Every sermon I've ever given (at least this is what this one feels like)

The following is a not-so-perfect transcript of this sermon.
 
Scripture: Matthew 18:15-35

Forgiveness is an impossibly challenging thing to talk about, because, being the human beings that we are, we are always acting like human beings, and the forgiveness Jesus is talking about is God’s kind of forgiveness—a kind of forgiveness that we not only fail to understand; we also find it offensive and downright stupid.

This requires some context.

Today's reading starts out with advice about how to point out faults to another. It seems like practical advice at first glance: Give them three chances. One on your own, one with others, and lastly with the church as a whole. Churches have followed this model. It seems practical, but it's also a bit strange coming out of Jesus’ mouth. After all, this story comes immediately after the parable of the lost sheep. Jesus just went from seeking out of the one lost sheep to the possible detriment of the 99, and now he's talking about a kind of limited forgiveness. What's going on?

So Peter asks for clarification: How many times should human beings forgive? 7? 77? Or is it 70 x 7? 490? Infinite?

Apparently, it's not so clear. So, Jesus clarifies by means of a parable, which is typical Jesus, illuminating by means that seem to obscure, and this is the brunt of what I'm going to talk about today.

Debt accounting business

In this parable, a slave receives a promise from the master, but the slave can’t imagine any kind of accounting for debt other than the model he uses. So when he is radically forgiven an impossible debt (in fact the number is so huge that it can hardly be fathomed), he only sees the king as being foolish rather than his system of accounting of being limited. The king does what the slave could never conceive of doing: he wipes the debt clean.

Robert Farrar Capon says, “And do you know why the king could do that and the servant couldn’t? Because the king was willing to end his old life of bookkeeping and the servant wasn’t.”

This is a story about a slave unwilling to consider that he will die.

It’s not that our models of accounting don’t work in our day-to-day lives—they do, and very well! In fact, that’s why it’s hard for so many of us to imagine any other system of accounting than one that holds past transgressions against us. It’s not so much that Jesus is advocating how to live our lives in a different, better way; it’s that Jesus is telling us all the ways that the way we lives our lives don't add up. God's way remains something foreign to us.

Again, Capon says, “In the spite of the fact that he [the slave] was an important enough servant to run up a whopping debt (mere stableboys don’t have opportunities like that), his first thought on being released was not how to die to his old life and market himself in a new one. Rather it was to go on with all his bookkeeping as before.”

When he puts his hand on the next slave down the line he misses out on “the new life he might have lived out of death” (-Capon).

We are the slave.

We are the slave who has been forgiven an impossible debt, but the impact of that forgiveness is yet to appear in most of our lives. For all the world knows, we have never known forgiveness. For all the world knows, we’re in the same bean-counting business as those who have no knowledge of a king freeing them from their impossible debts. Worse still, we assume we are born with a blank slate, that we don’t owe anything to anyone. We ignore the miracle of birth, even despise our parents for the control they had in creating us, and so it is hardly surprising that we would assume we owe nothing to nobody. We’re self-made people. It’s part of our grand delusion. Like the Jews who once said that they are descendents of Moses and have been slaves to no one, we too are oblivious and wrong-headed and just plain slow.

The only way to escape grace in this parable (and indeed in all of Jesus’ teachings) is to refuse to die. In our case, that means killing off the illusion of the “self-made man.”
 

Death and Resurrection

I realize I talk about death often. I was thinking yesterday about how people—usually young people—will say it’s morbid to talk about death, and then when I ask them what they’ve done this week they’ll gush about the latest horror movie they saw with peoples’ brains being blown out. Death seems to be OK as long as it’s entertaining.

My point is merely this: it’s easier to do forgiveness like the model Jesus offers at the beginning of today’s scripture. The three chance model is easy and practical. It’s the equivalent of going to a horror movie to say you aren’t afraid of death, but it’s skirting around the true issue, which is that no three-chance model will be good enough when you look in the mirror. You need more than three chances. You need three chances every three seconds or so. The reason I talk about death—and why it might be so jarring for you—is because here is a place to be honest: we are the slave with the impossible debt. And we’re afraid of dying. Physically, we’re afraid of death, but we’re also afraid to die to a world of accounting our sin. We’d much rather hold peoples’ sins over their heads, to recall all the times they have failed, to point out every one of the things they’ve done wrong.
 

Thank God we have a God who plays by absurdly different rules: who seeks out lost sheep, who forgives infinitely. Maybe we should start acting like it. We need to die to ourselves. I’m just going to keep saying it week after week, and maybe eventually it will sink in, but maybe not. It didn’t for the slave. The only way to escape grace is to refuse to die. So that’s really the only question before you: Are you going to die to this life, or continue to badger others’ over the debts they owe you?

One path leads down a slow, circling road towards nothing; the other road leads headlong through death on its way toward resurrection. It isn’t easy. None of this is. But you need to die to yourself—die to the idea that you’re super important, that you have power over others. All that needs to go. Then, and only then, will you remember the debt from which you have been freed.