February 29, 2004
The Meaning of the Cross

A woman was getting her hair done in preparation for her big trip to Rome when her hairdresser asked, “Rome? Why would anyone want to go to Rome? It’s crowded and dirty and full of Italians. You’re crazy to go to Rome. So how are you getting there?” “We’re flying on Continental,” she replied. “We got a great rate.”

 “Continental? That’s a terrible airline. Their planes are old, their flight attendants are ugly and they’re always late. So where are you staying in Rome?” “We’ll be at this exclusive little place called Testa.” “Testa? I know that place. Worst hotel in Rome. The rooms are small, the service is surly and it’s overpriced.”

And then the hairdresser asked, “What are you going to be doing in Rome?” And the woman said, “We’re going to the Vatican and we hope we can see the Pope.” “That’s a laugh,” the hairdresser said. “You and a million other people will be trying to see the Pope. He’ll be the size of an ant. Boy, good luck on this lousy trip. You’re going to need it.”

A month later the woman came back to the beauty parlor and of course the hairdresser asks, “How was the big trip to Rome.” “It was wonderful,” the woman explained. “Not only was Continental’s flight right on time, it was in a brand new plane, but it was overbooked so they bumped us up to first class. The food and wine were wonderful, and I had a handsome young steward who waited on me hand and foot.

“And the hotel was great, they just finished a $5 million remodeling job and now it’s the finest hotel in the city. They too were overbooked, so they apologized and gave us the owner’s suite at no extra charge.”

Then the hairdresser said, “Well, I’m sure you didn’t get to see the Pope.” “Actually, we were very lucky,” the woman replied. “We were touring the Vatican and one of the Swiss Guards tapped me on the shoulder and said the Pope likes to meet a few tourists every day, so they took us to a private room and told us to wait. Sure enough, in comes the Pope, and I kneeled down in front of him and he even said a few words to me.” The astonished hairdresser asked, “What did he say?” “He said, ‘Where did you get the lousy hairdo?”

Oh, if only life were like that, right? There’s always somebody around who wants to rain on your parade.

But today I want to talk about a much more serious rain which falls on everybody’s parade, and that is the problem of unforgiveness. Tonight is Oscar night, when a billion people around the world will watch as movie stars parade to the podium and pronounce, “And the winner is…” What’s wrong with that statement? They don’t actually say, “the winner is,” they are required to say “And the Oscar goes to…” You’re not allowed to have winners and losers, too many big egos to bruise.

Forgiving is probably the most difficult thing we humans are called upon to accomplish, especially if the hurt is deep. But what’s at stake is so much more important than a little gold statue. When you give forgiveness, you are the big winner. You receive so much more than what you have given away.

When you refuse to forgive, you are literally wrapping yourself in chains, chains of unhealthy anger, chains of isolation, chains in which you constantly relive the pain and re-cement your attitude of bitterness, but when you forgive, you’re breaking the chains and allowing yourself to live in freedom.

The German philosopher Schopenhauer compared the human race to a bunch of porcupines huddling together on a cold winter’s night. He said, “the colder it gets outside, the more we huddle together for warmth. But the closer we get to each other, the more we hurt one another with our sharp quills. And in the lonely night of earth’s winter, eventually we begin to drift apart and wander out on our own and freeze to death in our loneliness.” Wow. Sounds like Schopenhauer spent a lot of time in church. For even though we come here for warmth against what can be a cold dark world, we end up hurting each other, and driving one another out into the world to freeze in our loneliness.

Old Testament theology knew that we needed to be forgiven by God for our sins, but Jesus seriously raised the stakes on eternity when he said that unless we forgive our brothers, God is not going to forgive us. That’s what the story of the unforgiving servant is all about—we who have been forgiven a debt we could not possibly repay, the equivalent of billions and billions of dollars, we have seen our slate wiped clean. But if we are hard-hearted enough to refuse forgiveness to a neighbor who owes us a few dollars, our own debt is going to be put back on the board, and God will demand payment in full.

To carry this analogy one step farther, Jesus says if you keep a ledger on forgiveness, inevitably you’ll end up in the red. If books were kept on our lives, every last one of us would find that the debt that God has forgiven us is beyond measure. What we have to forgive each other for cannot compare with how much God has forgiven us. If God kept the books and put a mark against our name every time we messed up, how many of us would have any credit left? I know I would have used up my 490 marks a long time ago. But that’s the point—God doesn’t keep score, He wipes the books clean, every time we ask him for his forgiveness.

Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God for his forgiveness. You all know that. But it’s not that simple, not by a long shot. There are a couple linking words that make it complicated. You know what linking words are, but, and, nor, so. First of all, we ask God to forgive us in the same breath that we ask him to feed us. “Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts.” What’s that imply? That we need forgiveness every day, just like we need bread every day. It’s true that most of us aren’t carrying big sins like murder and adultery around, but if you’re like most people you’re glad that others can’t hear some of the nasty little thoughts swimming around in our head.

And the other linking word is only two letters long, but it’s scary. We pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Right there we’re signing a promissory note and using our own souls as collateral. Forgive us to the extent that we’re willing to forgive others. Thank God that he never calls in that note, or we could be in big trouble. In fact, many of us recognize how difficult forgiveness is, and we get nervous to think that God could be judging us by the letter of this law. Let me assure you, God knows we are imperfect people, but he does expect us to work towards perfection, in forgiveness and in every other part of our lives.

So I want to quote from an author called Lewis Smedes, who wrote Forgive and Forget. He wrote that there are four steps that must be taken before we are ready to forgive. The first is simply acknowledge that we have been hurt.

Denial doesn’t accomplish a thing. You can bury the memory, maybe, but you can’t erase the pain. Second, go ahead and get angry about the hurt. If you don’t allow yourself to feel anger, it may come out anyway in inappropriate ways. Third, start then to put the anger and pain behind you. It can feel good to hang onto the anger, it can feel like a sense of power to stay angry, but God can’t heal a wound that you won’t allow to be closed. In fact, Smedes writes, “Forgiveness isn’t about trying to make things easy for the one who hurt you. It’s about pulling the knife out of your own gut.”

Finally, the last step is the forgetting stage of forgive and forget, a stage that seems impossible to many of us. What’s needed is a sense of being sick and tired of being sick and tired—sick at heart and tired from carrying this burden of resentment. A woman came to a psychiatrist because her heart was broken by the bad marriage she finally had left. She felt powerless to put the marriage behind her and make a better life. The psychiatrist gave her a brick as the symbol of that marriage, and asked her to carry it around for the next week. As the week went on and her purse got heavier and heavier, she began to understand the burden she had been putting on herself. This wasn’t a new message, but for the first time it was presented in language she could really understand. Finally ready to let go of this burden, she held a ceremony in which she crushed the brick with a hammer and scattered the pieces. Then she was ready to make a new life.

As you leave here today, there are three principles on forgiveness that I’d like you to take with you.

For our own sakes, we need to be forgiving people. We need to act like Mary Nell Verrett, whose brother, James Byrd, was the black man who murdered in Texas a few years ago by being dragged in back of a truck, just for the color of his skin. She said that “My brother would have wanted the world to grow because of this, and I think it will. My family has no use for destructive hate. We have done our best to communicate a message my brother would have wanted the world to know. We are all here to stay. It is just as well that we learn to live together as one community.”

We need to accept the forgiveness granted us by God and pass it on to others, let it flow through our soul and refresh another life even as we have been renewed. This closing of the circuit can’t be emphasized too strongly—so that forgiveness can be made real, it first has to be taken into our own heart, and second, to be made real it has to be extended to someone else, and not just anybody. It has to be extended to somebody we find really hard to forgive. That’s when God’s highest purpose—changing our life—is realized. That’s when the burden we’ve been carrying is finally cast aside.

This process has been compared to God bringing our forgiveness over a bridge that we control. He wants to cross, but if we keep destroying the bridge by being sinfully stubborn in refusing to forgive others, he can’t cross the bridge and bring forgiveness to us. Who’s the big loser here? We are. It’s not that God doesn’t want to forgive us or will only forgive us on a tit for tat basis, but God cannot forgive us when we’ve burned the bridge with our bitter attitude. Forgiveness needs to be extended to others so that the circuit can close, and the power of love can flow.

The Book of Ephesians tells us that anger gives a mighty foothold to the devil to get into our lives. You don’t have to go far to see the effects of ice and rain on a highway that once was solid and smooth. Drive up Rt. 819 to Dawson and Scottdale, and right before you get to Jacob’s Creek you’ll see sections of pavement that have just been stripped away like taking a blanket off a bed. What happened was ice got underneath the road surface and heaved up, cracking the surface. Then when the heavy rains come, they just wash big chunks of asphalt right off the road.

Anger is like that. That’s why our Great Enemy drives wedges between people. Once that surface of love is cracked, it’s so easy for the damage to become permanent.

There was a man who was 35 years old who was angry with his mother because she had promised him a birthday cake when he was 9, and hadn’t been able to make it. The reason was forgotten, but a generation later he was still carrying around the anger. I’ve told you the story of the lady at First Presbyterian Church in Greensburg who had stayed away from church for years. When we asked why, we found out that her name had been omitted from an official list of the deacons 30 years ago. And look at me--there are members of this church who have harbored anger against each other. I will pray especially this morning that the Holy Spirit brings healing where all of us need to be healed.

Returning good for evil is our greatest opportunity to minister in somebody else’s life. You all know I’m constantly urging you to reach out to others in Christ’s name? Well, when somebody does you harm, this could be your big chance to minister to him. Why in the world would I want to do that? Because God will use that moment when you forgive them to change that life. Do you get that? God could be leading you to a point where he’s asking you to forgive someone so he can redeem a broken life. What greater honor could God pay you, than to put you in that position? Somebody could come to Christ next week, if you forgave them this week.

I don’t know if this is a true story or not, but it ought to be. As the story goes, there was a man in Madrid, Spain, who had a falling out with his son, and the son ran away from home. The father searched everywhere but could not find his rebellious son. Finally in desperation he took out an ad in the city’s newspaper. The ad read, “Dear Paco, meet me in front of the newspaper office at noon. All is forgiven. I love you. Your Father.” The next day at noon in front of the newspaper office, there were 800 Pacos, all seeking forgiveness and love from their father.

In Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables Jean Valjean, the hero, spends 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s family. When released, he is an utterly bitter, angry man. A bishop tries to befriend him, but Valjean steals some of his silver and is caught redhanded by the police. The bishop is called to the police station to press charges, but instead of having him thrown back into prison, the bishop brings him two silver candlesticks to fool the police into letting him go. Jean Valjean is completely changed by this act of forgiveness.

From that moment Jean Valjean leads a transformed life, trying to help those who are even more unfortunate than himself. He adopts an orphaned girl and raises her as his own daughter.

As she grows up and finds a boyfriend, they are all caught up in revolution and fighting in the streets, and Valjean saves the boyfriend’s life. And when it comes time to die, he clutches the silver candlesticks, symbols of the forgiveness he has received. In the musical version of Les Miserables Valjean and his daughter sing a powerful tribute to the transforming power of forgiveness which includes the line, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” Don’t miss this—If Jean Valjean had never been forgiven, and if he had never closed the circuit and forgiven his tormentors, he never would have known love, and thus missed the chance to see God.

You might say, “Yes pastor, but that’s just a story.” It sure is. So is the tale of a carpenter who preached the good news of peace only to be convicted by a crooked court of trumped-up charges, who was whipped and beaten, jeered and spat upon by a hostile crowd, nailed to a cross and left to die in agony. And as he hung on that cross bleeding out, he used his last breath to urge his father, “Forgive them, because they don’t know what they’re doing.” Forgiveness is seldom easy. But it is essential if we are ever to see the face of God for ourselves.

Who is the big winner when you forgive? You are. This morning as we pray together, look around in your life and decide if you’re carrying any bricks. Toss them out, blow them up, do whatever you need to do, but don’t carry those burdens one more step. Oscar day is a fine occasion to award yourself the best prize of all—freedom from anger.