“It
Just Seemed Important”
Matthew
18:21-35
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
September
11, 2011
After leaving behind the lectionary for
our summer preaching series of “Hidden Gems,” I wandered back into it as I
began to prepare for our autumn preaching. There
are advantages both to topical preaching of the kind that Don and I did this
summer and lectionary preaching. In
the first, there is the passion that comes from preaching something that we, the
preachers, choose, something we are working on in our own lives at the moment or
that has caught our interest. Lectionary
preaching has as one of its benefits that it causes us preachers perhaps to be a
bit more humble as we do something like submitting ourselves to the Word,
standing under the text in order to understand the text through which God is
trying to speak to us. To put it
another way, the difference between topical and lectionary preaching is roughly
the difference between hearing ourselves talk and having to listen to someone
else (smile). Most of us prefer the
former but perhaps the better and more profitable discipline is the latter.
So, hard as it is after a summer of luxuriating in the land of topical
preaching, I have lashed myself again to the lectionary mast.
That explains the sermon title.
As the deadline for the Post-Journal announcement loomed on Wednesday,
there was not anything about today’s gospel reading that really was standing
out to me, no sermonic path rearing its head, saying, “Walk this way, Tom.”
And yet there was something
about the passage that would not let me trade it in for another.
In some undefined way, it just seemed important.
So I signed on for it, sent the fax to the Post-Journal, and then started
listening ever more intently as the days turned harder toward Sunday.
Here is something of what I heard as I
listened to this day’s text, to your lives, to mine this week:
This teaching of Jesus is at its root
about a “conversion of consciousness.” Too
often and for too long the church has approached the gospel of Jesus Christ as a
compendium of tips for living well in the world or as a how-to manual for
getting by or getting on in this present age.
The underlying assumption by many is that in “things go better with
God” except, of course, in this world that is not necessarily or even usually
true. The gospel often sets its
faithful disciples at odds with the ways and consciousness of the world and the
world just as often does not look kindly on it.
It was because of a gospel consciousness out of which Jesus lived that he
was put to death.
Thus the gospel and so, too, the story
that Jesus tells in our reading today is about a conversion of consciousness, a
conversion from a worldly consciousness to a gospel consciousness.
I like the way a writer by the name of John Keenan puts it:
“Jesus is concerned with eliciting a conversion of consciousness from
those not yet able to understand, and not with imparting information to a
deluded pattern of consciousness.” This
came clear when Jesus was interrogated by Pontius Pilate and Pilate asked him
where his kingdom is, and Jesus answered, “It is not of this world.”
The
We see a precursor to this when, in
Psalm 73, the psalmist admitted how weary he was of looking around at the world
and its ways, how tiring it was to see the efforts of good and faithful people
thwarted at almost every turn and tragedies befalling them while the proud and
profane seemed to preen and primp and prosper without penalty.
The psalmist sighed that he was exhausted and undone by it all, that he
could not make sense of life or comprehend it until, he said, “I
went into the sanctuary of God; then, I understood.”
There was nothing magical about going
in and sitting in the pews of the
The New Testament declares that Jesus
is the new
In our story today, when Peter came to
Jesus and asked him how many times he had to forgive someone who sins against
him, Peter ventured the number seven. “Seven
times?” he asked Jesus, thinking that it was an over-generous number and that
Jesus might reduce it. Imagine his
surprise when Jesus said, “Not seven
times, Peter, but seventy-seven times.”
The exchange is not about a number.
“Seventy-seven times” was Jesus’ way of saying “without end.”
“Always.” “Every
time.” It is about a conversion of
consciousness. Trying to put a
number on it, Peter really was asking when the retaliation could begin.
At what point, Peter really was asking, is he justified in striking back,
in getting even, in doing to someone else as that one had done to him?
For Peter, forgiveness was one of a number of possible strategies.
If it works, fine. But, if
not, if the offending person does it again, there are other ways of dealing with
him or her. Peter’s was only a
partial commitment to forgiveness that kept him from fully investing himself in
it. For Peter, revenge was as live
an option as reconciliation or restoration or redemption and maybe for him even
the preferred one. We understand
that, do we not? Or am I the only
one who ever has wanted to exact revenge on someone who has hurt me or
embarrassed me or exposed me or treated me or someone I love badly?
But that is a worldly consciousness and
Jesus wants us to live from a higher one. Toward
that end, he develops the story we have heard this morning.
A servant appears before the king who demands payment of a very large
debt. The servant cannot repay it
and thus the king orders the slave to be sold as well as his wife and children,
and every possession the man owns is to be sold as well with all of the proceeds
reverting to the king. All the slave can do is to plead for more time even if in
his heart of hearts he knows that the debt is so huge that he never will be able
to fully repay.
Can you relate?
Have you ever gotten yourself into a situation in which you know you
never will be able fully to make restitution or amends?
It could be a financial thing but for most of us it is something that
gnaws even deeper inside us. Have
you ever made a mistake or broken a trust that is or seems irreparable, that
there just is no way to undo or to fix?
And then, as in our story, we are surprised by joy as grace comes, mercy is announced, compassion flows. The king forgives the debt and the debtor and releases the slave. He doesn’t put him on a revised payment schedule. He doesn’t ramp up his chores and responsibilities. He forgives and restores and releases the slave from a hell of the slave’s own making. I hope you have experienced something like that in your life.
As a matter of fact, you have.
We all have. For in the
story, Jesus means to tell us about God and God’s ways.
Like the prodigal come home to his father and the woman caught in
adultery where judgment is warranted, an indictment is refused.
Instead, we hear amazing grace: “I
do not condemn you. Go and sin no more.”
Judgment is the air most of us breathe
because even as I preach this grace to you, I myself have a hard time believing
it. That is how deeply entrenched in
a worldly consciousness we are.
In all of the gospel stories, including
ours today, forgiveness comes as a surprise.
As we saw at the Republican debate the other evening when the audience
roared its approval at the great number of death row executions in the state of
Do you recall the words of a hymn we do
not sing nearly enough that say, “Make
me a captive, Lord, and then I shall
be free”? What God’s mercy
does is to erase our guilt and our debt to our sin and instead makes us debtors
to divine clemency which has about it the air of freedom in which we live with
each other as the brothers and sisters we are intended to be.
It calls us to live within the divine consciousness for which Jesus
taught us to pray: Forgive
us our debts as we forgive our debtors. There
is a dance that makes the circuit complete.
The dance is that in the light of the mercy we have received, we give
mercy.
In our story today, the circuit is
broken. The one who received mercy
in his great debt to the king did not extend mercy to another who was indebted
to him. The one who had received
mercy did not look at the one indebted to him and say, “This
man is me before I was forgiven” or “I
am a forgiven person ready to forgive.”
He only could focus on what was owed to him and on the debtor’s
inability to pay and so he showed no mercy.
Notice what subsequently happens to the
man who had been forgiven by the king but who did not in turn show forgiveness
to the one indebted to him. The
king’s mercy dries up. It recedes
back into him, so to speak, which sets the one who had been forgiven back into
the consequences and milieu and air of his debt and guilt.
God’s mercy to us is freely given but if we do not imitate it in our
lives, if we do not enter into the divine consciousness, the mercy in which we
are bathed by God drains away as we settle back into a worldly consciousness. It
is not that God rescinds God’s mercy but we turn it away, turn it off.
Jesus calls us to be full-in to the
divine consciousness. So to Peter
who had wanted to know how many times he had to forgive another before he would
be justified in seeking revenge, and to us, Jesus answered, in effect, “You
live by the forgiveness of God. That
is what is to form your identity. It
is the experience of divine mercy and not the experience of being wronged that
you are to repay in kind.”
We might object that it is not
practicable so be so indiscriminate in the mercy we extend to others, that it
will not work, that it is too hard, that it will go unappreciated, even that it
could be dangerous. There are a
thousand excuses from the perspective of a worldly consciousness why mercy may
be misguided or misapplied. But from
the perspective of the divine consciousness there are none.
But we cannot “get” that or
“see” that from within a worldly consciousness which is why we are called to
live by faith and to trust God about the divine consciousness.
That is why, in the telling of
today’s story, what Jesus really is doing is to invite a conversion of the
consciousness in which we live. Receive
mercy. Give mercy.
It is how we change. It is
how the world will change. In our
lives and in the world, it is the path to freedom whose fruit is peace.
And, you know, that just seems
important.
Amen.
Copyright
© 2011 by First Presbyterian Church