Firefighters spray water on a burning building in south Los Angeles on April 30, 1992. Source: CNN
During the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King verdict, a truck driver named Reginald Denny was savagely beaten by four men and barely survived. His skull was fractured in 91 places, and he had to undertake years of surgeries and physical rehabilitation. His assailants were apprehended and tried, but Denny sought out their families to offer forgiveness, and even shook hands with one of his attackers. After this remarkable gesture of forgiveness, one of the reporters commenting on the scene wrote, “It is said that Mr. Denny is suffering from brain damage.”
Apparently only a broken brain can explain the radical nature of forgiveness. Because what is common and accepted as the norm is to seek vengeance for our hurts and to nurse old grudges. Forgiveness is understood as a sign of weakness, as something that only the powerless or vulnerable do. Those with power don’t forgive, and they certainly don’t need to ask for forgiveness, something exemplified by our president’s enthusiasm for revenge and his rejection of his personal need for forgiveness.
And yet, right in the middle of the Lord’s prayer – the prayer we say more often than any other, the prayer that teaches us how to pray – we pray for the radical and counter-cultural ability to give and receive forgiveness: “Forgive us our sins,” we say to our heavenly Father, “as we forgive those who sin against us.”
This weekend I’ll pick up in our Lenten sermon series on the Lord’s prayer by focusing on the crazy idea of forgiveness, and how important it is that this idea be located at the very heart of the prayer. Because forgiveness is not only the heart of our salvation, it is also the foundation of the Kingdom of God. Forgiveness is the catalyst for the transformation of the world, and how God changes our hearts from stone to flesh (Ezekiel 36:26). But the hard and sobering nature of forgiveness is that we can truly only receive what we are prepared to give: our forgiveness of others, even those who have done terrible things to us, is bound up with our reception of the forgiveness of God.
I’ll have more to say in my sermon, but I invite you to take a moment right now to pray this single line of the Lord’s Prayer as a mantra. Repeat it quietly to yourself for a few minutes. Breathe it in, and breathe it out. Ask for God to forgive, and ask for God to help you forgive others. They go together, these two, and together they are how the Kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven. See you this weekend.