Our subject for reflection this morning is forgiveness. I want to honor from the outset that even just mentioning the word – Forgiveness – can bring up a lot of deep and fraught stuff, you know, pain, woundedness, guilt, shame, anger, resentment, questions of morality and justice and fairness, and deep questions about the nature of ourselves and the nature of God, as well as tremendous experiences of mercy and healing. So, I invite you to be kind to yourselves: Just take a moment to let yourself feel that unconditional love and mercy that your Creator embraces you with, as a child of God. 

To start I’m going to let us eavesdrop on a conversation about forgiveness between two thoughtful and creative human beings, Maya Angelou and bell hooks. They each have written in insightful ways about harm and healing and morality and spirituality. Maya Angelou, as you’ll hear, speaks as a Christian. bell hooks doesn’t say it here, but so you know, she considered herself to be both Christian and Buddhist, a Buddhist Christian, so that’s where she’s coming from. 

         This is from a conversation between them:

bell hooks:  I feel I’m always trying to address the question of not dividing people into oppressors and oppressed, but trying to see the potential in all of us to occupy those two poles, and knowing that we have to believe in the capacity of someone else to change towards that which is enhancing of our collective well-being. Or we just condemn people to stay in place. …

I think this is a difficult question, how we deal with the question of forgiveness. For me forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?

Maya Angelou:  I’m trying to be a Christian, and that’s hard work. I’m always amazed when somebody says, I’m a Christian. I think, already? You’ve got it already? …It’s not something that you achieve and then you sit back and say, now I’ve got it. I’m trying to be a Christian in every moment. That also brings me great joy, and of course the concomitant misery, because according to my teaching I have to admit that everybody else is a child of God—the brute, the bigot, the batterer. I have to admit it, whether he or she knows it or not. So that challenges me, and when I can get over on that, it brings me joy. 

Now, notice how what each of them says relates forgiveness to our Lenten theme of connection & re-connection. As Maya Angelou says, forgiveness comes from a connection with the truth that everyone is a child of God, and as bell hooks says, this means that everyone has the potential to change and to grow. Forgiveness, bell hooks says, also comes from a connection with the potential in all of us to be both perpetrator and victim, oppressor and oppressed – a humility that comes from recognizing the ways we need to receive forgiveness as well as to offer it. But notice as well how bell hooks is also very clear about the importance of maintaining a connection with the need for accountability for wrongdoing. Both of them have a strong sense of staying connected with the truth of one’s own experience, and of growing in one’s own identity as a child of God. 

The heart of all this is growing in our connection with God, our Holy Creator, and God’s mercy for us, while negotiating the very challenging consequences of the hurt and harm from whatever rupture in connection has caused the situation where forgiveness may be an option. 

We need God through this, because it is hard stuff, forgiveness – a fraught and challenging and uneven process, but one that holds the promise of tremendous relief and release and reconnection with one’s own source of value and power. It’s part and parcel with the doing and the becoming of being Jesus followers. As Maya Angelou puts it, the joy and misery of trying to be a Christian, moment by moment, knowing that none of us can ever just sit back self-satisfied and say “I’ve done it. I’ve arrived.”

When it comes to the challenge and opportunity of Christian forgiveness, we have to wrestle with some severe misunderstandings and misuses of forgiveness.  

         For one: Too often there is a terrible double-standard.

         Just look for who gets told they need to be forgiving, and who doesn’t.

For example, too often in situations of domestic violence, the victim gets told that they need to forgive and return to their abuser. Too often it’s a clergy person who tells her that, without caring for her safety and without turning to the abuser and holding him accountable for his actions or addressing the grievances and resentments (real or imagined) that abusive people gnaw on to justify their rage. 

It’s a double standard, who is supposed to be forgiving and who isn’t.  

Another example, a public example. Right after the massacre in the Charleston African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, reporters kept asking the survivors if they are going to forgive the killer. Now, many of them said Yes, because they are amazingly faithful followers of Jesus. But you never hear white survivors of gun violence who are professedly Christian get put on the spot publicly to forgive. And it’s fair to put anyone on the spot like that. 

So, you see the double standard I’m talking about? Forgiveness is something that is demanded from those who do not have power and privilege, but not from those who do. 

Jesus did not have this double standard, no way. 

It’s also a mistake to think that Jesus wasn’t about holding people accountable for their actions. He just does so with a heart of mercy and compassion. The Gospel reading from Matthew this morning is all about confronting someone with the reality of the harm they caused, and giving them opportunities to be accountable. But if someone refuses, after their community gives them multiple opportunities to own up to the consequences of their actions, Jesus says, they are to be treated like a “gentile” or a “tax collector.” What does this mean? It means to treat them as someone who is outside the trusted circle of the faithful. And what does that look like?

Jesus was famous for treating tax collectors with mercy and humanity. He got in trouble for it with the people who wanted to treat tax collectors like pigs. Tax collectors betrayed the Jewish people by serving as agents for the Roman occupiers – and they got rich doing it. They were traitors. But Jesus offered them mercy and humanity. And sometimes that mercy and humanity moved a tax collector to accept God’s forgiveness and follow Jesus. And when they did, they became accountable for the harm they had done – they made reparations. The chief tax collector, Zacchaeus, we are told, gave half his wealth to the poor and paid back multiple times everyone he had defrauded.

So, Jesus famously said to forgive people seven times seventy-seven times – be merciful as God is merciful – but he was also clear about holding people accountable for the harm they’ve done, and for making sure that someone who is unrepentant about the harm they’ve done is kept outside of your circle of trusted companions. To do so with forgiveness means to do so with a heart free of bitterness, and with a compassionate hope that they may one day have a change of heart and grow in maturity into their potential as children of the living God. What helps people have this change of heart, like Zacchaeus, is the experience of divine Grace. 

You see, grace is free, but it isn’t cheap. 

I’ll say it again:

Grace is free, but it is not cheap. 

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote, about the Truth and Reconciliation process after the fall of the brutal racist apartheid system in South Africa:

“Forgiving and being reconciled are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the pain, the degradation, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking, but in the end, it is worthwhile, because in the end dealing with the real situation helps to bring real healing. Spurious reconciliation can bring only spurious healing …

“In forgiving, people are not being asked to forget. On the contrary, it is important to remember, so that we should not let such atrocities happen again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously and not minimizing it; drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens to poison our entire existence.” (“No Future Without Forgiveness, 270-271).

Jesus revealed to the world that God loves us each and all unconditionally, and is there to forgive us, unconditionally. But Jesus and centuries of Christian spiritual geniuses who followed in his way make it very clear that when we accept this grace of God into our hearts, this moves us to see more clearly the harms we have done, to seek to make reparations for those harms, and it moves us, in a healing way, to be free of the bitterness in our own hearts, to be more merciful and forgiving of others. 

So, wherever you are with all of this, I sincerely pray you know and feel God’s love and God’s mercy for you as you are, for you are each and all beloved children of the Living God. 

For each of your journeys with God, I give thanks. Thanks be to God. 

(Delivered Sunday, March 19, 2023, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge)