“Forgiving–Part II”
Psalm 130; Ephesians 4:25-32
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
February 7, 2016
“I forgive you.” Nadine Collier’s words, spoken to the man who brutally murdered her mother, started a movement. Other family members of thevictims of the mass shooting at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina stood up as well and spoke their words of forgiveness. Thousands of people gathered outside the church to offer prayers and support. Tens of thousands of dollars worth of donations flowed in. The Confederate flag in front of the South Carolina state house came down.
Nadine Collier’s words started a movement, and they became the center of a maelstrom–a storm of pain, misunderstanding, family and church conflict. Last Sunday, I described the anguish of the Emmanuel AME family as they struggle with their different ways of grieving and their different understandings of the biblical call to forgiveness.
The next day, on Monday, I read that the Emmanuel AME church has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. One of 200 nominees, it shares the honor with Pope Francis and also, strangely, Donald Trump. According to the Post and Courier, a Charleston-based newspaper, Nadine Collier is not happy about this. As the church has been elevated in the public eye, she feels increasingly disenchanted.
The nomination and Collier’s response highlight what an important, complicated challenge forgiveness is. Last Sunday, we began our reflection on this important, complicated challenge. I ended my sermon by inviting you to ponder some of the questions I raised. This morning I will offer a few of my own thoughts on those questions–core beliefs that shape my understanding of forgiveness, and two metaphors that help me make sense of what it means.
I believe in the overwhelming, all-encompassing grace of God. Grace is God’s love poured out on us. We don’t receive God’s grace because we are good; neither do we receive it in spite of our shortcomings. Grace is God’s love that is deeper and richer and wider than right and wrong, good and bad. Forgiveness, as I understand it, is a more specific expression of grace: God’s restoring us to wholeness and right relationship when we have hurt one another or strayed from God’s calling. God’s forgiveness follows our sincere effort to repent, to change our ways; God’s grace comes before that–God’s love for us in all our brokenness, God’s yearning for us to be made whole.
That’s what I believe about who God is. This is what I believe about who we are: we are created in the image of God–with the capacity for creativity and love and grace. We are good. And we are not God. Our knowledge and power are limited; our lives are limited. Fear, frustration, disappointment, anger, our narrow perspectives–they all get in the way of our goodness. We hurt one another–in small ways, in big ways, and sometimes in ways that seem unforgivable. We are imperfect, even broken; still we are created in God’s image, capable of reflecting God’s love and grace.
I also believe that human beings, with God’s help, are capable of change. God can soften even the hardest heart; God can bring new life to our deepest despair. Accompanying that belief is my recognition of how much gets in the way of our capacity to change. Lifelong patterns, deep-rooted expectations, layers of pain and self-hate, walls of self-protection all thwart our ability to change. Real change is incredibly hard, and requires tremendous support, a lot of time, and an openness to God’s movement in our lives. We don’t always know how to make change happen in our own lives. We do not have control over whether another person can or will change.
Two more core beliefs: We are all connected with each other. Our actions affect one another, even when we’d like to pretend they don’t. Finally, we can never undo the past. We can only make choices about how past events will shape our lives moving forward.
With these starting points, I offer a few reflections on the questions I posed last week.
“Is forgiveness an act of will or a process?” For me, it is helpful to think of forgiveness as a journey–often on a windy, rocky road, from which we cannot see the destination. When we have been hurt or wronged, we find ourselves at a crossroads. There are many different paths to choose as we move from that hurtful event into our future. There is the path of denial–pretending it never happened. There is the path of resentment, the road of anger that hardens into hate, the journey of building walls and finding scapegoats. It requires an act of will–a conscious choice–to embark upon the path of forgiveness, especially when we cannot imagine how we will ever be able to let go of our pain. Once we are on that path, we are not in control of what we face–valleys of deep despair, mountains of anger, oceans of pain. The journey may take months, years, decades, even our whole lives. Our act of will is to choose the path, to stay in the process, and to keep walking forward. Forgiveness is an act of will, and it is an honoring of a process that is not entirely in our control.
The next question I asked: “Is the purpose of forgiveness to give the forgiver peace or to reconcile with the offender?” A different image helps me as I explore this question. We are all connected. When we have hurt one another, those connections become entanglements–twisting around us, tying us up in knots, sometimes even choking our lives, our potential, our joy. Forgiveness is about disentangling–releasing the chokehold, untying the knots, freeing ourselves from the ways a past act constricts our lives.
Sometimes, that disentanglement process is a shared endeavor–when we have asked for forgiveness and are sincerely trying to change, when there is enough shared commitment that we can risk trusting change will really happen. In those situations, there is a new web of connection that is woven, stronger and more beautiful than before. A new, deeper relationship takes shape, one that honors our shared human frailty and our shared capacity to offer one another grace.
Other times, the disentangling is by necessity a one-sided project. The other person may not acknowledge the wrong. Or there may be so many things that get in the way of his or her changing that it is neither safe nor healthy to risk being hurt again. Sometimes disentangling means cutting the tie, or perhaps stretching the bonds of connection to create distance and appropriate boundaries for protection.
In a perfect world, forgiveness would always mean reconciliation and renewed relationship. In the real world, it sometimes means separation.
Last week I asked a third question, for which I don’t have a metaphor, just a reaction: “Does forgiveness enable positive change, or does it keep us stuck in the past by letting us pretend nothing happened?” In the weeks after the Charleston shooting and the family members’ expressions of forgiveness, I began seeing Facebook posts questioning whether the families should have expressed their forgiveness. The argument was that their act of forgiveness allows us as a society to avoid facing the history of racism behind the attack. The posts made me furious: what right does anyone have to question another person’s choice to forgive?
In retrospect, I understand and honor the intention behind these posts. I also think they were misdirected. The issue is not whether Nadine Collier should have said those words; she’s the one who gets to make that choice. The issue is what we–as individuals and as a community–choose to do in response. If we let the focus on forgiveness become an excuse to ignore racism, that’s on us. We are the ones who need to ensure that we respond to these expressions of forgiveness by deepening our commitment to fighting racism.
It was striking to me, in the midst of a couple weeks of thinking about the Charleston shooting and the meaning of forgiveness, to learn about the Nobel Prize nomination. I absolutely believe the survivors and the families of the victims of this racist shooting deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Not because they should be put up on a pedestal, but because they have chosen to engage in this struggle to forgive. It is the honest struggles of faithful people that will change the world.
I believe they deserve the prize. Even more, what they deserve is for us to honor them as faithful people struggling through a really hard time. They deserve respect for the ways each person’s journey toward forgiveness is different. They deserve time and space to disentangle their lives from the hate-filled act of Dylann Roof. Most of all, they deserve our commitment to do everything we can to dismantle racism in our nation.
I could do a year’s worth of sermons on forgiveness and barely scratch the surface. Today I offer two metaphors that I hope you will find helpful in your own reflections. Forgiveness is a journey–an act of will to take the first step, an on-going process of discovery and healing. Forgiveness is a disentangling–sometimes to reweave new connections, sometimes to cut destructive ties.
I end with a reaffirmation of the biblical promise and challenge. The promise is that God loves us, pours out grace upon us and yearns to forgive us. The challenge is that Jesus insists we forgive one another. May we trust in the promise and live the challenge. Amen.
Knapp, Andrew, “For AME Church, Nobel Peace Prize nomination a ‘phenomenal’ honor,” Post and Courier, February 1, 2016, Charleston, South Carolina.