November 3, 2019
Last week, we celebrated
Reformation Sunday and the work of Martin Luther to reform the church based on
his study of the Bible. This study gave
him a new understanding of God based on mercy and forgiveness. We rehearse that 500-year-old story each
year, not merely to remind ourselves of our theological roots. We also remember our constant need as a
church to reform, so that we don’t live in the world without the Word – the
Word which opens our eyes to God and to each other.
This week, we celebrate All
Saints’ Sunday. We can define saints in many different ways – even in very
Lutheran ways – but I think saints are also those who see God differently and
so live in the world differently. In a
sense, this Sunday too is about reform – it is about reforming our ideas of God
and reforming our own lives.
Jesus gives us a blueprint
for this kind of reform. He lays it out
in what is referred to in the gospel of Luke, “The Sermon on the Plain.”
Jesus begins with a series of
blessings and woes. The “blessings” are
not the way he identifies the people who are going to heaven. They are rather an encouragement to those who
are struggling and who believe God is far away from them – blessed are you who
are poor; blessed are you who are hungry now; blessed are you who weep
now. Take heart! God is far closer to
you than you think!
The “woes,” on the other
hand, are not the people who are going to the other place or who are
condemned. They are those who need to
wake up. They are those who need to pay
attention. Jesus is sounding an alarm,
or as one scholar puts it, “Yikes!” If
you are rich, if you are full now, if you are laughing now – Yikes!
Why does Jesus speak this
way? Because God rarely works in the way
we think.
It is easy to think that,
when we are suffering, God is far away, that God has abandoned us, that God has
forgotten about us. The Psalms are full
of examples of this experience. The
words of Psalm 13 – “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” – sound a
recurrent theme. It is also easy to
think that, when things are going well, when our life is full of ease, that God
is close at hand, that God is blessing each step we take.
These things may very well be
true. But it’s also possible that – at
the same time – the opposite is true. Earthly
blessings are wonderful, but they should not tempt us into taking God for
granted, or presuming on God’s grace by thinking that somehow we have deserved
our good fortune or, at worst, depending on them rather than God.
On the other hand, it is
possible that when we are suffering, God is closer than we imagine. In fact, this is what the Bible says over and
over again. If it is indeed our faith
that God has come fully into our troubled world in Jesus, then we have good reason
to believe that God does not turn away from us in our suffering, but rather
comes closer to us.
Jesus began his ministry by
announcing to his home congregation – “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…” Here he does just
that. Riches come and go. Do not depend on them! Poverty is not a sign of God’s
disfavor. So, take heart!
Jesus gives us a new picture
of God and how God works in the world. He stands the way we often understand
God on its head. Then Jesus gives us
tips to cultivate, not only a new way of seeing, but a new way of living in the
world.
But I say to you that listen: Love your enemies, do
good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse
you.
It is typical for Christians to
think, “I can’t love my enemies! Jesus
is asking too much!” This is especially
true for Lutherans. We read this as an
impossible command whose aim is simply to show us how much we need God. It is not a commandment we can possibly obey,
we think, so we ask God for forgiveness each time we do not.
I believe that this is only
half right. While Lutherans are great at
proclaiming how freely God forgives our sins out of deep love for us, we are
not so good at extending that forgiveness by forgiving ourselves or by
forgiving others. This, I believe, is
where the real benefits of God’s forgiveness comes, because it is how it
becomes concrete in our lives through our actions.
Several years ago, I was
having lunch at a Panera Bread café in Madison.
I was chewing on some old grievances related to a colleague while I was
eating. Then I thought, “Chris, you
haven’t even seen this person in ten years.
It’s time to let it go.” I realized I wasn’t changing the past by
continuing to blame him, nor was I punishing him by continuing to blame him. I may have been punishing him in my imagination,
but, in actuality, I was only making myself feel miserable.
So, I began the work of
letting go the resentment I had been holding onto all that time. It didn’t happen instantaneously, but I
gradually felt less bitter toward my offender.
Not only that I felt better toward myself.
It’s not just me that
forgiveness can help. It can help
everyone. And there’s scientific evidence for it.
A few years after this, while
I was doing my clinical work in hospital chaplaincy, I heard a presentation of
a study done at Mayo Clinic. (And the second name on the study was a Lutheran
that I know!) The study found that there
is no evidence of medical benefit to believing one is forgiven by a higher
power. However, there is scientific
evidence that there is medical benefit to forgiving oneself and to forgiving
others.
I think Jesus knew this. I think he knew that blame has no healing
properties. So, continuing to blame
ourselves for our mistakes or blame others for our hurts will not result in
healing. It is only in letting go of
that blame that we can start to heal.
Even with scientific
evidence, though, it is still hard to forgive.
Perhaps we think it’s a matter of justice. Perhaps we are afraid that forgiving means
forgetting. We want to remember our
mistakes so that we don’t repeat them, or we want to remember the mistakes of
others so that they don’t repeat them, and we get hurt again.
Forgiving does not mean
forgetting. Forgiveness is not condoning
the actions of oneself or of others. It
is not saying it doesn’t matter.
Forgiveness also doesn’t mean you have to be friends with someone who
has hurt you. It doesn’t mean you can’t draw boundaries or
even seek justice.
What forgiveness means is that
you let go of your desire to punish. Our
desire to punish doesn’t change what happened.
Nor does our desire to punish actually punish the offender. It really is only punishing ourselves.
We have a difficult time
forgiving because blame arises from bad feelings, from the hurt that we feel. Blame is a form of anger that arises from
pain. We think that anger will protect
us from getting hurt again. But what it does is to keep our wounds open so that
they can’t heal.
And contrary to what many
people believe, forgiveness is a teachable skill. You might think, “Well, I’m just not a
forgiving person.” But the capacity to
forgive is not a character trait. It is
a skill that can be learned. Both the
learning of forgiveness and the doing of forgiveness is a process. I believe it is a process that begins in
prayer.
Jesus says, “But I say to you
that listen: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who
curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”
What I say is, if you can’t
forgive someone, pray for them. And if
you can’t pray for them, then pray for yourself in your inability to forgive
them.
How does prayer help? Prayer gives us a wider perspective. It helps us to drop our focus on particular
actions and see the larger situation around those events. This larger situation
may include not only the particular context in which we know this person, but
also the situation of their present life and perhaps even the situation of
their past and their childhood. This is
not to excuse their behavior, but to soften our blame.
This wide view helps put us
in the mind of God. As Jesus says further on in the Sermon on the Plain, “Be merciful, even as your Father in heaven is merciful.” We think that this is an impossible
command. How can we be like God? Yet Jesus would not teach us to do this if it
were not possible.
And – here’s the Lutheran
thing – by practicing mercy – by becoming more merciful toward ourselves and
toward those with whom we have difficulty – we will know more deeply the
astonishing, everlasting, life-changing mercy of God.
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