Your sins are forgiven
2 Samuel 11:26-12:10,13-15 | Psalm 32 | Galatians 2:11-21 | Luke 7:36-50
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Can there be any doubt? Today's readings put us in the middle of the great mystery of forgiveness. It is mystery. It is grace. It is unnatural. It is supernatural. Richard Rohr, a contemporary author and speaker sums it up: "[Forgiveness] is a mystery we are dipped into. Two-thirds of Jesus' teachings are about forgiveness. A good third of Jesus' parables are about forgiveness, directly or indirectly. Forgiveness has nothing to do with logic. It is the final breakdown of logic. It is a mystical recognition that human evil is something we are all trapped by, suffering from, and participating in. It calls forth weeping, humility, and healing much more than feverish attempts to root out the evil. The transformation happens through the tears much more than through threats and punishments."1 We have set ourselves on a mission as individuals and as a parish: "To know Christ and to make Christ known." Today we encounter Christ as the One who forgives. I have no doubt that everyone of us here today has been in the sandals of the woman who crashed Simon's dinner party; she was a sinner, who with fear and courage, great need and great hope gazed intently upon Jesus and feeling the burden and the sorrow of her failings, her sins, also felt the tears come. Awash with tears, without speaking a word she touched Jesus, her tears told him everything. And in that moment God rejoiced to welcome her. The words of forgiveness were spoken. She was unburdened; she was born anew.2 We know forgiveness. It is part of the reason we are here. We know the grace this woman experienced. We know our shortcomings. We know our ability to hurt and harm. We know Jesus and forgiveness. Knowing Jesus, knowing forgiveness is not enough however. Making Christ known, making forgiveness known is the rest of the story for us. Thomas Merton, great 20th Century mystic and teacher, describes this for us: "We do not really know how to forgive until we know what it is to be forgiven. Therefore we should be glad that we can be forgiven by our brothers. It is our forgiveness of one another that makes the love of Jesus manifest in our lives, for in forgiving one another we act towards one another as He has acted towards us." We are to forgive one another. That is clear. This is not easy. That is even clearer. To forgive is not natural. To forgive is not logical. I do not pretend for a minute to have mastered this. I probably never will, but I will keep trying to forgive as I have been forgiven. And you encourage me, by your stories of forgiveness offered and received. Stories of infidelity, murder, violence, fraud, deceit of all kinds, unimaginable hurts and destructive words, matched by forgiveness and grace with God's help—your stories, our stories. Your stories humble me. Your stories of struggle to balance the desire for revenge, or the quest for justice (that is punishment for wrongdoing), with the grace of forgiveness humble me. Forgiveness does not come easily, we all know this. It is an act of the will when the more primal urges are to lash out, to hurt and harm in proportion to the hurt and harm we have experienced. Stories from the scriptures (like the ones we just heard) help us continue the struggle for balance. The comfort of being in community with those who are forgiven and those who struggle to forgive, helps. The grace of prayer and song and sacrament helps keep us on course and trying. Do not underestimate the graces received each time you gather here. For me, stories of other Christians like Bud Welch keep me trying harder. His story, his struggle, his triumph (with God's help) gives me courage, gives me hope. Many, some within the church even, consider him a fool and badly mistaken. Others, including me, see him as evidence of the hand of God at work in the world still. I want to share his story because of the evidence of grace it presents. I share his story to say to you and me, it is possible to make Christ—the One who forgives—known; it is not an impossible task. Bud Welch is able, with God's help, and so am I, and so are you. In his own words Bud begins his story, "I was expecting my daughter's call that morning, April 19, 1995. As I sat by the phone my coffee cup rattled on the tabletop. The next instant, I heard a thunderous sound and the floor shook beneath my feet. I ran to the kitchen window. Blue sky, spring sunshine. Just a peaceful Oklahoma day. It was hard to imagine anything terrible happening on a bright Wednesday like that." Bud's 23-year-old daughter Julie died in the explosion at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that April day. Just before the explosion she had gone to the front of the building to bring her first 2 clients of the day back to her office. Their 3 bodies were found a few feet away from the safety of that office (all of her office mates survived the blast). He continues, "From the moment I learned it was a bomb—a premeditated act of murder—that had killed Julie and 167 others, from babies in their cribs to old folks applying for their pensions, I survived on hate. When Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were arrested, I seethed at the idea of a trial. Why should those monsters live another day?" A natural reaction: "I survived on hate." The struggle for balance: revenge and forgiveness, punishment (what is deserved) and forgiveness (what is needed). God granted a special grace to Bud, though it didn't seem like it in the moment: "One small event did stand out among the meaningless days. One night—two months after the bombing? four?—I was watching a TV update on the investigation, fuming at the delays, when the screen showed a stocky, grayhaired man stooped over a flower bed. "Cameramen in Buffalo today," a reporter said, "caught a rare shot of Timothy McVeigh's father in his . . ." I sprang at the set. I didn't want to see this man, didn't want to know anything about him. But before I could switch it off, the man looked up, straight at the camera. It was only a glimpse of his face but in that instant I saw a depth of pain like— Like mine. Oh, dear God, I thought, this man has lost a child too. That was all, a momentary flash of recognition. And yet that face, that pain, kept coming back to me as the months dragged on, my own pain unchanged, unending." Another moment in Bud's journey to forgiveness came when looking again at the destruction of the bomb, feeling the pain of his loss, he looked at an elm tree under which his daughter always parked her car. The tree had been badly damaged by the blast, but in the summer after the blast it had, impossibly, thrust out new growth. Again, in his own words Bud explains, "I looked again at the tenacious old elm that had survived the worst that hate could do. And I knew that in a world where wrongs are committed every day, I could do one small thing make one individual decision, to stop the cycle." He decided to quit agitating for McVeigh's death. He decided to let go of hate. He was asked to speak about his decision. One speaking trip took him to Buffalo. On that trip he arranged to meet Tim McVeigh's father. He describes the meeting. "Mr. McVeigh?" I asked. "I'm Bud Welch." "Let me get my shoes on," he said. He disappeared, and I realized I was shaking. What was I doing here? What could we talk about? The man emerged with his shoes on and we stood there awkwardly. "I hear you have a garden," I said finally. "I grew up on a farm." We walked to the back of the house, where neat rows of tomatoes and corn showed a caring hand. For half an hour we talked weeds and mulch—we were Bud and Bill now— then he took me inside and we sat at the kitchen table, drinking ginger ale. Family photos covered a wall. He pointed out pictures of his older daughter, her husband, his baby granddaughter. He saw me staring at a photo of a goodlooking boy in suit jacket and tie. "Tim's high school graduation," he said simply. "Gosh," I exclaimed, "what a handsome kid!" The words were out before I could stop them. Any more than Bill could stop the tears that filled his eyes. His younger daughter, Jennifer, 24 years old, came in, hair damp from the shower. Julie never got to be 24, but I knew right away the two would have hit it off. Jennifer had just started teaching at an elementary school, her first job too. Some of the parents, she said, had threatened to take their kids out when they saw her last name. Bill talked about his job on the night shift at a General Motors plant. Just my age, he'd been there 36 years. We were two bluecollar joes, trying to do right by our kids. I stayed nearly two hours, and when I got up to leave Jennifer hugged me like Julie always had. We held each other tight, both of us crying. I don't know about Jennifer, but I was thinking that I'd gone to church all my life and had never felt as close to God as I did at that moment. "We're in this together," I told Jennifer and her dad, "for the rest of our lives. We can't change the past, but we have a choice about the future."3 I believe God has given each of us some work to do to reveal the illogical, unnatural, mysterious, healing power of forgiveness. I believe that as we join the struggle to reveal God's grace at work in us and in our world, as we are able to speak words of forgiveness, as Jesus did, the Kingdom of God gets that much larger and the world becomes that much better for our efforts and God is glorified. May we never tire in our going to the Lord for forgiveness, and may we never tire in our efforts to extend that forgiveness to others. Amen.
1 Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer, as quoted in Synthesis, June 13, 2004. 2 Shusaku Endo, A Life of Jesus (Paulist Press, 1973) quoted in Synthesis, June 17, 2001 3 "Where healing begins" Guideposts, May, 1999, pp. 1-6
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