The Bottom File Drawer

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
The First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
September 4, 2005

The Bottom File Drawer
1 John 2:1-11
Matthew 18:23-35

It was a mistake.
A simple mistake.
It was unintentional……or maybe not.
Perhaps it was intentional;
perhaps it was not a mistake.
He clearly had thought about it before he said it,
before he did it.
Maybe it was just bad judgment;
perhaps emotion got the better of him.

Now as the two sit across from one another,
she looks at him, but he does not return the look.
He looks at the floor, the ceiling,
the back of his hand,
the pen on the table:
anywhere but her eyes.
She can tell he wants to say something,
that he needs to say something.
She’s waiting for the excuse,
his attempt to try to rationalize what he said, what he did.
The words are mumbled at first.
They are a little louder the second time, but still indistinct.
The third time he says it, the words come out with force:
He says he is sorry. He apologizes.

He looks at her, waiting for a response.
She leaves him twisting in the wind for what seems like hours.
But then she responds:
she too apologizes, says she is sorry for her part.
She knows when there is a problem,
a disagreement, when two people don’t see eye to eye,
it is rarely all one person’s fault.
Usually there is equal blame on both sides.
She knows she had a hand in creating his words,
in forming his actions.
She knows she is not blameless.

Differences are patched up,
the icy coldness that had filled the room lifts
and sunshine floods across the table, the chairs, the walls.
He breathes again, stands up straight,
slumped shoulders now square.
The telephone rings and he goes to answer.

As she sits there, she wonders whether
his words had been honest, sincere.
She knows she’s supposed to forgive.
She learned the lessons in Sunday School.
Right there in the Lord’s Prayer:
“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
Her denomination had confused her when
they changed the wording from:
“Forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
but she understood that what mattered was forgiving.

She remembered having to memorize a passage
in Sunday School.
She chose Matthew 18, verses 21 and 22:
“then Peter came and said to [Jesus],
'Lord if another sins against me, how often should I forgive?
As many as seven times?'
Jesus said to him, 'Not seven times,
but, I tell you, seventy times seven.'”
When she was younger, she tried to keep track of how many times
she had forgiven her pesky younger sister,
looking forward to the day
when she would reach her quota of 490
and would not have to forgive her anymore.

As she waited for him to get off the telephone
she gazed out the window lost in thought.
Ugh, she thought. This business of forgiving is messy.
Why couldn’t Jesus have left that lesson unspoken?
Why did the gospel writers have to include so much
about forgiveness?
There it is in the Lord’s Prayer,
the Sermon on the Mount,
in parables, and other lessons.
But, she thought, the gospel writers were all men,
and they were probably in trouble all the time.
They probably included the lessons as much
to save their own skins
as they did to record the words of Jesus.

She was exasperated and exhausted by the whole business,
so when he walked back into the room she said,
“Okay, let’s consider the matter closed.
Let’s go to dinner.”
But she had not really forgiven.
She had taken the apology
and put it in a file drawer in her mind;
a file drawer we all have:
it’s that bottom file drawer everyone has.
It is the one where we keep things that bother us,
The drawer where we store bad memories;
embarrassing moments we want to forget
but never seem to be able to;
It is the drawer where we store those fears
we try to hard to shake.
It is not the drawer where we store grudges;
no, that drawer is higher up, more readily accessible.
It is the drawer where we put things that
we just can’t seem to let go of, shake,
flush out of our systems.
They’re in that bottom file drawer
in pendaflex files – you know:
the kind of file folders you see in well-organized offices,
with color-coded labels on each folder
to keep the feelings, the thoughts, the emotions organized,
ready to be called up at a moment’s notice,
even if we think the thought is in deep storage.

Every one of us has a special folder for:
apologies we don’t complete accept,
apologies that we don’t completely buy,
apologies that we hear,
but that don’t trigger complete forgiveness,
the forgiveness that we are supposed to offer,
the forgiveness that washes us clean.
A critical part of forgiving is moving on,
not hanging onto the past, the thoughts, the words, the deeds.
But when someone says something that hurts us
or does something that wounds us deeply,
even when there is an apology,
we struggle with the feelings the act or words provoked.
And so we hang onto the thought.
The person who offered the apology hopes to move on,
but we don’t because we have stored the item
in that bottom file drawer.
And then a few weeks, or a few months,
or even a few years later
we will open the drawer and say to the person,
“I still remember the time you said….” or
“I can’t forget the time you did ….”
But when we do that,
we have not offered complete forgiveness
as our Lord Jesus Christ teaches us.

The Bible is filled with stories and lessons about forgiveness,
so many that we have to conclude that God must have
considered offering forgiveness to one another
awfully important.
Just a few weeks back we talked about how
Esau forgave his brother Jacob,
even though Jacob had not sought forgiveness,
may not have even deserved forgiveness.
We heard how Joseph forgave his brothers,
those nasty older brothers who first plotted his death,
and then satisfied themselves with selling Joseph into slavery.
Moses wasn’t a model of perfection:
there was a little matter of his having murdered
the Egyptian for beating the Hebrew slave.
But God clearly forgave Moses.
Each time Moses was argumentative with God,
which he often was,
God didn’t reach into his bottom drawer and say
“I should have known that anyone
who would beat an Egyptian would act this way.”

Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness
are scattered throughout the gospels,
beginning with his Sermon on the Mount:
“If you forgive others their trespasses,
your heavenly father will also forgive you,
but if you do not forgive others,
neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:14)
The word “trespasses” tends to confuse us today.
We think of it as something to do with
walking on someone else’s property.
A better word when we translate from the Greek is “transgression”.
But as Jesus talks about forgiveness, he uses the words
sin, debts, and trespasses all interchangeably.
His focus is not on what it is that we are called to forgive,
but on the act of forgiving.
Call it a sin, call it a transgression,
call it a trespass, call it a debt,
Call it anything you want to:
For Jesus, the result is all the same:
we are to forgive them all.

And Jesus adds a bit of muscle to his teaching,
saying in effect, “Forgive others,
otherwise forget any hope of you yourself being forgiven.”
In our second reading, the slave missed this point.
He wanted forgiveness, but he didn’t offer forgiveness.
And for that oversight, he paid dearly.
Jesus often spoke in parables that can be confusing,
but here he could not have been clearer:
he doesn’t want anyone to misunderstand.

And there is no limit to how often we are to offer forgiveness.
Peter tried to put a number on how many times:
“Surely, Lord, we can’t be expected to keep forgiving,
especially to keep forgiving the same person.
We have to be able to draw the line somewhere!”

But Jesus tried to get his often-obtuse fisherman friend
to understand that we are called to forgive others
as often as we hope God will forgive us.
And the number of times we hope God will forgive us
is a lot more than 490, the seventy times seven
that Jesus uses in his teaching.
Do the math: if we confess our sins to God
and seek forgiveness only on Sunday,
that means God will fulfill his obligation
to each of us in less than 10 years.
So if we start the clock now,
God will be off the hook on Sunday, February 21, 2016.
But God doesn’t do that with us: he has offered us complete
and absolute forgiveness through our Lord Jesus Christ,
and in return, he expects us to offer complete
and absolute forgiveness
to one another in the name of Jesus Christ.

Let me try something this morning.
Let me ask a few questions of you.
Just raise your hand to respond:
Who is perfect here?
Go ahead – raise your hand if you are perfect.
Don’t be bashful.
Anyone? No one!
Okay, next question: who has never said something
that has angered or hurt someone?
Anyone? No one!
Who has never done something
that has angered or hurt someone?
Anyone? No one!

None of us is perfect.
All of us have done something, said something
that has gotten us in trouble, that has hurt someone.
We said or did something yesterday,
and we will probably say or do something tomorrow.
That’s why forgiveness is so important to God,
such a vital part of Jesus’ teaching.
If we didn’t forgive,
our world would have crumbled a long time ago.
Yes: Forgiveness can be hard at times.
And it is easier to forgive a small infraction
than a large one,
something relatively minor,
compared with something major.
But did you notice: Jesus does not qualify the transgression:
he says simply, “forgive transgressions.”
It may not happen immediately
but we are to work toward forgiveness.

And forgiveness must be real.
If we hold onto the transgression,
hold onto our feelings,
if we keep our feelings in that bottom drawer,
and at the same time hold ourselves out
as disciples of Jesus Christ,
you heard what John would call us: liars.

We all have a bottom drawer; every one of us.
Later today, or perhaps tomorrow as you enjoy the holiday
I encourage you to open up your drawer
and see what’s in there,
see who is in there.
Who have you not forgiven completely?
Who have you told you’ve forgiven, but haven’t?
Who have you not forgiven who has sought your forgiveness?
Reach into that file drawer and take out those files,
and put them in the trash, and wash yourself clean.
“for in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself,
not counting their trespasses against them…”
(2 Cor. 5:19)
fulfilling in Christ the promise made through Jeremiah:
“I will forgive their iniquity,
and remember their sin no more.”
(Jeremiah 31:34)
AMEN