FORGIVE AS I HAVE FORGIVEN YOU
MIKE CUNNINGHAM
JANUARY 13, 2013

Depending on the intensity of torment endured, some folks choose not to forgive certain people. Others don’t believe it’s possible. According to Jesus, the choice we make will determine if we will live in eternal misery or happiness after we die and leave this world. For instance He taught:

25 And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins. Mark 11:25 (NIV)

14 For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. Matthew 6:14-15 (NIV)

37 “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Luke 6:37 (NIV)

In “The Art of Forgiving,” Lewis Smedes asks: “Is everyone who belongs to a group or a gang that injures someone responsible for what the group or gang does? Does everybody in Germany need to be forgiven for what the butchers of Auschwitz did? Everybody? Even the children? Does someone who suffered at the hands of the Nazis in 1945 have a right to forgive or refuse to forgive Germans who were boys and girls in 1945? Perhaps to declare them unforgivable?”

“Allow Joseph Polak to answer that question.”
“Joseph Polak was three years old in 1945 when the guards of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen loaded him and his family into a packed freight car. They stacked 2,500 people on that freight train and gave them no food to eat or water to drink. The camp was not far off and most of them could survive that long. But the engineer missed the switch, got confused, lost his way, and his train ground blindly eastward, on and on for several days. Finally it came to a halt at a tiny village in eastern Germany called Troebetz. Five hundred people died horrible deaths on the lost death train before it stopped, and many more died soon after.”

“Joseph Polak survived, is now a distinguished rabbi in Boston, and told his story in the September 1995 issue of Commonweal. In 1995, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of that horrendous ride, Rabi Polak and some other survivors took a train along the same route that the death train took from Belsen to Troebetz. Before they left Belsen, the officials of the town held a service for them. The minister of culture spoke. In a speech he reminded the survivors that 85 percent of the present population of Germany were only five years old or less when the horror happened-his point being, of course, that these children-now adults-should not be held responsible for the killer freight train.”

“Rabi Polak rejected the cultural minister’s plea out of hand. As Polak listened to him, he silently spoke these terrible words to the adult Germans of 1995 who had been fated to be the German children of 1945.” “The deeds of your parents cannot be forgotten and as long as memory stirs…you are doomed to be their representatives, and your hands will be stained with blood that you yourselves may not have spilled. For as long as people remember history, or hear a Jewish story, or see a Jewish child; you are destined to take responsibility for this darkness and never, ever to be forgiven for it.”

“Never, ever to be forgiven? Are all Germans who were little children when the Holocaust happened forever under a curse? And their children after them? By the same law, would all generations of Jews be cursed for their fathers’ genocide of the ancient Canaanites? And all American children cursed forever because their fathers made slaves of black people? When does judgment cease? If we curse all children for the evil their parents do, do we nor doom most of the human race?”

“I have profound respect for the rabbi’s moral passion. I, too, believe that individuals in certain tragic senses share the destiny of the whole people. But I do not concede to Rabbi Polak the right to condemn all the children of guilty Germans to be unforgiven forever. The little children of Germany did not send a single Jew or Christian to a concentration camp. Three-year- old boys and girls did not stash the Polak family into that death train. The rabbi would have no right to forgive those people even if his heart nudged him to do so. By the same token, we have no right to declare them unforgivable?” pgs. 82-84

You and I can’t even begin to get a sense of the intensity of suffering endured by the victims of the regime of Adolph Hitler during World War 11. In “What’s So Amazing About Grace,” Phillip Yancey informs us that, “Walter Wink tells of two peacemakers who visited a group of Polish Christian ten years after the end of World War ll. “Would you be willing to meet with other Christians from West Germany?” the peacemakers asked. “They want to ask for forgiveness for what Germany did to Poland during the war and to build a new relationship.”

At first there was silence. Then one Pole spoke up. “What you are asking is impossible. Each stone of Warsaw is soaked in Polish blood! We cannot forgive!”

Before the group parted, however, they said the Lord’s Prayer together. When they reached the words “forgive us our sins as we forgive …,” everyone stopped praying. Tension swelled in the room. The Pole who had spoken so vehemently said, “I must say yes to you. I could no more pray the Our Father, I could no longer call myself a Christian, if I refuse to forgive… Humanly speaking, I cannot do it, but God will give us His strength!” Eighteen months later the Polish and West German Christians met together in Vienna, establishing friendships that continue to this day.” P.1,2&3.

It may seem as though I’m switching gears at this point but I’m not. You and I have seen them in places such as supermarkets and restaurants. Whenever I do, my heart always goes out to every one of them without exception. I feel badly if I see one of those special people being treated with disrespect. I hope they will forgive the person who was so rude.

In another one of his insightful books, “Forgive & Forget,” Smedes says that,

“Some people cannot get a clear picture of the culprits who did them harm because the “cameras” in their brains are out of focus. But they, too, need to forgive those who wrong them.

I wonder how mentally retarded children forgive people whose identity is always fuzzy in their eyes. Is a Down’s Syndrome child equipped with special powers to forgive?

When I wonder how intelligent a person has to be to forgive someone, I always think about Little Tony. I am not proud to tell it, but I want I want to tell it so that I can show how easy it is to hurt somebody who cannot get a firm fix on the person doing the hurting.”

…”It was on one of my walks that I met Toontje, close to noon every morning. Little Tony was microcephalic; his brain was too small to organize his world or learn the alphabet.

But Little Tony learned to perform one useful service. He had a smallish cart with two large buggy wheels for easy steering, a straight handle for pushing, and two large legs behind the wheels so the cart could stand almost upright when he parked it. He also carried a stick about three feet long, with a sharp point on the end for stabbing pieces of paper along the sidewalks on the hospital grounds.

You could see him every morning jabbing at crumpled cigarette packages or chewing gum wrappers, carrying them to his cart, pulling them off his stick, and cautiously laying them there, one by one.

If he walked a ways without finding any litter to pick up, he would provide his own. He would stop his cart, lift out a piece of paper, carry it to the edge of the sidewalk, drop it to the ground, walk back to his cart for his spear, stalk the piece of paper, pierce it through, carry it back, and soberly deposit it back into his barrow. Little Tony was exercising his human right to be useful.

How, you may ask, did Little Tony know when it was TIME to call it a morning and head back to Building Nine for his lunch? Simple. He had learned to ask one question and to recognize the one answer that gave him his signal. He learned to ask: “What time is it? When he heard one answer lunch-he knew it was time to turn the cart about and head home. So, with his respectful, squeaky drawl, he asked everybody he passed on the hospital walks: “What time is it? Everybody, every morning-same question.

One sunny Dutch morning I spotted Little Tony poking his studded stick through another cigarette pack, and I felt a nasty impulse of the sort that leads decent persons to do very mean things.

What would Little Tony do if I asked him his own question. My timing had to be exquisite. I had to catch him on the very verge, lips puckered for the W in what, and then sneak in my question before he had a chance to ask his.

“What time is it, Little Tony?”

He froze. His hand dropped limp from the handle of his cart, his eyes gaped, fixed on blank space, and he began to shake, first his hands, then his head, and his entire body quaking, while from his mouth came inchoate sounds. He shook for all of fifteen horrible seconds and then he gradually put his hands back on the handle of his cart and pushed it past me, not looking, not saying anything.

I knew the evil I had done the moment I saw him shake. In the conceit of my temptation I thought it was a harmless game, maybe even a psychological experiment. But after I did it, I knew what it really was that I had done: I had demeaned a person who had no tools to play my unfunny game with me. I had betrayed my brotherhood with this man, and hurt a child of God who did not have it coming.

Could he forgive me? Were my chances of forgiveness less with Little Tony than with a nasty Ph. D? Could this man with a brain too small to count change get a clear enough focus on me and what I did to him, even to the sense that I needed forgiving? Or is it possible that a large heart made up for his small brain”

I do not know whether little Tony, and all other people who are short-changed on cerebral skills, are given a special power to forgive. Little Tony died some time ago. In Heaven, I’m sure, little Tony learned what a wretched thing I had done to him that April morning twenty years before. He also got a clear profile of me as the person who did it. And I’m sure he forgave me, though I never deserved it.

When we meet maybe he will teach me how people with small brains will forgive people with small souls.

I think we are all like little Tony in our own ways. Everyone is at bottom a mystery to me, just as I was a mystery to Little Tony. I can never get a perfectly clear fix on anyone. The difference between the partial way we all understand each other and the partial way Little Tony understood me is really not all that great.

So we forgive in part, too.” Pgs. 61-63.

At the time of his death, Dr. E. K. Bailey was one of the best known preacher/pastors in America. In her book, “Learning to Trust Your Heavenly Father:” Denise George Quotes Bailey’s daughter Cokiesha, a good friend of hers who graduated from Beeson Divinity School at Sanford University in Birmingham, Alabama.

She said that her dad was “a teaching father who taught her practical life lessons that remain deeply embedded in her heart and mind.” For instance, about men he said, “Always encourage them and make them feel as though you cherish their thoughts and opinions. After you have asked a man a question, wait patiently for his response. Men think slower that women. Try not to interrupt him when he is talking. Women’s brains move so much faster, after you ask them him the question, wait for him to respond and conclude. My dad believed that men were visual, and women were emotional. ‘Men like for women to look good and smell good.’

About pain and tragedy: “’God uses the spade of sorrow to dig the well of joy.’ Daddy believed that everyone had to endure sorrowful times because, during those seasons, God shows us how to trust him more. He taught me that ‘joy is always on the other side of sorrow.’ He said that ‘No one can drink grapes. They must first be crushed.’ That phrase is one of the things that my dad said constantly, and I hear those words ringing in my ears even to this day. I see now, through his suffering, and the suffering of other family members, how God encourages us to be more like Jesus. I see how many facets of Christ’s character we’d never see if we didn’t suffer, and how he uses those experiences to get more glory, and to give us a greater testimony. Because of my own suffering and my father’s teachings, I see how God takes our ‘lemons and makes lemonade.’ After suffering, I see how God lifts up our heads and replenishes our joy. He refreshes our spirits, and he uses us to be greater witnesses for him.”

“…About loving others: “’Love people and forgive them.’ Growing up in a pastor’s home was a wonderful experience. There were lots of rewards and some challenges. Sometimes there were even disappointments because people expected you to be upright, forgiving, loving, loyal, and honest even when they were not. My dad encouraged us to always ‘take the high road,’ meaning that the ‘low road’ was ‘getting back’ at people. He said ‘God will take care of people when they have wronged us, and to never try to get back at people.’ He said that we should ‘pray for people, forgive them, and continue to love them, just as Jesus would.’”

“… My dad experienced many physical setbacks, including diabetes, kidney cancer, nasal cancer, and lung cancer,”Cokiesha remembers. He believed many of his battles could have been prevented by eating healthier and exercising more. He urged my family to “take care of God’s temples’ and to ‘eat well and exercise regularly.’

“Before I hugged him,” Cokiesha remembers, “I felt my eyes filling up with tears, and he said to me: ‘One day people are going to look at you and say. “That’s E. K. Bailey’s daughter.”’ Then he sat back with a heart of satisfaction and told me to go and make him proud.”

“A few days before Dr. Bailey died, Cokiesha wanted to stay at her father’s side instead of returning to her seminary classes. “I was so used to him advising me that I had become dependent upon his wisdom. I waited for him to say, ‘Well you can stay with me for a few more days just in case something happens.’ Instead he looked at me and said” ‘I can’t swim for you any longer, Cokiesha. I have taught you how to swim. Now just do it.’”

I’ve been praying from the depth of my heart that each of you folks who just heard this message preached, is that, whenever it’s necessary, you will hear Jesus softly whisper in your ear, “Forgive, As I Have Forgiven You,” and that you do it.

Lord willing, next week….