Forgiving

Robert Traer

Scripture: Luke 11:1-4, Psalm 32:1-5

I friend recently sent me a worship service with readings and themes from Jewish, Christian and Muslim scripture that present the exodus story as liberating for members of all three traditions. I replied that I find the image of God as forgiving more central to these three traditions of faith and also more compelling. His answer was that praying for forgiveness emphasizes personal piety and ignores the call to justice in the Christian as well as in the Jewish and Muslim traditions.

I think he's right. But I hope the universe is forgiving, because I know I fall far short of demanding the justice I think the God of justice should expect. My friend's counsel that affluent Americans should be living more justly, rather than praying for forgiveness for living unjustly, gives me hope, only if God is loving and forgiving, as well as just.

I share Paul's confession in Romans 7:19. "For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I do not want is what I do." I cannot see myself as other than a sinner, although I know many people today see this language as guilt-ridden and psychologically backward.

Why do I feel this way? I don’t really know, but a couple of memories come to mind. In the ten years I worked for an international non-governmental organization I traveled a good deal in impoverished countries, where in comparison to those I was visiting I was rich. Invariably, people wanted money from me, usually for socially constructive and educational projects, but sometimes simply for food and shelter.

In Bangladesh a Muslim leader, who hoped that I would agree to help fund his educational project, took me to visit the grave of a Sufi saint. Only when we arrived at the bottom of stairs leading up to the saint's shrine, did I realize that I would have to step past pitiful beggars all the way to the top. I couldn't meet the eyes of these crippled, blind and hungry beggars, as I climbed up the stairs and then down again. I remember that at the bottom of the stairs a small child, wearing only a tattered pair of shorts, pulled at my pant leg, but I ignored him and walked away.

When I was traveling I sometimes gave to beggars, probably to assuage my sense of guilt. But in India one day, after I gave a coin to a child, other begging children mobbed me. As I walked quickly across the street, one wrapped her stick legs and arms around my leg and hung on, wailing, until I entered a store and a security man pulled her off. I can still hear her desperate cries…

However, my sin is not simply ignoring individual beggars, but forgetting them after I returned home to enjoy a level of comfort scarcely imaginable to billions of the earth's people. As I think of the enormous gap between our affluent way of life and the impoverished and degrading lives that so many people have to live, I tremble. For if God is just, then the verdict is fearsome.

At home, too, I am reminded of my sin, but not only because there are homeless men, women and children on our streets. As a son, brother, husband, father, and your interim pastor, I have sinned by not being the person I wanted to be and think I should have been. I don't mean this in a melodramatic way, as though I've done great evil. But I haven't accomplished much of the good that I’ve wanted to do. I've been a disappointment to many, as well as to myself.

You may say, "But no one is perfect." Or, "Everyone makes mistakes." Or, "You're no more guilty of letting others down than most of us." Well, perhaps this is true. But great or small, I see no cure for sin except repentance and forgiveness.

So, I turn to the Bible to find the will to repent and the courage to forgive others. Two of the New Testament gospels contain the story of Jesus teaching his disciples how to pray. We are more familiar with the passage in Matthew 6:9-13, because it is the core of the Lord's Prayer we say, but Luke 11:2-4 also presents this teaching although with slightly different words: "Thy kingdom come. Give us today our bread to eat. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us."

I don't think this means we earn forgiveness by forgiving others. But it does affirm that insofar as we are forgiving, we may know forgiveness. In asking for forgiveness within my family, and by admitting my own sin and seeking to forgive others, I have come closest to what might be an experience of God's forgiving love.

But praying the Lord's Prayer also reminds me of the justice God loves and requires. Forgiving debtors today means that we in the West should forgive the international debts owed to our governments and financial institutions. Forgiving the international debt that cripples so many countries would not be an act of charity, but would manifest the justice of God because these debts represent the sin of the global economic system.

Between 1973 and 1979 oil exporting countries raised the price of oil eightfold. Most of these profits were deposited in American and European banks, which then pushed loans on third world countries to help them pay for the higher-priced oil. Rising interest rates on these loans and a global recession beginning in 1979 pushing commodity prices down made it impossible for the debtor countries to repay these loans out of shrinking export earnings. It’s more complicated, of course, because of corruption, drought, wars, and interventions by the World Bank and the IMF. But the result of international loans and trade policies has been to enrich Americans and Europeans at the expense of Africans and Latin Americans and South Asians. We, especially, have grown richer as billions of others have grown poorer.

If we are to pray today that our debts be forgiven, we must forgive the debts of those unable to repay these loans. We must act justly by being forgiving, if we hope for God's forgiveness.

In the story of the Israelites told in the books of the Bible, we hear that again and again God forgives the Israelites for their sin. And in the Qur'an we hear again and again that Allah takes compassion on all who repent. The God of these three religious traditions is a liberating God, as the exodus account reveals. But also the God of these three religious traditions is a forgiving God. So, let us hope Jews, Christians and Muslims will discover, despite their differences, that they are praying to the same God, the God whose justice includes forgiving love.

"In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate." (Qur’an 1:1) Amen.