Forgiveness

The Relief from Regret

Romans 5.1-11

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person - though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, we will be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

Christianity, despite all of the religious overtones, is not actually a religion. Yes, we tend to focus on religious things, like spirituality, holiness, sacred rituals and texts, but we are more of an alternative society than we are a religion.

In others words, Christianity is less about what we do and more about who we are.

Because we’re a different people.

We’re different in terms of just about everything. We are different regarding time, because we believe God’s future is overlapping with the present. We are different regarding space, because even though we exist right here, we’re all about what happens here getting out there. And we are most different in terms of story.

As Stanley Hauerwas is fond of saying, we live in a time (perhaps we shall call it modernity), when we believe we should have no story except for the story we chose when we had no story. To put it a different way, we believe we should be free to narrate our own existence.

The only problem with the story we chose when we had no story, is that we did not choose that story. We are captivated and captured by stories that want our hearts. We are stolen away by the stories of political tribalism, wealth, power, violence, retribution, etc.

But here in the church we believe that Jesus’ story stories us. It is the most important story, far more important than any other story, because it changes everything.

The story we call Jesus is a gift. It provides a new past, in which the mistakes we perpetrated are healed and the damage we have undergone is redeemed. We call this forgiveness. And the story that is Jesus provides a new future, in which nothing we do or leave undone undoes who we are in the light of Christ. We also call this forgiveness.

And forgiveness, to quote St. Dolly Parton, is all there is.

There’s a better than good chance that all of us here have heard Whitney Houston’s smash hit “I Will Always Love You.” It won Record of the Year at the 1994 Grammy Awards and, for many years, it was the best-selling single of all time by a female artist. And the song was originally written by Dolly Parton.

The inspiration for the song came from Dolly Parton’s experience with Porter Wagoner who, in 1967, gave the 27 year old Dolly Parton her first big break. She was featured on his weekly television program aptly titled The Porter Wagoner Show, and they wound up recording dozens of songs, albums, and hits.

They won the Country Music Award for “Duo of the Year” three times.

But by 1973, Dolly Parton dreamed of something more. She wanted out from Wagoner’s shadow, if only to stop being referred to by Wagoner’s as “his pretty little girl.” And Parton prayed about it, a lot in fact, and she later said she heard God was telling me to go.

And she did what she does best, she wrote a song about how she felt, she marched in Wagoner’s office, and she sang “I Will Always Love You.”

Wagoner responded to her dream by suing her for a breach of contract, he demanded a share of all her future royalties, and he bad-mouthed her all over Nashville. I mean, how does anybody, bad mouth Dolly Parton?

Nevertheless, even through she was blameless, she agreed to a settlement and paid Wagoner a million dollars in order to strike out on her own.

The next decade saw the meteoric rise of Dolly Parton and the downward spiral of Porter Wagoner. So much so that in 1981 he was dropped from his own label and fell into economic difficulty. By then Dolly Parton was so rich that she bought the whole label, and gave it back to him in order to protect his and his family’s future.

When Wagoner died in 2007, Dolly Parton was there with his family, holding his hand.

Dolly Parton had every reason to leave Wagoner in the dust, to even seek retribution for what he put her through, and so countless interviewers have asked why she did what she did over these decades, and she’s had the same answer each time, “Forgiveness is all there is.”

Photo by NADER AYMAN on Unsplash

The church is in the business of forgiveness, but its not always clear how we feel about forgiveness. David Zahl offers this example: In 2019, the billionaire investor Robert F. Smith announced during a commencement address at Morehouse College that we would personally pay off all the student loan balance for the entire graduating class. For the tune of $40 million, almost four hundred young men at the historically black all-men’s college would walk away debt free from the graduation ceremony.

Zahl writes, “A third party wiping the slate clean by absolving an incurred debt - by surprise, without coercion, and at a cost to themselves - is what we call an act of grace.”

The gift of graduating debt free liberated those students from so many shackles. They would no longer carry the burden of monthly payments while striking out into the workforce, they could take a chance on lower paying jobs because they would no longer fear the burden of interest payments, and they might even be able to seek further education right away instead of deferring until a better economic period.

The graduates, and their families, were obviously overwhelmed with gratitude for Smith’s financial forgiveness.

But others were not so happy about it. Some immediately lambasted Smith’s gift because it wasn’t fair.

What about the students who worked through college so that they wouldn’t have debt when they graduated? Or what about students at every other college or university who worked just as hard if not harder? Or what about the graduates themselves, isn’t this just setting them up for failure in the future? If you keep rescuing people from their challenges, how can they ever rescue themselves?

In short, Robert Smith’s gift was seen as an offense.

Zahl writes, “The offensiveness is worth noting. To those in need, forgiveness comes as a relief. To others, it comes as an affront.”

Forgiveness, of course, applies to more than just financial burdens. Forgiveness is all around us all the time. We forgive the doofus who cuts in front of us at Kroger, we forgive the kids not calling when they said they would, we forgive the preacher who preaches lackluster sermons.

And forgiveness is at the heart of every real relationships. Whether it’s something big or something trivial, we learn to let love be our guide rather than the ledger book.

But forgiveness always comes at a cost. To receive it and to offer it fundamentally unravels the fabric of our understanding. Perhaps we might think we’ve lived beyond the reach of forgiveness, or maybe we haven’t done some terrible thing or had some terrible thing done to us, but none of us can escape the unchangeability of the past. No of us can dodge regret completely.

All of us have some moment we would redo if given the chance, some past decision or action or utterance that we would take back if we could.

Our pasts exert pressure on us in the present. Sure, we can become very good at moving on or pretending we’ve moved on, but the truth of us, what we’ve done or left undone, never really leaves us. Regret is real. Which is why forgiveness is so important.

Forgiveness is the only thing that frees us and relieves us from the burden of not just who were were, but also who we are.

And, again, forgiveness is offensive. It’s why when Jesus told a parable about forgiveness, the disciples were quick to say, “Sounds good Lord. The world would be a much better place with a little mercy here and there. But exactly how many times do we have to forgive?”

We are inclined to discount or even diminish forgiveness because doesn’t it diminish what actually happened? Except the opposite is true; if anything, forgiveness amplifies what happened. It’s the declaration that understanding and empathy aren’t enough to heal what’s taken place. We need something more than that.

Another challenge to practicing forgiveness is the notion that it requires repentance. We often put conditions on our pardons. Which, to be clear, means that it’s no longer forgiveness. Instead it’s turned into reciprocity. There are no ifs in forgiveness.

If we got everyone back for what they did to us, or if everyone got us back for what we’ve done to them, that wouldn’t be any of us left.

An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.

And still, forgiveness is just about the most challenging thing we can ever do or experience. And it isn’t just rare or difficult, humanly speaking it’s impossible. That’s why, in the church, we believe forgiveness is a miracle. When it happens, and it does, it is the work of God.

Notably, though we often forget, there is a huge and fundamental difference between Christ’ command to forgive and the promise that, because of Christ, we are forgiven. To command a congregation to forgive might be a praise-worthy act of pulpit proclamation, but it is not a relief when you’ve been truly hurt or injured. That’s not grace, it’s just another burden. The truth, the inconvenient truth, is that we may not be able to forgive someone, and the only relief comes by leaving such matters to God, who is not us.

This, incidentally, is what Romans 5 is all about.

God does what we can’t and what we won’t. God knows the fullness of who we are, what we’ve done and left undone, God sees all of our ungodliness, and goes to the cross through Christ for us anyway. Nothing is said about repentance or remorse or restitution. Instead its all about restoration. God sets right what we’ve gotten wrong.

God rectifies our regrets.

This is the Gospel: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Not before we were sinners, or after we were sinners. But right in the midst of our sin, God saves us.

That is our great and only hope. God forgives us before we have a chance to come clean, before we even know we have something to come clean from.

Which is why Christianity isn’t religious. The Cross is too offensive to be religious. Forgiveness isn’t religious. Religion requires action for reaction. The Gospel isn’t about our actions, it’s about God’s action. It’s all about what God does for us, to us, and with us. We’re storied by God’s story.

And Paul was the first to ever put this into written words. The words we say every time we come to the table, the most important words we can ever hear because they are the difference that make all the difference.

The forgiveness promised through scripture, and made manifest in the present through the presence of Jesus is, to quote St. Dolly Parton again, all there is.

So hear the Good News: Christ died for us while we were yet sinners and that proves God’s love toward us. In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven. Glory to God. Amen.