The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



Proper 19, Year A, September 11, 2011, Church of the Holy Cross Murfreesboro

“So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart” (Matt. 19:35).

Roger Kahn tells a story about major league ballplayer Roy Campanella in his book The Boys of Summer, a look back at the Brooklyn Dodgers team that Kahn knew when he was growing up in the 1940s and '50s. A large part of the book paints a portrait of where those players ended up later, “the boys of summer in their ruin” as the poem by Dylan Thomas puts it. So we see Campanella, the great African-American athlete laid out as a quadriplegic, one of those ruined boys of summer, visited years later by Milwaukee pitcher Lew Burdette. When Campanella played ball, he was one of the first African-Americans to move from the old Negro League to the Major Leagues, breaking a color barrier and becoming the focus of racism. Burdette was a pitcher who insulted Campanella with some racial slurs and then threw the ball and hit him while he was at bat. So now later Burdette comes to visit Campanella. Here’s Campanella, “The onliest thing I want to remember about Lew Burdette is that whatever he called me, and he shouldn’t have, later on he came all the way to Harlem to say hello”.

Our Gospel today is about forgiveness, God’s forgiveness of us and our need to forgive others. Jesus’ story about the king who forgives his slave even suggests that our own forgiveness by God depends on our forgiving others, the fellow slaves who in turn owe us something. Things won’t be right until we’ve extended to others the graceful margin that God has given to us, the mercy and pity the king shows to his own servant. We all stand on the same ground in the sight of God. The Lord’s Prayer itself suggests the same truth about forgiveness, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive the sins of others”. We’re not simply the recipients of forgiveness, but also those who are called to forgive others so that we ourselves may be forgiven.

The Gospel writer Matthew places Jesus’ story within a larger frame of the sort of community the Church is called to be, a place where truth can be told gracefully and people can be reconciled gratefully. How challenging that picture is! As I say the words I almost wince, because the Church in its members and in its life together falls so far short of the mark. It’s the case of the preacher who stands judged by his own words. Make no mistake: I know and you should too that forgiveness is hard work, in some cases the work of a lifetime or even more than a lifetime. Still, Jesus tells the story, and invites us into that difficult work of extending to others the forgiveness that we ourselves have received from God, because it’s on this forgiveness that our own salvation, our own spiritual health, depends.

So back to Campanella for a moment. We don’t know what moved Burdette to visit him, some inkling in retrospect of pain caused and perhaps a desire for forgiveness or not, but there’s mercy and pity in the story, and also the specter of an awesome ruin and life prevailing in the midst of death. Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead, stands in the midst of this story, bestowing peace and new life. There’s relationship restored and even reconciliation in this story, the movement of grace and the healing of memory. Remember what Campanella said, “The oneliest thing I want to remember.” Campanella sought within himself to forgive and to forget, which is one of those crucial markers for real forgiveness. I take it as a note of encouragement to all of us that Campanella’s words are almost in the form of a prayer, for a grace that is hoped for but not yet received: “The oneliest thing I want to remember,” not “The onliest thing I do remember.” The human race in the midst of its ruin has a hard time forgiving, but that’s the work we’re called to in the Church.

Memory is a subject to conjure with on a day like today, the tenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11th. I pray today for the healing of memory, for the grace to remember what is best in this day and the grace to forget the rest. “The oneliest thing I want to remember” is human bravery in the midst of ruin, pity and mercy in the actions of others, the graceful margin I have received over and over again in my life and seen in the lives of others. My prayer is for the grace to be able to extend that graceful margin to others. For it is in forgiving that we ourselves are forgiven, discovering in the process that all of us stand on the same “Ground Zero” in the sight of God.

- The Rt. Rev’d John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennessee

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