Matthew 6:9-13
Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS
August 29, 2021
Kelly Connor was a 17 year old, newly-licensed driver in Perth, Australia, on her way to her part-time job. She remembers that day well because it changed her life. She had asked her dad for a ride to work, but he wanted to sleep in and told her she could drive herself. “I was so excited to drive myself in his car,” Kelly remembers, “It was my sister Jayne’s twelfth birthday. We were going to celebrate later that day. I was going on holiday with my friends in a few weeks. Life was wonderful. I was happy. I had so much to look forward to.”
As we’ve all probably done when feeling on top of the world, Kelly’s speed crept up while she was driving. And as she ascended a hill, she checked her rearview mirror, taking her eyes off the road for a split second. And in that split second, she accidentally hit and killed a woman named Margaret Healy as she was crossing the street.
When the police came to assist, the officer asked Kelly how fast she had been driving. She said, “I was going too fast. Probably about 45 miles an hour.”
“Do you know the speed limit?” he asked.
“35 miles per hour,” she replied.
“Then how fast were you going?” he asked.
She paused, confused. “Probably 45 miles an hour,” Kelly repeated.
The officer sighed. “What is the speed limit here?”
“35 miles per hour.”
“Then how fast were you traveling?”
Kelly didn’t know what to say. Was he asking her to lie?
“Thirty-five miles per hour?” she said.
“Good,” he responded, entering the numbers in the report.
Kelly wasn’t prosecuted in any way and her parents told her that they were never to speak of the incident again. To anyone.
But the clean-slate the officer and her parents tried to create didn't quite work. Instead, Kelly’s life fell apart in slow-motion. She lived in terror and anxiety for years, afraid the police would come for her. She had nightmares and lived with shame for years - but had no one to talk to about it. No one ever punished her, and so she punished herself. She was unable to seek forgiveness and she didn’t know how to forgive herself. For thirty years, she felt imprisoned by shame and secrets. [1]
As we near the end of our series on the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, we’re getting into some really hard stuff. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” I can scarcely think of topics more raw, difficult, nuanced, and challenging for us humans than forgiveness, temptation, and evil. When we, like Kelly, are in need of forgiveness and are cut off from the possibility of receiving it, we cannot be free. And when we have been wronged by someone else and cannot find a way to forgive them, we are similarly imprisoned. Being stuck like this - needing to forgive or be forgiven - is one of the more painful things we go through as humans.
I find it interesting that, in English, we have several different versions of this part of the prayer that Jesus taught. We say debts, trespasses, sins. The Greek is pretty clearly debts in Matthew’s gospel. In Luke’s the best translation might be “forgive us our sins, for we forgive those who are indebted to us.” “Trespasses” came into the picture later much later, but scholars generally agree that any of these three English words are faithful translations of what Jesus was trying to communicate.
Though these three - debts, sins, trespasses - definitely have differences, the thing that seems to hold them together is the plea that holds them together: “forgive us.” We can feel that desperation in Kelly’s story, can’t we? My guess is all of us know that sickening feeling of being trapped by the feeling that we can’t be forgiven. And we also know what it feels like to be stuck - unable to forgive someone who has done us wrong.
I’d like to remove the phrase “forgive and forget” from our shared vocabulary. Because we all know it’s not that simple. Forgiving isn’t about forgetting. If only it were that easy. Instead, forgiveness is much more complex than that. Last year, our adult Sunday School class read The Book of Forgiving by Desmond Tutu. That’s where I found the story about Kelly. If forgiveness is something you want to explore more, I can’t recommend this book enough.
Again and again, as I’ve talked with people over the years who are struggling to forgive someone else, they beat themselves up because they can’t forget what someone has done to them. Or they can’t bear to be in relationship with them any more. Or the person they need to forgive, or seek forgiveness from, is no longer in this world. Archbishop Tutu walks us through each of these concerns and reminds us that we forgive others not for their sake, but for our own sake. In forgiving, we find freedom for ourselves. And once we’ve forgiven another, it doesn’t mean we just forget and blissfully slip into a healed relationship with them. At the end of the forgiveness process, we have to decide whether we wish to renew the relationship - which can only be done if the person who has caused harm is willing to act differently - OR whether we need to release the relationship and be finished with it. [3]
Forgiveness doesn’t make things simple. Instead, it is a path to freedom. We cannot truly forgive if we just let something go again and again. That just perpetuates the problem and leads to resentment, not freedom. Instead, forgiveness is a process of recognizing that something that happened in the past is significantly affecting our present….and, therefore, shaping our future. Forgiveness is release from that past and an invitation to move into a new future that is unbound from that past.
“Forgive our sins, O God, as we forgive those who sin against us.” It’s a dance of needing and giving forgiveness. We are able to step onto the dancefloor only because we’ve known the forgiveness found in Christ. We’ve experienced the grace of a God who pursues us relentlessly in love, even when we’re sure we don’t deserve it. We are able to join the psalmist in calling out from the depths, “forgive us!” with the faith of our ancestors, hoping that God can free us for new life once again.
Whew.
This part of the prayer is a lot, friends, and we’re not even done with it yet! I could easily preach another entire sermon on the second part of today’s portion, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Don’t worry. I’m NOT going to preach a double-header. I’m just going to note two small-but-big things:
First, I know a lot of people don’t like this part of the prayer because we get very uncomfortable with the idea of God leading us into any kind of trial, tribulation, or temptation. I searched high and low, trying to find some way to let God off the hook and create some version of God that would never do this to us. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any easy answers. Instead, I found stories like Jesus being tempted in the wilderness and Job being tested for funsies. All of this is to say: I don’t have easy answers about the nature of God’s agency but I do think HUMANS have oftentimes experienced God as one who puts us to the test. That doesn’t mean, incidentally, that God is actually doing that. It just means we humans have explained the difficulties in our lives in that way. And so I’m not surprised to see that Jesus included this in his prayer. After all, this is the pleading part of the prayer, isn’t it? Save us, God. Help us, God, Forgive us, God. Deliver us, God.
Deliver us from evil, God. It’s a big plea. It’s the plea of a person who has lived long enough to know that there is evil in the world. Jesus doesn’t say where evil comes from or go into any detail about it at all. But Jesus recognizes that it exists. That there are forces for good and forces for ill. And although Jesus doesn’t give us pat answers about what to do with evil, Jesus models for us that there’s one thing we can do in the face of evil: and that’s pray to God to deliver us from it.
We may not have had time today to deal with this whole portion of the prayer responsibly. I hope you’ll forgive me (see what I did there?). Next week, though, we’re going to have time for your QUESTIONS. Not just about this prayer, but about prayer in general. What have you always wondered but never had a chance to ask? What challenges you in your prayer life these days? I’m hoping to spend the whole sermon time in a Q&A about prayer, so I’m really looking forward to your questions. You’ve got a card in your bulletin and I invite you to share your questions there (don’t forget to add your name and be sure to let me know if you do NOT want me to share your name with the congregation). If you’re on Zoom, Janet should be dropping a link into the chat. You can click that and share your questions there.
I’ll give you a few minutes now to write down your questions. You can drop them in the plate during the offering, fill out the form now online, or e-mail me anytime before Tuesday if you need more time to reflect.
NOTES:
[1] Story from The Book of Forgiving by Desmond Tutu, pages 170-173.
[2] Ibid., 53
[3] Ibid., 147.
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