Once again I am pleased to host a sermon by my good friend Bruce Coggin. Enjoy.
A
Sermon
Preached
at Trinity Church, Fort Worth
September
11, 2011
I’m
mighty grateful to Fr. Wright for the opportunity preach to you this morning—or
I think I am. I’m away a lot of
the time, sowing and reaping in other parts of the vineyard, and I’m always
happy to be with you just to pray; but it’s special to get to preach to this
congregation, so I readily accepted his offer.
Then
I had a look at the lessons for today and began to wonder . . . Here we are commemorating the attack on our
country that happened ten years ago this day, and the lessons are all about . .
. forgiveness. That’s a conundrum, to
put it gently. But he asked, and I said
yes, so let’s see how we do.
You
won’t find a stauncher defender of the separation of church and state, but there’s
no way on earth what we’re doing here today is not part of a great national
commemoration of a great calamity. Even
the Star-Telegram had a leader, FW Clergy Looking for Words for 9/11
Services. I checked the article to
see if there were some, but no such luck!
This is the anniversary of one of those days people mark time with. When I was a baby, it was Pearl Harbor Day,
then maybe V-E Day or V-J Day. Where
were you when . . . ? Then the day
President Kennedy was shot, then maybe when Challenger blew up. Now it’s September Eleventh. (I think 9/11 is kinda tacky. We don’t call the Fourth of July 7/4! Anyway.)
I
hope that today, though the eucharist is a joyous thanksgiving—and this will be
a joyous one—I hope that you’ll remember that at the very beating heart of our
joyous gathering is a solemn, aching hurt, brought on by the cowardly attack on
innocent people that happened ten years ago today. I’ve been told that the men flying those
planes weren’t cowards. Why, after all,
they flew right into those buildings!
Yeah, right. Those men went up in
a flash. They didn’t have to decide to
jump off that collapsing building. They
didn’t have to watch the fire come after them, choke on the smoke. They were cowards. But, oh, the people who faced it! I hope in your prayers you’ll hold up the
souls of all those who died—although they’re now in Abraham’s bosom and praying
for us, better off than we are. I hope
you’ll hold up all those who didn’t die but still lost so much, whose lives
were changed forever on that day, those who lost husbands and wives and mothers
and fathers and children and and and. A
lot of them aren’t healed yet, may never be.
Pray for them. And for the brave,
the unimaginably courageous fire fighters and police and medics and nurses and
other responders who, God knows how, raced up those stairs straight into the
maw of Hell. Pray too for this whole
nation, still not healed, many of us still angry and thirsty for revenge. And as the Prayer Book teaches us, pray for
our enemies that God may turn their hearts and give them better minds. All that pain is part of our offering today,
a solemn lesion at the center to our joyous thanksgiving. Hold that up to God today.
Now. Having said that, I need to preach about
forgiveness. That’s a big order, so pray
for me too.
I
don’t know if it’s just ironic circumstance or maybe even the work of the Holy
Spirit that on the day we remember a great sin that all over this country
Episcopalians and Catholics and Lutherans and Methodists and Presbyterians and
Disciples and just lots of others are hearing God’s word about
forgiveness. The Old Testament lesson
from Exodus, the Red Sea story, speaks of people freed from the toils of a
wicked power from whose grip only by an act of God, divine intervention, could
loose. That action is recalled in the
first words of the thanksgiving over the water at Holy Baptism, the sacrament
of forgiveness, the sign that we too are freed from a wicked power by a divine
act, by God’s own eternal overcoming mercy.
And in the gospel lesson, Jesus doubles down on what he said to St.
Peter in the gospel two weeks ago and last week to all the disciples, to
you: what you bind on earth is loosed in
Heaven; what you loose on earth is loosed in Heaven. Three Sundays in a row and counting. It’ll come up again. The Word could hardly be more insistent. We need forgiveness on both ends of the
stick, giving and receiving. And the two
seem inextricably laced together.
Beyond
that insistence, the very prayer that identifies us as the Lord’s people, the
one everybody can say, asks God to forgive us as we forgive others. Give and get; get and give. Consider:
the very fact that we mention forgiveness is a confession, an admission
that there’s something wrong with us, that without a divine action we can never
be whole, never attain the Kingdom prepared for us from before the foundations
were laid. That’s a sweeping admission.
Think
of it this way. Take puppies. What is cuter, more fun, sweeter, more
oogledy-googledy wonderful than a puppy!
I mean, I’m a cat lover and I love kittens, but they’re hardly even in
it up aside of puppies! Well,
what happens to puppies? They grow up
and dig in flower beds and chase cars and do a good many more equally
unattractive things. Next take
babies. Lord, babies rule the
world! Everybody with a drop of heart
and soul loves babies, and nothing gets the oohs and aahs going
in a church quicker than baptizing a baby.
We baptized my last grandson right back there in that font, and it was yummy
beyond description. Well, what happens
to babies? They grow up to be just like
you and me. Fact is, we can’t help it. We need help, and it’s gotta come from
God.
Forgiveness
is a word we often use fairly lightly, like when a favorite dog, say, roots up
that flower bed. The gardener almost
always says, “Oh, but I forgave him.
He’s such a good boy!” And
that’s the end of it. The dog’s more
important than the uprooted nasturtiums.
The flower bed, by the way, stays dug up until somebody redoes it. Or a good friends visits, and you’re showing
him that beautiful new vase or some other wondrous object you just got, and
dadgum! He drops it and it busts. Well, of course, you forgive him, maybe with
tight jaws, but you do forgive him.
The friendship is more important than the doodad. The vase stays busted nonetheless. Lots of examples offer themselves, but you
get the point. We use the word so much
we’re often in danger of forgetting how serious a matter forgiveness is.
Just
as often we’re tempted to think of forgiveness in caricature. I grew up in a bigoted little town about an
hour from here, where we didn’t have no dadgum kathlicks! They all lived up north in the county and had
Eye-talian names and raised grapes and made wine! We all knew, and said smugly, they could just
sin all week long and then go confess to a priest and be good as new! Of course, it was unfair and ignorant, but
it’s a risk you run when you reduce forgiveness to merely righting the balance. You been puttin’ too much over here in the
bad side, so you gotta put some in the good side for a while to even it all
up. Forgiveness is more than a guilt
management system.
And
we’ve got plenty of things masquerading as forgiveness these days, too. Far be it from me to take away from the
genius of the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve step program, but it has spawned a
whole litter of twelve step programs I’ve had experience of—and at least one
I’ve been the victim of—that like to “rethink” the past, go back through your
misfortunes, laying blame for this here and blame for that there, and when you
come out the other end, why, you didn’t do anything bad at all! Not.
Now
that I’m old enough to have a history, maybe a too colorful one at that, I
think I’ve learned something about the past.
You know I’m an English teacher, and one who’s taught me about the past
is Faulkner. In his Nobel Prize speech
he noted that the dead past is not dead, in fact is not even past, and the
whole corpus of his writing shows how both the sins and the virtues of the Old
South live right on in the New South.
Another thing I think I know about the past, especially the bad
past: you can’t make it unhappen. You did it.
I did it. We did it. It hurt.
It caused damage. It was
horrible. We cannot undo it. But we can overcome it. With forgiveness.
At
this point, I think we have to do a little theology. That word scares some people, but don’t make
for the door. Theology is the attempt—attempt—to
articulate our experience of the mystery of God, and it’s not definition. God cannot be defined, limited. Words can only try to open a way into the
mystery. They never capture it entirely,
though it captures us and our words.
So don’t be scared. I don’t know
how many of you watch Chris Matthews’ TV show Hardball—if you do you’re
a Democrat, and I know the house is right down the middle today, but I think we
all love the country, we love our home—where they talk about politics,
but I like to say to a congregation, “Let’s play Godball!” Let’s try to talk about God.
Seems
to me everything always comes back to the question, What is God up to? What does God want? What does God want me to do? What is God’s will, or as some say, God’s
plan? If you were here a few Sundays ago
at the Adult Forum, you know me on God as planner. It’s not a way I can think about God, and
it’s not original with me. In seminary
back in the last millennium, I listened to a conversation between one of the
faculty and a student who’d asked, “But, Dr. Casserley, don’t you think God has
a plan?” Dr. Casserley was a cockney and
a lot of fun to mimic, but not today. He
said, “I don’t know if God has plans. I
do know that God has loves; and if God has a plan, it’s to incarnate that love
in you and me and through you and me to show that love to the world.” God’s plan, according to Dr. Casserley, is
for us to be a light to others, a sign that God is love, self-sacrificing,
forgiving, merciful, overcoming love.
That’s a tall enough order, seems to me, all by itself, no need to go
any farther; and the working out of that order in our lives is the story of our
journey with God and to God. The same
with God’s will. God is eternal, not
whimsical, not capricious. His will is
always to love and incarnate that love in us (and who knows where else?), and living
according to that will is not such much “bringing in the Kingdom” as it is
living and trying to love and waiting to see the Kingdom revealed in
us. At times we live that way,
gloriously, joyously, and great wonders are revealed. At others, though, we bind right up, hanging
onto hurts and offenses and injustices, even get to likin’ it. In either case, it’s not God holding up the
game; it’s us.
Another
way to get at it is to remember that God and God’s will are eternal, not
ephemeral, not reactive. We don’t sit
and wait for God to do something; rather we strive to get in synch with God’s
will. The phrase whatever you bind,
whatever you loose, might lead us to imagine the heavenly scorekeepers
waiting for us to cross the goal line before they change the record. I think that’s backside front. God’s vision of you is eternal; forgiveness
is one of God’s root attributes, changeth not.
When you bind on earth, your link to God is blocked; when you loose,
it’s open again. God is
forgiveness; we must practice it.
God gives us the model in Jesus who forgave, comforted and consoled,
healed, invited, loved. Even the
soldiers who nailed him up, who were really just doing their job and did not
ask his forgiveness, he forgave. “They
don’t know what they’re doing.” We often
don’t know either. We’re either weak or
dumb or wicked, or maybe it was just the fatal shake of the potter’s hand. It seems, nevertheless, crystal clear that
not to forgive and not to accept forgiveness is to block the stairway to Heaven.
So
now, that’s about enough speculative theology.
Now some practical theology. How
does forgiveness work then in your life and mine? How do we make it a habit? How do we do it when we do not even want
to? Somebody in this congregation asked
me that just today.
I’m
gonna tell you a story about me and leave out all the details I can to protect
the guilty, me included. Once a person
did me a great mischief, a great offense, the kind of thing people sometimes
get killed over. I got a letter asking
for my forgiveness to which I snarled back, “I’ve forgiven you, but the next
place I want to see you is in the Kingdom of Heaven.” Which meant I had not forgiven. Time and tide separated us, though we were
aware of each other’s movements to some extent, and after a while I figured I
was going to get my wish and forget about it.
But. Not. Quite.
Something was bound in earth that put a kink in my place in Heaven. Curiously enough, the next place we met was
face to face and at a church doodah, in front of other people. My enemy says to me, “I think this must be a
God thing.” What was I to do? Run away?
And I learned next that my enemy was dying and that fairly soon, and I
was who was wanted to do the laying away.
I remember thinking, “God, this is over the line!” But somehow that tiny opening was all the
Holy Spirit needed, because, by golly, I did it. Teeth gritted, but I did it. And you know what? I can hardly tell you how lifted I felt after
that, not that I was such a great guy but rather that somehow all that load of
junk was off my back. Give God the
glory.
Now
you. Some of you here have known
forgiveness from both ends, I don’t doubt, and God bless it to you. Some of you also may be doing some binding
right now, may have had it on your gut a long time, wish you could get rid of
it but then maybe not. Well, believe me,
if you’ve got grudges, you’ve gotta get rid of them. Bearing grudges will kill ya quicker than cream
gravy! When your spiritual bowels are
bound, you’re standing in the need of prayer.
A way to start, even if you don’t want to forgive, even if you’re afraid
of what you’ll lose if you do, is to pray to want to. Ask God to help you want to. That’s all.
That may be, very likely will be, all the Holy Spirit needs, just a
little opening where a little love . . . just a little love . . . can
get through. After that, God’s love will
eventually flood through, raging and roaring like the Red Sea waters, and heal
and overcome and make you whole again. Or
at least a lot wholer than ya were totin’ around a lot of old, nursed
wounds. It can be scary, it may be right
painful, but, oh, what a relief it is!!
You don’t have to wait to be asked.
You can get back in line all by yourself, and let God deal with the
details. Vengeance is mine is just
another way of saying it’s none of our business. And it’s likely not vengeance either, since
God brings heavenly good from our worldly bads.
Well, I recommend it to you.
Beyond
that then, this day in our prayers—this day when we hold up in a kind of
spluttering indignation a great great sin—in your prayers, pray for the
grace of forgiveness, for our creator God’s overcoming, overpowering,
overwhelming love to flood us and through us and out into the world. Yes, even the likes of you and me, we can
pray that way. It’s God’s plan, God’s
will. And pray that God the Holy Spirit
will go before and behind us to nudge and shove and drag us into the narrow
places of our souls and there find just enough space to wing through to
victory. Above all pray to the Lord
Jesus, who wept over our warring madness, pray to the sacred heart of his
compassion, that we may find the courage to follow him and lay our burdens at
the foot of the cross upon which all glorious hangs our only healing. Come, Prince of Peace. Make us whole!
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