Forgiveness

November 25, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Trying to preach on something like forgiveness is a real preacher-trap. It’s one of those words, like love and truth and sweetness, that can so easily get reduced to the level of Hallmark cards.

There’s a story about President Cal Coolidge that comes to mind. He was called “Silent Cal” because he spoke little and seldom. He returned home from church one day and his wife said,”How was church?”

“Fine.”

“What did the preacher talk about?”

“Sin.”

“What did he say?”

“He’s against it.”

Forgiveness is one of those topics and I have this fear that some of you are going to go home today and someone will ask you what did preacher talk about and you’ll say forgiveness, and he’s for it. So if you want to cut to the chase and get a Cliff Notes version of the sermon, that’s it. It’s about forgiveness and I’m for it.

But forgiveness is not only a tricky thing, it’s a word and a concept that is more foreign to most of our worlds than we seem to be aware of. And before going too far into forgiveness, I need to say the point in life is not learning how to forgive everyone you know over and over, day after day. The point in life is learning to associate with the kind of people and to have the kind of relationships that you don’t have to forgive over and over, day after day.

Still, we mess up – or in religious jargon, we sin. I’m going to be using more religious jargon this morning than I usually do, and it’s worth talking about why. This word forgiveness seems to come primarily from Western religion and almost nowhere else. It’s not a Buddhist concept. The notion in Buddhism that you need to be forgiven shows that you’re suffering under an illusion that you need to be freed from. But in Western religion, it’s pretty powerful stuff.

It’s like the concept of sin. The word sin, which I think is really a good word, comes from an ancient Hebrew term that was actually an archery term. It meant “to miss the mark.” So when we use it in religion, it means that we’ve missed the mark in a bigger way. We’ve missed the mark in that we’ve missed living as the kind of person we should have, establishing relationships at the level that’s worthy of us and worthy of the other person. We’ve missed that kind of mark.

Nevertheless, the problem for an immense number in our society, not just most people here, is how do you find forgiveness when the notion of a Heavenly Father is no longer either coherent or compelling for you? How do you find forgiveness without a forgiver? In the twentieth century, the role of hearing confession and granting absolution for sins, to put it that way, that role was really taken over in our society from religion by psychology. Even ministers and priests went to see their shrinks to get forgiven rather than going to see each other.

It’s an often told story that if you have a problem with alcohol addiction or drug addiction, the last person on earth you want to tell is usually your priest and the last place that you feel comfortable saying that out loud is your church. That’s why people went to twelve step programs and twelve step programs have been called by some the most successful spiritual groups of the twentieth century.

There was a survey done twenty years ago to find out whether people of different religions nevertheless shared similar values. Unitarians were one of the groups that were in this study. And the study was surprising perhaps in a couple of ways. First, it found that we really don’t differ much from other groups in what we believe. We tend to believe in truth and love and justice and compassion and that life is a gift and so on, the whole list. We may put it differently if we don’t put it in traditional jargon, but the values are the same.

Where we did differ though, sort of sadly, was in what we didn’t value that most others did value. For almost every religion in Western religious traditions, forgiveness ranked right up at the top in things that were valued and yearned for. Among Unitarians, it was near the bottom. Now, if in this survey, they had also included the majority of people in this society who don’t attend any church on Sunday, I would guess that the real percentage of people in this society who actually attend church or temple or synagogue regularly is about twenty percent. For fifty years, the surveys have been saying it’s forty percent, but once in awhile other studies come out to say they’re really sort of fudging these numbers and doubling it. So if it’s true that about eighty percent in our society don’t attend church, and I think that’s probably close, if they had asked that eighty percent, I think they also would have found that forgiveness was something that ranked low in their values. I think the reason it ranks low is because for most people the word forgiveness has all kinds of metaphysical and supernatural overtones. It’s been dipped in centuries and centuries of a religious tradition that say forgiveness is something that comes from the grace of God, and I just don’t know what to do with sentences like that anymore.

There are a lot of other places that you don’t find the word forgiveness and some of these are very surprising to me as I was doing my homework for this sermon. If you look in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, you won’t find an entry for forgiveness. Seems odd. If you look in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, you won’t find an entry for forgiveness. Seems odd, that’s been an idea for a long time, I think. Even if you look in the Encyclopedia of Religions, the sixteen volume encyclopedia that’s sort of the standard work for all world religions, you don’t find and entry for forgiveness. You find and entry for , and for all kinds of animal sacrifices bizarre practices, but not forgiveness.

Now that’s odd. Where you do find forgiveness is in a thesaurus, but even there it says that it means things like to excuse, to absolve, to let someone get away with, to bury the hatchet. It’s all about us. Where you also find an entry for forgiveness is in the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. I have all these reference books, I think my secret religion believes in salvation by bibliography. I don’t get to look at them very often, so I’m glad to have a word like this to look up, it makes me feel I was justified in buying those things all those years ago.

In the Interpreter’s Dictionary in the Bible, there’s a very long article on forgiveness. And the person writing the article is saying that estrangement and reconciliation or sin and repentance and forgiveness are what the whole bible is about.

Now those are more religious words so I have to unpack them or you’re going to think we’ve gone into Disney World and I don’t want you to think that. When the bible talks about the fundamental human problem being one of estrangement from God, don’t think in terms of a big critter in the sky. Think in terms of the people who wrote these stories saying that the fundamental human problem is that we are estranged from the center of life, the source of life, those things that make life feel more real, more true and more full. The word God is a symbolic shorthand way of saying that. And a shorthand way of relating to that. But don’t turn them into Hallmark cards.

What’s different about forgiveness in the bible and in western religions is that forgiveness isn’t about us. Forgiveness is part of a relationship that we have with life, with God, whichever terms you’re comfortable putting it in. Sin means that we have missed the mark in trying to live up to what we think is most true, most noble, what we know is demanded of us. Repentance means we’re trying to find a way to say this and somewhere to say it, and someone to whom to say, “Look, I missed the mark, can I be made whole again?” Life isn’t about being perfect, it’s about trying to become whole. And forgiveness is part of a process that lets us restore a wholeness that we’ve lost when we’ve missed the mark.

The fact that you can’t find forgiveness an entry in major reference encyclopedias of the twentieth century, either for philosophy, the history of ideas, or religion is a measure of the fact that our whole world has changed in the last couple hundred years. We’ve lost that easy access to a sense that there is somewhere we can go to say, “I sinned, I messed up, I missed the mark. Can’t somebody forgive me? Can’t this somehow be made whole again?”

There’s a poem written about 160 years ago that I like here. I think usually our poets are aware of these things before most of the rest of us are. I want to read you this poem, it’s one you may not have heard before. A poem by Thomas Hood, a man about whom I know almost nothing, except that he lived from 1798 to 1845. And he lived during the time in the nineteenth century when we were losing touch with the mythic world, the older world, the stories, the Father in Heaven that we could talk to about things like forgiveness. It’s a nostalgic poem and a romantic poem, but see if you can’t identify with some of the feelings, at least at the end of it.

The name of the poem is “I Remember, I Remember?

I remember, I remember the house where I was born,

The little window where the sun came peeping in at morn.

He never came awake too soon nor brought too long a day

But now I often wish the night had borne my breath away.

I remember, I remember the roses, red and white,

The violets and the lily cups, those flowers made of light.

The lilacs where the robin built and where my brother

Set the laburnum on his birthday, that tree is living yet.

I remember, I remember where I used to swing

And I thought the air must rise as fresh to swallows on the wing.

My spirit flew in feathers then, that is so heavy now.

And summer pools could hardly cool the fever on my brow.

I remember, I remember the fir trees, dark and high

I used to think their slender tops would touch against the sky.

It was a childish ignorance, but now it’s little joy

To know I’m farther off from Heaven than when I was a boy.

We’re all farther off from Heaven than when we were children and that’s why a word like forgiveness can’t seem to find its way into our consciousness or even into our reference works anymore. It seems to be part of a world long ago. The problem is that the need for forgiveness comes from within our human condition, so it still remains.

In my way of thinking, forgiveness connects naturally with another religious concept. It’s an idea from the Jewish tradition and it’s the concept of atonement. The Jews have a day of atonement called Yom Kippur every year. This year it was the end of September, the 27th , I think. It’s quite an interesting holiday, but the word atonement is what’s most interesting to me. At the end of the day of atonement, Jews are all supposed to go out and do a good deed for someone else as soon as they can. So the notion of atonement ends with reestablishing connections with others.

The word atonement is wonderful. It’s the only English word, I believe, that became a theological concept. And the meaning of the word is in it’s spelling. If you look it up, the word means “at -one-ment?. It means just what it says. It’s the sense of being at one again as part of a relationship from which we’ve become estranged, that got breached, that somehow now has been made whole again. And the thanks for this is something we express by going out and doing something good for others.

Jewish thought is usually very down to earth and non-supernatural. You see this way of thinking in some of the Jewish writings and some of the psalms, especially the 90th Psalm, one of my favorites. The 90th Psalm begins with words about how God has been our dwelling place forever and ever and ever, but now God is gone, long gone and not around our lives and there’s the hope in the psalm that God will return again – not so God can fix things, but so we can be inspired to fix things. And the end lines in the 90th Psalm are the key to this. The psalm ends with the words, “Let the favor of our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us. Yea the work of our hands establish thou it.”

It’s easy to see why so many people would still go to God to find forgiveness. And for those people for whom that language works, I envy them. It doesn’t work for me. But mostly the kind of atonement we need, and mostly the kind of forgiveness we need is the work of our hands. And we’ve often forgotten how to do it. Because it involves reestablishing a connection to a bigger relationship that once gave life and that got broken because somebody, maybe us, missed the mark.

I have a story about the kind of forgiveness and the kind of atonement that’s much closer to the kind that most of us need in life. The story was told to me as a true story. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it’s one of those myths that are always true whether they ever happened or not.

It’s a story about a nurse named Sue who one night, in a blustery winter evening in January, went down to check on her patients and she checked on the man down in 712. He’d had a mild heart attack earlier. And she checked on him and all of his vital signs were fine, and everything seemed to be stable. But as she turned to leave his room, he suddenly grabbed his sheets so tight that his knuckles turned white and he raised up in bed and he said, “Please, you must call my daughter and you must call her now.” He said, “It’s urgent.” And she said, “Well, sir, you seem to be doing fine.” He said, “You don’t understand. She’s the only child I have and you must call her now, it’s urgent.” And she noticed that his breathing was now quite labored and quite irregular. He said that the daughter’s name and number were in his records and the nurse said she would call her. As the nurse turned to leave, the man said, “Nurse, do you have a piece of paper?” And she looked in pockets and found a yellow scrap of paper so she gave it to him and went to call the daughter.

She expected the daughter to concerned about her father’s health but she didn’t expect the daughter to become nearly hysterical. The daughter was screaming, “No, this can’t be true, he just can’t die.” And the nurse said, “Well, we don’t know and he seems fine although his breathing is a little labored and he wants you to come right away.” And the daughter said, “You don’t understand.” She said, “We’ve lived in the same town for thirty years.” And she said, “I haven’t seen him for a year. And the last time I saw him, we had a terrible fight. I screamed at him, “I hate you, I wish you would die?, and I slammed the door. He just can’t die!”

After this call, the nurse went back to check on the man who’d become now a part of her world. And she found him very still. She checked his pulse and there was none. She did CPR while she was waiting for the emergency team to arrive. But the team was too late. And no matter what they did, they realized that the man had died. One by one, the emergency team left the room, someone finally turned off the gurgling oxygen machine.

The nurse was the last to leave the man’s room and she saw in the hallway one of the doctors talking to a very upset young woman who had to be the daughter. The nurse went out and brought the daughter in to her father’s room. And the daughter cried almost uncontrollably. And then she grabbed the sheet that had covered her father and used it to wipe her eyes and cried more. When she did this the nurse saw the yellow piece of paper that she had given the man. And she picked it up and looked at it and handed it to the daughter. What the man had written on the yellow piece of paper before he died was, “I love you. I forgive you. I hope you forgive me. I know you don’t hate me.” And it was signed Daddy.

That’s forgiveness. And it happened by reestablishing a relationship that had been broken because two people had missed the mark. Maybe the daughter could have found that kind of forgiveness and at-one-ment on her own in years to come without that piece of paper, through thought or through therapy or through time. But I doubt that it would ever have had the power that it had from her father. And isn’t it sad that the forgiveness and the atonement only went one direction? Isn’t it sad that the daughter never got the chance to say those words to her father before he died?

I’m reminded of one last piece of religious wisdom that’s little known and worth sharing. It comes from the Lord’s Prayer. As many of you know, I’ve been involved with The Jesus Seminar for over a decade. That seminar has done a lot of good things. One of the things that it’s done is in clarifying the Lord’s Prayer and translating it. We’re clear that as the prayer as written Jesus never said it, for a variety of reasons, one of them being the whole notion of speaking on behalf of a group of people that he didn’t do anywhere. He would never have said “Our Father?. He would talk about life or truth or the need to establish a more authentic relationship with God, but he never spoke for a group of people or acted as though he were their minister.

But three lines in the Lord’s Prayer are, we think, true to what the man Jesus cared about and would have said. One is the line “thy kingdom come.” Jesus taught about his notion of the kingdom of God, and wanted it to become established on earth. A second line is “give us this day our daily bread.” Jesus and his followers begged for their meals, and we believe he would have asked for just the day’s bread. The third line is the one that is almost always mistranslated. We’ve learned it as “forgive us our sins, as we forgive the sins of others,” and that’s kind of a nice line. But the word “as” needs to be translated better. Read rightly, the sentence should read “Forgive us our sins to the extent that we forgive the sins of others.” To the extent that we forgive the sins of others. Very different!

We need to take this out of mythic language. This isn’t about someone talking to a God in some dramatic way. That’s not what sacred writings are really about. This is an insight into the facts of life. And the insight is that we seem to find forgiveness to the extent that we are able to grant it to others. So finally it is the work of our hands we seek to establish, though it is work we always struggle to learn just how to do, because it is hard for us.

Let us try to seek this kind of forgiveness before we run out of time, before we have to grasp at little scraps of paper to write the messages we can’t find the courage to say out loud here and now. Let us confess our sins for missing the mark, and repent of them, and seek the forgiveness that reconnects us with our larger relationships. The work of our hands, all of our hands. Here. Now. Let us seek it before it is too late. Amen.