I’m on vacation right now, so I thought it would be great to republish some of my favourite posts from previous years. This post was part of my sermon notes from a series we did at Bikers Church. The story I quote at the beginning is one of the most powerful stories I’ve read.
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Last time, I shared the introduction talk from the series, “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” I received a number of emails and comments and so I’ve decided to share the next talk in that series. A talk about learning to forgive others. I hope it challenges and encourages you.
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Let me begin by quoting Philip Yancey again:
In 1898 Daisy was born into a working-class Chicago family, the eighth child of ten. The father barely earned enough to feed them all, and after he took up drinking, money got much scarcer. Daisy, closing in on her hundredth birthday as I write this, shudders when she talks about those days. Her father was a “mean drunk,” she says. Daisy used to cower in the corner, sobbing, as he kicked her baby brother and sister across the linoleum floor. She hated him with all her heart.
One day the father declared that he wanted his wife out of the house by noon. All ten kids crowded around their mother, clinging to her skirt and crying, “No, don’t go!” But their father did not back down. Holding on to her brothers and sisters for support, Daisy watched through the bay window as her mother walked down the sidewalk, shoulders a droop, a suitcase in each hand, growing smaller and smaller until finally she disappeared from view.
Some of the children eventually rejoined their mother, and some went to live with other relatives. It fell to Daisy to stay with her father. She grew up with a hard knot of bitterness inside her, a tumor of hatred over what he had done to the family. All the kids dropped out of school early in order to take jobs or join the Army, and then one by one they moved away to other towns. They got married, started families, and tried to put the past behind them. The father vanished-no one knew where and no one cared.
Many years later, to everyone’s surprise, the father resurfaced. He had guttered out, he said. Drunk and cold, he had wandered into a Salvation Army rescue mission one night. To earn a meal ticket he first had to attend a worship service. When the speaker asked if anyone wanted to accept Jesus, he thought it only polite to go forward along with some of the other drunks. He was more surprised than anybody when the “sinner’s prayer” actually worked. The demons inside him quieted down. He sobered up. He began studying the Bible and praying. For the first time in his life he felt loved and accepted. He felt clean.
And now, he told his children, he was looking them up one by one to ask for forgiveness. He couldn’t defend anything that had happened. He couldn’t make it right. But he was sorry, more sorry than they could possibly imagine.
The children, now middle-aged and with families of their own, were initially skeptical. Some doubted his sincerity, expecting him to fall off the wagon at any moment. Others figured he would soon ask for money. Neither happened, and in time the father won them over, all except Daisy.
Long ago Daisy had vowed never to speak to her father– “that man” she called him-again. Her father’s reappearance rattled her badly, and old memories of his drunken rages came flooding back as she lay in bed at night. “He can’t undo all that just by saying ‘I’m sorry,’” Daisy insisted. She wanted no part of him.
The father may have given up drinking, but alcohol had damaged his liver beyond repair. He got very sick, and for the last five years of his life he lived with one of his daughters, Daisy’s sister. They lived, in fact, eight houses down the street from Daisy, on the very same row-house block. Keeping her vow, Daisy never once stopped in to visit her dying father, even though she passed by his house whenever she went grocery shopping or caught a bus.
Daisy did consent to let her own children visit their grandfather. Nearing the end, the father saw a little girl come to his door and step inside. “Oh, Daisy, Daisy, you’ve come to me at last,” he cried, gathering her in his arms. The adults in the room didn’t have the heart to tell him the girl was not Daisy, but her daughter Margaret. He was hallucinating grace.
All her life Daisy determined to be unlike her father, and indeed she never touched a drop of alcohol. Yet she ruled her own family with a milder form of the tyranny she had grown up under. She would lie on a couch with a rubber ice pack on her head and scream at the kids to “Shut up!”
“Why did I ever have you stupid kids anyway?” she would yell. “You’ve ruined my life!” The Great Depression had hit, and each child was one more mouth to feed. She had six in all, rearing them in the two-bedroom row house she lives in to this day. In such close quarters, they seemed always underfoot. Some nights she gave them all whippings just to make a point: she knew they’d done wrong even if she hadn’t caught them.
Hard as steel, Daisy never apologized and never forgave. Her daughter Margaret remembers as a child coming in tears to apologize for something she’d done. Daisy responded with a parental Catch-22: “You can’t possibly be sorry! If you were really sorry, you wouldn’t have done it in the first place.”
I have heard many such stories of ungrace from Margaret, whom I know well. All her life she determined to be different from her mother, Daisy. But Margaret’s life had its own tragedies, some large and some small, and as her four children entered their teenage years she felt she was losing control of them. She too wanted to lie on the couch with an ice pack and scream, “Shut up!” She too wanted to whip them just to make a point or maybe to release some of the tension coiled inside her.
Her son Michael, who turned sixteen in the 1960s, especially got under her skin. He listened to rock and roll, wore “granny glasses,” let his hair grow long. Margaret kicked him out of the house when she caught him smoking pot, and he moved into a hippie commune. She continued to threaten and scold him. She reported him to a judge. She wrote him out of her will. She tried everything she could think of, and nothing got through to Michael. The words she flung up against him fell back, useless, until finally one day in a fit of anger she said, “I never want to see you again as long as I live.” That was twenty-six years ago and she has not seen him since.
Michael is also my close friend. Several times during those twenty-six years I have attempted some sort of reconciliation between the two, and each time I confront again the terrible power of ungrace. When I asked Margaret if she regretted anything she had said to her son, if she’d like to take anything back, she turned on me in a flash of hot rage as if I were Michael himself. “I don’t know why God didn’t take him long ago, for all the things he’s done!” she said, with a wild, scary look in her eye.
Her brazen fury caught me off guard. I stared at her for a minute: her hands clenched, her face florid, tiny muscles twitching around her eyes. “Do you mean you wish your own son was dead?” I asked at last. She never answered.
Michael emerged from the sixties mellower, his mind dulled by LSD. He moved to Hawaii, lived with a woman, left her, tried another, left her, and then got married. “Sue is the real thing,” he told me when I visited him once. “This one will last.”
It did not last. I remember a phone conversation with Michael, interrupted by the annoying technological feature known as “call waiting.” The line clicked and Michael said, “Excuse me a second,” then left me holding a silent phone receiver for at least four minutes. He apologized when he came back on. His mood had darkened. “It was Sue,” he said. “We’re settling some of the last financial issues of the divorce.”
“I didn’t know you still had contact with Sue,” I said, making conversation.
“I don’t!” he cut in, using almost the same tone I had heard from his mother, Margaret. “I hope I never see her again as long as I live!”
We both stayed silent for a long time. We had just been talking about Margaret, and although I said nothing it seemed to me that Michael had recognized in his own voice the tone of his mother, which was actually the tone of her mother, tracing all the way back to what happened in a Chicago row house nearly a century ago.
Like a spiritual defect encoded in the family DNA, ungrace gets passed on in an unbroken chain.
Ungrace does its work quietly and lethally, like a poisonous, undetectable gas. A father dies unforgiven. A mother who once carried a child in her own body does not speak to that child for half its life. The toxin steals on, from generation to generation.
Margaret is a devout Christian who studies the Bible every day, and once I spoke to her about the parable of the Prodigal Son. “What do you do with that parable?” I asked. “Do you hear its message of forgiveness?”
She had obviously thought about the matter, for without hesitation she replied that the parable appears in Luke 15 as the third in a series of three: lost coin, lost sheep, lost son. She said the whole point of the Prodigal Son is to demonstrate how human beings differ from inanimate objects (coins) and from animals (sheep). “People have free will,” she said. “They have to be morally responsible. That boy had to come crawling back on his knees. He had to repent. That was Jesus’ point.”
That was not Jesus’ point, Margaret. All three stories emphasize the finder’s joy. True, the prodigal returned home of his own free will, but clearly the central focus of the story is the father’s outrageous love: “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.” When the son tries to repent, the father interrupts his prepared speech in order to get the celebration under way.
Last week, the focus was on Grace.
The opposite of Grace is ungrace
What is ungrace?
Ungrace = Unforgiveness
The gospel of grace begins and ends with forgiveness
Jesus saw forgiveness as so vital that He linked it to God in the Lord’s Prayer:
Matthew 6:15: Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
Paraphrase: “Show us grace the same way we show grace to others.”
There’s a cool little verse tucked away in Romans 12. The Apostle Paul writes things like: Hate evil, Be joyful, Live in harmony, Do not be conceited – the list goes on and on. Then appears this verse: Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge, I will repay,’ says the Lord.
FORGIVENESS IS AN ACT OF FAITH
By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am. By forgiving, I release my own right to get even and leave all issues of fairness for God to work out. I leave in God’s hands the scales that must balance justice and mercy.
Forgiveness is not a natural act – it’s hard to do – just forgive someone. Even when we are in the wrong, we want to earn our forgiveness … not just receive it.
Matthew 5:23–24: Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother, then come and offer your gift.
How serious to most Christians treat that verse?
Forgiveness is an act of faith.
Once again, I welcome your comments and thoughts on this post.
If you’d like to read more about this subject, here are some passages from the Bible
2 Samuel 11:1–27
2 Samuel 12:1–25
Psalm 51
Psalm 32
Colossians 3:1–17
