As We Forgive

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on July 27, 2025 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Luke 11: 1-13

Today a 27-year-old woman faces many choices as she reflects on the options that lie before her. She may have found a clear trajectory, perhaps in a profession or organisation, and with hard work and good luck she may see a promising career emerging. It could be she’s finding it difficult to match her creative gifts with a regular job and a lifestyle with space for friends and activities. It’s possible she’s finding it tough to hold it all together, with economic, social pressures and mental health challenges. She may be focused on a key relationship, and hoping to build a life and a household with a significant other, if she could ever afford a home. But she could well be wondering whether this is a world she believes in enough to bring new life into it.

Rosie was a 27-year-old woman, but she wasn’t living today, and she didn’t have this range of choices. Rosie lived in the late 1950s. She was two years into marriage and there was one thing above all in her mind: she wanted to have children. Her husband had a secure job and, while they’d never be rich, she was ready to set aside her work and start a family. She was delighted to find herself pregnant and, having worked several years as a midwife, took an especially close interest in her progress through the trimesters and wasn’t daunted by the impact of the early weeks on her body and metabolism. Somehow her experience of the NHS hadn’t diminished her reverent regard for doctors, and, despite her professional experience, she never questioned the care and guidance she was given at every stage. Which was why, as she approached the last few days, and she started to sense unexpected and unusual discomfort, she let the medical professionals’ reassurance dismiss her anxiety, even to the point when, in the hospital, she heard muffled words ‘pressure… placenta… danger’ spoken around her, and a sudden increase in speed until the crisis couldn’t be hidden, and the dismay was evident and her husband couldn’t hide his tears, and the truth was undeniable and her worst nightmare had come true, and she’d given birth but she did not have a son but she was already grieving a lost child.

As the shock subsided and the grief increased, the puppy arrived to lighten the mood and the flowers of sympathy surrounded her days, she tried to reconcile what she’d experienced as a woman, what she knew as a midwife, what the medical professionals wanted her to believe, and what her Christian faith implied. She couldn’t square two inconvenient truths. One was, she knew this was not just one of those tragic things; this was a mistake, an error that shouldn’t have happened, something someone should have spotted, realised, addressed – but didn’t. The other was, that in the prayer she said every day, right in the middle of that most familiar set of words, was the plea, ‘Forgive us… as we forgive.’ But how, she pondered, could she forgive if no one was prepared to put their hand up and acknowledge their mistake? As she grieved her lost child, and the future of a family she’d imagined, she likewise resented the hold this moment had on her life. She couldn’t see past, it round it, beyond it: it blocked all the light and left her mind in darkness.

Eighteen months later there was good news. She was pregnant again. She wasn’t so trusting this time. She still worshiped doctors, but this time she regarded them like a passenger treats a driver who has a habit of taking his eye off the road. She was terrified as the last days drew near, and inwardly prepared herself for the worst; but it turned out all was well, and she cradled in her arms a little baby girl, and much as she loved her little dog, somehow he didn’t take up so much room in her heart now her deepest longing was met. But she grieved again that her two children would never play together; and while she made her first steps as a parent, she could never work out how to answer the question, ‘Is this your first child?’ without hiding her face and changing the subject. But one thing did change. She no longer let the medical professionals block the light; she was living in a bigger story now, and she wasn’t going to let them fill the room however much it still hurt.

Meanwhile the were other griefs; her brother-in-law died, young and suddenly, and then her father, only in his sixties, also suddenly – and her grief was swept into a current of sadness, yet one in which the joy of her new child remained a shining light. And amid all this drama she quickly found herself expecting again, effortlessly it felt, and for the first time since the disaster of her loss she dared imagine she might be blessed with the four children for which she’d always secretly dreamed. The medical professional she’d been with in her second pregnancy had moved elsewhere, and she found herself assigned to the same person who’d been in charge when all had gone so horribly wrong. But she pondered and weighed things in her mind. There’s no use bearing grudges – no doubt this person had learned and could never make the same mistake again; you can’t live your life in resentment and revenge, you have to give people second chances: surely she should put that story behind her and they could both make a new beginning.

So she proceeded through her third pregnancy, and all was well. And yet, around eight months, she started to get some of the strange sensations she’d had the first time. The medical team called and reassured her, yet didn’t check out her concerns. But she set her experience and knowledge of midwifery aside and trusted them, because the alternative was anxiety and fear. She asked about a caesarean, but no one thought that was necessary: they just reassured her because they realised why she might be ill at ease. But then as if the first tremors of an earthquake rumbled, the awful horror began to engulf her. Like the rerun of a terrifying movie, she started to see the panic on the faces of the medical team. Once again she heard the dreaded words, ‘placenta … twisted… blockage… danger… can’t move it…’ and this time no one needed to tell her what had happened. Time stood still, and her worst nightmare was repeated in her body and before her eyes, and no words, no emotions, no fury, no despair could encompass the true dismantling of her very being.

Lightning had struck twice on the same womb; but why why why had those who’d been there when all this had happened before not installed a lightning conductor, not seen this coming, not realised sooner, not had the emotional intelligence and practical experience and sheer humanity to understand that this was the one thing they must avoid at all costs? This was beyond description, in territory an apology can’t begin to cover. This was hell on earth.

Rosie was glad she hadn’t parted with the dog. Somehow the dog understood better than any friend or neighbour. When she wept great wails of tears, when she pummelled the bed with her groans and laments, the little dog moaned in solidarity and love. But Rosie now felt a twofold impossibility. How could she ever begin to comprehend those who had failed her so catastrophically and inexplicably? And how could she face a God who had prepared for those who loved him such despair as passed all understanding? These questions, shrouded for months by grief, eventually surrounded her on every side. She said the Lord’s Prayer every night; but each night she stumbled over the unsayable words, ‘Forgive us…. as we forgive.’ What had she done so terrible that she deserved this? And how could she be expected herself to forgive?

Months passed, until one day she was awakening from an afternoon nap that had become her lifeline as a way of getting through the day. In the garden she heard a woodpecker relentlessly drumming away on the upper trunk of a dead tree. And, while she hadn’t been to church for some time, it triggered a memory in her imagination – the sound of a nail being hammered into a block of wood. She remembered a children’s club in Holy Week where they’d listened to a nail being banged into a log, and thought about the agony of Jesus on Good Friday. And she heard a voice saying, ‘Father, forgive.’ She realised something that had never occurred to her before: in his moment of greatest pain, when people were deliberately inflicting on him cruelty beyond imagining, Jesus didn’t forgive. He asked his Father to forgive. He couldn’t do it himself. But he didn’t want to die in anger and hatred and resentment. So he said, ‘Father, forgive.’ And right that moment she realised the significance of the words, ‘Forgive us … as we forgive.’ The Holy Spirit was speaking on behalf of the Trinity and gently saying, ‘Forgive us, as we forgive you.’ God was requesting her forgiveness. She realised she’d been furious with God – but it never crossed her mind God could be seeking her forgiveness. She’d railed against a God who’d treated her so unjustly so mercilessly, so cruelly: but she hadn’t till now ever thought how desperately God didn’t want things to be this way.

And, not suddenly, but over the months that followed, she not only began to be able to say the Lord’s Prayer again, but she started to say a prayer she’d never said before. She’d heard of the Jesus Prayer, ‘Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner,’ but she couldn’t relate to it because she felt so much more sinned against than sinning. But now she’d stumbled upon what she called the ‘real Jesus Prayer’ – his prayer from the cross: ‘Father, forgive them, for they have no idea what they’re doing.’ She couldn’t forgive – but she called over and over for her heavenly Father to forgive, and she began to realise how Jesus had sustained his three hours on the cross, by resting in his Father’s strength and not allowing his agony to shrivel his soul into hatred and bitterness and despair. She’d discovered the real Jesus Prayer. And she’d found the real meaning of the Lord’s Prayer.

And her husband in the midst of this quagmire of grief and horror realised he had to take her away. He flew her and their little girl away to another country far from home. And they began to make a life there, away from all support, but with new discoveries and new adventures and fewer memories. Within three months Rosie was expecting again, and she told the medical team in the new country the whole story and they listened with dismay and disbelief but with seriousness and fixity of purpose. And all plans were in place for a caesarean, and every effort was made to smooth the arrival, and all went well, and death was no more, and mourning and crying and pain were no more, and her fourth child lived. Rosie and her husband realised they had done what they came to the new country to do, and to their surprise, after a year, they were ready to return home, even to the same house, the same neighbours, the same friends. They still carried their hurts, but they didn’t nurse them; they prayed the Holy Spirit would turn their grief into compassion, their sorrow into hope, their anger into efforts to enable others to have better outcomes than they’d had.

Rosie experienced a lot more suffering in her short life. But that afternoon as she arose from the place of despair and heard the woodpecker, she left behind her self-pity and bitterness, and found who God truly is, and who God truly called her to be. And it all lay in her discovery of the Lord’s Prayer.

I’ve called her Rosie, but Rosie wasn’t her real name. Her real name was Ruth. She was my mother. The boy and girl that died were my brother and sister. Her fourth child, the second who survived, the one born on the other side of grief and despair, the child of forgiveness and the discovery of the living God, she named Samuel. Which means gift from God. That child was me.