Forgive as we have been Forgiven

This is a sermon given at St David’s Uniting Church, Newtwon, Victoria, Australia, on the Second Sunday in Advent, 2024.

I would like to acknowledge the Waddawurrung People of the Kulin Nation, on whose lands we gather today. I pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and commit to reconciliation and truth telling.

Here we are in the second week of Advent, but the third week of this series thinking about the prayer of the church, often known as the Lord’s prayer. The second week of Advent is traditionally focussed on Peace. As a Hebrew Bible or Old Testament scholar my mind immediately goes to the Hebrew word Shalom.

Shalom does indeed mean peace, but the nuances of this word are broader than this. In contemporary Israel, shalom is the greeting often used for both hello and goodbye. The name Jerusalem can be understood to mean ‘city of peace’ which is slightly ironic given its history and the ongoing violence that envelopes it.

Shalom conveys within the word a sense of wholeness. If we are at peace, if we have shalom, then we are complete – without want. There is also a sense of health. When our minds and bodies are healthy, they have peace, they have shalom.

You might like to stop reading for a minute and take a death breathe.

Can you see what shalom might feel like in your body?

The reality is that there is almost never a time when everything is perfect for us as humans. Even at the best of times there are so often niggles, worries, people we are missing, And if you are someone like me who struggles with anxiety and depression, these are often more than just niggles but something which we have to actively work to stop them taking over. So if shalom or peace is so difficult with just one person in the picture, what happens when there is two or more.

Sometimes, having another person around helps us to regain our shalom and can go a long way to soothing our fears, hurts and anxieties. Thank God that there are these spaces of healing and wholeness in the world.

However, too often the shalom that we cannot achieve in our individual lives impacts relationships. We hurt other people – sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally – and other people hurt us. Growing up as a good Christian girl, I was taught to squash down my hurts, not to talk of them for fear of upsetting someone else. This means that as an adult I have had to work really hard to learn the language of conflict resolution. I am pretty sure I am not the only one who was taught not to talk about upsetting things. One of the things I have been learning is to set boundaries. This means that when someone has upset me, and I want to keep the relationship, I have to find the words to say how I have been hurt, and give the other person the opportunity to fix the relationship. This is not easy.

It’s also true in reverse. When someone comes to me and tells me that my words or actions have hurt them, if I want to keep the relationship – or have it be healthy, then I need to own my part of the situation and sincerely apologise.

This is not a new thing. It’s right here in this ancient prayer. Forgive us as we forgive others.

Now, I think it is really important to include a caveat here, because forgiveness has too often been used to overlook abuse, to silence victims and to perpetuate unjust power structures. No one has the right to demand forgiveness from another person, and I firmly believe that there are situations when it is not only right but it is just to withhold forgiveness.

If you wanted to go further into this topic, I would really recommend Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s book, On Repentance and Repair (and I enjoy reading her blog too, Life is a Sacred Text).

So, we can seek shalom on the personal level.

And we can seek shalom on the interpersonal level.

But what happens when it gets bigger than that.

What does it mean to have shalom and or to practise forgiveness in the wider community?

I would suggest that last year we as a community we had the opportunity to practise shalom. As a nation we were asked to formally recognise Indigenous people within our founding documents. The Voice to Parliament was a proposition based on the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a document that Indigenous leaders came together to draft.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for years have been telling us that they are hurting, and they are hurting because white Australia refuses to treat them as equals. And it’s not just Indigenous people who have been saying this. We have had numerous investigations like the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the Closing the Gap Reports and many others that note, here in this land, where sovereignty was never ceded, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have worse health outcomes, die earlier, have less educational opportunities, are more likely to be sent to jail, and are more likely to die in jail, than white people.

The easy response is to say, “well everyone in this country is equal why don’t they just work harder so they can be like us whitefellas? Why don’t they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps?”

Let’s take a step back, to help us understand this. If you work up the courage to tell another person they have hurt you. What sort of response would you like?

Do you want them to say, well, it’s your own fault that you are hurt. You just need to try harder or do better and then you wouldn’t get hurt. Have you ever been in a situation like that?

I certainly have. When I am on the receiving end of that sort of response, my instinct is to run away, sometimes to get angry, but I can’t ever say that I have felt peace or shalom in that situation.

Sometimes when I have told someone of abuse I have received, their response is – well, the right thing to do as a Christian is to forgive them. Do you think this response makes me feel safe? Do you think in this response there can ever be shalom? Do you think me rushing in to forgive the abuser will stop the abuse – either towards me or anyone else? It has not been my experience that it does. Abuse doesn’t tend to stop until the abuser is held accountable in one way or another.

One of the things that is really important in this issue is that it can be so very hard to understand someone else’s experience, especially if we have never experienced it before ourselves. And when we don’t understand it, it is easier to discount it. I have never been the subject of racism, so I can only imagine what it is like to be on the receiving end of it. Let alone to have to deal with it day after day, year after year.

I do know what it is like to be on the receiving end of sexism and misogyny though. I know what its like to have my suggestion ignored, only to have it accepted gladly when a man repeats it. I know what its like to be told that I am hysterical or over emotional, even in situations where it is entirely normal to be upset. I know what its like to be told that only boys are allowed to do some jobs or roles, when I know that I have been stronger, smarter, and more capable than the boys who are chosen. And I know that me saying that I am stronger, smarter and more capable will be heard as me bragging, where if a man said it he is more likely to be described as confident.

We live in a world where some voices, some people, some groups are consistently treated better than others. And if we are in those groups that get treated better, it can be tempting to think that we get treated better because we deserve it, because we have worked hard, because we are good people, rather than to recognise that we live in a world of systems that are fundamentally unjust, even in these lands now called Australia where there is seemingly so much wealth and freedom, more than enough to go around.

So knowing all this, how do we practise shalom?

Well, first of all it IS a practise.

We need to practise finding our own shalom. We need to understand the things in our life that brings us peace, that make us feel healthy and whole. We need to recognise when we hurt others and we need to practise the steps of repair, and then be able to forgive ourselves for the missteps we make.

Then we need to practise shalom in our personal relationships. We need to be willing to say when we have been hurt, and also to hear when others say that we have hurt them. We need to practise being a safe place for others and I also think we need to require others to be a safe space for us. Part of practicing shalom is the permission to walk away when someone is not safe, even if they are a long time friend or family member.

There has been some really good work done in this space over the last few years, and I think it is helpful here.

• First, we have to acknowledge the offense. We can’t change what we won’t acknowledge.
• Second, express regret. If we are not sorry, if we cannot say we are sorry, and really mean it, then can be no reconciliation or forgiveness or shalom.
• Next, accept responsibility. It can be really hard to own up to our part in things, especially if we think we are not to blame. But sometimes not accepting responsibility looks like failing to speak up, failing to see our privilege, failing to right wrongs because we think they are not our fault or our responsibility.
• Fourth, apologize sincerely. When my kids were little I didn’t make them apologise to one another because I couldn’t stand the hypocrisy of an insincere apology. I am sure this meant some people thought I was a bad mother, but I was more concerned that my children knew the impact of their actions rather than pretending to make nice. If we can’t apologise sincerely then this is where reconciliation or shalom or forgiveness gets stuck.
• Fifth, share how you’ll fix the problem. This might be a multi-part step. If we share our solution, but the injured party doesn’t accept it, we do have the choice to insist that our fix is the right one. But again, if we do that. Here is where shalom stops.
• Lastly, learn from your mistakes. If we keep repeating the same mistakes, then the other person or people will rightly think we are being insincere, or hypocritical or that our apology is performative.

Now, while these steps are difficult in the one-to-one space. I think they are even harder when we are talking about systemic injustice. None of us invaded Australia so many years ago. But each one of us benefits from the systems that were put in place to prioritise white, English speaking people.

None of us took part in the historical massacres of Indigenous people, but here we are worshipping on stolen land.

None of us by ourselves can fix the problems that face Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people today. However, unless we commit to step five and step six, we become complicit in the ongoing subjugation of Indigenous people here in Australia and around the world. And we can’t get to step five and six without working through steps one, two, three and four.

The Voice might have given us a chance to hear the things we need to start at number one. The current Truth and Reconciliation process is another chance for us to start at number one. In my work as an academic, I try to lift up Indigenous voices and do what I can to help Indigenous theologies be heard. So one of the projects I have been working on since I last saw you is this book called Reading the Bible in Australia. The three co-editors were all white women, and we felt it was tokenistic to invite an Indigenous person on to the team just so we could say we had some diversity. What we did instead was to work really hard to include Indigenous authors, and we placed them as the first three chapters. Then the next two chapters focus on Indigenous understandings and translation issues, too.

 As a white person, it is really important for me to call out racism when I see it, so this work isn’t always being done by those who are the victims. I also try to support Indigenous businesses and causes because as Midnight Oil told us so many years ago “the time has come to say fair’s fair, to pay the rent, to pay our share.”

If we want shalom, real shalom, we are going to have to work hard to be worthy of forgiveness. And while I have talked mostly today of Indigenous issues, this also applies to queer people, to refugees and migrants, to people with disabilities, to women and to any other people who have been hurt, marginalised and are vulnerable in our community and in our nation.

So, my question to you today is, what are you going to do to practise shalom?