Letting Go

Matthew 6:9-13

May 28, 2023 (Pentecost) • Mount Pleasant UMC

I guarantee it was not the day they expected. They had been told, ten days before, to “wait for the gift [the] Father promised,” and that “in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 1:4-5). But, honestly, that’s all the explanation these disciples got. They had spent three years, give or take, with Jesus, and had heard him talk about the Holy Spirit, but they really had very little idea what he meant or what was going to happen when the Spirit arrived. They did know enough, though, to do what he told them to (they had learned that much!), so they stayed in the last place they had been with him (what we know as the Upper Room), and they waited. And waited. And waited. Ten days they waited. And when they got up on this morning, they had no reason to suspect it would be any different than any of the other nine days. Except it was.

As they prayed on that Pentecost day, the Spirit came upon them in a form that looked like tongues of fire and “the blowing of a violent wind” (Acts 2:2). The Spirit caused them to be able to speak in all the languages that were represented in Jerusalem so that they could preach the good news about Jesus and everyone could understand (Acts 2:4). We only have Peter’s sermon recorded, but I assume everyone’s sermon in every language was pretty much the same. It’s a call to follow Jesus because he had proven himself to be the long-promised savior of the world. And when the people ask how they should respond to this truth, Peter tells them this: “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). Apparently, according to Peter, having the Holy Spirit in our lives is tied to practicing and receiving forgiveness.

We are in the middle of our walk through the Lord’s Prayer, and I have been saying that prayer is the basis of our ability to live out our vision as a church: love God, love people, love life. If we try to do these things in our own strength, we will not get anywhere. All of this must be rooted in prayer, and there is no better teacher than Jesus himself. On at least two occasions, he taught those who followed him a simple prayer, a model for prayer that has come to be known as “the Lord’s Prayer,” and this morning we have come to what is perhaps one of the most difficult parts of the prayer: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (6:12).

Forgiveness is hard, isn’t it? And we don’t have many good examples. Dr. Tom Long was checking out at a library when a friend of his, a pastoral counselor, approached the desk with a huge stack of books. Dr. Long asked him what he was doing with all those books, and the man said he was doing some research on forgiveness. “Research on forgiveness?” Dr. Long asked. “What are you trying to find out?” The counselor thought for a moment and replied, “I guess I’m trying to find out if forgiveness really exists or not. You know, I see so little evidence of it in my work.” Amazing—he works in counseling yet sees so little evidence of forgiveness. In the world around us, there’s often a lot of talk about forgiveness but not a lot of action. People are more likely to file a lawsuit or air their grievances (loudly) on social media than they are to forgive.

Jesus included this request in his model prayer because the health of our soul is directly tied to our willingness to forgive. His prayer reminds us of two truths, both of which are easy to forget. The first is that we have sinned against others, and we need forgiveness. The second is the opposite of that: others have sinned against us, and they need forgiveness. In fact, in the prayer and the two verses after the prayer, Jesus directly ties our ability to give forgiveness to others to our ability to receive forgiveness from God. That’s hard to hear. (It’s one of the things I wish Jesus had never said, but he did.)

 

         The translation we read this morning, along with the majority of modern translations, use the word “debts” in Matthew’s version of the Lord’s prayer; our typical use of “trespasses” is a holdover from the King James Version. The original word literally means something that is legally owed, like a car loan or a mortgage, so “debts” is probably a better translation. Jesus is using financial language to talk about our spiritual condition. Jewish teaching regarded our sins as debts that we owe to God, but it is a debt we can not begin to repay in full (Keener, Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, pg. 62). In the Hebrew Scriptures, there is the whole sacrificial system, details of layers and levels of different types of sacrifices, which is why most people usually bog down somewhere in Leviticus when they’re trying to read the Bible straight through. But that system was all about giving up or killing something to pay your debt. And yet the sacrifices were never the point. The sacrificial system was put in place so that human beings could do something tangible about their sin. It was a practical lesson in forgiveness. It was meant to teach people about the mercy of God, that God could and would provide a way for people to be set free from their debt of sin. Unfortunately, like a lot of religious rituals, the ritual became more important than what it represented and the idea of making the debt right with God was pushed to the background. By the time of Jesus, it was all about doing the sacrifice right. Somehow the idea of forgiveness was pushed to the background.

In Jesus’ day, a strict code defined who could be forgiven and who couldn’t, which is why the Pharisees, who were always very concerned with holiness and following all the rules, were very upset that Jesus didn’t follow their rules. He went to eat with—of all people—tax collectors, Roman collaborators! In Matthew 9, Jesus even calls a tax collector named Matthew to be part of his band of disciples. And then, when he has dinner at Matthew’s house, the Pharisees have a fit. “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” they ask the disciples. And Jesus says to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick” (Matthew 9:12). He says, in essence, “For me not to hang out with sinners would be like a doctor refusing to see sick people.” Then he quotes from the Old Testament prophet Hosea, through whom God said, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings” (6:6). Mercy is more important than the sacrificial system. It’s only because of mercy that we truly find forgiveness.

 

So what did Jesus mean by “forgive us our debts”? What needs forgiving? I like the way one four-year-old misquoted the prayer: “Forgive us our trash baskets as we forgive those who put trash in our baskets” (Hamilton, The Lord’s Prayer, pg. 70). That’s funny, and the theology is actually pretty good. The debts, or sins, or trespasses—whatever word you care to use—is the trash in our lives that keeps us bogged down. It’s the garbage in our lives, put there either by our own actions or by the actions of others, the garbage we’ve been meaning to carry out but just haven’t gotten around to yet. And, ironically, enough, it’s also what makes every human being alike. You have something in common with even your worst enemy: you both need forgiveness (Mulholland, Praying Like Jesus, pg. 102). As we talked about a couple of weeks ago, sin has been the universal condition since the Garden of Eden. It’s not something we like to talk about, and sometimes we’re not even sure we want to get rid of it. We can become like the little boy who prayed, “Lord, if You can’t make me a better boy, don’t worry about it. I’m having a real good time like I am!”

 

The essence of sin is a broken relationship. Whether the break is between people or between people and God, it’s still sin, brokenness. The Greek word is hamartia, which is actually a word that comes from archery and means “missing the target.” The one time I went to Boy Scout Summer Camp, I decided I would take the archery course and learn how to shoot a bow and arrow. I was sure by the end of the week I would have my archery merit badge. But what I had at the end of the week instead were a whole lot of lost arrows. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to hit the target. I would take careful aim, pull back the bow and let it fly, and the arrow would go…somewhere but not where I wanted it to go. That’s harmartia—missing the mark. Paul described it (and us) in his letter to the Romans: “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing” (Romans 7:19). “Sin” is when we miss the mark.

When you talk about sin, people typically think of the “big ones:” things like theft, murder, adultery, even lying. There are the “seven deadly” ones: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. And so we can end up thinking we have no sin because, well, we haven’t done any of those things. Nothing really bad, we say. But if sin is a broken relationship—what about those words we spoke in anger? What about the time we spoke badly about someone else so that we could feel better about ourselves? What about the times we treated someone differently because of their race or religion? What about the time we had the chance to stand up for what is right or do what is right and we didn’t? All of those things are sin, because they put up barriers and break our relationships with other people and with God.

Listen carefully to what Jesus says, “Forgive us as we forgive others.” That little word “as” is key; it means “in proportion to” or “as much as.” So what we’re actually praying is this: “God, forgive me up to the level that I am willing to forgive others.” Wow. That makes it harder, doesn’t it, because we’re good at keeping score, holding grudges and collecting debts. We’re good at allowing our own debt to be forgiven, but not so willing to quickly do the same with others. And then Jesus defines sin as a debt that I owe, so I want to know how I can take care of that debt quickly. The reality is I can’t, not in my own strength. But the good news is that someone else already has. In his death on the cross, Jesus took care of our debt, of our sin. What he asks of us in return is to live out among others the same forgiveness we have been given in the cross. As I mentioned a moment ago, Jesus even calls it sin if we refuse to extend forgiveness to that person who has hurt us. He says, “If you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins” (6:15). I like the way Eugene Peterson put it: “In prayer, there is a connection between what God does and what you do. You can’t get forgiveness from God, for instance, without also forgiving others. If you refuse to do your part, you cut yourself off from God’s part” (The Message Bible, pg. 1755). Now it’s not that God refuses to forgive us when we hold on to our grudges and hurts. It’s that we block God’s work in our lives by convincing ourselves that our sense of justice and righteousness overrules God’s. We don’t trust God to take care of it and them. And by that, we show how little we appreciate God’s forgiveness because we refuse to offer it to others. One author has said that “nothing hurts God more than ingratitude. It is always evidence of our selfishness” (Mulholland 92). Bottom line: because of sin in us and in the world, followers of Jesus are called to a lifestyle of forgiveness.

So how do we practice this thing called forgiveness? First of all, to forgive the other person who has hurt us or wounded us in some way, we have to deal with the reality of what happened. We can’t simply ignore what we’ve done or what was done to us. On June 17, 2015, a young man showed up at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, presumably to take part in a Bible Study. At the conclusion of the evening, when the group started to pray, the young man, Dylann Roof, pulled out a gun and began shooting, eventually killing nine people and wounding several others. He intended to shoot himself but ran out of ammunition. Instead, he fled the scene and was eventually captured.  When the time for the trial came, politicians and pundits called for the death penalty, but at the hearing, shooting survivors and relatives of five of the victims spoke to Roof directly, saying that they were “praying for his soul” and offering him forgiveness. They were not ignorant to the harm Roff caused. They knew firsthand the pain, suffering and hurt he inflicted. And while they did not forget it—no one ever could—they knew that they had to give up that hurt and pain in order to move forward. They offered Roof forgiveness as they dealt with the reality of what had happened.

Remember I said that practicing forgiveness in the Old Testament involved a sacrifice, giving up something that was precious or valuable. Sometimes today that thing we need to give up is the right to be angry about what happened. The word used in the New Testament for forgiveness literally means to let go, to release or to send away. “Forgiveness is letting go, releasing, sending away the resentment or the right to exact revenge” (Hamilton 71). We choose to let go of our right to vengeance, to “make things right” ourselves and allow God to handle it. After all, when we ask God for forgiveness for our sin, our brokenness, we expect God to set aside his right to punish us for our sin. Why do we believe we get to keep that right when we seek to forgive someone else? Is our hurt more important than the hurt we have caused God? When we refuse to forgive, when we refuse to let go, we’re saying that we decide who can and who cannot be forgiven (cf. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer, pg. 54). We are effectively taking Jesus’ place. But that is not what God wants. King David wrote, “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:17). We deal with the reality of what happened and we let go of our right to control the outcome. When we do those things, we are on the path toward forgiveness.

But it’s most often a process. There are people, I believe, who have the spiritual strength to forgive in an instant, but that’s not most of us. It’s not me. My experience is that forgiveness is a choice and a process. There was a hurt in my life that extended back many years, and when it happened I made a choice to forgive. I made a decision, but that doesn’t mean in that instant I forgave those who hurt me. I have to tell you I struggled with it for a long, long time (many years) and only recently have I been able to (I hope) finally let go of it all. I don’t wish them ill anymore and, I can tell you, the power of forgiveness is incredibly freeing.

So I was thinking about all this a few weeks ago. This past January, when we went to Israel, one of the treasures I had shipped home was a set of glasses made in the Phoenician style that I bought in Jericho. They are beautiful glasses, and while I was a bit worried about shipping them from Israel to Terre Haute, they arrived in perfect condition. One of the selling points of these glasses is that, according to the shop owners, they are virtually unbreakable. They even demonstrated it by hitting the glass with a rod or something. But I’ve got to tell you, that word “virtually” is very important, because, yes, I found a way. When you drop a Phoenician glass product in your sink, well…here’s what happens. Yeah, I broke a virtually unbreakable glass, and not one that I could just go to Walmart and replace. I was moments from throwing the whole thing away when I remembered the Japanese art form I’ve told you about before, kintsugi. Then, in telling a friend about what happened, kintsugi was suggested again. In case you don’t remember (and I don’t expect that you would), kintsugi is where you take a broken vessel—maybe a pot or a plate or, say, a glass—and glue the pieces back together with epoxy that’s mixed with gold dust. It’s believed that the gold both gives attention to the breaks and makes them beautiful. What was ugly becomes art. So I got on Amazon, bought a kintsugi kit, and one evening I sat at the table and put my broken glass back together. It’s a humbling and beautiful practice. The glue also smells really, really bad. But here is the end result, my first attempt at kintsugi, if you promise not to laugh.

Now, I tell you all that for this purpose: forgiveness is the gold glue in the midst of our broken lives. Our lives are like this glass: broken by sin. Our relationships are broken. Our communities are broken. Our hearts are broken. And Jesus says the thing that brings healing, the “gold glue” in the art project of our lives is forgiveness. The only thing that can heal our world and the relationships between us all and God is forgiveness. The reality is we all have broken places that need the healing touch of forgiveness. In order to be able to extend the healing power of forgiveness to others, we need to experience healing ourselves. So this morning, we’re not going to have a “typical” closing prayer. I want to invite you, if you would like to come and ask for prayer for healing of a broken place in your life, a place that needs forgiveness, to come forward to Pastor Rick or I and we will pray for you. We will anoint you with oil, placing the sign of the cross on your forehead, but there’s nothing magical or mystical about it. We simply do it in obedience to what James wrote: “Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed” (James 5:14-16). So let’s do that.

This is a place of forgiveness. This is a place of healing. “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Let’s enter into a time of prayer, and let’s begin by praying together again the Lord’s prayer.