Disarmament of the Heart--November 22, 2022

Disarmament of the Heart--November 22, 2022

"Love is not irritable or resentful..." / "Love is not easily provoked and keeps no record of wrongs." [1 Corinthians 13:5b]

I don’t want to get us bogged down in a lot of inside baseball here, but I wanted to include two different translations because this is one time when the often-reliable New Revised Standard Version misses the punch of the Greek. Saying that love merely “is not resentful” sounds rather weak, something akin to answering someone’s question, “How is that restaurant?” with “Not awful.” Talk about damning someone with faint praise.

So let’s go with The New International Version for the day. Its translation of the same verse, “keeps no record of wrongs,” is getting somewhere. It says something about how love keeps on going, how it works. It says something about the inner workings of forgiveness. Really, Paul is saying that forgiveness is ultimately simple. Not easy, certainly, but simple. Simple, in the sense of being uncluttered with lots of old odds and ends that are being saved for who-knows-what.

We have a word in our society for people whose homes do get filled up with piles and stacks of things, things that are compulsively saved and held onto in the name of “you-never-know-if-you-might-need-this-one day.” That word is hoarder. We know the stories. We’ve seen the TV shows. People with towers of old newspapers stacked precariously in the living room so you can’t really walk around freely. Folks with scraps of this, odds and ends of that, all stored in piles in their own homes, just because they think they might possibly, maybe, one day have a use for those things. And all the while, they are losing usable space in the present in their actual living rooms and dining rooms.

What is the solution, the help, for hoarders? To simplify. Sometimes it takes someone else’s loving but honest wake-up call to make someone get rid of (or do it for them, whether they like it or not) some of the stacks and piles and bags and collections, and just pitch them. You help a hoarder, not by feeding their habit and saying, “Yes, you just might need to have a copy of the newspaper from seventeen years ago—you should keep it just in case!” but rather by helping them part with the things they had thought were important enough to keep. You have to say, “Your life will actually be better with less, not with more.”

For most of us, watching the plight of real hoarders whether on television or in real life, this seems obvious. Just because something might possibly of use one day in the future, it doesn’t automatically follow that you should hold onto it. You might need a collection of empty tin cans one day (who could say what, but let’s give you the benefit of the doubt, you crazy person), but even so, you definitely need the space in your kitchen to be able to walk around with to cook breakfast and wash your vegetables, so the cans will have to go out from your pantry and into the recycling bin just to help you keep your sanity.

Odd, isn’t it, that we can understand it when we are talking about disorders that lead us to hoard things compulsively, but that we have such a hard time seeing the same thing, the same impulse, working in us when it comes to our inability to forgive. Or wait, maybe it’s more honest to say “our refusal to forgive.”

The issue is that we are hoarders at heart. Quite literally, in our hearts, we often find ourselves unable and unwilling to forgive and to be reconciled to others, because we have stuffed our souls with stacks of newspapers, collections of empty tin cans, and other odds and ends we are “just sure we’ll use someday.” We hold onto memories and hurts inflicted by others, and we keep picking at the scabs they leave so that they will not heal. And we hold onto those memories of what others have done to us (or sometimes, just what we perceive they have done to us) because we are convinced in some place of our souls, that we “might find them useful again,” with the same delusion of the crazy cat lady who never throws out the cardboard tubes from paper towels and toilet paper. We hold onto wounds others have inflicted on us, and worse yet, by holding onto them and agitating them, we build scar tissue in our spirits, and that in turn calcifies our bitterness even more than before. We are so easily hoarders of the heart, holding onto past wrongs, and then our accumulated bitterness about those wrongs, even when the original offenses were small. And it’s all in the name of thinking we might just need it later—to use the past as a weapon against someone, a way to beat them with the same mistakes of the past every time we want to hurt them.

What would you tell someone who hoarded stuff in their space? You would do something to help them unclutter and simplify the inside of their house.

So what would the Scriptures tell us when we are the ones hoarding the memories of wrongs from others in our hearts? I suspect you would hear something like, “genuine love doesn’t keep record of wrongs.” And then the Scripture offers us a new path, an alternative way of living in the world. Instead of stockpiling our hurts so we can weaponize them later, what if we let go as soon as we possibly could of the right to weaponize the past? What if we decided we were done with hoarding in any sense of the word? 

Maybe that's all forgiveness really is in the end--the choice to de-weaponize the past and to unilaterally disarm by dismantling the grudges we otherwise would have stockpiled to return fire in the event of an attack.   Whether it's our forgiveness of others or God's forgiveness of us, it involves the choice to let go, rather than to hoard, the record of wrongs done.  That doesn't mean pretending the past hasn't happened or that we are perfect peaches, but it means we refuse to attack others with that past, just as God refuses to attack us with our past, so that in turn we can instead tell the truth about the past, face it, and begin again.  It is much as James Baldwin wrote:  "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."  So then, the challenge of loving well is to face the past without weaponizing it.

 Let’s dare that today—and see what it does to our ability to forgive.

Lord Jesus, unclutter our hearts, and simplify our love, so that we can let go of all the things that prevent us from reconciling with our neighbors.