Preached by the Rev. David Henson at St. James Episcopal Church in Hendersonville
When she went to answer the unexpected knock at her front door, the last person Cancilde ever expected to see standing on her stoop was the man who had murdered her husband and five children.
Emmanuel.
He had committed the murders when he was just a teenager, confessed to them publicly, and was sentenced to 25 years. Emmanuel had gotten caught up in the terrible frenzy of horrifying violence that swept through the area, and with a group of local folks, he had broken into Canclide’s home and killed those six souls simply for being Tutsi.
It was April 9, 1994, and the Rwandan genocide was underway.
Emmanuel was one of its many perpetrators, and he also happened to be Canclide’s neighbor.
Now, seventeen years later, released from prison early, he had returned to her house, not looking for violence but for mercy, for forgiveness, for absolution for the shame he carried for his atrocities.
And, Canclide did.
She forgave him. In the intervening years, while Emmanuel was imprisoned, she had joined with other widows of the genocide and simply started reading the gospels of Jesus.
“My heart had been freed from hate by then because we widows had been reading the gospel together,” Canclide explained in a book documenting the long road of forgiveness following the genocide. “Its message prepared my heart to forgive.”
Within three years’ time, Cancilde and Emmanuel had bonded. “She is like a mother to me,” he said, the person he goes to for life advice like when he wanted to get married.
And Cancilde added, “And he is my son. Emmanuel is the one I ask for help when my house needs repair. If my cow has problems, I call him. And he knows he’s always welcome to share a meal at my home.”
“You prepare a table before in the presence of my enemies.”
That line from the most well-known Psalm in Scripture hits a little differently in the light of Cancilde and Emmanuel. It takes on so much more richness and weight. It’s almost haunting, even a little unnerving.
I’m not sure I actually want to eat with my enemies. I would much rather God prepare a table just for me and maybe make my enemies extra hungry so they can see how right I am and how wrong they are. I want a triumphal table that demonstrates God’s favor for me and not for them.
But then I remember the last table at which Jesus prepared a meal.
And who was sitting not just at the table, but in the very place of honor?
Judas, his betrayer, his enemy.
Whenever God prepares a table, a meal, a feast, everyone gets a seat and everyone gets to eat, even our enemies, especially our enemies.
That’s what God’s tables are actually for. The long, difficult, but good work of reconciliation, forgiveness, mercy.
But that doesn’t mean it comes easily. It certainly didn’t for Cancilde. Often, forgiving others is at best a work in progress or at worst a chronic condition we can’t seem to shake one way or the other.
Which of course leads us to the very next, concluding verse of this beloved Psalm, which now becomes just as haunting, if not more so.
“Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.”
It sounds nice, but the actual meaning is lost entirely in a rather sanitized translation.
Goodness and mercy are not two divine puppy dogs padding around the house behind us, filling us with warm fuzzies.
Rather, Goodness and Mercy are the very hounds of heaven. They seek us out and chase us down to the very ends of the earth and the corners of our souls with dogged relentlessness.
That’s what the word we translate as “follows me” actually means.
It means the hounds of heaven will sniff us out wherever we go and God will hunt us down with the bow of mercy and pierce our hearts with the arrow of grace. When we seek to hide or find ourselves lost in the edges of a weary world, we will, without fail, hear the rhythmic footfalls of God’s love sneaking up on us unseen, unaware, when we least expect it—like a knock on the door from an enemy.
While it’s a reassuring promise that there’s nowhere we can go where Goodness and Mercy can’t find us, it also means that when we seek to run from it—by refusing to offer it to others, resisting its insistent knocking on our souls—that same Goodness and Mercy will seek us out, haunt us, and hound us until they find us.
Sometimes I wish those old dogs would just leave us be, that the call to forgive would leave us alone, to let us rub the balm of grudges into our old and aching wounds. To let the old pain of hurt and harm flare. To let us pick at the scabs of our soul.
Not ask us to let go of our right to revenge, to get even, to seek retribution.
But God won’t ever quit hunting us with Goodness and Mercy, those hounds of heaven, because God knows, deep down, we’re on the run, not from the law, but from grace. And we can never truly be free until we’re forgiven like Emmanuel and until we forgive like Cancilde.
Source: From the Red Earth: A Rwandan Story of Healing and Forgiveness by Denise Uwimana, 2019