Texts: Psalm 130; Matthew 6: 5-13
Forgive Us Our Trespasses (Different Ways to Pray, Part V)
I’ve been trying to get down,
To the heart of the matter,
But the flesh it gets weak,
And the ashes will scatter,
But I think it’s about
Forgiveness…Forgiveness.
-Don Henley, “The Heart of the Matter”
Those are the words that close Don Henley’s 1989 album, The End of the Innocence, a reflective and melancholy masterpiece that pays revisiting. I cite them because I too have been trying to get down to the heart of the matter. Throughout the late summer and the fall, I’ve been circling around the theme of prayer, returning to it like a moth to the light of the moon. Back in September we spent a few weeks thinking about the Lord’s Prayer, thinking about the meaning of the words that we repeat here in the Meetinghouse every week. We paused over words and phrases that bear important meanings, like that first word, “our,” or words that can call up questions, like the second word, “Father,” or phrases, like “Give us this day or daily bread.” But today, I want to bring us back around to the heart of the matter, to the very heart of the prayer, when we arrive at those arresting and heartbreaking and confounding words: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
I confess to some trepidation about doing so. There’s so much in the world that feels overwhelming just now, whether public displays of violence, cruel and inhumane legal policies or ethical turpitude among so many of our national and international leaders. We might do better to talk about justice than about reconciliation, about a public reckoning rather than forgiveness. And then there’s the tangle of hurts and regrets that make up our inner lives, the things we carry from our marriages and families, our workplaces and our friendships. It can all feel so contorted, so impossible to sort through. Even so, we say those words about forgiveness every single week. “Forgive us, as we forgive.” Might they have some wisdom to offer just now?
My wager is that they do. I can’t say everything about forgiveness this morning, but I’ll try to say a little. What I’d like to do first of all is to frame the work of forgiveness as a form of prayer, which is to say, a way of encountering God. One of the most common forms of prayer is the prayer of confession, prayers that plead for forgiveness. Sometimes we’re in need of it, and sometimes we are in a position to offer it. But there are few moments in life that expose the core of our humanity the way that forgiveness does. To find ourselves in the wrong, and to have to say, “forgive me,” can be one of the more difficult positions we find ourselves facing throughout our lives. It’s embarrassing. It’s humiliating. And yet it’s also essential to our growth as human beings. So too, to have been wronged, and to be confronted with the dilemma of whether to forgive another, or even how to forgive another – this too exposes the raw and contradictory depths of our experience. It forces us to acknowledge that beneath our armor, we’ve truly been wounded. There’s something within that process that suggests an attitude and posture of prayer, whether we’re directly addressing God or not.
Here’s what I mean: Insofar as we touch the vulnerable core of our existence in such moments, and insofar as we’re exposed to the vulnerable core of another, or of several human beings in such a moment, we’ve already begun to pray. That’s because God is present to us most especially in those depths of experience, where we truly encounter another person. It might be that praying about forgiveness helps to move us closer to actually offering it. But it might also be that practicing forgiveness is one of the deepest forms of prayer available to us. That’s because the work of forgiveness takes us directly to the heart of the matter, which is to say, the heart of who we are as human beings.
*****
Before proceeding any further, it’s important to address the question of terminology in the prayer. Just what, in the Lord’s Prayer, is the offense for which we’re offering, or being offered, forgiveness? Are we being forgiven our trespasses? Or is it our debts that are being forgiven? It’s a point of confusion every time we enter a different worship space, or anytime a visitor arrives here for the first time. The question arises: which way will they say it – debts and debtors, or trespasses? Which raises the question of where the difference comes from, and whether one is better than the other.
I confess I like them both, though for different reasons. They both have their origins within the Bible. But in both versions of the Lord’s Prayer, found in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels, the word that’s used is an economic term: opheilema, debt. And that is powerfully significant. It means that the prayer has to do, at its most literal level, with money, and being forgiven the debts that we owe, and that others owe us. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Jesus has a lot to say about money in the pages of Scripture – he has far more to say about the power of money, for example, than he does about the power of sex. The forgiveness of debt is a theme found throughout the Hebrew Bible as well, where usury, charging exorbitant interest on loans, is roundly condemned. I suspect many churches avoid saying “forgive us our debts” because of unspoken economic assumptions. On one hand, debt is something we’re ashamed of if we have it, and so we prefer not to speak about it. On the other hand, the forgiveness of debt challenges some of our most cherished economic beliefs. Forgive debt? We don’t forgive debt – we receive payments on it, and hopefully at a profitable interest rate. Then we defend the practice as helping to instill responsibility. That’s why I think it’s healthy to use the language of debt when we pray the Lord’s Prayer. It challenges us! Debt forgiveness is a theme with a deep theological pedigree. The Lord’s Prayer gives us license to talk about debt relief as a theological issue, and not simply an economic one.
But then there are the words we use for the Lord’s Prayer here at FCCOL – forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. That too is biblical. In Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, immediately after the prayer itself ends, Jesus continues to talk about forgiveness, using the word “trespasses” or in Greek, paraptoma. It means a false step. And that word too has a powerful resonance, connoting the ways that we too often violate the boundaries or integrity of others with our actions. It could be a promise, or a sacred trust. It could be the boundaries of a relationship. Or it could be something far more powerful, degrading the freedom, autonomy, and well being of others with cruel words, spiteful actions, or worse yet, with bodily harm. Then, as now, those are pervasive realities within the world, and I like that the words we speak in the Lord’s Prayer Sunday by Sunday names that reality. And so debt and debtors? Trespasses? Both words are necessary. Both valences are helpful.
*****
More than debts and transgressions, however, it’s the preceding word, “forgive,” that proves to be the true stumbling block. It is one of the most frequently occurring themes in all of Scripture, and so it would seem that there’s little to say about it, except that followers of Jesus are required to practice forgiveness. But are we? Aren’t there limits that we must acknowledge as responsible and thoughtful people?
Most of us, when wronged once, are quite able to forgive, particularly if the offense isn’t overwhelming, or if there’s some kind of remorse on the part of the offender. That much we can do. But what about repeated, and chronic, offenses? What about someone that keeps on violating, that keeps on offending or hurting? Is there a limit to the number of times we should forgive? We need only think of survivors of domestic violence or sexual abuse – do we not risk greater harm by urging victims to forgive the perpetrators of violence rather than holding them responsible for their actions? I suspect a good many ministers and other well meaning confidants have much to answer for in counseling a hasty forgiveness. I am not saying that perpetrators should never be forgiven – only that calls for forgiveness can often be premature. There are times that withholding forgiveness is probably the most loving thing we can do.
And then this question: aren’t there acts that can’t and shouldn’t be forgiven? When a gunman shot and killed nine members of the Mother Emmanuel Congregation in Charleston, some members of that community quickly declared their forgiveness toward the killer. I continue to be profoundly moved by that offer of forgiveness. And yet when a number of us visited Mother Emmanuel several years ago, one leader of the church told us in no uncertain terms that the offer of forgiveness wasn’t representative of the entire congregation, and that he himself believed it was the wrong thing to do. Maybe God can forgive, but I can’t and won’t, he told us. For him, it was morally irresponsible to forgive something so heinous, and something that had such a long and painful legacy within the United States. For him, forgiveness absolved the killer, and the country, of responsibility for such violence.
He has a point. Actually he has several points. Accepting responsibility is an all-important component of forgiveness. When the offending party won’t accept responsibility for an offense, it does short circuit the process, leaving those who have been wronged to make some difficult choices. One is to categorically forgive, so as not to hold onto the anger and pain that would otherwise poison their souls. But another faithful response is represented by that church leader – to acknowledge the enormity of what has happened, and to reserve forgiveness for God alone. That response might also extend toward situations where we are afflicted from afar by those with whom we have no personal relationship. There are times when the best we can do is to affirm that we will not allow ourselves to be defined or controlled by the actions of another. After that, we must simply walk away, and trust God to do the rest. That too can be a faithful response.
Even amidst all of the Bible’s admonitions to practice forgiveness, it’s a topic that defies tidy ethical formulations. And so if forgiveness is at the heart of the Lord’s Prayer, if forgiveness is truly the heart of the matter, and if it is such a vexing issue, what, finally, are we to say about it? Better still, how are we to practice such a thing as forgiveness?
*****
If I had to distill it, I’d say that forgiveness comes down to mending relationships that have been ruptured or broken, or somehow overcoming a powerful rift, whether between God and oneself, or between persons or groups of people. Forgiveness isn’t about indifference, or ignoring an offense. It doesn’t preclude consequences, or reparations for the harm that was inflicted. Nor is it about forgetting what occurred. Forgiveness means recognizing what happened, remembering what happened, and then committing to work through it together.
Above all, though, forgiveness entails a recognition of one’s own frailty, and an empathy for the humanity of the other. Perhaps that’s why the prayer speaks of our own trespasses first of all. Forgive us our trespasses, we say. Only after that does the prayer speak of forgiving another. Even if we’re the ones who have been wronged, doesn’t the work of forgiveness entail self-knowledge on our parts, and an awareness of all the ways we may have inflicted harm, or have the capacity to do so?
One of the best examples of this that I know comes from a recent children’s film, called How to Train Your Dragon. It’s a parable about all the intractable conflicts that exist or have ever existed in the world, and how we’re somehow drawn to participate in them, without a lot of conscious reflection. Fearsome dragons attack the villagers on a small island, and the young are taught to respond in kind – to hunt the dragons, and if possible, to kill them. A young boy in the film dreams of doing just that. He prepares for it, and at last his moment comes. After a pitched battle during an attack, the boy fells a dragon and he is exultant. He stands alongside of it, and he shouts in victory, “I did this!” Except then he sees the creature, and it’s hurting, and not as scary as before, and now all he can see is the damage he’s done and the pain that he’s caused. “I did this!” becomes a cry of anguish. “I…did…this.”
It’s a parable of course, but is that not one of the preconditions of forgiveness? Is it not the admission that perhaps we’re not as right as we thought we were, and that the person or persons with whom we experience a rift are, at root, frail and vulnerable people like us? In the flow of the prayer, “I did this,” leads us finally to say, “and so it is that I can extend mercy to another.” It is such an understanding of the humanity of one’s adversaries that makes it possible to entertain the idea of living with them as fellow human beings.
Some of you may remember George Saadeh and Rami Elhanan. We visit with them every year on our Tree of Life journeys, and they’ve visited us here in Old Lyme to share the journey of forgiveness that they’ve embarked upon. George is a Palestinian, a teacher and school principal who lost his daughter when the Israeli military ambushed his car, loading it with bullets. Rami is an Israeli, an artist who lost his daughter when a Palestinian detonated a bomb on a Jerusalem tram. They have every reason to despise one another, or at the very least, to distrust one another. And yet they find the strength to travel together, to tell their stories to visitors, and to affirm the power of a reconciling forgiveness, even amidst the pain that they still carry. The wounds are deep, and both admit to a desire for vengeance. Nothing they do can ever bring back their daughters. But there’s something beautiful about seeing these two men embrace, committing to a different way, affirming, for themselves and for others, “This is my brother. This is my friend.”
There’s more to say, and I’m running out of time to say it. But George and Rami’s example lead me back to Jesus. At a certain point in Luke’s Gospel, Peter wishes to know what we all wish to know: what are the limits of forgiveness? He tries to set a number, like a moral accountant. “Should we forgive as many as seven times?” he asks. “Not seven times,” Jesus replies, “but seventy times seven.” What he’s saying is that the work of forgiveness is a constant struggle, a continual process that knows no finite bounds. It can’t be quantified, or tallied on a ledger sheet. You can’t just do it, and then walk away. I suspect George and Rami know that well. I suspect that everyone who has engaged in the hard work of forgiveness knows that it’s an infinite process. What Jesus is saying is that forgiveness is an attitude or strategy for being within the world that is something like a loving partnership with a friend or spouse. It takes commitment. How many times must we say I love you to our children, our parents, our spouses, in order for it to sink in? Seven times? No, I tell you, seventy times seven, which is to say, for the rest of your lives. So it is with forgiveness.
It’s a hard thing to do, forgiveness, maybe one of the hardest things. There are legitimate questions about the timing of it. But without forgiveness, there’s no moving on. Without forgiveness we stay stuck. How many marriages, how many families, how many friendships, how many cultures and groups have been wrecked because of an inability or unwillingness to forgive. No one said that it was easy, least of all Jesus. But it is the heart of the matter.
