Preached September 14th, 2014 by Pastor Brahm Semmler Smith
Based on Matthew 18:21-35
I spent some time this past week reading a number of stories collected on a website called the “Forgiveness Project.” If you Google their name, it will take you to their website and lead you to a wealth of information about this project. The goal of “The Forgiveness Project” is to collect personal stories in examining and exploring the themes of forgiveness, reconciliation, and conflict resolution. In using these stories, they hope to encourage and empower people to explore the nature of forgiveness and find alternatives to conflict and revenge.
And there are a lot of stories about forgiveness. Stories from Great Britain, the United States, Rwanda, Palestine and Israel, Bosnia, from all over the world. Stories that are emotional and moving in the face of some of the worst circumstances and acts of humanity. Stories that speak of healing and wholeness brought about in a broken world through acts of forgiveness. Stories like that of a mother named Mary Johnson and the boy who murdered her son, Oshea Israel in Minneapolis. Initially, Mary writes that she was filled with hate. Hate that consumed her. But after some time, she found her faith challenging her and her hate, to the point where she went to the prison to meet with her son’s killer, and begin a long process towards forgiveness. A process that led her building a relationship with Oshea, and helping him reintegrate into the neighborhood and rebuild his life when released from prison. She took her experience to help create an organization that uses healing and reconciliation to break through the cycle of violence in families similar to hers and Oshea’s.
There is story after story like this on this site, that cause me to pause and say “wow.” Wow. Who are these people? And how can they do what they do? I have a hard time forgiving the guy who cut me off on Claremont Avenue or the coach who didn’t play me enough in high school basketball or my neighbor for mowing his lawn when my kid is trying to take a nap. How do these people do what they do? How do they forgive their child’s murderer? Or the White supremacist who terrorized their family? Or the drunk driver who paralyzed them?
In a number of their stories, the writers talk about some of the responses they got from others. People who treated them like crazy, like they were betraying their loved ones, like they were doing something extremely radical. I don’t want to simplify them or make it seem like these are simple stories with immediate, clean cut endings. These stories aren’t simple. The ways the many people describe forgiveness and the long, complicated, messy processes that lead them to that point are all different. But for many, the point they reached, a point of forgiveness, was surprising and abnormal and radical in the face of what the world would have them do.
Why is it stories like this are surprising? Shocking? Not normal? Why is forgiveness so hard for us?
We may pray every week, every day, as Jesus teaches us in the Lord’s prayer, “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us”, but we find more power and control in holding grudges and notions of vengeance and revenge. Living forgiveness is not in our sinful nature.
Jesus knew this about us, and it comes about in today’s Gospel.
Peter asks him, how often should I forgive, Lord? 7 times? That really is generous, isn’t it? Any more than that would be nuts!
Hold on there, Peter. Not 7 times. 77 times. Or as many scholars suggest, 70 x 7 times. 490 times. The point? Forgive until the forgiveness takes! Forgive until you actually mean it! Forgive until the pain, anger and hate inside of you no longer consumes you. Forgive.
Well, thanks Jesus, we, and Peter say. I am not you. Do you have any idea what you are asking?
Yes, of course he does. This is the savior who will say from the cross, “forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.” So he tells us this parable afterwards, about a servant who is freed from a debt by his king. A huge debt. 150,000 years of earnings, $2.25 billion dollar debt. He is freed from it. And what does he do? Rather than be gracious, he goes and demands that another slave pay up his debt to him, a debt of a couple of thousand dollars. Miniscule compared to what he was just freed from. And when he can’t, he throws the slave in jail, only to be found out by the king and told he must repay the entire $2.25 billion dollar debt he originally owed.
Jesus uses this over the top parable as a starting point. A starting point to describe God’s relationship with us, and how God desires us to be in relationship with others. A starting point that begins for us in our baptisms. Baptism reminds us of the immense gift of grace and forgiveness we receive from God in these waters. Forgiveness that we carry with us each and every day.
Which doesn’t seem to make it any easier on us. We still struggle to live a life of forgiveness.
Thomas Aquinas says that God does not command us to do impossible things but rather commands us to do things that would be impossible if it were not for the grace of God. I think forgiveness is probably towards the top of that list. If it were not for the grace of God, I do not trust my own ability to forgive others.
But when we consider the great debt God has wiped clean for us in our baptisms and the forgiveness of every single one of our sins, the weight of our own forgiving really seems small. It is through God’s gracious, loving act of forgiving us that we are able to forgive others. Which means that forgiveness is about more than the isolated acts and words of individuals who seem so radical and crazy in a world stuck and payback and revenge. Forgiveness is way of life that comes through our faith in Christ. A way of life that breaks through the pain and destruction of an eye for and eye world, and offers a way to reconciliation and healing.
That is Jesus challenge and insight for us today. May God continue to forgive us daily, as help us forgive those who sin against us. Amen.
Trinity Lutheran Church 