I heard about a preacher and a young boy who decided to make a trade.  The young boy gave the preacher his lawn mower, and the preacher gave the boy his bicycle.  As the young fellow was getting on his new bicycle to leave, the preacher said, “Hey now wait a minute, before you go, tell me if there is a secret to starting this lawn mower.  These old machines can be cantankerous sometimes, and you can’t get them started.”  And the boy said, “As a matter of fact, there is a secret.  To get this lawn mower started, you’ve got to say a few cuss words.”  Well the preacher was indignant.  “I haven’t used any cuss words since I became a Christian, over 30 years ago,” he said.  But the boy re-assured him, “Don’t worry.  You try to start that lawn mower long enough, and those words will all come right back to you.” 

We can be like this sometimes, even the best of us, our sinful nature comes right back to us, when things don’t go our way, it all too quickly emerges.  For some of us, it doesn’t take all that much.  I remember a “New Yorker” cartoon where two men sitting at a conference table are talking about another man who just walked into the room for a meeting, and he has kind of a sour disposition on his face.  And one man whispers to the other man, “He started out as lactose intolerant, but now he’s just intolerant of everything.” 

I know that we all have our intolerant, our angry, our mean moments.  We can put a disposition on our faces, an expression, that would scare anybody away.  We all have our bad days.  But what I would like us to think about this morning, what I want you to ask yourself, what I want to ask myself, is this: as a Christian, how do I respond when someone does something to me?  How do I respond to someone I don’t like?  How do I respond to someone who doesn’t like me?  People do things to us; they say things that hurt us.  Sometimes they just aren’t thinking; sometimes it’s all very deliberate.  Sometimes it’s a stranger; sometimes it’s your best friend, someone you love.  And we may not think of them as our enemy exactly, but we do almost always have a reaction.  And my question is: what is your reaction in such situations?  What do you want your reaction to be? 

I heard about one man who was bitten by a dog.  He went to the doctor, and he was told that the dog did, in fact, have rabies.  When he heard this, the man began making a list right there in the doctor’s office.  And the doctor said, “Oh rabies can be cured, you’re not going to die, there’s no need to make a will.”  But the man said, “Oh I’m not making a will.  I’m making a list of the people that I want to bite.” 

So that’s one way we can go, one choice we can make.  “I don’t get mad I get even.”  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that one.  I know those who seem to have made that as their choice so often in life, this then becomes their life, this is their way of being almost, they harbor all kinds of hurts and resentments and bitterness, and it just sort of comes out, at a moment’s notice, whenever anything happens.  The thing is that we don’t always know what the consequences of what we do or say will be.   Our thoughts and our actions and our words have consequences, they may have consequences that are unanticipated. 

I heard of a young couple who were having difficulty in their marriage.  Of course, she thought it was all his fault, and he thought it was all her fault.  The husband especially though, felt that he was being pushed right up to the edge emotionally by all that was happening.  And this couple had a little boy, maybe three years old or so.  One night at dinner, in the middle of yet another emotional argument, the husband just felt that he had had enough, so he blurted out in a very angry way to his wife, “No!  No!  No!  No!  I hate you!  I hate you!  I’m not going to take it any more!”  And then he got up and walked away.  And I don’t know all of the circumstances, I don’t know whether this outburst was justified or not.  But the three-year-old little boy was sitting there at the dinner table, taking all this in.  And a few nights later, the husband, the father, was walking around the house before bedtime, and he heard his son, three years old, playing in his room with his stuffed animals, and so he went to his son’s room, and stood there at the door watching, and his son picked up his stuffed teddy bear, and pretended to have an argument with it, and in an angry voice that sounded an awful lot like his father, he said to the teddy bear, “No!  No!  No!  No!  I hate you!  I hate you!  I’m not going to take it any more!” and then with his baggy diaper hanging out the back got up and walked away.  

We have to be careful, we have to watch what we do.  Our actions and our words can have consequences well beyond what we might think is our isolated, self-centered little episode right in the moment.  The anger and bitterness, the violence, that can inhabit our spirit, that can inhabit our lives, can be passed on so easily to other people, without our even thinking about it, without our even realizing it, we can inject this into the world, inject this into the lives of other people.  I agree with Abraham Lincoln.  Abraham Lincoln was loved by many, but he was also reviled by many.  He had enemies who were just relentless in their criticism of him.  And yet Lincoln once said, “I may be crazy, but I just don’t think I have either the time or the energy in this life to hold onto that kind of grudge.  It’s just not worth it.” 

Jesus tells us that we have to deal with this kind of attitude, we can deal with it, we can control it, we can let go of it, we need not be forever imprisoned by these kinds of feelings.  It takes a little different way of understanding things, not giving in so easily to these feelings, and it takes a lot of help from God.  Peter came to Jesus and asked him, if someone sins against me, how often should I forgive?  Should I forgive as many as seven times?  Probably Peter was trying to be magnanimous here, thinking that it was gracious plenty, as my grandmother would say, to forgive a person three times, and here he was willing to forgive twice as often, plus one, for a total of seven times.  That’s more than enough, isn’t it?  But Jesus says to him, “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” or as some ancient manuscripts say (did you catch the footnote in the text), “seventy times seven times,” which doesn’t mean literally to forgive a total of 490 times.  You would need a certified public accountant following you around 24 hours a day to keep a tabulation of how many times each person in your life has done something to you and how many times you have forgiven them so far, and when you reach 490 you cut that person off.  No, that’s not what this means.  What Jesus means is that there really is no limit to the number of times you should forgive someone.  Forgiveness is unlimited; it is a habit, a way of being in the world.  The point is to be able to let things go, to not harbor everything that has happened to you, to not nurture it, not hold onto it to the point that it makes you sick emotionally and spiritually, and begins to eat away at your soul.  Forgive as a way of life.  Have as your goal to be gracious in this world, to be gracious with all people in all circumstances. 

Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, can be an example for us.  She was known never to hold a grudge.  One time a friend was remembering some cruel thing that someone had done to Clara some years previously, but Clara seemed not even to remember it.  Her friend asked, “Don’t you remember the wrong that was done to you?”  Her friend couldn’t quite believe it.  But Clara Barton said, “No, I distinctly remember forgetting about that.” 

Abraham Lincoln, who I quoted earlier, was once asked by the mother of a young man who had been killed in the Civil War how Lincoln could be so magnanimous in victory to those who had been part of the Confederacy.  “We ought to destroy our enemies,” she said.  But Lincoln replied, “Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I forgive them and make them my friends?”

The point for Jesus always seemed to be to make a difference in the lives of other people, to make a difference in the world.  And we can only do this, we can only make the most profound difference when our lives are changed by the grace of God, and then we begin to affect those around us as we reflect the grace and the love and the forgiveness that God is bringing to life in us.  We might even settle the score we have against someone else for good, we might settle the score completely and totally, not by getting even, but by making them our friends, in the words of Lincoln, by being used of God to help transform their lives. 

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a woman by the name of Corrie tenBoom.  She was just a young woman during World War II.  She and her family lived in Holland, and they were not themselves Jewish, but they assisted in hiding Jews from the Nazis during those years, and when the Nazis discovered this, she and her whole family were thrown into a concentration camp.  Corrie survived this concentration camp, so many didn’t, but Corrie survived, and after the war she began to speak about her experiences, and she began to speak about the power of forgiveness to heal those memories and experiences.  She spoke to church congregations and other audiences, she eventually wrote several books, maybe you’ve read some of her books.  She even began to go back to Germany, where she had been imprisoned, to speak to people there.  Once, when she was in a church near Munich, after her sermon, a man came up to her and held out his hand, and said, “Yah, Fraulein tenBoom, I am so glad that Jesus forgives all our sins and enables us to forgive each other for all the things we have done.”  And there were tears in his eyes, and it was obvious that he was sincere.  The only problem was that this was a guard that Corrie recognized from the concentration camp, and even though he had perhaps not been the worst one there, he had done things, and participated in things in the concentration camp, and Corrie felt that she simply could not forgive this man.  She had spoken on forgiveness countless times, but here was someone she could not forgive.  And her arm, instead of reaching up to shake his hand, stayed rigid at her side.  And so she prayed silently, “Oh God, I cannot forgive this man.  Please forgive me for not being able to forgive.”  And with that, it seemed as though some unseen power began to lift her arm up until she was able to shake the hand of this man, and begin in her own heart to forgive. 

This is a powerful story, I think.  It’s powerful because it shows that we can only truly and deeply forgive, because of the strength and the power and the forgiveness of God that is in us.  Remember that parable?  It is the king, the master, God is the one we’re really talking about, who gets the whole thing going, who begins the whole process of forgiveness, who enables us to forgive, by first forgiving us.  Jesus seems to be saying, “Because of the way that God has forgiven you, now you must forgive.  Forgive as a way of life, forgive as a way of being in this world, forgive as a way of transforming this world and bringing healing into the lives of other people.”