry around the rocks of hurt that have our names on them.

Rev. Adam Hamilton says that there are six words everyone needs to know to be able to keep a relationship together. The first three are hard, and that is, as we’ve been working on, “I forgive you.” But the other three may be even harder, and so we’re going to practice saying them, and that is “Please forgive me.” Can we say that together? Now while I think that’s a good start, I do disagree with him and think that there’s six other words that have to go along with this. The first of those three is “I was wrong.” Can we say that together? And the final three are “I am sorry.” Now how about we say all three of them? I wanted to practice here because it’s easier to practice it when there’s nothing on the line then saying it without practice when it really matters.  And it doesn’t matter which order you say them in, but they are the start. Just as one of the steps of giving forgiveness is to name exactly what it is that happened and why it hurt, and the same is true in seeking forgiveness. If we are truly seeking forgiveness, then we have to be able to say what we did and why it was wrong. If we cannot admit that, then we’re not actually seeking forgives, we’re just seeking to be absolved of our guilt, and those are not the same thing. This is also the not the time in which you seek to explain yourself, or make excuses. The one exception to that is if it’s to use that to say what you learned from it so you can try and not have it happen again.

Mend The Bond Torn By Pride

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Ephesians 4:25-5:2:

We continue today in our series on the gospel in Pixar looking at the movie Brave. This is the first Pixar film to star a female lead, a redheaded female at that, and it is also the first in which the entire story real centers on and focuses around two female characters, Merida and her mother Eleanor.  It is also the darkest of Pixar’s films, in that it resembles some of the fairy tales we all know, although Merida doesn’t need any gammy boy to come to her rescue, she can do things quite fine all by herself thank you very much.  Eleanor is trying to raise up Merida to be a proper princess who will be able to lead the kingdom along with her husband in strength, just as she has done. Merida, however, doesn’t want to be the person her mother wants her to be, this is another example of the sense of identity that runs throughout Pixar films. Eleanor invites the other clans and their first born sons to come and compete to claim Merida as a bride, but Merida has other plans, and first subverts the contest that is to decide who she will marry. Then she gets a witch to cast a spell to change her mother, which Merida hopes will convince her mother to change her mind on forcing Merida to get married, but instead gets her mother changed into a bear. Merida is then told that if her mother isn’t changed back to a human by sunrise of the second day that she will remain as a bear for the rest of her life. As it turns out this is not the first time this curse has been laid on the kingdom, and to overcome it, to change her fate, the witch tells Merida that she must “look inside, mend the bond torn by pride.”

I already told this story a few weeks ago, but at annual conference this year, Bishop Cynthia Feirro Harvey told a story about her husband. She kept telling him things, but he said he didn’t hear them, or was acting as if he didn’t hear them, and so, getting a little older decided to get his hearing checked out. At the end of the appointment the doctor asked him why he had come in and so he told her, and the doctor said, well you’re hearing is just fine so perhaps it’s not your hearing but your listening that’s not working. We hear but we don’t listen. Merida and her mother are encountering exactly the same problem in that instead of talking to each other, they are talking at, or around each other, or not even to each other…..  Does that seem like a familiar story? Each of them have something to say, each of them have reasons for doing what they are doing, but neither can express that to the other, perhaps because even if they do they think they won’t actually be listened to.  And there is that moment, when literally and metaphorically Merida feels like she is being stuffed into something that is too tight, that constrains her too much, that is not who she is, and for a brief moment both of them appear to let down their guards, and are going to be honest and open, but then Eleanor can’t do it, and Merida can’t do it, and they go right back to their own positions.