Ephesians
4:25-32
“Paths
Toward Forgiveness”
I have a confession to make to you this morning. No, I didn’t drive to
And you know the scene where Jesus prays for those who were
about to crucify him, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they
do.” I suppose better people than I are
inspired by that to forgive even their most bitter enemies. But it makes me think: “Well, of course Jesus could do it; he was
the Son of God. I’m not so sure I could
do it.”
As I have studied and learned and worked on forgiveness over
the last few months, however, I have found that scripture and the Christian
tradition have a lot more to offer than those few passages. And what I want to offer you this morning are
three approaches, three paths, three practices that tend to lead in the
direction of forgiveness.
Let me first once again try not to sound naïve. I know that forgiveness is not easy. I know that some people have had almost unspeakable
things done to them. And I know that
there may be that one person that it seems almost impossible to forgive. Well, you’ll eventually have to come back to
that person, but as Ann Lamott has written somewhere, when first learning
forgiveness, let’s not start with Hitler and the Nazis, okay?
So here they are—three paths toward forgiveness. There’s nothing original about them. But I do believe that one or more of them
might just change your life, if you let it.
1. Rediscovering the
Humanity of the One Who Hurt You
One counselor has put it like this: that we come to see “forgiveness not as doing
something but as discovering something—that I am [as much] like those who have
hurt me than different from them. I am
able to forgive when I discover that I am in no position to forgive. Although the experience of God’s forgiveness
may involve confession . . . and being forgiven for specific sins, at its heart
it is the recognition of my reception into the community of sinners.[1]
A different way of saying it is that when we have been
deeply hurt, we tend to things as pretty black and white: they are bad, and I am good (or at least
better than they are). Alexander
Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only it were so simple!
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil
deeds, and it were simply necessary to separate them from the rest of us and
destroy them. But the line dividing good
and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his
own heart?[2]
Jesus’ parable puts it yet another way: Each one of us is right with God only through
forgiveness. We have no place to stand
that has not been given to us by forgiveness.
What makes us think then that we can squeeze the debt out of someone
else, since our own massive debt has been marked, “Canceled by God.”
Forgiveness does not mean that we have to like the person
who has wronged us. It does not always
mean that we have to work together or have a relationship. It means acknowledging that that person is
human, just like you. “In the end,” Jack
Kornfield writes, “forgiveness simply means never putting another person out of
our heart.”[3] So here’s Path #1—try to recognize or
rediscover the humanity of the one who hurt you.
2. Making Sacred
Space for Pain, Anger and Grief
Forgiveness is blocked when we fail to deal with the strong
emotions that result from being hurt by someone. What makes us think we can forgive if we have
barely admitted that we are angry? What
makes us think we are ready to forgive if we have not cried?
Strong feelings can be scary. I remember when I first started getting in
touch with the sadness of my own life—of nieces and nephews who struggled to
get it together in life; of four grandparents who had lived just a block away,
now all gone; of my dear brother and sister going off to college when I was
just a little boy; and now my dad dead these six years. I remember telling my counselor, “It’s too
much, too big. If I start feeling that,
it will swallow me up. If I start
crying, I’ll never stop.” But she said,
“No, it’ll be all right.” And it was. Awful, but all right.
Sometimes it’s not so much the pain and anger and grief
themselves that paralyze us, but our fear of them. There’s no way around them, only through
them.
And you can’t forgive so long as you’re still running your
anger up the flagpole every day. You
can’t forgive so long as you keep this secret load of pain inside ready to dump
it one someone at a moment’s notice. And
you can’t forgive until you’ve cried your tears. And frankly, even though some people are
pretty self-conscious about it, church can be the perfect place to do
that. Here’s a poem called “Stealing
from Stephen” that I’ve shared with several of the criers in the Maynard
congregation:[4]
Sunday morning worship
I sit to the side
Stealing from Stephen
Borrowing from Paul
Mending the torn canvas
Of my faith
Longing for my
Own epiphany
I settle for a few
Sacred moments
And one blessed
Weep.
Forgiveness requires feeling our feelings, especially the
most painful ones.
3. Practicing
Kindness
My mom used to say that everything would go better if
treated with some tender loving kindness.
Man, I hated it when she said that!
And I suppose one reason I hated it is that I knew it was true. I just didn’t want things to go better enough
to treat them with tender loving kindness.
Which says, of course, that in order to forgive someone you
have to want to forgive them. Wanting to forgive someone by itself isn’t
enough to make it happen, but you can be assured that without wanting to
forgive, it isn’t going to happen.
Please don’t tell my wife and kids that I know this, but I
do know this: being right is not all
it’s cracked up to be. There are times
when being right doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Sometimes I have virtually cut myself off
from other people because they wouldn’t admit that I was right and they were
wrong. You know, some of those times I
probably was right—it doesn’t feel worth it any more. I’ve had couples sit in my office and I feel
like saying, “Do you mean to tell me you’re going to walk away from each other
because you each think you’re right?”
That’s a pretty high price to pay for being right. Now I’m not suggesting you have to be a
doormat or that it’s always wrong to stand up for yourself. But in general, a lot of the time, it’s
better to be kind than right.
There is an approach to counseling called “cognitive
therapy,” which as I understand it suggests that if we can change the way we
think about something, eventually how we feel about will change as well. And there’s another approach called
“behavioral therapy,” which suggests that if we can change how we act, how we
feel will eventually change too. I think
there’s something to both of those approaches.
If you think kind thoughts about someone long enough, eventually you’re
going to begin to have some kinder feelings toward them. And if you treat someone in a kind way,
eventually you may come to believe they deserve to be treated that way.
On your sheet in the bulletin is a little meditation that I
used every day for years. It was taped
to the desk above my computer screen. I
still use it regularly, only now I have it memorized. You begin by praying for yourself:
May I be filled with loving-kindness.
May I be well.
May I be peaceful and at ease.
May I have joy.
And then you begin to pray it, over and over, for people you
don’t love, people who have hurt you, people you’re angry at.
May ____ be filled
with loving kindness.
May ____ be well.
May ____ be peaceful and at ease.
May ____ have joy.
You see, my mom was right, of course. Simple kindness, practiced over a long period
of time, goes a long ways toward forgiveness.
[1] John
Patton, Is Human Forgiveness Possible: A
Pastoral Care Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon, 1985), 176.
[2] in
Jack Kornfield, The Art of Forgiveness,
Lovingkindness, and Peace (
[3] Kornfield, 31.
[4] James R.
Wade, “Stealing from Stephen,” Theology
Today (January 2006), 542.