Sermon by The Very Rev Chris Yaw, 5/21/2023, Easter 7, Ascension Sunday
Ascension Sunday
The first time I visited my friend Wendy at her home was 518 days after she had rear-ended and killed the head football coach at Cranbrook High School.
I remember this number because as I walked into her front door, immediately on the right was a huge stack of letters. When I asked her to explain them, she said, “Yes, that’s the collection of letters I've written to the man I killed: one letter a day since he died - 518 days ago."
Wendy's guilt, shame, and remorse for this drunk driving accident had little bearing on her sentencing. I visited her on Friday at the women's prison in Ypsilanti, where she will be incarcerated until she's 65 years old. That was the criminal suit.
The civil suit or law suit, brought on by the coach’s family soon followed. It was settled quickly and out of court. Wendy comes from money, and the settlement certainly set her back quite a bit, but she didn’t care: "Take what you want," she had said to the coach's family, "I killed someone, my life is over.”
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Right before Jesus ascended into heaven, as we heard this morning, Jesus told his disciples to go forward preaching the gospel of ‘repentance and forgiveness of sins.’
It’s as if Jesus knew how paralyzing, debilitating, and poisonous these things can be when we fail to say we’re sorry or languish in unforgiveness of others or ourselves - as Wendy had - and still does.
Like Wendy, we can go into a spiral of self-loathing and self-pity when we realize what we’ve done - which may not necessarily be taking a life - but may be staying in a relationship too long, allowing too much abuse, or accepting less than we deserve. We all regularly beat ourselves up - and talk nasty to ourselves - when we don’t do what we wish we’d done.
Experts say that one of the best ways to combat this is to be more gentle with ourselves - talk more positively to ourselves - See yourself and talk to yourself like God might - or, at the very least, as if you were talking to a good friend who’d done the same thing.
Wendy might tell herself, “It was not intentional. You didn’t mean to kill the coach. Yes, you made a horrible decision - and you have to pay the consequences. But how many other people have done the same thing, driven impaired, but ran into a mailbox instead? Or somehow made it home safely? Of course, that doesn’t make it right - but it does underline the truth that you’re a good person who did a dumb and horrible thing." - And by the way, welcome to the club.
A lot of us have problems with forgiving ourselves, maybe it's something you are wrestling with this morning...
Self-forgiveness can begin by being nicer to yourself - and to say it again, talking nicely to yourself.
Not harboring unrealistic expectations.
Not holding ourselves to impossible standards.
But realizing that we are frail humans living in an accidental world.
And there’s probably not a person within earshot who doesn’t know what this is about… as 17th century Puritan William Bradford is credited with saying, "but for the grace of God go I."
Maybe you have come to church this morning under the weight of an awful mistake, miscalculation, oversight, omission, or blunder - maybe it happened this week - maybe it happened years ago - and you may be having a hard time seeing beyond what you’ve done - you may be feeling guilty, remorseful, and truly sorry. Chances are, you’re not alone.
As most of you know, I accidentally killed someone 10 years ago in November and the weight of that tragedy will always be carried - I was recently elected president of the world's largest support group for those who commit unintentional harm - and I bring that up with hopes I can discuss this topic more completely in a Connection Hour Forum after church in the Fall - and to call attention to the ways I have experienced and witnessed what getting through accidental harm looks like - because it's intimately correlated with the gospel Jesus asks us to embrace this morning moments before he ascended into heaven: the gospel of forgiveness and repentance.
That gospel asks us to behave, as Jesus commended on more than one occasion, like children.
Here's what I mean.
Every year I like to keep a ritual with the children of getting an ice cream cone on the first warm day of spring. I've been doing this for years. And one thing I find is that when I say, "Sun's out, let's get ice cream!" I have never heard this response, "I'm not going dad, I hit my sister yesterday and I just don't deserve it," or " I didn't put my toys away, or I threw food against the wall, so I'm not worthy of an ice cream cone."
No, kids are not wired that way, they will immediately accept God’s gifts - and I wonder if Jesus wants us to recapture just a little bit of that ease of receiving grace - the grace that:
You are forgiven.
You are accepted.
The mistakes you have made do not define you.
You are worthy.
Now, what flavor would you like?
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Forgiveness of ourselves, the lofty enterprise that is, is always connected, however, to our forgiveness of others - and maybe that's where you are this morning - forgiving as we have been forgiven - it’s easy - until it’s not.
Say it’s a $5 offense - I bumped your elbow when you were carrying coffee and some of it spilled - not too hard.
But it gets more difficult the more costly the offense - up to $500 when I backed into your car and bent the fender - up to $5,000 when I talked badly about you to your boss and cost you a promotion - up into the millions if I injured your child.
And the most difficult people to forgive, and I may get an Amen here, is to forgive people who don’t apologize! They never, ever say they’re sorry - often because the truth hurts and we all want to avoid the pain.
As we know, there are some people who won’t apologize even when the facts are right in front of them.
There are people who don’t think you deserve an apology.
There are some people who will blame you, saying ‘Well, you made me do it!’
There are some people who will ONLY apologize with actions and not words, again, because the truth hurts.
There are some people who won’t apologize because of their ego.
There are some people who will break if they tell the truth.
And there are some people who simply don’t have the capacity to be accountable for their actions. ( Drama Free, p 128, Nedra Tawwab)
How frustrating is this?
But getting to a place of forgiveness - us forgiving the offender - regardless of their attitude towards us - is so important - and we know it.
The Gospel of repentance and forgiveness is about forgiving others as we would like to be forgiven - not done simply because God says so - but because WE are better off when we do those things.
By forgiving them we give a sense of closure - and we tend to feel better. Therapist Nedra Glover Tawwab puts it this way - she says that forgiveness gives us the gift of peace.
So don't do it for them - do it for you! Do it knowing you are pleasing God!
And let’s remember: forgiveness is not a pass for what they did-
Forgiveness is not access to you -
But it’s a release - so that we no longer own our negative energy.
Now, some of us, maybe most of us, don’t take the time to do this correctly - ever heard the phrase ‘forgive and forget?'
Of course - and we want to do this as fast as possible.
We want to get past the pain so we adopt this posture - without taking the time to process the hurt, slowly rebuild trust, and decide if we need to show up differently in the relationship.
In actual practice, most of us don’t ‘forgive and forget’ - we engage in toxic forgiveness meaning we ‘forgive and repress’ - which fits into most of our norms of shunning it off and moving on as fast as possible. But we can’t ‘move on’ until we’re intentionally work through what’s really happening.
For example, when we move too quickly, we fall victim to the fallacy that ‘once you’ve forgiven, you can’t talk about it anymore.’
We forget that holding onto emotions without fully processing them can come back to bite us. We forget that the memories of the incident, especially if it was very serious, don’t vanish so quickly - and that we NEED time and opportunity to bring the subject up over and over again.
We can also mistake forgiveness for reconciliation - and think we must stay in an unhealthy situation because there’s been forgiveness. But we need to consider what the ongoing relationship is going to look like - and if that other person can do what needs to be done to truly reconcile.
We also tend to think that once we’ve forgiven someone, we can no longer get angry. But the truth is that, especially for big offenses, these things take time, and anger ebbs and flows like the ocean. We need to realize that we can get angry, because we still have underlying feelings associated with the depth of our pain, which, like a bad cut, or broken limb, doesn't vanish just because we say it does.
Forgiveness: let’s do it first, but first, let’s do it right.
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With all the recent attention on England and the coronation of Charles III, if we go back in history to Charles II, we find a concept that we are still in need of today.
1660 was the year legislation was passed called the Acts of Oblivion. As you history buffs know, this followed the English civil war in which the monarchy was dissolved for a number of years, before being restored. Once that restoration occurred, in order to keep peace in the land, politicians actually banned people from bringing up the past! It was illegal to write, speak, or engage in actions that were rooted in previous disputes!
These arguments and feuds were to be tossed into oblivion.
While forgiving was not legislated, forgetting sure was! And the attempt to do something so essential to the common good is something we still need today.
We need a world that is more forgiving.
We need a world that is more understanding.
We need a world that is more compassionate - which is why we need you and I to go forth and preach Jesus’ gospel of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Friends, today, as we celebrate the Ascension of Jesus and his command to us to bring this Gospel of forgiveness and reconciliation into the world, let us examine more closely the things that keep us from receiving forgiveness, from knowing that God accepts us no matter who we are and what we've done.
And let us look more closely at forgiving others, at those with whom we are angry, the imperfect situations that get us down, and let us call upon God to help us let it go!
May the coming Holy Spirit grant us strength to be kinder and gentler with ourselves, and be humble and forgiving with others,
Amen.