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Reunion Part 3
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to The CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons. Church for more information.
Speaker 1:Well, welcome again this week. Great to have you here with us online. My name is Jeremy if we haven't met IRL, but we are in the middle of a series on the idea of forgiveness. Die. So far we've talked about what forgiveness is all about.
Speaker 1:Now for that we looked at the story of the prodigal son to see that we way that Jesus both illustrates what forgiveness does for us, but then also what unforgiveness can do to us. And then Last week, we spent some time flushing out how we practice forgiveness. How this actually can be a skill that we can develop and learn and train and grow ourselves into. How it takes work to forgive, but that work is ultimately an investment in ourselves. Now we've got today and then next week left to talk about revenge and what happens when we don't forgive well, and then boundaries and what happens when we do forgive well.
Speaker 1:We're gonna jump right in today because we have a lot of ground to cover. So let's pray and invite God to be with us in this conversation. God to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden. As you look down toward us, into us, through us, as you see us completely for who we are and love us. Might you help us then to see ourselves through your eyes.
Speaker 1:Loved and embraced and welcomed com and invited to follow the path of forgiveness, the path of grace and peace, the path that heals us and helps you heal the world. We recognize that our choices are part of a much bigger story. A story that you invite us into as you begin to repair are all things. May we join you on this path. May we see the value and the significance of our choices and steps In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray.
Speaker 1:Okay. Revenge and why it never works. And I want to start today by telling you a story, and this is a story that comes from the Bible. It's in the Hebrew scriptures way back in the book of Judges, but It's the story of Samson. However, it's the start of the story of Samson.
Speaker 1:Now some of us have probably heard of Samson. If you haven't, go listen to the incredible song Samson by Regina Spector. It's a really great song. But Samson's story starts way back before For Delilah and his long luscious hair, his beautiful locks that made everyone say, let's take him very seriously and definitely not. This guy has poor personal grooming habits.
Speaker 1:By the way. After having long hair for most of my life, I recently discovered in this past year that using shampoo and conditioner is a very different thing than using shampoo plus conditioner. Like 2 in one has not been serving me well all these years. I've entered into a whole new world of soft sheen despite spending a little more work. And also, by the way, speaking of multipurpose, Dove Men Care recently released a product this year, a 3 in one cleaning bar that you can use on your face, in your hands, in your body.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, dude, that's soap. I mean, yes, I see the value of condition now, What you're talking about soap. Calm down, dove. You haven't changed the world. Anyway, back to Judges chapter 14 where we find the story of Samson before his long hair.
Speaker 1:And basically what happens is that he, a Hebrew man, falls for a Philistine woman, forbidden love and all at. But he decides he wants to marry her. Of course, his parents object. They want him to find a nice Jewish girl, but he says, no. This is the one I love.
Speaker 1:I've made up my mind and eventually everyone gets on board. So they have this big festival, a party to celebrate the pending nuptials. And Simpson's parents and his new family are there, but during the party, Samson decides to make a bet with some of his new in laws. He gives them a riddle. He says, if you can solve this riddle before the wedding, which is coming up in 7 days, I will give you 30 fancy linen outfits.
Speaker 1:And who doesn't want that? But if you can't solve the riddle, then you will have to give me those same 30 fancy linen outfits. As someone who wears a capsule wardrobe, I can appreciate what Samson is going for here. It's much easier to just wear the same thing every day. Anyway, they agree so he gives them the riddle.
Speaker 1:Out of the eater, something to eat. Out of the strong, something sweet. Now side note here. This is a really good translation As it gets the basic idea of this riddle across, but they also have found a way to incorporate the rhythm of the Hebrew into the English. Now, Hebrew poetry doesn't exactly rhyme the way that we're used to.
Speaker 1:And a more literal translation would be something like, out of the one who eats, food came forth, and from the strong sweet came out. But here the word food is the word and sweet is the word Those words have a sound that plays each other in ways that a rhyming structure sort of works in English. And so this is one of those moments where being less literal actually is more curate to the riddle. And that's a sermon right there. But this is basically an inside joke that no one could ever Sibley figure out.
Speaker 1:Because one time Samson killed a lion and later when he walked past the dead animal, he saw some bees building a nest in the carcass and so he ate the honey and apparently came up with this little joke. But it's entirely based on his own personal experience. There's no way anyone could ever solve this. It's like the types of riddles my son makes up for me. And so when these future brother in laws can't figure it out, they go to his sister and they say, listen, you've gotta, well you gotta help us out here.
Speaker 1:We don't have 30 fancy linen outfits. We just didn't think he seemed all that smart, we figured we could figure out his read all. You need to get the answer for us. If not, Well, somehow we're gonna take this out on you and your family. So she goes back to Samson, and she asks him, but he won't tell her.
Speaker 1:She says, you don't of me and she starts to cry and he says, fine. Here's the answer. It's a lion and a bee. She goes back and tells her brothers and they call Samson up and they say, look, we've got it. We figured it out.
Speaker 1:Samson is so angry about this that he leaves the walks over to the next town, kills 30 Philistines, takes their fancy linen outfits, brings them back and gives them to his new potential in laws. Then he leaves before the wedding can even happen he's so upset. This is this is not by any stretch a stable individual that we are dealing with here. Now, sometime later, the text actually says, at the time of the wheat harvest, implying that an entire season has gone by, Samson decides that he wants to go and see his wife. So he goes to see her, but the family is like, what are you talking about?
Speaker 1:You left in the middle of the party months ago, she got married to someone else. Samson says to himself, that's it. This time I am blameless. It's actually what the text says. I have a right to get even.
Speaker 1:So he goes out, he catches 300 foxes. Who knows how long that took him? He ties their tails together into 100 and the fox pears, he lights them on fire and he releases them into town. Everything gets burned up. The grain, the vineyards, the olive groves, he destroys everything in this town.
Speaker 1:The men of the town blame this all on the woman and her family for bringing Samson into their lives. So they go, and they burn down the house with her and her father and her new family in it, killing them all. Samson responds by, and I'll quote Judges 157 here, viciously attacking and killing many of them in revenge. But the story is not done yet Because the Philistines raised an army and prepared to attack Judah, but the leaders of Judah agreed to hand Samson over in an effort to avoid a war. Except when they do, Samson breaks free, finds the jawbone of a donkey and kills another, get this, 1,000 men.
Speaker 1:Then, just to rub it all in, he writes a little poem to memorialize the day. He says, with a donkey's jawbone, I have made donkeys of them, with a donkey's jawbone I have killed a 1,000 men. Again, probably didn't rhyme in Hebrew. Now, this is an awful story. And it is a long sorted embarrassing tale.
Speaker 1:It is not fit for children and barely even for grown ups. But it leads to the more familiar story of Samson that follows, the one with Delilah and the hair and the heroics. And all of it seems to be part of a bargerstorydemonstrating how God can redeem and even use this frankly horrible human being called Samson. I think Sampson sums it up perfectly, at least this part of the story when he says, I merely did to them what they did to me, judges 1511. Them.
Speaker 1:Now that line, I merely did to them what they did to me. If that's not the life verse we choose for ourselves, It certainly is the verse that exemplifies exactly what unforgiveness does to all of us eventually. In fact, if I had to guess, I'd probably bet that somewhere along the line, most of us have actually said something very similar to ourselves. Something to the effect of I only did to them what they did to me. I mean, I I know I've said that, but that's the point of the story.
Speaker 1:Simpson tricks his neighbors with a riddle they can't solve. So they trick him by extorting the answer from his bride to be. Angry, he leaves before the marriage can happen. Hurt, she marries someone else. Frustrated, he burns down their fields.
Speaker 1:Enraged, They murder his estranged wife. He murders them back. They raise an army to start a war. He finds a junky bone and he proceeds to go John Wick on the rest of the film. But at the end of the story, a thousand people are dead over what amounted to a bad joke.
Speaker 1:That's what the story is about. It's about the way that revenge escalates always. Yes. It's silly. It's supposed to be because it's supposed to show us how absurd our revenge fantasies are.
Speaker 1:Look, ancient cultures were not any less in tune with the power of story and hyperbole. Sometimes they even knew them better than us, and the writer knows exactly what they are doing here. They absolutely understood the damage that unchecked aggression could cause, but the point of the story is to walk you through this absurd tail and get you to the point where you read the words, I only did to them what they did to me. And then to realize that you have said something like that somewhere before. You see, one of the most powerful feelings that we can have is when someone gets what's coming to them.
Speaker 1:Think of the last movie that you watched, and honestly, I don't I don't even really care what what movie it was because I can almost guarantee there was some moment of comeuppance that made you smile. John Wick killing the bad guys who killed his puppy. Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father.
Speaker 1:Prepare to die. Anytime the protagonist is given permission to use any means necessary every time the hero gives a speech about how our values are better than their values. These moments, they they feel like justice to us. But the problem is as Samson shows is that it's alwaysjustice+1. You hurt me, so I inflict hurt back on you, plus 1.
Speaker 1:But now not not only are you hurt, there's a new perceived imbalance. And so you heard me back plus 2 and on and on and on the story goes. Until a bad joke ends up with a 1,000 murders. But that's the story of revenge. No.
Speaker 1:Of course, when we talk about revenge in real life, we're probably not talking about burning down someone's fields or murdering their families. That's generally not the world that we live in. But we are very much talking about returning a cold shoulder with the silent treatment. Or responding to an embarrassing disclosure with a little more gossip. There are all kinds of small but deeply injuring ways that we play out this hostile escalation strategy IRL.
Speaker 1:And of course, forgiveness is meant to be the exit strategy. The skill that helps us choose a different path toward a different future. But that's always so much harder because the path to destruction often feels so right in front of us. As Desmond and Mfotutu write, the quality of our human life on this planet is nothing more than the sum total of all of our daily interactions with one another. And each time we help and each time we harm, we have a dramatic impact on our world.
Speaker 1:Because we are human, some of our interactions will go wrong and then we will hurt or be hurt or both. It's the nature of human being and it is unavoidable. So forgiveness is the way that we set those interactions right. It is the way that we mend the tears in our social fabric. It is the way that we stop our human community from unraveling.
Speaker 1:Forgiveness is more than just our process of healing. It is also how we heal the world. So we need to talk today about 2 ways we can diffuse this natural instinct toward revenge, and then how Jesus invites us to actually heal that part of our soul that wants to lean into revenge in the first place. So Let's talk about revenge. At first, why it's so appealing, and second, how we can maybe begin to diffuse that instinct.
Speaker 1:Now, a lot of the academic work I've done in my spare time is with the theories of Rene Girard. There's a whole 6 part series here on our YouTube channel where I walk through some of his main ideas. If you're intrigued, you can check that out. But Gerard's main idea is that what defines us as humans is our ability or our instinct even to imitate each other. So how we get language in societies and all kinds of good things, but it also tends to create tensions with us.
Speaker 1:When we all imitate each other, then we all want the same things, and sometimes there's not enough of those same things to go around. And Girard imagines that this is what kept early homo sapiens living in small family units. As soon as the group got too big then the tensions got too great and the competition too fierce and the group either erupted into violence or had to separate and go their own ways. But at some point what we realized was that instead of having everyone angry at everyone, we could have everyone angry at someone. This is what we call the scapegoat.
Speaker 1:The conflict in the group is redirected at 1 person, one cause, one scapegoat. And What this does is it allows the group to actually cohere together even more tightly against that person. I've used this example before. It's a distinctly Canadian one. But how do you get Flames fans and Leafs fans to get along?
Speaker 1:Well, you introduce them to an Oilers fan. And If you want them all to be friends, then you bring Gary Bettman into the room. But when you have a shared enemy, you have a new friend. That's that's the power of a scapegoat. And so many of our different identities are based on this phenomenon.
Speaker 1:I'm and so that means I'm not one of them. Or I'm a Canadian which means I'm not an American. Or I'm an American which means I'm not a socialist. Often what we're not that defines us far more than what we actually are. And as soon as we allow that to happen, Revenge is always going to feel like the most natural response, far more natural than forgiveness because the person that hurts us becomes them and not an us.
Speaker 1:And them is always inherently a scapegoat for the feelings that we don't want. So what do we do with all of this? Well, first, we have to learn to rehumanize each other. See, human beings act in unhealthy, hurtful ways of 2 primary motivations, fear and insecurity. And the older I get, the more convinced I am that the root of all of my sin is the misapprehension of God.
Speaker 1:When I'm stingy or greedy, it's because I forget that God is generous and will continue to look after me always. Is. When I'm selfish and I'm inward focused, it's because I forgot that God is self giving and that my satisfaction ultimately flows when I follow that example. When I'm aggressive, when I'm defensive, it's because I forget that God is welcoming and healing and I don't need to protect my image in order to be worthy of love. But the more that I come to believe that despite all of my flaws.
Speaker 1:I am actually deeply loved and will always be. That the universe is not just a cold and dark empty vacuum, but a generative space created by the God who is love always. And rather than give me a license to continue being awful, what it does is it starts to free me from the need to be awful. I mean, that's what that's what grace does. It doesn't let us off the hook.
Speaker 1:It changes us. It transforms us. It completely alters the calculus we use to evaluate our world and our choices. Vulnerability is a source of strength And generosity is a source of security and kindness is the natural outflow of love that chases us down and welcomes us athome. But once you get that, once you start to recognize that all of the hurtful choices that you've made in the past, all of the decisions that you would take back if you could.
Speaker 1:They're being driven by motivations that are now beginning to dissolve in the presence of grace. And that changes the way we think about ourselves. It changes the way that we act in the world, but it also allows us to begin to think differently about the hurt that's happened to us as well. Now, it doesn't mean that hurt is not real. Hurts regardless of the motivations.
Speaker 1:But when you start to understand that the person who hurt you is probably acting out of a deep seated sense of fear or insecurity that they don't even fully understand themselves. It doesn't ever excuse or condone their actions, but it helps us to at least we humanize our interactions with that person. They are not actually a them. They are actually an us. So once you stop thinking of someone as a person within their own insecurities and fears, and you start thinking of them just as a thing that they did to you.
Speaker 1:Once you turn someone into an action, revenge is easy. That leads to a second problem. Hurt is always going to be subjective. After all, I only did to them what they did to me. And if If your goal is to take the hurt that you've received and bundle it up and find a way to give it back, you will.
Speaker 1:And hear me here. Always overcompensate. And it's it's not necessarily because you're a bad judge of pain, it's because pain just isn't transferable and the truth is you you know that. You know you can't make someone hurt the way that you do. You know that you can't make them feel what you do inside.
Speaker 1:And so what happens is we try to triangulate pain. Well, you hurt my heart so I'm gonna hurt your career. Or you hurt my pride so I'm gonna try to embarrass you. You took advantage of me so I'll do the same to the next person who comes along my way. This is why When someone tells you that you've hurt them, you don't ever get to say, no, I didn't.
Speaker 1:Now, you might disagree with their assessment of the situation and you may Try to explain your motivations to them. You may even choose to stand by your choices. But when they are hurt, you don't get to say that they're not. Hurt is always personal. It's always subjective.
Speaker 1:And if you're going to ever be in a healthy relationship with another human being, you're just going to need to accept that. That also means that when we are the one who's been hurt, our perception of how deep that offense has gone is not it's just never some objective measure that can be meted out in appropriate recompense. It's always are hurt and we can't ever give it to anyone else. In other words, if you have already dehumanized them and your approach to hurt is to try to pay it forward. You are never going to be able to go one for 1.
Speaker 1:Things will They will just always escalate Because the issue here isn't tit for tat. It's actually about taking this ball of hurt that you've been carrying on and trying somehow to recreate that inside someone else's chest. But it doesn't work. Because transferring suffering is a myth. Redemptive violence is a myth.
Speaker 1:There is no way for you to make him hurt the way that you do. Which is exactly why Jesus tells us to forgive Again and again and again forever. 490 times in fact. Do you remember that? Peter comes to Jesus one day and he says, look, how many times should I forgive someone?
Speaker 1:Would 7 be a good number? And you almost get this sense Peter is expecting a big fat pat on the back here like Jesus is gonna say, Woah. I mean, Peter, that's that's excellent. I was gonna say 5, but 7 is chef's kiss. Well done.
Speaker 1:No. Of course, Jesus instead says 70 times 7. That's an important number. It's not just random. It's not just Good play on words.
Speaker 1:It's actually, it's a it's a callback. It's a callback all the way back to Genesis. In fact, There we find the unfortunate story of the first scapegoat. Cain is upset that God hasn't loved his offering as well as the one his brother brought. He's embarrassed that God has preferred what Abel brought to God and so he triangulates that frustration onto his brother and He kills his brother.
Speaker 1:Rather than pay him back one for one, life for a life, God shows us that God is different than all of that. God banishes him from the garden. He says, you can't kill people and have no consequence. You are now going to wander and have to make your own way in the world, but Cain protests. He says, look, if you send me out someone will find me and they will kill me.
Speaker 1:But God says, no, we're we're not gonna play that game. It will only escalate. Your death will result in suffering 7 times over. That's not the way to go. And so King goes out and eventually find that he found the city and he becomes a father and he seems to do quite well for himself.
Speaker 1:But there's this there's this interesting thing that happens in the short genealogy of Cain that's found in Genesis 4. We're introduced to a son of Cain named Lamech whose name means something like powerful or strong. He writes a poem for us. He says, I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me. If Cain is avenged 7 times, then Lamech, 77.
Speaker 1:And so within 7 generations of the start of the story, we've moved from a single murder to a warning that revenge will only escalate from 1 to 7 to now a song with a promise of 77 times the revenge. So when Jesus comes along and says forgive 70 times 7, it's because 7 is great But what happens after that? What happens when the 8th offense comes along and you repay them now this time plus 1? Where does that story end? It ends with Lamech.
Speaker 1:It ends with Samson. It ends with escalation and violence and hurt forever being passed one to another to another. And there is well, there's no end to that story. That story begins when we believe that a scapegoat can save us. It grows when we dehumanize each other.
Speaker 1:It escalates when we imagine that we can actually transfer for our pain onto someone else. But Jesus says, the only way out from that story is when we set those interactions to the right and the only way we mend the tears in our social fabric, the only way we can stop our human communities from unraveling is to learn to forgive again and again as many times as we need to in fact. And hear me here. This is not not for a second about condoning. This is not about accepting.
Speaker 1:This is not about allowing bad behavior. This is about refusing to believe in the myth of redemptive violence. The myth that tells us we can heal ourselves by hurting someone else. You can't. You won't.
Speaker 1:And Jesus offers us forgiveness as the antidote to the curse that has infected the human story since the moment we chose our first scapegoat. When you choose instead to hold on to your hurt closely, to feel it deeply. When you allow yourself to be human and in pain and to know that you are loved right there and you will be okay. What happens is you rob revenge of its power over you and you disarm its potency in the world. And then you play your part in healing in the world alongside Christ.
Speaker 1:That the story that began at the very beginning, all of that can be undone every time we choose forgiveness. 70 times 7 times 7 and again every time we choose what is healing and healthy. That you know today that Christ has absorbed the sin of the world and has refused to give it back to us. May remember that you find your humanity when you humanize others around you. May you feel your pain and know that it is very real, that it can teach you something, that it can help you set new and healthy boundaries in your if but recognize that you could never truly pass it to anyone else anyway.
Speaker 1:And so instead. May you welcome divine grace to you, to be present to you in this moment, healing and helping you, walking with you toward the wholeness that God has always imagined for you. And it all starts when we learn to forgive. Let's pray. God, for all the times that we have traded the path of grace and peace, the path of revenge, believing these myths about scapegoats, it's believing these myths about violence, believing that we could ever take our hurt and transfer it to someone else.
Speaker 1:And may we instead be fully human and fully present to our pain. Might we feel it deeply And know that it has something to teach us. But then when it has served its purpose and we have learned our lessons when we have come to know you even better in the midst of that suffering. Right? We'd be ready through your spirit To leave it behind.
Speaker 1:To send it away and instead to walk the way that is Jesus. Grace and peace and forgiveness in our lives, but also to play our part in the healing of the universe, knowing that every time we choose the good, we are part of the story of renewal that is playing out all around us. In the strong name, the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Thank you for being here with us today.
Speaker 1:These are important conversations and they're heavy. Next week we will wrap up the series talking about boundaries and barriers. Revenge is what happens when we don't forgive well. Barriers are what happen when we do forgive well and so we're gonna need to talk about that and how we set them in our lives and we'll do that next Sunday, but we will end here as we always do with Love God. Love people.
Speaker 1:Tell the story.