Sermons from St. John the Divine
Sep 13, 2026 · 15 min · 8 segments
How do we forgive when the wounds run deep? In this sermon, Jesus’ call to forgive “seventy-seven times” reminds us that forgiveness is not forgetting or ignoring injustice, but refusing to remain…
R. Leigh SpruillHost
I bet you, like a lot of you, if not all of you, um, Probably two dozen times, at least, over the past week, I stumbled across videos or reels of the terrorists flying those jets into the Twin Towers in New York City.
And it's as if the clock in my soul, seeing those videos this past week, was reset again to 8.46 a.m. Eastern Time.
He's not asking if it's permissible never to forgive someone who has wronged us.
He's asking, is there a limit? Is there a point beyond which we can just stop having to worry about forgiving somebody else? This is not a hypothetical question.
Every single one of us in this sacred room can relate to this experience to greater or lesser degrees of how hard it is to forgive someone or some injustice that someone has perpetrated against us.
How often shall my brother sin against me and I have to go on forgiving him? My brother, not my enemy.
And how often is it the case, and we know this from pastoral ministry, that the very people who can hurt us most deeply and most lastingly are the very people who are closest to us.
It is a limitless commitment to try more and more by God's grace to be forgiving people.
It's not like signing up to be an usher at the nine o'clock service a couple of times a month or coming to a Bible study for a particular season or volunteering to do an outreach project a couple of times a year, as important as those ministries are.
It's a pattern of existence, a habit of being, an ongoing way of life that I can't achieve without.
I bet you, like a lot of you, if not all of you, um, Probably two dozen times, at least, over the past week, I stumbled across videos or reels of the terrorists flying those jets into the Twin Towers in New York City.
And it's as if the clock in my soul, seeing those videos this past week, was reset again to 8.46 a.m. Eastern Time.
He's not asking if it's permissible never to forgive someone who has wronged us.
He's asking, is there a limit? Is there a point beyond which we can just stop having to worry about forgiving somebody else? This is not a hypothetical question.
Every single one of us in this sacred room can relate to this experience to greater or lesser degrees of how hard it is to forgive someone or some injustice that someone has perpetrated against us.
How often shall my brother sin against me and I have to go on forgiving him? My brother, not my enemy.
And how often is it the case, and we know this from pastoral ministry, that the very people who can hurt us most deeply and most lastingly are the very people who are closest to us.
It is a limitless commitment to try more and more by God's grace to be forgiving people.
It's not like signing up to be an usher at the nine o'clock service a couple of times a month or coming to a Bible study for a particular season or volunteering to do an outreach project a couple of times a year, as important as those ministries are.
It's a pattern of existence, a habit of being, an ongoing way of life that I can't achieve without.
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