Releasing God's Power
through Forgiveness

Beloved,
Last Time,
When you walked through the city
So beautiful and naked,

You left a thousand women crazy
And impossible to live with.

You left a thousand married men
Confused about their gender.

Children ran from their classrooms,
And teachers were glad you came.

And the sun tried to break out
Of its royal cage in the sky
And at last, and at last,
Lay its Ancient Love at your feet.

      Sham-ud-din Mohammed Hafiz
      c. 1320-1389, Moslem mystic

Yes, you heard me correctly. But if you think that I am quoting some contemporary piece of erotic poetry, you are wrong. No, this is a poem in praise of God written in the fourteenth century by a Moslem mystic, Sham-ud-din Mohammed Hafiz. He describes his vision of God's presence using a mixture of the language of human desire and the language of divine epiphany. The language integrates what Christianity has so long held apart: the desire for human intimacy and the desire for divine intimacy.

It is curious that Christianity, a religion anchored so deeply in the conviction that God became flesh in Jesus, has developed a ethos of body hate expressed in contemporary times, may would say, by our inability as a faith community to handle issues of sexuality and also expressed in the overly cerebral nature of the Christian faith, especially Protestantism.

And all despite the clear teaching of the letter to the Colossians ( 2:9) that says, " In his body (Jesus) lives the fullness of divinity, and in him you too find your own fulfilment". There it is plainly written in scripture and yet radical denigration of the body has been a major part of Christianity almost from the beginning. More so than in other traditions such as Hinduism, Islam, and many native spiritualities. Yet Christian theology teaches that after the incarnation, the act of God becoming flesh, the material world became the privileged place for the divine encounter. That is what the sacraments represent. And believe me there is nothing materially closer to us than our bodies.

Does your piety tell you that your body is an enemy to loving God. If it does, dump it!! Does our culture tell you to hate your body or starve it or redesign it or hide it. If it does, dump that too!

The reason I use this selection of ancient Muslim poetry this morning is to draw your attention to what I believe to be the profound insight of Jesus into the issue of forgiveness. If you remember only one thing from what I say this morning remember this: forgiveness is first and foremost about celebrating God's presence, a presence "so beautiful and so naked" that it unsettles us as surely as a flash of unexpected human passion.

Today's reading from Matthew's gospel is the record of yet another story by Jesus about the importance of forgiveness. We have already heard the parable of the lost sheep and how important is the recovery of every single sheep, we have already heard the advice about how church members should go about seeking reconciliation when one offends another, and now this same theme is re-enforced with even more extreme language. Jesus tells Peter that he should forgive another church member not seven times but seventy-seven times. Furthermore, the consequences of not doing so are dire, like handing onself over to an angry master.

For those of us who have struggled to forgive someone even once or maybe twice the words of Jesus sound like folly. Why is this? Well, it certainly could be because we know how difficult it is and we know that the road to trusting someone again after they have injured us is a long and difficult one. We also know that forgiving is not forgetting. And since many people think of forgiveness as an act of the heart, they are sure that they cannot forgive until such time as they feel some of kind of benevolence toward the offender, or at the very least, the absence of anger or hatred.

Remember that a full two thirds of Jesus' teachings and one third of his parables are about forgiveness. It has been wisely pointed out that Jesus'understanding of forgiveness, which seems so unrealistic and so unattainable to us is based on an understanding of God which we can barely grasp. In order to understand Jesus' teaching we need to shift gears completely. We need to think of forgiveness as unlocking the future not repairing the past.

What do I mean by that?

First of all, for Jesus, forgiveness is not about how you feel. If you are lucky how you feel will follow what you will to do. This is very much in keeping with the biblical understanding of love. Divine love is about compassion and justice and faithfulness. This value is very much enshrined in Christian marriage vows which are promises not to sustain good feelings, or passionate feelings or even positive attitudes toward one another but rather to sticking to one another through thick and thin. In an age which upholds romantic love as the be all and end of intimate relationships, Jesus perspective is very hard to hear. Indeed, we usually miss it altogether.

Second, for Jesus, forgiveness is not really about one's self, that is the self that has experienced the offence. Now that's a new one. Not about me, you might challenge? Nonsense, its all about me. I am the injured party. I, only, am the one who can forgive the offender. I am the one who holds that power.

And yet, is that really true? What power do you actually hold? After all, your act of forgiveness will not necessarily make you feel any better. No power there. Your act of forgiveness will not necessarily bring the offender to their knees in humble apology. They might remain totally indifferent to your injury. Nope, no power there. Your act of forgiveness will not necessarily bring about a transformation in your life or that of the person forgiven. No power there. And your act of forgiveness may do nothing to restore the broken past.

But your injury does give you power. As one sinned against you will know the sweet satisfaction of excluding and punishing the offender by withholding your forgiveness. There can be such sweet agony in suffering when someone has injured you. It is the dirty little deed that becomes the focus for your life. As the Hasidic masters taught their students, " Rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way, it will still be muck. In the time you are brooding, you could be stringing pearls for the delight of heaven". Why do we so often chose the muck over pearls?

Do you chose muck instead of pearls for the centrepiece of your soul? That is certainly the way our criminal justice system works. But then it does not pretend to be based on the teaching of Jesus. In your heart of hearts you want the world to operate as a meritocracy. That is, you want all people to be loved on the basis of whether or not they deserve it. Only those who merit love will be loved. We betray this fundamental conviction a hundred times a day. The church has often portrayed God in this way as well. God is just waiting for you to step our of line and when you do you get zapped with some kind of punishment or exclusion.

That is not what Jesus is about. If the gospel of Jesus Christ means anything at all it means that God's loves does not operate in this way.

Jesus wants us to see our lives a part of a great river of life, a great flowing current intermingling the human and the divine at all times with the human being refreshed and renewed every moment by this contact . No wonder the spirit is described as "flowing water" and as a "spring inside you" in John (4:10-14) or as "a river of life" (Revelation 22:1-2). And our psalm this morning, psalm 114, praises God with these words, "Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turns the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of water.

Hold onto these images. Every time you forgive, you cease to be a stone on the river bed, instead, you rise up start to dance along with the flow of life. And the power of your forgiveness gives strength to that current so that it is able to lift other stones from the riverbed.

All of us are much bigger than the good or bad in our lives -the good and bad people see in us or we see in ourselves. You are more than that. Dear friends, you are so much more than that. You are more than your moral flaws, or your little virtues. Can you believe that the world's most vilified human beings, Egypt's Pharoah of today's reading, Hitler, Sadaam Hussein, or Bin Laden, are also destined to be pearls of delight on God's chain of life? If you can't, then you believe in a meritocracy not in the Kingdom of God.

Forgiveness opens doors for God to work within the human community. The Kingdom of God is about releasing God's life into the world and that is why it is the central image of the New Testament.

Use your power of forgiveness to release God's power into the world. You must trust that you have this power even if you cannot now see the results of your gift. Jesus teaches about forgiveness over and over again because he knows that it goes against everything we have been taught, it is against the ethos of every worldly system, it is even against the nature inclination of your heart.

But know this: every time you forgive you cast down a barrier to God's life flowing into the world.

What a wonderful power you have been given. Use it well.