ON FORGIVING AND BEING FORGIVEN
or
On Being Hurt and Not Hurting Back

I speak to you in the name of Our God,
to whom belong mercies and forgivenesses.

On Friday evening, November 30, 1985, Candace Derksen, aged 13, a student at the Mennonite Collegiate Institute in Winnipeg, did not return home from school. And so began the worst nightmare that any parent can have, but for the Derksen's it was not a nightmare it was a living hell.

In the early stages of concern for her lateness, as Wilma and Cliff Derksen drove around their neighbourhood looking for their daughter, Wilma describes her first moment of facing the terrifying possibility of what might have happened to her daughter.

She wrote,

" I slammed my fist on the steering wheel. "No God! No! Not my Candace!"

"I could feel my heart sink down somewhere to the bottom of my being and throb there murmuring unintelligible prayers. There are no words for such moments, just pain. There was a terrible sense of futility, knowing that she was in danger-possibly struggling for her very life- and I didn't even know where she was, I was helpless, so totally helpless"
(Have you Seen Candace, Tyndale House,
By Wilma Derksen, 1991)

On January 17, 1986, Candace Derksen's body, hands and feet bound, was found in a shack just as few streets from her home. She had frozen to death the evening of her abduction.

The events of this terrible ordeal and how the Derksen family faced it as a Christian family are recorded in a powerful book written in 1991 by Wilma entitled Have You See Candace? It is a testimony to the power of God's love to transform the deep-down rage for revenge into forgiveness. And More. I met Wilma four years ago here in Ottawa where she was invited by Corrections Canada and numerous professional and voluntary organizations involved in the criminal justice system to speak at a conference on distributive justice. Wilma has become an effective advocate for this approach to dealing with violence which involves victim-victimizer reconciliation and encourages communities to become directly involve in the re-integration of offenders back into society.

When I read the appointed gospel for today, Matthew 18, where Peter asks Jesus about forgiveness, it makes me think, as it always does, of my own bottom line on forgiveness. After the birth of our two sons I quickly determined that the murder of my child would be the one sin I would never be able to forgive. And then my thoughts moved on to this book which I read four years ago- and this remarkable spiritual journey literally through crucifixion to redemption.

The eighteenth chapter of Matthew's gospel ends a long series in which Jesus talks about relationships within the community of faith. And our epistle readings from Romans over the past weeks have also deal with the subject of right relationships in the community of faith.

You see, for Matthew and Paul, the most important community in the world is the community of faith built upon Jesus Christ. It takes precedence over family, nation, race and culture. Building an harmonious community is top priority. Paul counsels against all the pitfalls which destroy this harmony: quarrels, jealousies, and religiosity. The lost are so important that the saved are left alone while the shepherd searches for them, and as we read last Sunday, a process is established for the re-integration of sinners into the community - a process which would require an enormous amount of time and personal risk for all involved.

For these early Christians the issue of forgiveness in the community of faith is a crucial one. After all the church claims that forgiveness is at the heart of the gospel message - for that matter it is of the very nature of God. One might expect that the church will both teach and act as if this were so.

Oh my how we have failed! We have shoved forgiveness off into a prayer of confession more often mumbled by rote than with conviction and the age-old discipline of regular private confession is rarely practised even in churches where it is obligatory. We have virtually no mechanism for helping members forgive one another or anyone else. And we do no enforcement of the discipline that people be in love and charity with one another before receiving communion. Often in our zeal to be inclusive and non-judgmental we neglect the requirements of neighbour-love so clearly tied to God-love.

The Book of Common Prayer contained a injunction which we should not have abandoned. Before receiving communion the priest would declare, "Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins and are in love and charity with your neighbours" and the exhortations to living in charity following the Service of Holy Communion have been abandoned. What can communion in Christ's body possibly mean when two members intentionally walk up separate aisles of the church to avoid one another at the altar? What can the community do to eliminate this scandal from its midst?

None of the challenges of maintaining the harmony of the community of faith is as great as that of forgiveness.

I believe that forgiveness is really what we mean by love in the Christian tradition. No aspect of love is harder to understand and to enact than forgiveness. Forgiveness enshrines the very meaning of the suffering and death of Jesus: for us as for him it is our highest and hardest calling. .

You see, while forgiveness is the highest calling of people of faith it is also fundamentally contrary to our nature. Our nature is to count the cost, react in anger to injury, and to seek revenge. That may be why it is easier to say what forgiveness is not than what it is- precisely because we are so good at falsifying our acts and words of forgiveness .

So let me say a word about what it is not.

Forgiveness is not pretending.
How often have you said that you forgive someone but you still harbour resentment or even gossip about them to others? Very often our glib gestures of forgiveness are really a way of dismissing people. To say "I know exactly what you are and what you have done, but I'll say no more about it." can be, in fact, a terrible, negative judgment which really says, "I don't take you seriously enough to do anything: do what you like, but I'll have nothing more to do with you". Our intention is to disengage from the relationship not to rebuild it.

Forgiveness is not counting.
Peter is a counter and he wants a guideline from Jesus as to what is the upper-limit on forgiveness. Jesus reply to Peter is, "Peter, numbers and forgiveness don't belong in the same conversation". Forgiveness cannot be quantified. Forgiveness is a way of life not an isolated act or a magic formula. It is like non-violence, it is not passive, walk-all-over-me as many have portrayed it, it is creative, assertive, seeking to restore and rectify. Above all it is exhausting. That is the ultimate criterion for determining whether you are truly working at forgiveness: exhaustion.

Forgiveness is not self-preservation.
Ah, this is a good one. You know how you will say to yourself, "If I'm going to have any peace I'll have to forgive her". Or the flip-side of the same coin, "If I'm to have any peace I'll have to apologize". When we insist that our children excuse themselves for some impertinence, chances are it is done to get us off their back. You've all heard those apologies, "I apologize, Dad" when the eyes are saying "Go to hell, Dad!"

The parable this morning seems to be about self-preservation - the King forgives the servant who does not forgive his equal, the king's wrath is incurred and the servant is jailed. It seems to say, "Do unto others or else the King will do unto you".

But surely the intention of the parable is, "Do unto others as the king has already done unto you" . The parable is a most exaggerated affair. The amount owed the king is astronomical amount equal to something like 1.5 billion dollars in today's terms - an amount which could never be repaid even though the servant rashly promises to do so. The servant clearly does not understand the extent of his indebtedness. Thus the extreme generosity of the king is emphasized.

The amount owed to the unforgiving servant is about $10,000 in our terms-not an insurmountable debt, thus emphasizing how relatively little was being asked of the servant. But the amounts don't mean anything to the servant because he has simply not understood the magnitude of the gift the king has given him. Indeed, he probably went away chuckling to himself and saying , "That old coot must have lost his marbles, I really pulled a fast one on him"

Only those who know their life is a gift to them can begin to understand the notion of forgiveness. Only those who know their own need for forgiveness can themselves forgive. That is why the petition in the Lord's Prayer is a conditional one (the only one that is), "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us" we pray. Forgiving and being forgiven always belong together.

I wonder, If you have no personal experience of the liberation of being forgiven, is it really possible to forgive others? The much-loved hymn which we will sing at the offertory captures this overflowing of gratitude for the grace of forgiveness,

"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, I once was lost but now I am found, was blind but now I see"
(Common Praise 351)

A year after the murder of her daughter Wilma Derksen begins to come to terms with her own sense of guilt-guilt that somehow she was responsible for the death of Candace and guilt at the feelings of rage she felt toward others. She wrote,

"I could see the pattern. At first, my anger had been directed at the murderer, and I had wanted to kill him with my own hands. But I didn't want to hurt others the way I had been hurt, so I had kept the front yard of my life groomed, free of any hint of angry weeds.
Then I discovered that the anger had grown in the backyard, and it was directed at the police. I was overwhelmed at the enormity of the rage. But the blame hadn't lasted after I discovered that my expectations of them had been unrealistic.
Now I was discovering that I had hauled all that rage, anger, and guilt into the house itself."

"In some weird way, the whole concept of forgiveness wasn't for everyone else, it was for me. I had always thought forgiveness was a means to bridge broken relationships with others....I had never really thought that this same forgiveness would, in some way, be there to heal the broken relationship within me as well. It was the glue that would keep me together and save me from falling into a million different pieces".

"There was no way around it, I couldn't complete this. I couldn't really forgive my daughter's murderer. It would be a vicious circle. I could try to forgive and forgive, but who could ultimately wipe away this guilt, throw it into the deepest sea? Who could bear the guilt and rage? ..someone needed to die-someone who was part of God, because God was part of the tragedy..And there in the shadows I saw the cross..I finally knew where I needed to go with all the guilt.. And the deadness was gone..I could again remember the love, the goodness, the beauty of (Candace's ) life again"
Have You Seen Candace? p.286

You see, when we are hurt, we want to hurt back and that very impulse creates fear, anger, and guilt in us. We must remove the burden of that before we even begin to think of offering forgiveness to another. In reality, where there has been great injury, we never succeed in offering that forgiveness to another. At best we can stop wishing them evil and hand the whole unfathomable matter over to God.

Finally, but most importantly, forgiveness is not forgetting.
Forgive and forget is not a Christian notion. It is indeed monstrous and cruel to expect the pain we inflict on one another to be forgotten: Wilma and Cliff Derksen will never forget their daughter.

The thousands of people around the world who have witnessed unspeakable atrocities commitment against their families and their people will never forget.

The victims of violent crime or even wanton disregard and irresponsibility -some of whom live with disabilities for the rest of their lives- they do not forget.

The monument to the massacred Jews at Auschwitz reads, "O earth, cover not their blood" and I dare say every monument to the Canadian war dead in every village and town in this country bears the inscription, "Lest we Forget".

To suggest that forgiving is forgetting is to mock the depth of suffering that humans inflict on one another. Forgiving requires remembering because true forgiveness means a commitment to renewing the relationship and that means entering into the places where trust has been broken, not pretending they have disappeared.

And so we return to the fundamental notion that forgiveness is gift- a gift which is always offered to us in God and which we seek first for ourselves in order that we may offer it as a gift to others on the rare occasions we are able to do it.

And because our capacity to forgive is limited we must ask ourselves again and again the question St. Paul asks in this mornings readings from Romans 14: "Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of God." (Romans 14:v10). We do not understand how God can forgive a murderer or a tyrant; indeed, most of us have troubled accepting that God can forgive us. By faith we allow God to be God; by faith we accept the promise of redemption from our sins and the sins of all others in Jesus Christ.

As we sang a few moments ago in that lovely new hymn by Rosamond Herklots,

"How can your pardon reach and bless the unforgiving heart that broods on wrongs, and will not let old bitterness depart?"
(Common Praise 614)

" All we can be sure of is whatever the deficiency and the drying-up of the human capacity to love, the killing of love by pain, there is still at the heart of everything a love that cannot be killed by pain. That is a warning against regarding or treating any human being as unforgivable....We who profess belief in the forgiveness of sins must see forgiveness as something creative of the future, the future of our own love."
(Open to Judgment, Rowan Williams p. 62)