Pentecost 14A/Lectionary 25
Sept. 14, 2014
Matthew 18:21-35
This has
been a long week, and I’m sure anyone whose kids are just starting school and
sports again can agree! Even without kids, I came home some days this week,
sometimes after 9pm, so exhausted I could hardly hold my head up, and could not
wait to get into my bed. But when I
finally climbed the stairs toward my bedroom, did I fall right into bed? Nope.
I brushed my teeth. I did the usual evening rituals, and then and only then did
I crawl under the covers.
I didn’t really
want to brush my teeth, truth be told. But the thing is, it is a habit, a
ritual, so much so that if I hadn’t done it, I probably would have gotten into
bed and felt all wrong, perhaps so wrong that the wrongness would finally
convince me to get back up and go take care of the nagging need to go to bed
with clean teeth.
Why so insistent about brushing my
teeth? Is it my pride in my nearly perfect dental health? No, I don’t think so.
Do I get a prize if I do it enough? Not that I know of, though I’ll ask my
dentist
about that. As much as anything, I do it because it is ingrained in me.
Do you know what I mean? Do you have things like that, things that are so
ingrained in you that it feels wrong not to do them? .... Okay, so if this is
so important to me, then how many times do you think I should brush my teeth?
As many as seven times?
When Peter
asks Jesus in our Gospel lesson today how many times he should forgive someone
who has wronged him, suggesting “as many as seven times,” it sounds to him like
he is really going above and beyond. Three times to forgive someone would be a
lot, but to more than double that? Talk about mercy! But to Jesus the question
must have sounded as foolish as me asking you how many times I should brush my
teeth. The truth is, counting the number of times I brush my teeth is
ridiculous – it is something not to be counted, but just done, over and over
again, without counting, because there is a continual need to do it. And so
Jesus’ response reflects that. To suggest forgiving someone 77 times is not just
increasing the number, but rather is saying, “Stop counting and just do it!”
Make it a part of you. Forgive day in and day out. Forgive in the morning, in
the evening, all over this land. Forgive when you start your day, and forgive when
you are so tired you can hardly climb up the stairs to bed. Keep on forgiving.
Easy for me
to say… harder for us to do. This past week we started what we’re calling a
Roundtable Pulpit Bible study, where we study the texts appointed for the
upcoming Sunday and let them work in us all week before hearing them in worship
on Sunday morning. So I had the opportunity to grapple with this text with a
group of you all, and together we shared about times when we have been
forgiven, and times we haven’t, and times we have forgiven others, and times we
haven’t. This is deep stuff! Forgiving the person who cut me off on 104 on my
way here? Well I can likely manage that by the time I arrive at my destination.
But what about the big stuff, the stuff that cuts us deeply, that leaves wounds
and then scars, the stuff that affects us for the rest of our lives? What about
the person who bullies you in school or at work, routinely tearing down your
self-worth? What about the man or woman who is abusing your best friend? What
about your estranged child? What about those behind the 9/11 attack? Or, what
about the time you did something
seemingly unforgiveable – said words you couldn’t take back, refused to love
someone in need, allowed someone to die, or harbored hatred for someone in your
family?
Suddenly
forgiveness becomes almost scandalous, and even seems impossible. And at the
same moment, the parable that follows Peter’s question hits us like a kick to
the gut. A man is forgiven an astronomical debt – put in modern terms, this
slave owned the king about $500 million dollars. There was no possible way he
would ever pay off this debt. Yet the king, full of mercy, forgives it.
Oh, how I wish the parable would end
there! I could wrap up this sermon with a neat little bow, saying, “See how
merciful our God is! That God could and would forgive us even this debt we
could never repay, no questions asked. Amen!” But alas, the weasel in the story
goes off, finds a fellow slave who owes him a much more modest sum – only a few
thousand dollars – and when the second slave pleads for mercy, the first slave
will give none. Hello?! Did you not remember the
abundant mercy that was just
shown to you? Okay, well I can still get on board with this parable as is – the
idea is “this is how not to be.” But then the end: the king finds out about it,
and takes back his mercy, and tortures the slave until he pays back his debt.
Like I said,
it comes like a kick in the stomach. And perhaps the reason it is so hard to
hear is that even as we disdain this unmerciful, jerky slave, we realize: that
slave is us. We have been forgiven a gigantic debt we could never repay on our
own by a God who is unendingly gracious and merciful. And yet we can’t find it
in ourselves to offer even a shred of that forgiveness to people who have hurt
us deeply. Is there some way we can learn to forgive?
In her book,
Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean
tells the story of Lloyd LeBlanc, a Roman Catholic layman, whose son was
murdered. When LeBlanc arrived to identify the body of his son, he immediately
knelt down and began to pray the Lord’s Prayer. When he came to the words, “Forgive
us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” he realized the
depth of the commitment he was making. He later told Prejean, “Whoever did
this, I must forgive them.” With so many feelings of bitterness and desire for
revenge to overcome, LeBlanc knew this would be
difficult, which is why, he
said, for the rest of his life, forgiveness must be prayed for and struggled
for and won.[1]
Forgiveness,
whether of others or of ourselves, is hard work – even if the practice of it
becomes ingrained in us from how many times it must be repeated. So why put in
the time and the work? Because the alternative is that we let our lack of
forgiveness hold us captive. Indeed, it tortures us, just like the slave in the
parable was tortured when he didn’t forgive. An unwillingness to forgive is far
more damaging to the one withholding forgiveness than it is to the one who is
not being forgiven. When we are unwilling to forgive, we allow ourselves to
remain slaves, to remain imprisoned. So how do we get free?
Some may consider the rituals we
enact in worship to become meaningless the more we repeat them. But in their
repetition, they hold the power to form and shape our lives of faith. One
ritual that has formed my faith is included in our worship today, and that is
the order for confession and forgiveness from the LBW. The words of this
confession were the words I spoke as a child, along with my congregation, every
single week. They are written on my heart, and even now, they remain the words
I use to articulate my faith. But as I have grown more mature in my faith, I
have realized just how much truth there is in those words I know by heart: “We
are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in
thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.”
We are in bondage, and all the time
do things we shouldn’t, and don’t do things we should, and we cannot free
ourselves from this pattern.
But therein
lies the good news. We cannot free ourselves
– but God doesn’t ask us to. We’re not in this alone. That, after all, is why
God sent us Jesus – to show us that God’s forgiveness is boundless and unconditional, and to show us what transformation
and new life can look like. And because we are showered daily in this grace –
first in our baptism, and every day since – and because we are a forgiven people, we can also become
forgiving people.
And so we keep trying. We keep trying
to live into our forgiven identity by offering that forgiveness to others, or
praying that we might someday be ready to. We keep on practicing forgiveness so
that it becomes for us a faith-forming ritual: something we do as frequently as
we brush our teeth; something that we do because without it something feels
off; something we do because we are so overcome by the grace of God that we
can’t not do it. And by God’s
unyielding grace, we trust that the freedom that forgiveness offers can be
ours.
Let us pray…
Gracious and merciful God, help us to live
into the identity you gave us in baptism, such that we can learn to forgive
others – and ourselves – as freely as you have forgiven us. In the name of the
Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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