FORGIVING OURSELVES
Rev. Dr. Joyce Antila Phipps
Old First Church. Middletown. NJ
September 6. 2020
Texts: Isaiah 43:1–13; Matthew 18:15–20
The mother was holding back the tears. “How can I ever forgive myself?” she spurted out. “How can I ever forgive myself?” The girl sat silently; she had been afraid that her mother would throw her out of the house and still thought that a real possibility. She was four months pregnant and only fourteen-years-old. Her mother’s response is not atypical of women who find their young girls pregnant. Often we blame ourselves for what happens to our children as if we had total control as we imagined we did when they were babies. Of course. we didn’t have total control at that point either; we just thought we did.
The other response, of course, is scapegoating. For centuries. we human beings have been particularly good at this. Blaming the other person is a way to deal with our own shortcomings, our own limitations, our own mistakes. We do it personally and we do it societally. Although Hitler’s blaming the Jews for the economic problems in the Weimar Republic may have been the most infamous instance of scapegoating during the last century, it wasn’t the only one. Ethnic groups blame each other for their misfortune and the blame often breaks out into massacre and genocide. as with the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda. White politicians in the South used colored persons, as African-Americans were politely referred to, to keep poor whites from looking at the real issues of economic and social injustice. Immigrant bashing is just another form of scapegoating.
So, how do we forgive ourselves? How do we change our behavior when confronted with our mistakes, our failings. our sins? Matthew’s Gospel, written in a time when the early Christian communities were facing conflict from within and persecution from outside. gives a kind of mini-twelve step program for dealing with conflict and reconciliation. The first step is actually the most difficult: directly confronting the offender. followed by forgiveness and reconciliation.
Leaders of the early Christian communities, anxious to settle conflicts before they could grow and destroy the harmony within, used the concept of mediation by bringing in another person to help resolve the conflict. And we thought it was a modern concept. Only when that intervention failed was the conflict to be brought before the community of faith.
Even then. people understood that reconciliation can only occur when there is confrontation. when there is a way for the aggrieved party to state those grievances directly to the offender. Otherwise. the grievance festers. grows and becomes a cancer to not only the relationship between the persons. but one that could also destroy the church. The words attributed to Jesus here speak to that very issue.
Forgiving those who have offended us, reconciling with them, and admitting our own roles in the conflict are necessary preludes to rebuilding relationships. When we admit our own roles, our own participation in a conflict, whether it’s a personal argument or an international mess, then we can begin to forgive others and to reconcile ourselves with them––and to rebuild relationships.
The reading from Isaiah is a promise of not just forgiveness but of reconciliation and restoration. We cannot have restoration without reconciliation and we cannot have reconciliation without forgiveness. And forgiveness requires repentance. The early church realized that all four factors were interwoven.
Repentance is not just only for the offender but also is required of the offended. We are called to repent of the anger we feel at being offended. We have to let go of the anger before we can forgive the one who has offended us. Sometimes that is the most difficult anger to let go of because we feel justified in our anger.
It’s really difficult to admit our complicity for messes in our personal lives. Look at divorce. Just as it takes two to keep a marriage together. it takes two to have it come apart and end in divorce. And it’s really hard for us to admit our own roles. When my ex-husband went gallivanting about and hooked up with another woman and left me, it was really easy to throw all the blame on him. But part of the healing process was to look at my role, including my willful blindness to problems that existed in our relationship.
It’s no different in the church, back to the reading from Matthew. Each of us here has to look at our own individual responsibility in making decisions, in developing the kinds of relationships that enable a church to be healthy whether it’s small or large. Now. taking responsibility for the consequences of our actions is different than the debilitating feelings engendered by guilt. Rather than helping us create good behavior and rebuild a relationship, guilt often puts us back into a pattern of the very actions that caused the problem in the first place. Rather than feeling guilty about what you did, says the Gospel reading, go to the person you have offended or who has offended you and restore your relationship by admitting your responsibility for what happened.
As a prelude to the Lord’s Supper we see before us, historically, as part of the worship service, congregants passed the peace of God. Even before the threat of Covid–19, due to health considerations, we changed our practice to only saying the words.
The words of reconciliation are important for us and our brothers and sisters. Passing the peace never was not a time to catch up on our lives. We used to do that later in the coffee hour. It is a very ancient symbol that we are all members of Christ’s body. that we cannot really do without each other in spite of our differences and disagreements. and that we are unified through God’s love shown to us in Christ. As we say the words of reconciliation today, let us forgive ourselves as we have been forgiven. reconciling ourselves as we have been reconciled. and opening ourselves to all of the possibilities of God’s love.
Let us pray: God of love, God of inner peace, bring us into a deeper sense of your presence in our lives, enabling us to take responsibility for our actions and forgiving ourselves and others as we have been forgiven. In the name of him who forgave others. even Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.