The theme that our Worship Committee at UCC Valley Forge chose to guide us through this season of Lent is: Renewal. Lent is a time for reflection and for spiritual practice. So, our theme leads to an inquiry: What does your soul need for its renewal? What do we need for spiritual renewal as a community, as a society, as a world? What practices can help us exercise that renewal?

This Sunday I invite us to reflect on the practice of forgiveness. It would not at all be unusual if some of us when we’re honestly and prayerfully reflecting on what renewal could mean for our souls become aware of impediments to our spiritual well-being that are the results of hurts that we have suffered or that we have caused others. Maybe there is bitterness or resentment or rage in us because of hurts we’ve received, maybe damaging messages about ourselves or our worth that we’ve internalized, challenges to receiving love or sharing love. Or maybe there’s guilt we bear, or shame, or moral injury because of ways we’ve hurt others. These can all be things that if we imagine what it would like to be renewed in our souls, we can see that these are impediments to that renewal, these are things from which we yearn to be released.

The good news is that this release is possible for the sake of spiritual renewal. The experience and this practice of forgiveness is central to theWay of Jesus. According to Jesus and those who walk in his way, God’s true nature in God’s relationship with humanity is one of Mercy. Mercy, mercy, a holy mercy that can transform and renew our souls.

Sounds nice, right? But, ugh, it can be hard!

Several years ago, at the start of Lent when I was praying for discernment about what I could do for a Lenten practice, I realized that my heart had gotten cluttered with guilts and grievances. When I reflected on it I identified that there was some harm I had done to others that I had avoided being accountable for. At that same time there was harm that others had done to me that I also had been pushing down, which had made me in general more distrustful and cynical and judge-y.

What does Jesus have to say about this? I’ll be honest, when I asked myself this, my very first reaction was, “Oh no! Do I have to? That sounds hard!” But right on the heels of that feeling I got the message: “You can do this. It may be hard, but you can do this. And everyone will be better off for it. God will be with you.”

Okay, fine, but how? How do you go about the work of forgiveness?

A few months ago, through Advent and into the New Year, a bunch of you had a discussion group around “The Book of Forgiving” by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu, his daughter. The subtitle of the book is “The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and our World.” This is a sane and smart, faithful, helpful, and deeply wise guide to the challenges and opportunities of forgiveness.

One of the really important things this book does is address the damaging ways that forgiveness is misunderstood and misused to diminish rather than address harm that has been done, too often in ways that perpetuate abuse rather than liberate folks from abuse.

The Fourfold Path of Forgiveness that the Tutus recommend, which you can see modeled by Jesus, takes great care to recognize the harm and the consequences of the harm, and to find meaningful accountabiliy.

This is about truth and reconciliation.

When Zacchaeus in the Gospel of Luke, received the unexpected mercy of Jesus’ loving attention, despite being reviled for exploiting his people as a tax collector for the occupying Roman Empire, how did Zacchaeus respond? When he received Jesus’ loving attention, he immediately recognized the harm he had done, and he sought to be accountable – literally, with his bank account. Through this he experienced a great freedom and renewal of life that comes when we let God’s mercy transform us.

According to the experience and wisdom and research that the Tutus share in their book, it’s helpful to approach forgiveness in four steps.

Here are the four steps:

Telling the Story

Naming the Hurt

Granting Forgiveness

Renewing or Releasing the Relationship

(pg. 46)

Let me share a little more about the wisdom the Tutus share.

First, forgiveness is a process, and it is a process done from a place of safety.

The first three steps are to be done with the help of people you trust (Telling the Story; Naming the Hurt; Granting Forgiveness) and with the support of a ways of prayer that help us find comfort and strength and wisdom from a Higher Power. This process involves honoring and accepting our feelings, including anger and bitterness. Forgiveness is not something to be forced, but something that comes about often gradually through growth and care and connection.

“Forgiveness is a choice” they write. “We grow through forgiving. Forgiving is how we move from victim to hero in our story. We know we are healing when we are able to tell a new story.” (pg. 140).

When it comes to the stage of Renewing or Releasing the Relationship, Desmond and Mpho Tutu advise:

“The preference is always to renew unless there is a question of safety.

“Ask for what you need from the perpetrator in order to renew or release the relationship … an apology, an explanation, a tangible object, or to never see that person again.

“Look at your part in the conflict.

“When you renew a relationship, it is stronger for what you have been through, but it is always different.

“By renewing or releasing a relationship you free yourself from victimhood and trauma” (pg. 159).

When we are the ones who have perpetrated the harm, it’s important that we go about things so as to not do further harm in how we re-engage with the person we hurt (if at all). The world of 12-step recovery has a lot of hard-won wisdom about this. It’s important to check our motivations and to be willing to be accountable in meaningful ways. Forgiveness should never be demanded.

The process for when one has done harm also is best done in a way that relies on the safety of trusted relationships, and prayerful invitation for God to be at work on us, and a willingness to honor and accept our own feelings around the consequences of our actions, guilt, shame, anger, and so on. Most importantly it takes a willingness to bear witness to what the other person has been feeling and the consequences for the person we have harmed. It’s important that we honor where the person we’ve harmed is in their own experience of the consequences of that harm. They may not be in a place to forgive or for it to be okay for them to even be connected with us in any way. It can be damaging to force anything based on our own neediness to receive absolution. However it goes, there will also be for us our own journey in being accountable in meaningful ways, and growing to forgive ourselves and release whatever cycles of harm we’ve been participating in, and receiving to our hearts the mercy and unconditional love that God has for us.

In my Lenten experience several years ago, it just so happened that there were two people I had to apologize to, and two people I had to forgive. (In one case, by the way, it was forgiving a literal debt, money that someone owed me, but one that had moral sting to it because of lying and betrayal of trust.) What I discovered was the astonishing way that the experiences of both receiving forgiveness and offering forgiveness are connected and supportive of one another. What Jesus teaches is very profound, about a deep relationship between forgiving and receiving forgiveness, offering mercy and receiving mercy, and experiencing how that all flows from the reality of God’s mercy.

It’s very humbling to realize how much one needs mercy; and how much judgment and guilt and shame can become a cycle that captures our soul. But freedom is possible.

I’ll end with giving Desmond and Mpho Tutu the las word:

“Transformation is always possible,” they write, “We do not heal in isolation. When we reach out and connect with one another – when we tell the story, name the hurt, grant forgiveness, and renew or release the relationship – our suffering begins to transform. We don’t have to carry our pain alone. We don’t have to bind ourselves to our losses forever. Our freedom is forged in the fires of forgiving, and we grow in to more spiritually evolved people because of it. When our losses are great, the depth of our compassion for others can increase exponentially, as can our ability to use our own suffering to transform the suffering of other people. It is true that when we harm others, we harm ourselves; but it is just as true that when we help others, we also help ourselves.

Creating a world of forgiveness is a living practice.” (pg.221)

Lord knows we need it, our world needs it.

Delivered Sunday, February 25, 2024, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge