Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility,gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. And whatever you do,whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him. (Colossians 3:12-17)
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An event that's had a huge impact on popular culture and on colloquial English happened back in 1878. In West Virginia, The McCoy's were accused of stealing a hog from the Hatfields. And so it began – the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Now, when a seemingly irreconcilable divide erupts between two people or two groups, it's often referred to as a Hatfield-McCoy type of feud. I suspect that because it's entered the common lingo, we don't realize how serious the Hatfield-McCoy feud was. The Hatfields accused the McCoys of stealing a hog. The McCoys denied it, and refused to give the hog in question to the Hatfields. The Hatfields took the McCoys to court, and the justice of the peace who heard the case just happened to be named “Anderson Hatfield.” Not surprisingly, the Hatfields won the case. The feud erupted. It was not the thing of humour that is sometimes portrayed. In fact, it was serious – deadly serious. 11 people died as a direct result of the feud. One of the interesting things about the two families is that in the decades prior to the feud breaking out there had been several inter-marriages between them, which perhaps explains a lot. These weren't just two different families, they were more like an extended single family, and the better you know someone the more bitter might be the reaction when you feel wronged by them. The killing, of course, eventually stopped (largely because the Hatfields moved on to Kentucky) – but interestingly enough it wasn't until 2003 that Bo and Ron McCoy met with Reo Hatfield and on national television they shook hands and declared the feud over. After 125 years! And it started with an accusation about stealing a hog! Sometimes the bitterest and longest lasting fights erupt over simple things that happen between people who should be close. But as Reo Hatfield said after, “you don't have to fight forever!” In the end, 60 descendants of both families signed an official truce, which said in part that “we ask by God's grace and love that we be forever remembered as those that bound together the hearts of two families to form a family of freedom ...” Ron McCoy said, “The Hatfields and McCoys symbolize violence and feuding and fighting, but by signing this, hopefully people will realize that's not the final chapter.” It never has to be the final chapter, because if it is, we're lost. The final chapter in such things is hopefully written in the Gospel, and hopefully it's entitled “forgiveness.”
Forgiveness isn't about not making people face the consequences of their actions. It's about letting go and moving on. In some respects, forgiveness isn't about the person you're forgiving at all. Forgiveness is about “me.” It's not uncommon to hear church leaders today decrying the “me generation” and the impact it's had on the church – the idea being that for many people the church today seems to exist only for the purpose of meeting “my” needs. That's really not a good rationale for the church's existence, but in this one case, maybe it is about “me.” Forgiveness is about me giving myself permission to move on with life. For the community as a whole, forgiveness is about letting us move on without baggage. It's about healing and wholeness. It's about new life. Jesus once said that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” That applies to individuals, to families, to churches. If we're constantly involved in battles – inner battles or battles with others – then we can't stand. We will fall. And these divisions only arise because we have trouble letting go of the past. But let go of the past and move into the future we must – because the past can so easily be a trap – perhaps even a nightmare that we can't let go of. Paul wrote “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace.” He told that to the Christians of Colossae because he knew that a church that couldn't live at peace couldn't bear witness to Christ. Living at peace doesn't mean agreeing on everything – but it does mean always being ready to start anew.
Some of you have probably heard of Corrie ten Boom. She was a Dutch Christian who helped many Dutch Jews escape from the Nazis during World War II. She was eventually arrested (along with her entire family) and sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp – a camp for women which was notorious for slave labour and grotesque medical experiments. Corrie's sister Betsie died at Ravensbruck while they were imprisoned there. A couple of years after the war ended, Corrie was teaching in Germany, and quite by chance she met a man who had been one of the most cruel guards at Ravensbruck. The man approached her and held out his hand in a gesture of reconciliation. Corrie wrote later that she didn't want to forgive the man, but she did reach out and take his hand. She wrote later, “for a long moment we grasped each other's hands and looked in each other's eyes, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God's love so intensely as I did then.” She also wrote that in her experience with other former inmates of concentration camps, it was those who were able to forgive who were best able to rebuild their lives.
The odds are that none of us here have to deal with such difficulties. The things we have to forgive are pretty small by comparison. Which makes it all the more important that we learn the lesson of forgiveness, because small things can be mighty things. As Paul wrote,
Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace.
Forgiveness is about peace; it's about healing; it's about wholeness. It's the glue that holds a community together; it's the glue that holds our lives together; it's what gives us the ability to move forward – ever forward – boldly proclaiming the love and grace of God, and making us effective witnesses. I think this is an important subject. I believe that most of the problems I've discovered in churches and in Christians over the years really find their root in unforgiveness; in an unwillingness to let someone off the hook and move on. That's why it needs to be talked about and proclaimed among God's people over and over again - because when we fall into that trap we can't be the people we should be, and we can't be the church that God calls us to be. I want us to be all that God wants us to be, and for that to happen, we can't just talk about forgiveness – we have to be able to live it. That's hard. But it's necessary. I give the last word of the month to Nelson Mandela – a good Methodist, the former president (and the first black president) of South Africa; a man imprisoned for almost 30 years for fighting apartheid, and who could have chosen to take brutal vengeance against those who had oppressed him and his people when he finally claimed power – and yet a man who chose the route of reconciliation and forgiveness. In his words, “We especially need to forgive each other, because when you [merely] intend to forgive, you heal [only] part of the pain, but when you [actually do] forgive, you heal completely.” As individual Christians, and as a Christian community, may we always seek the path of forgiveness; the route of healing and peace.
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