But I Say unto You: Forgive Richmond s First Baptist Church, September 17, 2017 The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost Matthew 18:21-35

Transcription

1 But I Say unto You: Forgive Richmond s First Baptist Church, September 17, 2017 The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost Matthew 18:21-35 Then Peter came and said to him, 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, seventy-seven times. There is a refrain that runs through the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5-7 Jesus often says, You have heard that it was said by men of old but I say unto you. That s the title of this new sermon series, and in it we move from Moses to Jesus, from the time-worn tradition of the elders to the radical new teaching of this prophet from Galilee. For us, his is the voice of authority. When he speaks, we listen. Last week we talked about how some of our traditions might need to change in order to make room for a new generation. Today, let me invite you to lean in close and listen, to hear what Jesus might have to say about forgiveness at a time when it seems that almost nobody wants to forgive. In last week s Gospel reading, Jesus told his disciples what to do if another member of the church sinned against them. Go to that person, he said; Confront him with his fault. If he listens you ve won your brother back. But that s not what we usually do. When another member of the church sins against us we usually go and tell someone else, we make triangles instead of straight lines, and it makes things worse instead of better. No, Jesus says, go to the one who has sinned against you when it is just the two of you alone. Have the courage to confront. That s how reconciliation happens. That s how you get your brother back. I can almost see Peter thinking about 1

2 that, and imagining how he would put it into practice. If someone slapped him he should probably say, I don t like it when you slap me. And if they said they were sorry he should probably forgive them. But what if they slapped him again the next day? And what if they slapped him the day after that? Lord, he asked, how many times should I forgive the one who sins against me? Seven times? It s a generous offer. Not many of us would forgive that much. But Jesus says, No, not seven times: seventy seven times! Or, in some of the ancient manuscripts, seventy times seven. Either way Jesus makes it clear that you can t limit forgiveness. You can t say, This far and no further. You have to forgive and forgive and forgive. But it s not only a matter of how many, it s a matter of how much. And Jesus tells a parable to make his point. He says: 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 ten thousand 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 (Mt. 18:23-27). If a talent was worth fifteen years wages for a common laborer, then ten thousand of them was a whole lot more. Let s say that in today s dollars a common laborer makes $500 a week. That s about $25,000 a year, or $375,000 for fifteen years. If that s a talent, then ten thousand of them would be ten thousand times $375,000, a number so big my calculator doesn t have enough zeroes to display it. It says, 3.75e9, or, roughly, one zillion dollars. The slave could not pay, Jesus says. Well, of course he could not pay. He owed a zillion dollars! Which makes me wonder how he got into that much debt in the 2

3 first place. All I can figure is that he had a gambling problem, and his problem was that he was a terrible gambler. In one unfortunate hand of Saturday night poker with the king he may have bet a zillion dollars, and now it was time to pay up. But since he couldn t this king who appears to have no pity orders him to be sold, along with his wife, and children, and all his possessions, and payment to be made. It wouldn t be nearly enough to cover the debt, but it would be something. But the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything. And here s the surprise; this king who appeared to have no pity actually does. He has more pity than anyone on earth. Which makes it clear that this is no earthly parable this is a parable of the kingdom. And the king of this kingdom is capable of unimaginable forgiveness: one zillion dollars worth of debt forgiven, and erased, just like that. There is only one appropriate response to such a gesture, and that is unimaginable gratitude. If Jesus had said the man dissolved in tears, or leaped to his feet and shouted Hallelujah! or grabbed the king and kissed him on both cheeks, I could understand it. What I can t understand is what the man actually does. Listen: But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, Pay what you owe (Mt. 18:28-30). Unthinkable. Unimaginable. Unforgiveable. His fellow slave owed him a hundred denarii, which, compared to what this man has just been forgiven, is nothing. And that s what this parable is all about: it s about comparison. Jesus says the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king, and the debt he forgives may be compared to our debt. How much do we owe the king? More than we can pay. Much more. And yet the king has pity on us. He forgives us, and erases our debt. The only appropriate response 3

4 is unimaginable gratitude. But that is not how this slave responds. He seizes his fellow slave by the throat and says, Pay what you owe. His victim says, Have patience with me, and I will pay you exactly what this slave has just said to the king! but he doesn t have patience. He throws his fellow slave into prison until he can pay the debt. And that leads to the parable s surprising conclusion: When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. 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 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 (Mt. 18:31-34). Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you? the king asks, and that s the question for all of us. Can we give as we have received? Can we offer forgiveness to others, no matter how much, or how many times, they may have wronged us, simply because we have been so abundantly forgiven? If we can t, then the conclusion of this parable falls on us like a judge s gavel. That slave was handed over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt, and since that would be impossible, he was handed over to be tortured forever. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, Jesus says, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart (Mt. 18:35). Now, Jesus could be exaggerating. He probably is. He has already shown himself capable of exaggerating when he talked about a slave owing ten thousand talents. But if he is exaggerating, he is exaggerating for a reason. He wants us to understand how much we have been forgiven, and he wants us to understand how much we need to forgive. If we cannot do it, and do it from the heart, there will be hell to pay. I don t know what it does to you to hear that, but you may be thinking, Pastor, I love Jesus, and 4

5 I want to do what he says, but you have no idea what s been done to me. You have no idea how many times it s been done to me. You have no idea how much you re asking me to forgive. That s true; I probably don t. But I know what s been done to some people. Last week I went to a one-day conference in Louisville, Kentucky, i where I learned that there are about 190 million white people in America in approximately 82 million homes, and about 40 million black people living in 14 million homes. ii I learned that white households in this country control 90 percent of the wealth, while black households control only 2.6 percent. iii But that s not all. I learned that the top ten percent of white homes in America are worth $1.4 million dollars or more, while fifty percent of black homes, once you deduct the family car, are worth no more than $1,700 dollars. iv But that s not all. I learned that education, the great equalizer, has not made things equal at all: that a black college graduate still makes only two-thirds the average salary of a white high school dropout. v That s just not right. I was still thinking about those statistics when I met with the worship planning team on Tuesday afternoon I said, I m supposed to preach about forgiveness this Sunday. I m supposed to tell people that unless they forgive from their heart they will end up like that unforgiving servant. But how can I tell that college graduate to forgive, the one who s making two thirds as much as a white high school dropout? That s a matter of justice. It doesn t need to be forgiven, it needs to be fixed! And they agreed with me, but they also pointed out, gently, that this parable from Matthew 18 is not about justice, but about forgiveness, and that s true. There is no justice in forgiving a man a 5

6 zillion dollars, and there is no justice in torturing a man who can t pay his debt. Justice is not the point of this parable, at least not earthly justice. The more I ve thought about that in the days since the more I ve realized that you could fix every broken thing out there, in the world, without fixing what s broken in here, in the heart. Jesus seems to understand this, and maybe that s why he insists that we forgive. Maybe he knows that an unforgiving heart is deadlier than any injustice that can be done to us, and that we have to fix that before we can fix anything else. There s a movie called Places in the Heart, set in a small town in Texas during the Great Depression. In the opening scene the white sheriff is called away from Sunday dinner to investigate a disturbance down by the tracks. He finds a young, African- American boy drinking from a whiskey bottle and firing a pistol. The sheriff calls out, Wiley? and he says, Hi there, Mr. Roy! Nice day, isn t it? Wiley, you are drunker than a skunk, the sheriff says. Yes, I am, Wiley admits. I m sorry, Mr. Roy. Are you ready to come with me? the sheriff asks. Just a minute, Mr. Roy, the boy says. He takes a last swig from his whiskey bottle, throws it up in the air and fires off two or three drunken shots. And then he turns toward the sheriff with a smile and his gun goes off again, accidentally. The sheriff falls to the ground with blood stains spreading on his white Sunday shirt, and nobody is more shocked or surprised than the boy. The sheriff is dead by the time they get him back to the house. They stretch his body out on the same dining room table where he had just been eating dinner. A little later two truckloads of white men pull up in front of the house, with Wiley s dead body dragging along in the dust behind them. They ve taken justice into their own hands. The movie is mostly about how the sheriff s young widow has to struggle to survive, but by 6

7 the end a kind of uneasy peace has been reached. She s been able to hold onto the farm. Her sister has reconciled with her husband. A blind boarder has become a member of the family. And a good-hearted hobo named Moze has saved the day. The last scene is in church, where the pastor stands to read from 1 Corinthians 13. Love is patient and kind, he says. It does not keep a record of wrongs. The sister reaches out to squeeze her husband s hand and the deacons start to serve communion. And that s all it is a communion scene until you see Moze s black hands reach for the tray, and you wonder what he s doing there. Moze hands the tray to Will, the blind man, who didn t have any use for religion. And Will hands it to the widow s daughter, who passes it to her brother, who passes it to his mother the widow and then she passes it her husband, the same one who got shot at the beginning of the film, now alive and well and sitting on the pew beside her. And that s when you know we re not in Texas anymore. That s when you know that we ve caught a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven. But the next scene proves it, because that s when the sheriff passes the tray to Wiley, the very same boy who shot him, and says, The blood of Christ, shed for you. There is an undeniable power in the act of forgiveness. In some ways it is even stronger than the power of justice. Justice can set others free, but forgiveness can set us free. Maybe only then, when I forgive you and you forgive me, can we lay down all those old injustices, and begin to work together to bring in the kingdom. Jim Somerville 2017 i The Angela Project, hosted by Simmons College in Louisville, Kentucky and co-sponsored by the National Baptist Convention of America, the Progressive National Baptist Convention, and the Cooperative 7

8 Baptist Fellowship. The Angela Project is a three-year movement commemorating the 400th Anniversary of Black Enslavement in America. ii Antonio Moore, an attorney living and working in Los Angeles, whose YouTube channel ToneTalks advocates for racial equality. iii Demos.org (as cited by Antonio Moore in The Racial Equality Gap Explained in Sixty Seconds on ToneTalks.org). iv Slate.com (again, cited by Antonio Moore). v From Antonio Moore s lecture at The Angela Project, September 11, 2017, Louisville, KY. 8