The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost Exodus 14: 19 – 31
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew
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?”
Matthew 18: 21
September signals the beginning of our stewardship campaign here at St. Bart’s. Last year, Haywood quipped in one of his September sermons that the framers of the lectionary must have known September was stewardship month because the gospel lessons at the time all focused on money. Such is not the case this morning. Today in the gospel according to Matthew we hear Jesus’ command to forgive those who have sinned against us, not seven, but seventy-seven times and the parable of the unforgiving slave. Matthew this morning is far more concerned with our stewardship of one another than with the stewardship of our finances. Matthew knew that the church was called into being by God to be a communion, a communion that will always be threatened not by a lack of money but by the absence of forgiveness.
Stewardship, Matthew reminds us this morning, is not limited to the way we use our financial resources and how much of those resources we give to the church. Stewardship, broadly understood, embraces the way we live into our calling as the creatures God created to bear God’s image into the world. And what God gave us to accomplish this task of bearing God’s image into the world was not a bank account but rather one another.
The climax of the story of creation is the creation of Adam – the man of mud in Hebrew. And no sooner has God created Adam then God says: “It is not good to be alone” and God brings forth Eve, to be a helpmate and a partner to Adam. God creates not one but two human beings and tells them to take care of a garden. Human being, in other words, was created to be “being in communion” – a relationship of mutual giving and receiving between two different but similar creations. God creates two rather than one because God knows none of us can be fully human alone.
We hear this morning a parable of forgiveness from the gospel of Matthew. A king remits the huge debt of a slave who then turns to a fellow slave and shows no mercy, throwing him into prison for a fraction of the debt the wicked slave owed to the king. The wicked slave did not treat his fellow slave as he had been treated and he should have. None of us can miss the point. We all have screwed up and most of the time lightening has not struck us down so be kind to those who have hurt you.
Jesus’ logic is impeccable. And strictly in keeping with Jewish tradition. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love your neighbor as yourself.
But we can’t. Some people are simply intolerable. Some people are so mean or so arrogant or so controlling or so clueless that we want nothing to do with them. We wish they would just go away and disappear. We really would rather not deal with them. And some people have hurt us so badly, robbing us of our innocence or our loved ones or our trust – things we can never reclaim – that we really would like to deprive them of what they have deprived us. We want revenge or at least the satisfaction of knowing that what goes around comes around, a moment when we can say “I told you so.”
So Peter poses the ultimate question: Isn’t there a limit to forgiveness? Seven times, is not that enough? Do we not all reach a point when we are no longer required to forgive? And Jesus says “No.”
Pastoral theologian John Patton writing in his book Is Human Forgiveness Possible? makes the following comment on Peter’s question:
Peter’s question seems to say: “Please give me a rule so I don’t have to keep dealing with this. How can I know when enough is enough? I want to know what to do instead of having come to terms with the whole history of our relationship.” Jesus’ response to the question says in effect, “I am unwilling to give you a way out of a continuing relationship to your brother.”
Forgiveness is the investment we make in one another. Forgiveness remembers not only what you done to me but what I have done to others. Forgiveness is neither blind to the hurt others have caused us nor blind to our own sin. Forgiveness knows we cannot be church by ourselves. Forgiveness holds open the possibility of communion when all we can see is the impossibility of communion.
The church is a strange and very fragile place. Called together by God, God then tells us to live together, to forge a common life with people we do not choose. Pledging commits us to one another for good and for ill. Keeping the lights on and the copier running and the staff paid is the very least of our problems. Creating, maintaining and nurturing community is far harder and requires an investment of the heart as well as the wallet. If you want to know what you are investing in, look around – you are investing in us, a rather motley and sinful group of folks some of whom will undoubtedly cause you some dismay in the year to come. Now why on earth would anyone in their right mind do that? Because God said a long, long time ago: “It is not good to be alone.”