John 20:19-23
June 2, 2013
When it was evening on that day, the
first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had
met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and
said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his
hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the
Lord. Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father
has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed
on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive
the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of
any, they are retained.’
You know, the reality is that all of us have pains and
hurts from our past that we have a hard time letting go of. Forgiving others is
hard, especially when we have been really hurt. There are slights and grudges
that all of us hold. Perhaps it’s toward high school classmates who treated us
poorly. Perhaps it’s toward college classmates. Maybe it was a co-worker, or a
friend, or a family member. Maybe it was a parent or a sibling who treated us
poorly or did harm to us. Whatever it was, we have a hard time forgiving.
Phyllis Dominguez has had to deal with this kind of
residual pain for her whole life. She has battled anger and rage for much of
her life, trying to keep it from taking over.
One day, she had to confront it. She received a telephone call from the
assisted living home where her mother lived. Apparently, her mother had been
refusing to come out of her apartment and eat in the dining room. She had not
eaten either breakfast that morning or dinner the night before, and she was a
diabetic. They needed Phyllis to come and convince her mother to eat.
Phyllis went to the home and walked into her mother’s
apartment. It smelled of dirty laundry and dishes piled up in the sink. She
knew that the nurses and aides at the home really didn’t take care of her
mother all that much anymore. Who could blame them? Her mother was a vile,
angry, critical, and abusive woman. Who wants to help someone who not only
doesn’t appreciate it, but who is abusive?
She saw her mother sitting in a chair in the middle of
the room. “Mother, you need to get dressed.” “I won’t!” she replied. “You need
to dress so you can go to the dining room,” Phyllis said. “What dining room?” “The
dining room down the hall. It’s where you eat.” “No, I don’t. Go away!
Stop it!” As she listened to her mother, memories of her childhood
flooded her. She remembered all the times her mother had hit her, and when she
cried her mother said, “Stop crying, or I’ll punish you some more.” Her mother
had been verbally and physically abusive all her life. Growing up, there was
little peace in their household, especially considering her parents’ constant
and explosive arguing. Phyllis’ answer was to lose herself in her music,
playing the French horn in her room for hours on end. Playing the horn not only
distracted her from her pain, but drowned out her parent’s voices.
After she left home and graduated from college with a
degree in music, she had made a happy life for herself with a wonderful husband
and a young daughter. Learning from her own experience, she made sure that her
daughter, Mary, always knew how much she was loved. Phyllis also had hoped
never to have to deal with her mother again, but here she was years later being
the only one left to care for her. She hated this, and her anger and rage
towards her mother was always with her.
She continued trying to convince her mother to eat: “Come
on. Let’s get dressed.” “Why?” her mother scowled. “So you can eat.” “I’m not
going anywhere.” “You have to eat. You’re diabetic. I’ll help you,” Phyllis
said as she bent over her mother’s recliner to start helping her dress. Her
mother spat a spew of profanity at her. Phyllis did her best to ignore it, but
then her mother did something she couldn’t ignore. Her mother hit her across
the face and arm. Phyllis was stunned more than she was hurt. Then the rage
began to flood up from within her: “Go
on. Hit her! Now’s your chance.” The anger started to take her over. “She’s got
it coming. All those times.” She could
get her mother back for every pain she had inflicted on Phyllis. It would be so
easy, and no one would ever know.
Her arm trembled as a fist clenched. Looking at her fist,
she heard another voice speaking within her: “Hasn’t there been enough pain,
anger, and rage. It all has to stop here. Let go of that rage and anger, and
give it to God.” She unclenched her fist, bent down and picked up the fallen
dress and calmly said, “Let’s put this on.”
She had let go of her rage and turned the other cheek. As
she did, she stood up and saw her mother as if for the first time. This was no
longer a powerful woman who could control Phyllis’ life. She was an old, frail,
fragile, fearful, and helpless woman. This was a woman who had been scarred by
her own upbringing in an alcoholic family. This was a woman who had never
learned how to love. Phyllis let go of her rage and anger, and forgave her
mother. Her mother died a few months later. She took care of her mother until
the end, but Phyllis was now different. She was no longer controlled by her
anger. She was freed, and in that freedom of letting go and forgiveness, she
experienced God’s grace (Guideposts,
June 2001).
Phyllis had to forgive her mother for two reasons. First,
she had to forgive so that she could break the pattern of her life. Second, if
she didn’t forgive, she would be trapped in her hurt, anger, and resentment for
the rest of her life, always battling it and always running the risk that the
resentment would win.
She learned the lesson Nelson Mandela learned through 24
years of imprisonment under the white, South African apartheid government.
Mandela had been arrested as a subversive, and spent his 24 years in a tiny
cell, with one window that looked out on a dusty courtyard filled with
sun-bleached rocks. His days were spent sitting on that ground, wielding a
small sledgehammer, and breaking those rocks. When he was finished they would bring
him more rocks to break. The point was to give him something completely
meaningless and mundane to do, day after day, to break his spirit. It didn’t.
It gave Mandela time to reflect.
When he was released, he would have had every right to
hold onto his anger as motivation to get back at the white apartheids. Instead,
he let go of his anger and resentment, and forgave them. When asked about this
forgiveness, he said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and
then hoping it will kill your enemies.” What an insight!
It can be really hard to let go of resentment, which is
why we have to tap into something beyond ourselves and our own will if we are
to do so. Jesus, in our passage for this morning, connects the ability to
forgive with openness to the Holy Spirit. He said to his disciples, “Receive
the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven
them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Basically he
is saying that real forgiveness comes from the Spirit, not by our own will. In
other words, if we become truly open to the Spirit, then the Spirit’s
forgiveness not only flows through us, but our actions become part of the
Spirit’s actions. Our forgiveness becomes the Spirit’s forgiveness, and vice
versa.
The reason we cannot truly forgive without an openness to
the Spirit, to God, is that real forgiveness comes from love, and love is God.
This is what John tells us in his first letter. He says, “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and
his love is perfected in us… By this we know that we live in him and he in us,
because he has given us of his Spirit… God is love, and those who live in love
live in God, and God lives in them” (1 John 4). The clear implication of
this is that when we forgive, it really is an act of letting God’s love come
alive in us once again.
When I think of this kind of forgiveness, my mind
automatically goes to Bud Welch. You probably don’t know who he is. I preached
about him a number of years ago, but his story stays with me.
Welch’s daughter, Julie, was a bright and vibrant young
woman. Bud took his daughter to church each Sunday, and sent her to a Catholic
high school, as she was growing up. Her favorite subjects were anything that
had to do with language. She loved Latin, French, and especially Spanish. As a
senior, she won a scholarship to Marquette University to study Spanish. After
graduating from college, she got a job translating for the Social Security
Administration. Through it all Julie had always taken her faith seriously, and
wanted to serve God in whatever she did.
Bud’s life changed in an instant on April 19, 1995. That’s
when Timothy McVeigh’s bomb went off outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal
building in Oklahoma City, killing Julie, along with 167 other people. On the
morning she died, she had gone to 7:00 a.m. mass, and then to work for a 9:00
a.m. appointment. Soon afterwards, McVeigh’s bomb went off.
For months afterwards, Bud Welch was filled with rage. He
couldn’t understand why his daughter had to die, and thoughts of vengeance
consumed him. To dull his grief, and to help him sleep, he began to drink a
lot, generally pouring his first drink as soon as he got home from work. This
alcoholic haze consumed his life for almost a year, until he visited the site
of the bombing on sunny day. As he looked through the trees, trying to ward of
the pain and nausea of a hangover, he realized that he couldn’t live his life
this way anymore. The drinking wasn’t making him any better, nor was his anger.
Welch realized that he was living his life like a
clenched fist, holding tightly to anger and rage. He had to release his grip
and start living as his daughter, Julie, would have wanted him to live. As the
month passed, the rage slowly subsided, and Welch felt that he had a new
purpose in life, one that felt like a calling from God. He started speaking out
against the death penalty. This was in part because his daughter Julie had been
so opposed to it, but it was also part of his trying to forgive Timothy McVeigh
for what he had done to Julie and the others.
One of the people who has truly helped Welch overcome his
grief, anger, and resentment has been a man named Bill, who has become one of
his best friends. Bud first saw Bill on
television in 1998 on the third anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. A
reporter for a news program was trying to get reactions from those who had been
affected by the bombing. As Bill worked in his garden in Buffalo, New York, a
reporter walked up to him, thrust a microphone in his face, and asked him what
his thoughts about the bombing were. Bill looked into the camera, and Bud saw
the depths of pain in Bill’s eyes—the same pain Bud felt. Bud decided at that
moment that he had to speak to Bill.
When Bud made a trip to Buffalo to speak out against the
death penalty, he asked a local nun to arrange a meeting with Bill. There were
some awkward moments at first. Then Bud said, “I understand you garden is
beautiful.” Bill’s eyes lit up, and so they spent the next hour looking at Bill’s
garden. They found out they had a lot in common. Both were blue-collar Irish
Catholics. Bill had worked in a GM plant for 38 years, while Bud had owned a
Texaco in Oklahoma City for 34 years.
They moved into the kitchen, and over coffee they talked
about their children. Bill pulled out pictures of his son, while Bud pulled out
pictures of his daughter. As they looked at pictures of Bill’s son, a tear
formed in Bill’s eye. He began to talk about the pain surrounding his son. You
see, his son is Timothy McVeigh, the man who killed Bud’s daughter and so many
others. In their afternoon together, Bill and Bud shared so much, and in his
forgiveness of Bill, God’s grace flowed through Bud into Bill. As their
friendship deepened over the next few months, God’s grace also flowed from Bill
into Bud. Over the course of the past several years, a real friendship has
formed that has been healing for both. In many ways, by meeting Bill, Bud has
been able to say about Timothy McVeigh, “Father,
forgive him, for he knows not what he has done.” Bud’s forgiveness has let
God’s grace flow into Bill McVeigh’s life, into the world, and also into his own
life.
Bud Welch forgave because he finally opened up to the Spirit,
allowing a Spirit of God’s love to replace his spirit of rage. Each and every
one of us has pain and resentments over something, whether it’s big or small.
And we are free to hold onto them, and to let our frustration, pain, anger, and
even rage hold onto our lives.
The deep question for us is whether or not we’re willing
to receive the Spirit, and if we do, to let it lead us to forgive.
Amen.
