thoughts on Forgiveness

Transcript below.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7okzXzbDbqprL3O4dKq6ED?si=1a3079ab6ca047f2

Hi there. I hope you like my new room. It’s very brick. [I’m using an AI background with a brick wall.]

Anyway, I wanted to do something a little bit different today and just talk a little bit about this idea of forgiving and being forgiving. You know, I certainly have been in those circles where it seems like the priority is getting to a place of peace and unity, right?

Now that absolutely should be a goal. Anyone who claims Christianity as their faith system, like that’s clearly what the Bible discusses and puts out as an outcome of the Christian faith. Not just Christian. There’s plenty of faith systems that want to get to peace.

So forgiveness plays, as we know, a huge role in getting to peace. Now the issue is always in my mind. One, how do we get to peace? Because the methods count. You know, the ends do not justify the means. Because even if we’re trying to address someone’s sin and then we commit a whole bunch of sins in order to address. that sin. Clearly it’s making the situation worse and causing more harm for a longer period of time than what was probably necessary.

And then two, we have to define peace because there’s clear evidence also in scripture of a piece that is performative. It looks nice. It’s something like a beautifully laid table of food. You know Thanksgiving’s around the corner. It could look lovely and it can all taste awful or it can be plastic. So yeah it’s you know clearly peace in and of itself needs some definition as well.

Now, one of the things that has happened to me in the course of the past, let’s say ten years in ministry, whether I was on staff at a church or was the pastor’s wife -who was looked to for guidance, for leadership, because that’s how that works sometimes- and I have had to wrestle with this idea of, are we performing peace? Are we actually building peace, a lasting, sustainable, true peace in the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ?

Now, I firmly believe that most of the time, if I can use another metaphor, it’s like cleaning your house and organizing, you know, I’ve been spending a lot of time organizing our garage. Right? And I think organizing a garage is a really good metaphor for life because, you know, it gets out of control. We just throw things in there because we can’t see it, we just throw it in there and it just becomes this crazy town.

And so when you start organizing, a lot of times things get worse. They get worse first because you’re cleaning out, you’re throwing stuff into piles, you’re pushing stuff to the side. You need to like get at the shelves in order to organize the shelves. And so a lot of times it can feel like it’s all getting so much worse first and does.

And I think that’s true of conflict. I think if we’re honest, which I hope we all can be and I’ll come back to that. When we’re being honest, things will come out that are going to be painful. They’re going to hurt. They’re going to be scary. It’s going to create division and confusion and people are going to freak out and things are going to get ugly really fast.

And depending on the people involved, depending on the power dynamics of who’s saying what, who has the power, who has, whether it’s actual power, job titles, or relational power, or some people are just more well-liked than other people. And that’s just the truth, right? Truth. Again, being honest. Some people can say things because everybody loves them. Everybody thinks highly of them. And when accusations come out, it doesn’t matter if it’s true, because people want to believe what they want to believe. And so this false piece is presented like, “well, you need to drop it because we don’t either believe you or we’re afraid to believe you.” And then you become the one who is preventing peace from happening.

Now, we’re talking about this sense of forgiveness. So I’ve been reading this book by Timothy Keller Forgive. It’s weird how that shows up on the… [the virtual background makes the book disappear].

“Why should I and how can I forgive?” It took me a long time to start it.

I was, as we know, as many as most of us know, Tim Keller was diagnosed with cancer, late stage, going through lots of treatments, trying to get healthy when he was writing this book and when it came out.

It just made me sad. I mean, very sad that he was dying and he knew he only had a number of days left. And the times that Tim Keller talked to me were very precious to me. That’s another podcast for another day.

But this book, Forgive, made me think about what would I write if I knew I was dying? If there was a pretty good chance that this was my last book? What would I write it on? And it took me a while to pick it up.

And when I did, it just made me frustrated and sad. So I finally have about halfway through, a little more than half. I skipped around, I always do, with these kinds of books. Because I don’t have the greatest attention span. And so, you know, I’ll read a chapter and it just sends my mind off in another direction. And so I go, I skip around to try to find things.

And, you know, I deeply appreciate the way that Tim Keller addresses the issues around forgiveness and the way that society, our current culture, looks at forgiveness. And I think in true Keller form it’s very thorough; it has this kind of academic feel to it at times, but also pastoral.

But one of the things that I came up to almost right away, I mean page 8 and 9, is this idea of truth telling and understanding what the debt is.

So forgiveness as a biblical concept is certainly about forgiving a debt, right? It’s the language of like a legal proclamation that this debt has been canceled. There was a debt that was incurred, now it’s canceled.

And what does that mean? It was the language that Jesus used and the Bible itself uses, other authors use throughout. And for me, do we understand what the debt is? That’s kind of where I kind of wished that he also wrote a book called Repent.

Because what’s interesting to me is, do all the people involved agree on what the debt is? And can I cancel a debt that I don’t agree on? I don’t agree on the amount. I don’t agree on what the terms are. And so having to settle the debt, and anyone who’s actually had to settle a debt who says, you know, I’ll agree to this much money, but I’m not going to agree to that much. Or, you know, I think about a time when I settled on a credit card when, you know, they offered you something for a lot less money so that you can just be done, but then you get something in the mail that you have to pay taxes on the amount that you originally owed, right? I mean it’s that’s the way that works and it’s not the same amount of what you owed but it’s still a significant amount.

So when you think about that in terms of the sins against us and how we are to forgive people, in a lot of ways you’re forgiving the sin plus interest. You’re forgiving this concept of this is what you did against me but then how much more above that do you owe me and and we just we just need to write that off?

Now depending on the debt, the kind of debt that it is, that’s the work of of each person to consider, can I write this off? Because here’s the thing, like I was saying before, there’s the initial sin, and then there’s all the sins after, right? So you keep sinning against me, and yes, we forgive, you know, 70 times seven. But when it comes to justice, and redeeming the time, because he did a good job in the book of saying, it’s not that we give up on justice. We don’t give up on justice.

And that, of course, is where we kind of get into this tricky part, right? Because can we forgive the debt, and no one knows anyone or anything? And what kind of ripple effect does that have?

What kind of consequences does that have? Rippling out into the rest of our lives. He talks about two kinds of forgiveness, inward and outward, and the sense of, in our hearts, the inner healing of our heart is based on our ability to forgive the debt.

But then there’s also the consequences, and the outward justice that needs to be enacted. And, you know, he quotes the section on Luke 17, which is corresponding to the famous Matthew 18, which lays out this, you know, peacemaking, you know, first you go to the person who’s sinned against you, and if they confess and repent, then you forgive them and you’re done.

If they don’t, repent, and then you go back with someone else, and then if they still don’t listen, then you tell the church, right? And that sequence of events is very important to understanding when there’s some interpersonal conflict or when there’s something that needs to be considered.

But what we’re seeing now, we’re right past that, we’re at this place in church history which would be fascinating to go 100 years from now into the future and read about what happened and what people say about it 100 years from now.

Because what’s happening in church history right now is, you know, that’s step three, tell the church. People are not repenting on their own. They’re not. We’re hearing all kinds of stories now, all kinds of abuse, and whether it’s spiritual abuse, sexual abuse, domestic cases, there’s just so many things that are happening right now every day. Not a day goes by when you can’t read about some pastor or someone in ministry somewhere being arrested, and allegations coming out. People are not repenting on their own.

And the Matthew 18 process, while it’s not, it doesn’t apply to some cases. That’s, I’m not going to go there, but it does not apply to everything. It does apply in many cases, and when that procedure, when that process is followed, and you get stuck on that tell it to the church portion, and you can’t even agree on what the offense is, on what the sin is, how much the debt is. You get stuck. You spin. You continue to spin. And that’s where we’re at. That’s where we’re at in the evangelical church right now is that we’re just kind of spinning on this axis of repentance, the lack of repentance.

You can’t get to forgiveness fully if you never have repentance. That’s my contention. And people who want to look to the Atonement of Jesus to cover all sins, absolutely. The Atonement of Jesus in the cross forgives the debt … to God. I have to think through more of that and maybe the rest of Tim Keller’s book will tell me, but in my mind the forgiveness from God is a separate entity from the redemption of all things here on earth, to even make it possible to redeem things here on earth.

Is it possible without Christ? You know, there’s a possibility. Honestly, there are some people who absolutely do not believe in Jesus, who do not believe in a God or atheist, who are absolutely wonderful people, and who have a very, very well-developed sense of forgiveness and confession and how important that is to society. To say otherwise is wrong. I mean, it’s just a lie, because there are very good people in the world who have no problem saying that Christianity is a hoax that are very good people and will forgive you much faster than some Christians. So that, there’s that.

I do feel compelled that for such a time as this, that those of us who are no longer affiliated with the spaces we used to be, have some, you know, unique insights into how shallow the peace and unity of the church can be. How, you know, many of us have been pushed out because we won’t just, you know, fake it till we make it. And I’m very much against faking things. I think we all need to level up and be able to deal with the conflicts and the pain, the tension, like mature adults.

And say, yeah, things, things are getting really ugly and we need to confront it instead of ignoring it or trying to smooth it over. You know, like, just put some icing on that cake that’s crumbling and it’ll be fine.

It tastes fine, right? So we just move on, um, until it doesn’t. And some of us certainly feel like it tastes pretty bitter and I want it to not. I want it to be sweet. I want the fellowship of the saints to be sweet again and to feel like no one has to lie to exist in the spaces where we can fully be ourselves and feel safe.

Yeah.

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