Forgive Thy Brother, by Scott Erickson.
Eight years ago, on a day in June, a shooter slaughtered nine people who gathered for Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, also called Mother Emanuel Church. The violence was racially motivated. It was an act of atrocious evil. The person who did it was clearly damaged, seemingly beyond repair, and though our faith teaches us that every human person can be reached, it is hard to imagine how the humanity of this killer could be recovered and rehabilitated.
During the shooter’s bond hearing, several family members of the victims told the shooter that they forgave him. Now, why would they do this?! What could it even mean, that they forgave him? This was their faith in action, but their choice to forgive may seem almost obscene. The killer was not repentant. The crime was a hate crime, committed by a white supremacist. But they forgave him. In doing so, they echoed Jesus himself on the cross in Luke’s Gospel, where he prays to God, asking God to forgive the executioners. Why?! Why pray this?
Well, Jesus gives us some wisdom about forgiveness in today’s Good News. He opens up the topic, and helps us understand how forgiveness works. Yes, forgiveness is something we practice when a person has been wickedly violent, as in the Mother Emanuel shooting. But forgiveness is something we work on at lots of levels. One person forgives another; one group forgives another group (think of South Africa, after Apartheid); and we even are encouraged to practice forgiveness in our resistance to the whole unjust global economic system. It’s not accidental that we talk about “forgiving” student loans, nor is it accidental that Jesus, in his teaching about forgiveness, tells a parable about debts owed by people in a cruel imperial economy. Forgiveness is a tool that helps us repair all kinds of things, from our whole capitalist system of oppression all the way down to your broken heart.
But here’s the thing about forgiveness: if you forgive, whether you forgive someone who harmed you, or you forgive a debt owed to you, the act of forgiveness never denies what happened. It just changes our relationship with what happened, and frees us to create a new future. You don’t have to worry that if you offer or accept forgiveness, someone is ducking responsibility, or weaseling out. When we forgive, we are liberated from miserable (and sometimes self-centered) anguish about injustice; and with God’s help, we find that we are more than our mistakes. We are more than even dreadful, tragic mistakes, from personal injuries all the way up to racist systems like Apartheid and dehumanizing capitalist systems that damage countless humans, and the earth.
And yet, for all the fact that forgiveness is so useful and lifegiving, we (much like Jesus and his companions) live in a time of widespread unforgiveness, of unending conflict that leads nowhere, a time when it’s all too easy to assume that life is just a zero-sum game. If I admit I did something wrong, then I lose to you, who did not do that thing. Or I lose face. Or I’m just a loser. And if I forgive a debt you owe me, I’m a different kind of loser, because in our unforgiving economic culture, a culture that commodifies human beings – “you are what you own,” our culture says – my wealth is diminished shamefully if I don’t grab everything I can.
There’s a better way. Jesus frames it in a parable, a story that shifts our perspective, and opens our minds to a new insight. In the parable, someone who had been forgiven fails to understand the liberating gift that he received, and therefore fails to share that same liberation with a person who was in debt to him. He reveals in his actions that he simply doesn't get it. He doesn’t understand that even though he is one of the victims of the cruel economy, he all too willingly participates in it. He doesn't understand that forgiveness is about justice.
If we are forgiven for offending or hurting someone, or if we are forgiven a debt or otherwise freed from economic injustice, then the forgiveness we receive releases everyone involved from the burdens of injustice, and empowers them to extend outward the liberation they now enjoy. As we go forward in other relationships with other people, we remember the forgiveness we received, and we remember in particular that it was a tremendous gift.
All of this requires a significant amount of faith, and it takes a lot of hard work. So let’s return to Charleston, South Carolina, and reflect again on the extraordinary forgiveness offered by the families of the shooting victims.
I believe these family members offered forgiveness to the shooter because they did not want to carry the heavy albatross of rage and resentment; they did not want to return evil for evil; they did not want to take up the weapons of death as the shooter had done. Their act of forgiveness lifted those burdens, freed them from those prisons, and offered that same gift to the shooter, someone all too easy to throw away, someone all too easy to dismiss as a monster, someone the state has abandoned as just another throwaway creature on death row. And again, again I say, what that shooter did remains an evil atrocity. That will never, ever change. His soul may be redeemed and for all I know he may one day reach heaven as a magnificent, redeemed saint of God; but he will still be guilty of his actions on that terrible day.
But with forgiveness, those actions don’t have to be the final chapter of the story. Later chapters in the shooter’s story could find him forgiving those who damaged him so much that he became a racist killer; or they could find him making restitution – never enough, never, ever enough, but restitution nonetheless – to the families, to that church community, to Charleston, to all people of good conscience everywhere.
But there’s a larger, economic reality operating here, too, and the families’ choice to forgive the shooter disrupts larger systems of injustice. Everyone in this story – the shooter, his victims, and their families – is living in a system of oppression propped up by human avarice and ignorance. Racist shooters are made, not born. The mercy these extraordinary families offered to the shooter could redeem the slaughter by encouraging further acts of justice and reconciliation, and if so, this would be the exact opposite outcome from the one the shooter had hoped to inspire: he had wanted to start a race war. Their brave choice to forgive could save a generation of people from hatred and violence. It could inspire more and more people to question and push back on systems that damage white people and people of color alike. Forgiveness doesn’t guarantee this happy future for anyone involved, but it makes this future possible. Refusing to forgive forecloses that future. Genuine forgiveness – actual, difficult, wrenching forgiveness – gives us hope.
And if the shooter never repents, what then? Perhaps the victims’ families will look or feel foolish. But I don’t think so. They still have been relieved of their burdens. Forgiveness can still do its good and saving work in their own lives, and with all who hear and respond to their story of remarkable wisdom and courage.
And so we work at this. We wrestle with it. We wonder if the unrepentant should be forgiven, and if so, we wonder how we would do it. And we sometimes despair at the staggering challenge of disrupting unjust systems. But recall again that Jesus prayed for forgiveness, with gentleness and humility: note that when he says, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” he doesn’t forgive the executioners in that moment; he asks God to forgive them. So perhaps that’s an early step for us to follow. We could pray, “O Lord, help me, I cannot yet forgive. God, forgive them.” Or we could pray, “O Lord, help us, for so much is wrong in the world. God, strengthen us.”
And so we practice forgiveness, Sunday by Sunday. We open the holy book, and what we read there inspires us to pray for the whole world, including all the violent offenders and wrongdoers, all the oppressors, and all their victims. Then we ask God to forgive us; and then we share the Peace, an ancient ritual of reconciliation that makes us both ready and willing to sit at this Table together, offenders and victims alike.
We help each other, day by day, always with God’s presence and God’s power. We help each other forgive our siblings from our hearts.
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Preached on the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 19A), September 17, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Exodus 14:19-31
Psalm 114
Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35