Community Church Sermons
September 11, 2005
Matthew 18:21-35
September 11th., 2001.
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy
name…”
American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 with 91
passengers on board lifts off from Boston’s Logan Airport. It is 7:59 AM.
“Thy
kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…”
8:14 AM. United Airlines Flight 175 departs Boston
with 65 passengers. Six minutes later, American Airlines Flight 77 leaves
Dulles International Airport. There are 64 people aboard.
“Give
us this day our daily bread…”
8:42 AM. United Airlines Flight 93 lifts off from
Newark Airport. 44 passengers are on board.
8:46 AM. American Flight 11 impacts the North Tower
of the World Trade Centers. 9:02 AM. United Flight 175 hits the South Tower.
9:37 AM. American Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon. 9:59 AM. The South Tower
of the World Trade Center collapses. 10:03 AM. United Flight 93 crashes to the
ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. 10:28 AM. The North Tower of the World
Trade Center falls.
“…as
we forgive those who have sinned against us.”
And
it is not the Word we want to hear.
Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but
seventy TIMES seven.”
One of the great challenges of preaching the
assigned texts of the Revised Common Lectionary is that once in a while you are
handed a scripture passage that makes you mad – or sad – or just plain upset.
Sometimes you find yourself holding a verse that speaks right into a life
experience that screams in objection to what the Bible says.
I mean, how many lives were lost on 9/11? How much
anguish have we as a nation and as individuals suffered? How dark has the world
become in the aftermath of that awful day? And yet, the verse the Bible throws
at us today is about forgiveness – and most especially, about forgiveness that
is unlimited in scope and duration.
“I tell you, not seven times, but seventy TIMES
seven.”
And yet, if you are at all like me, still unable to
even emotionally process the full tragedy of 9/11, even ONE TIME of forgiveness
would seem to be too much.
It is not easy to be a Christian. Those who think
faith solves all our problems do not know faith. Those who believe Jesus has
all the answers have not come to grips with the hard questions he poses. Those
who comfort themselves solely in the embrace of the everlasting arms do not
appreciate that sometimes God holds us in the grip of a spiritual paradox such
as the one we face today on the fourth anniversary of 9/11.
“I tell you, not seven times, but seventy TIMES
seven.”
So what are we to do with words like these in times
like this? They are easy to say and even to believe when life is good and you have
nothing to forgive. But when the wound is fresh and the pain is deep and the
injustice is greater than you can bear, what are we to do with God’s call to
forgiveness?
Perhaps it would be helpful if we just set aside the
word “forgiveness” for a while. Most of us don’t understand what it means, and
so we get terribly confused when confronted with the issue of forgiveness.
Forgiveness does not mean letting someone off the hook for an evil deed. It
does not mean overlooking the sinful behavior of an abusive parent, or a drunk
driver, or anyone else who perpetrates harm and injury. Forgiveness is not
about making excuses for unjust behavior. Forgiveness does not overlook the
need for accountability and restitution and justice. Forgiveness does not try
to pretend the pain is gone and the deed forgotten.
I wonder if you’d be willing to just suspend your
preconceived ideas about forgiveness – at least for a few minutes – and instead
think about forgiveness in another way. Think of forgiveness as the ultimate and
highest act of love.
To understand the kind of love expressed in
forgiveness, you have to stop thinking about forgiveness in terms of yourself
and your own hurt. I don’t know about you, but even as I was listening to
myself thread the litany of the Lord’s Prayer through the timeline of that
horrible day, I found myself recoiling from the part of the prayer that says, “…and
forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us.” I
found myself thinking, “That’s crazy! That’s nuts! I can NEVER forgive what
was done to us that day! The sin is too great! The hurt is too deep!”
Is that how you feel? Well, I understand. I feel
that way, too. But listen: one reason we find it so hard to forgive is because
we are starting from the wrong place. We are starting with ourselves – and the injury we carry. “HOW can
I forgive?” is the question we ask out of our pain
But Christian forgiveness does not begin there –
with ourselves. That is why, whenever the Bible talks about forgiveness, it
moves the discussion away from our own injuries and how we react to them.
Nowhere in the Bible is the call to forgive tied to the sin committed against
you. Instead, the Bible points us away from ourselves and connects us to God.
We are to forgive because God forgives. We forgive because God
forgave. Forgiveness begins with GOD!
And the picture we are given to study is the picture
of Jesus.
So the best way to think of forgiveness is by
thinking about the Lord.
We Christians believe that God was in Christ,
reconciling the world to himself. We declare in our creeds that Jesus somehow
took upon himself the sins of the whole world – sins past, present and future –
bearing them in his own body on the cross. And we believe that sin was put to
death, and that new life is offered to us and everyone through what Jesus
accomplished in his death and resurrection.
This is the story of ultimate love – of Jesus taking
our failure and turning it into triumph, of taking evil and turning it into
good, of taking brokenness and healing it. This is a kind of love that looks to
the end result of God’s will – the complete transformation of our sin-soaked
world into the Kingdom of God where there is truly justice and peace and life
for EVERYONE! It is the story of God’s saving the world.
And the key to the story coming true is forgiveness.
So this morning, I want to invite you to come to Jesus and learn.
First of all, in Jesus we discover that when we are
brought face-to-face with evil – whether at the hand of the 9/11 hijackers, the
manipulative family member, the deceitful business partner, the friend who
betrays, or even the Roman soldiers who crucify our Lord – forgiveness calls us
to keep our eyes on God’s ultimate goal. This is what is written of Jesus in
Hebrews 12:2:
“Let
us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy
that was set before him endured the cross…”
What
do you want out of life? What is your joy – your highest hope for yourself, for
your kids and grandkids, and for the world? What kind of world do you want this
world to become?
Jesus taught that God dreams about transforming the
world into the kingdom of heaven. And Jesus further taught that God has both
the desire and the power to make all things beautiful and right for His
children. The question is: do WE
believe that? And do we share that hope? Do we truly want a better life,
a better humanity, and a better world? Or do we desire only to satisfy our base
instinct for payback even if it tears our lives, our families and the world
apart?
The first step toward forgiveness is to keep your
eyes on Jesus and the high heavenly hope for humanity that is found in him.
Second, when you aim your life at the highest good,
you now have choices available besides retaliation and other destructive ways.
What am I going to do with the wrong that has been committed against me? How am
I going to keep it from becoming even more destructive than it already is? How
can I turn it toward God’s purposes of hope and healing?
Again, look at Jesus, and consider that passage from
Hebrews 12. We are taught that, for the sake of the joy – the hope – the higher
good, Jesus endured the cross…
To make the world a better place, you sometimes have
to absorb the pain of life. Those who think that Christianity is a painless way
to live have clearly not read the Bible. Every biblical hero who made a
difference in the world endured some kind of suffering along the way. In order
to reach the Promised Land ahead, they had to persevere through the pain that
came their way.
There are times when the only thing you can do to
avoid becoming as destructive as the sin committed against you is to suffer it.
But we are never called to suffer alone. The promise of our faith is that God
suffers with us, and enters the suffering, and will transform it into life!
Listen to what happened in the life of Jesus in the amazing words of
Philippians 2,verse 9:
“…he
humbled himself and became obedient even unto death on a cross. Therefore, GOD
HAS HIGHLY EXALTED HIM AND GIVEN HIM THE NAME THAT IS ABOVE EVERY NAME…”
What we
can do with our suffering – rather than turn it into destructive behavior – is
to invite God into it. And God is able to transform our suffering into good. It
was just a couple of weeks ago when one of the members of our church who lost
his wife to death said, “I don’t think I ever really understood the pain that people go through
when they lose their partner. Now I know, and I feel a special connection to
them.”
The
experience of suffering often opens our lives to deeper understanding of how
life is experienced by others. And from that understanding, we learn to love
others in ways we never could before. To endure our suffering by asking God
into it to transform it into some form of good is a second step toward
forgiveness.
And that
brings us to the third component of forgiveness – redemptive love.
My
childhood best friend – Dennis Astrella – and I used to return empty bottles to
Slattery’s Spa on the corner of Burncoat and Clark Streets in our neighborhood.
Some of the bottles were from our houses and some were from the side of the
road. We would put them in big paper bags and haul them up to Slattery’s where
we could REDEEM them for five-cents each.
Imagine
that! Discarded and empty bottles with no apparent value could be made to have value and
make a couple of little boys rich!
That’s
what forgiveness aims at – bringing those who devalue their lives through
sinful behavior to the place where they can discover value! And the place where
human beings find their value is in God.
This is
why you can never excuse sin. You can never just turn your back and say, “That’s okay.” So
forgiveness is never about letting murderers run free, or abusive people keep
on abusing, or drunk drivers keep on driving drunk. Redemptive value only comes
to us when we are helped to become accountable for our sins before God.
Only God
can forgive sinners. Our job is to guide sinners to where they can find God!
That is why we require accountability, confession and repentance.
Someone
recently asked me how you can accomplish that with suicide bombers. Well, there
are some people who sin against us who are beyond our reach. And all we can do
is trust that God will bring about justice for us. Forgiveness, remember,
starts with God.
But in the
meantime, we have to make a decision. Will we spend the rest of our lives
living out of our hurt – sometimes becoming as destructive as the sin committed
against us - or will we re-direct our lives toward things that will help us
heal?
Bud Welch
lost his daughter Julie-Marie in the Oklahoma City bombing. His life was torn
apart with anguish, and with anger. He wanted to kill Timothy McVeigh with his
own hands.
One day,
Bud happened to see on television William McVeigh – Timothy’s father. Bud was
stunned to see in William’s face the same pain he knew was etched on his own.
Both of them, he realized, had lost a child. All through the trial and
afterwards, Bud Welch watched Bill McVeigh from afar. But it was not until
three years later that he made the decision to meet the father of the man who
had killed his daughter and hundreds of others.
When they
met, the two men cried. McVeigh’s sister Jennifer was there, too. She embraced
Bud with huge sobs and held on to him for long moments. Somewhere in that
moment, Bud found himself saying, “We’re in this thing together – for the rest of our
lives.”
And so
they are.
Bud says
he can’t explain it, but since meeting Bill and Jennifer McVeigh, he feels
closer to God. The loss of Julie-Marie will never go away – he will suffer that
loss forever. But somewhere in the reaching out to two fellow pilgrims on the
road of suffering, Bud Welch has found the strength to go on.
That’s
what love does. It creates a hopeful future even in the face of terrible loss.
September
11th, 2005.
At
(current time) AM, all over the nation and around the world, men and women and
girls and boys of faith rise up in the midst of our national and personal
anguish. They lift their eyes from the rubble of that day to the face of the
One who makes all things new. And hoisting their suffering around their
shoulders, they carry it with them into the future. Not using it to destroy
further, they let the suffering teach them about redemptive love. And they go
out and love the world in Jesus’ name.
Our
Father, who art in heaven
Hallowed
be Thy name.
Thy
kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give
us this day our daily bread,
And
forgive us our sins…as we forgive those who have sinned against us.
And
lead us not into temptation,
But
deliver us from evil.
For
Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory forever!
Amen.