Matthew 5:21-25; Luke 17: 3,4; Luke 19: 7,8

Last week a football player on the Miami Dolphins was the big story in sports news.  A powerful player named Rickey Incognito (you can’t make this stuff up), was blasted for being so incredibly violent.  The man was totally focused on hurting people they said.  So he went from being incognito to being very much “cognito.”  A lot of physical injury is very obvious, but lot of the psychological is incognito, below the surface. We ourselves may not even be aware of it.  Today I introduced the topic of “moral injury,” the grievous harm we do someone and ourselves that we consider at one point to be unforgiveable.  In the Gospel of Luke Zacchaeus is presented as a curious man who climbed a tree because he couldn’t see over the crowd. Jesus recognizes the hidden pain inside him, the moral injury he has taken on as a result of his immoral activities.  In an earlier chapter of Luke, Jesus talks about the order to forgive whenever someone comes to you.  That’s not easy. The singer Shania Twain made a public statement about her ex-husband who cheated on her with her friend and said she will always be mad.  Last week the director of the Bolshoi Ballet who was injured by acid thrown in his face by a resentful dancer said during the trial of his attacker that he will never forgive them. Who could blame them?  Even when you, as Jesus says in Matthew you should do, namely go make up with the person with whom you have a quarrel and reconcile, it may be too much.  We all get stuck with some moral injury, some wrong we have committed that we can’t quite forgive ourselves for.

Friends, we just saw half of the short film “Day of Independence” about a moment in camp life.  We can see that the physical injury of the father is a metaphor for the greater psychological injury caused by the war which now creates an injury inside the family.  We see the guard who can net yet suspect what sense of moral injury he will experience later.   I also just read clips from a short story I wrote (“Confessions of an Old Soldier”) loosely based on the life of my Australian uncle who fought against Indonesian independence as a Dutch colonial soldier.  The narrator tells us “what his country made me do.” It seemed fitting on this veteran’s weekend, for veterans do not only carry victory, they carry emotional scars too.    As do we, friends.   Now I can’t quite say “moral injury” is what the Bible calls “sin,” for some moral injury is not our fault and some sins do not really harm others, but there is significant overlap I am sure.  What we can say is that the Bible, Jesus to be more specific, sees this deep sense of healing Jesus offered Zacchaeus, a healing that will finally free those who feel imprisoned by their past acts.  It is a kind of healing no other therapy, physical or psychological, can offer. Thanks be to God.