Do Not Take Things That Aren’t Yours

This Sunday, we continue our series All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten and Sunday School. We have explored playing fairly with one another as well as last week, when you go into the world, watch for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. I based this on the wisdom of the book from years back by the same title, All I Ever Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulgrum and the strength of our scripture lessons.

When we hear ‘do not take things that are not yours’, we think of material possessions like children’s toys and watches, money, plasma TVs, and cars. We think of the commandment to not steal. Perhaps, we even think of the commandment to not commit adultery, and remember the clear instructions to be fully present with the person with whom you are in relationship. But I wonder how often we realize that the kindergarten teaching relates to much, much more. This morning, on the strength of the Old Testament and Gospel lessons, I want to suggest that one of learnings from not taking things that aren’t yours is not taking peace by offering forgiveness.

In the Old Testament lesson, we catch the end of the saga with Joseph and his brothers. To catch you up, Joseph was the favorite of his father’s thirteen sons as a boy. His brothers plot to injure him, teach him a lesson/ sell him “down the river.” For the better part of eight chapters in Genesis, they plot and scheme, rationalize and cajole and ultimately achieve selling their youngest brother, favorite of the father, into slavery. Joseph, ultimately does quite well for himself with God’s help and ends up overseeing Egyptian plentiful resources during a major famine in the region. This is where the brothers find him and worry that he may *just* have a little grudge. This story made popular with the modern musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream with Donny Osmond as Joseph.

The brothers prepare to beg and plead with Joseph, when he surprises them with compassion and forgiveness. Rather, Joseph’s question — “Am I in the place of God?” — is the recognition that final judgment is God’s. In the meantime, remain open to the possibility of redemption, both in others and ourselves. What does forgiveness mean? The Hebrew verb for “forgive” conveys a concrete action, to take or lift up. The brothers ask Joseph to “take up” or “lift off” their guilt. The Hebrew verb is, in effect, a metaphor; to forgive is to remove a heavy burden, like taking a dead weight off someone’s shoulders.  Forgiveness is not taking that which is not yours. Forgiveness is letting go of the hope that the past can be changed. Forgiveness is always about the future, never about the past.

Perhaps, today we might retell the story of Joseph and the brothers like this. Five Amish school girls killed, 11 wounded, by a shooter in Nickel Mines on October 2nd, 2006. The Amish community not only comforted the shooter’s wife and children, they forgave him. The press and others questioned the action. However, the Amish community was clear as they provided for the children and widow of the shooter, Charles Roberts, forgiveness did not take away their pain of loss. However, forgiveness did offer a life back to Marie Montville and her three young children and the possibility of redemption in the midst of such pain and tragedy. RAP and UMW will sponsor Marie Montville to come here in the Spring to tell her story. This story of forgiveness is on-going as the Nickel Mines’ Amish families still check in on the Montvilles and love them based on Jesus’ example, while grieving their own horrific losses.

How much must we give? How often must we offer this forgiveness to others, even in the light of horrific offenses? From our gospel lesson, we listen to Peter’s seemingly generous offer to forgive someone seven times. Jesus multiplies Peter’s suggestion to seventy-seven, or probably a better translation, seventy times seven, or four hundred ninety. This is pretty shocking to begin with and then, we do a little figuring regarding the parables and talents. A talent is about 130 pounds of silver and equal to about 15 years of the average laborer’s wages. So, the first slave owed approximately 1.3 million pounds of silver or 150 thousand years of labor. This is an impossible debt. A denarius, by comparison is approximately equal a day’s wage, making the other slave’s debt about one hundred days of labor.

But these details do not drive us to a new forgiveness quota, instead. They are to point us to no longer counting and recognizing that it is our relationships that suffer under such a legalistic reckoning. Love cannot be quantified, and the love of God is not. The parable seeks to open our minds to a different way of relationship in which we offer love and compassion, instead of exacting guilt and punishment.

The parable reminds us that the work of forgiveness is not just so that others may forgive our foibles and offenses. Forgiveness is also so that we might forgive others. I like this image the by French artist Andre Girard. He seeks to illustrate the Lord’s Prayer through this silkscreen from the book, “Sayings of Jesus.” Often, when we use the phrase two-faced and our intention is a negative description of someone who says one thing and does an opposite. But here in this image are two faces of the same person: one who was forgiven, who can then turn around and offer forgiveness as a gift to someone else.

In Florida in 2012, no so longer after the murder of Trayvon Martin, was the murder of Jordan David, African- American teenager. The shooter was acquitted in a mistrial, but it was the words of the Davis’ mother, Lucia, that captured the curiosity, criticism, and imagination of the press:
“Don’t think that we aren’t angry. Don’t think that I am not angry. Forgiving Michael Dunn doesn’t negate what I’m feeling and my anger. And I am allowed to feel that way. But more than that I have a responsibility to God to walk the path He’s laid. In spite of my anger, and my fear that we won’t get the verdict that we want, I am still called by the God I serve to walk this out.
I am praying for him [Dunn] and my church is praying for him. I forgave him a long time ago. I had to. It’s not just about Jordan. And I would not stand and wait for him to apologize. I don’t need his apology. I had forgiven him pretty much in the first 30 days. I just knew that was what I was supposed to do.”

No one can make us forgive and forgiveness is a lifelong process of letting go of the judgement of someone else, which is not ours to exact in the first place. The actress Marlene Dietrich famously said, “Once a woman has forgiven a man, she must not re-heat his sins for breakfast.” I’m pretty sure that goes for all of us, male and female, alike. When we judge, when we refuse to forgive, when we nurse our hard-earned grudges, we embrace our humanity over God’s divinity and sovereignty.

This image of Ruby Bridges is from Norman Rockwell, don’t you recognize his classic style. Norman Rockwell was committed to illustrating that which affected the whole of the country. This piece is entitled the Problem We All Live With. In the 1950s, six year old Ruby Bridges integrated an all-white school by herself, walking there every day with two federal escorts in front of her and two more behind her, while around her an angry crowd of white adults heaped abuses on her little head. Child psychiatrist Robert Coles noticed her lips were moving as she walked, and asked her, in her home, what she was saying. She said she was praying, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Her parents hoped, by giving her this prayer, she could shield her mind and heart, and walk unscathed through her daily hell.

For many of us, our forgiveness is daily and mundane. We are not forgiving those who murdered our children or kidnapped us; we have not had the experience of digging ourselves millions of dollars into debt or trying to integrate a school, all by ourselves. Our forgiveness must be for those in our lives who hurt us and disappoint us, who lead us astray and manipulate us. Our forgiveness is for those who threat our country and our safety and well-being. Our forgiveness is no less difficult and no less important. God who forgave and forgives us, calls us to walk the difficult road that God has shown us in forgiving one another.

I wonder this morning, who you need to consider forgiving. Who have you been carrying around with you – perhaps for hours or days – maybe even for years. Hear God’s invitation to step out of the holding of grudges and cultivating of anger and hatred and into God’s way of peace, trusting that God is indeed judge and authority over all, not you and me.

This is the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, thanks be to God, Amen.

Andre Girard. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, numbered page 45 and first page of the twelfth folio in the unbound book Sayings of Jesus (Milwaukee: Chirho Press, Marquette University, 1956). Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

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