Wandering Heart: “Teach me”
Welcome & Passing the Peace
Welcome to the fifth Sunday in Lent. We continue to follow Peter’s journey of faith and find echoes of that journey in our own. We are not a Catholic community, but maybe a few of us are Irish, so I’ll wish you a Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I see a lot of green today in here and outside. Spring is springing. I can’t decide if I’m hoping for the temperatures to plummet, so my allergies get a break, or praying they don’t, so all the little buds don’t get nipped. I can take Benadryl. I’m rooting for the budding trees and plants.
We are glad you are with us today – in this room or on Facebook. If you’re joining us online, be sure to say hello in the comments. [If this is your first time…blue cards]
May God’s peace be with you. And also with you. Let us pass the peace to one another and share the name of your favorite teacher as we do.
Reading from the Gospel: Matthew 18:15-22
Today, instead of ending with the art created for this week, I want us to start with it. The image is on the screen, but it is also on the front of the worship folder, so you may choose to use that one. This image was created by Lauren Wright Pittman. It is a mandala, or mandala as it is sometimes pronounced. A mandala simply an image, usually circular but doesn’t have to be, with symbols or patterns. My peeps are familiar with these images because they have seen them in the art station during Pastor’s Peeps. They are tools used for meditation. This mandala was created as an interpretation of the Gospel text for today.
“Seventy-Seven Times” by Lauren Wright Pittman, Digital Painting
Let’s take a few slow deep breaths in and out. [breathe] As I read the text from Matthew, chapter 18, I want you to gaze at the image. Immerse yourself in what you see as you listen to the words.
15 “If another believer sins against you, go privately and point out the offense. If the other person listens and confesses it, you have won that person back. 16 But if you are unsuccessful, take one or two others with you and go back again, so that everything you say may be confirmed by two or three witnesses. 17 If the person still refuses to listen, take your case to the church. Then if he or she won’t accept the church’s decision, treat that person as a pagan or a corrupt tax collector.
18 “I tell you the truth, whatever you forbid on earth will be forbidden in heaven, and whatever you permit on earth will be permitted in heaven.
19 “I also tell you this: If two of you agree here on earth concerning anything you ask, my Father in heaven will do it for you. 20 For where two or three gather together as my followers, I am there among them.”
21 Then Peter came to him and asked, “Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?”
22 “No, not seven times,” Jesus replied, “but seventy times seven! [NLT]
[silence]
Listen to the voice of the Spirit speaking to the Church. Thanks be to God.
Hold on to what you’ve already seen and felt. As you continue to gaze at the image, I’m going to read what the artist says about her work. Let your eyes find the symbols she describes. How does what you saw or felt change as you hear her words?
Lauren Wright Pittman writes:
When I’m creating a mandala inspired by a text, I’m able to zoom out and see the bigger picture, and the image itself ends up looking like a bird’s eye view, which I think is a helpful perspective sometimes. In this mandala, I wanted to follow a person through the process of reproval, forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration as Jesus describes in Matthew 18. In the center, a person is standing alone, isolated, with their arms crossed in a closed-off posture. If you’re sinned against, Jesus says to go and “point out the fault when the two of you are alone” (Matthew 18:15). When you move to the second ring of the mandala, there are pairs of people shaking hands, finding common ground, or at least attempting to. If this doesn’t work, then you are to bring more people (one or two more) together to provide counsel and witness. In the third ring of the mandala, two people are engaging with the closed-off person, sharing a way forward. In the next ring hyacinth flowers—which represent sorrow, regret, and forgiveness—stretch, bloom, and grow, bringing beauty into the now open arms of the people in the last ring of the mandala, who are embraced and woven into the community. The person from the center goes from being alone and closed-off to embraced and open. When I was drawing the figures from the center out, it began to look like a dance. Is this the picture that grace paints? Forgiveness cannot happen in isolation and certainly neither can reconciliation nor restoration. The movement toward wholeness is the movement toward one another.
Perhaps craving more tangibility and practicality, Peter asks how many times he should forgive someone who has wronged him, and Jesus says, “Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times” (Matthew 18:22). This piece contains seventy-seven people and flowers to represent the abundance of grace that Jesus calls us into. The gold represents the divine presence of empathy, compassion, grace, and love throughout this dance from isolation toward community, from brokenness toward wholeness, and from guilt and shame toward freedom. [Lauren Wright Pittman’s artist statement from the Wandering Heart resource from A Sanctified Art]
[silence]
When we met this last week to talk about the scripture, the poem, and the art, we did this same practice. It was so rich, the group all encouraged me to send out the artwork ahead of time so that you would have a chance to look at it and think about it and experience it in preparation for today. That didn’t give you much time, but I would encourage you to look at the advent booklet between now and next Sunday to see what the art looks like, to read the poem, to read the scripture, the commentary on the scripture, and the artist’s statement.
Whether or not you spent time with today’s artwork and scripture before today, you likely noticed some things in this image. Tell us, what do you see?
What do you feel? How does the image make you feel?
What does the image inspire you to do or be?
Do you see things in this image that were not necessarily in the scripture or the artist’s description?
The essential truth of this text is about forgiveness – learning how to love one another, to love our enemies, to love those who despise us or who have wronged us.
It’s also about learning and being open to learning.
Peter is our disciple prototype once again. He’s the student on the front row who is eager to learn, eager to impress. He asks his rabbi, Jesus, a follow up question to this teaching on forgiveness and reconciliation. Peter’s suggestion of forgiving seven times seems generous. And we can just imagine that when Jesus multiplies that number by 70 (or adds 70 to it – there’s some confusion about the specifics here, but maybe that’s the point), we can just imagine that Peter’s eyes would have widened. He might have even taken a step back and said, “Whoa, Rabbi, really? 70 times 7??” Jesus might as well have said, “Forgive and never stop forgiving,” because that’s what Peter would have heard. Isn’t it how we hear it today?
In biblical terms the number 7 has a sense of completeness. Think of the story of creation. God created the world in 6 days, and on the 7th, God rested – the work was complete. Whether we translate the verse as 70 times 7 or 77 times, perhaps the point is that we need to forgive until we have completed the inner work that it takes to forgive someone who has wronged us. Perhaps the point is that we may have to forgive over and over because the hurt doesn’t go away and even when we think it has, it may rear its ugly head again, almost like PTSD or maybe exactly like PTSD. Perhaps the point is that that is exactly how God forgives us – no matter what we do, no matter how many times we mess up and put distance between us and God, God keeps on forgiving us, keeps on loving us all the way into forever with them. That’s how grace works, my friends.
When I read this scripture aloud on Tuesday evening and got to the verse that says, “If the person still refuses to listen, take your case to the church. Then if he or she won’t accept the church’s decision, treat that person as a pagan or a corrupt tax collector,” I thought, gee, Jesus wasn’t messing around. We know how the first century Judean world felt about gentiles and tax collectors. Jesus must have meant ostracizing them or putting them out of the community or saying, that’s it, we’ve tried our best, but you’ve gone too far. But then, Jesus tells Peter to forgive and keep on forgiving, and that just didn’t quite jive.
Then I remembered who this text is attributed to – Matthew, the corrupt tax collector whom Jesus called to be his disciple. And there was that Roman officer – clearly a Gentile – whose daughter he healed. Jesus didn’t seem to feel the same way about tax collectors and Gentiles that the general Jewish population did. Perhaps that verse wasn’t saying what I thought it was saying at all. Perhaps what Jesus was saying was that even when someone won’t listen to the whole church’s plea for reconciliation, don’t give up. They may never come around, but we can keep loving them. We can keep reminding them that they belong. We can keep forgiving and yearning for that circle of community with arms around one another, and with arms reaching to the center of that circle, to the one whose own arms are tight around themselves. Because, friends, that’s what grace is.
Pray with me.
God of grace, even when we fail to forgive as you have forgiven us, even when we don’t think we deserve it, especially when we don’t think we deserve it, you love us. Even if we don’t believe it and don’t quite understand it, we are grateful. May we be open, God of love, to hear from one we’ve wronged that we have sinned against them. May we seek their forgiveness and may we be reconciled to them and to the community. Teach us, Lord, to be like you. Amen.
An Invitation to Learn & Love
Our conversation today may have brought to mind a situation or a person or a relationship that has been festering, maybe a need to be forgiven or to do the forgiving. Perhaps the Spirit is whispering to you that it is time to try again or time to talk to a friend about it. Maybe you need to sit down with your pastor. My door or email inbox is always open, and unless you say otherwise, anything you feel a need to share is confidential.
In an article I read about forgiveness, there was a paragraph that I found especially helpful. It read:
Part of what my Christian identity calls me to do is to decide to forgive and to be committed to the process of forgiving others as often as I possibly can. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I will always reach whole and complete forgiveness — that’s part of my humanity. The question is: Have I intentionally worked on developing a forgiving disposition? [https://sojo.net/articles/reconstruct/why-are-christians-so-bad-forgiveness?]
And there’s the invitation for today. Would you covenant with me today to be intentional about working on developing a forgiving disposition? That doesn’t mean opening yourself to being harmed. It doesn’t mean forgetting about something someone has done to you, because that’s pretty much impossible at times. It may simply mean cultivating empathy, or seeing something from the other person’s perspective, or considering their circumstances. A disposition towards forgiveness – let’s work on this together.