Forgiveness Part Two: Forgetting

Scripture Readings

WWTW

Introduction- Grace

Last week we began this series on Forgiveness.

We talked about how no matter what we do, people are going to wound us, and chances are pretty good that we’re going to wound others.

And we ended with the action step of realizing that sometimes the most important thing for us to do is to just decide to forgive someone.

I’ve had the kind of conversation that usually follows with a bunch of people, but my favorite variation came from a member of a former church.

I loved it because her name was Grace.

Irony abounds.

But Grace would always say after I talked about deciding to forgive that she just couldn’t forgive and forget.

“I know we’re supposed to forgive and forget, but I just can’t do that.”

And you know what? Grace was right.

Of all the things we say to each other about forgiveness, forgetting can in so many ways be one of the most harmful things we can do.

In fact, I think there are two kinds of forgiving that are trouble for us.

Two Kinds of Forgetting:

Forgetting how they hurt. (Proverbs)

This is a funny text to read after last weeks!

In fact, I almost felt bad for the liturgist who I made read that passage.

Almost.

But after last week when Jesus told us to watch out for calling people a fool, the writer of Proverbs sure seems to have some thoughts to offer up about fools.

Like a dog returns to it’s vomit.

This is vivid, isn’t it?

But the writer wants us to know that there are people out there who are going to return to the same destructive behaviors over and over and over again.

In fact, I’ve lived this proverb in my own life.

This is super gross for this morning…

We have this dog named Kona.

<picture of Kona>

We got her for what was supposed to be $70 in West Virigina.

But when we adopted her, they waved the fee, which should have been clue one!

Kona has some pretty serious oddities about her personality.

She’s a big fan of just…running away.

She’s a goofball and runs in to the walls and stuff at home a lot.

And, this is gross…but from time to time Kona will go out in the back yard, and eat her own…droppings.

I know, I know. It’s gross.

But she’s a dog!

So there’s really no reasoning with her.

I have tried to sit down with her and offer a 12 point plan on why eating your own stuff is a bad plan.

But she just sits there and wags her tail at me, completely oblivious to what I’m saying or what’s going on.

There’s no changing it. That’s just what’s going to happen.

So we have to change the circumstances around it.

We have to clean up the yard a bit more frequently than perhaps we’d want to.

We have to stay outside and watch her.

We have to shorten up her leash from time to time.

We can’t change Kona.

So we have to change the circumstances.

Like a dog returns to it’s vomit...

Toxic People

We all know that person who is always, always, always, going to say the wrong thing.

We all know someone who has that knife edge to them, and just kind of rubs us wrong.

We all know someone who carries venom in their veins.

We all know people who are Philadelphia Flyers fans

(For anyone who had an over/under going on when I would pick on Flyers fans this season…week one…)

Hopefully we don’t know anyone who actually tries to eat their droppings.

But we know toxic people.

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names. —JFK

And yet, the Church often tries to avoid this topic a bit.

Case in point:

Domestic Violence Statistics

Roughly 10 million women and men are abused by an intimate partner every year. This shakes out to about 20 people per minute.

1 in 7 women and 1 in 25 men have been injured by an intimate partner.

1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men have been victims of severe physical violence.

1 in 15 children are exposed to intimate partner violence each year, and 90% of these children are eyewitnesses to this violence.

Avoiding the topic.

And what’s sad, something we need to own, is that some how the Church is more comfortable talking about dogs and vomit than they are about this kind of violence.

But we need to, and we need to make a few things clear:

If you’re being abused, get out.

If those statistics got a little too close to you, if you are part of those statistics, you need to get out of the situation.

You might have the best of intentions of changing your partner.

But actually that doesn’t always work.

Sometimes we have to change the circumstances.

And none of that is poor forgiveness!

It’s looking after you and your wellbeing.

If you’re not being abused, let’s be a safe place.

Maybe though you’re more like me, and you aren’t part of those statistics.

Then I think it’s important for us as the church to craft a safe place for our brothers and sisters.

If you are the victim of domestic violence, and you need a safe space, come see me.

If you want to help victims of domestic violence, come see me and we’ll make that available for folks.

In this room we have rooms and resources, we can help.

We can help.

We can help.

We don’t have to be there.

Look, there are toxic people out there in the world.

And we can forgive them. We really can.

But we don’t need to forgive and forget.

In fact, forgetting in that way can be toxic.

What we need to do is forgive and remember.

Like a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool returns to his folly.

But we don’t have to be there when they do.

We can change the circumstances.

We can get help.

We can work on this together.

We can remember.

Surely it is much more generous to forgive and remember than to forgive and forget. —Maria Edgeworth (Irish Novelist)

But there’s another kind of forgetting that can be trouble for us.

Forgetting how we’ve been forgiven.

Keeping score

Our NT lesson starts with Peter asking a question that every seven year old is intimately familiar with:

How often do I really need to forgive someone?

And I guess he’s worked out the math in his head, and come around to a very reasonable number.

Seven.

A couple of things about this:

I really want to know which of the disciples was annoying Peter to the point of asking this question.

My money’s on John…those two had a bit of a rivalry going.

But then can you imagine, Peter’s going to have some kind of score card to work with.

Ok I forgave you for forgetting the bread before the trip, I forgave you for laughing at me for falling in the water, and I forgave you for when you tripped me outside the temple...

But the problem is, and Jesus sees right through it, when you’re keeping a score card, you’re not really engaged in forgiving.

When you’re keeping count until you don’t have to forgive again, it’s because you’re really most interested in wrath than you are in forgiveness.

So Jesus says forgive your neighbors not seven times, but in the Greek literally “Seventy times seven times.”

This was another creative way of saying “higher than you can count.”

And as he’s want to do, Jesus has a story to go with this.

Disparity

Imagine there’s a servant who gets into some debt trouble with his master.

How much debt trouble?

10,000 Talents

Someone did some rough math based on the price of gold then and now, and came up with today’s money number.

4 trillion dollars.

One man wracked up 4 trilion dollars.

One man held the same amount of debt as the US has accumulated in 1971 (that was a hard stat to look up).

One guy owed 4 trillion dollars.

And when the King calls in the debt, the servant begs for mercy.

And the King, in a ludicrous twist in this story, forgives the debt.

4 Trillion Dollars.

Not a payment plan.

Not a loan structure.

Not a new mortgage.

Forgiven.

Gone.

Wiped.

4 trillion dollars.

But then the servant goes out in his new freedom and finds another servant.

The same servant that just had a 4 trillion dollar debt forgiven.

And he refuses to forgive a fellow servant for 100 denari.

100 Denarii

Again, I had to go take a look at what that would mean in today’s money.

The servant that had a 4 trillion dollar debt paid is throwing his brother in jail over...

$3.79.

I found that in my cup holder this morning at Dunkin.

And this dude throws his brother in jail.

He’s been forgiven such a great amount...

And yet he seems to have a very short memory.

He forgot to forgive his brother.

Everyone saw it.

What frequently goes over looked is that there are other people who are watching us.

The other servants saw what had happened, and they were greatly distressed.

When we refuse to forgive others, either because we’ve forgotten what God has forgiven in us, or just because we’d rather hold a grudge, people will notice.

If we claim to be about grace but can’t show forgiveness, the world thinks we’re hypocrites.

If we claim to be about love but seem more interested in vengeance, the world thinks we’re mean.

If we claim to have been forgiven, but can’t find our way to forgive those who have wronged us, then the world wants nothing to do with us.

Way more than the words we speak, the actions we take will be noticed by those around us in the world.

But maybe we have another problem in this story...

“Pretty Good People”

Not too infrequently, I will meet someone who has grown up in the church.

And they’ll tell me that they’re really a pretty good person!

And when I press them on what they mean by that, they seem to mean that they haven’t killed anyone.

…that’s an extremely low bar folks.

By and large, I do think that everyone here is a pretty good person.

But that doesn’t mean that we haven’t had our own debts forgiven.

Hierarchy of Sin

In our minds, we like to pretend that there’s some kind of hierarchy of sin.

Lying isn’t quite as bad as swearing at someone in traffic.

Swearing at someone in traffic isn’t quite as bad as punching someone.

Punching someone isn’t quite as bad as murder.

But two things about this:

Usually we’re the ones making the hierarchy, so we tend to make sure that our sin is slightly less bad than someone else’s.

But more important than that: There is no hierarchy.

All sin is equally horrible.

All sin is an offense to God.

All sin is an insistance that we know better than God.

All sin is separation from the life God wants for us.

And all sin, even what we might consider the smallest of sin, adds to our debt.

You and me, we’re easily 4 trillion in the red.

Even when we think we’re pretty good people.

And even though that’s true, the King forgives us all, free and clear.

Never Forget

Never forget that Christ willingly gave himself for you and your brokenness.

Never forget that God wipes the slate clean, forgiving even our deepest debts.

Never forget that there is nothing, nothing, nothing that you can do to separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

We’re not about forgive and forget around here.

We’re about forgive and remember.

Remember that we’ve been forgiven much.

And that there’s much to be forgiven in our brothers and sisters.

Forgiving is an action

Decide to Forgive

How did you do with this last week?

This one is worth putting back in our action list for this week because you really don’t get to decide once to forgive.

It’s a decision that we have to keep making over and over again.

In part because people will wound us again and again, that’s just life.

But also because we have a tendency to forget, don’t we?

Something that sounded like a great idea last Sunday morning may well have been forgotten somewhere around the 4th quarter of an exciting Steeler game.

Who do you need to forgive?

Remember that forgiveness actually has very little to do with the other person.

It has everything to do with our hearts, and what we do and don’t decide to hold on to.

If there’s a name that comes to mind when I ask “Who do you need to forgive,” that’s probably the Spirit’s prompting.

Let them go.

Let forgiveness be our decision today and always.

Leave the dogs alone

This is a video that seems to follow me on every social media platform, and I love it!

A bear shows up on a family’s porch, and a little girl has confused the bear with a puppy.

<play video>

Can I pet that dawg?

Mom knows that that particular “dog” is more harmful than good for the little girl.

Friends, if you know someone who acts like a dog who returns to it’s vomit, leave the dogs alone.

If you find yourself surrounded by toxic people, you can forgive them, because forgiveness has to do with us.

But you don’t have to be around when they come back to their toxicity.

If you find yourself in an abusive relationship, you can forgive them, because forgiveness has to do with us.

But you have to, have to, have to, find your way out.

We can help.

If you know someone who is caught in that cycle of abuse, we can help them.

Whatever it might look like, let’s leave the dogs alone.

They might come back to their destructive behaviors again and again and again.

And while we might not be able to change them,

We can certainly change our circumstances.

Set up reminders

On Friday I went with a friend to pick up a new bike for him, and then go for a ride afterwards, because that’s what you do on new bike day!

He was driving, and I had hooked up my phone to his radio to listen to some tunes.

And all of a sudden, the car was filled with the sound of my alarm, which was set to ring WAY too loud!

Fridays are my day off, and that means that usually I’m in charge of getting the boys off the bus in the afternoon.

So I have an alarm that rings every Friday at 3:40, which is exactly enough time to wake me up from whatever slumber I might be in, throw on some shoes, and get down to the bus.

You know, unless Sarah’s home that day, then the alarm is just a really loud wake up call for my friend while he’s driving.

But we have these automatic things in our lives that remind us of what might be so easy to forget.

So this week, what kind of reminder could you set up for how much God has forgiven you in Christ?

For sure, Church itself is a reminder as we gather here and have the words of affirmation spoken over us.

Maybe for you it is an alarm, something that your phone can ring out every morning to tell you that you have been forgiven by Christ.

Maybe for you it’s a sticky note on your desk in the office.

Maybe fore you it’s a weekly check in with a friend.

Whatever it might be, remember that we have been forgiven somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 trillion dollars worth of sin.

The slate is clean.

It’s done.

It’s over.

And so we have the ability to offer that forgiveness to our brothers and sisters when they wound us.

Because the world is watching.

And they need to see the forgiveness of Christ too.