I want to begin our time together tonight by reading a section of the Book of Matthew. It goes this way:

Pray therefore like this: Our Father Who is in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.  Amen.

It is the Lord’s Prayer, of course, and Christians have heard it so many times, have said it so much by rote, so unthinkingly that many times many of us who are Christians no longer hear it most of the time, even as we are supposedly praying it.

We find the Prayer, as we have it here, as I just read it, in the book of Matthew in the New Testament, in the sixth chapter, in verses 9-13 of that chapter. The thing we don’t usually, in fact almost never say, and positively, absolutely never ask about, however, is verse 14, not to mention verse 15. But if you put them all together, this is what Our Lord actually said:

Pray therefore like this: Our Father Who is in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. For if you forgive people their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you your trespasses.

Now those last few words are very sobering ones. In fact, I have often thought that the reason Christians don’t reference them very often—that we don’t, in fact, even find them very familiar when we do hear them—is that we instinctively do not want to hear them. For one thing, we find them too illogical to be taken literally.

But those words are not the only place where Jesus tries to assure us that both his Prayer and his words about that prayer are exactly and literally and uncategorically what he wants us to hear and to receive into our thinking and living. We are not the only ones who find such explicit and totally unreasonable directives to be way, way over the edge and beyond credibility.

Later on in Matthew’s Gospel, in Chapter 18 to be specific, we are told that Peter also couldn’t believe that Jesus really, really meant what he was saying, and so old Peter—God bless him—old Peter decides to clarify the whole thing by taking the conversation from the abstract to the very personal and—and this is the most telling thing—and to clarify the whole thing as well by taking the discussion from some abstract religious concept into the much more reasonable and reasoned realm of moral concepts. Thus, Matthew tells us in verses 21 and 22:

Then Peter came up to Him and said, Lord, how many times may my brother sin against me, and I still forgive him and let it go? As many as up to seven times?

Well, Jesus answers him and says, “I tell you, not up to seven times, but seventy times seven— which, as we all know, is an infinite number and translates to forgiving forever.” But before Peter can protest that, number one, such is impossible and that, number two, such is not fair, Jesus tells those gathered around the two of them the story of a king who decided to settle his accounts and accordingly he called in his principal debtor to repay the money that he had lent him.

Now, the man’s debt was enormous, and he could not pay it. So he begged, and then he received, the king’s forgiveness of his debt until such time as he could find the funds with which to repay it. But that same debtor, we are told, as soon as he left the king’s presence, went out, found all the men who owed him money, and demanded that they pay their debts immediately. And when they could not, he did not show them mercy like that which he himself had received. No. Instead he had his debtors beaten and then thrown into prison until such time as they could pay him the money they owed him.

The king, Jesus says, upon hearing this, seized the man whose debt he had forgiven and turned him over to torturers and to prison until he likewise could pay his debt to the king. Jesus concludes his story by then saying this, “So also my heavenly Father will deal with every one of you, if you do not freely forgive your brother from your heart.” 

And now we really are in trouble. Somehow, in Peter’s push to have Jesus be a bit more realistic about the obligation of forgiveness, he has managed to dig our hole even deeper. Hear again what Jesus says in those very last lines: “…forgive your brother from your heart.” 

While words like “forgive as you have been forgiven” could be considered as being just a little vague or could even be manipulated a bit into some more comfortable interpretation, there’s no way to misunderstand “forgive from your heart.”

And Jesus is going to come back again and again to forgiveness. It was, in fact, if one actually looks at the Gospels in terms of the number of references given to an idea or concept, a major theme in Jesus’ work; and he himself was going to apply it. It was going to cry it from the agonies of the cross: Father, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. But, like Peter, we wonder whether or not what Jesus demands of us really can be done?

Well, yes. It can. For one thing, Jesus’ theology of forgiveness was and is inherent in both Judaism and Christianity. But when I think of Jesus’ command to forgiveness, it is not to the saints long since dead and holy, whether they are Christian or Jewish that I turn for example, instruction, and inspiration, but to a small group of ordinary people, women, Jewish and Christian, who by the spring of 1945 had been for many months forced into hard labor at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, just north of Berlin, and who almost, almost in that spring of 1945, had survived the war.

Camp rumor said—and camp rumor was always to be believed—that the Americans were coming from one direction and the Russians from another, and they knew it. The women knew it. The Allies were about to liberate the camp. Any day, any day now they would hear the battering of the walls and the roll of tanks and the great horror would be over.

But instead of the victory shouts of their liberators on that April morning in 1945, what the women heard was the shrieks of their companions and the gun butts of the guards rounding everyone still alive into the ovens. The camp must be emptied of all its inmates. Nothing must be left. No one must survive to tell the story of that horrible place. But some one, some Jewish girl or Christian girl or woman, just before they came for her, found a scrap of a paper sack, hastily wrote upon it some words, and then stuffed it into the crack in the wall behind her cot. It was found there, three days later, by a Russian soldier. And here is what she had written:

Lord, forgive not only the men of good will, but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted upon us. Remember rather the fruits we have bought, thanks to this suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, the courage, the generosity, the greatness of heart that has grown out of this. And when they come to judgment, Lord, let all the fruits we have borne be their forgiveness.

To Peter he said, “Not seventy, but seventy times seven.” And to us he says the same, “Not seven, but seventy times seven.”

Let us pray: Father, forgive us as we would be forgiven and as he have forgiven, and grant us the grace always so like them to forgive, for the sake of your kingdom and always to the glory of your eternal and unending name. Amen.

Conversation with Phyllis Tickle

Daniel Pawlus: Phyllis, thank you for that beautiful message and for joining us today.

Phyllis Tickle: Thank you for letting me share it. I carry that prayer on a little card in my pocket all day long everyday and I’ve carried it for years there. I haven’t learned yet it’s message but I think it’s one that I certainly need to learn. Maybe by osmosis out of my pocket!

Pawlus: You’ve given us several beautiful examples of Jesus’ command to forgiveness and I guess my first question would be, how do we embrace this more rather than struggle with it? I know it’s a challenge to be forgiving, but the grace that comes out of that is really quite wonderful isn’t it?

Tickle: Yes, indeed. It is. And, you know, the examples one gives all involve something horrible, like the concentration camps or like the cross, where there is such breaking of the human being over into that state of grace, which is true forgiveness. And I think most of us who are fortunate enough to live less dramatic lives don’t probably ever get there, in which case we need to ask for it. One of the interesting things about the new theology that’s coming out of “Emergence” Christianity, it spins here on the business of forgiveness. Emergence Christians talk about acts of inhumane kindness, by which they mean much of the charity and the deliberated intellectualized attempt to go relieve suffering and all of that, saying that what it makes is acts of inhumane kindness. That the gifts we give must be given with love and the only way, if they are Christian gifts, you can do that is to learn to forgive the other for his otherness or her otherness. And I love that.

Lydia Talbot: Phyllis, you use the words “breaking of the human being.”

Tickle: The breaking of the human being.

Talbot: When you first appeared on “30 Good Minutes” five years ago, the title of your message then was, “Serpent in the Desert.”

Tickle: My goodness, how can you remember that, Lydia?

Talbot: You’re a memorable person! “Serpent in the Desert” was on suffering and, of course today, forgiveness. I guess I have to ask you, how have you experienced both of them personally and how has your own faith sustained you?

Tickle: That’s the second time in twenty-four hours I have been asked that question. I’m wondering if I should change my clothes or something!

Talbot: Who asked you first?

Tickle: A young seminarian asked me yesterday that same question. I’m 75 years old, so obviously nobody goes through 75 years without having hit some of that. But I actually discovered, to my surprise, I could name the three or four times. One of our sons is dead. That death certainly was pivotal. That certainly is not unique to us, but as any parent will tell you who’s lost a child, that redefines everything. The other was not suffering exactly but a near death experience back when I was 21. And people, nice people, in 1950 did not have near death experiences or if they did they didn’t talk about them because they were, you know, really weird!

Talbot: But we will. What was that?

Tickle: I was about to miscarry and was given a drug that we found out later had killed six women already. And after my experience, it got taken off the market very quickly. But I was lucky. I did, technically speaking, die but was resuscitated. But when that happens, it’s impossible thereafter to fear death. You just absolutely cannot. The old joke, “I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens,” sort of pertains. I don’t want to be forever doing it! But death is just not as frightening. That changed things enormously.
Talbot: I was really trying to get at how you think suffering and forgiveness are connected. I mean, we all face it, we all carry around crosses.

Tickle: I think that suffering really does. And I think age translates into suffering. I mean, I think just by living X number of years, you pick up X amount of suffering. It’s impossible to live without suffering. And what it does, I think—either dramatically if it’s a moment of huge suffering or if it’s just the slow erosion of age—you lose your “person-ness” in a best kind of way. I don’t think of “me” anymore so much as I think of me as a presentation of “us” in this particular persona or body. And once you begin to feel that, to really feel that, there is the “you and I are the same.” Of course, it’s a trick to forgive yourself sometimes, too. But then it’s not an intellectual endeavor to forgive. It is a recognition that we all are together and there is no pain for me that is not pain for you, as well.

Pawlus: Phyllis, you’re one of our gifted religion writers and your latest book we have to spend some time talking about. It’s called “The Great Emergence.” You mention “Emergence” Christianity. Tell us about the premise of this book. It’s a wonderful examination of church history in some ways.

Tickle: Thank you.

Pawlus: Tell us a little bit more for our viewers.

Tickle: Well, Emergence Christianity is, of course, the “Great Emergence,” per se, and it is a total, across the board sociological, intellectual, economic thing that’s happening. Every 500 years Western society goes through one of these tsunamis, or paradigmatic shifts. I hate paradigmatic shifts. Nobody knows what they mean!

Talbot: It cleans out the attic every 500 years and has a rummage sale.

Tickle: And has a rummage sale! That’s right, to quote Bishop Dyer. And that’s what we’re going through. And as the society goes through that, then, of course, religion—whichever religion holds pride of place and Christianity obviously—goes through the change with it, both being informed by and informing those shifts. So Emergence Christianity is what’s replacing Protestantism.

Now, before anybody screams and hollers, let us say that five hundred years ago the Great Reformation happened and Protestantism came up and took pride of place over Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism didn’t cease to exist, it just gave way to something new. One thousand years ago, at the Great Schism, Greek Orthodoxy had to give way to Latin Christianity and it didn’t cease to exist. We just now had two. And if you go back 1500 years, then you find out that monastic Christianity took over apostolic Christianity. And five hundred years before that, Christianity took over Judaism as having hegemony of place. But at no time in any of those events has what was ceased to be. It’s just given over pride of place. And every time it’s happened, the faith—in this case Christianity—has increased dramatically, both demographically and geographically, and it has been spread by this.

So when we say we are post-literate, post-enlightenment, post-ration—all of these posts!—post-Christendom and post-Protestant and post-denominational, what we are recognizing—and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist or more that one column of newspaper to realize—that denominations are shrinking, but Christianity is growing.

Talbot: Phyllis, you are a rare chronicler of the “ever-evolving church,” as theologian Karl Barth would say.

Phyllis Tickle: Thank you.
 
Talbot: I’ve just got to tell you, a chapter that stood out for me is what you refer to as the “Marginalization of Grandma.” You are one and I am one.

Tickle: It’s because you and I have a vested interest in saying that and protesting that one! That, of course, is a popular way of getting at the idea. But when we lost “grandma,” when we moved away from the village—when there were four million of us in cities in 1900 and now 84% of us live in cities—and when we moved away from her, grandma was the great conservator, whether she meant to be or not. She was the one who was watching. She was the one who was sure that the values were true.

Talbot: What you learned in Sunday school.

Tickle: What you learned in Sunday school. That was grandma. And we’ve lost immediate contact with her now and it’s too bad.

Pawlus: Our viewers are going to have to buy this book and read about grandma. It’s a wonderful book.

Tickle: Thank you.