Welcome to St James

Matthew 18:21-35 – Forgiveness

I’m so glad that you decided to come along today to St James to be part of our celebration of what people have come to call Back to Church Sunday.    The day started out to be something of a call to those who had gone astray so to speak but in recent years it’s more of an attempt to encourage our regular worshippers to invite someone that they know to come with them on that day and on Sundays after that.

If you’ve come today because you were invited “Welcome!” We have a special morning tea afterwards especially in your honour. You really must come to that. If you are a regular and you invited someone and they didn’t come then welcome to you as well.   Of course you are not only welcome today but all the time.

Today Jesus reminds in our Gospel reading of the importance and the role of forgiveness. Forgiveness is one of those things which everyone thinks is good but most people have trouble doing it.   It’s like that urge we sometimes have to start up an exercise routine or the feeling we might have that we should eat more fruit and vegetables. If we think about something else for a minute that urge will go away.

The whole matter of forgiveness, as well as being a subject that Jesus actually does spend quite a bit of time talking and teaching about, is also something that plagues organisations like us because, yes even we, the Church, find it very, very difficult at times.

It is true that for many people who give up their faith life, it’s the result of something someone said, usually many years ago – something that was hurtful, possibly untrue and unfair, and that person never said “sorry”.
If this is you then I do feel for you and I am very sorry that you have suffered in this way and that your feelings were hurt. I can’t possibly make amends for what happened but I can, through my position as Vicar of St James, apologise on behalf of the parish and I do so now.

This is no idle apology because the fate of a person in my position is that everything that goes wrong in a place is my fault and so I fully understand the pain of the injustice of false statements and whisperings around the place that are both unfair and untrue.

So what then do we do about forgiveness if this is so important to Jesus? What should we do to restore our relationship with God and God’s Church if that has been damaged somehow and we have either drifted away or thought about doing that?   What place has forgiveness in our lives today? In fact is there place for it?

A lack of forgiveness, either giving or receiving can eat away at us and be a very great spiritual burden on us and that’s not something that any of us needs. I’m sure that’s why Jesus speaks so much about it.

Today we can not escape the painful memories of ten years ago when terrorist forces decided to attack the heart of 20th Century western culture in New York. All of us can remember those terrible pictures of the Twin Towers of the World Trade centre in flames and then crumbling to the ground, the huge plumes of toxic dust billowing into the air and then covering everything in its path as it slowly settled. Many of us witnessed it happen on live TV. And everyone it seems in the whole world saw replays of those planes hitting the towers over and over again as we tried to absorb what had happened and feared what might happen next.

It was one of those moments in our lives where we can remember what we were doing when it happened. This was a truly terrible time. Of course, as Christians, we responded with prayer and through the lighting of many candles and various kinds of generosity towards those affected. But it also changed us.

I believe this was a turning point in history. In countries around the world including this one the incident changed people’s attitudes towards each other, especially others who were different to us. Some became less trusting, more afraid, more insecure, more intent on striking first rather than waiting to be struck. More inclined to resort to force; less inclined perhaps to be forgiving. Yet it is a basic part of our Christian faith to be forgiving. Jesus tells Peter that he should forgive his brother 77 times, a number which really means we should always forgive. So what do we do?

As members of a church family, when it comes to forgiveness, it helps if we try to keep things in perspective. Putting aside our hurt pride and our dented ego, think about these things. What actually happened? How serious was its impact really? Do we think the ‘person or persons responsible’ actually remembers what they did? If it happened years ago are they still around at the Church anyway? And can the love and fellowship and sharing that we have with others, and the spiritual strengthening we receive from worship help us in dealing with that pain?   And were we ourselves partly responsible in the first place for what happened? I say this because frequently, I would even say most of the time, when you look at these hurtful incidents with all this in mind, they tell us logically we should not let them drive us away from having that life-giving relationship with God through the Church.

If the matter is more serious we can work towards forgiveness because Jesus teaches us that we should and also there are wonderful benefits if we can succeed.

As Christians and as a Church family we can actually bring about a better world and a better community which is more resilient and more able to handle the tough times through learning and practicing forgiveness. It’s a gift that we can bring to the community and as we do that we will not be labelled as hypocrites – people who say one thing but do another.

We should probably say first that if we are living the gospel then we will not hurt or offend anyone to start with and so the need for forgiveness would not arise as often amongst us. That’s important.

In recent times I have had a very significant experience of forgiveness and the healing it brings.   It wasn’t in the Church but involved wider family members. It involved the healing or at least partial healing which I hope is ongoing, of relationships that had long been so damaged that I would have said they were not able to be repaired.

In my case, sadly, it took a family bereavement. But the healing was truly of God.

In general terms the background pain and feeling of sadness about what has happened is no longer there. Forgiveness brought with it the gift of true peace and real joy. Family members are now able to relate to each other freely. This meant that some of my family met my youngest child Rebekah for the first time in many years, some for the first time.

When the relationship with these family members was restored for me it was as if they had never been severed – we talked about our passions about sport and about lots of other things, leaving aside the subjects on which we have no common ground. My children were very surprised, and very happy that the reconciliation happened at all after so many years of silence. They met cousins they didn’t know they had.

It changed what could have been a terrible time to a time that we will remember with some smiles and a great deal of thoughtfulness and thankfulness on my part at least. And the experience has made me almost an ambassador for forgiveness.

So when it comes to our church life we must not let small things, careless words and thoughtlessness ruin something as fulfilling, life building and life changing as our relationship with Jesus Christ and his Church. Whatever we suffer from others, we can deal with it with Jesus’ help.

Each Sunday here at St James’ we gather to hear the Word of God and to receive the strengthening spiritual food of bread and wine, prayed over by the community, reminding us of the special relationship that Jesus wants to have with his people.   Nothing that people could say could keep me away from receiving this wonderful gift

Let’s resolve from today, to be people who look not only to receive forgiveness from God each week but also people who genuinely reach out with forgiveness to each other offering that gift freely, seventy seven times in fact, just as God has forgiven us our sins.

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