This has been an unusually emotional Memorial Day weekend already.  Did you see the dedication of the national World War II memorial in Washington D.C. yesterday?  Moving speeches by Tom Brokaw and Tom Hanks!  Of course, the war in Iraq is on everyone’s mind right now and all of this coupled with the fact that one week from today is the 60^th anniversary of D-Day, a day that not only changed the course of World War II but of human history. 

All of this has been interlaced with testimonials by veterans who fought in World War II or Korea or Vietnam or the Gulf.  One right after another, they all seem to have this one thing in common.  Telling their stories of living through the most horrific experience any human could imagine, these veterans frame their memories with words like, “I was just doing my job.”  Somehow or another, framing the greatest horror and pain they’ve ever known in words like duty, honor and country makes it possible for them to live with a memories that might otherwise destroy them.

If you can learn that basic skill of reframing, you will not only be a long way down the road toward meaningful living, you will also be a long way down the road toward doing what scripture commands. “Whatever grievances you have against one another, forgive as the Lord forgave you (Colossians 3:12-13, NIV).”

Two weeks ago I began a brief sermon series entitled “Breaking the Cycle of Shame.”  The purpose of this series is to help us discover some practical tools for fulfilling our calling to forgiveness of those who have in any way wounded, harmed or taken from us.  It is based on the assumption that the undercurrent of all human conflict, from the most personal to the global, is a never ending cycle of shame perpetuated as one person shames another in response to being shamed.  Everyone is just trying to get even but no one ever does and the cycle of shame goes spinning on.  Unless, that is, someone finally chooses to break the cycle.  Simon Weil once wrote that “The source of evil can be broken only by one who is willing to sacrifice himself in Christlike fashion, to absorb evil and suffering into himself, without yielding to the temptation of causing others to suffer” (source unknown).  The question is, how do we actually go about doing that?

First, as we saw two weeks ago, if we are going to break the cycle of shame we must find a new starting point for forgiveness.  If we are going to wait until our feelings change toward the person who has hurt us or until they have changed enough to say they are sorry for what they’ve done or made restitution, we’ll never make it to forgiveness.  We’ll only make it all the way to forgiveness when we start with God’s forgiveness of us, not the offense of others against us.  While we were yet sinners, while we were in the very process of offending him, God was in the process of paying the price to make us right with him through the death of his son.  The way God has forgiven us must become our new starting point for forgiving others.  

A second good step toward forgiveness involves reframing the pain.  Now, before I go any further, please be reminded that forgiveness will always cost you something.  In fact, if it hasn’t cost you something, it probably isn’t forgiveness you’ve extended.  As we’ve already read this morning in one of the first manuals on Christian forgiveness, “God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ-by grace you have been saved.”  It was out of his riches that God paid the cost of our very expensive forgiveness.  It was in no way cheap.  It came at the cost of his only son. 

Now, this manual on forgiveness that we call the book of Ephesians not only defines the gospel of God’s forgiveness toward us, it models for us how we should extend it toward others.  A quick review of what forgiveness is not might be helpful at this point, in light of what we know for a fact forgiveness cost God.

Forgiveness is not just “forgetting about it.”  As a matter of simple fact, if you can actually fail to remember something that once hurt you, it probably doesn’t require any more forgiveness than a human being might naturally, without God’s help, be able to extend.  And, for that matter, equating forgetting with forgiveness is virtually impossible.  Just the act of remembering to forget demands that you think about the very thing you’re trying not to remember. 

Forgiveness is not just learning to live with something offensive.  Like the $250 deductible on my insurance that I’ll have to pay to repair the basketball sized dent someone left in my car without leaving a note the other night when Griffin borrowed it to take his date to the band banquet at Rockwall High School.  Who do I blame for that?  I’ll just have to live with it and write it off and move on.

You can almost get to the definition of forgiveness by just listening to the word itself.  To forgive means to fore-give.  To give in advance.  To extend something unpaid for at great expense to yourself.  “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, NASV). 

Before we had the capacity to appreciate our offenses against God or had the desire to change our ways, in a sense, while we were in the very process of doing our very worst, God initiated the process by which we would experience forgiveness.  He gave it before we knew better. 

When Christ forgave us, our sin didn’t just go away.  God didn’t just forget about it or accommodate it.  He fore-gave grace and mercy in response to our offense at great expense to himself by absorbing the evil of our sin into himself on the cross in the person of Jesus.

Now, he has “reframed” us, not in the framework of our sin but in the framework of his grace.  Not in the framework of what we made of our lives but of what he intends to make of them.  Our lives were originally framed in failure and death.  “You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived.”  Now, they have been reframed in mercy and hope.  “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”  Are there more beautiful words in scripture?  “We are what he has made us.”

That is the gospel.  Now, what will we make of what he has made of us?  What will we do with all of this forgiveness?  Just as we have been reframed in grace, now we are also to reframe the pain of those wounds others have caused us.

This process of reframing, in some ways, is something that can sometimes come naturally with maturity.  I used to love the white chocolate cheesecake they served at the Vickery Feed Store on Greenville Avenue.  I’m still sad when I think about how it burned and they replaced it with a video store.  Never have replaced that cheesecake.  Anyway, one day I was enjoying my cheesecake when in walks a man I hadn’t seen in over thirty years, the meanest football coach any eighth grader could ever hope to meet.  All of a sudden I found myself back on the bench under his disapproving scowl, his humiliating insults, his debilitating condescension.  I couldn’t believe, after all this time, someone that mean was still alive.

Then, suddenly, I realized that he didn’t even recognize me.  I had grown up.  I wasn’t a little boy anymore.  I was an adult, just like him.  So, I went over to him and introduced myself to him and the most amazing thing happened.  He was kind and gracious and carried on a brief but very adult to adult conversation in a very polite and respectful manner.  It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have to keep him framed in my memory as the meanest football coach I ever knew.  I could reframe him as the adult he was who, even all those years ago, was probably just trying to do his best to make us successful so he could be successful.  When I reframed him, a whole new relationship blossomed right before my eyes. 

Reframing is something like that.  Except that, with forgiveness, it takes a lot of intention, commitment, prayer and surrender.  Reframing the coach was easier.  I’ve been given much tougher assignments since then.  You probably have, too.

One of our church members told me just two weeks ago of her own personal struggle with forgiveness.  When she was very young, not even a teenager, she was sexually abused by an uncle.  She was so very young and it was a different day and time when public awareness of abuse was not what it is now.  The man was never confronted.  For years, she had to see him at family reunions and such.  Every time she saw him she was reminded afresh of the pain he had inflicted in her tender young life.  She went on to share with me a writing she keeps on a wall in her home that describes what forgiveness is and how it acts.  It’s something she reminds herself of every single day as she is still working toward forgiving someone who did something unspeakable to her. 

I’ve never had to do that kind of forgiving though perhaps some of you may have.  Yet, each of us has to go where no one has gone before in doing the work of forgiveness that is ours and ours alone to do.  All of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus are called to the work of forgiveness.  And, just as there was a grace for whatever sin we committed, a grace that was merciful enough to reframe us in God’s eyes, there is a grace available to each of us enough to reframe whatever the pain might be.  “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than we all ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us” (Ephesians 3:20).  Can you imagine forgiving the person who has hurt you most deeply?  What would that look like?  Beyond the reach of your wildest imagination, God can empower you to forgive. 

The same power that raised Christ from the dead is now at work within us, empowering us not to in order to make us wealthy and healthy as much as to enable us so to enrich and empower others by extending to them the same forgiveness that God in Christ has extended to us.  We are infused with the resurrection power of God the Father to be the presence of Christ in this world by being agents of forgiveness wherever we go. 

We don’t have to forgive.  But, if we knowingly refuse to extend forgiveness to others, at a minimum, we should not call ourselves part of God’s forgiven family.  How can we?  As Jesus said, “‘But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.  He causes his son to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous’” (Matthew 5:44-45).  Before we were reframed in mercy, we were “children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3).  The most natural thing for us to do was to return kind for kind when we were wounded, to escalate and perpetuate the cycle of shame.  But, now, if we are in fact children of God, our truly spiritual response to shame will be prayer, mercy and forgiveness. 

If we choose not to forgive, we should also prepare ourselves to pay a very heavy price.  Forgiveness is expensive.  Unforgiveness is even more expensive.  There is nothing more self-destructive than carrying around the corrosive, acidic venom of bitterness, anger and hatred in our souls.  As Anne Lammott has written, choosing not to forgive “is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die” (Anne Lammott, Traveling Mercies, Archon, 1999, p. 134).

If we choose to forgive, the only way to do so will be to reframe those who have hurt us as more than just someone who hurt us.  To see them not just as the one who delivered injustice to us but also as someone for whom Christ also died, for whom Christ also endured all injustice, theirs as well as ours. 

What if we chose to see others in another framework?  They may have been the person who hurt us.  But, is there another way of seeing them?  What might that be?

In my own experience, the framework of gratitude has been most useful.  Gratitude for what God has been able, beyond my imagination, to make of what, at the time, seemed like the worst that could have ever happened to me.  The very best things I have in my life I have because of what, at the time, seemed like the very worst thing that could have ever happened.

Some twenty years ago we discovered we couldn’t have children.  It seemed like the end of the world.  Then, God reframed our infertility in the framework of adoption and this next Friday I will watch the best God made of our worst walk across the stage and get his high school diploma. 

When the very worst thing I could have imagined at that time happened to me, I thought my world had come to an end.  My family, my dreams, my career were all finished, I was sure, because my marriage ended in divorce.  Then, God, in his “makes all things work for the good” (Romans 8:28) kind of way, reframed my worst into his best.  It sounds strange saying it, much less living it.  But, I can now tell you that, if it hadn’t been for the worst thing that ever happened to me, I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you today. 

More recently, I’ve had conversations with people on canes and walkers I never would have had.  Would I like to have another knee surgery?  Not on your life!  But, I’ve made new friends in this church and even built deeper relationships with people because we have walking canes in common.  God has taken the disability of a cane and turned it into a bridge to new relationships I might have never had. 

So, I would ask you, are the worst things that have ever happened to you, especially the hurt others have inflicted on you, only the worst things that ever happened or the doorway of the best you have yet to discover?  The very best things I have in my life, the very best, have not come to me in spite of the worst things that ever happened to me but specifically because of the worst things that ever happened to me. 

The very best things I have in my life came to me through the doorway of grief, sadness and loss that God reframed as the doorway of mercy and hope.  Now, he has literally infused me with the same power for reframing others who have hurt and wounded me in forgiveness and mercy and hope, for turning enemies into new brothers and sisters in this family of forgiveness. 

Will the worst thing that ever happened to you always be the worst thing that ever happened to you?  Could it be something else?

Well, now, that’s totally up to you.