Being Forgiven and Forgiveness

 

"Forgiven"

Today's sermon was about being forgiven and forgiveness. It's nearly impossible to do the latter without having already experienced the former. Forgiving someone for something they did or said to us in the past is one of the most difficult Christian concepts to put into real-world action. I'm not even talking about the attack our country bore four years ago on this date, although that was one of the most atrocious and evil attacks we have ever experienced in our homeland and among our people. People in other countries have suffered even worse ongoing atrocities and evil with governments oppressing and suppressing their citizens, killing their people by the hundreds and thousands, and burying them in mass graves. We don't usually find out about it until a year, three years, ten years, or more have passed. We are horrified when we learn the truth.

But that is not the kind of real-world action I am talking about, because those bigger global issues are at various stages of retaliation or resolution and involve our world religious and political leaders, and our military men. It involves us when we read about it, see it on the news, and talk about it amongst our friends and family, and we criticize and say how we think the government ought to do things because our tax money helps pay for these things. Even more, it involves those whose sons and husbands, daughters, and wives, mothers and fathers have been sent to deal with it in a very direct and life-threatening way. We pray for world peace and we pray for our leaders.

The kind of real-world action I am talking about takes place at the individual level, where one person ends and another person begins. Where love is expressed or betrayed. Where relationships of trust are built, commitments made, and hearts given. Where some children learn very young that adults take care of them and will not hurt them, and where other children learn that sometimes adults hurt them even as they take care of them.

These are sad, embittered people who remember when they were innocent and alive. They remember that the adults in their life did not take care of them, did not love them, did not protect them, did not nurture them. This is the kind of real-world action I am talking about: when we are called to forgive someone from the past,whether they are alive or not, for what they did to us, or did not do, when we were children.

I do not speak as much for myself as I do for someone else I know and love. Forgiveness for her, as for most of us, does not come easy. She wants to forgive, and she admits she has tried to, but forgetting is the part that won't let her. She can't forget.

I cannot even speak for her, because I did not experience her pain, but I can speak of what I know about forgiveness and of being forgiven, for I was forgiven.

Human nature is not to forgive. My pastor told us this morning that his nature is to retaliate when someone attacks him or hurts him.

I am that way. When someone verbally assaults me, I want to attack back. If you are good to me, I am good to you. If you show me disrespect, I may show you the same. If you hit me, I will probably hit you back. That is our human nature to respond in this way. Christ calls on us to act differently, especially toward our aggressor. He tells us to forgive others who trespass against us (Matthew 6:9-13), who owe us (Matthew 18:21-35), and who have done us harm (Luke 23:32-34).

I am not going to preach here. I just know that there is One who forgives us all when we go to Him with our hearts broken and open, bleeding, and weak. We give up all that put us in this dark and broken place, all that holds us back, weights us down, all that wounds us, and suffocates us. We fall at His feet, so to speak, as He hangs on the cross, and we realize that our sin put Him there, and His act of dying was/is an act of love. He suffered so that He could experience our human suffering, and so that we could experience His divine love, His divine forgiveness. Yet not for His glory alone, but that we would forgive others who hurt us, even those who would kill us. That is our mission: to forgive others. It is an aspect of love.

                      

The painting above is called "Forgiven." It is how I felt when I was forgiven, when I realized the very personal nature of Jesus Christ, of his humanity and his divinity. The little girl represents the manner in which I approached him, as a child, though I was grown when this awareness came to me. The surrounding area of reds and purples signify the chaos that grew around me when I left my faith by the wayside and tried to follow the ways of others, and how, there in the warmth of the yellow light, his Light, I saw him standing there waiting for me, as he had been all along. I knew there was only one right thing to do: tell him I was sorry for leaving him. After all, I had been the one to leave him, he had never left me.

He called me Beloved. I was forgiven.

In my heart this happened. It changed my life, the way I respond to others, the way I respond to my own wants and needs. It is as real as me walking into the classroom every day and teaching children. It is not a fantasy, nor a dream. The painting is only a paper and watercolor representation of what really happened.

I may not be able to convince another person to forgive the ones who have not loved her enough, or who have taken too much from her. I can only tell her that I love her, I hear what she is saying, and I know that Jesus waits with open arms to take her in as well, to free her of all the pain, the memories, the lost childhood, and to give back to her a life to be lived in fullness. There is love in being forgiven, there is a home in being forgiven, there is life in being forgiven. A forgiven heart can turn around and forgive another.

I would say to her, "Go to him, then. Let him hold you in his arms like a father. Cry there, and tell him what is heavy in your heart. Make your heart so empty that nothing but his love can fill it. No one cando this like he can. Hear what he has to say to you, what he has in store for you. Hear him call you "Beloved." You are his. He has called you by name. Let that bring peace to your troubled heart and soul, my sister, for there is nothing on this earth that can do that for you."

1 But now, this is what the LORD says”
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
"Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have summoned you by name; you are mine.

2 When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers,
they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire,
you will not be burned;
the flames will not set you ablaze.

Isaiah 43:1-2