by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given October 14, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Slouching towards forgiveness?  Well, that’s how I feel this morning—here I am, supposedly your spiritual leader, preaching this morning on forgiveness, but knowing that I’m so totally unqualified to be speaking on the topic.  I mean, I try.  But I have to admit—this is the most difficult spiritual struggle that I have, this forgiveness thing.  So every three or four years, I give this topic another shot.  Last week our Associate Minister Tom Disrud mentioned to me, “So you’re preaching on forgiveness this Sunday.”  And I responded, “I am?  Already?  I thought that sermon was in the spring!  I thought I had 5 more months to understand forgiveness.”  Oh, well.  So here I am, folks, ill-equipped, but bringing you what I’ve learned so far.  I could title this, I guess, “A Few Things I Think I’ve Perhaps Tentatively Learned About Forgiveness.”

Now if I haven’t completely disqualified myself, I’m going to proceed.  Let’s start with five basic principles.  Now some of you like to take notes, and for those of you who do, this is your chance—though I’ve got to tell you, you’ll never get to the forgiveness place cognitively: it’s a heart thing.  Nevertheless, maps, directions, can help.  So here goes.

Principle #1:  You need to take responsibility for any part you may have had in the hurtful situation.  Did you invite the pain in any way?  Did you allow it when you should have turned away from it?  Did you go back for more, when you should have known better?  I myself have the problem of going back to the same place, whether it’s a department store or relationship, to find that, sure enough, I still can’t get what I couldn’t get the last time I was there.  What’s wrong with this picture?

Principle #2:  See people for who they are, not for who you’d like them to be.  We need to understand that other people are different from ourselves, in temperament, understanding, background, etc., etc.—so why should we expect them to think and behave the way we would?  The Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh uses the word “suchness” to mean the essence or true nature of a person.  He says that if we want to live peacefully with another, we have to see and respect the suchness of that person.  He gives the example of electricity—if we are mindful of the suchness of electricity, we will not hesitate to bring it into our homes, but if we are not, we could get electrocuted.  A person is the same, he says.  If we do not know enough about the suchness of another, we can get hurt, but if we do, and we recognize and respect the limits of that person, we can benefit from the relationship.  And then finally, in this passage, he says (and I love this), “We do not expect a person always to be a flower.  We have to understand his or her garbage as well.”[1]  This reminds of the time when I returned a plant to a gardening shop and complained to the proprietor that it “stopped blooming.”  He looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Well, of course it did.  You don’t bloom all the time, either, do you?”

So back to this “suchness” concept:  we can’t expect people to be other than what they are.  Can people change?  Yes, of course.  But not because of our expectations.  Notice the signs which will tell you who people really are, and don’t dismiss those signs.  Don’t say, “He didn’t really mean to say that,” or “I’m sure that was just an oversight.”  When a leopard shows his spots, he’s a leopard—not a Labrador retriever.  Don’t try to pet him.

Principle #3:  Realize that forgiveness is not about the other person—it’s about you.  It’s not about forgetting—it’s not necessarily about reconciliation, because the other person may be absent or dead or unable to truly understand why or how you’ve been hurt.  Forgiveness is not essentially a gift to the other person, though it may be that, as well—it’s for you: it’s what is necessary for your emotional and spiritual and even physical well-being.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama tells the story of a senior monk who had been a close associate of his in Tibet, before the Chinese occupation in 1949.  At the time many Buddhist monks were killed.  Others were imprisoned for years.  They were sometimes subjected to great physical and mental hardships.  In 1962, as a gesture of goodwill, the Chinese released this monk who was close to the Dalai Lama.  The old man made his way to Dharmsala, the city in northern India where the Dalai Lama maintains the Tibetan Buddhist tradition in exile.  The two men greeted each other warmly after being apart such a long time, and the Dalai Lama said, “So, how are you, my friend?”  And the monk responded, “Physically, I am healthy.  Mentally, I am sound.  But spiritually I was often in very great danger.”  Concerned, the Dalai Lama inquired as to the nature of this spiritual danger.  The old man replied, “I was often in danger of losing compassion for my captors.”

Think about what happens to us when we cannot bring ourselves to forgive.  We become arrogant, indifferent, cold, irritable, restless, anxious, we get into obsessive thinking.  We become lonely and cut off from others.  I know these feelings well.  They are the sufferings of the closed heart.

Principle #4:  Stay with yourself and your pain.  Get under the anger to the hurt and then on down to the sadness and the grief.  This is a tough one.  You see, we want to deny the pain and the sadness—we want to push it away.  But the only way out of it is through it.  Pay attention to your body.  I try to notice how my body feels, for example, when I begin to discuss this current administration in Washington and all of the terribly wrong ways our leaders are taking this country.  When I begin to rant and rave, when my breathing goes shallow, when I become so angry and outraged that I don’t notice what’s going on with others around me, then I know I’m pretty useless as a spiritual leader—or even for that matter, as a change agent.  I need to accept that, yes, things really are this way, that this is reality, and then go ahead and breathe and grieve, and center myself, and then act appropriately to make change.

In regard to anger with another person, it’s not helpful to let your thoughts dwell on the other person.  That’s of course what we tend to do—we think of her dishonesty, his cruelty, her maliciousness, his betrayal—and the more we think about this other person who has hurt us, the more we feed our anger.  We feel the pain of the closed heart I spoke of earlier.  We don’t want to return to ourselves, for we think that the solution is outside ourselves—we think it is in blaming the other person, or getting revenge.  But it is not.  When we are deeply angry, the anger seems to consume us.  If we can sit with the anger and breathe, in meditation, we can care for ourselves, we can be with our pain.  We need not be afraid of this pain or reject it.  And what we notice is that space begins to form around our pain, and it begins to ease and let go of its grip.  The words of Lao Tzu: 

Allow yourself to yield, and

You can stay centered.

Allow yourself to bend, and

You will stay straight.

Allow yourself to be empty, and

You will be filled.

Principle #5:  Realize that forgiveness is too hard to do alone—go with intentionality, but depend on grace.  Forgiveness can be longed for and opened to.  It can be prayed for.  But it cannot be required or demanded.  Sometimes it has to be done over and over again—70 times 7, as the scripture says—because old hurts we think we’ve put away can sneak up on us with surprising force and power.  Then we have to go back to the drawing board.  Sometimes it takes a long time.  We are not bad persons because we find this difficult.  We’re just human.

Now a story about forgiveness.  You know this story—but you may not remember that it was just about a year ago, on October 2, that an intruder, Charles Roberts, backed his pickup truck into the schoolyard of the West Nickel Mines Amish school.  Inside the one-room schoolhouse were 28 students, the teacher, and three adult visitors.  It was a beautiful, clear day, and Roberts, a milk truck driver, was well known in the area.  That morning, however, he was heavily armed.  He ordered everyone in the school to lie on the floor.  Two adults dashed out the door and raced for help.  Apparently thrown off that his plan had gone awry, Roberts ordered the remaining adults and boys out of the school and nailed the door shut.  He tied the girls up, he told them that he could not forgive God and he could not forgive himself.  Before turning the gun on himself, he killed five of the girls and severely injured the other five.

This was an especially poignant incident for me because I had agreed to preach in the area on the weekend following the shooting, in a church that had lost its minister.  I didn’t know these people—how could I minister to them, I thought.  I tried to get the former minister to return, to comfort them, but he could not.  He asked me to go, and I did.  We opened the service by lighting candles for each of the five girls who had been killed, and calling the name of that girl.

The news story could have been, well, another school shooting—this one in a place of innocence and peace.  But the story very quickly shifted in emphasis—the Amish victims were behaving in a very strange way: they were forgiving the gunman.  There were no calls for retribution, no attacks on Roberts’ character.  Other neighbors were saying they hoped he was burning in hell, but the Amish said they trusted he had met a merciful God.  They sought to treat him as a fellow human being whose memory was to be respected.  Moreover, within a few hours of the shooting, members of the Amish community reached out in sympathy to his widow and to his parents.  Six days later, when most non-Amish neighbors stayed away from Roberts’ burial, the Amish were present—in fact, they were about half of the mourners present.  They hugged his family and cried together.  These people included Amish parents who had just the day before buried their own daughters. 

We were prepared for violence, for school shootings—we weren’t prepared for this kind of forgiveness.  How were they able to do this?  Well, since that time, there has been a huge amount of analysis trying to explain just that, including a new book that is recently out.[2]  Let me summarize some of those findings for you.[3] 

First of all, the Amish do not have a simplistic understanding of forgiveness.  But one thing was immediately clear—there was no indecision about their wanting to forgive.  They knew that so clearly that they could express it immediately and publicly, even if they didn’t feel that way.  Forgiveness is a part of their culture, their religious belief, and was a decided matter, long before October 2 ever occurred.

At the same time, the Amish made it clear, too, that forgiving is hard work and that deciding to forgive and expressing that desire in words are just a first step.  Many of those most closely affected by the shooting went to professional counselors and a year later, continue to work through their grief.  They know that forgiving takes time and is not a simple once-and-we’re-done project.

What exactly does forgiveness mean, then, to the Amish?  It is not pretending that the hurt wasn’t so bad.  It’s not pardon, or saying there should be no consequences for actions.  Had Charles Roberts lived, no doubt the Amish would have supported his prosecution.  For the Amish, forgiveness is about giving up—giving up your right to revenge.  Giving up your feelings of resentment, bitterness, and hatred.  Replacing these feelings with compassion towards the one who has offended.  There is a saying, some folk wisdom, from the Amish people that goes like this: “The acid of hate destroys the container that holds it.”

But still—how were they able to forgive, as they did?  When asked, these are the answers they give.  The first thing they go to is their religious belief, their theology: Jesus tells us to forgive, they said, and God expects us to forgive.  They point out Jesus’ parables on forgiveness and they cite the Lord’s Prayer.  It’s not uncommon in this area for the Amish to pray the Lord’s Prayer 8 times a day, perhaps 10 times on Sunday.  Your trespasses will be forgiven, they say, only if you forgive others.  In other words, they see their relationship to God and their relationships with other people closely bound together.  Amish forgiveness is supported by hundreds of years of living out of this theological perspective, and so their responses, which seem so bizarre to most Americans, seemed normal to them.

I have said that for the Amish, forgiveness means “giving up” certain feelings of hatred and revenge—but we need to remember that in a multitude of ways, the essence of Amish life is in giving up, in surrender.  Giving one’s self to God.  Giving up self, for the needs of the group.  The Amish dress and work, according to certain rituals and routines.  Their lives are about self-surrender.  This doesn’t make forgiving easy for the Amish.  But it does make it something that seems congruent with the rest of their living, and not an unnatural way of being, as it does in a culture that celebrates the individual and revels in getting one’s due.  And because the Amish are a close community, they all share in the pain, and their forgiveness is collective, as well.

So what does all of this say about us?  We’re not Amish, and most of us would not do well under the rules and restrictions of the group.  So we can’t just apply these lessons from the Amish too easily and broadly.  Their forgiveness grows out of their collective life, out of a theology of generosity, and out of a culture of sacrifice.  But there are a few things we can say.

One thing that is clear—and that is that people tend to be formed by the culture they adopt, the stories of that culture, and the people who surround them every day.  Think about it.  We know the lies of the popular culture—you can buy love, you can buy happiness, and it’s all about “my needs,” all about me and my family, not about the needs of the larger community.  So where in our lives are other values celebrated?  Other stories told?  Forgiveness is not a single act, it’s a way of seeing the world, a way of being.  If we want to be forgiving, perhaps we need to try to be around forgiving people.

When 13-year-old Marian said to the gunman, “Shoot me first,” and he did, and when members of her family walked over to the killer’s house with words of comfort just a few hours later, they were acting on habits formed by years upon years of cultural practice and prayer.  And now their actions there at Nickel Mines will be told around dinner tables for many generations to come, re-membering what was dis-membered, stories about the power of faith and love to respond to the greatest of tragedies with compassion and grace.

What are the stories we tell, to ourselves and to our children?  Do they come from television and video games, or where?  Who are the heroes we celebrate?  What are the images we surround ourselves with?  Forgiveness is profoundly countercultural.  But we’ve got to remember that we are not only the products of our culture, we also form our culture.  This church now has a new Peace and Justice Collaborative in our new Buchan Building.  Our children are learning a countercultural story in their Sunday School program, and adults are writing memoir and meeting together in Sustaining Circles.  We have all kinds of educational events, lectures, and readings here at this church.  We are telling a new story.  We are doing that here, together, giving one another the strength to move beyond the expected, to do more than the ordinary.  We are re-imagining our world.  I don’t know a better place to do that work, and a more faithful people to do it with.  May the grace of God guide us as we go forward.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we find that life tries us in many ways, and when we have been hurt by another, we find it difficult to forgive.  And then we hurt even more, as our stony heart closes up and refuses to let in new life.  Help us to yield, to stay centered, to bend, to become empty, that we might be filled.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

My prayer for you this day is that you will let go of all that would bind you to hurt and sorrow.  Go now in love, and go in peace.

-----------------------------------------------------