Biography
The Rev. Dr. Thomas Tewell is Senior Pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. Dr. Tewell served in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and at the 5,000 member Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas, before being called to his current post in 1994. Under his leadership, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church has grown by 50 percent since 1995, to a vibrant congregation of over 3,400 people. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"The Things We Dare Not Remember" 
God spoke through the prophet Jeremiah saying: "I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more." God spoke through the Gospel writer Matthew in a text that gives us a clue about the broad dimensions of forgiveness: "Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?' Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy times seven.'"

Ernest Hemingway tells the story of the Spanish father who wanted to be reconciled with his son who ran away from home to the city of Madrid. The father misses the son and puts an advertisement in the local newspaper El Liberal. The advertisement read, "Paco, meet me at the Hotel Montana at noon on Tuesday. All is forgiven! Love, Papa." Paco is such a common name in Spain that when the father went to the Hotel Montana the next day at noon there were 800 young men named Paco waiting for their fathers! Hemingway's story reminds us how desperate all of us are for forgiveness.

So many of us are weighted down by the problems, mistakes and hurts of yesterday. Many of us live with guilt over something we wish we'd never said or something we wish we had never done. Others live with resentment and bitterness because of an injustice that was done to us. Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a way to get rid of the weight of unresolved guilt which weighs us down? Keeping resentment and bitterness under the surface of our life is like trying to keep a beach ball under water in the deep end of a swimming pool. You can physically do it but after a few seconds of keeping the beach ball submerged under water, it gets heavy. Soon, it takes all of our energy just to keep it submerged under the surface. But, once we take the beach ball up from under the water it is a lot lighter. In the same way, unresolved guilt weighs us down but forgiveness makes us feel lighter. Today God wants to teach us three spiritual lessons about the power of forgiveness that have the potential to change our lives.

Spiritual Lesson 1: Don't allow the pain of our past to define our future

God has erased the record of our past wrongs from the Divine Computer. That's what Jeremiah was trying to tell us when he said, "God remembers our sin no more." If God has forgotten our past sins and mistakes, why should we remember them? Yet, so many of us define our identity in the present and in the future by the mistakes and pain of the past.

That's precisely what Melissa did. Melissa desperately needed to let go of the beach ball of bitterness that was threatening to drown her. But how could she let go of it? It's painful to say it, but Melissa was a victim of sexual abuse. She had been abused by her own father and her own brother. She was so ashamed! How could she possibly live with the memories of what she was forced to do to give these men sexual pleasure? Her guilt and shame led her into a limousine one night when a man offered her a chance to escape. He offered her a drug that would help her forget her problems ... cocaine. For a time cocaine did help her escape the pain of the past but those moments of escape soon thrust her into a love affair with cocaine which became more complicated than the incest in her family. Cocaine proved to be as abusive as her father and brother. In the darkest moment of her life, Melissa realized that she was an addict.

In total despair, Melissa came to the Walter Hoving home in New York which specializes in ministry to addicts and prostitutes. She was finally ready to let go of the "beach ball" of anger, resentment and bitterness at her father, her brother and the people who introduced her to cocaine. A compassionate female leader at the Walter Hoving home asked Melissa to type into the computer all the things that people had done to her that were hurtful and all the things in her life she had done for which she was truly sorry. She filled many pages with her pain! Then she typed in the words of our scripture today, Jeremiah 31:34: "1 will forgive your iniquity, and I will remember your sin no more." Then the leader asked Melissa to press the delete key twice. Right before her eyes all those mistakes and hurts from the past were erased from the memory bank of the computer forever. The wise leader at the Walter Hoving home reminded Melissa that if God erases these memories from the Divine Computer, why should she keep these painful memories in her computer? She was free! This simple exercise changed her life.

Spiritual Lesson 2: The only motivation for forgiveness is gratitude

Every one of us comes to a fork in the road. We can either walk down the road marked resentment and retaliation or we can walk down the road marked gratitude and grace. It is a matter of focus. If we focus on the wrong that someone has done to us, we will never forgive them. Author, David Augsberger says, "If we wait until someone deserves forgiveness, forget it! That's not forgiveness." Frankly, the only motivation for forgiveness is gratitude. It is only when we realize our gratitude for the many times that God has forgiven us that we can forgive others. In the text from Matthew, Jesus was teaching Peter that forgiveness is beyond calculation. Peter focused on the number of times he has to forgive someone according to Jewish law. But Jesus taught Peter and us that forgiveness can't be quantified. It is a grateful response to God's grace.

A six year old girl named Ruby Bridges taught the world an unforgettable lesson about forgiveness. In 1960, Ruby walked into the William France elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana the first day after a federal judge mandated the desegregation of the New Orleans school district. Ruby was the only African American student in the entire school. Every day she walked through a gauntlet of angry adults who insulted her with racial slurs and foul language. Robert Coles, the Harvard psychologist, interviewed Ruby Bridges in the midst of this pressure packed situation. Coles had seen the little girl walking through the crowd with her lips moving. He asked, what she was saying? Was she talking back to them?

"No!" she replied.

"Then what were you saying?" Coles asked.

"I was praying!"

"Praying?" Robert Coles said in a surprised voice. "Why were you praying?"

Ruby said, "I usually pray before I go to school but this particular morning I forgot so I prayed as I walked into the school."

"What did you pray?" Robert Coles asked.

I prayed, "God forgive them. That's what Jesus did on the cross." Dr. Coles said that Ruby Bridges' gracious act of forgiveness transformed his own life. Ruby Bridges reminds all of us that the only motivation for forgiveness is gratitude.

Spiritual Lesson 3: Forgetting is the outgrowth of forgiveness

Author Frederick Buechner warns us about the dangers of reliving past hurts when he says, "Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll your tongue over the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you."

Betty was a living illustration of Buechner's words. Betty was filled with anger at her husband because of an affair he carried on with his secretary. The worst part of it was how she found out. The morning after her husband was honored by the Rotary Club for outstanding service to the community, Betty was looking through her husband's desk at home to find an old photograph. Imagine her shock to find motel receipts in a file drawer from a local motel. When she confronted her husband, he confirmed the affair and rubbed salt in the wound by telling her that it had gone on for 15 years. Betty's husband was not the man that the Rotary Club nor she thought he was. Two weeks after Betty confronted him, her husband had a sudden heart attack and died! Betty was left with a huge beach ball filled with rage and resentment in her soul.

Betty told me this story at a conference several years after the death of her husband when she challenged my point in a sermon that forgetting is often the outgrowth of true forgiveness. Betty used to be a whistler she told me. She was known for her whistling. But she hadn't whistled since she discovered her husband's affair and she would never whistle again. She asked me how to forgive someone who had died? I suggested that she write a letter to her husband and be honest with him about the hurt he had caused her. I told her to write down the unedited rage in her soul. Betty thought this was the craziest idea she'd ever heard! I thought I had offended her because she didn't show up at the conference for the next two days.

The day before the closing session, Betty came into the conference with a big stack of paper. "Betty, you look tired."

"You're darn right I'm tired! I haven't slept in two days. Here's the letter and I'm going to read it to you—all thirty-five pages of it! (There's got to be an easier way to make a living than the ministry I thought to myself!)

We went to the cemetery and on a bench near her husband's grave, she read the letter out loud. The catharsis in her soul was punctuated by tears, screams and long moments of silence when she couldn't speak. When she finished, we burned the letter and watched her rage disintegrate into ashes. I offered a prayer for Betty and she said one too asking God to help her forgive and forget. I believe God answered those prayers. Do you know why I think so? Because the last morning of the conference, I looked out at the congregation and my eyes locked with Betty during the closing hymn, Amazing Grace. Betty wasn't singing, she was whistling! That's the power of forgiveness.

Interview with Thomas Tewell
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: Tom, I was thinking during your message on forgiveness, what a critical role you and clergy play in the lives of people who are struggling with forgiveness. But is it so simple as the example you cited in the case of Melissa, the cocaine addict and sexually abused by her family? Is it as easy as pressing a delete key on a computer?

Thomas Tewell: Forgiveness is very complex. I think it's really humanly impossible, it's a gift from God, truly. It's nothing we do. I think it's God's gift to us. But I don't think simple, it's often complex and often takes people a long time to get their minds, their hearts, and their heads around it. In Melissa's case, I think she was ready to do something. She knew she was being destroyed by resentment. So the act was simple, but it took her years to get ready for the simple act to receive and then to be able to give forgiveness.

Talbot: How did you learn the technique in the case of Betty, who had been angry, enraged at her husband for an affair, to get her to write that letter to him even in his grave?

Tewell: I don't know exactly when I learned it but I remember early in my ministry someone came to me, a young man who was back from the Viet Nam war, and he was having a hard time forgiving himself for all the things he'd done in Viet Nam. I couldn't think of anything. He had been to therapists, he'd been to psychiatrists. I got this idea that he could write it out. So we wrote it out and then we burned it. I have done that with several people; actually, quite a number of people through the years in my ministry. It's been very liberating for people.

Talbot: Tom, I must ask you. You serve the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City, an important cross-roads in our world. What are you preaching to your parishioners about the Christian doctrine of forgiveness in the context of the war on terrorism, 9/11, Iraq?

Tewell: Forgiveness is the key. I've preached that forgiveness is like inhaling and exhaling. We have to receive it in order to give it. I believe that we have to move on in our world. We can't keep retaliating and fighting or we're never going to get anywhere that way. Somewhere we have to break the cycle. I think the way we have to do it is to receive God's forgiveness so we can give forgiveness to others, even when they don't deserve it.

Talbot: If we could all be like little Ruby Bridges. Thank you so much, Tom Tewell.