Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hallelujah.
Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia
[00:00:44] Speaker B: the Holy Gospel of our Savior Jesus Christ according to Matthew.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Glory to you, Lord.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Christ Peter came and said to Jesus, lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times.
Jesus said to him, not seven times, but I tell you, 77 times.
For this reason, the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves.
When he began the reckoning, one who owed him 10,000 talents was brought to him. And as he could not pay, his Lord ordered him to be sold together with his wife and children and all his possessions and payment to be made.
So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.
And out of pity for him, the Lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt.
But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him 100 denari.
And seizing him by the throat, he said, pay what you owe.
Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, have patience with me, and I will pay you.
But he refused.
Then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt.
When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their Lord all that had taken.
Then his Lord summoned him and said to him, you wicked slave, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me.
Should you not have had the same mercy on your fellow slave as I had mercy on you?
And in anger, his Lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt.
So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.
The Gospel of the Lord.
[00:03:45] Speaker A: Children ages 3 to 10 are welcome now to go with Katie for story time. And they will rejoin us at the peace.
In the name of one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
This week, as we mark the 25th anniversary of 9 11, we are reminded again of the depths of human suffering and the challenge of forgiveness in the face of unimaginable evil.
For some in this room and for the city of Ars, those memories are not distant.
They are raw, lived and personal.
We honor that pain and the stories we carry today with our prayers and memorials for those who have died in the terrorist attacks in New York, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania.
For those who died in the days following in the rescue missions for those who died even years later in long term illnesses related to the disasters, those who were alive in those moments, many of us, and who were making memories at those moments can't seem to stop ourselves this week from asking one another, where were you when. I'm sure many of you had those conversations this week?
I think that's because it was a moment when we marked time, a time before and a time after.
So those answers become a milestone for us as well.
My answer to that question was I was in Bethlehem as a freshman in College. My 8:30am Class was over and half an hour late to start and we didn't know why. When my professor ran into the room to tell us the news about the planes and to go back to our dorms to shelter in place, that we were under an attack, I know that there are people in this room who were even closer to the attack on the Pentagon and indeed those we lost, members here in our own church to that attack.
We'll be praying for them in the prayers of the deceased later in our service today, as each of us remembers that day. For those who do, we also remember that this was 25 years ago. So there's an entire generation of those of us who do not remember it, but now live in the aftermath of those days.
It is that aftermath that we also try to tell and tell people about those who didn't live through it. The grief, the anger, the longing for justice, and for many, the struggle to even imagine what forgiveness looks like in the face of such evil.
It felt, or may even still feel impossible to forgive, to be honest, and that is human.
I know that the colloquial wisdom is to forgive and forget.
But here, 25 years later, with our lectionary making us face what it means to really forgive, we have to wonder, is the forgive and forget really what we're supposed to do with this pain that we carry?
After all, the Bible doesn't say forgive and forget. It only says forgive.
How do we do that?
How do we learn to forgive even the worst things that happen in society?
Well, Jesus is pointing us to this in his admittedly harsh parable. For today.
This parable is often known as the parable of the unforgiving servant.
Now we need to put this story in the larger context of where it appears in the Gospel, because it doesn't do well just standing alone. We lose the context of forgiveness that Jesus is weaving throughout chapter 18.
First of all, let's take the tone.
Jesus as a storyteller in the Gospel of Matthew tends to be one who is trying to wake us up. You might say he's uncompromising as a storyteller. You might think of him as kind of a Charles Dickens, where his parables sound a lot like Jacob Marley showing up to Scrooge, rattling the chains of his own bitterness and saying, you must change, or you will be wrapped up in these chains of your own making. As well.
The storytelling of Jesus here is doing just that, shaking us by the shoulders, saying, we don't have to live this way.
We don't have to have yet another generation clinging to unforgiveness.
We can wake up.
But the placement of this story is equally important.
As I said, in this entire chapter, he's talking about the central tenet of Christian forgiveness, exactly how much we should forgive, which, by the way, is continuously.
We hear about the kingdom of heaven being like welcoming little children in something his disciples are trying to reject. And Jesus says, no, this kingdom is welcoming all.
And then he tells this crazy parable of lost sheep where the shepherd lives every, leaves everything, his whole livelihood, his flock behind to go and find this one sheep desperate in need of finding. It's a story of grace and forgiveness, but it is also hyperbolic, because no shepherd would do this in the ancient Near East.
But what Jesus is painting with both this picture of children and sheep is that God's grace will stop at nothing to find you and bring you back. In that tone of forgiveness that Jesus is weaving here, these tones of grace, they are sweeping and all encompassing and inexhaustible. And it's not merited out by who is deserving, but rather merited out by a God who gives so generously we can't really even fathom it.
And then last week, right before this passage, he says it just so plainly. He says, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
He says here, if we bind ourselves in the chains of acts, of vengeance, of retribution, of what we are owed, if we only bind ourselves up in relationships where no one is forgiven, then not only will the person in need of forgiveness not be freed, but we too will be imprisoned by that rage. And Jesus says, this is how we can live forever. Either bound up by unforgiveness or loosed in grace, we must forgive. To unlock those chains. Jesus says seven times. Seven times.
That in biblical language is a little code, almost like a mathematical equation, because the number seven in biblical terms means complete.
So Jesus is saying, every time you think you've gone far enough in forgiveness. It's not complete. You must keep going and going and going.
And then he really takes us by the shoulders to shake us and wake us up with the ending of this parable where he talks about the kingdom of heaven being like a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants.
When he begins the reckoning, he comes to one who owes him 10,000 talents. Friends, there's a reason he cannot pay this. That's like over $10 million in today's money. I don't have that kind of scratch laying around to you.
He didn't.
This servant shouldn't have even had this amount of money to begin with. Jesus is painting an almost cartoonish story here, saying that this is something this man could never hope to repay.
And if it were just about debts, well, then he should be put in prison.
But that's not what it is in Jesus economy.
And also notice, the man himself would have not just him would have gone to prison, but his whole household. Such is the way of unforgiveness. It's not just us we keep bound, but the society around us.
But he says this, have patience with me and I will pay you everything out of pity for him. Notice that word, pity. The Lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt.
It's so subtle here. This man thinks he's tricking the king into someday paying back his debt.
The king knows that's not what it's about.
His heart has been moved with the same pity that we find in a God of grace.
Not because he believed the slave was going to pay him back, not because this was even a good business decision, but because he was moved to pity.
But this unforgiving servant doesn't get it. The very next thing he does is he goes out, finds one of his fellow servants who owes him about, let's say, 100 bucks, and then throws him in jail for that. History repeating itself. Do you see how cycles of unforgiveness when our hearts are unmoved, can wrap us all in chains again? Jesus is making a cartoonish villain out of this guy here, shaking us over the head with this last part. Because in his anger, the King handed him over for torment and judgment when he found out he would not release the second servant of his debt.
So my Heavenly Father will do also to every one of you, Jesus says, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from the heart again, transaction is over.
It's not about forgiving a debt, because that would be a poor substitute for the world and reality that God is actually asking us to live in something that's much more than that, to live a life where forgiveness is not about debts and keeping score, which is a losing proposition.
No, Jesus asks us to consider the issue differently than the rest of the world would.
The rest of the world, who would mock people who forgive, rather than see it to the call to freedom that it is.
Please do not think, though, that Jesus is asking us to forget.
That's not the call to action here.
In fact, Jesus is trying to say, learn from these moments, make a different statement.
Take the memory of what could have been and make it shine with the light of forgiveness.
He's saying that the cycles of evil and the legacy that we leave behind for generations can end with us when our hearts are changed by pity and mercy, that we can rewrite the legacy, the memory of these events, by forgiveness.
Now, this is not an easy thing to do, and I think Jesus knows exactly how hard this is because he makes us practice it every single time we say the Lord's Prayer, his own prayer. He taught us that we must forgive others as we have been forgiven.
And when he is hanging on the cross, I don't think it escapes him how hard forgiveness is when he's being ridiculed, spit upon, and terribly killed by the very people he is forgiving in real time with the words, father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. He is giving up his right to revenge.
That's all well and good.
These are some bold and powerful things that Jesus is trying to shake us into awareness of.
But how do we do it?
How do we actually live this forgiveness?
Well, I think the first thing we must remember in this practice is that it's just that, a practice, an everyday choice to live as though we are offering freedom instead of retribution.
Because once we start to have this chain reaction of forgiveness, it trickles all the way into eternity. Jesus says, I'd like to read a quote from Robert Kappen on this, who says, in heaven there are only forgiven sinners, but in hell too, there are only forgiveness sinners.
Jesus on the cross did not sort out certain terrible parties and cut them off from his pardon in his death. He never takes back that forgiveness, not even in the bottom of the bottomless pit.
The sole difference, therefore, between heaven and hell is that in heaven the forgiveness is accepted and passed along, while in hell it is rejected and blocked.
In hell, the old life of bookkeeping and credit and debt and score and retribution is insisted on and becomes forever the pointless torture it Always was.
So then we must practice every day the terribly hard work of forgiveness.
The next thing we must remember in trying to be people of forgiveness is that we don't have to do it overnight. I think that's critical.
It's enough to ask God to want to be able to forgive.
That itself is a very powerful prayer. It's asking God to take your heart and move it and shape it with pity. To want to be a person of grace and peace, even in the face of evil.
Because Jesus, remember, says this is a matter of the heart.
The third step might be the hardest, because to forgive, we must also pray for that person or group who has hurt us as well.
Praying for them, praying for their hearts that they might be changed, praying that they might also find peace and healing and wholeness.
That's the only way these chains of generational pain are broken.
Again, this is hard. And if you cannot do this again, you can ask God just to want to do it. At some point it begins to soften. At some point our hearts open up to this.
That's true even if the person never asks for forgiveness themselves.
Friends, this is the ultimate act of hope.
After the terrorist attacks, we saw fear, we saw pain, and we saw glimpses of hope.
I think that hope comes in when we lay down our sword and our claims to retribution, these are acts of radical heavenward gazing. It's anything but easy, but it's the only way we become free.
We live in a world where pain and suffering and violence and killing have become such the norm that what we tend to remember are the pain, are those tragedies, are those times when we felt crushed, as though evil is winning.
It's then that forgiveness must be the thing that we become known for, that we change the memory into one of peacemaking, one that seeks to understand that in Jesus economy, grace, the grace that we've been given, is anything but limitless.
Except, I suppose, the very limits that we place on it ourselves.
So here we are, 25 years later, a generation later.
And just last week, Ken and I dropped our own child off to be a freshman in college.
That has haunted me a little bit this week.
The memory of 911 reminds me that I cannot protect Delia from the evil that humans are possible of.
But if I let that memory and that fear and that retribution call stop there.
Then I'd be giving up on the hope for a better future, for a new generation of peace and hope.
A future where we do not bind ourselves to retribution, but rather become known for the measure of grace and love that we are even more capable of than acts of pain.
A legacy of peace and forgiveness and a life that we must strive for.
So today, let's begin that generation, that generational change of a daily practice of forgiveness.
If you cannot yet do this, it's okay to ask God to loosen those chains by asking for the desire to forgive as we have been forgiven.
Maybe then our stories of forgiveness, big and small, will be what we remember in ages to come and what we are known for.
And maybe then we will truly know freedom as we bring peace to this earth.
May it be so.
Amen.
