Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.  Luke 6:27]

Do you want to live in ruins?  Recently, while watching a television program, I heard one of the characters say, “He ruined my life.  He should pay.”  She had been raped thirty years before, and it took a long time for the perpetrator to be brought to justice.  The court proceedings did not turn out as she hoped.  The prosecutor was not able to win a conviction.  Outraged by what she considered a miscarriage of justice, she struggled with her need to be avenged because her life had been ruined.

I see this attitude in a lot of situations.  Adults live in ruins because of abuse at the hands of a priest or a parent in their childhood.  Ethnic groups live in ruins because of wrongs done to their ancestors. Siblings live in the ruins of a quarrel long in the past, and they never speak to each other again.

These individuals believe that the effect of a wrong done in the past cannot be erased from their lives until some matching or greater pain is inflicted on the person responsible for the original injury.  They claim that they want justice; what they really want is revenge.   

In the service of their need for payback, not only do these individuals testify to the pain of the injury, but they also commit to the role of victim.  Any suggestion that they might give up the quest for reprisal due to the passage of time or in the interest of building new lives for themselves is received as if it were an insult to the magnitude of their suffering.  They seem to prefer sitting in the ruins of the life that might have been. 

Pray for those who persecute you.  [Matthew 5:44]

Jesus taught us that it is not necessary to live in ruins.  When he said that he came to give life and to give it abundantly, he made that offer to everyone.  Those with trauma and injury in their past were not excluded.  Jesus offered healing and wholeness, joy and fulfillment, cleansing and change to everyone.  What he did not offer was retribution.  Some people take undue comfort in the proverb which says that doing good to an enemy heaps coals of fire on his head, and they legalistically exhibit what they choose to call kindness to those who have wronged them in the deliberate hope of seeing smoke from those coals rising from the heads of their enemies.  However, careful reading of biblical teachings will make it clear that any such coals were more about shame than punishment.  They were not revenge.

Do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves.  [Luke 23:38]

Jesus’ life is a lesson in giving up the right to be a victim.  In his own home town of Nazareth, he was attacked with the intent of throwing him over a cliff; he escaped, and he took no action at all against those who had attacked him.  When he met a vile tax collector, who would have had to steal from honest citizens in order to make a living at his chosen occupation, Jesus invited this man to be one of his twelve closest friends.  When Roman soldiers were nailing Jesus to the cross, He prayed that they might be forgiven and spared the vengeance of the Almighty for the assault on His Son.  Jesus demonstrated that it is not only possible but highly desirable to leave the ruins behind.

Why is this a good thing?  Why should anyone let an enemy escape without punishment?  How do we even do that?  We read in the Bible that God wants justice done on behalf of the weak and the wounded.  How is it justice to forgive and forget? 

The answer lies in what becomes of those who remain victims.  Suppose, for example, that the prostitute Jesus rescued from the Pharisees had devoted the rest of her life to getting a court judgment against the Pharisees for false arrest.  Imagine that Zaccheus, overcome by guilt for his theft and graft, had simply wadded up in a ball and cried remorsefully until he finally died.   What if the widow of Nain had gone on a crusade to destroy the local doctor who had let her son die in the first place?  What sort of life does a person live if he or she is unable to leave the ruins of victimhood?  People who cannot forgive others and cannot forgive themselves live in the ruins of what might have been a life.

Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.  Romans 6:4

How do we escape the ruins?  There is a simple answer that is hard to learn.  When we remember our baptism, we remember that we are marked with the cross of Christ forever.  Christ died on the cross, endured the ruin of our lives for us, and rose victorious over all of that.  The power of this sacrifice is embodied in his words, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”  [Luke 23:34]  Those words mean that our lives need never be in ruins because of our own guilt, and those words set us free to forgive others for all the pain they inflict on us.

God’s forgiveness through Christ is always there for each of us.  A new life, made whole, guilt-free, is right in front of us.  However, when we are busy keeping accounts of the things other people do to harm us, it is very hard for us to allow ourselves to be forgiven by God.  We even project our own attitudes and need for retribution on God.  At the very least, the self-righteous attitude which nourishes our victimhood keeps us from knowing that we need forgiveness.  The Pharisees were completely self-righteous individuals, and Jesus said to them, tongue in cheek, “I have come to call not the righteous, but

sinners. ”   [Matthew 9:13] He was saying that as long as we think we are righteous, we hold ourselves apart from God.  When we are able to see ourselves more clearly as the sinners we are, we hear Jesus’ call to forgive and to be forgiven.

When we experience forgiveness, we learn what it means to be healed and made whole.  We discover that we want to be like the woman at Sychar and the mental patient in the Gadarenes – we want to tell everyone what Jesus has done for us.  We are able to forgive others, because we have moved into a new life, a life where we are no longer living in the shadows, in the tombs, in the ruins of a life.  We don’t feel like victims, and we don’t want to act like victims.  Life feels so new and so full of promise that you might say we are reborn.

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!  [2 Corinthians 5:17]

I know a lot of people who spend a lot of their time worrying about which of God’s laws they have broken. They fret over the wording of the laws trying to figure out how to do the right thing. They really do their best, and then they see how they failed. These people are baptized children of God, and they still worry a lot about these things.
It isn’t because they don’t know that Christ died in order that they can be forgiven for their sins. They know. They are faithful Christians, trying to be ever more faithful. They love the Lord. They actually know that they cannot live up to the demands of the Law. They know, however, that the Law is God’s standard. He gave it to teach us how to live. The real problem they experience daily is that they constantly beat on themselves to obey the Law and they know even as they are beating on themselves that they never will be able to do it. It is killing them.

 How do I know so much about this situation? I used to be the same way. I believed that I had an obligation to be the most obedient law-abider in the world, because Jesus died to save me from all my sins, and it was time for me to quit doing that. I didn’t want to pile on more sins after he saved me. I really believed that God was very disgusted with me for never getting it right. I truly thought that He was waiting somewhere far away for me to finally learn how to follow His Laws, and I was pretty sure that He didn’t want to hear from me until I figured it out.

 I can’t possibly explain why I believed this pack of lies. Or why anyone else believes it. That is, I can’t explain it except for Satan. Some people try to explain Satan away as some “force” of evil, not a real person. There is no way to explain all the evil in the world without a real person behind it. Simple “forces” have no goals and do not rejoice in the destruction that follows them. Satan has one and only one goal: to make human beings reject God just as he did long ago. Satan is a person who rejoices every time we fail to do what God wants. Furthermore, he is so perverse that when we actually do something good, Satan manages to insinuate himself into our feeling and attitudes, turning any good work into self-worship. He motivates other people to praise us until we believe we really are as good as they say. Or he motivates us to mull over our good deed and focus on it and admire ourselves for finally getting something right. We believe the lie that we must obey all God’s Laws in order to be loved, and when we fail, we believe the lie that God doesn’t love us any more. When we do anything good, we believe the lie that we have earned God’s respect and deserve God’s blessing. When we don’t feel blessed, we believe that lie that we are not blessed because God is mad at us.

 Human beings believe Satan’s lie that God won’t love us if we don’t obey the Law perfectly, because we want to believe that we can earn God’s respect. Even more than that, we want to believe that if we try hard enough we actually can be perfect, like God. And that is the biggest lie of all. It is the first lie, and the worst lie, and the one that still entraps us even if, like the rich young ruler, we have kept the Law from our youth.
In the beginning, in the Garden of Eden, God had only one rule for Adam and Eve: Don’t try to be me. Each day God walked with them in the garden, and they talked with each other. They lived in a harmonious relationship. Everything Adam and Eve needed to know about life they were learning from God himself. In conversation with him, they were growing up, maturing, becoming what God had created them to be. In that conversation they fully understood that God was God and they were not.

 Satan took advantage of the innocence in which Adam and Eve lived. He appealed to their innocence and their recognition that God knew things they did not know. Satan used truth in order to create a lie. Satan succeeded in making Adam and Eve yearn to break the only rule God had given them. He encouraged them to believe that God was preventing them from being their own gods. The moment that Eve started to think she could be like God, knowing good and evil, the relationship she had with God ended; she started worshiping herself.
This is still Satan’s big lie. In a thousand, million, different ways, Satan turns our attentions toward ourselves and away from God. He tries to make us believe that the rules are what matter to God when it is actually the relationship that matters to God.
Think about a marriage. In marriage two individuals have a relationship that thrives on honesty and integrity. It doesn’t thrive on rules. The two may be very different in their behaviors and their likes and dislikes. The relationship will survive all those differences if the couple has a strong, loving relationship. However, if the couple has rules and lives in an environment of enforcement and punishment, the relationship will die. They may never divorce, but they will not have a happy marriage.

 Our relationship with God is like that. As long as we measure our relationship with God by our compliance with God’s rules, then we will not have a relationship. God doesn’t need to stop loving us for us to lose the joy of his love; we only have to start believing that he doesn’t love us any more because of our behavior. That is Satan’s big weapon; first he lies to us by telling us that if we try hard enough we can be as good as God, perfect, like God wants us to be, and when we fail, Satan says that it is really too bad, but God can’t love such disgusting sinners. It takes real faith in God to reject that lie.

 Our behavior does matter to God, and it matters to each of us, too. We are not happy and satisfied with ourselves when we do the sort of things condemned by God’s Law. The Law is intended to show us what hurts us. It isn’t intended to put up a barrier between us and God’s love. It truly is our teacher, but it isn’t the judge who can condemn us before God.
If we are not to worry about the rules, then how are we to live? The answer is that we are to live in a faithful relationship with God. We are to speak the truth to him and to ourselves. We are to drown all our failures daily in remembrance of the waters of baptism. We are to nourish our faith with the body and blood of Christ in Communion. We are to run to him with our failure and wrong-headed behavior just as we run to him with our attempt to serve and give and love. He greets us just like a father who praises what is good and rebukes with forgiveness what is bad.

 Our life with God isn’t about the rules. It is about our relationship with him through the salvation purchased at the price of the blood of Christ on the cross. We can quit counting our money and our good deeds and simply wash ourselves in the blood of the Savior. That is what it is all about.

 Forgiveness is a subject Christians discuss often. When the Brief Order for Confession and Forgiveness is part of a worship service we are reminded that before God we are flawed and broken and in need of repair.

Our flaws and brokenness, however, manifest themselves not only in our relationship with God, but also in our relationships with each other. God wants us to have healthy relationships with family and friends and siblings in the faith. Jesus taught that love of neighbor is the second most important commandment. When our relationships with people are broken, we need forgiveness from them as well as from God. Jesus said we were to ask God for forgiveness “as we forgive.”

Recently while preparing to teach a study of Christian teaching about forgiveness, I discovered Ancient Faith Radio. At http://ancientfaith.com I found audio files of music and sermons in the Orthodox tradition. Among the many interesting subjects was a pair of sermons on forgiveness. In one of those sermons I heard about something new and intriguing: a ritual of mutual forgiveness.

Being Lutheran, I am accustomed to start the Lenten season on Ash Wednesday, but Orthodox Christians use a different calendar, and they start Lent on a Sunday evening. Listening to the sermon on forgiveness, I learned that the first service of the Lenten season in an Orthodox church concludes with a ritual unfamiliar to me. Each person in the congregation turns first to someone beside him and asks, “Will you forgive me?” to which the other person responds, “I forgive you.” They expect that every person will ask forgiveness of every other person in the congregation.

The speaker noted that congregants have asked him on numerous occasions why they must ask forgiveness of people they don’t even know. He answers by pointing out how the behavior of each person has repercussions none of us really follow. A cascade of troubling behavior in need of forgiveness might begin when I yelled at my child for not being dressed in time to catch the bus for school. At school my child is in a bad mood and mouths off to his teacher when she is lining up the class to go to lunch. That evening the teacher, frustrated by her chaotic day, flings plates on the table for supper, at which point her child stomps off to her room feeling tromped on. A lot of behavior by a lot of people contributed to that cascade, which is replicated millions of times each day. A lot of forgiveness needed here. I felt as if a light bulb had turned on. 

Inspired by the story of this Orthodox ritual, I decided to try it. During Lent, I was scheduled to lead a prayer service focused on self-examination. At the end of the service I asked my small group, about twenty people, to ask and receive forgiveness in the form of the Orthodox ritual. Each person was to turn to someone and say, “Will you forgive me?” to which I suggested the response, “I forgive you for Jesus’ sake.” I thought a few would try it, but I actually expected that some would simply slip away.

To my amazement, everyone participated, and even more amazing was the sight of people going beyond the scripted exchange of forgiveness to embrace each other. Some even had tears in their eyes as they walked from person to person receiving and granting forgiveness. It seems very clear to me that mutual forgiveness is a grace we all could use more of.

I don’t know what the long-term repercussions of this experience will be. I can’t guess what others in the group are thinking this morning. I can speak only for myself. This experience taught me something very important. When we speak of the ways Christians can help each other grow in the faith, we use the term support. We think of it the way athletic teams work together, each player encouraging others, even when they are struggling. From this time forward, my understanding of mutual encouragement will always include mutual forgiveness. All our relationships with family and friends are marked with moments when we hurt each other accidentally, and sometimes on purpose. We very much need to acknowledge that it has happened and to assure each other that our loving relationship is not destroyed or somehow lessened by those wounds. Forgiveness acknowledges the wounds and applies a healing balm to them. The teaching of the Lord’s Prayer that forgiving each other is as important as being forgiven by God truly came to life for me in a ritual of mutual forgiveness.

In the book The Shack, the author explores a question many of us ask when we realize that we are expected to forgive people. The central character, Mack, is consumed with grief over the abduction and death of his daughter, Missy. Confronted with the suggestion that he ought to forgive the person who harmed his daughter, he asks, “Is it fair to Missy if I don’t stay angry with him?” We humans think we want everything to be fair. In fact, that is not what we want at all.

Mack, for example, suffers not only from guilt due to his perception that he failed Missy, but he also suffers from guilt due to his fear that her abduction might be God’s judgment or punishment for a terrible sin from his childhood. He certainly wants to be fair to Missy, but if cosmic fairness means that Missy pays for his wrong-doing, he isn’t so sure that “fairness” is what he wants. Likewise, forgetting the past, Mack looks forward to the possibility that the perpetrator of this horrible crime might actually be caught, and then he wonders if forgiving that person means he shouldn’t want him to pay for his crime. would that be fair? 

Most of us are conflicted over the whole idea of forgiveness. We like being forgiven by others, but we are less eager to grant forgiveness, because deep inside we are pretty sure the person we resent does not deserve forgiveness. To forgive would be an affront to our sense of honor and justice. It is completely human to believe that other people deserve punishment while we ourselves deserve mercy.

There is a different way to look at the situation. When Jesus was with his disciples, he told them, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” [John 20:23]  Some people interpret this statement as if it meant the inadequacy of the death of Jesus on the cross. Some wonder if we humans can keep God from forgiving other people. We should not assume such a preposterous notion. This statement, coming from the One who told his disciples that they must forgive people, no matter how many times people sin against them, can hardly be understood to give them a license to reject forgiveness and condemn those bad people.

What really happens when one person refuses forgiveness to another? The Hatfields and the McCoys give us a comic example of a horrific reality: unforgiveness destroys the one who does not forgive. Jesus told his disciples the deep and frightening truth that if they chose not to forgive, unforgiveness would dwell within them. Shakespeare gave us a dramatic picture of the consequences of unforgiveness as he showed us how a family feud that would not die doomed a young and beautiful couple. The Balkan peninsula has become the image historians perennially call upon to show what happens when nations try to take vengeance for offenses hundreds of years in the past. The movement of some black people in the US to demand reparations for slavery, which has not existed in this country for more than a hundred years, is the expression of an unwillingness to forgive a wrong that is over and done with. Unforgiveness creates victims, and victims give birth to a communal malaise that destroys its victims for generations.

When Jesus taught us how to pray, he also was teaching us how to live. In the most important prayer we will ever learn, Jesus taught us to say, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” This important petition embodies a cry for the healing of all people. We ask that our guilt for wrongs we have done be washed away and that the wounds we have received at the hands of others be healed. When we both request and grant forgiveness, we are engaged in what Martin Luther described as the daily drowning of our sins in the waters of baptism. All humanity is forgiven and broken relationships are healed as we pray this prayer.

Forgiveness is not a way to let wrong-doers “get by” with evil. If someone murders my daughter, and I forgive the murderer, my forgiveness does not excuse that person from paying the price of such a crime. The murderer does not “get by” with murder when I forgive him or her. However, we are both set free of the poison of that evil act when I grant and the murderer receives forgiveness. I will not spend endless days seething in anger and grief. I won’t shut myself down and deny all God’s goodness because of this crime. When I forgive the murderer, I make myself available to the healing and redemptive power of the Holy Spirit. What’s more, my forgiveness granted to the perpetrator of a horrible crime also crashes through one more barrier to the work of the Holy Spirit in that person’s life. If I refuse to forgive, the unforgiveness in my heart may well lead to two lives in a prison of the heart, a much more secure prison than any operated by the federal government.

Forgiveness is often seen as a hard task demanded by a cruel God. If we read the Bible prayerfully, we will soon come to realize that forgiveness is a beautiful gift to everyone from a loving God. It is more than fair; it is a blessing.