Luke 23: 33-43 When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’ And they cast lots to divide his clothing. And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!’ The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’ There was also an inscription over him, ‘This is the King of the Jews.’ One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’ But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’ +++++
This strikes me: from two crosses, we hear these words - Jesus says, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” And THEN, only after that, another man, hanging on a second cross, says, “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.” Two things said – one about forgiveness, and one asking to be remembered. What’s the connection between them: being forgiven, and being remembered? Would you even want Jesus to remember you, if you weren’t first reassured that you’d be forgiven? Would you want to be remembered by Jesus, if everything you’ve ever done – the cruel as well as the kind – were perfectly preserved, enshrined forever never to be undone, never to be forgiven? Or would you want to hide…. +++++ Brendan (spoken from choir loft): Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. Hannah (sung from choir loft): Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom. Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom. +++++ Other things were said on that cross-filled hill – the cruel jaunts and jeers of life: “Jesus, if you’re really so great, save yourself; if you’re really a KING, act like it and lord your power over us now! Come down from that cross….. HA ha ha…” People who try to do the right thing in life are always met with jaunts and jeers. What else is new? It’s horrible, and painful, but there’s nothing new about that. What is new, what is astonishing, is to have someone say, “Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing.” And then to have a request that’s answered right away: “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.” Today, Today (!) you’ll be with me in paradise. Now that’s worth exploring. Forgiveness. Being remembered always in Love. Hannah sings: Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom. Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom. +++++ Remembering surrounds us this week. Here at King’s Chapel we are blessed with many traditions and memories – we cherish them, and repeat them year after year. They hold us, these memories and traditions. Though other pieces of our life may change, some things remain stable. So on Thanksgiving Sunday We always read the Governor’s Thanksgiving Proclamation. And we sing our well known hymns. We know the tunes; we may even know the words by heart. Tradition and memories are evoked that hold us. We remember on Thanksgiving Sunday. +++++ But other memories also pursued us this week. Friday was the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, and across the airwaves our whole nation remembered. The Boston Globe reprinted the front pages as they had appeared in 1963, and we were hurled back into the events. For any of us who were alive then, we remember specifics – we can’t help it. They’re seared in our memories. As 9/11 is for today’s generation, as Pearl Harbor was for the generation before, the assassination of President Kennedy was a defining moment for my generation of Americans. I had just turned seven a few weeks before, and still see the Public Announcement system box perched high on the pale green wall of my second grade classroom, because that is where I stared when the principal came on so suddenly, so unexpectedly, to announce that President Kennedy had been shot. On Friday, here at King’s Chapel, we marked that moment, when the President died 50 years ago, by tolling our bell 50 times. Bostonians have particularly remembered – Jack Kennedy was born in Brookline, attended college in Cambridge, and listed his voting address as Beacon Hill, just three blocks from here, over the Capitol Coffee Shop, at the corner of Bowdoin and Ashburton Place. Kennedy was our state’s US Senator and then our native son President. This city -- riven by a history of Catholics denied power, then rising to power – was fully enmeshed in Jack Kennedy’s journey to the White House. Not everyone rejoiced when he was elected, but no one was indifferent. This week, feelings of pride and horror and shame have coursed through Bostonians – those who cared or those who didn’t care - when the President was gunned down in Dallas. Remembering. +++++ Hannah( sung): Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom. Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom. +++++ I’ve felt uneasy among the competing story lines this week. Whipsawed between an upcoming joyful national holiday premised on bountiful food and warm family scenes, and the scenes of mourning: a young widow behind a black veil holding the hands of her two little children. In this service today, we bolted from our powerful Introit, mourning death, into our opening Thanksgiving hymn, We Gather Together. In our scripture readings, we’re required to hold together, at one time, a God worthy of exaltation, declared in the psalm and the limp, agonized body of Jesus tortured on the cross? Why are we even reading about crucifixion on Thanksgiving? Who cares if it’s the final Sunday of the Christian year, with Advent beginning next Sunday? Can’t we stick with the more upbeat Thanksgiving theme? How can we remember all these things at the same time? No – we’d rather close our eyes, and cover our ears… It’s almost too much to bear, this remembering of everything all at once, a cacophony of pain and joy. It makes no sense! +++++ …Just like our lives, sometimes, batted back and forth between pain and joy. Like our lives, that sometimes seem not to make any sense at all…. ….UNLESS there is forgiveness. Unless the pain of what we have done, and the pain of what has been done to us, can be healed, so that the life of joy, for which we are made, can become ours again. How could that ever happen? +++++ In Jesus’ kind of forgiveness, you forgive the one who hurts you, because they really didn’t know what they were doing. In Jesus’ kind of forgiveness, we assume that there is much we never know: I don’t know everything about the person who hurt me The person who hurt me didn’t know everything about me. And I don’t even know myself fully, and they don’t know themselves fully. There’s so much we never know. Love is the practice of carefully and gently trying to learn more about myself and the other person. And when we can’t know it all, love then imagines with generosity what may have been behind what I did and what they did. Love assumes the best, not the worst. Love seeks to understand. +++++ How many times has it happened to you? The times when I savor my hurt feelings, and invest energy in excoriating the other person’s behavior – sometimes out loud, sometimes in my own mind. I am so right and he/she/they are so wrong! I won’t forgive, I can’t let this just slide over me! ……And then I learn another nugget of the story I hadn’t known earlier. The dry cleaners AGAIN do a lousy job with my blouses, the cuffs emerging with huge wrinkles ironed into them instead of pressed smooth, and I’m livid to pay good money for this incompetence – until I learn that the store owner’s wife, who usually irons the women’s blouses, is dying in the hospital. The husband has been using the men’s shirt press to do everything, rushing through all the laundry so he can get back to sit with her for at least a little while before visiting hours end…. Father, forgive me, I didn’t know what I was doing when I got so angry… I didn’t know the whole story. +++++ Steven Covey calls it a “paradigm shift” – when the way you’ve looked at something completely changes. I quote from his bestseller, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Says Covey: …one Sunday morning on a subway in New York, people were sitting quietly – some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene. Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed. The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing. It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?” The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you’re right, I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.” Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior… Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely…. Everything changed in an instant (pp. 30-31). According to Covey, we can try to work bit by bit on our behaviors – trying to be more patient or to control our temper when irritations arise in life. Or we can fundamentally change the way we see others’ actions toward us, a paradigm shift. Like Jesus did, we can assume that we don’t know the whole story. Assume that the people who have hurt us did not know what they are doing. And then we can forgive. It’s a choice. Forgive in the way Jesus did – by taking it for granted that we won’t know everything – or hold the grudges. +++++ Take Jesus’ own situation. For Jesus, it would have been supremely easy to make the case that the people who scorned him, who tortured him, who ordered his death knew EXACTLY what they were doing. His religious rivals had been plotting this day for some time. The Roman authorities heard the arguments on both sides, had the power to stop the execution, but chose to move it forward instead. The soldiers who mocked Jesus weren’t required by their job to do so – they could have stood by silent, rather than render the horrific scene even more inhumane. The first man on an adjoining cross who derided Jesus could have asked to be remembered, as the second man did. But instead the first was scathing, taking the same part as the worst accusers of Jesus, sneering at him. But despite all this intentionality, all this planning, all the pain people chose – CHOSE – to inflict on him, Jesus took this stance: Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. Not really. Not really. They don’t really understand me, and what I was trying to do, Jesus is saying. They don’t really understand themselves fully, and why they are acting so viciously. They’re better than that, God – they really are. They have wonderful potential, still. Forgive them, God! +++++ We hardly ever know what is really happening in the lives of those with whom we’re battling. We hardly ever know what’s happening in our own. It’s too painful to go there, to remember…. But those who are deepest along their spiritual path make this their practice: to understand as very best they can, what is happening in their own lives. And to learn, as best they can, about what is happening in the other person’s. Not to fix the other person. Or correct them. But to understand more. And when they still can’t understand, they are generous, and assume the best. This doesn’t mean that we always need to put ourselves in the line of abuse. We protect ourselves when needed. But we operate from a different paradigm of more understanding and generosity, not solely from reflexive blame, unhealed hurt, and fury. +++++ The most powerful healing that I’ve experienced, and that I’ve seen in others, always has required this painful work of remembering, for both people who have been hurt. I begin by remembering my own hard times. I do “my work,” of trying to understand myself, and the ways I’ve been hurt in the past, the pains that keep coming up again and again, and that still today trigger my anger or sadness or defensiveness. Remembering this painful past helps me better understand why sometimes I’m so hurt when someone attacks or belittles me. I learn to ask, What’s really going on? Why can I let some things run off my back, but other things make me seethe? Is it because of times from my past when someone didn’t understand how hard I was working, of all that I had done, and only complained about the few things I just hadn’t been able to get to yet? Is it that old feeling of, “IT’s NOT FAIR” rising up within me again? What old memory within me is being evoked by the person today, whom I find so irritating? But that’s not all. I also try to do the same for the other person – in Jesus’ words, “my enemy” that I’m supposed to love and forgive. Can I imagine, Why would they say that, do that? What’s wrong with them? Can’t they see that…. Maybe they can’t see, says Jesus. Forgive them, because they don’t really know what they are doing…. Don’t really, in the deepest sense, understand why they’re acting that way, don’t really understand why you are so vulnerable. Inadvertently we’ve kicked up a wasp’s nest that was buried among the forest leaves, and now we’re both being stung. Remembering. Forgiving. They go hand in glove. +++++ This Thanksgiving, we probably all have at least a glancing fantasy that we’ll get to re-enact the scene painted by Norman Rockwell. Many of us will have turkey, and we may gather with family or friends, but few of us will have the Rockwellian, idyllic experience. There will be memories around the table with us, some delightful, but some painful. We’ll remember someone who used to be there, but is now gone, and a hollow emptiness will fill our chest. We may yet again be offered a particular dish that we’ve always detested, and that will remind us again how poorly others notice our desires, but seem adept at getting their own met. We will be challenged by the ridiculous opinions or habits of a sibling or a neighbor, and feel a rising need to stand up for truth and justice again! All of which means we’ll have a grand opportunity to hear Jesus’ words: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” We’ll have a chance to hear the words, friends – you don’t need to piously utter them out loud! But do hear them – for you and for those around you. We’re forgiven, because we don’t really know what we’re doing. So are they. Because if we weren’t, we’d have good reason to be anxious about how we will be remembered, when it is our place at the table that stands empty. We all want to be remembered with love. It’s our gift as humans – that we can give love and receive it. But we all mess up, maybe even as badly as those who strung up Jesus that day long ago on a hill. Do not be afraid, we are told. Give thanks for a God whose love never ends. For a God who always – astonishingly – forgives us. And with that reassurance – that we are forgiven – we can dare ask, “Jesus, remember me, too…”. Forgiveness and remembering intertwined. Hannah begins singing, walking down center aisle toward the chancel Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom Jesus, remember me, When you come into your kingdom……. Choir joins, harmonizing – Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom Jesus, remember me, When you come into your kingdom…. Hannah leads congregation in singing, with choir: Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom Jesus, remember me, When you come into your kingdom Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom Jesus, remember me, When you come into your kingdom Amen. Comments are closed.
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February 2015
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