First Parish Sermon Archive

 “HOLDING ON OR MOVING ON”

 

The Sermon at the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts

By the Rev. Ken Sawyer

On February 7, 2010

 

 

I suppose it is probably time to forgive Jimmy Boyd, who opened the cage door, letting my parakeet fly away. I don’t think he was entirely aware what the consequences of his action would be. After all, when the act was committed, in 1954, Jimmy was three years old.

 

I am even prepared to forgive Bobby Morris, who did know just what he was doing, and was older by seven or eight years when, in that same era, he devoted himself with determination to beating up his male classmates, at least the few of them that included me.

 

Not that I have changed my mind about the reprehensible nature of a bully’s behavior. But who knows what he was going through at the time; the attacks were maybe less personal than they seemed. Anyway, Bobby is now a man in his mid-60s, like me, if he is still around; and life goes on.

 

According to Talmudic wisdom, “If a person hurts or offends you, you are entitled to be upset with him for … two or three days…. If the bitter feelings extend to a fourth day, it is because you are … nursing the grievance, keeping it on artificial life support, instead of letting it die a natural death.” [106]

 

This fact was passed along by Rabbi Harold Kushner. He does modify the point by adding, “We are talking about routine arguments and misunderstandings here, not major offenses.” [106] But while Bobby’s beatings were more than routine arguments and maybe justified some extra days of upset, I do not think of them as major offenses … and it has been fifty-four years. Bobby, by-gones are by-gones.

 

I am even willing to classify a junior high school classmate’s telling me the secret to “Psycho” in the middle of the movie, which he had seen, as less than a major offense. Likewise, reluctantly, every lie I have heard over the decades from people trying to sell me cars.

 

Bad driving I have witnessed, points of view I have heard that were totally and annoyingly at variance from my own, rude salespersons I have encountered, contractors who did not come through – well, you can make a list of your own – if the episode happened more than three days ago, it may be getting toward time to let go, if possible, leaving space in their going for happier thoughts.

 

You may be wondering, just how do we do that, let go of grudges? Well, one way is represented by a cartoon by Jules Feiffer that has a man about my age saying, “I can’t remember names, obligations, where I put things, if I did something already or just hope to do it. That’s the bad part. The good part is, I can’t remember 45 years of grudges.”

 

I am not sure if the years as they accumulate do not help in other ways, too, although it may just be that it takes years for some of us to see what other folks knew all along, like, how much of what could seem annoying in behavior is not worth thinking about, or how little annoyance contributes to happy solutions, outside us or within.

 

Rabbi Kushner provides theological encouragement for our forgiving. Harold is now retired from the congregation he served in Natick, having had enormous success as an author, beginning with When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Today I am drawing on his later book, How Good Do We Have To Be?: A New Understanding of Guilt and Forgiveness.

 

Now I know that there are some of you who are understandably uncomfortable with the notion of forgiveness because of the awfulness of things that were done to you, or you fear that talk of forgiveness is going to encourage people to put up with behavior they should be confronting, reporting, or fleeing.

 

Kushner’s focus is narrower. When forgiveness confronts monstrous behavior, other answers than his are called for. That would be a different book, and a different Sunday – an important one, but not this one.

 

The questions of forgiveness that Kushner deals with have to do with our more common failings, our derelictions of duty, our lapses of judgment, our angry outbursts, our insensitivities, our hurtfulness and greed. While recognizing that people do commit such acts, he says we are also capable of being “very good indeed.” [177] We are able to repent of our mistakes, learn from them, and improve, become better people.

 

But not perfect, ever. That is his basic point. No one is perfect, or can be, because “as human beings the situations we face are so complex that no one could possible be expected to get them right all the time.” [64] I acknowledge again that there are people whose imperfections go to extremes. Kushner knows that, too, but he wants to talk about the most of us who are pretty okay and try to do right and mostly succeed, but not always.

 

He wants us to lighten up on each other and on ourselves, without losing our own high hopes to do right – that is to say, to ease up on our judgments while we keep our aspirations high. Try to do good, but accept that you will not always succeed, for “our choices are so complicated and temptations so strong” [174]; and let that insight make gentle your judgment of yourself and of others as well, even as we go on “struggling to be as good as we can … never letting our failures be a reason for giving up the struggle.” [174]

 

He notes with regret that religion has not only failed to get this forgiving point of view across, more often than not it has been on the other side, often with a vengeance. “It is unfortunate,” he writes, “that so many of us have been brought up to think of religion as a scolding voice that makes us feel guilty. I wish we could learn to see religion as the source of healing and of relieving guilt….” [62] “Religion properly understood is the cure for feelings of guilt sand shame, not their cause.” [43]

 

He has a prime example of how religion has been misused, in his view, and how a familiar story could be told in a new, important, and virtually opposite way: the story of Adam and Eve. Kushner thinks that in our culture there is an attitude toward mistakes bred of that story as it is usually told, where Adam and Eve are given clear instructions not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and of Evil, do so anyway, and are horribly punished by God, doomed with their progeny to hard labor, painful childbirth, and death.

 

Christianity compounded the negative message – St. Paul and St. Augustine in particular – with the notion of Original Sin, adding the curse of some taint we all bear because of the transgression in Eden, a native inclination to do wrong. Sin becomes not just a wrong deed, requiring repentance and reform, but a genetic condition, forgivable only by the atonement of Christ on the cross.

 

Why, I once saw in the newsletter of a church here in Wayland a quote by a contemporary writer [Oswald Chambers] saying, “Never build your case for forgiveness on the idea that God … will forgive us because He loves us…. God forgives sin only because of the death of Christ.”

 

Kushner goes back to the original account in the Bible and instead of a story of God’s condemnation of humankind, finds “an inspiring, even liberating story, a story of what a wonderful, complicated, painful and rewarding thing it is to be a human being.” It is “a tale, not of Paradise Lost but of Paradise Outgrown, not of Original Sin but of the Birth of Conscience.” [21]

 

“I am suggesting,” he goes on, “that the story of the Garden of Eden is not an account of people being punished for having made one mistake, losing Paradise because they were not perfect. It is the story of the first human beings graduating, evolving from the relatively uncomplicated world of animal life to the immensely complicated world of being human and knowing that … there are such things as Good and Evil. They enter a world where they will inevitably make mistakes, not because they are weak or bad but because the choices they confront will be difficult ones. But the satisfactions will be equally great.” [30-31] “I read the story of the garden … as an account of Eve – in a terribly brave act – giving us humanity, with all its pain and all its richness.” [24-25]

 

In this retelling, “religion is not the carping voice of condemnation, telling us that the normal is sinful and the well-intentioned mistake is an unforgivable transgression that will damn us forever. Religion is the voice that says, I will guide you through this minefield of difficult moral choices, sharing with you the insights and experiences of the greatest souls of the past, and I will offer you comfort and forgiveness when you are troubled by the painful choices you made.” [31-32] 

 

I should probably get us back out of the garden, but those of you who remember your Bible may be wondering how Kushner finesses what you may recall as God’s clear directive and God’s imposition of woeful life on the couple outside the garden. Kushner suggests that God might have wanted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit, so he would not be the only one who knew the difference between good and evil. And when he “told Adam not to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, He gave it not as a prohibition but as a warning, like the person telling a friend in line for a promotion” that he may want to think twice before he takes on new and difficult tasks. And when God told them their lives would be painful, he was only giving them the wisdom of his own experience.

 

Kushner goes on to develop the idea that the three traditional curses are not really curses anyways, for work makes us feel useful, needed, and creative; love and sexuality can be painful, but also the source of much satisfaction and pleasure; and death … well, he notes, the so-called curse could not have been death itself, for all things die, but the awareness of death, without which we would not so use and delight in the days that are ours.

 

Kushner has some other points, too, including an extended consideration of sibling rivalry; but his main point is the one about perfectionism, guilt, and forgiveness.  We are not perfect and can not be, nor can our partners, parents, children, siblings and friends. It comes of living in this world east of Eden, where people can’t help but make mistakes. It profits us little to hold fast to those memories, to hold on rather than moving on.

 

I was at a meeting this week of a committee that is, over the course of several years, re-writing the professional code of conduct for UU ministers. It is nearly done. It runs 41 pages. Should someone roll their eyes at the length, the chair will say, well, you have a choice: 41 pages, or the shorter version, which is only three words: Don’t be stupid.

 

Many of the Guidelines concern not just relations with parishioners but also with fellow clergy, and some on the committee have stretched the list to three commandments: Don’t be stupid. Pick up the phone. And, Get over it. Move on.

 

There is a custom during the Jewish High Holy Days. On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, congregants may go together to a nearby body of flowing water and cast into it bread crumbs or lint from their pockets – or sometimes these days, pieces of bread – to symbolize their sins in the year being left behind. This is called Tashlich [or Tashlikh], which means “casting off.” Ten days later on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, there is a reading from the book of Micah, thanking God for “washing out our guilt, casting all our sins into the depths of the sea.”

 

Tashlich, casting off — I like the idea. Maybe next time you or I am near a body of flowing water we might send our misdeeds out toward the depths of the sea, and maybe as well, memories we nurse of grievances and our futile expectations of human perfection.

 

It does not forsake our hopes of living decent, loving, kindly lives to admit that we do not always measure up. Instead, it recognizes how impossibly hard the effort is, forgives us our fallings short, and frees us to renew the precious but ever imperfect endeavor.