The Rev. Canon Carl Turner | Festal Evensong

Sunday, February 09, 2025 @ 4:00 pm

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The Fifth Sunday After The Epiphany

The Fifth Sunday After The Epiphany

Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, and give us,we beseech thee, the liberty of that abundant life which thou hast manifested to us in thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

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Sunday, February 09, 2025
The Fifth Sunday After The Epiphany

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Festal Evensong
4:00 pm

Scripture citation(s): Colossians 3:1-17

✛
A Sermon by
The Rev. Canon Carl Turner
on
Colossians 3:1-17
✛

Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

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“We are the family that love built.”  Words of Bethane Middleton-Brown, the sister of the Rev. Depayne Middleton, one of the nine people killed in in a horrific shooting during a bible study held at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, ten years ago this June.

The families of the nine people murdered at that bible study ten years ago were invited to the bond hearing by the Chief Magistrate and allowed to address the accused.  Now, you might have expected anger and hate; recrimination and calls for justice, or even the death penalty. All of those things, and more, would be quite justified, but the words expressed were extraordinary.  One after another the families of the victims said “I forgive you.”  In the face of a racism that had taken away loved-ones, they still said “I forgive you.”  Bethane’s own words are particularly striking:

“I‘m a work in progress, and I acknowledge that I am very angry. We are the family that love built! We have no room for hate so we have to forgive.”

 We have no room for hate so we have to forgive.

 I want to say just a few words about forgiveness this evening.

It takes a great deal of courage to utter the words we have no room for hate so we have to forgive, and it takes a great deal of faith to believe them as true.  We only have to look at the parable of the Prodigal Son to know that Jesus, himself, understood the complexity of forgiveness for, while we all remember how the father saw the son afar off, and ran out to meet him, and embraced him, we often forget the older son who was bitter, and stayed outside, and remonstrated with his father.  Sometimes, I have to say, I have more in common with that older son than the prodigal.

Forgiveness in the bible is rooted in the concept of debt.  If you owe someone something, then you are indebted to them unless they forgive that debt.  Jesus gave another parable to illustrate this point quite clearly; the parable of the unforgiving servant (see Matthew 18:23-35) who owed his master a huge amount of money, but who was forgiven the debt rather than him being thrown into prison.  That same unworthy servant then found a fellow servant who owed him just a little and throttled him, demanding his money.  Jesus contrasts the enormity of forgiveness of the master who forgives the debt, and the meanness of the one forgiven against the one who owed him so very little by comparison.

Forgiveness in the bible is all about release from debt; indeed, when Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he taught them about this: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” (Matthew 6:12) What you may not realize is that the Greek word ὀφειλήματα which we translate in traditional language as ‘trespass’ is, actually, the word for debt. So, the accurate translation is “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

This concept of debt and forgiveness of debt underpins what we mean by forgiveness of sin in the bible and in the early Church.  Peter famously asks the Lord, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” to which Jesus replies, ““Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” (Matthew 18:21)

The great spiritual giant, Henri Nouwen, commented on the way that the Lord’s Prayer is formulated in this way and reminds us that “Forgive us our trespasses” (or our debts) comes before “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” In other words, forgiveness can only come when we know that we are forgiven ourselves. In his book on ‘compassion,’ Nouwen suggest that to live in God’s forgiveness is to live in the very compassionate nature of God; to know that one is in need of forgiveness oneself allows us the capacity to forgive others.  As I remember from Sunday School, and as I still teach in the Pilgrim’s Class, the middle letter of the word sin is not ‘U’ – it is ‘I.’

Perhaps now we begin to get a feeling of how those families of the victims of Mother Emmanuel Church had the power to forgive, because they knew that they, also, had been forgiven their indebtedness to God.  Flowing from the very heart of Christ who, dying on the cross, utters the most perfect antidote for the selfishness and cruelness that we see too often in our world and, sadly, in many of our own lives: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

In our second lesson, Paul uses the most beautiful image of what it is to belong to a community bound up in that kind of compassionate love – the love of Jesus Christ; the standards of such a community were clearly reflected in Mother Emmanuel Church, Charleston that fateful day ten years ago. Let us listen to it again in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible:

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

As Bethane said, “We have no room for hate, so we have to forgive.”

 To forgive means saying to the one indebted, “I free you from your debt. You do not owe me anything.”  It seems counter-intuitive; our judicial system is all about paying back a debt to society but, as any of us know who have been the target of crime or hate, no amount of justice can temper the feelings of hurt.  I remember once, many years ago, when I was assaulted quite badly and knocked unconscious for a moment.  I have to say I was more bothered about my broken designer glasses and my cracked iPhone at the time than the blood dripping from my head!  The perpetrator was caught; the crime was found on a CCTV camera; the person was found guilty, but I was not satisfied with the sentence and told the judge so because I wanted a new pair of glasses!  “But,” the judge remonstrated – “a prison sentence is the just settlement!”   “But I am out of pocket!”  I replied.  It was at that moment that I suddenly realized that I had not forgiven my attacker – I had not released that person from their debt.  Their very real debt! That person still owed me something; and, sadly, they still had power over me.  I needed to learn how to truly forgive; to, quite literarily, release them from their debt.

Now, of course, it did not mean that we suddenly became best friends.  In fact, to forgive does not mean that we have to trust a person again or even want to spend time with them.  That is where Paul’s talk about love comes in; forgiveness is only part of the process. Forgiveness is a release not just for the person forgiven, but it is also the process of release for the person who has the power to forgive.  The next stage is even harder – for from forgiveness we begin the journey to love, and to put into practice that most difficult of commandments of the Lord to “love one’s enemy.” (See Matthew 5:43-48) It was Martin Luther King Jr. who reminded his hearers that Jesus did not say “you must like your enemy” because there were many people that Dr. King did not like – particularly those who threatened him, abused him, or tried to kill him. Love is something very different, but I think loving our enemies can only come after we have learned to forgive…and that might take a very long time. That is why God’s forgiveness is all the more beautiful and powerful; Jesus took upon himself the sin of us all – he took our indebtedness to the Cross, and flung out his arms in a loving embrace: I forgive you; I love you.

Some words of the 11^th rector, Fr. John Andrew, preaching on Ash Wednesday:

You are here today for a short time.  You have the chance to go back onto Fifth Avenue a different person.  A new person.  With a new heart.  Think as you sit here of who it is who has hurt you, injured you, caused you grief.  Then think (if you can imagine the enormity of it) of the damage you have done to God’s love, and the wounds your unwillingness to forgive has caused in Christ’s sacred heart of love.  Know that you cannot leave here forgiven unless you make an act of forgiveness now.  Now. If you’ve made it you can claim Christ’s forgiveness for yourself, because you have obeyed the Scripture: ‘Rend your heart and not your garments and return to the Lord your God.’ ^[1]

We have no room for hate so we have to forgive.