PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Matthew 18:21-35                                                                  FORGIVENESS

Sermon September 14, 2008:  People's UCC, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

 

                                   

 

How nice!  Let's do a little math.  A "talent" is a measurement of weight.   One talent of gold was equal to about fifteen years' labor of a day-laborer.[1]  This July the minimum wage went up to $6.55 per hour.[2]  At minimum wage the day-laborer would make $13,100 a year; and in fifteen years his total income in today's dollars would be $196,500:  that's today's equivalent of one "talent" of gold back then.  This man owed ten thousand talents:  $1,965,000,000 in today's dollars.  (Kinda makes you feel better about your credit card, doesn't it!)  To owe this much, this "servant" must have been the royal treasurer, or the prime minister, or something.  When I read this parable this week, it occurred to me that there are quite a few people in our society who would be offended by the almost flippant view of money in this parable.  This king didn't know how much money he'd invested, and he didn't seem to care whether he got it back or not.  That's no way to run a business, or a country.  This parable is a scandal to modern business practice at its best.  How could Jesus tell such a story?  I think it's important for us to remember that Jesus didn't tell this story to teach us about handling money.  The money isn't literal:  it's a metaphor for the things that get between you and God—unfaithfulness, moral flaws, failures, mistakes, sins.  Remember, in the Lord's Prayer in the Gospel of Matthew it says:[3] 

 

forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors

 

but in the Gospel of Luke the same prayer phrases it this way:[4]

 

forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.

 

The money is a metaphor, not literal.  So what does this metaphor symbolize?  What's he really talking about?  He's talking about the greatness of the forgiveness of God, and how our own acts of forgiving need to be big, too.  He said:

 

 

I want to introduce a word here to describe the Universal Moral Law that Jesus is touching:  the word "RECIPROCITY."  As God forgives, you should forgive, or you won't receive forgiveness. 

 

            Peter asked Jesus a question:  "What is the limit of forgiveness?  If Andrew offends me seven times and apologizes, shall I forgive him seven times?"  (Andrew was Peter's brother.)  Jesus' answer is a hyperbole—he uses a phrase that means about the same thing as we mean when we say "a million times"—"I don't limit forgiveness to seven times, but a million times."  Why?  Don't we get weary of forgiving the same person for the same offense over and over again.  Shouldn't they take some responsibility and stop doing it?  Why should I just keep on forgiving them?  In answer to this, Jesus tells the parable of the $1,965,000,000. 

            Back in 1995 our daughter Beth was in college and living at home.  She had wanted to move in with some friends in town, near the school; but it was cheaper to live at home.  Our son Bill had been living in Indianapolis and wasn't doing well at all.  He called home and asked if he could come live there long enough to get back on track, and we said, "Yes, but there's going to be a contract."  So then we told Beth that her brother was moving back in.  She flew into an awful rage, stomped around and shouted, "I'm NOT living in the same house with HIM!"  And she didn't:  she moved out and paid the extra cost.  This was the culmination of years of conflict between the two of them.  From the time Beth was two years old she knew how to get Bill in trouble; and he paid her back with pain.  There was no love lost there, so why should she forgive Bill for all his bullying?  He didn't have to do that.  There was a chasm between them that had no bridge.  Like Peter and Andrew:  "Do I have to forgive him seven times?"  And Jesus told the parable about God's vast forgiveness:  because—(the moral law of "RECIPROCITY":  you receive in the measure you give.) 

 

            This is not the only time Jesus taught "RECIPROCITY."  "The one who lives by the sword will die by the sword."[5]  "Do to others as you would have others do to you."[6]  "Forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us . . . . for if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive you."[7]  Paul wrote to the Galatians:  "As a person sows, so shall they also reap,"[8] and Jesus would add:  "some thirty-fold, some sixty-fold, and some a hundred-fold."  We say "What goes around comes around."  "RECIPROCITY." 

            So if forgiveness is so important in the Christian religion, if the cross and the resurrection and the prayers and the calls to self-discipline are so central to what Christianity teaches, then this forgiveness is at the very heart of the call to "RECIPROCITY."  Let me put this another way.  How many times have you committed sins or made mistakes before God and your neighbor?  And so how many times do you want God and your neighbor to forgive you for them?  Seven times?  Is that enough?  A fourth of them?  Half of all your sins?  Or do you want God's grace to extend so far and so deep that every one of your sins and every one of your mistakes, every weakness, every moment of unfaithfulness, every failure is taken up on the cross-bar of Golgotha and forgiven?  If you want God to forgive you a million times, "RECIPROCITY"  asks that you forgive your neighbor a million times.  This is not super-Christianity:  this is the basics of Christianity:  forgiveness.  It's what we're here for! 

            So Beth took her mattress and her clothes and moved into a friend's kitchen for a month until her housing situation got worked out, but she wasn't going to spend one night in the same house with Bill.  I didn't know what to do with that.  Harriet didn't know what to say—to either one of them.  But now they were both living in the same community, and over the years, inch by inch, they began to tear down the wall they had spent their childhood building.  Bill married one of Beth's friends from high school.  Beth began visiting their house to see her nephews.  They started talking on the phone an hour at a time.  Then they got to the place that they would go to a coffee bar together and talk—talk about the family, talk about what they were doing, talk about the children, talk about their parents.  I don't know if there was any specific moment when Bill said, "I'm sorry"; or any particular occasion when Beth said, "I forgive you for my broken tooth and my fractured spine."  But now they live seven hours apart, and they still talk on the phone an hour at a time.  When their grandmother died two summers ago, they both went to Tennessee for the funeral; and Bill asked to ride back to Virginia with Beth and her husband.  He told me, "Dad, I'm going back with them—the music in the car is better." 

 

            I had something of the same kind of problem with my sister, Jacqueline.  She's twelve years older than me, and when she was a teenager and I was very small, it became a problem.  I bothered things in her room, and she did subtle things to cause me pain.  This back-and-forth escalated for years until, when I was about six years old, I said, "I love everybody" (I said that because I was taught that I was supposed to):  "I love everybody, but I love Jacqueline just above the devil."  I grew.  She got married and left home.  When she was pregnant with her first child, one warm summer evening sitting on the front porch of our aunts' home, she said to me, "I think we ought to stop being enemies.  I'll forgive you if you forgive me."  I was glad to hear that, and I immediately agreed:  I needed a sister—or, at least, I needed to end the suffering.  So we forgave each other:  "RECIPROCITY." 

            Harriet is named for her father:  Harry.  She was his oldest child.  His brother Ben named his oldest daughter Benja.  There was a lot of pride and hope in the hearts of the brothers.  Harry wanted the best for his daughter, but he was not pleased when she said she wanted to become a nurse.  His family and Harriet's mother's family were all either teachers or farmers or both; and Harriet was supposed to become a teacher.  So since Harry was paying the bills, she went to college and became a teacher.  She stopped teaching to have our children and spent several years at home, until they were both in school.  Then she started nursing school—three years of what amounted to a combination of hard study and boot camp; but she did it.  After the first year the students went through the capping ceremony:  her father didn't come to celebrate it.  When she graduated we had a big party:  her father didn't come to celebrate it.  She got a job in a pediatrics ward:  her father didn't want to hear about it.  This standoff went on like that for years.  But in his retirement Harry developed ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and diabetes.  As time went by his conditions grew more severe.  One July we were visiting Harriet's parents, and it came time for Harry's insulin injection.  Harriet's mother got out the insulin and the hypodermic needle and started to prepare, but Harry said, "Let the nurse take care of me."  She could hardly see the needle through tears of reconciliation.  Forgiveness flowed in both directions.  "RECIPROCITY." 

 

Concluding the parable of the unforgiving servant, Jesus said:

 

 

Don't let the illustration of the $1,965,000,000 just slipping through the cracks    get in your way and blind you to the real point of Jesus' parable about forgiveness.  Christianity is about what we might call "a RECIPROCITY of forgiveness."  And you have a responsible place in this moral order; because, you see, if God's people learn to forgive as we are forgiven, then forgiveness will spread across the face of the earth; and that would be the most powerful act of evangelism there has ever been. 

AMEN