There is nothing more powerful to me when I lead this congregation in the Lord’s Prayer, as when I can hear my daughter’s sweet little voice out of the corner of my ear reciting it with us. My daughter is 5 years old, and she has learned the Lord’s Prayer. We say it together nearly every night before bedtime along with her other prayers. Lately, she has wanted to say it on her own, and I get lost in her tiny voice clearly reciting each word, seemingly to fully understand exactly what she is praying about. What amazes me is how well she knows it, and I only need to remind her of a word here and there to help her. However, I have noticed that nearly each time she says the Lord’s prayer, she tends to skip a line—the same line—every time.

She has no problem saying, “And forgive us our trespasses,” but she immediately goes into “and lead us not into temptation…” skipping right over, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Although I gently remind her each time, she continues to skip that line. It’s gotten me thinking…why it is so hard for her to remember to pray the line …“as we forgive those who trespass against us?” Then I began to realize that of all the lines in the Lord’s Prayer, this one line, maybe is really the hardest prayer any of us ever prays.

If we were honest with ourselves, we too would like to skip this line in the Lord’s Prayer. We have no trouble praising God in the prologue; of course we want God’s will to be done; and clearly we recognize that our daily needs are met by God; we have no problem asking God to forgive us our wrongs; and even beg God to protect us from evil so that we can live free and joyous lives. But this one line stands out…this line is different. All the other lines of the Lord’s prayer is asking God to do something for us; but this line is our promise to God to “forgive those who trespass against us.” If truth be told, this line makes us uncomfortable, because we have real trouble following through on our promise that we will indeed forgive those who wrong us.

We live in a forgive-less society: a society that prizes retribution, revenge, and fairness instead of grace, love, and mercy. And we buy into it…someone does us wrong, cuts off in traffic, hurts our children, cheats us in some way…we feel it is our duty to make things right, that it is okay to do them wrong, hold a grudge, making them suffer as we suffered. We want to “get ‘em back!” But that is not the Christian idea of justice. ‘Getting even’ is not in the Lord’s prayer.

But, if we examine this line closely, we begin to discover a terrifying truth…there is a clear, unmistakable relationship to God’s forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of others: could it be that we cannot be forgiven by God unless we can learn to forgive others? That doesn’t sound like ‘good news!’

1) Scripture: Matthew 6:9-13 (and 14-15) and 1 John 2:1, 9-10

Certainly God could forgive us, but it seems that God chooses not to if we are not willing to forgive others. The parable of the unmerciful servant, who was granted forgiveness from the king for his debts, but was unwilling to forgive a fellow servant who owed him a debt, incurred the wrath of the king. Jesus also explained to Peter that one must forgive not just seven times, but seventy times seven…and it seems quite clear in the Lord’s prayer, that we say everyday that our forgiveness is directly tied to how we forgive others.

Look closely at verse 12 in Matthew, which is the root of “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” It clearly shows a relationship between God’s forgiveness and how we forgive others, but what kind of relationship? Jesus seemed to know that his disciples would struggle with this line, so after he taught them the Lord’s prayer, he explains what he means by forgiveness in verses 14 and 15 (which were not read today), “For 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.”

When we harbor feelings of bitterness against others, we sense darkness moving in to our lives like a heavy blanket thrown over us, weighing us down, and we become overwhelmed with feelings of anger, bitterness and loneliness that we just can’t seem to let go. It begins to affect other relationships in our lives, and we find ourselves slipping away from the joy-filled life that God intended.

Today’s text in 1 John also echoes this sentiment that if we hold something against another person, we are trapped in darkness, shackled down, enslaved to a life of eternal misery. But, we lie to ourselves and to God if we call ourselves lovers of God, but cannot find a way to love others. Forgiveness lets the light in, cleans out our closet, renews and refreshes our souls and frees us to discover that close, intimate and joy-filled relationship with God.

Just as the Great commandment links our love of God to our love of neighbor, Jesus is linking the forgiveness from God to our forgiveness of our neighbor, revealing forgiveness as the ultimate expression of love.

Can we really love God if we are holding grudges against our neighbor, a family member, a fellow church member? Can we really experience the exhilarating joy and freedom of life with God, if we are shackled to the anger, pain, guilt and feelings of revenge against a fellow human being? When we can reach out and forgive, especially when it seems we have every right to demand retribution, we are fulfilling the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves, which in turn transforms us and others into the joy-filled people that God intended.

(Many have heard me tell this true story, but the power of forgiveness bears repeating.)

At 4am in the summer of 2003, Trish received the phone call that is every parent’s nightmare: there’s been an accident, and your son is in the hospital. She rushed to the hospital only to discover that her son, Wayne, was fighting for every breath in surgery because his best friend, Karl, had been drinking and driving. A few days later, Trish’s only son died.

Karl was distraught with guilt with what he had done. The betrayal, the lies, and the poor life-and-death choices he made. He was in agony, not only over losing a best friend, but being responsible for his death. Everyone makes mistakes, but few make a mistake that can’t be fixed.

Trish was overcome with all the normal feelings that any mother would feel: pain, anger, despair and most of all looking for someone to blame for her son’s death.

A few days later at the funeral home, Trish, filled with anger and grief, was standing in front of her son’s casket when she saw Karl come in crying. Then she did something quite extraordinary. She walked away from the casket directly toward Karl and hugged him with the passion and love of a mother to a son. And Karl went limp in her arms.

He told her he was sorry, so very, very sorry.

Trish reached for his face and held it gently. Their foreheads touched. Trish said to Karl in almost a whisper, “Honey, I forgive you. Wayne loved you. I love you.”

Karl’s parents were astonished. “There was a light coming from her face,” Karl’s mother said. “I’ll never forget it. I birthed him, but she gave him back his life.”

At the trial of Karl for manslaughter, Trish, the mother of the victim, stood up and spoke on her son’s killer’s behalf--begging the court for mercy. Karl was given three years of probation, including mandatory speaking engagements to tell his story.

A reporter once asked Trish how she could forgive Karl so soon after the accident. Her reply reflects the truth of the power of God’s forgiveness. “I’m a sinner and God sent his only son to save me and forgive my sins. I’m not worthy of that forgiveness. So why wouldn’t I forgive Karl? I love Karl. Now he has two mothers.”

I wonder how Karl would’ve turned out without forgiveness…bitter, depressed, lonely, eternal feelings of guilt.

But because of Trish’s forgiveness, Karl is now a transformed man. Just by meeting him, one gets a sense that he is different. He is now a more forgiving person, because he has been forgiven. He has become a more healing man, because he is being healed. He is now a more loving person, because he has been unconditionally loved.

The world will never change if we continually seek retribution; but transformation can begin if we can learn to forgive others their trespasses against us.

Learning to be a forgiver begins and ends in prayer. Good forgivers are good pray-ers. Oh, it’s easy to pry for people we like; it’s even easy to pray for people we don’t like to change…but It is hard to pray for us to change.

Talk to God. Tell God all about your desire to forgive that person that you just can’t stand. You’ve probably talked to everybody else in the world about it, gossiping, demeaning, putting down the other person…but our tune will change when we talk to God about it. Prayer has a way of opening us up, clearing away the rubble so that we can receive God’s power of forgiveness. Just as God’s grace, faith, and love are gifts from God, so is forgiveness.

Make no mistake, forgiveness is not saying that the offense never happened. It did.

Forgiveness is not saying everything’s okay. It isn’t.

Forgiveness is not saying that we no longer feel the pain of the offense. We do.

Forgiveness is the gift from God whereby we are able to turn over to God the business of how the other guy is doing. Forgiveness is the gift from God that allows us to let go of our need to be the instrument of correction and retribution. Forgiveness is saying, “I still feel the pain, but I am willing to let go of your involvement in my pain.”

In the end, forgiveness has little to do with changing the other person, and more to do with changing ourselves.

A church member entered our doors for the first time on April 25, 2004 weighed down with thoughts of his father, although dead for 17 years, still haunting him with the painful memories of abuse that he just couldn’t or wouldn’t forgive. But today was different…for the first time ever, the struggle to find forgiveness was on his mind. He desperately wanted to be free of the darkness of bitterness that has deeply clouded his life.

In the sermon, Richard Randolph was preaching on the text where Jesus is asking Peter if he loved him, clearly referring to how Peter denied Jesus in his greatest time of need. Jesus responded to Peter’s betrayal, not with anger, retribution, or even bitterness…but with love. Richard said, “Next to love, forgiveness is the most important human emotion.” At that moment, a flood of emotions washed over the man in the pew, and he was able to forgive his father right then and there. He realized that forgiveness was not about his Father, but about himself…He was able to drop that ‘100-lb sack’ that he’d been carrying through life. As a result, he said to me, “Once I did forgive for the first time, subsequent forgiveness on others came so much more easily.” The truth is forgiveness has little to do with the other person, and everything to do with us. Forgiveness may not change the other person, but forgiveness changes us.

In the end, every time you say the Lord’s prayer, may each of us be reminded of those whom we need to forgive. Whom do you need to forgive? It’s time to let it go. It’s time to allow God’s gift of forgiveness to transform you, to free you from the burden that is keeping you in darkness and despair, slowly eating away at your soul. It’s time to drop that extra hundred pound sack that keeps you from living the vibrant life of Christ. It’s time to lay it down at the foot of the cross of forgiveness, and to claim for ourselves the very last words of Jesus before he died, “Forgive them.” It’s time. It’s time to make good on our promise to God: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”