Sermon: Supernatural Forgiveness

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Supernatural Forgiveness

By Charles Rush

March 17, 2002

the movie, now 15 years old, ‘Shoot the Moon', Albert Finney plays a writer who lives in beautiful Marin County outside San Fransisco. He is at the height of his considerable career, aged 50, married to a lovely woman, played by Diane Keaton. They have one child, aged 13. Finney has won critical acclaim with a Pulitzer prize and has sold a whole slough of books as well.

He has achieved all those goals that were so critical to him in his 20's but somehow his relationship with his wife has gradually run lower and lower on steam until it was pleasantly boring. He has an affair with a younger woman that only knows him as a celebrity and worships him or adores him, in the manner that certain men of that age seen particularly vulnerable to.

His wife finds out about the affair. They have a heart to heart, very bracing argument, in which they both admit that there is no spark between them. They articulate the anger, the hurt, the embarrassment, the disappointment in each other, and they decide to separate.

He moves some stuff out. When the last box is packed he comes back in and the two of them talk about being separated. They both agree, each saying, “We are adults. We can do this.”

Couple weeks later, Diane Keaton, in grief, decides to stop living the way her ex wanted her to live and start finding herself. She starts smoking pot again, invites over the massage therapist, covers the house in candles and incense, and reconnects with her hippie days before she got married.

This infuriates her ex-husband when he comes to pick up their daughter for visitation. He always hated that hippie crap. Of course, she partly digs seeing him get all wound up.

Then she decides to build a tennis court out back. She had always wanted a tennis court. So she hires a contractor, a very handsome young man… As my sister-in-law would say, ‘he's a crunchy vegetable'. Work begins.

This, too, infuritates her ex-husband. He thinks the tennis court is extravagant. He hates tennis. And now, in his mind, she isn't spending their money. She is spending his money. Every time he picks up his daughter, he makes snippy comments about the court or he yells about it.

Meanwhile Diane Keaton puts the old moves on the Young, crunchy, vegetable Tennis contractor. She has not lost her touch. So now, every time her ex-husband comes around he makes snide remarks about her new boyfriend who is not so bright and Diane Keaton returns the favor with snide remarks about her ex's new girlfriend- the Bimbo that worships him.

On and on it goes, the escalating repartee of vindictive assault. Every trivial thing becomes the occasion for another spewing of bile. Finally one night her ex-husband comes over to the house and she is having a little party to celebrate the completion of her new tennis court- built with his money. The contractor has practically moved in by this time. There are all these fruit cakes in what used to be his back yard. He drops off his daughter pulls away. Taps on the brakes. Throws his Mercedes, 500 series, in reverse and blows right through the fence around the tennis court, pulls a donut over the new clay court, until the contractor pulls him out of the car, grabs him by the tie and smacks him around until he is bloody, while his ex-wife is screaming.

They are all standing there dazed… The audience is saying to themselves “We can do this… We're adults.” There is a creepy realism to that descent to the bottom. Nothing quite like families, who know the power of love, and the real pain of hate. Nothing quite like a family feud.

Unless, maybe, it is a clan feud. We are at the front end of a situation that is rapidly deteriorating into something sub-human in Israel. As one commentator said recently, “just when I think it can't get any worse, it does.”

There is a spiral to this violence. Actually it is a swirling vortex like the flush of the toilet that pulls everything downward. 3 wars have already been fought, each decisively won by the Israeli's. None of them did the least to establish the peace.

Instead they spawned the birth of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the Fatah faction that surrounds Yasir Arafat. Each of these groups is committed to the use of violent terrorism as the principal tactic of their revolutionary struggle. They are only interested in Israel's extermination. And now these factions have been able to define the voice of the Palestinian cause.

Likewise, on the Israeli side, there has been growing toleration of religious zealots that want to start settlements inside the West Bank on the religious conviction that all of this land was originally promised by God to Abraham, irregardless of the political settlements that are broached at Oslo or anywhere else.

As the situation has deteriorated, these two extreme groups have been allowed to dictate the conversation more and more, the Palestinians developing text books that show a Palestine that engulfs all of Israel and the religious Israeli's exerting increasing control over the West Bank.

Then the Intafada began in 1987. That conflict lasted some 17 months, involved mostly stone throwing and armed incursions into the West Bank by Israeli soldiers. All told 17 Israeli's died and 424 Palestinians died. Both sides saw themselves as victims.

When the latest round of peace talks failed, the Palestinians were not only better armed, better funded, they had thousands of martyrs ready to die for the cause. So in the last 17 months 340 Israeli's- almost all innocent civilians- have been murdered by terrorist suicide missions. And 1,000 Palestinians have been killed- some also innocent civilians- in raids into the West Bank in search for terrorists and destroy the Palestinian infrastructure.

Each side has compelling stories of the victims of arbitrary violence that have ended in tragedy. Just this week a young Israeli couple that were engaged to be married and had gone out to dance on Saturday night in Jerusalem were ripped to shreds by a suicide bomber than managed to sneak a bomb into the nightclub.

Likewise, a father in the Dheisheh Refugee camp near Bethlehem was shot through the walls of his house as he played with his 2 year-old son and his one-year-old daughter. He died right in front of them and his wife, aged 22.

The bitterness of each of these incidents spreads radially out into the community, enraging every single person that they know, every single person in their neighborhoods. The anger and the frustration that one feels from dying young, from being dealt a life-script that you did not choose and do not want to live- all that finds a scapegoat in an enemy that is easy to hate, easy to caricature.

That rage is pretty easily stirred by Clerics and political leaders that use extremist texts and whip up the testosterone and the uncritical passions of young people, so that more and more extreme acts of violence are permissible. And the spiral takes on a life of its own, sucking out the creativity of the imagination of everyone involved, undermining everyone's ability to see the total situation in its complexity, limiting vision so that you only see the vices in your enemies, you only remember their faults, you only hear their hatred and anger, you only feel your own fear in their presence.

Many of us in metropolitan New York do not really understand how people can hold on to a grudge for so long. That is because we have never really lost. Losers remember longer. That bitterness runs deep. As a child in the South, my relatives paraded me from one battle field to the next, told us the story of how you damn Yankees brought us to ruin… I was ready to get a gun. You talk to some of my relatives, you would think the Civil War had ended in the early 1990's.

Robert Kaplan wrote an article about 10 years ago that stopped me dead in my tracks. He was covering the election campaign of a thug in Serbia, a no-name politician Slobodon Milosevic. Milosevic began his campaign for office out in a field commemorating a battle fought nearly 700 years ago, where thousands of Serbs died holding off the onslaught of the Turks. With a chant of “Never again. Never again”, he whipped hundreds of followers into an ecstatic frenzy that almost led to mob anarchy. I read that and said, “Hold it. I don't even know this battle… 700 years ago… This is a bad omen for the region.” Indeed it was, though no one in the West really took notice until it was almost too late. There is a deadly power to vengence. And the memory of loss is long.

Left unchecked, the power of vengeance concentrates your mind until you can only think about a blood feud and only honor blood vengeance, until tragedy spreads so far, so deep that even if you win, there is nothing left to celebrate in victory because everyone you love, everyone you would celebrate with, is dead.

And was the point of “Romeo and Juliet”. It wasn't about the tragic nature of true love, a bad theme that has been overdeveloped. After the star-crossed lovers take their lives, their warring families, the Capulet's and the Montague's are both summoned to the Royal residence of the Doge of Verona. Each of them come bearing their children on the way to the funeral. And the Doge tells both families that their two children had hoped to find love together but were thwarted by the long-standing feud between their families. This feud got so out of control that not only did many fine young men from both houses die, these two would-be lovers that could make a way for peace, both the beloved of their families are dead. The Doge says,

Where be these enemies? Capulet! Montague!
See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.
And I for winking at your discords too
Have lost a brace of kinsmen: all are punish'd

A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

The play ends on this sad/hopeful note. The high price of revenge for both families, was the loss of so many of their kinsman, even up to their favorite children. And at some point, the price becomes too great. And that is when the spiritual break-through occurs. Forgiveness. At some point, the profundity of forgiveness is forced upon us because we find that we cannot go on living out of our lower selves continually. Anger, revenge, and bitterness are expensive indulgences. They eventually eat us up too. They destroy everything around us. And finally, we cannot really enjoy even the few spoils that we might have garnered for ourselves. We cannot live that way.

In a serious conflict, in a serious feud, few of us ever reach the point of forgiveness until we have painted ourselves into such a corner that we come to a moment where we realize that there is no other way out. It is a supernatural moment of break through, a spiritual break through that happens. It has to come from without and take root deep within us. We get to this place where we just say we have to forgive and move on because we just do. And sometimes, it will cause people to suddenly make radical changes. After months of obdurate resistance, they just say ‘take it, just take it… I don't care about it anymore.' It came seem bizarre to people on the outside because they cannot appreciate the spiritual change of disposition internally.

This will eventually become important for us in our area in the aftermath of the tragedy in September. We are still in the early stages of seeing friends and neighbors that were directly affected begin to express a destructive capacity for anger. And there are so many convenient channels for that anger. Because the people that did this, the masterminds behind this are really despicable characters for the most part. They are good candidates for hatred. We are not near through it for the most part. But one day, there will come a point where we have to deal with it.

The week before Tim McVeigh was to be executed for the bombings in Oklahoma City, Michael Radutsky went with his crew from '60 Minutes' to interview about a dozen family members. It was about two years after the event. A horrible mass murder that even blew up a Day Care center- and Tim McVeigh knew about that Day Care center. He never apologized. To all of the family members of the victims that died in this interview, he was a despicable man- misguided perhaps, disillusioned- but despicable. Every one of them spoke articulately and with great human passion about how easy he was to hate. Every one of them spoke at length about how much energy they got out of their anger for such a long time, how it motivated them into action, and got them going, channeling a grief that could have swamped them for good.

Some of them were looking forward to Tim McVeigh dying. Several of them said, “At last it will be over.” Or, “I just want to see him die for what he has done.” Other people were opposed to the death penalty and didn't think it would really solve anything and they were remarkably articulate and humane in what they said about it.

But all of them… all of them… for the death penalty or against it, described reaching a point in their souls, a point where they realized that this anger they had loosed, this vengeance they had been living on, was killing them. They got to a point where they knew that they would just become bitter, old, angry, ugly people.

Now most of these people were Christians. They are from Oklahoma. So they prayed to God to fill them with a spirit of forgiveness. That is exactly what you should do. One way or the other, this transformation is so profound that it has to come from without. It has to come from God. Prayer just opens us to God authentically.

They had to forgive Tim McVeigh so that they could go on. Their tape had gotten stuck in a loop and the same short track was playing over and over and it was going to drive them crazy.

Real forgiveness is a profound reality. It is not easily achieved, nor is it lightly done. Over this year, I have been struck by just how much Jesus talks about it, just how important it was to him, and just how critical it is to our spiritual life. When it happens, an impenetrable impasse suddenly opens, like the young Arthur pulling the sword out of the stone. And a whole new world suddenly opens up and begins to bloom, and whole part of our psyche regain some human feeling again, and relationships that are frozen in a monotonous pattern suddenly break free for growth and we look at ourselves and say, “It's about time.” And you know what, it is.

Amen.