Bazaar United Methodist Church

Bazaar, Kansas

Sermon Text
Colossians 3:12-14
Luke 6:36-37

Radical Forgiveness

Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Colossians 3:12-14 NIV

Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate. Do not judge, and you will not be judged yourselves; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned yourselves; grant pardon, and you will be pardoned. Luke 6:36-37 Jerusalem Bible

Robert Tuttle tells the story of his children who had a rather vigorous disagreement. "Our three children," he says, "retired only to be aroused at two o'clock in the morning by a terrific thunderstorm. Hearing an unusual noise upstairs I called in to find out what was going on. A little voice answered, 'We are all in the closet forgiving each other.'"

Sometimes it is true that a little child will lead us. Forgiveness seems to be one of the concepts that is hardest for us as Christians to grasp. It doesn't matter that every week we pray the Lord's Prayer in which we pray, "and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." Forgive us as we forgive. I wonder if we pay attention to what we say in those words because I hear so many who don't think they need to forgive. Who think that forgiveness is not really a necessity for followers of Christ. Christians who believe that forgiveness is not necessary have missed the central teaching of Jesus Christ. Jesus says it repeatedly in the scripture. "And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins." (Mark 11:25) You can't be much clearer than that. When Peter asked if he should forgive someone as many as seven times, Jesus replied, "not seven times but seventy times seven times." (Matthew 18:22) In other words, an innumerable number of times.

Yet time and time again we seem to struggle to forgive. Vengeance seems to come so much more readily to us. We understand retribution. We cry out for it. We scream for what we call justice. The Old Testament eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth works for us. But when Jesus says, "forgive seventy times seven times." We don't believe it. When he says, "forgive as you have been forgiven." We get our backs up. And when he says, "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." We not only don't believe it, we get angry. We'd rather trip back to the Old Testament and do what comes naturally than to live out the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is just so much more difficult.

But there is a big problem with our desire for revenge. With our living in hatred for one another. It builds up walls between us. Walls that separate us from one another. Walls that prevent us from being in relationship. And the thing is; it gives the hated person power over you. He becomes your jailer. A jailer who imprisons you in walls that you yourself have built.
Hatred separates you from others but it also becomes a wall that separates you from God so that your ears don't hear God as clearly, your eyes don't see his hand at work, and you live a life in shades of gray rather than the vibrant, radiant life God intends for you in glorious, living color. It's as if your eyes have thick cataracts and your ears are plugged and all of life has grown dim.

Robertson McQuilkin says "The sin of unforgiveness is a cancer that destroys relationships, eats away at one's own psyche, and-worst of all-shuts us off from God's grace." What I see most often in those who won't forgive is that unforgiveness eats them alive. Unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting it to kill the other person. Unforgiveness is one of the ways that we build walls between people. And it happens in families, in neighborhoods, in communities, in states, in countries, in all kinds of ways.

You know that I grew up in Southwest Kansas. It can be a pretty dry area out there and irrigation has made it even drier. The Arkansas River has been dry since the flood in 1963 when the Army Corps of Engineers made it "safe" and Colorado dammed it up to form John Martin Reservoir so that Eastern Colorado farmers could irrigate. They let out just enough water to flow through Eastern Colorado and by the time it gets to Kansas it's dry as a bone or has gone underground. Nobody knows if it comes above ground again if it will even be following the same riverbed. As you can imagine there is a great deal of hostility between Kansas and Colorado over this. We have been to court several times. Colorado has had to pay some steep penalties. But the practice remains the same. Threats by local Kansans to blow up the dam continue and would probably have happened except that everyone knows that such a rapid loss of water would kill countless people and animals in homes and farmland downstream. It's an argument in which nobody wants to play fair or practice forgiveness. And it has been going on for years.

But the fact is that Jesus calls us not just to forgive but to a radical forgiveness. He calls us to forgive as he forgives. He calls us to be compassionate as he is compassionate. He tells us not to judge that we may not be judged. And He tells us to forgive that we too may be forgiven. I don't know about you, well, yes I do, but I need God's forgiveness. Therefore I must forgive those who have sinned against me, no matter what they have done. And forgiveness sets not only us but also the other person free to be the person God has called them to be. Let me illustrate:

A man came back to work in a place from which he had been fired several months previously. His work was superior. A fellow worker remembered how inconsistent he had been in the past and asked, "What happened to make such a difference in you?" The man told this story: "When I was in college, I was part of a fraternity initiation committee. We placed the new members in the middle of a long stretch of country road. I was to drive my car at as great a speed as possible straight at them. The challenge was for them to stand firm until a signal was given to jump out of the way. It was a dark night. I had reached one hundred miles an hour and saw their looks of terror in the headlights. The signal was given and everyone jumped clear-except one boy. I left college after that. I later married and have two children. But the look on that boy's face as I passed over him at a hundred miles an hour haunted me day and night. My work was hopelessly inconsistent. I was moody and withdrawn and finally became a problem drinker. My wife had to work to bring in the only income we had. I was drinking at home one morning when someone rang the doorbell. I opened it to find myself facing a woman who seemed strangely familiar. She sat down in our living room and told me she was the mother of the boy I had killed years before. She said that she had hated me and spent agonizing nights rehearsing ways to get revenge. Then I listened as she told me of the love and forgiveness that had come to her when she gave her heart to Christ. She said, 'I have come to let you know that I forgive you and I want you to forgive me for hating you.' I looked into her eyes that morning and I saw deep within them permission to be the kind of man I might have been had I never killed that boy. That forgiveness has changed my whole life."

Such radical forgiveness is one of the reasons I have recommended the book The Shack to you. It has to do with radical forgiveness and how it is possible to come to it even over seemingly impossible circumstances.

During the Korean War a South Korean Christian civilian was arrested by the Communists and ordered to be shot. But when the young Communist leader learned that the prisoner was in charge of an orphanage, caring for small children, he decided to spare him and kill his son instead. So they took his nineteen-year-old son and shot him in front of his father. Later, the fortunes of war changed and that same young Communist leader was captured by UN forces, tried, and condemned to death. But before his sentence could be carried out, the Christian man whose son had been killed, came and pleaded for the man's life. He declared that this Communist was young, that he really did not know what he was doing. "Give him to me and I will train him," he said. The UN forces granted his request and the father took the murderer of his son into his own home and cared for him. Today, that man, formerly a Communist, is a Christian pastor, serving Christ. This is the power of forgiving love.

Radical forgiveness is not only possible, it is essential for us as Christians. It is not easy. But it is essential. It takes practice. It is an act of will. It also, frequently, requires of us some actual, physical action. In the stories I have told, the boy's mother came and forgave the man who, as a teenager, had killed her son in a college hazing and the Korean man pled for the life of his son's murderer, then training him in the Christian life. Radical forgiveness requires radical action.

In April of 1958 a young Korean exchange student, a leader in student Christian affairs at the University of Pennsylvania, left his apartment and walked to the corner to mail a letter to his parents. When he turned from the mailbox he stepped into the path of eleven teenagers who attacked him. They beat him viciously with a blackjack and a lead pipe and when the police found him in the gutter, he was dead. All of Philadelphia cried out for vengeance. The district attorney secured legal authority to try the boys as adults so that those found guilty could be given the death penalty. Then a letter arrived from Korea. It made everyone stop and think. It was signed by the murdered boy's parents and twenty other relatives. It read in part:

"Our family has met together and we have decided to petition that the most generous treatment possible within the laws of your government be given to those who have committed this criminal action. . .In order to give evidence of our sincere hope contained in this petition, we have decided to save money to start a fund to be used for the religious, educational, vocational, and social guidance of the boys when they are released. . .We have dared to express our hope with a spirit received from the gospel of our Savior Jesus Christ who died for our sins."

Radical forgiveness followed by radical action transformed the desires of a city for revenge, made them think again and hope was offered to teenagers gone astray.

Forgiveness is love in action. Forgiving our enemies grants them the possibility of transformation. And that is extremely important for the transformation of the world.
But it is also important for our transformation. We cannot be transformed as long as we continue to hold unforgiveness in our hearts. We cannot become like Jesus when we are unforgiving. Forgiveness sets us free to live every day fully while unforgiveness binds us to the past, to anger, resentment and bitterness; in fact, it binds us to death.

Radical forgiveness is the forgiveness of Christ and it is the forgiveness that we, as followers of Christ, simply must practice. Amen.