Finding Forgiveness

     A week ago Saturday was Yom Kippur – the most sacred day of the Jewish year.  The roots of Yom Kippur are in Scripture, nearly three thousand years old.  From the book of Leviticus.  “The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: Mark, the tenth day of this seventh month is the Day of Atonement.  It shall be a sacred occasion for you...” 

     A Day of Atonement.  A day set aside to say, “I’m sorry.”  It is more than that, of course.  It comes 10 days after Rosh Hashanah, the new year.  I think an essential question of Yom Kippur is: what baggage will we drag along with us into the new year? 

     I can’t think of the question of baggage, without being reminded of a story.  The joy of Interfaith, of course, is that there’s always a story. Buddhist tradition speaks of a man who was making a great journey.  One day he reaches a river with no bridge.  The current is swift and he cannot swim across it.  But he finds some trees that have fallen, makes himself a raft, and crosses the river.  Then he picks up the raft and holding it over his head continues on his journey, only now complaining bitterly that his travel is so much more difficult than it used to be! 

     Hurt and anger can be a necessary raft that helps us get through some hard times.  But how many of us carry rafts with us that we fashioned years ago?  Rafts that perhaps were useful once, but are now only burdens that make our great journey more difficult.  The truth of it is that when we remain angry, when we remain hurt, the person we hurt the most is ourselves.

     A Day of Atonement is a day to ask for forgiveness – and mean it.  As well as day to give forgiveness – and mean it.  A day to heal.  A day to let go.  Is it important?  As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has so poignantly and eloquently written, speaking of South Africa but truly about us all: there is “No Future Without Forgiveness.” 

     We look across the waters, to the Middle East.  Palestinians and Israelis.  Both sides aggrieved.  It’s not as if forgiveness is magic.  Or even a goal.  But it is a beginning.  And there is no future without forgiveness.

     On a more personal level.  We may want to let go of a hurt or a grievance, but still, the question is how?  The hurt is real.  How do we let it go?  I believe that one clue is that before we can let it go, before we can truly forgive, we must admit the depth of our hurt to ourselves and own it.

     Yet on a Day of Atonement, we must not only own our hurts, we must own that we have caused hurt.  That can be hard.  Hard, but needed.

     When we screw up, and we’re sorry, we want to be forgiven.  We need to be forgiven.  “Can’t we just…start over?” is a plea that all of us have made at one time or another  And if we can’t start over, if we can’t forgive and be forgiven, a sense of guilt and resentment can pile up on us and become a heavy, even crushing burden.  A Day of Atonement, gives us the opportunity to lay the burden down.  Having crossed the river, to leave the raft behind.

     But there’s more to it even than that.  You may have noted in our responsive reading, we said “we” not “I.”  In the typical Jewish Yom Kippur service, the list of transgressions to which “we” confess is much larger than any list a single individual could possibly “accomplish” in a lifetime, let alone a single year.  This gives us more to chew on than we might realize.

     There was a concept in Scripture that we have in many ways misplaced.  That concept is community.  Life is not just about me.  It’s not just about how well I live, how much I can accumulate, how happy my life is. 

     Whether we see Scripture as absolute truth or parable, when the prophets spoke about God’s wrath on the whole of Israel because of what one or a few had done, it reminds us that we are interconnected.  All of us!  What we do affects others.  And what others do affects us.  It is true with something as huge as climate change, and as small as bringing a contribution to the food bank.

     Community.  And mutual responsibility.  What a concept!

     So!  How do we go about this “atonement thing?”

The tradition of Yom Kippur is that we must first ask those we have hurt for forgiveness.  Only then, if we are so inclined, may we ask God.  That’s hard.  Many of us fall short.  I know I do. 

     And yet the other half of the Yom Kippur tradition is perhaps even harder.  This half tells us that we must accept an apology sincerely given – not grudgingly listen to, but truly accept.  Why on earth is that there??  It’s for us.  It’s there to help us become whole again. 

     Now, sometimes for our own safety, we need to forgive, but not forget, and we’ll speak again of that later.  Still, the need to forgive remains, or the hurts that we nurse, the grudges that we hold can become cancers and destroy us as surely as the most virulent disease.  

     The metaphor of “nursing” our hurts is a profound one.  Do we nurse our hurts to heal them?  Or do we nurse our hurts to keep them alive?  If we would heal, then we must not only own our hurt, but then let it go.

     It can be easy to be fixated on how we have been wounded.  And I’m not talking here about an imagined hurt.  Real hurt.  We need to be able to let go, not simply for the sake of the person who needs our forgiveness, but for the sake of our own lives, our own wholeness.  This is what Desmond Tutu understood, and why reconciliation in South Africa was so critical. 

     Apology and forgiveness.  These are the twin pillars of Yom Kippur. 

     None of us is perfect.  All of us will make mistakes.  But if we can keep those mistakes from festering, if we can find the humility to say “I’m sorry;” and if, when we are wronged, we can accept a heart-felt apology from the person who has wronged us; then we will be taking a step, a good step, towards making this a more livable and a better world.

     Amen.