Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Sunday, September 4th, 2016click here for past entries
Loving God, you set us free from the power of sin and call us to live as your children, imitating your grace and mercy. Help us to experience the joy of your forgiveness, as well as the desire to pass it on to others, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
So how are you at forgiving people?... Is it easy or hard to forgive?... [Why easy? Why hard?] In thinking about those times when it might be really hard to forgive, why is Jesus always telling us to do so?... [just to aggravate us? As a response to God’s forgiveness? To show us we’re not perfect? To set us free?] “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us” (Lk. 11:4).
Throughout the gospels there is this tying together of God’s forgiveness given to us and our forgiveness of others. In fact, there are also several places that sound downright threatening:
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses (Mt. 6:14-15).
However, in spite of passages like these, there are plenty of others indicating that God’s forgiveness always comes first. In fact, God offers us forgiveness before we even ask for it. The thing is, though, that the threatening passages like the one just quoted lead us to examine our own attitudes toward forgiveness and to take seriously the call to forgive.
Just this week an article showed up in my inbox that was entitled “Should we forgive Osama Bin Laden, counting the cost of resentment” (Rob Voyle, The Appreciative Way). While it was aimed primarily at Americans as September 11th approaches, it also asks all of us the question, “How is resentment working for you?” While we often feel quite entitled to our resentment and our anger, very rarely does anything good come out of it. In fact, we generally do ourselves more harm than those whom we resent.
Rob Voyle says this about resentment: “Resentment is not something others do to us. Resentment is what we do to ourselves in the darkness of what others have done to us.” Resentment and the inability to forgive are very closely related. So why do we cling to anger and resentment instead of practicing forgiveness?
One suggestion is that most of us don’t understand what forgiveness actually means. We think that forgiveness means forgetting or that forgiveness can only happen when reconciliation has taken place. However, it is possible to have an attitude of forgiveness even when a situation has not been resolved.
In order to delve deeper into what forgiveness means, it can be helpful to look at the verb that is translated as forgive in today’s gospel, and thus in the Lord’s Prayer. It seems entirely appropriate that the verb “to forgive” is very complicated. It is a word that has multiple meanings, none of which are actually listed as “to forgive.” Aphiemi can mean to send away, to permit, or allow, or not hinder, or to leave or go away from one. It can mean to let go, let alone, let be. It can mean to let go, give up a debt, by not demanding it. It can mean to give up, or keep no longer.
It is this idea of letting go or releasing that is particularly related to forgiveness. In fact, the same verb is translated as “release” when Jesus announces in Luke 4 that he has been sent “to proclaim release to the captives” (4:18). And so, when we forgive, we are letting it go. We are releasing somebody from their debt to us. We are letting it go so that the resentment and the lack of forgiveness and the anger no longer have control over us. We are placing ourselves under the power of God rather than under the power of sin.
This is not to say that we will not stumble on occasion or fall into sin. Martin Luther writes in the Large Catechism that “we still stumble daily and transgress because we live in the world among people who sorely vex us and give us occasion for impatience, wrath, vengeance, etc.” He does have a way with words sometimes! However, the context in which this is written is explaining why we pray daily for God to forgive us. We also pray daily about our need to forgive others.
As we have explored different wordings of the Lord’s Prayer over the past few weeks, some have used the word trespasses and some have used sins. The gospel of Matthew actually uses the word “debts,” and some of you may have heard either spoken or sung versions of the Lord’s Prayer that use “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
This wording actually comes out of the Jewish tradition which uses debts as a figurative word to talk about sins. The Jewish wisdom tradition also includes the idea that you need to forgive your neighbour first before presuming to ask God to forgive you (Sir. 28:2). We find these same ideas reflected particularly in the gospel of Matthew, which is believed to have been written for a Jewish audience.
However, as those who follow Jesus, the question becomes, What comes first? Do we forgive others and only then will God offer us forgiveness? Do we show love to others so that God will love us? Or does God act first?
From 1 John: “We love because [God] first loved us” (4:19). From Luke: “Be merciful, just as [God] is merciful” (6:36). From Romans: “while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (5:8). And in Luther’s Small Catechism, we gladly forgive others as a response to God’s grace in forgiving us.
Just as children imitate their parents or imitate an older sibling, so we are invited to imitate God and our elder brother, Jesus. This means praying that others might be forgiven, even when we can’t forgive them ourselves. This means imitating God’s love and mercy. This means announcing God’s forgiveness to those who have been held captive by the power of sin. This means releasing others from their debt to us and discovering that we, too, have been set free.
And so today we pray, “Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” Amen.
Pentecost 16 (NL summer) Luke 11:2-4
September 4, 2016
St. Luke’s Zion Lutheran Church
Pastor Lynne Hutchison
© 2016 Lynne Hutchison All Rights Reserved
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