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Weekly sermons from the traditional and contemporary worship services at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas, Texas. Rooted in Scripture and the Anglican tradition, these messages explore how the gospel speaks to our faith, our everyday lives and the world around us.
The closing words of Jesus are stark this morning, to say the least.
They're not harsh, but stark, and there's an important difference there.
Harshness is saying hurtful things in order to hurt.
Jesus is saying something stark. It is meant to cause alarm.
It's meant to wake us up at 9:15 on a Sunday morning.
But he's doing so not in order to hurt us, but in order to heal us.
He's offering a true diagnosis of the state of our heart, news about our well-being
that we may not want to hear, but that we need to.
He's telling us something important about reality so that we can become a healed
people, capable of being vessels of healing for others.
So here is that stark claim. If you do not forgive your brother or
sister from your heart, then your entire life's debt to God
himself will be paid by you. We pray a version of this many days a week,
perhaps without even noticing it in the Lord's Prayer.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
In other words, apply forgiveness to our lives, Father, to the extent
that we apply it to those around us.
If you're already comfortable with this teaching of Jesus, then one of two things
is probably true. Either one, you have achieved a level of holiness that
few of us will get to experience this side of eternity.
If that's you, please make yourself known so that we can all spend time with you.
Or two, you have no idea of the extent of the forgiveness
that you need from God or that you need to offer others.
But my guess is that most of you are joining me this morning in being uncomfortable
with the idea that my forgiveness of others from my heart is somehow linked
to God's forgiveness of me. Being uncomfortable is not a bad thing.
In fact, it's essential if you're going to grow.
And to grow from this place of discomfort this morning, we need to answer three
questions. First, what is the human heart?
Second, what is forgiveness? And finally then, what does it mean to forgive
from the heart? So first, what is the human heart?
We could have a longer conversation sometime about who is right, but here's the
reality. When people living in our century encounter the word heart,
we imagine something quite different from those who experienced it in the
time of Jesus. I tend to think that the ancients were right and we are wrong,
but at least this much is clear. We should understand what those living in the 1st
century meant when they used the word heart, if we want any chance at understanding
what it might mean to forgive from the heart.
In the wisdom of the ancient world, a widely held understanding of the human person
in Jesus' day, you and I are made up of a head, a heart, and a gut,
and we are all of these things together.
According to the ancient world, the heart is where you process what matters most.
You have a head, a mind, that can interpret what your senses experience, but you
dwell on those things in your heart.
You relive moments in your heart. You act out ways things could
have gone differently in your heart.
The heart to the ancient world is also where you decide.
It is where your will lives. You choose with your heart.
This is why we call a medieval Scottish rebel, Braveheart, when he has
chosen to act courageously in the face of injustice and danger.
We are called to take heart when things are difficult, to choose to hope even in
the face of despair. And then finally, the heart deals with emotions,
but not as the primary seat of the emotions.
In the ancient world, the emotions don't live in your heart.
The emotions live in our gut. They live in our stomach.
It's why we get butterflies in our stomach when she walks in the room, or why it
felt like a gut punch when she rejected our offer to be boyfriend/girlfriend.
These are all hypothetical situations.
I'm not being instantly brought back to 1997 McDonald Junior High lunchroom
when I share this story with you.
So the emotions don't live in the heart.
In fact, in the ancient world, the heart takes what your mind
knows and what your gut feels and then chooses to act
rightly. And sometimes, I would argue, at least in my own life, more often than
not, the right action, the good choice, is one that conflicts either with
what you know or how you feel. The good life is one that goes beyond pure
rationalism, where you are ruled by your head, and pure emotionalism, where you're
ruled by your gut. The late Wendell Berry put it beautifully.
"Be joyful," he said, "though you have considered all the facts." Ours is a culture
ruled by our feelings. You can't escape it.
Follow your feelings wherever they go is the cultural Kool-Aid that everyone in
this room has been drinking since they were born.
You can know it's there, you can try to avoid it, but you and I are still shaped by
that way of viewing ourselves. The answer is not to abandon your feelings or to
pretend they don't exist or that they don't matter, but it does help to view
our emotions properly. And when your emotions are making the right
decision difficult, that's a warning flag.
It's your heart telling you something about who you are.
So it is in the heart that we decide to act justly, despite what we think and what
we feel. So what, then, is forgiveness?
Our Old Testament reading gives us a pretty helpful summary of what it means to
forgive, and that summary comes in the form of the words of Joseph's brothers.
Listen to what Joseph's brothers feared when they prepared to face Joseph after
they had previously sold him into slavery and convinced their father that he was
killed by a wild beast. Joseph's brothers said, "What if Joseph
still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the
wrong we have done to him?" A purely rational being, a head with
no heart and no gut, would look at this situation rationally.
Joseph's brothers did him wrong. He should exact payment from them for the wrong
that they did. A purely emotional being, a gut with no head
and no heart, would look at this situation from a purely emotional perspective.
Joseph deserves to hold a grudge against his brothers.
They hurt him, so he at least should get to enjoy hurting them back in his
imagination. But how does Joseph respond? Does he retain a grudge?
Does he exact revenge or demand a payment for the wrong that they did?
Listen again to the final lines of the reading. "Have no fear," Joseph says.
"I myself will provide for you and your little ones." And we are told in the
scriptures, in this way, he reassured them, speaking kindly to them.
Despite what Joseph knows about what they did to him and the real harm it caused in
his life, and despite how he feels towards them because of this, he
forgives. He cancels their debt, and he cancels his grudge.
His emotions towards his brothers were justified and real.
Joseph wept in this passage when they were speaking to him.
In an earlier passage in Genesis, Joseph had to leave the room in order to weep
when he was speaking with his brothers.
But here in the final scene, we see that Joseph has the strength to know what he
knows and feel what he feels, but still choose to forgive.
So this is what it means to forgive from the heart, to have that strength to know
what you know and feel what you feel, and still choose to free the other
party from the weight of payback and from the guilt of a grudge.
Forgiveness is not the purely rational choice, and it is not the choice that will
satisfy what you're feeling now, but it is the good choice, and it is the path
towards healing, your healing and theirs.
Now, forgiveness does not always mean that you need to continue in that
relationship or ever be in the same room again as the offending party or go back to
the way things are. That is called reconciliation, and it can be a very
beautiful thing. Reconciliation and forgiveness sometimes go hand in hand,
but there are plenty of scenarios where they can't, at least for now.
To forgive is to cancel a debt and to cancel your grudge.
Both of those can be done on your end, regardless of how the other person
responds. Now, in our gospel passage, the one that closes with these difficult
words of Jesus, we are given the one and only path to growing strong
enough in our hearts to forgive those who have hurt us.
This parable of Jesus shows us that way.
Only when we truly recognize the forgiveness of God in Christ that has already been
extended to us, will we then have enough strength to rightly choose in
our hearts to forgive those that have offended us as well.
This parable exposes the hypocrisy that lives inside each of us, of running to
God for forgiveness of a lifetime of compounded offenses, and yet
refusing to pass along forgiveness to a fellow creature.
So how do we tangibly get there? How is it that our heart is strengthened to
recognize the forgiveness God has already extended us so that we can forgive from
the heart those who have sinned against us?
Here's one very practical path. Confess your sins.
You can do this every day on your own in the daily office.
You can schedule a time to do this with a priest.
If you're here with us on Sundays or throughout the week, we do this corporately
every time we gather. However you do it, regular confession of your
sins is a baseline practice that begins to make forgiveness from
the heart enter into the realm of possibility.
My wife and I recently picked back up a book that we started reading a couple of
years ago. It's called "How to Stay Married" by Harrison Scott Key.
And yes, that's his real name. I won't spoil anything other than to say this book
beautifully illustrates how powerfully confessing your own sin can
be as you journey down the path towards being able to forgive the sins of
others. Now, in just a moment, we will actually confess our sins together as we do
each week, and perhaps this week, before you join in that confession, you and I can
search our hearts for grudges. What's the chief grudge that comes to mind?
And as you approach confession this morning, bring that grudge before God.
"God, I cannot shake this grudge.
As I separate myself from that and confess my own sin,
please strengthen my heart so that I'm more prepared to forgive than I was when I
walked in the sanctuary today."
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.