My friend, Cathy, has written a beautiful sermon that's she's delivering at her church today. Her congregation gets to hear the story of Joseph forgiving his brothers (Genesis 45), and the story of Jesus' encounter with the Canaanite woman (Matthew 15:21 ->). (These days, I am the Canaanite woman, pleading with Jesus to heal my daughter, too, who has been having a difficult time of late -- if you have any spare prayers, I'd be grateful.) I'd like to be in Cathy's church, to hear her share with her Christian community. What she says about spending time in silence with God, the ground of our being, is so true. Enjoy.
Forgiveness
Cathy Coulter, RN, BScN, Parish Nurse
Not everyone that
comes to church has grown up hearing the stories of the Hebrew Scriptures, but
chances are they know the story of Joseph and the amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Here’s a quick synopsis: Joseph was the favoured child among the twelve sons
and one daughter of Jacob. His jealous brothers sold him into slavery to a
caravan going to Egypt. In Egypt Joseph experienced suffering and adventure but
eventually ended up finding favour with the Pharaoh and gaining a position of
power. When famine spread throughout every country, Jacob’s sons came to Egypt
to look for food and Joseph recognized his brothers and finally revealed
himself to them as we heard in the reading this morning. It’s a really great
story with twists and turns that I’d forgotten about and I encourage you to
read it again for yourselves.
Our scripture
passage today is dramatic. Think of the emotion of that moment. Joseph had been
ripped from his family and his home and here were the brothers that had done
it. We expect Joseph to harbour anger and thoughts of revenge. But Joseph
forgave his brothers with a graciousness that turned their world upside down.
How about Jesus’
response to the Canaanite woman in the Matthew gospel? Was his response as
welcome and gracious as Joseph’s? A Canaanite woman seeks out Jesus to beg him
to save her daughter and Jesus says in effect, “Nope. You’re not good enough.” Jesus has taken
his disciples away for a rest and that rest gets interrupted by this demanding
woman. Who hasn’t been in this situation? You’re just about to have a break or
settle into something you enjoy and you’re interrupted by someone’s demands.
You’re annoyed. You ignore them, like Jesus did initially, or feel like saying
to them, “I can only please one person a day. Today’s not your day. Tomorrow’s
not looking good either.” But the woman has the courage to persist and use her
wits to counter Jesus’ argument that only the Jews should receive his healing.
Jesus finally shows graciousness at this point. He hears the woman. He changes
his mind.
Does he admit he
made a mistake? Not in our scripture reading, and likely not in traditional
theology. But I like to think about Jesus, not as some sanitized, sinless saint,
but also as a human being who has the vulnerability to admit he was wrong and
change his actions accordingly.
How I want to see myself is how I see Jesus once
the woman has schooled him with her quick witted reply to his protests… “Even
the dogs get the crumbs”. How often I react when I’m caught out in bad behaviour
by feeling embarrassed and defensive and “double down” to prove I’m in the
right. But Jesus softens and changes his attitude. He shows the woman respect, hearing
her and praising her for her faithfulness. And, best of all, he sends his
healing energy to the Canaanite woman’s daughter.
Two stories this
morning. One of forgiving and one of admitting making a mistake. We need to
practice both of these actions to bring peace into our lives and our world. But
how difficult forgiving and admitting mistakes are for us.
Forgiveness is a
mysterious process to me. It’s not something we can summon up with will power.
We can say with our heads, “I forgive you,” but we can’t force our hearts. I
don’t know if it’s something we can practice and work on, or if it is more to
do with God’s grace working on and healing our hearts. It doesn’t happen all at
once, but you’ll know when you’ve truly forgiven someone. I’ve tried to figure
out how to express the feeling, the knowing, but I can’t, other than to say a
bad feeling is replaced by a feeling of love. We can’t force ourselves to feel
forgiveness but I wonder if the first step is wanting to forgive. Wanting to
have our eyes opened to the other’s humanity like Jesus and wanting to find
gratitude like Joseph.
And what about
admitting we’ve made a mistake? This can be excruciating, if we’re honest with
ourselves. I call it my cringe-worthy moments. When, after my blustering and
protesting and telling friends my side of the story to prove I had every reason
to act (or not act) or say what I did…when I can finally admit to myself that I
behaved badly or acted stupidly, or spoke wrongly, I feel an inward cringing
that I find really hard to take. Do others ever experience this? That terrible
feeling of cringing embarrassment?
I think I’m not
alone because there is an epidemic of being right at all costs. I’m sure many
relationships end because both parties insist they are in the right. Marriage
can be a battle ground of two people being right. Like the old joke goes, I
married Mr. Right. I didn’t know his first name was Always. The same joke can
be told about Mrs. Right. A self-help talk on the internet is titled, “People
Would Rather Die than Give up Being Right.” The classic, pathological example
of this is the current leader in the country to the south never admitting he is
wrong.
A really nice
little book about this kind of thing that I found surprisingly useful is the
classic “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” by Richard Carlson with the subtitle “And
it’s All Small Stuff”. One of his quotes is, “Choose to be kind over being
right and you’ll be right every time.”
So it’s not easy
to admit we’re wrong. And it’s not easy to forgive. And I think that it is
almost impossible to do either fully without two conditions. These are the two conditions for being able
to forgive and being able to admit we’ve made a mistake. The first is we have
to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. While forgiving may seem magnanimous, in
reality, true forgiveness is hard because it means we leave ourselves
vulnerable to being hurt again. Think about this for a minute. Even if you
never see the other person again, to forgive you must drop the wall that you put
up to protect yourself, and that is a vulnerable place to be, but the only
place from which you can live a whole hearted life.
And of course, to
admit we’ve made a mistake is to be vulnerable. It is to admit we are not
perfect, and perhaps, like me, feel some uncomfortable feelings.
The second
condition to be able to forgive and admit we’ve made a mistake is really the
only condition because we can’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable without it.
This condition is knowing we are grounded in that which created us and sustains
us. In our tradition we call that Love. We call that God. We need to know in
our hearts, in the very core of being, that we are okay as we are, loved as we
are, not required to pass a worthiness test. That there is a purpose and a
rightness to our very specific being in the world right here and now. If we
don’t experience this sense of okayness and are not grounded in that sense of
being loved, it will be impossible to become vulnerable. It will be impossible
to forgive and allow someone who has hurt us back into our heart, or to admit
we are flawed and imperfect and (God forbid!) wrong about something. It will be
impossible because without that sense of groundedness it will feel like we are
falling, with our feet swept out from under us. It will feel like we are dying.
People would rather die than give up being right.
Jesus said over
and over, in his words and in his life, you have to die before you can live.
Sometimes life circumstances force us to be vulnerable. And then we fall, and
that is where God begins to reconstruct our hearts. But we can also get a head
start on the heart reconstruction that gives us that sense of ultimate security,
and allow God to work on our hearts with prayer, particularly contemplative
prayer when we stop doing and learn to sit in the presence of the Holy.
Until we come to
know God as the ground of our being, we experience too much anxiety about
protecting ourselves and making sure we don’t slip up. But when we sit in
intentional silence, there is no hiding from ourselves, no pretending that we
are better than we are, or covering up because we think we are worse than we
are. In silence we can’t pretend we are in control and slowly and gently we
begin to relax into that which is holding us. Into who is holding and always
has been. And always will be. Practice sitting in silence every day. Start with
5 minutes. Then 10. Then 20. And see your life change.
What two betters
examples do we have of people who lived grounded in the love of God than Joseph
and Jesus? Look at the rest of the stories of their lives. It is really
profound.
So now I want to
ask you, who in your life are you estranged from, or have a strained
relationship with? Are you ready to think about forgiveness?
A few years ago I
spoke here about a vulnerable letter I wrote to my cousin when our relationship
had been fractured. That was the talk that I got the most feedback about ever.
One woman told me that after I spoke she went home and phoned her son whom she
hadn’t spoken to for two years. Well, ever since then I was thinking about
another letter I needed to write for another relationship that I had
deliberately let go, but never felt right about. This was a friend that I had
shared many important life experiences with when we were in our twenties. But I
did not relate to the direction her life took after that. It seemed not to
share many of the values that were important to me and I grew increasingly
uncomfortable whenever we got together until finally I just kind of dropped
her. But it niggled and niggled and I could never move on. It took years, maybe
ten years until I was ready to try to find some closure and I did that this
spring, writing her a letter over three stints in a coffee shop. The letter I
ended up writing took me by surprise because through it I worked out why I was
so uncomfortable with her life choices. I had been jealous. I was not secure in
my own choices and felt I suffered in comparison. My wobbly self-esteem took
the form of judging her harshly but what I worked out in the letter, now that I
am more in that place I mentioned of feeling grounded, was that I actually
behaved badly towards her. It turned out to be a letter of confession and
apology.
When I came home
from the coffee shop after I was done, I felt really buzzed, like the decaf
coffee I’d ordered had been caffeinated. But I felt really good. Really happy
with the letter. It was a good energy, and the rest of that day I turned to a
big job I’d been poking away at and that was cleaning out the basement. And my
goodness, did I clean out that basement! I couldn’t believe it when I was done.
I honestly felt a surge of power and energy that I can only explain by the
release of admitting I made a mistake and asking for forgiveness, and for forgiving
my friend as well.
Annie Dillard
writes: “On the whole, I do not find
Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does
anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as
I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? ... It is madness to wear ladies’
straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.
Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to
our pews…. ”
There is power in
this God of ours. God is the rock on which we stand. God is the wind beneath
our wings. God is the great dissolver, the great heart reconstructor. God gives
us the power to forgive and ask for forgiveness and even clean our basements.
Let us pray.
God of Joseph and
Jesus, thank you for the gift of life! Thank you for the gifts of the heart.
Give us courage and grace to forgive and be forgiven.
Amen
I have a lot on my plate these days:
