On Saturday I took our dog to Crissy Field for an early
morning walk on the beach. It was a windy morning. The bay was covered in white
caps and the sand blew fast across the whole width of the beach. I guess that
salt was blowing in the air too, because when we had finished our walk and got
into the car for the drive home I could taste salt in my throat. And that’s
when it happened, that’s when memory took over from a normal Saturday morning
walk with the dog.
The taste of salt in my throat took me back ten years to
that other September 11. Of course then the taste of salt in my throat
was because I had spent most of the day swallowing my tears. At the time I was
the rector of a church in Houston. The day before – September the 10,
2001 – had been the opening day of our brand new Montessori school. After all
of the crashes and collapses and all of the death, I spent that Tuesday morning
talking to parents who came to get their children. One cried in my arms, “I
just want to go. I just want to go somewhere that’s safe.” My own tears came
later, leaning hard into the chest of my husband Grant, staining his blue
Brooks Brothers shirt. “Why are you crying?” he asked. But the hardest thing
was the next Sunday.
I had carefully planned the liturgy, trying to strike that
balance between sorrow and courage and compassion that I knew my people really
needed. I preached about the need to forgive, as well as to grieve. When it was
all over, I took my regular place at the front door of the church, greeting
people I knew and people I’d never seen before. Most were sweet and crushed and
bewildered. But some were angry. Angry at me. One woman demanded, “Where was
our anthem?” At first I assumed she meant some piece of music for the choir,
but in the next instant I realized that she expected the National Anthem, a
piece of music I had intentionally left out of the liturgy. I told her to wait
until everyone had cleared the line and I’d explain it to her. But she left.
There were more such conversations. Some people were angry at my
peace-mongering sermons. And some people left the church as a result. The
hardest thing wasn’t their anger or their absenting themselves or their lashing
out at me. The hardest thing was forgiving them.
The hardest thing is always about forgiveness. Forgiveness
requires us to step out of a place that feels safe and go to a place where
nothing is safe at all. Forgiveness, as the preacher Karoline Lewis said last
week, is giving up on the idea that we can change the past. Something bad
happens between two people, and the life that they had shared before is changed
forever. They may reconcile, they may forgive each other, but the life between
them can never be the same again. And no matter how much we try and pretend
that we can just move along in life as if nothing has happened, we’re really
only kidding ourselves.
This rock hard parable from Matthew’s Gospel is addressing
just what it feels like to be in community with someone that you must forgive.
It’s important to note that it is very specifically about the community of the
church; this isn’t a parable about the need to forgive people that you are
distantly related to or generically interested in. It is about the absolute
imperative to forgive those who are closest to you, who share with you the
spiritual and ethical call of God in Jesus Christ. The church is the place
where we come to experience the life of Christ, to learn the life of Christ,
and to practice the life of Christ. It is from the community of the church that
we go into the world as those who re-present Christ for all people. The church
is our laboratory and our gymnasium; it is our testing ground and our study
group; it is our crucible and our potting shed. And if we cannot learn to
forgive each other in this place, then we have very little likelihood of
forgiving the people we encounter in the world outside of these walls.
Like terrorist bombers. Or political hacks. Or moral
perfectionists. Or your boss. Or your past. Or yourself. We come to church in
order to experience and learn and practice forgiveness. And if we can’t do it
here, then life will be a torture.
Parables are not analogies. It is impossible to read this
parable and assume that from start to finish the king in the story is
equivalent to the God of Jesus Christ. That just isn’t possible. The God of
Jesus Christ does not hand people over to be tortured; she just doesn’t.
Parables are infinitely more complex than analogies, and at the same time they
are more resonate. A parable is like a painting that invites the viewer to
linger over it and to be changed by it. A parable is like an opera where the
music and the movement and the drama all fit together into something greater
than the sum of the parts. If there's torture in life, it comes from us and not
from God.
This parable says that there is a basic conflict between
receiving mercy and holding onto legal rights. The difference between the world
of mercy, freely given to another, and the world defined by my demand for my
rights is a matter of life and death. Forgiveness has nothing to do with
claiming rights. Forgiveness is limitless, freely given, charged with life.
Limited forgiveness is just the rule of law repackaged in a slightly fuzzier
wrapper. This parable says in the brassiest way possible that if you want the
world of legal rights and rule bound relationships, you’ll soon discover that
it is called “hell”.
There’s a special supplement in today’s New York Times
called, “The Reckoning”. One section of it is called, “What we Kept”. It’s a
collection of relics and stories that people kept after 9-11. One of the
relics, one of the stories is mine. The relic is a small desk calendar. Dan
Barry interviewed me, and from that interview composed these words, my own
story from that day: “I'm a priest. I was having an early breakfast at a diner
with a friend when the first plane hit. I went home to put on my clerical
collar and go to the church when the first tower fell. I went to the church,
opened the front door and put up a sign that said, 'Pray.' The little calendar
was a gift for my ordination. I used to change the date every month. But after
Sept. 11, I left it. I would look at it, sitting on my desk. Sometimes I would
cry. Later I put it high up on a shelf, the date still set for September 2001.”
Jesus commands us to forgive in the same way that he
commands us to love; if it weren’t for the command, we might draw back. We
might find it too hard to live with forgiveness as a part of our lives if it
was only a suggestion. Forgiveness takes practice; it takes a long time to
settle into our lives. Sometimes I would look at that little calendar,
perpetually stuck on September 2001, and it would remind me of all the people
that I needed to forgive: that woman at my church, that terrorist who killed so
many innocents, that politician who used the tragedy for advancement, that
hurting, weeping self that is me. But eventually I moved it off of my desk, out
of sight, because I didn’t need the reminder to forgive anymore. And I don’t
recall a moment where I forgave all those people. But I do know that I believe
I have forgiven them. Because I don’t want to live in hell. And I don’t need
them to live there either.
Or, as St. Paul says in today’s reading from Romans, “For
none of us lives for himself and none of us dies for himself; while we are
alive, we are living for the Lord, and when we die, we die for the Lord: and so,
alive or dead, we belong to the Lord.” I know the one to whom I belong and I
know that the way of forgiveness he commands me is meant to make me truly,
eternally alive. And so I will forgive, because I want to live. I want to
understand more and more what God’s forgiveness means. I want to live in a way
that I am truly, unconditionally free. I want to love others not because they
are necessarily loveable, but because I am good at loving. I want to experience
this love, and learn about this love, and practice this love with you in this
household of God. And I want to go forth from this place into the world
empowered by God’s Spirit to change the world with the power of forgiveness.
Like the servant in today’s parable, we get to make a
choice. We get to turn to God’s mercy and be turned around by it. We get to
lose our rights and the privilege of our grievances. And in their place we get
nothing but mercy to give to each other and to the world.
