What Do You Do With Someone Unforgivable?

Speaker: Vince Klassen

What do we do when we're confronted with something unforgivable?

Not the small stuff. The real thing. The kind of act that makes us wonder if some people are just… evil.

Our answer matters. Not in some abstract philosophical way - but in something that cuts right to the heart of this series: what it actually looks like to Live Life Abundantly.

Because underneath that answer is a bigger one. What are we, as humans? Is there something in all of us that we keep disconnecting from - and what does it cost our lives when we do?

Here's what we keep finding: the way we see other people - especially the ones who've hurt us, failed us, or horrified us - shapes the life we're able to live. More than most of us want to admit.

What would change if we looked at the people we've written off - or the person we see in the mirror - and found something unexpected there?

Come find out. Friends Church, this Sunday.

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To donate to this podcast and support the making of more of these please visit https://friendschurch.ca/podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

What a beautiful picture of the sense of not being alone. Be still and know I am here with you. You are not alone. Let me transition very heavily, but I'm gonna come back to that. Um anyone Jason Statham fans, anyone? Anyone like violent, violent action movies? Put it big and proud. Nice and proud. More violence the better, as far as I'm concerned. Um, did anyone watch the newest ones? Shelter. Nice. What's the movie Shelter starts off with him on an island by himself, right? If you are currently hearing my voice and you're living on an island by yourself with no access to any other people, you do not need to listen to me right now. You can ignore me. But if you're like everybody else, every one of us here, being all by yourself is not something you get to experience, is it? You might live by yourself, but you see your neighbors. You might, you know, um work by yourself at home and everyone's gone, but you're still interacting with other human beings. I got an email this week from somebody in a community that I'm a part of. Someone's behavior was poor. Someone else was calling them out. They CC'd about 10 different people. There was name calling, there was like all kinds of stuff. And the core behavior that they're they're calling out was really bad behavior. But the way they handled it. There's a reason I called this series detoxification. Because there's a toxicness in how we often interact with humans. There's a sense of toxicity when sometimes it's we don't even know what we're doing. Something comes up and we get activated, we get freaked out, and suddenly we're yelling. Where someone told me a story. I don't know if I'm allowed to tell this, but there was a physical assault in the story because someone got upset. Toxic. Sorry, I didn't mean it quite loud. Yeah, I shouldn't have done that. Ha ha. All that when it's open and public, it's one thing. But when I realize that I've been toxic and I didn't even realize I was being toxic, that scares the crap out of me. Because I'm damaging the people around me, and I don't even know I'm doing it. After a particularly unskillful moment on my part, like the euphemism. I started rereading the John Gottman book, The Relationship Cure. This is a man and a woman who've studied couples, studied relationships. They bring people in, they call it the love lab, they bring people in this lab and they studied them for days at a time. And they realize the subtle little things that are destroying relationships. Things you don't even realize you're doing. What would life look like if we became more skillful? If we detoxified the way we interact with the people that we love, or the people who are rando strangers walking their dog on the street? What if we detoxified how we handle public conflict? So that we came out of that, not to overuse the metaphor, but with more abundance in our lives. And more abundance in the lives of the people around us. So again, if you're Jason Statham and you're living on an island by yourself because you're wanted by whatever corrupt organization, ignore everything I just said. But if you're like me, either you don't know, or reminder is a very good thing. It starts off May 24th. We're gonna have a community lunch right after it. So come on out, enjoy the series, then you can start practicing your skills with people across the table from you. The final thing I want to talk about is um if you're a Bible nerd, which uh guilty, I'm a bit of a nerd, I read through every instance of sin in the Bible for this current series that we're working on. Every instance, I have this 24-page paper of what the definition of sin may or may not be in all the different iterations. If that is something that's interesting to you, first, I'm sorry. Um, second, come on out. I'm gonna actually do a word study. So May 17th, after the service, you can sign up for it. We're basically just gonna go deep. So if you're just kind of like, I like it surface, just Vince Tum what's going on. Don't come to this one. If you want to geek out and really explore this topic, it's gonna be a blast. I know it sounds geeky that I'm saying it, but I'm super excited about this one. So come on out, sign up. You can sign up online, friendshurts.ca slash sin. So detoxification, community lunch, and sin. I want to ask you a very important question. And this is actually based in real life. Imagine a person that you despise. Not theoretically, but someone you actually hate. They might be evil, they might be just they've hurt you, they might have been something. And and imagine you have a gun and they're standing about 10 feet from you, and you you have the gun pointed at them. Are you tempted to pull the trigger? You're better than I am, because there's some people I'm like, uh I'm thinking hard. Thinking hard, why shouldn't pull the trigger? When I was in university, I got a job with Paramount Pictures Canada. Um, the movie place. The I was a second-year student, I have no money. Their first question was, could you go to Toronto for an all expense-paid trip? Yes. I'd never had freshly squeezed orange juice for breakfast. That was a revelation. Every day I had a$7 glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. I'd be lucky if it didn't get scurvy going through university. The reason I tell you this story is because I walked down Young Street. We walked down there every day, from the hotel to where our meetings were. So when a couple years later, I picked up the paper and I saw 2018. A man drove a van down that very sidewalk that I walked on. He ran into crowds of people. The final toll was he killed eleven people with that van. He injured sixteen more. He drove down that very street, and I can picture it like when I read it, I didn't. What do you do with something that evil? The crazy thing was, a number of blocks later, he stopped the van in front of a man named Constable Ken Lamb. Ken Lamb had heard on the radio that this atrocity has happened, that somebody has driven a van down the sidewalk of downtown Toronto. At the time they knew he'd killed nine people. They didn't know how many would be dead by the end. Constable Lamb has his truck or his his uh squad car in front of the van. The man gets out of the van. Constable Lamb puts out his gun and points it at the man.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

And the very question I asked you to start with, he has to wrestle with. Here's a man who's done incredibly evil things. And you have your gun trained on him. Did you pull the trigger?

SPEAKER_00 8:56

And pulling the trigger, you know, the gun metaphor, it's like, whoa, uh okay, let's soften a little bit. The email that I talked about with detoxification. Did you call someone names? Are you mean to somebody? They've done horrible things, they've hurt you, they've done you maybe even look at them and say, This is an evil person. What then can you do to them? I've heard of kids going no contact with their parents. My parents hurt me, and therefore I can never talk to them again.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

It's got some weight, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 9:48

And the question I think the Ken Lamb, Constable Ken Lamb.

SPEAKER_01 9:56

He's sitting there with his gun to an evil human. What would have to go through his head to pull the trigger?

SPEAKER_00 10:10

What has to go through our head to say, I will never talk to my parents again? What will have to go through our head to treat the people the way we do, to assault somebody walking down the street? Again, true story. What has to go through our heads? What has to shift? And that piece right there, that's the sin we're gonna study. Not in the way you think it is. Not in the way that says the old school sin, where it's like, oh, if you snap and if you do something horrible to somebody, that's bad. You're a bad person. And bad people go to hell. That's how we started this series. This whole idea of sin was characterized as this, you're gonna, if you do something wrong, some conception of God, something is gonna be angry, and you're gonna go and burn in hell or something like that. And all the way through this series, we kept saying, no, no, no, what if we do this differently? What if we don't look at sin as this, things we need to run away from?

SPEAKER_01 11:19

And ask ourselves, where are we trying to go?

SPEAKER_00 11:25

I have this line on my whiteboard in my office that says, What can we use the concept of sin to become? Completely different way of looking at that word sin. Jesus said, He was telling a story about shepherds and sheep. You have to be a farmer to understand part of that story. Long story short, he says, I've come to teach you to live an abundant life. This whole series is designed to not say, what about sin is this? How do we run away from this? How do we make sure we don't go this? Instead, saying, How do we get towards something? How do we get towards abundant life? I think that's what Constable Ken Lamb is wrestling in that moment right there. Now, on our way here, I'll blow this out. Hell does not want to go away, clearly. On the way here, we started talking about this idea of sin as lack. We talked about the Adam and Eve story. Eve's in the garden, she's in paradise, she's living in the perfect place, everything she could ever want. This walking, talking serpent walks up to her and says, But you're not God. And she realizes, wait a second, I am lacking something. Instead of living in paradise, abundant life, she becomes focused on what am I lacking? What am I missing? As a side note, the number of times my wife has asked me, um, so is that lack? And I'm like, can you please not use my words against me? Because you're 100% right and I don't like it at all. How much of life are we seeing the things that we're missing? My house is wonderful, but that little piece isn't clean. Everything was right, but there's that one spelling mistake. That story is great, but we have one detail wrong. We're lacking something that if we only we had that right, if only that was accurate, if we didn't have that lack, we would feel better. That's the sin. Because instead of focusing on abundant life, we're focusing on the thing that we lack. Thank you, Rollins. That's the guy who brought this to us. Second week, last week, we did the song Hurt, made famous by Johnny Cash at the end of his life. It was originally written by a guy named Trent Reznor, the lead singer of Nine Inch Nails. He's 30 years old. He's playing to like huge events, playing his music he's always wanted to do. But that's not him. He's a geek who wants to sit in his room and listen to records. And so he splits himself apart, becoming who he isn't and hiding who he is. He writes this lyric. Can you throw it for me in a second? He writes this lyric that says, if I could do this all, if I could start it all over again a million miles away, I would keep myself, I would find a way. The sin there is separating parts of ourselves out and hiding them. And the reason it undermines abundant life is because if you're hiding part of yourself, someone can look at you and love you. And it's the most painful thing you'll experience because you know that they don't love you. They love the parts that you're showing them. And every bit of love is like a dagger because you know if I just showed you the whole part of me, if I didn't hide that, you wouldn't love me. So every moment is like judgment. Talk about pulling us from abundant life, this sin of separation from self. This week there's another sin. And it has to do with those moments when we have someone in our crosshairs. And they've hurt us and they've done horrible things to us, and we don't like them, we don't believe in what they believe in. A friar named Richard Rohr said there's a sin that's pretty insidious inside of all of us, not because of what it does in the world, but because of what it does for us.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

Not for us, that's the wrong word. To us.

SPEAKER_00 16:23

He anchors his view in the first beginning. So we talked about the Adam and Eve story. There's a first version. Yeah, that's the wrong word. Version sounds like we've changed it. There's a few different creation narratives in the Bible. There's at least three of them. Two of them are right at the beginning. I've been looking at the second one. He goes to the first one. He says, This is what the creator or the redactor says. In the beginning, the creator created humans and said they are good.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

Very good. Just sit with that line for a second. Humanity was good. Very good. When you look around in your world, does humanity look good? Very good.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

There's days when I think, yeah, yeah, we're good. I hear all the different ways of people taking water, and I'm like, yeah, humanity is good. And then I hear about a man who drives a van down a sidewalk in downtown Toronto, and I go. But the core question, and if you look at many Christian traditions, the core question is, are we very good? Or should we fast forward and go, no, no, Adam and Eve, they ate an apple, that was sin, so we're all covered in this idea of sin. We're sinners, we're evil people. Richard Rohr points out, he says, if you think that we're core sinners, then the whole point of this journey is how do I get out of this core sin? I'm an evil human being. How do I get out of that? But if you use the other the other creation story where we're good, very good, the the journey of becoming abundant and living an abundant life isn't about getting over our evilness or somehow trying to get rid of that. It's about realizing that we're good, that we just kind of forgot a little bit. We got off the path. There's a guy named uh Jacob in the Bible. This is my dad's name, I just realized his name originally means trickster. When he was young, he stole his brother's inheritance by dressing up and tricking his blind father. Evil? Let's just do vote. Evil, not evil. Evil, you trick your blind dad into stealing your brother's inheritance. Come on. No one's going like, no, no, that wasn't evil. That's good. You should totally do that. So his name, and again, this is often these stories, they they create these stories, and the the names mean something. So the trickster gets he has to run from the family because everyone's gonna kill him. Dad's gonna kill him, brother's gonna kill him, everything. So he runs away 20 years later, or something like that. He finds out that his brother's coming to meet him. His brother that he's stolen his heritage from. He's crapping his pants. He takes everything he has. He sends his family across there's a river, he sends his family across the river to keep them safe. He sends all his possessions across the river so that they'll be safe. Because his brother is powerful, he has a private army. If my brother had a private army, we'd be in a lot of trouble. But private army, he's freaking out. And then the story reads something really I was gonna say awkward, but maybe that's not the right word. It's really weird how it's phrased. It says this Jacob the trickster was left alone on the other side of the water, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. There's no foreshadowing of the man. There's nothing said about the man. The man. Which is why many interpreters say, no, no, no, this isn't a man. This is a man. Jacob is sitting alone and suddenly has to come to grips with everything he's done in his life. The way he's behaved, the people he screwed over. And like many of us, when we have those kind of days, he wrestles with that part of himself all night. And the reason I tell you this story is because when he wakes in the morning, he says this I name this place Panel. Which means the place that I saw the face of God.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

He wrestled with himself and named it Panel.

SPEAKER_00 21:26

The idea is the redactor saying, inside of each of us is the spark of something beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

The spark of the divine.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Some say it this way we are made in the image and likeness of God. If we look inside of ourselves, just imagine this look inside of yourself, just right now, just kind of take a minute, check in, and in your mind. Mind say, I have the spark of the divine inside of me.

SPEAKER_01 22:07

Kind of feels nice, doesn't it? Or maybe it doesn't.

SPEAKER_00 22:15

Maybe your parts are saying, no, no, no. Oh, if only Vince knew. If only he knew what we've done or who we are or what we're hiding, he would not say that. And yet, when we when we say there's the spark of the divine inside of us, I look in the mirror and I am in pineal. I am seeing the face of God by looking at myself. Something has to shift. That's why those parts are saying, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 22:46

What would happen in your life if you said, no, at the core of me is something good and beautiful and divine.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

Then this spiritual journey is not about getting away from some core evil. No, no, no. It's refining that very thing. And this is Richard Rohr's idea of sin. He says, when we lose connection with the divinity inside of us, the spark of the divine. Instead of living that out, I have the spark of the divine in me. I'm not a horrible person. I do bad things sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

But the core of me is something beautiful and worthy and valid. Changes the journey, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 23:37

Richard Rohrer says, when you're stuck in this idea that I am an evil person, that there's nothing of value in me, that's what the shame striker says, doesn't it? It's not I've done bad. I am bad. Why is my life crap? Because I am bad. Why did that person leave me? Because I am bad. Why is the world the way it is? Because we are bad. Richard Rohr says, no, no, that's the sin that keeps you from living an abundant life.

SPEAKER_01 24:12

Can you do it right now? Can you just say inside? The spark of the divine is inside of me.

SPEAKER_00 24:22

The parts that are saying, no, no, no, no, no, just say, okay, it's okay. I always know when my parts are freaking out, I'm probably in the right spot. Probably I need to do some work on that.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

I have the spark of the divine inside of me. And you have the spark of the divine inside of you. And to lose that is to disconnect from that abundant life.

SPEAKER_00 24:58

Let's go back to Constable Ken Lam. He's sitting in front of a man who's just driven a van down a sidewalk who will ultimately kill eleven people. He's got his gun pointed at the man. The man reaches behind his back and then grabs something dark like this and is like nothing. Does it again? Constable Lamb sees, no, no, that's not a gun. Constable Lamb not only does not pull the trigger, but he goes to his squad car and he turns off the lights. And he holsters his firearm. He pulls out his baton and he walks towards the man who instantly goes on the ground. When I first read that story, I didn't even understand it.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

How do you treat someone that evil that way?

SPEAKER_00 26:22

And then I heard Richard Rohr say, losing abundant life is when we lose track of the connection of the divine inside of ourselves and inside of the people all around us.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

That's where it landed for me.

SPEAKER_00 26:51

I don't know, Constable Lamb. I don't know what he was thinking. I did read an interview after he's like, I was well trained. I did what I was supposed to do. But to me, if I was Constable Lamb, I would have had to have something bigger than that to not pull that trigger. I would have needed something like this conception of there's a spark of the divine inside of that murderer right there. We don't need to forgive him. We don't need to, oh, it's okay. No, no, that's not what we're getting at at all. Throw him in jail. Right now he's in jail for I don't know, bajillion years without parole or something. I'm like, you can just take the parole out and throw it away. Like it's not a message about forgiveness. It's the message of how do we treat another human when they've hurt us. Because if we can strip the spark of the divine out of them, we can do whatever we want to them. This is what Nazi Germany did to the Jews and to the queer community. There's a few other groups in there, a whole ton. They said they're not human. They're animals. And we get to do whatever we want to animals. I try not to live in a black and white mentality. But probably the closest I am to that is in this moment. I want to see the spark of the divine in every human I encounter. Myself included, so that I do not do something that steals abundant life from me. I do not do something that I go, oh, I should not have done that. I should not have said that. And you know how it shows up in my life? I don't know how it shows up in your life. If I want to do something truly heinous to somebody, I can hear, I start calling them names. Oh, that person is an a-hole. That person's a dictator. That person's a fascist. That person's a transphobe. That person's a, and as soon as I start doing that, I know what my brain's trying to do. It's trying to suck the spark of the divine out of them so that I can treat them how I want, which is horribly. Richard Roar says, the sin isn't how we treat the people. The sin is in what happens to us when we do that. It's easier when we see it inside of ourselves. If I'm disconnected from the spark of the divine inside of me, I know how I treat myself. I can hear the voice in my head saying, Vince, what the hell are you dumbass? Right? That one's easier. But watching how the world treats each other, I wonder if the antidote would be this. And every human look them in the eyes and say the spark of the divine lives in that human being. I don't have to forgive them.

SPEAKER_01 30:32

I don't have to let them do whatever they want.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

But if I treat them as less than human, I will pay the cost in my life. Today look through the people in your life who have hurt you, who've done evil things to you.

SPEAKER_01 31:03

What happens if you see the spark of the divine inside of them? Does something change in you?

SPEAKER_00 31:16

Not that you let them do what they want, not that you do any of that. No, no. Does something change in you?

SPEAKER_01 31:27

I feel like I have a connection to my soul in a way that I don't. When I'm treating people like they're less than.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

I feel like I have an expression of my spirituality in a way that pulling the trigger in the moment it's going to feel good, they deserve it. They've done horrible things. I will make the world a better place because I'm killing them.

SPEAKER_01 31:51

And yet I will always have to live with that act. And I think so will you. This isn't a stay away from sin message.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

This is a message that says, when we lose connection to the spark divine inside of us and the people around us, we pay for it in the lack of abundant life. May you see the person who's not turning quickly enough in front of you to get through the Mother's Day run. Spark of the divine inside of them. The cop who thinks that it's very important that I have a license plate on my bike, thinks this is such an important thing in this world. Who cares? No, no, no. Spark of the divine. That person in your building, that person on your street, that person at work who treats, does those things that just like stop. What if they have the spark of the divine inside of them? How will that change my life? Not even theirs, mine. Maybe be a people profoundly connected to the spark of the divine inside of us. Even as all those voices are saying, no, no, no, but Vince, but uh ooh. Connection. And may we give that same thing to the people around us. Amen. Again, for me, it's hell yes, but sounds way more pastoral if I say amen, doesn't it? Okay, let's take a deep breath. Because that was a bit of a heavy one, wasn't it? You start off with a gun pointed at someone's head. Yeah. And yet, yeah, I won't preach this again, but I live this all the time. Okay. Before we go, we have two things. We're gonna have some snacks. Uh, Rebecca, there she is. Rebecca baked us some snacks today. So we're gonna have a in midnight culture, we call this Fospa. It's like food after like a late afternoon lunch on Sundays. We're gonna have FOSPA together. So don't rush out. Go grab some food, hang out, visit with some people. We have lemon cookies with Saskatoon jam. We have oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and we have carrot pumpkin muffin with walnuts. Yeah. But today it's Mother's Day. And so before we go, I have a tribute to mothers. I'm gonna do this old school church. Uh, has anyone ever done a responsive reading in an old school church? I say something, you guys respond. Okay. Your response line is for that we thank you. So let's try it. For that, we thank you. To all the mothers today, I want to send our thanks for those who gave birth to us. That capacity has cost you, and you've paid that all your adult life. For that, we thank you. For those who raised us, who worked to try to build us into good, healthy humans. For that, we thank you. For those who would give anything to have birth to a child but couldn't, the cost to your body did not go away. You've paid for it every month. For that, we thank you. For those who acted as mothers, but the word mother doesn't really fit, but you still played the role. For that, we thank you. Mother is a complex word in our day. If we put mother on a bell curve, there are many in the center for whom mothers make sense. It's everything is about your life, has been. You've put this into your children, you you've you've bled for them, you've given everything for them. And today we recognize you. And there's those on the edges of that bell curve for whom that word doesn't fit, but the function's there. You two have given everything to be mother to somebody. It said when the child leaves the home, a part of the mother's heart leaves also. Ah, crap. For those for whom they're missing a part of their children in your heart today, we say we thank you. Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers.