7-19-09

And how is your summer going? Too fast for me. I thought June was kind of rough. Both of our congregations experienced some tragic deaths related to it - young people, accidents. My last sermon, which was the last Sunday of June, was titled "It's the Pits." Life can be like this.

And though there is still grief to bear and prayers to petition, I have since had a chance to do some July camping, so now I preaching "It's a Wonderful Life." Call me fickle if you like. Life is like this.

Most of you are old enough to remember Jimmy Stewart, the mid-twentieth century icon of the cinema screen, especially portrayed as the cowboy hero back when westerns were the rage. He was born in 1908, back when Walter Breuning (now the "world's oldest man" at 112 and a resident of Great Falls) was a mere lad of twelve. Stewart died the summer of ?97, a young 89 years old compared to Walter. But we still remember Stewart, who was an actor of mythical proportions.

He represented the values we believe in, and associate with for our nation. At least for white, middle class, small town, Midwestern America, where neighborliness is taken for granted and life is honest, hard working and simple.

Stewart, himself, grew up in a small Pennsylvania town in the early decades of the twentieth century, where simple kindness and courtesy were at the roots of his church going community. Jimmy Stewart represented this honorable way of life as a movie actor.

Was it really who he was? Well, to the often asked question, "What was Jimmy Stewart really like?" the standard response by those who knew him was typically, "He is not acting, he is just being himself."   "Aw, shucks."

And though nothing or no one is that simple, which can be seen in some of his later movies, for instance, his trilogy of Alfred Hitchcock films, we'll leave the image undisturbed and let the icon stand.

Jimmy Stewart is an image of a time past when it truly was "a wonderful life." Or so we say.

But time has past. This is not the "I like Ike" of the 1950s. America has changed. And life is not so simple. The small, homogeneous, Midwestern town struggles to survive, as seen around our state. A different America has emerged since Jimmy Stewart's mid-20th century heyday of film making. It is an America which is urban, heterogeneous, complex, competitive, and confrontational, if not currently economically depressed and awash with Meth.

So as we progressed through the last half of the twentieth century, a new movie star emerged to represent the times. It is said of him, like Jimmy Stewart, "He always plays himself." Riding to center stage, still in westerns, if not fast cars, was Clint Eastwood, whose movies we associate with values like justice, retribution, retaliation, and our all time favorite, revenge.   A shift from "aw, shucks," to "Go ahead, make my day."

If it is true, we live in a less civil time, from the small towns of America to the halls of Congress, it is perhaps fair to say our incivility has been encouraged by the "in your face" attitude personified in the Eastwood films and quickly multiplied by the Rambos, Terminators, Ninja Turtles, and the like.

I read an article recently about a farm woman, who was busy doing her in-town chores with children in tow.   She stops by the post office to pick up her mail, and as she reaches for her mail box, her arm accidently brushes the head of another woman bent over gathering her mail. The farm gal apologizes and then steps back to read her mail.

She is about to walk out of the post office when the other woman charges her, head butts her in the belly, and knocks the wind out of her. Says the Rambo woman, "That's payback for what you did to me" adding, "If your children weren't with you, it would have been worse."

We do seem to have a prevailing "payback" mentality. Certainly we can each offer our own examples taken from the highways of America if not the 10th Avenue Souths, where we are more likely to run into Dirty Harry than Charles Kuralt "on the road," who even himself was somewhat sullied following his death by an ugly fight over his Montana estate.

Which, curiously, leads to the good news. So dominant is the mentality of get even, that the Church's teaching about forgiveness is heard as something foreign. Which is how it was heard in the first place in the first century, in another time when disputes were typically settled by revenge and retribution, though obviously we need not pick on the first century to highlight this approach to life.

This is, however, when the teachings of Jesus come in. So let's turn to our text for this morning. Of course, not new to you, but it bears repeating until we have got it right. Asks Peter of Jesus, "How often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?"   "How often?"

Peter is being rhetorical here. He actually knows the answer to the question and he is trying to impress Jesus, as he proceeds to answer his own question, "As many as seven times?"

Peter lived in a time in which life was outlined by rules. Everything was spelled out. That's what the scribes and rabbis were for, to interpret the Law, making it easier for the rest of us. We just had to obey the Law.   So the laws of forgiveness were already in place - who we were to forgive, including our brothers, sisters and neighbors; and who we did not have to forgive, including those outside our circle of kinship, like the foreigners and the outcasts.

It was all spelled out, including the number of times one must forgive one's brother: three times was the rabbis' response.

So Peter, seeking to show off, and knowing Jesus is more demanding than the average rabbi, doubles the number and adds one, answering his own question, with a smile, "Seven times?"

Yes, Peter surmises, seven will do, a symbolic number for the biblical people. If all the universe could be created in seven days, including a day of rest, then all you needed of just about anything was seven. Yes, forgive seven times, Peter concludes, for this is a complete and impressive number.

Forgiveness is a major theme in Jesus' teaching. We need look no further than the one prayer he teaches us. A brief, yet inclusive prayer, there it is right in the middle, "forgive us our debts (or trespasses or sins, as we did this morning), as we forgive those who sin against."

Each day we ought to pray for and prepare for a life of forgiveness. For you see, forgiveness is not an optional exercise, to be used sparingly to settle some differences. Forgiveness is a way of life, an approach to our neighbor and to our world, an alternative course of action to the vengeance and retaliation which characterizes much of life.

Back to Peter, who is seeking an "atta boy!" from the Lord for his brilliant "seven times" answer. Instead he gets a greater lesson from the Lord. "How often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Seven times?"

Answers Jesus, "I do not say to you seven times, Peter, but seventy times seven."   That is, seven, complete number, times itself, to the power or ten. In other words, Peter, forgiveness is beyond calculation. Don't even try to keep track. Forgiveness is not an exercise to be counted, forgiveness is a way of life.

To drive the lesson home, Jesus tells a parable, as he so often does. It is a story about a merciful king and an unmerciful servant. I hope you listened to it as it was read. Otherwise reread it as it is printed in your bulletin, because we do not have time to cover it now.

Basic plot: a servant does not forgive his lesser debtors as he, himself, has been magnificently forgiven his humongous debt, and it ruins his day. Bottom line: freely we have received forgiveness, so freely we must forgive. God has dealt graciously with us, so now we must deal graciously with one another. Make magnanimity a way of life.

This is not the model we get today from movies nor the coaching we receive from the halls of Congress. We have moved beyond the innocence of Jimmy Stewart's character Jefferson Smith in "Mr. Smith goes to Washington."

Isn't it wonderful the Church is here to offer a different lesson? Like when the Pope went to the man in prison who had tried to assassinate him, and knelt before him in forgiveness. Or when Nelson Mandela, in prison for thirty years, invited the two white wardens who guarded his cell all those years, to be his guests at the inauguration of his presidency of the new republic of South Africa. Or in a worship service in Atlanta a few years ago, when the descendant of a plantation owner knelt in front of the descendant of a slave who had lived on that plantation, and asked for forgiveness for the sins of slavery. Or when the UCC fifteen years ago presented a public apology to the natives of Hawaii for our insensitivities committed while converting them to Christianity a century ago. Or in Colorado ten years ago, when some United Methodists gathered at the place where soldiers under the command of a Methodist pastor slaughtered over 100 Arapahos and Cheyennes, and confessed their sins.

I know, I know, we think these acts of reparation are absurd.   In fact, they rather tick us off. It wasn't us. Why should we apologize? Which is exactly how the world reacted to Paul when he preached Christ crucified. "It's foolishness," said the Greeks. "It's a scandal," said the Jews. "It's sedition," said the Romans.

It's absurd to think the world can be saved because a person without sin took on the sins of the world, so the world could be forgiven, and therefore be invited to a new future. It is absurd.

It is absurd.   Which is good.   Because it reminds us, this is God's world, not ours.   And we don't get healed when we try to forget the past. Or get even with the past. No, we get healed when we forgive the past.

At Coventry Cathedral in England is one the Church's more dramatic symbols of forgiveness. Coventry Cathedral was destroyed in the blitzkrieg of WWII. Only a shell of the cathedral remained, which was left standing when a new cathedral was built following the war.

In order to enter the new cathedral, one must pass through the ruins of the old, where in the courtyard there is a cross made out of the charred timbers from the old cathedral which says, "Father, forgive."

It gets better. A few years following the war, Germans came to Coventry Cathedral and established the International Center for Christian Reconciliation. The center sponsored a team of Germans who went to Israel to live in a kibbutz and work side by side with Jews for six months.

When the time came for the Germans to leave Israel, an Orthodox Jew said with tears in his eyes, "When one person says to another, ?I want to love you,' one is glad. But when this is said by a person at whose hands one has suffered, there is no greater joy in this world."

You see, in this world in which we live, it is forgiveness which gives birth to new life and a hopeful future.   I am sorry. I wish there was an easier way. But we follow the way of the cross.

One last story.   Politically speaking, Jimmy Stewart was as conservative as Henry Fonda was liberal. Rooming together in their early days of theater in New York, the two of them got into an argument, which concluded in a fist fight out on the street.

Remembers Stewart, "Thank God it was snowing - I went down on my face more times than he did. No one got hurt."

When they returned to their hotel room, Fonda made a proposition. They would forgive one another's political differences and never fight over them again. Stewart agreed.

Said Stewart speaking at the death of his friend, Henry Fonda, "And we never fought again. For 30 years it was a wonderful relationship."

Well, as Jimmy Stewart said in one of his most memorable movie lines, "It's a wonderful life." The way to a wonderful life is through forgiveness. It's biblical. God love you.
AMEN.