Sermon
Sunday, September
14, 2008
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
The Reverend Dr. E. Neil Hunt
The United Church of Marco Island
“You’ve
got to be kidding!”
The Reverend Dr. E. Neil Hunt
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Matthew 18:21-22
Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the
church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times,
but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.
Let
us pray: May the words of my mouth and
the meditations of your hearts be acceptable to you O God, our rock and our
redeemer. Amen.
There
was this certain married couple who had many sharp disagreements. Yet somehow through it all the wife always
stayed calm, cool and collected. One day
her husband commented on his wife’s restraint.
“When
I get mad at you,” he said, “you never fight back.
How
do you control your anger?”
The
wife looked at him and said: I work it off by cleaning the toilet.”
The
husband couldn’t understand, “How in the world does that help?”
She
said: “I use your toothbrush!”
Then
there was the motorcycle patrolman who suffered a minor accident that put him
in the hospital for a couple of days. His injuries had been to his foot and
ankle.
Then
why, he wondered, did he feel what seemed to be a large bandage on his
chest? With some effort he was able to
pull his hospital gown down far enough so he could examine the bandage and
figure out what it was doing there. When
he did, he saw it was indeed a large bandage, the kind that is exceedingly
painful to tear off of a hairy chest.
On
the bandage was written this note:
a
gift…from the nurse you gave a ticket to last week!”
A
man was bitten by a dog. Later it was discovered that the dog had rabies. This
was back when there was no cure for rabies. His doctor brought him the bad
news. “Everything will be done to make you comfortable,” he said, “but we can’t
offer any false hope. My best advice to you is to put your affairs in order as
soon as possible.”
The
dying man sank back in shock, but finally he rallies enough to ask for a pen
and paper. He began writing furiously.
An
hour late, when the doctor returned to his room, he said, “Well, it’s good to
see you have taken my advice. I take it you’re working on your will.”
“This
is no will,” the man said, “It’s a list of people I plan on biting before I
die.”
What
I want to talk about this morning ties in with what we were talking about last
Sunday with relationships, but today it is forgiveness.
Peter
asked the question of Jesus, “how many times must I forgive someone who has
hurt me, abused me, exploited me? How
many times? Would seven times be enough?
Let’s
see how Jesus replies to Peter in our scripture reading for this morning:
Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another
member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times: Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I
tell you, seventy-seven times.”
Can’t
you just hear Peter’s reply: “Jesus You’ve got to be kidding!”
Peter
thought that he was being very generous.
After all, the rabbis of his day taught that only three times were
required. They said, “Forgive three
times, but not the fourth.” That was how
they interpreted passages like Amos 1:3 (“For three transgressions of
Peter
was taking what the rabbis commanded, multiplying it by two, and adding one
more for good measure! Seven times,
Peter thought, should be plenty enough forgiveness.
But
it was not enough for Jesus. In answer
to how many times we should forgive Jesus said, “I tell you, not seven times,
but seventy times seven.”
In
other words, Jesus is saying that forgiveness is limitless.
That
is important for us to remember because some of you are probably sitting out
there thinking this morning, well, that is a lot, seventy times seven, but at
least for the four hundred ninety-first time, I can bop him one real good!”
The
Jesus says to each one of us, no, forgiveness is limitless.
And
we sit here this morning ourselves thinking, “Jesus, you have got to be
kidding!” And we miss Jesus’ point.
There
is no limit to our forgiveness. Forgiveness is at the very heart of our
Christian faith.
We
are not to hold grudges,
carry
resentments,
or
harbor bitterness.
It
is another one of Jesus’ tough teachings, but it is one of Jesus’ most
important teachings.
It
is at the very center of everything we believe about Jesus the Christ.
REFUSING TO FORGIVE CAN BE
DEADLY!
That
is the first thing we need to see this morning.
But
what is the alternative to refusing to forgive?
Isn’t
it to wind up carrying around with you, for a lifetime, those feelings of
bitterness and resentment and simmering hatred?
Why would we want to do that to ourselves?
Someone
once said that harboring resentments is like taking poison and waiting for the
other person to die!
Someone
else said that letting hatred simmer within us, eating at our emotions and our
bodies, is like burning down our house to get rid of rats.
C.S.
Lewis once said that he had finally forgiven a man who had been dead for more
than thirty years.
Can
you imagine carrying those negative feelings around with you for thirty
years? Meanwhile, as has often been
said, the other person is out dancing!
Why would you do that to yourself?
A
minister tells a wonderful story about a judge in a middle- eastern country who
was trying to resolve a difficult case.
The wife of a deceased man was asking for the death sentence to be
imposed upon the man who had killed her husband.
It
seems that while he was in a tree gathering dates, the man had fallen upon the
woman’s husband and fatally injured him.
“Was
the fall intentional?” the judge asked.
“Were these men enemies?”
“No,”
replied the woman. “Even so,” she said, “ I want my revenge.”
Despite
the judge’s repeated attempts to dissuade her, the widow demanded the blood
price to which the law entitled her. The
judge even suggested that a sum of money would serve her better than vengeance. No dice!
“It
is your right to seek compensation,” the judge finally declared, “and it is
your right to ask for this man’s life. And it is my right,” he continued, “to
decree how he shall die. And so,” the
judge declared, “you shall take this man with you immediately. He shall be tied to the foot of a palm tree;
and you shall climb to the top of the tree and throw yourself down upon him
from a great height. In this way you
will take his life as he took your husband’s.”
Only
silence followed the judge’s decree.
Then
the judge spoke again: “Perhaps you would prefer after all to take the
money?” SHE DID!
I
think that judge had the wisdom of Solomon.
When
we refuse to forgive, we hurt ourselves most of all.
Lewis
Smedes in his book Forgive and Forget? Portrays a self-righteous man named
Fouke, who is betrayed by his wife.
Superficially he forgives her, but secretly he hates her. Every time his
secret hatred boils to the surface, an angel pops a stone in his heart, until
the man is stooped and bent over with their weight.
When
we carry anger and resentment toward someone else, the person we really hurt is
ourselves. Philip Yancey writes: “Not to
forgive imprisons me in the past and locks out all potential for change. I then
yield control to another, my enemy, and doom myself to suffer the consequences
of the wrong. I once heard an immigrant
rabbi make an astonishing statement. ‘Before coming to
“We
forgive not merely to fulfill some higher law of morality; we do it for
ourselves. As Lewis Smedes points out, ‘The first and often the only person to
be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiving.”
This
is to say that forgiveness is one of the very best gifts we can give
ourselves. Do you understand that? I fear sometimes that we regard forgiveness
as something we do for God, or something we do because it is the nice thing to
do. All of that is true, of course. But forgiveness is ultimately a gift we
give ourselves. We need to purge
ourselves of our negative feelings toward a former or perhaps a current
co-worker, toward a family member, toward an ex-spouse who has hurt us, and
sometimes we even need to forgive a spouse or family member for dying, for our
own well being. We just can’t carry those feelings around with us all the
time! They will only drag us down.
FORGIVENESS IS A CHOICE.
We
do not have to carry around those feelings of bitterness, and resentment or
anger. We can choose to forgive.
David
Augsberger wrote a book a few years ago about anger. He noted that anger is a
choice. He said the only thing we don’t
have a choice about is the adrenalin which is being pumped into our
bodies. He told about a large rock in
his front yard. One beautiful afternoon
he decided to move it using a 2X4 for leverage.
Somehow the 2X4 slipped and the rock rolled back breaking his leg. He remembers that no one was home at the time
and he wondered how he was going to get up the front steps and into the house
to the phone. At that moment the
paperboy came along and put the paper on the front steps. He saw David
Augsberger stretched out on the ground and he called out, “Hello, professor! It’s a great day to lie
out on the lawn and get some sun.”
realizing the boy didn’t have a clue about what had happened, David
laughed so hard that he forgot to ask the paperboy for help.
Could
a broken leg prompt laughter? Well, it
depends on the circumstances and the person.
The important thing for us to remember here is that we always have a
choice. A person says, “I can’t control
my temper.” That’s not true, we control our tempers every day of the week or
else there would be bodies strewn all over the place!
It
is important for us to understand that it is possible to forgive another
person. People do it every day. You and I need to see that. We can choose to forgive. The damage that we do to ourselves through
unresolved anger and resentment is far more deadly than any damage we are
likely to inflict on one who has hurt us. Why keep hammering away at yourself? It is a physiological fact that hating people
can cause ulcers, heart attacks, headaches, skin rashes, asthma, and even
death! So why carry that anger and
resentment around with us?
Jesus
asks us the very same question and then tells us how to get rid of those
feelings when He teaches us to pray:
“Forgive
us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.
We
say those words every time we worship together.
Yes,
it is a hard teaching of Jesus’ and we are very apt to say right along with
Peter, “Lord, you’ve got to be kidding!”
But
you know what, Jesus was serious, very serious when he gave us those words to
say when he taught us to pray!
Pete
Peterson was appointed
And
when asked how he could return to this land as an ambassador, he replied, “I
left my anger and regret at the gates of that prison when I walked out in 1972.
I just left it behind me and decided to move forward with my life.”
“How
many times may my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?” asked Peter. “As
many as seven time?”
And
Jesus answered him, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.”
And
you can almost hear Peter saying, “Jesus, you’ve got to be kidding!”
And
you can also hear Jesus responding to Peter and each one of us saying, “No, I
am not kidding!” Amen.