First Congregational Church of Montague Trinitarian

Rev. Barbara Turner Delisle

August 15, 2010

Psalm 80; Heb 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-56

Untying the Ties That Bind Us

Tomorrow I am getting together with an old friend of mine. We grew up together in Brookfield, MA….went to Elementary and high school together. She and I played with each other when we were young and hung out or talked on the phone almost daily when we were in our teens. Before graduating from Tantasqua Regional High School we made a vow to never lose touch. We even talked about maybe living with each other in our old age if we were alone. We did pretty well for a number of years even though I went to college in Boston and she in Worcester. We would see each other during Christmas break and during summer vacations. We wrote to each other about our courses and our loves and our heartbreaks. After graduating from college it became a little tougher but we managed to keep up with each other by calling on our birthdays and sending Christmas cards at least….at least for a while. But then there was a hurt…a betrayal of sorts…a betrayal to our childhood vow of keeping in touch at the very least on our birthdays. Seems silly but it happened many years in a row that my friend did not send me a card for Christmas or remember to phone me on my birthday. One year, when we were both back living in Massachusetts, we made plans to meet and she forgot! It always seemed someone in her family was more important. So, I stopped responding to her forwarded emails…they seemed as empty to me as did her promise to stay in touch. I just decided I wasn’t important enough for her to make a real attempt to communicate with me. I was holding onto a hurt that was binding me and preventing us from restoring our relationship or better yet recreating it. A few weeks ago she stepped out of the pattern of forwarding me emails with no personal content. This time she asked a question. It was a simple but serious question that opened the door. She asked if she had done something to offend me because we had gone from connecting regularly to zero. She said she missed me in her life. Rather than hash it out over email or on the phone, I invited her to meet. I too miss her in my life. And I need to own up to my part in the rift…the division between us. Although I’d like it to be all her fault, any division is never one sided. Seems I was more committed to words that we said than to our actual relationship. So, tomorrow we will talk and I have prayed and will continue to pray that I have the courage to be open and honest, the courage to be vulnerable, trusting that God will see us through, having the faith trusting that God will help to restore our relationship. It seems like a silly little thing but that is so often the way with long standing hurts. Something gets said or done that offends and the one offended is so hurt he or she is unable to respond from a mature position. We go back to our child selves…the self that needs someone else to make it all better. I guess we never get over the need for someone else’s help. For a Christian mature in faith, that helper role gets filled first by God and then by spouses, children, friends, or our church community. To elicit the help of friends on such tender issues requires trust and faith….trust that they will not try to fix it or fix us and faith that God is in the mix. And in order for restoration or reconciliation to occur there always needs to be forgiveness. Forgiveness is such a huge concept. And it’s nebulous…huge and nebulous! In the Lord’s Prayer we pray, “forgive us our debts/trespasses/sins as we forgive our debtors or those who have trespassed against us/ sinned against us. We kind of know that forgiveness means to let someone off the hook but often it can be hard to grab the corner of that crumb covered cloth in order to shake it out. Where do we begin? So much time goes by and the original offense gets buried beneath other hurts and suddenly it seems instead of crumbs you have giant globs of bread hardened to a dry and sticky surface. We can pray Lord forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors til the cows come home but do we get actively involved in this prayer? Are we actively doing our part as mature adults or are we resting in our child-selves hoping that God will rescue us, restore us? Have no doubt, God is powerful enough to restore us when we are too weak or too young or too damaged to help ourselves! But, when we have even the tiniest bit of strength we need to do our part. First by asking for God’s help, then by listening for God’s response …which can come in so many forms from actual words heard within our self, to words found in the bible, to images that lead us to an epiphany, to sensation, expressions, other peoples stories…the ways God communicates with us are infinite…too many for me to list or to even know! After asking and listening then we need to follow up. That is where forgiveness comes in. Pixie Koestline Hammond offers us some ways to think about forgiveness in her book For Everything There Is a Season. “Forgiveness is giving up the right to retaliate. Forgiveness is the willingness to have something happen the way it happened. It’s not true that you can’t forgive something; it’s a matter of the will, and you always have the choice. Forgiveness is never dependent on what the other person does or does not do; it is always under our control. Forgiveness is giving up the insistence on being understood… Jesus forgave those who crucified him. This is a radically new way of thinking. For those who accept and practice this discipline, there is a release of energy and a sense of freedom.” Forgive us our debts or our sins/trespasses as we forgive our debtors (those who sin or trespass against us). Washboqlan khaybayn (wakhtahayn) aykanna daph khnan shbwoqan l’kayyabayn This is one of the hardest phrases to say in Aramaic and it is one of the hardest practices for us to be faithful to. Forgiveness can take a decade or a lifetime. But, it is a very worthy and worthwhile practice to live by. The Aramaic translation of this phrase gives us a more concrete way of engaging with the prayer…it gives us the corner of the cloth to shake. One of the ways an Aramaen could have understood this line is “Loose the cords of mistakes binding us, as we release the strands we hold of others’ guilt.” Another is, “Erase the inner marks our failures make, just as we scrub our hearts of others faults.” And one more, “Untangle the knots within so that we can mend our hearts’ simple ties to others.” The Aramaic language paints a picture giving us an image of what we do symbolically when we forgive another person. It is about letting go but it is also about restoring. It is a gentler way of thinking about our mistakes or the mistakes of others and in that gentleness it reminds us of God’s enduring love and especially of God’s grace poured out abundantly for us through Christ. Forgive, untie, untangle…so simple a concept…Loose the cords of hurt words or actions that bind us, that are keeping us from being in relationship with one another. Create some space some ease between us. Help us see our actions and the actions of the other in a new way. Untangle the knots within…those knots that give us heartburn and anxiety…the knots that are so tight they restrict us from moving and make us angry without even knowing what we are angry at. Erase the inner marks our failures make…How often do we hold onto mistakes forever, our own and the mistakes of others…we hold on and allow them to define us, allow them to direct our actions, to prevent us from moving freely, from taking steps. We get locked in place forgetting how much our loving God can help. Just as debilitating is holding onto the failures of others…seeing them through the eyes of a failure they’ve experienced rather than restoring them in our eyes and our heart to the innocent being God created, holding out the opportunity for them to create anew. For those who accept and practice the discipline of forgiveness, Hammond tells us, “there is a release of energy and a sense of freedom.” That sense of freedom comes from an untying of knots that keep us bound to ourselves instead of to the boundless nature of God. Let us put our faith, our everything, in God’s hands first, looking, listening and sensing what God would have us do next! Amen. Information drawn from books by Neil Douglas Klotz, The Hidden Gospel (1999) and Prayers of the Cosmos(1990) Also from Richard Carlson in Feasting on the Word (2010)