Love Is Say, "I'm Sorry"

Love Is Saying, “I’m Sorry”
Rev Steven R Mitchell
First Congregational UCC, Rock Springs, WY 10/31/2010
Based on Psalm 32: 1-7 & Luke 19:1-10


We American’s love a good love story. Millions of books are written depicting the search for that one “true love”. Hundreds of movies have been produced concerning “true love”, with its audiences quietly dabbing the tears from their eyes in the darkness of the theatre. Movies like Sleepless In Seattle even refer to these types of movies, such as a scene where all the women in the apartment are in tears as they watch An Affair To Remember, and the guys in the kitchen drinking their beer, berate it as a “Chick flick”, when in another scene you see all the men sitting in the living room crying while they are watching the movie Rocky, and the women are in the kitchen contributing their husbands emotionalism to watching a “Man flick.”
There are always memorable lines that come from these types of movies. Lines like, “We’ll always have Paris”, or “Play it again, Sam” which actually really wasn’t in the movie Casablanca, but became a memorable line anyway. Another memorable bit of Proverb comes from the 1970 hit movie, strangely enough titled, Love Story. The line used twice within the film about two young lovers, both from the opposite side of the tracks; the man from old New England family and money, the girl from a poor family with no notoriety. This famous line was, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
I didn’t much like this line in 1970 and the older I become the more convinced it is the furtherest thing from truth. Actually, in 1972, in the movie What’s Up Doc, Barbara Streisand’s character looks up to Ryan O’Neal, bats her eyes and once again delivers the line, “after all Doc, Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Ryan O’Neal, who first delivered that line in the movie Love Story, looks at the camera and with a blank look on his face, say’s, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
If we look at what today’s lectionary reading is saying this morning, saying “you’re sorry” seems to be the only way to come back into fellowship with another person. In Psalm 32, we read where the renewed relationship between the writer and God comes by recognizing his sin and the asking for forgiveness. It was the psalmist’s sin that was keeping him separated from God. The result of his refusal to acknowledge his sin kept his spirit in despair and his strength was draining away from him. But once the psalmist said, “I am sorry for my sin”, he recognized a change within his heart and his burden, his aloneness was at once changed to where he felt “renewed” and “alive” and no longer “alone” in life.
Our relationship with God so very much parallels the relationships that we have as humans, whether it is between two people who are in love, or between individuals within a faith community, or two friends, or even within the family structure. When we are in relationship with someone, we have to be open within our heart in order to deepen that relationship. When we find that we have wronged that person, and become stubborn and do not acknowledge that wrong, we then begin to build walls that if left unattended, eventually become such barriers that the relationship experiences an ultimate break down.
This happens far too often in church communities. One person gets their feelings hurt, or their integrity or authority challenged by someone else, sometimes without the other person realizing it. Lines are drawn and the process of “retaliation” begins, which can escalate into all out and out conflict that by this point includes a good number of people, each taking sides. From the point of the psalmist and looking at the faith community as a single body, he says, “my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.” This is what happens when we build up walls and do not acknowledge our sin to God or to one another. The body begins to dry up and whither, a cancer grows within the body and eats away at all that is good.
The only way that healing and reconciliation can come about, then, is to say, “I am sorry”. I want to share a couple of examples of how varying aspects of wrong doing develop into the building of walls and ultimately prevent healing. In my early twenties, I was a fresh kid on the block, so to speak, as a new member of a church that had had a major split. A split so severe that it was handled at the Superior Court level and the winners, if you want to call them that were a handful of people who were given back a building that could seat 2,000 for worship, along with two educational wings, one with five floors and the other four stories. This group of 175 members was able to keep their place of worship but from the eyes of the larger community, the building was always viewed as, the place where those people can’t get along with one another, and the growth of that faith community suffered because of the cities sigma that was represented by the physical building. The healing for that congregation didn’t come until a pastor by the name of Dr. Roger Fredrickson, a man with great skill, contacted the pastor of the larger, displaced congregation who had build a new home across the river, with the intent to trade pulpits and have each congregation worship with the other in both buildings in two separate evening services. This was going against a court order of twenty-five years that stated the group in exile was never to step foot inside the original building of dispute. As it turns out, the larger, displaced congregation was also in need of healing and through this act of worshipping together and with many people saying, “I’m sorry” to folks that they hadn’t seen in twenty-five years, there was a renewal within the heart of both congregations. It was big news and with the coverage by the local news paper, there was a healing within the community itself and no longer did people look at the big old stone building on Broadway Ave, as the church where “they can’t get along.”
As a new person and wanting to contribute within the structure of the church, I joined various boards over my years there. As I worked on these boards, I continually butted heads with one man in particular, who always seemed to be on the other side of any issue. By my way of thinking, his views tended to be in the directions that strangled church growth. My frustration continued to grow toward this man. Finally I decided to pray about the situation. I had once been told by a wise person, not to pray for change for the other person, but for myself. As I did this, I eventually began to realize that this person’s opposition wasn’t to keep the church from growing but rather was based on good intensions. I was so convicted of my frustration, that once I found release from it through prayer, I had to go and share what had been going on within my heart with this man and asked for his forgiveness. The funny thing was, he wasn’t aware of our alienation, for you see, most of it had been in my own heart, yet through that conversation, and we were able to build stronger bonds of respect and open communications. This wouldn’t have been possible had I held onto my feelings of frustration and had I not been willing to go to him and say, “I was sorry.”
On the other end of the spectrum, my first appointment as a pastor was in a small rural community, where once again, there had been a huge dispute, again between the pastor and the congregation. Through the hardening of hearts, on both sides of the issue, this dispute ultimately involved the whole community of around a thousand people. During this dispute, one of the patriarchs of the church received a letter for a minister in the neighboring town, basically accusing him as being the center of that dispute. This man deeply hurt by these accusations, held on to this letter for several years, often referring back to it. Eventually I submitted to reading this letter and in truth it was a letter filled with many hurtful things. Whether, the things within the letter were based on fact or not, isn’t the point that I am wanting to stress. What this letter represented was a wall that was preventing a healing for this man over a situation that had pasted several years earlier. The eventual healing came when this man was able to destroy the letter, for in destroying the letter, it broke down that barrier and allowed him to heal and move forward. Once his healing started, the church seemed to begin to heal as well. I’m not saying that this man was keeping the church from moving forward, but rather, there was a change that seemed to occur within the whole congregation, that can only be explained as the “healing through the Holy Spirit” at a congregational level. This healing wasn’t able to happen until this one person actually started to heal emotionally and spiritually, I think because the congregation as a whole saw the change within him, much like what we see in the change in Zacchaeus the tax collector.
In Luke, we read where Zacchaeus, an obviously sinful person, finds healing through an encounter with Jesus. In this particular story, we do not read that Zacchaeus has actually “repented” in front of Jesus, but by his actions was definitely a different man prior to Jesus coming to his house. I think to get a fuller picture about this story we have to go back to chapter eighteen and read about the parable Jesus was telling about two men who were praying to God; One was a Pharisee, the other a tax-collector. The Pharisee, was looking up to heaven thanking God he wasn’t like the tax-collector, who was a sinner; while the tax-collector was so contrite in his pray of asking for forgiveness, that he couldn’t even raise his head to heaven. In this parable, Jesus indicates that it was the Tax-collector who went away as a forgiven man and able to enter into a right relationship with God and that the Pharisee, the religious man was the one not forgiven for his sin, first and foremost because he actually didn’t ask for forgiveness.
I think that this parable Jesus was sharing came from an actual encounter that he had had with Zacchaeus, and that when Jesus had entered into Jericho, he recognized Zacchaeus as the tax-collector in the previous town and by his inviting himself to Zacchaeus’ house, gives the indication of just how included Zacchaeus actually is, as a man who had asked to be forgiving for his wrong doing and has found reconciliation and affirmation in the eyes of Jesus.
The church as a collective body has often acted like the Pharisee that sees itself as righteous, when in fact has done many sinful and harmful acts upon individuals, harmful acts so great that it builds up walls that prevent “reconciliation” between God and those individuals, as well as walls of isolation between God and the church. True healing doesn’t take place until there is a real, “I’m sorry” being spoken. The opportunity for healing for American Japanese did not take place until our government publically “apologized” for placing them into concentration camps during World War II. The work of Congregational Missionaries in Hawaii, destroyed a culture, and with the admission by the UCC to the Hawaiians, that we recognize the pain, sorrow, and injustices that were incurred through our zeal to provide “salvation” to them and in saying “we are sorry for our wrongness”, deep wounds are starting to heal.
A church will never truly over come deep hurts that occur within its individual members until there is forgiveness being asked for. There are people within a faith community that can feel they are the “victims” and pray that they will be vindicated. But you know what? That is a prayer of futility, for that type of prayer will never change anything. The prayer of the person who feels “victimized” should be a prayer for personal healing. Why? Because, you can never change “the other person”, but we can change ourselves, and it is through personal transformation where we are able to break down those walls that separate us spiritually, both from those that we feel have victimized us, as well as from God. For the odd thing is, the more we hold on to hurt and pain and memory of “who did what to us”, the farther away we move from a truly loving relationship with God. Our hearts are either like the Pharisee and see “others” as being the problem, or our hearts are going to be like the tax-collector and know that we are the problem. It is in the heart of the tax-collector that God truly is able to heal, and with that healing, everyone benefits, not just the one saying, “I’m sorry” but everyone! Am