Sermon for Sunday, September 14, 2008

Text: Matthew 18:21-35

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to hear a prominent Evangelical pastor speak on the topic of ‘radical forgiveness.’ He took for his text the Gospel for today, and a preached a sermon centering on the idea that we could all improve our lives by practicing the same kind of ‘radical forgiveness’ that Jesus tells Peter to do.

I could preach a thousand sermons about that – about how incredible the parable of the unforgiving servant really is. But something else caught my attention. I’m focused on Peter.

In the New Testament, Peter often serves the role of the speaker – voicing concerns of the disciples, sometimes of the other people around Jesus, but in an interesting way, I think Peter represents the thoughts all people who read the text. He’s the John Q. Public of the New Testament.

Peter, prone to pride, self-righteousness, denial, and sweeping statements of bravado reminds me of how we are from day-to-day. I like Peter. Seems to me that he knows what it’s like to live between the altar and the door – so close to the kingdom of heaven, but at the same time still mired in the world he knows doesn’t work the way it should, but that he can live in just the same. In Peter, I can see many of our own struggles as we live our lives as disciples of Jesus Christ.

So you’ve heard the back story in weeks past, and just last week we read the text that comes right before this – Jesus lecturing the disciples on how to deal with problems in the church – be they caused by people, or be people themselves.

So in response to that lecture, Peter comes to Jesus and asks, “Lord, if another member of the church (actually, the Greek reads ‘my brother’) sins ---sins--- against me, how often should I forgive him? As many as seven times?”

Now 7 is a pretty significant number to Peter, being pretty important in his tradition. So I think he’s asking a question about his own righteousness, about how holy he should be when dealing with people who wrong him. Again, it seems to me that Peter represents all of us, because he turns the conversation right back to his favourite topic – himself.

Peter exaggerated his answer, because even today we have a term for people who forgive no matter what transgression – at best we call them doormats, or at the very worst victims of abuse. But he wants to know what’s in it for him. He’s maybe ready to forgive seven times – but he wants the other disciples to know that he’s ready to do it. He wants to be holy. He’s ready.

He’s really annoying. Maybe you know somebody like this. I know I do – he’s usually the guy staring back at me in the mirror every morning. A little while ago I had the captive opportunity to sit down with someone and be told for five straight hours why they were a better pastor than me (and no, it wasn’t Pastor Stewart). A better Christian than me. A better…well, anything that me.

How I didn’t really understand the bible the way they did, but the person offered to enlighten me as to the error of my ways. It was all I could do not to throttle him with his own self-righteousness. I would have prayed over him afterwards, of course. But I thought you might be disappointed in me.

So maybe Peter annoyed Jesus, because his reply is to exaggerate Peter’s example even further, to a number that basically be taken to be ‘infinity’ – a practical impossibility. He also reverses a law established all the way back in Genesis 4:24, when Lamech crowed that he had revenged himself seventy-seven fold.

But I think it’s also reflexive – in effect, Jesus is turning Peter’s question back to him: “You think you’re righteous, eh? Well how many times do you think I’ll forgive you of your sins?” I’ll explain why a bit later.

That wasn’t what Peter was thinking of. He wasn’t thinking of his own sins – just those of other people.

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Martin Luther (of whom some of you may have heard) spent a great deal of time thinking about sin. It’s said that some days he would spend up to six or eight hours a day in the confessional, stripping bare his soul of every possible transgression he could think of. As popularized in the movie Luther, his Augustinian supervisor told him, “Yes, Martin, and in six years you’ve told me nothing interesting!”

So later, when Luther was writing about sin, he chose the Latin word “incurvatus,” to describe it, a word literally meaning “inward-turning”.

Because, you see, for Luther, sin wasn’t just a transgression before God, some kind of mindless trespass over God’s moral absolutes. Sin was more than that. It started, and in effect, ended with the first commandment.

Thou shalt not have any gods before me.

The issue for Luther being that as humans we can honestly achieve nothing this is not tainted by self-interest. Which places our own desires ahead of God, which breaks the first commandment – which, in turn, condemns us before God.

Yet, Luther pointed out, we are forgiven. We have no power to make ourselves right, but by the grace of God we’re forgiven. Asking ‘how many times should I forgive someone’ seems pale in comparison with the scope of sin we are forgiven.

And so when we hear Peter ask that question, and hear the reply of Jesus, it seems totally absurd that Jesus would, in fact, demand of Peter that kind of absolute forgiveness. Peter’s not capable of it. We’re not capable of it.

So Peter heard the hyperbole in Jesus’ answers, but ultimately he could not know that this was the size of the debt that Jesus would soon forgive. All the sins of people in the world – an unbelievably large debt. Peter – the one who tried to stop Jesus from teaching about his death – couldn’t forsee the debt that Christ was to pay on the cross.

So really, what does ‘radical forgiveness’ look like?

Is it the image of a powerful king, generously forgiving the incredible debt of a servant? Or is it the image of two hands nailed to a cross?

A friend of mine tells a story from his early years in ministry. He was called into a hospital room to offer what comfort he could to a woman dying of a particularly brutal cancer. She had lived her life alone, and was regarded as an embittered, joyless woman.

When he offered her communion, she refused. “Don’t worry about me,” she told him, “I don’t deserve it and I deserve everything I’m going through now.”

As he asked what she meant, she at first tried to direct his attention elsewhere, but eventually she said quietly “I committed an unforgivable sin.” And she broke down, and wept.

In between storms of weeping she told her story: how, as a young woman of fifteen in the years after the Great Depression she’d fallen deeply in love with a man who stopped by to work on her family’s farm. After a few weeks he’d left the same way he came, by night. She was left, fifteen, pregnant, and alone.

When her family found out she was locked in the house so the scandal wouldn’t be seen in the community. One night her father took her out to the car, and into the city. In a run-down area of the city he dropped her off in front of an apartment building, and sent her in.

On the way home, along a deserted stretch of gravel road he stopped the car, got out, and opened the trunk. He handed her a shovel, and a box, and told her to ‘think about what she’d done.’

As she collapsed in her final fit of weeping, my friend was at a loss. This was a burden that she’d carried for more than eighty years. Never told anyone. Never believed that she could be forgiven. “I’m sorry,” she kept repeating, “I’m so, so sorry.”

So my friend did the only thing he thought he could, because he couldn’t offer her any words of forgiveness that she would hear. No trite explanation of the wrongs done to her would suffice, for eighty years she had condemned herself.

So from the satchel he carried he took out his communion kit, still shiny and new. He took one small piece of bread, and a tiny cup of wine, and he looked her in the eyes.

He said, in the night, in which he was betrayed, our Lord Jesus took bread. When he had given thanks he broke it, and gave it to the disciples saying ‘take and eat; this is my body, given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And again after supper he took the cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them to drink, saying ‘this cup is the new covenant in my blood, shed for you and for all people, for the forgiveness of your sins.

As he spoke she stopped crying, and for the first time she knew that she could have forgiveness – that there was nothing she could do that could separate her from the love of Christ Jesus. She cried again then, but her tears were those of joy.

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I don’t think that forgiveness can happen without love, and radical forgiveness requires an incredible act of love. As Paul wrote to the Christian community in Rome years ago, “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” We remember ourselves forgiven, and loved, when we share in the baptism of a new life, and when we kneel at the rail and hear the words “for you”.

Because the time we spend here, between the altar and the door, equips us with the knowledge that even though we may yet sin, we rest in the promise of forgiveness. And that promise, made at our baptism, follows us through our days. It reaches out past us to all creation, from East to West, from one scarred hand to the other.

May this be so among us. Amen.