Things fall apart.
Of course I’m talking about the world. I hear so many of us struggling to make sense of what feels like the world falling apart. I’m right there with you, and so my sermon this morning is less about give you the answer than sharing some thoughts about where I’m trying to start down a path to forgiveness.
Because ultimately, that’s where we need to get, I think. We need to get from this dumpster fire of a situation to a point where we can forgive–I don’t know–everything for this happening.
I wasn’t going to preach about Lent. While I’ve found it a powerful practice to examine my spiritual life, most of us probably don’t relate much to it as it’s practiced in traditional Christianity. I didn’t see many ashes on foreheads on Wednesday.
Yet, my book discussion group slammed right into it Wednesday. I’ve been with this group for twenty years. We started in seminary as a covenant group, morphed into an annual lakeside retreat, shifted to a Bible study group for lapsed Unitarians, and now we’re reading Diana Butler Bass’s book A Beautiful Year. And this week’s reading is on Lent. Which we didn’t skip.
Bass’ book was published in 2025, so part of me wants to scream through the pages, beautiful year? Really. Bass is known as a purveyor of gratitude, but this seems too far.
But her section on Lent is really a meditation on death and the forgiveness of death. Coming to peace with the death of things. As anyone who has aged past 50 knows, at some point in our lives death becomes more real than it was in middle age.
I’ve never thought about the practice, or period, of Lent being about forgiveness for the world falling apart, but this is exactly what Butler Bass suggests.
The truth is, the more you fall in love, the more we feel loss.
Things fall apart.
You ask yourself: Why am I doing this? Why do I fall in love with beauty and grace when, ultimately, everything falls apart?
How can we even move toward the kind of unconditional forgiveness the world seems to require of us? How to forgive the world as it slowly falls apart?
I learned everything I need to know about forgiving the world from my diminutive Southern Baptist grandmother. The Southern Baptist identify was very important to her, and up until she was 93 years old she walked more than a mile to church every Sunday up and down the steep hills of Newport Beach, California. And did Zumba, and yoga. She was that kind of tough, all 4’9″ of her. I’ll never forget how she outpaced Cindy and I the Sunday she proudly took us to see the beloved church she had attended for decades. As we approached, I noticed it wasn’t Southern Baptist at all. On the sign it read, “Community Church of Newport Beach” and in little tiny letters underneath, “United Church of Christ.” Grandma, I asked, are you UCC? What’s that, she replied, squinting at the tiny letters? I just love the way this church loves everyone. For those of you who don’t know, UU and UCC are the two most progressive protestant traditions.
Truth be told, my grandma spent her whole life learning to love and forgive. I’ve watched her do it my whole life. Growing up, my family all had big and often abrasive personalities. Someone would say something inappropriate at Christmas. Forgiven. Someone would violate the “no politics at Thanksgiving rule” with a rant about Carter or Clinton. Forgiven. One of my cousins disowned the family and changed his last name. Grandpa said it was unforgivable. For her, nothing was, because she knew the stakes of unforgiveness where we forget how come back to balance. I remember it seemed naive to us sometimes, until I remembered when she forgave me. It must have been very hard for her, the thing I said. I was probably ten years old. I had heard my friend tell his grandmother, “I hate you grandma,” when he didn’t get his way. It sounded tough, so I tried it. Grandma wouldn’t let me play after dark, or some other terrible horrible injustice, and I blurted out, “I hate you!”
She stopped. She turned to me, got down on my level, and said, “No, you don’t. And your words hurt because I know you don’t mean them.”
I burst into tears. And then the small miracle. She forgave me. I could feel it. No grudge was left behind. Just her firm resolve not to let it happen again, and love. I learned to live with whatever rule she enacted to ruin my life. Which wasn’t, of course.
I think this practice of constantly forgiving the small insults of life prepared her for the big ones, the unthinkable ones.
They came. Boy did they come. Later in her life, in separate instances, her adult son and her adult daughter were killed tragically. My father and aunt. I think part of her eventual resilience and healing came because she had spent her life learning to forgive in small and big ways, never turning away from pain but allowing life to take her where it took her. What other choice does she have, she has said? To stop living? To stop loving?
Losing his children destroyed my grandfather, who died bitter and hurt. His world fell apart. Grandma’s did too, but somehow she returned to joyfulness. If the cost of life is suffering, she knew the reward of life is everything else.
Pierro Ferrucci, in his book The Power of Kindness, writes that forgiveness is a decision we make to create peace and to close the circle of violence…when we choose to hold onto anger for the way things are, or have been. This, he writes, is counter intuitive to the evolutionary process that would have us destroy all that threatens our sense of safety. And the world does not feel safe. Forgiveness exposes us to feelings of vulnerability. Ferrucci writes that we feel vulnerable “because our identity, like ivy that grows over an old column and clings to it, is attached to the wrong we have received.” We feel that to forgive will invite danger, and that to retain our sense of outrage and indignation will give us strength.
But forgiveness allows us to transcend the part of human nature that would have us retreat to our caves and resentments. Ferrucci writes that forgiveness is illogical and surprising, sometimes sublime, as it frees us from chains of resentment.
Right now I’m not ready to forgive the world. It’s too much. There’s too much. So I’ve been pondering the small forgivenesses so we can practice for the big ones. Those Olympians we’re all watching on tv this month didn’t start jumping hundreds of feet in the air; they began with a mogul. Those ice skaters didn’t start with a triple axel, they began with a hop. Those curlers didn’t start with, well, never mind. I have no idea how curlers train.
I wonder, often, about how the very practice of church give us space to practice forgiveness. Church is a constant practice of small forgivenesses, not just those monsters that we can barely fathom. I don’t think a week goes by where I don’t hear one of us struggling with something someone else did, or didn’t do, or should do, did 20 years ago, did yesterday. And it’s wonderful work. It’s like a forgiveness training camp. That time you almost left because someone said something unkind. Or a bad leadership decision. Or a new theology or identity that prompted you to discomfort and growth. The new minister who couldn’t remember your name. Or a previous minister hurt us. Maybe a previous leadership made changes that didn’t work out well for you, or others, or anyone. Sitting too long in worship. The newsletter format. The altar tables. The projector screen. Too many visuals. Not enough visuals. We wish we could do better avoiding the inevitable bumps of community. It’s difficult to trust because we’ve been hurt before. Hurt is always real.
BUT! Seriously, when I tried to think of how many times a church conflict ended without reconciliation over my career, I could count five or six times.
Church is a perfect place to practice forgiveness. Oh my gosh we can get upset about things. I’ve often said church is where our inner children come to play. I don’t say this because they shouldn’t. In fact, we intentionally create safe spaces so the wounded parts of us can come out to play, be seen, be held, be healed. There have been more than a few times in the past six months when members have apologized to me because we had to address something in our community related to being hurt, offended, misunderstood, neglected.
When we can face something and then find a way to reconciliation and forgiveness, for me it’s a win. That’s what we’re here for. To practice forgiveness. To find paths back to relationship. It’s not always possible, but in my experience I’d say 99 percent of the time we figure out how to forgive each other and return to relationship.
Sometime we have to stick to our guns, and sometimes we have to give things up. I’ll never forget the great cranberry cushion controversy of 2016. When I first arrived at one of the churches I’ve served, I did a little rearrangement of the chairs. I pulled together a half-dozen people to consult. I loved the new arrangement. It brought people closer, moved people to the center, shortened the long rows. It was perfect. Informal polling suggested that 90 percent didn’t agree. The chairs went back. The center isle returned. And we used it for an opportunity to practice the small forgivenesses that prepare the way for the big ones. They’re just chairs, right? No, they’re the furniture of our lives. Relationship, covenant, to be a people of forgiveness, that’s what they are. Sometimes chairs get moved. Sometimes they go back.
But the next time we messed with the chairs, we were better prepared. This is where the cranberry cushions come in. Some people wanted cushions, others worried that 300 pillows would ruin the acoustics of the room, but mostly people were worried about the color. But one thing we agreed on was nobody would do anything until we agreed. OMG. We finally came to the resolution that as long as they were the exact cranberry color of a particular cushion we already had in the church, everyone would be happy. And wouldn’t you know it, IKEA just happened to have 300 cranberry cushions on clearance for $4 each.
It is resistance to life that gets us into permanent trouble, so we practice the small forgivenesses that prepare us for the big ones. Living in community gives us so many ways to practice.
So many ways to forgive the small injustices of community. Here’s another truth: Offering forgiveness isn’t just about changing the other person, it’s about changing how we react to things that aren’t going to change. What we’re really trying to attain with forgiveness is a renewed sense of trust.
I think when it comes to forgiveness we have to start small and work our way up. We may never forgive the world, or have the capacity to reconcile the terrible stuff, until we can learn to trust and forgive the small injustices and affronts.
I wish, also, that we could do all of our forgiving in advance. I wish I could forgive everyone for whatever it is they’ll do to me in the future, but I can’t. I wish everyone I know could forgive me in advance for my lapses, oversights, hubris, misguided leaps of the spirit, and blind spots. But they can’t. Each forgiveness will be met in that unexpected moment of transgression, and each time we forgive in that moment, or in moments after, we grow better and better in it.
All the qualities to which we aspire, to be of good character, to be resilient, to be steadfast, to be loving — they all rest their haughty weights upon our practice of forgiveness. They all rest upon the many transgressions we will be asked to forgive as our lives, hopes, and aspirations intersect.