The Measures of Grace
Fourth in a series on the Lord’s
Prayer
Preached at Midway Hills Christian
Church
Today we
continue our series on the Lord’s Prayer.
We have been lingering over each phrase of this prayer that Jesus taught
his disciples. In our lingering we want
to go deeper, as modern day disciples, to try to understand how this prayer is
a model for all our praying.
I am an
internet subscriber to a website called Belief Net. It is a wonderful, interactive site that
publishes a prayer for each day from religions all over the world. It has helped me appreciate that prayer comes
in many languages and many forms—and many topics.
Of all the
prayers that Jesus could have taught us, it is this one. This is the model prayer for Christians. When we hold this prayer up to other prayers
the world over, we might ask, “Why didn’t Jesus give us a more global
prayer?
If this was
to be a prayer for all disciples for all time, why didn’t Jesus teach us to
pray for the overthrow of oppressive systems?
He did. “God,
your reign come, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Why didn’t
he teach us to pray for an end to world hunger?
He did. “With
the bread that we need for today feed
us.”
Why didn’t
he teach us to pray for world peace? He
did. “Forgive us as we have been
forgiven.”
Forgiveness
breaks the cycle of revenge and violence.
When we choose forgiveness over revenge it releases a ripple effect in
the world that can eventually reach nations and prepare the shoreline for world
peace.
The church
uses the word ‘forgiveness’ a lot, but we rarely explain its meaning, or more
importantly, how it is done.
When I
think about forgiveness I wind up with more questions than answers:
Jesus
taught us to pray: “Forgive us our sins,
as we forgive those who sin against us.”
What does this prayer teach us about forgiveness, and more importantly
about the nature of God’s grace?
To pray
“forgive us” acknowledges that I have something in common with my enemy
or the person who has wronged me—we both need forgiveness.
One writer
has said, “It would have been challenging enough if Jesus said ‘forgive us our
sins.’ But then Jesus added the word AS.
When we
pray “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against
us” we are praying a prayer of proportion.
In the matter of forgiveness, do we want God to come down to our level,
or do we want to rise to God’s level? Do
we want heaven to be as it is on earth OR
earth to be as it is in heaven.
Jesus’
invitation to pray this part of the prayer is an invitation for us to take a
long, honest look at the way we measure forgiveness.
I love to
cook and I grew up with a grandmother who did not follow recipes. She never wrote anything down. It was always a pinch of this, a handful of
that, use just enough milk until the flour begins to stick to your hands….Well,
I don’t cook like that. I am more linear
with my food, and my forgiveness. I
measure out ingredients to the teaspoon.
Robert Mulholland, in his book on the Lord’s Prayer has this to
say about the measures we use for forgiveness:
I think
Peter was trying to figure out his recipe for forgiveness when he asked Jesus,
“If someone sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”
Jesus
responds, “Not seven times, but seventy times seven.” Jesus’ response was rhetorical. He was not suggesting that 490 times should
be the limit of our forgiveness.
The real
answer to Peter’s question is in the parable that Jesus goes on to tell. We know it as the parable of the ungrateful
servant. A king forgives a great debt of
one of his servants, yet when the servant encounters someone who owes him a
small amount, he throws him into prison instead of forgiving his debt. When the king finds out he says to the
servant, “Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on
you?” Then he hands the servant over to
be tortured until he pays the entire debt he once owed.
After
telling that parable Jesus says, “So my heavenly parent will also do to every
one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
What is the
measure of forgiveness in this parable?
Is it a threat? God is not going
to forgive us if we don’t forgive? I
don’t think we have that kind of power over God. I also don’t believe we can earn God’s
forgiveness by forgiving others.
We need to
be careful about how we read this parable.
It is not an allegory. God is not
to be equated with the king in the story.
Jesus did not begin the parable by saying, “God is like.” He began it by saying, “the kingdom is
like.” This is a parable about the
nature of forgiveness in the kingdom. It is about the kingdom’s demand for
unlimited forgiveness because of God’s unlimited grace.
Because of
God’s unlimited forgiveness we are invited to be unlimited in our forgiveness
too. Jesus told this story to illustrate
the infinite grace of God. And to
illustrate what happens to us when we measure grace by our standards and not
God’s. When we fail to offer the kind of grace that we have been given the
result is our own imprisonment.
I came
across a quote that says, “The first and
often only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the
forgiveness. When we genuinely forgive,
we set a prisoner free and we discover that the prisoner we set free was us.”
(Lewis Smedes)
And another
that claims, “Grace is the only force in
the universe powerful enough to break the chains that enslave generations. Grace alone melts ungrace.”
(Philip Yancy)
This is the measure of forgiveness: When we forgive we are set free. When we withhold forgiveness we are
imprisoned, and we keep those who have hurt us in prison too.
Forgiveness
is far more than a personal issue. When
we forgive, we break the cycle of violence, hate and revenge that permeates our
world. We counter stories of war and
destruction with stories of reconciliation.
There is a
grassroots organization known as the Forgiveness
Project that gathers stories of forgiveness and posts them on their
website. They also have a traveling
exhibition of words and images that they take to cities all over the
world. I love the name of the
exhibit: “The F word.”
For some
people forgiveness is a dirty word because they would rather hold on to their
hate.
One of the
stories I encountered on the site was of Bud Welch. His 23 year old daughter Julie was killed in
the
Bud’s hate
took him on a journey of sleepless nights and drunken binges to numb the
pain. It also lead
him to visit the bombing site one cold January afternoon. Standing there, watching hundreds of people
walking along the chain link fence he thought to himself,
“Will I really feel any better once McVey is executed?” Every time he asked himself that question he
got the same answer—NO. Nothing positive
would come from it. It wouldn’t bring
Julie back. “After all it was hatred and
revenge that made me want to see McVeigh dead, and
those two things were the very reason that Julie and 167 others were dead.”
Bud Welch
remembered watching Bill McVeigh, the bomber’s father, on television and
suddenly recognizing his own pain and
grief in that father’s eyes.
He arranged
to meet Bill McVeigh. They sat together
and talked about their children, one who was dead and one who soon would
be. Forgiveness and mercy overwhelmed
bud Welch. He said, “I never felt closer
to God than I did at that moment.”
He went on
to say this about forgiveness. “It’s a struggle, but it’s one I need to
wage. In any case, forgiving is not
something you just wake up one morning and decide to do. You have to work through your anger and your
hatred as long as it’s there. You try to live each day a little better than the
one before.”
Jesus
taught us to pray, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against
us.”
Isn’t it
about time for some of us to say the F-word?