Forgiven and Forgiving

(Scriptures: Genesis 50:15-21, Romans 14:1-12, Matthew 18:21-35)

I suspect each of us has a story to tell about where we were on September 11, 2001. I remember it was a Tuesday, and a beautiful sunny day, not a cloud in the sky. For myself, I remember I was at my office in Elkins Park, north of the city. I’d just gotten to the office maybe half an hour before, and was on the phone with someone from Blue Cross about some relatively mundane matter, when I heard a gasp on the other end of the line. I asked the person what was wrong, and she said that she heard on the radio that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. Other people in my office had had similar conversations, and the few of us who had radios turned them on. As the events of the day unfolded – a 2nd plane flew into another tower, the Twin Towers collapsed, we heard about a 3rd plane flying into the Pentagon, and yet another plane crashing in Shanksville, PA – heard the words “America is under attack” - we were in a daze. People responded in various ways to the unfolding events. Many called their families, and then began to make calls to check in on any friends they had in New York City. Of course, the phone lines were jammed. In the days that followed, there were worries about other potential targets, even in Philadelphia. In 2001, I was on the Official Board of Old First Reformed church down at 4th & Race Street – right smack dab next to the Mint building. Would a terrorist try to fly a plane into the Mint, or Independence Hall, or some other symbolic target in Philadelphia?

Even now, 10 years on, the memory of that day gives me a sick, dazed, angry feeling. I suspect I’m not the only one. Our lives have changed. We have words in our vocabulary – homeland security, Patriot Act, transportation safety administration – that weren’t there 10 years ago. If we travel by air, we now take it for granted that we’re expected to remove our shoes so that screeners can be sure they don’t contain plastic explosives, and we know that we can only take tiny amounts of sunblock and toothpaste and other items that come in tubes and bottles. (On my first church trip to Cuba in 2008, my sunblock was confiscated, and I joked for the rest of the trip about my sunblock of mass destruction.) We live with the knowledge that our email messages and phone calls are likely under potential or actual government surveillance.

On a day like today, with all manner of local and national September 11 remembrances, today’s Scripture readings may seem not only irrelevant, but even offensive, practically obscene. On a day like today, listening to a Gospel reading about forgiving others 70 x 7 may make us angry, angry enough to see red, maybe even angry enough to walk out of the church service, perhaps spitting at an usher on the way out. On a day like today, our Epistle reading about respecting differences in worship traditions may make us instead want to thump our chests and insist that we, who of course worship God aright, are saved, and everyone else is damned. On a day like today, listening to Joseph’s words in our Old Testament reading – “what you meant for evil, God meant for good” – may make us turn away in disgust. What possible good can God bring out of a terrorist attack? And for those of us who lost loved ones in the attacks, September 11 will for the rest of our lives be a day not only of national, but of personal, mourning.

Our country has changed in the 10 years since September 11, and not necessarily for the better. I haven’t heard the phrase “freedom fries” for a while, nor have I heard people from France referred to as – to clean the phrase up a bit - “cheese-eating surrender junkies” recently – but 10 years after September 11, there is, I think more than before the attacks of 10 years ago, a very strong tendency in our country to think that every dispute, personal or national, can and should be settled with a fist, a knife, a gun, a bomb, that diplomacy and negotiation are for wimps and weaklings, for the French – indeed, for cheese-eating surrender junkies. Movies in which the hero saves the day by shooting people and blowing things up are a dime a dozen, but when’s the last movie anyone has seen about resolving personal or national disputes by means of conversation and negotiation. We don’t know, and don’t especially care, how other countries view the United States. And within the USA, the aftermath of the attacks has done nothing to bring us together as a nation. Within the USA, there seems to be little sense of community, little sense of what it is to work for the common good, almost no sense of what it is to be our brother’s or sister’s keeper. Congress is bitterly and hopelessly divided, for the most part bought and paid for by corporate donations, and outside of Washington DC it’s every man, woman and child for themselves. Those few who have risked their lives and their well-being for the common good – our military personnel, our national guard, our first responders, fire and rescue personnel – if they are injured, find themselves out of luck, our society expressing its gratitude by leaving them without sufficient health and disability benefits. More than a few of the folks we encounter on the street, missing arms and legs, panhandling, years ago had gone to Iraq and Afghanistan, and before that Vietnam, on our behalf. After World War II, a generous United States through the Marshall Plan sacrificed to rebuild war-devastated Europe. Fifty-five years later, the highways, bridges, and rail lines our fathers and grandfathers built are crumbling around us, and we won’t even sacrifice to restore them – our own infrastructure - to its former condition, let alone expand and improve them.

There’s a genre of movies – “Back to the Future” is the first that comes to my mind, “The Butterfly Effect” is a more recent effort – that envision what would happen if the lead character could travel back in time and get a “do-over” on some decision they later regretted. What would happen if the hero had asked the girl out on a date instead of pining for her at a distance? What would happen if they avoided a certain intersection where a fatal car accident happened? What if? Even though, yes, hindsight is 20-20 – even so, I’d ask us to think over the past 10 years and ask what if? What if our national leaders had worked to bring our country together, had worked to promote a sense of shared sacrifice, rather than letting poor and working class families bear almost the entire cost– in terms of death and injury – of our national defense over the past 10 years, while telling the rest of us to go shopping? What if our sense of patriotism had gone beyond waving flags, to actually trying to care for our injured troops and their families. What if we had tried to understand Islam – not convert to Islam, not agree with Islam, just try to understand Islam - instead of demonizing it? What if we had taken the time to find out who actually planned the attacks of September 11, 2001 and held them responsible, rather than stomping into other countries with guns blazing, willy nilly? Ten years after 9-11, it’s a haunting question. What if?

To be fair, our Scripture readings today are about resolving disputes within the family, within the church. Peter asked Jesus how many times he should be expected to forgive a member of the church. Paul was writing about disputes between the early congregations, early house churches, who had different views on whether it was necessary for Christians to observe the kosher laws. Joseph is addressing his own kin. Today’s readings say nothing directly about our actions toward those outside the church.

Even so – while our impulse is to read these passages like W. C. Fields, as he once said, “looking for loopholes” – the clear thrust of all three of our Scriptures is forgiveness, and beyond that, the desire for the restoration of a renewed relationship. Individual congregations are not to be divided into hostile factions; clusters of congregations are not to demonize and undermine each other. And beyond our own walls, in the words of our reading from last week, we are called to love our enemies, to bless those who curse us. Jesus’ talk of loving one’s enemies sounds lovely – until the moment we actually encounter an enemy, when suddenly these words of Jesus sound, not beautiful, but contemptible. And yet these words of Jesus stand. Pastor Dave didn’t put those words in the Bible; they were there in the Bible when I found it, there before I or any of us here ever thought to open a Bible. If we are to call ourselves Christians, we need to find a way to come to terms with those very difficult commands of our Savior.

I believe that, even in the horrors of the aftermath of 9-11, there were divine lessons to be learned, had we at the time ears to hear. And the book of Jonah reminds me that when God wants us to do something, God has a way of making it happen, has a way of sending a whale to pick us up from wherever we’ve fled and bring us back to where God wants us. To whatever extent we haven’t fully learned the lesson of forgiveness, God may find ways to replay the lesson for our benefit.

When we hold grudges, personal or national, what is missing is the consciousness of how much God has forgiven us. As difficult as it would be for any of us to find peace with the acts of 9-11 – God in God’s commitment to humankind, God in God’s gracious love for each of us has had to make peace with so much worse. Our crucified Savior reminds us that our purported righteousness is like filthy rags, that we all come before God with empty hands, that we are all entirely dependent on God’s grace. Because we are forgiven, we too are called to be forgiving.

The national office of the UCC sent out a 9-11 remembrance message this week. It acknowledged the losses, but it also called on us to remember with hope. It included two sayings of Jesus: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you.” “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” Perhaps for today it’s enough for each of us, in our own way, to ponder what it means to remember 9-11 in light of these words of Jesus. Amen.