Lent I February 21, 2010 “Forgiveness at the Heart of Lent”

Lent I
February 21, 2010
“Forgiveness at the Heart of Lent”

What if . . .
What if after we had prayed the Great Litany together, I had walked out there and stood in front of you and said to you, “Please forgive me for anything I have done to hurt you.”
And then you had answered the same to me, and then turned first to one neighbor and then to another, saying, “Please forgive me for anything I have done to hurt you.”
That ritual happens at the beginning of Lent each year in Eastern Orthodox churches around the world on “Forgiveness Sunday.”
Every year at this time we talk about what we’ll give up during Lent, what practices we’ll take up. I suggest that this year we focus on that one practice— forgiveness.

Jesus put forgiveness front and center.
When the disciples begged him, “Lord, teach us to pray,” he included forgiveness in the very center of the prayer he gave them. “Forgive us our trespasses,” we say, or in the balder, more direct newer version, “Forgive us our sins.” Ok that’s all very well, but then Jesus followed that with a very startling next phrase: “forgive us our sins JUST AS we forgive those who sin against us.”
Hear that? “Just as”! That’s pretty clear: Like it or not every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we’re putting ourselves on the line on the forgiveness front. We’re giving God permission to ignore our request for forgiveness, if we refuse to forgive the people who have hurt us, or failed us, or gotten in the way of what we want.
I’ve mentioned to a few of you over the years that I had never really heard that part of the prayer until one day, right here, when we were saying the Lord’s Prayer together. All I could think was, “Uh oh.” I spent the rest of the service listing in my head the names of people I hadn’t forgiven and wondering, where does that put me with God?
To make this forgiveness business even more difficult Jesus didn’t just tell us to forgive others. He also said that that we shouldn’t even bother to come to church if we don’t seek forgiveness from the people whom we’ve hurt.
In Matthew’s Gospel we hear him saying, “. . . if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother or sister has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”
Jesus is clear, then, that we can’t possibly be in right relationship with God unless and until we learn to forgive and to ask for forgiveness.

Yet even Jesus may have needed to learn forgiveness.
Today’s Gospel describes Jesus’ forty days of temptation in the wilderness. The writer only describes three of the temptations. But he says that Jesus was tempted all the time—all the time! Forty days of whispers, suggestions, excuses, vivid pictures of gratifications of all kinds—nothing left out.
Jesus learned over those forty days how hard it is to be human, how many weakness we humans are prey to. How excruciatingly difficult it is not yield to those seductive voices, those “try it—it won’t really matter,” “try it—it’ll be worth it,” “go ahead—you’re more important than those other people.”
And by experiencing what it feels like to be a human being in the grip of a legion of whispers to turn away from God and one another—Jesus became even more truly human and capable of forgiving.
He’d felt the temptation to give up God’s work and go back to live a safe, comfortable life in Galilee, so he was able to forgive Peter when, poor coward, he denied knowing his beloved master. He’d felt the temptation to let fear of the devils overwhelm him, so he was able to forgive his closest friends for running away from the crucifixion. And he’d felt the fatal attraction of greed and power, and so he would have forgiven Judas.
Jesus knew how deep and powerful run the human attractions to cruelty and selfishness and cowardice. And so from his heart he was able to cry out from the cross: “Father, forgive them.” [Point out the heart at the center of the cross in the banner]

This Lent we will spend our sermon time exploring the forgiveness to which we are called as Christians.
Each week we’ll look at a different facet guided by the week’s Gospel.
It won’t be easy. We’ll have to talk about questions like: If I forgive someone who’s doing me harm, does that mean I just have to give in and keep on letting him hurt me? Does Christian forgiveness mean we can’t advocate putting people in prison? How could I ever forgive the murderer of my child—and should I?
Such hard questions! But they are questions we Christians need to ask as we grapple with Jesus’ demand that we put forgiveness at the center of our life.
The writer Paula Huston suggests that we won’t have to struggle alone: “When Christ tells us we must take forgiveness seriously, he also promises to accompany us. We do not seek or offer forgiveness on our own; we cannot. It is only through him that we are able,” able to say: “Please, please, forgive me for anything I have done to hurt you.” Amen.