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Reunion Part 2
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 2:Welcome to church. My name is Jeremy if we haven't met yet. And today we are continuing this new series called Reunion. And this is a series all about forgiveness. It's a series about how we process and understand and metabolize our hurt and how we prepare ourselves Also, how we make ourselves ready for the possibility of reunion.
Speaker 2:Now notice here, we're talking about forgiveness This is the condition for the possibility of reunion. Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same things. Forgiveness is or process as we prepare and we heal. Reconciliation is something that takes movement and healing on both sides eyes of a relationship. And so we're going to need to talk about that before this series is over.
Speaker 2:What happens when we do our work and they don't. Spoiler, it doesn't mean you don't forgive. It may mean you need some new healthy boundaries in your life. But before we get there, we still got some work in front of us here on forgiveness. Because last week we talked about what forgiveness is.
Speaker 2:We talked about forgiveness as a We talked about forgiveness as remembering well. We talked about forgiveness as a gift to us. And in some As that may make forgiveness sound like a lot of work and it can be, but the truth is not forgiving. Choosing to carry Pray around old wounds longer than we need to, holding on after a moment has served its purpose for us. This always ends up being more work overtime.
Speaker 2:As we said last week, you only have so many calories available to you no matter how much you ate over Christmas. In physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy, all of that has to come from the same pool. When a part of you is working, straining to hold on to then, it's hard to be here now. Psychologist Fred Luskin writes that forgiveness training has been shown to reduce depression, increase hopefulness, decrease anger, improve spiritual connection and increase emotional self confidence. But notice there, he says forgiveness training.
Speaker 2:Not just forgiveness, certainly not Forgetting, not condoning or ignoring, but training, practicing, learning how to forgive well. And if our goal in this conversation is to start the new year with as much of our energy as possible, Here in this moment pointed in healthy directions, then the work of forgiving becomes an investment in ourselves. And that's really what forgiveness is all about. Learning to send old hurts away, so that we can be present to where we are right now. So we talked about 3 things last week.
Speaker 2:The first was forgiveness isn't a moment, it's a process. Now sure, sometimes someone offends you when you brush it off and you move on. No big deal. In fact, honestly, I think we could all probably stand to do that a little bit more. But when someone has really hurt you, when you have offered a piece of yourself to someone and they've not treated it with the dignity it deserves, That will take more than a moment.
Speaker 2:It will take more than a single prayer, more than just a decision for you to forgive, and that's okay. This The process that we are choosing to enter into, and it's one where the larger the industry is, the more consciously Justly we're going to have to choose to deal with it and sometimes the longer that will take. 2nd, we talked about the fact that forgiveness is not at all All about forgetting. In fact, it's about remembering well. And this should seem obvious.
Speaker 2:I mean, you can't make yourself forget something. You you can however give. And that's because forgiveness is actually about remembering. Now sometimes that means that you're gonna To let go of a narrative that you've constructed for yourself. Someone may have hurt you, but you may have built all kinds of for that hurt that are entirely fictional and unrelated to what actually happened between you and that person.
Speaker 2:Now that doesn't mean that what they did was okay. This simply means that it takes work for us to understand exactly what it is that we're choosing to forgive. Oftentimes, we have taken things too personally. Sometimes we have blamed someone for how we feel about their choices. Sometimes we have created an entire story about and what we think someone meant by their actions.
Speaker 2:But none of those are things that can actually be forgiven because all Love those are things that we've created in response to our pain. And truly, I think this is why God forgive so fully and completely because God is never confused about what to forgive. God sees you honestly. God but forgives you completely. That means that forgiving for us starts with remembering well.
Speaker 2:What actually happened? How did they actually hurt you? What is the clearest and most sincere language you can use to describe your injury? Because that remembering well is the beginning of choosing to let it go. As I read last week from Healing and reconciliation are not magic spells.
Speaker 2:They do not erase the reality of an injury. To forgive is Had to pretend that what happened did not happen. Rather healing and reconciliation demand an honest reckoning and remembering. And And this is why sometimes forgiveness will come with new boundaries and new barriers, but it starts with letting go of all of the stories we have constructed for ourselves. And by the way, for someone who is generally pretty rational and objective, doesn't have huge feelings all the time, this is one I really have struggled with a lot in my life.
Speaker 2:I remember early in my marriage, I built a story into every awkward interaction, every uncomfortable conversation. And maybe because I was trying to be so rational, I constructed a why behind everything Rachel said that I did not like. And over time, I had to realize that it was all of those whys that had me tied up in knots. Nothing that she had ever actually said or done. And so one of the most transformative practices in my marriage has always been trying to choose the best possible story.
Speaker 2:The most generous explanation for why Rachel might have done that. And over time, what I realized was I Actually had almost nothing left to forgive once I let go of my stories just by learning to remember well. Finally, we talked about this. The idea that Forgiveness is a gift. And this is what we need to flesh out a bit more today, but it's also what I think Jesus is really trying Trying to get us to understand in the parable of the prodigal son.
Speaker 2:See, when we hold on to unforgiveness, when we refuse to let go of are heard. What happens is that it grows until it consumes not just that part of the story but every part in front of it. That's what happens to the older brother in the tale. His brother has hurt him. He's hurt the family.
Speaker 2:He's acted selfishly and destructively, and there should Be consequences for that. But now somehow it's the older sibling that's paying the price. His father is overjoyed because his son is home, a new chance for a new future, and that is reason to celebrate. But for some reason it's the older brother, the one who's holding on to all of his bitterness. He's the one left outside of the party.
Speaker 2:That's what unforgiveness eventually does to all of us. It turns real hurts into present suffering. That's what Jesus wants us to be free from. K. Let's pray and then today we'll jump into our our new conversation.
Speaker 2:Almighty God to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom No secrets are hidden. Would you by your spirit be near to us today so that we can know ourselves as honestly as you do. So that we can see all hurts. To understand them. To learn from them.
Speaker 2:To find the ways that those memories can serve us well as we move into the future, but at the same time to be free from them. Not to allow them to have the power over us, not to allow them to direct our future for us, but instead and to be full of the grace and peace that you offer to us. God, if we are holding on to stories that have served us well in the past but Are now bearing us down with weight that we don't need to carry. Would your healing spirit be here. Helping us to recognize, helping us to process, helping us to learn and learn how to let go.
Speaker 2:How to move forward or in the path of your son who invites us to renewal and reunion, reconciliation where that's possible, but forgiveness is the path we walk always. In the strong name of the risen Christ we Pray. Amen. Alright. Today, I wanna start very simply with looking at the words that we use for or perhaps the words that we translate forgiveness in our Bibles.
Speaker 2:And to see if we can add some nuance to our imagination of this word. Because there are basically 2 Hebrew words in the Old Testament and there's one Greek word in the new that sits behind the references to forgiveness in our Bibles. The Hebrew words are nasah and salach and the Greek word is aphemi. Now, nasah An interesting one because the primary meaning of the word is actually to carry or to burden something. That almost kind of seems like the opposite of what we might think of when we think of forgiveness.
Speaker 2:But the meaning here comes from the idea of lifting something. Part of the word nassa, you lift something so that you can carry it or carry that burden. And you can see this in a passage like Exodus 34 verse 6 where we read, the Lord, this compassionate and gracious God is slow Oh, to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. Maintaining love to the thousands, forgiving, perhaps we could say, lifting off of us our wickedness, rebellion and sim. And so the word can mean to carry or to burden, but what it gets used for when it's talking about forgiveness is actually this idea of lifting the burden to take away or carry away some weight.
Speaker 2:And so when you forgive, you by lifting the weight, perhaps off of someone else, but almost certainly as well off of yourself. Now salak is Actually, the more common Hebrew word for forgiveness and this one is also more complicated. The origins of the meaning seem to be something like to carry or to sprinkle water. But by the time of the Hebrew scriptures, it basically means forgiveness. It's taken on a religious connotation patient, and that meaning is probably best understood as pardon.
Speaker 2:So God pardons us. When you forgive someone, you pardon them. You release them From any debt that they might figuratively or perhaps even literally owe you. I do find this word really interesting though because if you go and you dig into the etymology In ancient Ethiopic, the word meant to draw water. So it's been theorized that perhaps it could have started with the idea of drawing water, To bring is a gift, as someone is a sign of your reconciliation to them, a cool drink of water.
Speaker 2:Over time that became a ritual perhaps Sprinkling water or washing your hands to demonstrate that intention and reunion, which eventually simply became the word for forgiveness itself. Who knows? It's tough to say diachronic meanings of ancient words are really hard to parse. But I do like this idea that when Forgive, we are the ones carrying water. We're the ones bringing the gift with us.
Speaker 2:We're not waiting. Forgiveness is an active posture Pursuing grace in our relationships. We're bringing the tools that we need with us into those conversations to make reunion happened. And yet, even salak is only used 46 times in the entire old testament. Forgive is just simply not a very common word in Hebrew.
Speaker 2:And the reason for that is that Hebrew is a much more concrete language than English. And so Strack concepts like forgiveness generally will give way to metaphors. Metaphors like covering something up. That's where the Hebrew word for atonement or kippur comes from. Metaphors like maybe washing away or placing behind or even taking away sin or hurt or brokenness.
Speaker 2:These are images that we hear much more frequently in Hebrew when it comes to the idea of forgiveness. And wonder if that might actually be part of our problem when it comes to our thoughts about forgiveness. Now we They're often trying to be far more high minded, more abstract when the scriptures actually call us to when it comes to forgiveness. And that brings us to by far the most common word associated with forgiveness in the Bible. That's the Greek word aphemi.
Speaker 2:Now, ephemian is actually used over a 130 times in the Greek translation of the old testament called the Septuagint. It gets used to translate a bunch of different Hebrew words and different Hebrew metaphors that carry this idea of forgiveness. But then it gets used another 143 times in the new testament as well. And defame basically means to Send away. And I think this is just really helpful.
Speaker 2:There's oftentimes what I hear from people is, well, I don't know If I should forgive this person yet, I don't know if they deserve it. Or I don't know if I should forgive them yet because I'm not sure they Understand what they did to me. And by taking forgiveness out of that abstract conceptual realm and talking about it in the terms of sending away, a. I think it actually helps to recenter our conversation. Because if forgiveness really is essentially to take the Hurt that's been done to us and the injury that's been inflicted upon us and choose to send that away, well then all of a sudden we start to ask Very different questions about who and how and when we should forgive.
Speaker 2:I once had a friend, you know, had the same job that I have. And they made some unfortunate decisions that hurt a lot of people and let a lot of people down including myself and it hurt a lot. Hat. It's a very interesting thing to be caught in the corollary damage of someone else's choice. This story wasn't about me at all.
Speaker 2:It didn't involve me. And yet, I felt a lot of emotion tied up in this story. It's how we tend to personalize things. And the truth is like it or not, When you're a pastor or when you choose a role where you have a lot of people in your life, then the personal choices that you make impact a lot of people even if they're not really part of the story. I I think about that a lot.
Speaker 2:But over time, I was able to move past things and I took that hurt. I sat with it. I thought about it and eventually I understood but enough that I could able to choose to walk away from it. And after some time and some distance, I was even able to reconnect with my friend and rebuild a relationship. But I do remember having conversations with people years after the fact and this situation would come up and people would say, I don't know how you can forgive this person because I don't think that they have owned it yet.
Speaker 2:It's a very specific phrase that Kept coming up. I remember it very distinctly. In fact, I remember one conversation in particular over a coffee with someone and they said this to me and I just replied pretty matter of What would that change for you? Now, don't get me wrong. I understand.
Speaker 2:If we're talking about your relationship with someone, that changes a lot. If someone has hurt you intentionally or otherwise and they've refused to understand that, if they Haven't changed because of that. That should change your relationship to them. Number, forgiving is not condoning or Accepting or ignoring bad behavior. It is sending away the hurt that was caused after it served its purpose.
Speaker 2:But let me ask you this. Someone who refuses to acknowledge how they have hurt you, why would Do you ever allow that person to decide how long you choose to carry your hurt with you? I mean that person who injures you, especially The person who doesn't seem to own it or apologize for it or make changes from it. That is the last person you should ever cede control of your life to. Does Desmond and Nfotutu write?
Speaker 2:The one who forgives becomes untethered from the yoke that bound them to the person who caused the harm. When you forgive, you are now free to move on in life, to grow, to no longer play the victim. When you Give you slip the yoke and you are unshackled from your past. But what happens is that We often confuse our process of letting go of our pain with someone else's process of coming to term with their mistakes. And we conflate them in ways that tie us to the person who's hurt us all over again.
Speaker 2:Remember, forgiveness is a gift, but you are the recipient. And here's the hard truth that we sometimes don't want to acknowledge when it comes to our pain. That person that hurt you an hour ago, a month ago, a year ago, that's on them. They're gonna have to come to terms with that eventually, but the pain that you have felt since that moment, the story you have told yourself about The pain that you keep choosing to carry with you into this moment, that is up to you. They aren't The one that's hurting you anymore.
Speaker 2:You're the one who's standing outside the party furious of our how others are moving on. And hear me. I'm not blaming you with this. I get it. Sometimes you need to be angry.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you need to carry that with you for a time so that you can learn. You do this so that you can learn from it, so that you can know who you Are and who you aren't in the midst of it. That's natural and it's normal. It's healthy even. But at some point, Assuming this person is not still in your life actively injuring you because that's what boundaries are for and we'll talk about them in a couple weeks.
Speaker 2:But assuming they're not Still able to inflict more hurt on you, how far you carry that pain. Where it stops serving you is up to you. Are there consequences for bad behavior? Of course, there are. But you're not responsible for ensuring that they get What they deserve.
Speaker 2:You are responsible for how you choose to learn and grow and evolve and forgive. Because forgiveness is to let go of the past. It is to send away the hurt. It is to choose not to live back there anymore. Now, reunion, reconciliation, that will take movement from both sides and that's another conversation and we'll get there.
Speaker 2:Forgiveness, first, is about how you choose to heal, how you choose to move forward for yourself. And it's important to recognize that the person That hurt you does not get to decide for you how and when you will do that. And I think it's actually these less abstract, More concrete images of forgiveness that we find in the scriptures. These metaphors of leaving behind or sending away that Actually can really help us here, because they show us that this isn't something we're waiting for. This is an active process we Choose for ourselves.
Speaker 2:We're not passive in forgiveness. We're not at the mercy of the person who hurt us in forgiveness. In forgiveness, this is Something we choose for ourselves. And even if it takes an incredibly long time, even if we have to Choose it again and again every single morning for a season. Even if we have to choose to forgive every time that person pops back into our minds, and it is our choice, not theirs.
Speaker 2:And Tutu talks about getting to the place of posthumously forgiving his father after his death. Forgiving my father frees me, he writes. But Think about that for a second. If Desmond Tutu had locked himself to waiting for an apology that could never come. If he'd linked himself to a memory Could never change the world.
Speaker 2:Might never have been gifted the brilliance and the work of this man. The same way that we, All of us we miss out on you the longer you hold yourself captive to someone who does not deserve to have that power over you. There are lessons to be learned from the past. Of course there are. But there is too much in front of you now.
Speaker 2:There is too much ahead of you to be perpetually living back there. And this is why I think when Jesus This teaches us to pray. He very specifically brings us back to a focus on this present moment in front of us. There's a time for reflecting. There's a time for dreaming, but the future and the past don't actually exist anywhere but in your mind.
Speaker 2:And prayer There is perhaps where we are most in touch with what is really real. The present. We've talked about the Lord's prayer a number of times before. Specifically, I think the last time was a series called the problem with prayer a couple of years ago, We know this prayer. Jesus prays, our father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Speaker 2:We ground ourselves by remembering who God is. Goodness and graciousness, full of love, the divine source of every breath we take. May your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is. In heaven, we start exactly where we are. Remembering that we live in a participatory universe where things don't just happen to us.
Speaker 2:We get to respond, we get to We get to choose how our world will unfold and we can point it toward the divine imagination with every choice. Give us today our daily bread. Not tomorrow or next week or next year, but this moment right here and now. Gift an awareness of our need in this point in time. Then he says, forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven Our debtors, God of the universe, who is never trapped by our past help us not to get stuck back there either.
Speaker 2:Help us to be here and now with you in this moment. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever. Amen. You see, temptation and anxiety, they drag us off into the future with things we can't control.
Speaker 2:Unforgiveness traps us in the past where we weren't meant to live our lives, but Jesus offers This prayer to bring us back to the moment where God is most present healing and repairing, lovingly preparing us for all the potential Show that God sees in us. And all of that begins when we engage the spiritual practice of forgiveness, which is really interesting because that phrase practice of forgiveness is actually where we started today. There's that Quote from doctor Luskin that introduced the idea of forgiveness training. And here's the thing, over and over again, whether you read the work of spiritual leaders There's like Desmond Tutu or the research of psychologists like Fred Luskin or the teachings of Jesus. You'll find yourself coming back to the idea of practice.
Speaker 2:This idea that forgiveness isn't easy, but it is something that we can cultivate. Because you see, every time you choose to believe that healing is possible, that you can begin to move even slowly toward letting go and becoming whole. Every time you choose to remember well, to set aside false narratives and assumptions to learn from past hurts, but to no longer be captive to them. Every time you trust that God is in this with you You cheering you on, not scolding you for your unforgiveness, but encouraging you toward everything that is good for you. And even.
Speaker 2:Maybe I could even say, especially when you practice this in those small Moments that don't really seem like they're worth celebrating. What happens is you slowly and you steadily build the reflexes, Is the muscle memory, the strength to forgive in the moments when you're not sure you can. Because ultimately this is what we mean when we talk about the way that is Jesus. It is the series of small steps, one after another over and over again. Slowly shape us and become us and heal us and help us know the person that God already celebrates.
Speaker 2:May you begin to forgive well because you deserve to. May God guide and walk with you on the path Jesus toward all grace and peace. Let's pray. Almighty To whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secret is hidden. May you speak to the deepest parts of who we are.
Speaker 2:To remind us that every time we choose the good, every time we choose not to build false narratives in our mind, Every time we choose that most generous explanation for the actions of those around us. Every time we Choose to forgive even when it's not a big deal. To learn but to set that hurt aside and to move forward into something More graceful and peaceful. Every time we do this, we build the skills of forgiveness. We practice And we train and we become the kind of person who can confront even the largest hurt.
Speaker 2:As we forgive on a daily basis, we build the skills that we need to let go of that thing we've been holding on to for years. Every time we choose to move forward in relationships, we build the strength that we need to let go of that wound that we've been carrying around for far are too long. And eventually, as we heal and become whole as your spirit speaks to us, we become ready to Move on the path of Jesus. To choose the good. To move forward.
Speaker 2:To believe that you are Healing us, repairing us, knitting us together right now. Spirit, be with us. Spirit, heal us. Spirit, help Us. Spirit move us toward Jesus.
Speaker 2:In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.