Our old testament reading is one of the oldest hymns in the Bible.It's found on page 61 and 62 of your pew Bibles. Our passage is called Miriam's song, and it celebrates how God delivered the people from slavery in Egypt. Listen for the word of God as it is found in Exodus 15:1b-11, 20-21.
1 "I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.
2 The LORD is my strength and my might, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him,my father's God, and I will exalt him.
3 The LORD is a warrior; the LORD is his name.
4 "Pharaoh's chariots and his army he cast into the sea; his picked officers were sunk in the Red Sea.
5 The floods covered them; they went down into the depths like a stone.
6 Your right hand, O LORD, glorious in power -- your right hand, O LORD, shattered the enemy.
7 In the greatness of your majesty you overthrew your adversaries; you sent out your fury, it consumed them like stubble.
8 At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up, the floods stood up in a heap; the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.
9 The enemy said, 'I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil, my desire shall have its fill of them. I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them.'
10 You blew with your wind, the sea covered them; they sank like lead in the mighty waters.
11 "Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendor, doing wonders?
20 Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron's sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. 21 And Miriam sang to them: "Sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea."
This ends our reading from Exodus. In Genesis, God speaks of a sevenfold vengeance upon anyone who kills Cain for killing Abel. A few verses later, Cain's great-great-great-great grandson Lamech speaks of being avenged sevenfold. 1 In our gospel lesson, Peter refers back to this number when he asks about forgiveness. We'll be reading from my translation. Listen for the word of God as it is found in Matthew18:21-35.
21 Then Peter came, saying to him, “Lord, how many times do I forgive my brother or sister who is sinning against me? As many as seven times?” 22 Jesus said to him, “No, I say to you, not as many as seven times, but as many as 77 times. 2 For this reason the realm of heaven is like this: A king wanted to calculate accounts with his servants. 24 When he began calculating, a debtor who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. 25 Since he was not able to pay it back, the lord commanded him to be sold, also his wife and the child and all that he had, and payment to be made. Then, falling on his knees, the servant worshipped him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay all of it back.' 27 Having compassion, the lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt.
28 As that servant went out, he ran into his fellow servant who owed him a hundred denarii; and he seized him and choked him, saying, ‘Pay what you owe.'
29 Falling down, his fellow servant appealed to him, saying ‘Have patience with me, and I will repay you.'
30 But he did not want to, and went and threw him into prison until he paid back the debt.
31 So his fellow servants, seeing what had happened, were very distressed and went telling their lord all that had happened.
32 Then summoning him, his lord said to him, ‘You wicked servant! All that debt I forgave you because you appealed to me.33 Shouldn't you have mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?' 34 And angered, his lord turned him into the jailer for torturing until all his debt had been paid.
35 So my heavenly parent will also do to you-all, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
Th is ends our reading from God's word.
When Peter asked about how many times he had to forgive a brother or sister, that is, how many times should he forgive someone from his faith community, Jesus told him, there's no counting. Vengeance ended at seven in that old story in Genesis. But forgiveness has no limits.
Sometimes we confuse forgiveness with reconciliation. In order for reconciliation to happen, there has to be true repentance, and restitution offered. Reconciliation is precious. But it doesn't always happen.
Jesus has been lecturing the disciples on how to get along with one another. Forgiveness is vital for community In our scripture, the brother or sister is sinning against Peter, and has not asked Peter for forgiveness.
But this word forgiveness does not mean we pretend we haven't been harmed and that our brother and sister's behavior towards us doesn't matter. It simply means we don't nurse a grudge or bear ill will. If the community of faith is to follow Jesus, then vengeance and retribution can't be our destination.
Many of us have friends or relatives who committed crimes, or are addicted to drugs and have proven themselves untrustworthy. Forgiveness doesn't mean enabling them to continue unchallenged, or trusting them blindly or allowing them to continue harming people. It just means we don't let our anger at being harmed hold us captive; we let go of the power they have over us when we forgive them. When we have a community of faith where forgiveness and caring are routine, we have the spiritual resources to meet whatever comes.
And when our resources run thin, we can count on other people to help. This week, I couldn't bear to watch the television and see news of Katrina. No analysis of who did what wrong in the aftermath of the hurricane, and why so many people didn't leave, and why so many didn't help sooner and who is to blame -- whether it's the cronyism and history of corruption in New Orleans politics that prevented better levees from being built or the current levees from being maintained, or FEMA for not being prepared or local authorities for not acting faster – right now I don't want to know. I trust that there are enough policy wonks, bureaucrats, reporters, and activists working on this that it is okay if I turn off the television and close the newspaper. I do not need to know it all.
Here's one story I did read.
A Presbyterian church's education director, “ Suzie Springler, has been text-messaging teens all week. She's living in a hotel-casino in Tunica, MS — at $40 a night, the hurricane rate. She plans to move to Clinton, MS, for at least at few months. She logged onto Presbyterian Disaster Assistance's Web site and found a rental house where her ailing, 75-year-old father can be close to a Veteran's Hospital and her 12-year-old daughter can be close to a good school.
What's more, the rent is free — a hurricane discount. She has given the keys to her father's River Ridge house to a relief worker, who will make himself at home until the family returns, whenever that is.
‘We've tried to stay as connected as possible,' she says, adding that, if nothing else, the storm drove home the lesson that we're all our brothers' keepers. Today, when she went to fill a prescription, a drugstore clerk spontaneously took her hands and said, ‘May the peace of Christ enter this person.' It made it her cry, and the tears felt good.” 3
I was glad to read that story, but my tears do not feel good. I am just too sad about the hurricane to do much reflection on forgiveness, so I was grateful to find these words written by a German man about events sixty years ago, when he was 17. These words reminded me of what's important.
“We had escaped death, but we were prisoners of war. I was first of all in the wretched mass camp 2226 Zedelgem near Ostend, then in Labor Camp 22 in Kilmarnock in Ayrshire. It was July 1946 before I came to Norton Camp. The end of the war and summer of 1945 brought cold horror into the camp: all the German cities in ruins; 12 million people fleeing from East Prussia and Silesia. Many people were face to face with nothing, and didn't know where to go. We had escaped but we had lost all hope. Some of us became cynical, some of us fell ill. The thought of there being no way out was like an iron band constricting our hearts. And each of us tried to conceal his stricken heart behind an armor of untouchability.
… And then came what was for me the worst of all. In September 1945, in Camp 22 in Scotland, we were confronted with pictures of Belsen and Auschwitz. They were pinned up in one of the huts, without comment. Some people thought it was just propaganda. Others [compared it to what happened in] Dresden. But slowly and inexorably the truth filtered into our awareness, and we saw ourselves mirrored in the eyes of the Nazi victims. Was this what we had fought for? Had my generation, at the last, been driven to our deaths so that the concentration camp murderers could go on killing, and Hitler could live a few months longer? Some people were so appalled that they didn't want to go back to Germany ever again. …
For me the turn from humiliation to new hope came about through two things – first through the Bible, and then through the encounter with other people
In the Scottish labor camp, together with some astonished prisoners, I was for the first time given a Bible by a well-meaning army chaplain. Some of us would rather have had a few cigarettes. I read it without much comprehension, until I stumbled on the psalms of lament. Psalm 39 held me spellbound: ‘I was dumb with silence. I held my peace and I have to eat up my suffering within myself. My lifetime is as nothing in thy sight…Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry; hold not thou thy peace at my tears, for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.' They were the words of my own heart and they called my soul to God. Then I came to the story of the passion, and when I read Jesus' death cry, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?' I knew with certainty; this is someone who understands you. I began to understand the assailed Christ because I felt that he understood me; this was the divine brother in distress, who takes the prisoners with him on his way to resurrection. I began to summon up the courage to live again, seized by a great hope….This early fellowship with Jesus, the brother in suffering and the redeemer from guilt, has never left me since. I never ‘decided for Christ' as is often demanded of us, but I am sure that then and there, in the dark pit of my soul, he found me. Christ's godforsakenness showed me where God is, where he had been with me in my life, and where he would be in the future.
The other thing was the kindness with which Scots and English, our former enemies, came to meet us halfway. In Kilmarnock the miners and their families took us in with a hospitality that shamed us profoundly. We heard no reproaches, were accused of no guilt. We were accepted as people, even though we were just numbers and wore our prisoner's patches on our backs. We experienced forgiveness of guilt without any confession of guilt on our part, and that made it possible for us to live with the past of our people, and in the shadow of Auschwitz, without repressing anything, and without becoming callous.
The other experience that turned my life upside down was the first international Student Christian Movement Conference at Swanwick, in the summer of 1947, to which a group of POWs was invited. We came there still wearing our wartime uniforms. And we came with fear and trembling. What were we to say about the war crimes, and the mass murders in the concentration camps? But we were welcomed as brothers in Christ, and were able to eat and drink, pray and sing with young Christians who had come from all over the world, even from Australia and New Zealand.In the night my eyes sometimes filled with tears.
Then a group of Dutch students came and asked to speak to us officially. Again I was frightened, for I had fought in Holland, in the battle for the Arnheim bridge. The Dutch students told us that Christ was the bridge on which they could cross to us, and that without Christ they would not be talking to us at all. They told of the Gestapo terror, the loss of their Jewish friends and the destruction of their homes. We too could step onto this bridge that Christ had built from them to us, and could confess the guilt of our people and ask for reconciliation. At the end we all embraced. For me that was an hour of liberation. I was able to breathe again, felt like a human being once more, and returned cheerfully to the camp behind the barbed wire. The question of how long the captivity was going to last no longer bothered me.” 4
Jurgen Moltmann spoke these words in remembrance of the theological school in Norton Camp. It was there he read books on theology, and philosophy that had been forbidden under the Third Reich. It was there he began his journey to become a pastor and professor of systematic theology, and one of the pre-eminent reformed theologians of the twentieth century.
I hope you found his words on forgiveness comforting and inspiring. Jesus is serious about forgiveness. We have to learn how to live together as a faith community. As we learn to love our brothers and sisters in church, we can let that love sustain us in more difficult tasks.
Here's a hymn, written by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, a Presbyterian pastor. She wrote it for all of us after hurricane Katrina.
God of creation, We have seen the horror—
Great devastation, Overwhelming sorrow!
Hear now your people — Homes and loved ones taken —
Feeling forsaken.
Christ of compassion, You who calmed the rough sea —
Hurricane crashing, We prayed for your mercy!
Comfort your people! Hold them close, now giving
Hope for their living.
Give to your children Food to end their hunger,
Clean water's blessing, News of those they long for!
And by your Spirit, Use our gifts and labors
To help our neighbors.
Amen.
1“15 a reads: Then the LORD said to him, "Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance." 23 –24: Lamech said to his wives: "Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say: I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. 24 If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”
2 could also be translated 70 times 7, that is, 490 times.
3 Smith, Alexa. “The sheep that are lost: Presbyterians in Gulf area wonder where friends, parishioners are,” Persbyterian News Service, Sept. 9, 2005, 05468.
4 Moltmann, Jurgen. “Wrestling with God: a personal meditation.” Christian Century, August 13-20, 1997, from Moltman''s book The Source of Life ©1997 Augsburg Fortress. May not be reprinted further. |
First Presbyterian Church