Forgiveness

 Forgiveness 

Roz didn’t intend to go to church with Uncle Albert and me; she was only going to help us up the stairs, then she was going to get a cup of coffee and come back to help us back down. But when she realized how little time she was going to have for her coffee, and then when she ran into our rector, the former Miss Virginia, at the top of the stairs, she decided to stay: to help us down the aisle to our seats and to help us to the communion rail for the body and blood. And in the interim to listen to the Bible and the message.
     The Bible was about the story in Genesis (50),* where Joseph forgives his brothers because even though they intended him harm, God intended it for good, in order to save many, including them, the ill-intending brothers, and their little ones. And about Psalm 103 and the God that forgives all our iniquities and heals all our diseases because he doesn't deal with us according to our sins; rather as far as the east is from the west, so far he removes them from us. And it was about The Apostle’s letter to the Romans (14) where he asks them shy they pass judgment on one another? why do they despise one another? Don’t we all stand before “the judgment seat of God”? — which, haven't we just heard, is all-forgiving? And finally, the Bible was about the story in Matthew 18, where Peter comes to Jesus to ask how often he should forgive, and Jesus tells him 77 times. That is, if he doesn’t want to stand before God’s judgment, which.
     And the sermon was about forgiveness, the vocation above all other vocations for the follower of Jesus.

St. Jude’s

The rest followed: the creed and the peace and the pages and pages of prayers and the kneeling at the rail then trying to get up again after the priest, the former Miss Virginia, said the eucharist has ended, go home. (Except, I think, she said the Eucharist.)
     And we did get up and we got down the aisle and we got out the door and we got down the stairs, with Roz’s help. And into the car, and on the way home, Roz looked at Uncle Albert sitting beside her and over her shoulder at me in the backseat behind him and said, “Why do you think, since all over the world today the message must be about forgiveness, no one is very forgiving, if at all?” And after a minute, Uncle Albert asked her how many people she guessed were in worship that morning at St. Jude’s? And she shrugged. He said, “8.”

“She is right, you know,” Uncle Albert said at the half of the extremely boring, indeed unrelievedly tedious, Everton-Arsenal match. He looked over at me. I muted Rebecca Lowe and the one Robbie and Lee Dixon. I looked vacantly back, meaning she who? “Miss Virginia,” he said. “Not that the other she, Roz, is wrong. But when the last Christian dies, probably not too long from now, forgiveness will disappear from the planet, for we are the only people that have a true vocation for it.”
     “Oh?” I said, meaning “You really think so?”
     “I mean true forgiveness,” Uncle Albert said. “Everyone else wants justice though some will pay lip service to mercy. But mercy is not the same as forgiveness. Actually, you have to have that vocation for forgiveness to know how far away it is,” Uncle Albert said.

                                                                           09.21.23
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 * The passages, from the common lectionary for the sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (September 17, 2023) are here.