Matins at Guilsborough, 1 July 2001
O Lord Help us
To disagree without being disagreeable
To differ without being difficult
To be honest without being tense, and
To be frank without being offensive.
“ There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth”.  
The last time I said a few words from here,  some people may remember that I talked about the Seven Deadly Sins.  To-day, bearing in mind that quotation from our lesson for to-day, as set out in the Book of Common Prayer, I thought I would think aloud about forgiveness,  something of course fundamental to our Christian beliefs. 
The shepherd seeking the one lost sheep and returning it to the fold, is one of the best known and loved of the parables, and the image has been the subject of many famous paintings over the years, not to mention hymns.  
“ Perverse and foolish oft I strayed
And yet in love her sought me.
And  on His shoulders gently laid 
And home rejoicing brought me. “ 
I hope it does not sound to cynical, however, to speculate about whether the lost sheep was actually trying to do its own thing,  and might not have welcomed a forcible to return to the fold.  Personally,  I prefer the parable of the Prodigal Son whose repentance and return to his father’s house present much clearer images.  In that story it was the sinner himself who made up his mind to return.
In the Old Testament God is generally portrayed as sternly unforgiving towards sinners.  Pillars of salt, writing on the wall, sticky ends for transgressors, and indeed their descendants, are very much part of the story.  In the New Testament, however, the message that Jesus preached is one of a God, merciful  for those who truly repent.  No one remains beyond the Pale, provided they want to make a fresh start.  
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us” – words we say with almost monotonous regularity.  It’s on the wall.   Of course, we hope that God will forgive us our sins – we may think in our inner heart of hearts that  actually they are not very serious: the moral equivalent of three points on the licence and a smallish fine.    “A bit of greed, envy, lust, ?  Well, it’s  understandable. Everyone has it at some time or another” - we may say complacently.   Normally,  we don’t do things that put us in gaol.  
But how about those who trespass against us?  Well, do we? I mean forgive them.  These days one thinks about about Timothy Mcveigh or Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the boys who murdered Jamie Bulger.   Now, that’s a different proposition altogether from the level of forgiveness we might be expected to offer. Controversy rages. Vengeance is called for.  The News of the World names and shames.  
For those of us brought up with the belief, the hope, that God forgives those who truly repent,  one has to wonder whether there is not some kind of sliding scale for sin.  The sort of sins that most of us get up to, we could argue, God will hopefully fairly easily forgive.   But mass or vicious murder, what then?  
Can there be forgiveness for the enormity of the crimes  that McVeigh and the boys  committed?  I believe that for Christians the answer has to be: yes, provided there is repentance.  And even if there is no discernible repentance, sometimes we must forgive as Christ himself forgave.   After all, for us the most heinous crime in history was the judicial murder of our Lord and Saviour.  And what did he say about his killers as they nailed him to the cross?   “God forgive them for they know not what they do”.   
God forgive them for they knew not what they did.  I find it impossible to believe that those two ten year old from Bootle really knew what they were doing as they led Jamie Bulger away from that shopping centre.  They were bound to bediscovered and retribution was bound to fall upon them.  Short of wanting to destroy their own lives (which requires a fair amount of deep thought at ten)  they cannot have appreciated the consequences that would flow from their terrible actions.  
Do they now, as young adults, after eight years of education, repent?  We do not know.  But  look at the other side of the coin and think of the impact  if  James Bulger’s mother had publicly forgiven the boys instead of mounting a campaign for greater vengeance against them.  Now that would have made an impact.   
As Shakespeare puts it: 
“ The quality of mercy is not strained, 
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.
It is an attribute to God himself
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice”
So if we purport to live in a Christian society, I feel we have to accept these two lost sheep back to the fold, and protect them.  
The McVeigh case presents us with another difficult dilemma, mixed up as it is with the vexed issue of capital punishment.  Because he wanted to strike a blow against the Government , he ended up killing 168 people without compunction and was condemned as the worst mass murderer in US history..  Yet in some Middle Eastern countries, on the surface a good deal more religious than the United States, the men who packed lorries with explosives and  rammed  a couple of Embassies in East Africa,  killing scores of people, have been hailed as a heroes and martyrs.   
As I understand it, the Christian view is that  man made laws are supposed, in principle, to reflect the mind of God who desires the well being of human society and knows what is best to achieve it.  While justice is a human concern it is also, therefore, a divine one.  I prefer to take a New Testament view of  law and justice, with its message of forgiveness for repentant sinners   
Mc Veigh  seemed to remain defiant in the face of his death penalty, a tragic act of Old Testament like vengeance, putting an end to all possibility of  repentance in the future. He ought to have had that opportunity over the years.  Instead for his last recorded thoughts he quoted lines from a Victorian poem: 
It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.
 
True.  For whilst all of us are subject to sets of laws, for example of gravity  or of biology, the only law that we are free to disobey, if we choose, is the so called Law of Nature, that which determines right and wrong as human society sees it.  God has given us freedom to choose between good and evil, illustrated in the story of the Garden of Eden.  Too often we choose evil.  Yet Jesus gives us hope, that  whilst we may be the captains of our souls, we can get to Heaven if we ask forgiveness and,  I would argue, give forgiveness  freely to others.
 “ Joy shall be in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and none just persons that need no repentance. “ 
Anyone here claiming to be one of the 99?
 
