Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
Original Manuscript:
This is an interactive manuscript. To follow links, click the highlighted words below.
One of my duties as a City Year member in Washington, D.C. was serving as co-math coordinator for our school. We tried to do various things to help build up the math literacy at our school. Part of the way we did this was through events for the school.
Now my co-coordinator was much better at doing all these things and had a lot more energy than I did around it. Sometime in our second semester I was tired, and truthfully a little jealous, and I did the one thing that you should never do in a conflict situation. I sent an email dictating how I felt.
When we went home that day, my co-leader had a talk with me that spanned many Metro stops. It was the kind of conversation that really could have ended our friendship. In fact, that’s more or less what she told me. The only thing that saved our friendship, as she later said to me, was that she could see in my eyes that I was sorry for having hurt her. That was the only reason she was able to forgive me. It is the only reason we have remained friends, even to this day.
Forgiveness is our theme today. It is what every single lesson we have this morning is about.
Forgiveness is hard. It is never easy. It can be hard to receive. It can certainly be harder to give. Forgiveness is hard because it involves a wrong that has been done. Forgiveness is hard because there is something that has been done that needs to be forgiven.
We see this first with Joseph and his brothers. As we saw last week, Joseph’s brothers threw him in a pit and sold him into slavery. Yes, Joseph was a brat to them. Yes, he was a narc. Yet, selling him into slavery? That is going way too far. We also shouldn’t forget that their original plan was to kill Joseph, until their oldest brother Reuben talked them down.
As he relates to his brothers in this passage, Joseph rises from slavery, and even wrongful imprisonment to be Second-in-Command to the Pharaoh of Egypt and to save them and the nations surrounding from famine. This is why Joseph’s brothers are in front of him now in this passage.
There is something we don’t see in the parts between this week’s Genesis reading and last week’s. Joseph is really struggling with what to do with his brothers. He wants to mess with them, but at the same time he wants to embrace them.
In today’s reading, we see Joseph finally forgiving his brothers. He knows what they did was wrong. He tells them just as much. Yet he also knows that God has used their actions to save them and many others. Ultimately, his love for them wins out in the end.
We are not the only ones who forgive. God forgives too. We see that in our reading from Romans today. There we are reminded of what we saw through our reading of the Prophets last year in this time of the Season after Pentecost. There we saw how the Ancient Israelites time and time again went against God and followed their own ways and desires. Time and time again, God called them back. Even when things got so bad that Israel fell, first the North to Assyria and then the South to the Babylonians, God was there and brought them back to their homeland again. Even now, with the rejection God has faced from God’s own Chosen People, Paul assures us that God will not reject them. God will continue to work to show mercy to God’s People chosen of old.
Then there are those harder things to parse out and forgive, such as the conflict between the Canaanites and the Israelites. Their conflict was old and over the land. So many wrongs had been done to one another, that it might be hard to parse out which had more to forgive. This was a nationalistic, a tribalistic conflict. It was also a conflict over race.
This is why the Disciples beg Jesus to send the Canaanite woman away. This isn’t someone deserving of help and mercy. This woman is a nuisance, a bother. She doesn’t deserve interaction. She deserves to be sent away.
Yet Jesus does recognize her. He does deign to speak with her, to have a conversation with her, even if it’s just to say He wasn’t sent there for her.
Yet the Canaanite woman still looks past their differences. She recognizes Jesus’ authority, even if He is an Israelite, a Jew. She is willing to look past their peoples’ past and lower herself to the Lord just to receive help for her daughter.
What she does doesn’t just provide healing for her daughter. This leads to a turning point in Matthew. Before now, Jesus has only spoken of His work among the House of Israel. After this point, whenever He speaks of His mission, Jesus speaks of going forth to the ends of the earth. A great healing has happened here, a healing between nations even.
Forgiveness is hard. It means reforging relationships with those who have wronged us. It can also mean accepting that we have done something wrong.
Yet as one who has been forgiven, it can be powerful. It can be helpful. It can allow us to continue forward with relationships that looking back, we cannot see how we would survive without them.
Forgiveness is hard, but it is what God teaches. It is what we see in Patriarchs like Joseph. It is what we see in God’s dealings with all of us in the world. We even see it in our Lord Jesus Christ’s interactions with others.
Forgiveness is a process though. It takes time. It takes repentance. It takes valuing the other over our own hurt and loss. To forgive is Godly, though I’m not asking you to jump in head first. At least take the time. At least consider it. Move forward, however slowly, to offer forgiveness to others, just as God offers it to us.