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Sermon - September 14th, 2008
Once More With Feeling
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: Matthew 18:21-35
Jesus has been talking to the disciples in Matthew, chapter 18, about community and relationships and what they should be like in a Christian community. His point was that life in community, in the family of God, is very important and those who are part of it are called to do everything within their power to nourish and strengthen the bonds of their love. They are to let nothing get in the way of those bonds, not disagreements or rivalries, not their tendency to put each other down, and not sins. If one goes astray, they are to leave the rest and go find the one who is lost. If one does wrong and becomes separated from the rest, they are to go and try to bring the one back.
Peter was listening carefully. As usual, Peter was the first to speak. He wanted to know exactly how far he was called to go with this togetherness stuff. “Lord,” he asked, “how often do I need to forgive my brother? Isn’t seven enough?” Seven is a lot; however, Peter doesn’t get any kudos for his generous offering.
Jesus replied, “Not seven, but seventy times seven.” Jesus was saying there is no limit to forgiveness. Forgiving those who sin against us is not something we ever finish. It is something that goes on forever. Forgiveness is a way of life.
And I say, “Good grief, Jesus, what are you trying to do to me? Wear me out? Forgiving someone just once is hard enough!”
Here is today’s hypothetical situation: You have a lunch date with a friend, downtown Hillsboro. You leave early so that you get there on time. You circle the block a few times to find a parking place, and you still make it on time. You choose a nice table in the balcony and settle down to wait and wait and wait---until it becomes clear that you have been stood up, so you pay for your coffee and leave, telling yourself that your friend must have had something come up.
Later that afternoon he calls, saying how stupid he feels, that he totally spaced it out and just now remembered. He is SO sorry. Let’s re-schedule, soon, he says. And you do. After all, what is one missed lunch between friends. You aren’t perfect either. So, the re-scheduled date comes around and the whole thing happens all over again. Now, forgiving someone once is one thing, but are you really going to set another lunch date with this person. Are you really willing to go through this routine seventy-seven times or seven times seventy times?
Well, I wouldn’t. I would start getting creative. Besides, our human nature does not work that way. Most of us are willing to get burned once, a lot of us even twice, but the third time and we back off—after all we aren’t stupid. We have little calculators in our heads keeping track of how much we are putting into our relationships versus how much we are getting out of them. We don’t make a habit of pursuing those with a negative balance. So we turn our attention elsewhere. We prefer cost-efficient relationships. It’s true. No one wants a one-way relationship, in which one person does all the giving while the other one just gets and gets and gets. I know I don’t. So what is Jesus telling us?
Well, Jesus is speaking to that part of us that—like Peter—wants to place a limit on our involvement with people who run up debts with us. We try to be patient. We try to stay open. But surely, Jesus, we can set limits, can’t we? Isn’t seven times enough?
So Jesus tells Peter a story, a prickly story about a king who wishes to settle accounts with his servants, many of whom owe him money. He is a king who keeps good books, employs accountants to keep track of who owes him how much. He employs a few jailers as well, to lock up those who cannot pay. On this particular day of reckoning, he starts at the top of the list, and a servant is brought before him who owes an enormous amount of money—10,000 talents. It is a ridiculous amount. It is roughly 1.5 billion dollars by today’s standards, probably more in today’s economy. Clearly, the servant cannot pay that amount, so the king orders him and his family and all his possessions to be sold. The price they will bring will not even begin to cover the debt, but the king is in the business of cutting his losses, and selling the servant is less expensive than keeping him around. Realizing that the gig is up, the servant falls on his knees and promises to pay everything he owes, everything, if the king will just be patient.
It’s an absurd promise. If he works forty hours a week for the next 150,000 years he will never be able to pay what he owes. But the king is moved by the slave’s plight and plea. The king takes pity on him, releases him, forgiving his entire debt. Forget the book-keeping, in this case. For reasons only he and God knows, the king cancels his servant’s debt and gives him back his life again, out of the goodness of his heart.
Within moments, the servant has a chance to return the favor by forgiving someone indebted to him. A fellow servant owes him 100 denarii—or about three thousand dollars. The forgiven slave grabs the slave who owes him by the throat, demands his due. This servant says exactly the same thing that the forgiven servant said to the king—“Have patience with me and I will pay you”—only the king’s servant has the man thrown into jail.
The king finds out, revokes the mercy he showed before and sentenced the servant he had forgiven to life in prison. “You wicked slave! I forgave all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on him as I had mercy on you?”
Oh, this is a prickly parable. On the surface, it sounds like a lesson about the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Or, it really sounds like this: Do unto others as you would have God do unto you, because if you don’t your heavenly Father will have you hauled off to jail and throw away the key.
Have you heard that interpretation? I don’t think Jesus was giving us that message. If the only reason to forgive my neighbor is to save my own neck, to secure my own forgiveness, then it is not something I am doing out of love but out of fear. That doesn’t sound right. How did this story start out so well and end so badly? What went wrong? What made the servant so awful, so unable to forgive a mere fraction of the debt that he himself had just been forgiven?
Real forgiveness is pure, unadulterated grace. There are a lot of imposters of real forgiveness around. People overlook one another’s faults or make excuses for them and call it forgiveness. They hide their feelings in order to avoid a fight and call it forgiveness. They learn how to say things that sound forgiving and call it forgiveness, while their actions bear no resemblance to their words.
There is a lot that passes for forgiveness these days that is not forgiveness at all but a kind of indifference, in which we dismiss people from our lives by “forgiving” them and then have less and less to do with them until finally there is nothing left between us at all.
When that happens, the only reason I can think of is that we have forgotten what it is like to be forgiven, genuinely forgiven from the heart, because if we could remember what forgiveness is really like, how could we deprive anyone else of the same experience? It would be like refusing to share food or water, like breathing in and refusing to breathe out. Once we have experienced the exhilaration and freedom of real forgiveness, how could we fail to pass it on?
That is what the king wants to know. The king who quit keeping score on his servant wanted to know why the servant could not do the same thing, and all I can figure out is that the servant missed the significance of what had happened to him.
Somehow, when the king released him and forgave him his debt, he did not get it. He thought he had gotten away with something. He thought he had pulled a fast one. He thought the king was soft in the head to buy such an obvious lie. “Lord, have patience with me and I will pay for everything.” He could never repay what he owed. He knew it, the king knew it, but if making the king feel sorry for him meant he didn’t have to pay, what did he care?
The king’s slave missed the experience of forgiveness altogether. It never occurred to him that he was not being let off the hook, or being patronized by a sentimental old monarch. It never crossed him mind that what was really happening to him was that he was being forgiven from the heart by someone who understood the enormity of his debt—indeed, by someone who had financed it—but who was willing to let it all go, to stop keeping score, to erase the debt that had become a substitute for the relationship so that they could get to know one another again.
That is what real forgiveness is all about. The only reason for any of us ever to forgive each other is because we want the relationship back again, which is hard to do when we are keeping score. As long as we are focused on what someone owes us, we tend to spend our time figuring out how to get paid back or proved right, or protected from further harm. But once you have forgiven your brother or sister from your heart, there is all the time in the world—time to put the calculator away and go for a walk, time to compare notes on what you have lerned, time to get to know one another again. Time to get to know yourself again.
That is what the servant missed. When the king forgave him, he just figured that he had outsmarted the old guy, and that the best way to cut his own losses was to see that the same thing did not happen to him. So when his turn came, he did what he had fully expected the king to do to him: He grabbed his debtor by the throat and demanded to be paid. He had missed his own forgiveness, so of course he could not forgive anyone else. All he saw when he looked at his fellow servant was an overdue bill walking around, and he grabbed that overdue bill by the throat.
You hear how it ends. He gets thrown in jail until he can pay his debt, which amounts to the rest of his life, but his imprisonment is a technicality. The wicked servant was already behind bars, bars of his own making. By refusing to be forgiven and refusing to forgive, he had already created his own little Alcatraz, where he sat in solitary confinement with his calculator and kept track of his accounts.
“Lord, if someone sins against me, how often should I forgive?” Peter asked. “Seven?” And Jesus replied, “Not seven, but seventy-seven, or seventy times seven.”
By the end of the parable, Peter thinks he got the message: Do unto others or the king will do unto you. Only that is not the message. The message is: Do until others as the king has already done unto you. It is not a matter of earning your forgiveness, or letting others off the hook so that you will be let off the hook yourself.
It is a matter of understanding that you have already been forgiven, that someone to whom you owe everything—your life and breath, your blue, brown, or green eyes, your fondness for home-grown vegetables, your delight in the moon and the stars, all the loves of your life—someone who has given and given and given to you and who has gotten precious little in return has examined your enormous debt in great detail and knows from your credit rating that the chances of repayment are nil. Someone who knows all of that, has taken the stack of your IOUs and shredded them, balancing your books in one fell swoop for one reason and one reason alone: because that someone wants to remain in relationship with you, and wants you to be free to respond.
When someone like that has stopped keeping score on you, don’t you feel sort of foolish keeping score on the people in your own life. You feel sort of petty, wanting to write them off after seven times, when you consider how many times you have been forgiven yourself, forgiven from the heart over and over and over again, through no merit of your own but simply because someone loves you very, very much and wants to love you some more. Once you have let that sink in, once you have really taken that into your own heart, how can you—how can any of us—pass up a single chance to do the same?
Amen.