“New Light on an Old Prayer”
6.
Release and Released
Luke 15:11-32
First Presbyterian
The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
April 1, 2007
Palm/Passion Sunday
“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors…”
Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and
theologian, once said about his praying that “…as my prayer became more
attentive and inward, I had less and less to say.
I finally became completely silent…This is how it is.
To pray does not mean to listen to oneself speaking.
Prayer involves becoming silent, and being silent, and waiting until God
is heard.”
Throughout these Sundays in Lent, I have been
suggesting that the Lord’s Prayer is not what it first appears to be or
what we commonly make of it. It is
not a prayer more holy than any other. It
is not God’s favorite prayer. It
contains no miraculous power so that by its repetition we can get God to do
something. It is, instead, the core
of what Jesus heard God “saying” to him over time as he practiced silent
prayer, as he “tuned into” God’s Spirit, as the Aramaic would have it, or,
alternately, as he “set a trap” in the silence to catch the dream and drift
of God.
The Lord’s Prayer is the spiritual
direction Jesus received while praying. It
is the substance of his ministry. It
is the essence of the
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Emo Philips, writing in The Sun Magazine,
reminisces that when he was a little boy, he used to pray every night for a new
bicycle. Then he realized that God
doesn’t work that way, so he stole one and prayed for forgiveness. (1)
I think that strategy probably
is not what Jesus had in mind when he taught his disciples to pray, “Forgive
us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” It
reminds me of the character in W. H. Auden’s Christmas Oratorio who
said, “I like to sin; God likes to forgive sin; really, the world is quite
admirably arranged.”
Forgiveness is harder than that.
Can you imagine how crushing it must have been to the prodigal’s father
about whom we read today to bear the pain of his younger son’s rejection?
In demanding his share of the family inheritance and then leaving home,
the prodigal, according to the conventions of the culture of that time, declared
his father to be as good as dead to him. A
son could do no worse to his dad. Yet
the father did not allow his hurt and humiliation to harden into a wall against
his son. Instead, he hobbled day
after day down the long lane that led to the edge of his property in the hope
that his son might have come to himself and changed his mind, and because if his
son ever did round the bend in the road he wanted him to see that welcome
awaited him and not woe.
And when one day, to the father’s great joy, his
son did come home to great fanfare and festivity and his other son sulked and
screamed and berated his father for the lunacy of his love, the father forgave
him, too, and threw open his arms as wide as his heart.
Forgiveness cannot be legislated.
It only can be offered freely. The
last thing that someone who has been deeply wronged needs to hear is, “You
should forgive. You must forgive.”
And yet it also is true that hoarding and harboring our hurts hinders our
health and hampers our humanity. The
grace with which the Amish community in
One writer called the killings and the subsequent
Amish forgiveness “an unimaginable crime and an inconceivable
response.” Why inconceivable?
Because it seems so divine? Because
it is so seldom offered? But the
Amish know that if they do not practice the grace of forgiveness that their
freedom will be compromised and, in his letter to the Galatian church,
Sigmund Freud, the German founder of
psychoanalysis, said, in a memorable phrase, that “all of us are museums of
our own past.” He said that we
carry in ourselves the joys and sorrows of our childhood.
Sometimes - not always, but sometimes - our unhappiness in adulthood can
be the result of continuing “hang ups” growing out of unresolved events or
experiences in childhood or earlier in our adult years.
Freud compared our “hang ups” with a line of soldiers marching down a
road. Each of us is equipped from
the time we are infants, he said, with a certain number of soldiers.
When something happens to us, some hostility, anxiety, or betrayal, that
we do not resolve or let loose of or forgive, we “station some troops”
alongside the problem. We tie up our
energies there and so lose the use of those energies farther down the road of
our lives. That is why some people,
so pulled in and pushed down by their pasts, have little or no resources for
coping with the present. (2)
Forgiveness frees us from the unwanted tyranny of the past.
I like the way Rocco Errico puts it.
He affirms that it is healthy, in many different ways, for us to forgive.
He says that whatever mental or emotional message we send to others, we
always keep the original thought, the original picture, the original energy.
Like a camera, the indelible impression of the thought or picture or
energy is made on our brain cells first before we send it out.
The chemical, electrical, and emotional forces accumulate in us in a
matter of seconds, be they good or bad.
Errico says that what we send out to others, then,
is only a copy. If we project hate
and resentment toward others, we keep the first and authentic impression of them
within ourselves because we are the source.
The same thing holds true when we send love, forgiveness, and mercy.
It takes a great deal of energy to stir up the forces of anger and
hatred. But forgiveness causes peace
and serenity to flow in us and through us. (3)
So, then, is the practice of forgiveness selfish?
If two of the primary benefits of offering forgiveness are the
preservation of our freedom and better physical and mental health, is forgiving
someone basically a selfish act? The
answer is no, because, if we are spiritually attuned, we know that we are both
forgivers and forgiven. Someone once
described the church, at least as it should be, as “the company of forgiven
forgivers.” “Forgive us our
debts as we forgive our debtors.” We
both release others from their sins and are released from ours.
If at any time we are tempted to feel superior to someone because of the
grace we have offered them, we need only to remember that we also are sometimes
in need of being forgiven. That is
what Jesus was calling to mind in those who were bent on capitally punishing the
woman caught in adultery: “Let the one who is without sin, that is, without
the need of forgiveness, cast the first stone.”
Forgiveness is - I was going to say “a” way but I think I
safely can say “the” way - that God has provided for attaining and
nurturing peace, reconciliation, repair, and renewal both in the world and in
our own lives.
Robert Frost has a well-known poem called Mending
Wall in which Frost meets his neighbor, a fellow farmer, at the juncture of
their two farms on an early day in spring, perhaps on April 1!
The harsh winter storms of
Frost hates that the other farmer simply dredges up
the past without even thinking of its applicability to the present, saying,
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why
do they make good neighbors? Isn’t
it
Where
there are cows? But here there are
no cows.
Before
I built a wall, I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Gazing at the snow-strewn stones lying on the
ground, Frost knows, he knows at the core of his being that
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’
For Christian faith, that “something” is the
Spirit of God who blows through the whole creation in order, according to St.
Paul, to “set it free…” so that it may participate “in the
glorious liberty of the children of God.” (4)
The Spirit of God, no less for us and for the world than for the
Amish in
It was no random happenstance that Jesus paraded
into
Forgiveness does not gloss over the judgment that
is rightly rendered on sin or the hurt that has been inflicted.
It looks them squarely in the face. But,
as the Amish community reminded us so eloquently, forgiveness never forgets that
the truest and highest expression of human dignity is the restoration of
community where it has been broken. Some
of the ways in which the Amish community demonstrated its forgiveness of Charles
Carl Roberts for his killing of its children was to give some of the money that
poured in to it to the Roberts family. The
community invited Charles Roberts’ wife to the funerals of the children
because they were her loss, too. But,
most of all, it said of Marie Roberts, “We consider her to be one of us.”
As we forgive and are forgiven, we both release and
are released from the hell and hopelessness of hostility.
How good it is to be a part of a people that seeks to live as it prays: “Forgive
us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
Amen.
(1)
The Sun Magazine, April
2007, Issue 376, p. 48.
(2)
Shriver, Jr., Donald W., The
Lord’s Prayer: A Way of Life.
(3)
Errico, Rocco, Setting a Trap
for God.
(4)
Shriver, Jr., Donald W., The
Lord’s Prayer: A Way of Life.
(5)
The Reverend Stephen H. Phelps
in a sermon entitled “The Sent-Down Man” preached at First
Presbyterian Church, Jamestown, March 7, 2007, as part of a Lenten preaching
series on 2 Corinthians 12:7-10.
(6)
The Reverend Dr. Richard L.
Young in a sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church, Jamestown, March 28,
2007, as part of a Lenten preaching series on 2 Corinthians 12:7-10.
© Copyright First Presbyterian Church 2007