Easter 3 April 26th, 2009

Easter 3
April 26th, 2009

Last week, doing my chaplaincy stint at Speare Hospital, I met an elderly man.
I asked him if he’d like a visit and he said yes. He told me that he had just made a decision for a “Do Not Resuscitate Order” to be put on his chart.
I asked him, since he seemed to want to talk about it, why he had made that decision. He told me his story: Several years ago he was rushed to the hospital with a heart attack. Shortly after he arrived, he “died.”
He “woke up” finally, and he described to me coming slowly aware of the lights in the room and the pain from the paddles, and seeing his son’s face.
But he remembers just as vividly how, before that, he had gone deep into a dark tunnel, feeling only one thing, he told me, “Peace, peace, peace.”
Now he is no longer afraid of death. He knows that he can embrace it as a friend.
I know a middle-aged woman who was poisoned by a toxic mix of chemicals on the job. She drove herself to the hospital. She doesn’t remember getting there, but what she does remember is a sense of flying through a beautiful light, and again, a great sense of peace.
When her husband lay dying of cancer, she was able to calm his fear of death by telling him her story, helping him visualize the joy she was sure lay ahead of him.

When people are around death, going through someone else’s death or one’s own near-death experience, they often bring back gifts to the living.
Jesus brought just such a gift to his disciples out of his own death and the amazing fact of his resurrection. It was the vision of a new human society, based on forgiveness.
After all, the Easter story is a story of forgiveness. The cruelty and malice of Jesus’ death confronted God the Creator with the worst that we humans can do. But God did not wreak vengeance upon us, or turn away from us in disgust.
Instead, God forgave us.

After his resurrection, Jesus appeared in a room full of people in serious need of forgiveness.
First of all, the disciples needed Jesus’ forgiveness. He was not only their teacher, but their friend, and they had totally messed up. They had run away, and in Peter’s case, denied him.
Maybe that was why they were so worried that Jesus might be a ghost. At that time, ghosts had a horror-movie-bad reputation for doing harm to the living. Perhaps Jesus’ “ghost” had come back to punish them!
Peter and Andrew, James, John and the rest knew they deserved Jesus’ anger and condemnation. So they were unprepared for the gift of forgiveness shining through Jesus’ first words to them, “Peace be with you,” or in Hebrew, “Shalom.”
Second, the disciples stood in need of forgiving one another. Can’t you imagine them saying to one another before Jesus’ appearance, “If you hadn’t persuaded me I wouldn’t have run away!,” or “Why didn’t you stop me?”
What’s the first line of defense when you feel lousy about something you’ve done? Blame somebody else for getting you into the mess in the first place. I’m sure there was more than enough blame to go around.
Jesus said, “Hold it. Here’s how you can live and work together from now on. Here’s how you can be my church: Change—work on being more courageous and more faithful, and when your brother or sister hurts you or seems to abandon you, forgive them. Pray for them, keep trying to see them as a beloved child of God and worth your care.”
Third, I’m pretty sure they were having a hard time forgiving themselves.
Imagine what was going through Peter’s mind when Jesus appeared among them: “He told me I’d say I didn’t know him, and I bragged, ‘Never, I’ll never disown you.’ It took, what?, about five hours? As soon as someone asked me, what came out of my mouth—‘Jesus who? I never met the man.’ He might forgive me, but I’ll never forgive myself.”
Forgiving yourself is perhaps the hardest form of forgiveness. I know that I’ve had times when I could not see any goodness in me. That’s the reason I came back to the church after many years. I needed to kneel once a week say the words of the Confession in the Prayer Book and hear someone tell me God forgave me---because there was no way I could forgive myself. Only over time, slowly, slowly, like drips of water wearing away rock, could that forgiveness come.

Christ’s command to his disciples (which includes us!) to forgive and let themselves be forgiven is absolutely countercultural.
We live in a world in which the lust for vengeance passes like DNA from generation to generation among peoples and nations. We live in a litigious society in which someone always has to bear the blame and the blame always carries a price tag. On every level from marriage to international relations, to acknowledge one’s own contribution to a bad situation is a sign of weakness.
And if we dare to mention that as Christians we’re called to a life of forgiveness, someone will come back at us: “Let’s be honest— this idea of mutual forgiveness—it’s fine if we’re indulging in a fantasy about the kingdom of God. But in the short term—otherwise known as our lives— does God really want me to forgive people who have done harm—a negligent or abusive parent, a rapist or pedophile, maybe, or a tyrant like Hitler or Stalin or Idi Amin? Shouldn’t they be brought to justice?”

But Christian forgiveness is not taking everything that happens to us with a sweet smile and a quiet, “Please walk all over me.” Forgiveness in the real world is a lot more muscular than that. Forgiveness means the heavy lifting of looking at a person who has done harm and seeing someone who is still a child of God. It doesn’t ask us to coddle them or set them free from the legal or moral consequences of their actions, but to try, try, try to do the hard work of holding them up in prayer to the justice and mercy of God.
It’s a lifetime of work and struggle, failing and succeeding. But each time we succeed, the world becomes a little different, a little better, a little closer to the vision Jesus brought us back from his death and for which we pray each time we say the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”