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Weekly sermons from the traditional and contemporary worship services at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas, Texas. Rooted in Scripture and the Anglican tradition, these messages explore how the gospel speaks to our faith, our everyday lives and the world around us.
When the spring of 1933, with the United States at the absolute bottom of the Great
Depression, FDR stood up and gave his first presidential address and issued what
is his most famous line, that the only thing we have to fear is what?
Fear itself. Well, this morning in our lectionary, whether it's Genesis, our Psalm,
the Gospel with the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, God is saying to us that
that's not exactly true. That this morning, whatever we fear or whatever we
face, perhaps the thing we should most fear is unforgiveness.
Unforgiveness for us, but also unforgiveness in us.
And so first, unforgiveness for us.
Because in Jesus's parable, we meet a slave who stands before a king owing an
impossible debt, 10,000 talents.
And so how much is that? Well, in those days, one talent was the equivalent of
6,000 denarii, and one denarius was the equivalent of one day's
wages. So I was an English major, and therefore this math is really going to
stretch me. But if the slave owes the king 10,000
talents, then that means he owes him 60 million denarii.
Meaning that to pay off the debt, he would have to work for the king roughly 60
million days, or approximately 164,000
years.
Jesus is revealing to us what one theologian has called our chronic indebtedness.
That what it means to be human is to be perpetually and chronically in
the red. And we are not going to get in the black by trying harder.
When the servant says to the king, "Have patience with me, and I will pay you
everything."
That's a farce. He and us could try to work harder and be a good person the rest of
our life, but our life simply is not long enough.
At best, we will live 80 or 90 or 100 years when what we really need is
164,000.
And so we do not need the king's patience so that we can slowly climb our own way
out of the hole, but we need God to wholly and completely forgive the loan.
And the good news of the Christian gospel is that is what God does, and he does
it by dying.
Because think about it. If the king in our story is owed 164,000 years of labor,
and that is just from one slave, then that means by forgiving even this one slave's
massive debt, he is effectively bankrupting himself and his kingdom.
He's finished. His rule, his kingship is over. He is dead.
And that's what God does. In order to forgive us, he dies.
Knowing that we cannot pay 164,000 lives, he
gives up his own life, the life of his son, to completely forgive our debts.
I want to sit for a second in this glorious moment in time, five seconds, 10
seconds, however long it lasted, when you have this slave kneeling before the
king and hearing these amazing words of pardon and out of
pity for him, the Lord of that slave released him and forgave him his debt.
164,000 years of labor gone. Imagine the relief and the
liberation.
And so that really takes care of our first fear.
In the end, there is no unforgiveness for us, no matter what we have done.
But the parable does leave us with a second fear, which is what about the
forgiveness in us, unforgiveness in us?
Because no sooner does the slave hear these words of unthinkable relief and pardon
when he gets up from his knees and immediately goes out and finds someone who owes
him a debt. And compared to the debt that slave number one owed to the king, the
debt that slave number two owes to slave number one is, of course, a joke.
100 denarii, which if you remember the math, is only 100 days of work.
In other words, if slave number one owed 164,000 lifetimes of labor,
slave number two owes a summer internship.
And yet, slave number one turns violent. It says he seized slave number two.
He literally grabs him by the throat and chokes him, screaming, "Pay what you
owe."
Immediately, slave number two falls to his knees and begs for mercy.
And you would think that in that moment, slave number one would see in the face of
slave number two his own face and hear his own voice
and see his chronic indebtedness that was erased literally minutes before.
But he won't,
or he can't. He refuses to forgive him, but instead throws
him into prison.
And in doing so, slave number one paves his way towards a place that can
only be described as hell.
Because suddenly the whole town turns against him.
The people tell the king what he's done, and when the king hears it, it says in
anger, the king handed slave number one over to be tortured until he would pay
his entire debt. Handed over, tortured, hell.
And because that is what unforgiveness is. It is hell.
It's the surest way to cut ourselves off from other people, the surest way to cut
ourselves off from the mercy of God, and the surest way to cut ourselves off from
our own hearts.
Unforgiveness is the surest way to turn our children against us, our spouse,
our friends against us, our fellow church members, our
coworkers. The surest way to bring about our deepest fears,
to be alone, to die alone, is to be like slave number one.
To so quickly forget the mercy of God, to so quickly
ignore our chronic indebtedness, to imagine ourselves as somehow
superior to other people, standing above them, somehow more righteous than them,
when in fact, we are all slaves.
To stand before others with our little scorecards and our ledgers.
We're counting everyone's most petty mistakes, docking points.
Unforgiveness is hell because, as the author Anne Lamott says,
"Unforgiveness is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to
die." In judging other people, we judge only ourselves.
In choking other people, we choke only ourselves.
And when we throw them in prison, through our daydreams and fantasies about what we
would do to them and what we would say to them if only we had the chance, the only
one that is imprisoned and tortured is me.
In the moment, let's be honest, withholding forgiveness really can feel like
heaven. It feels so good. But in the end, it is only hell.
But the opposite is also true. In the moment, forgiving others,
releasing them, really can feel like death and like hell.
And yet in the end, it is always heaven.
The best movie I know which captures this paradox of forgiveness is the 2014
movie Calvary, which tells the story of an Irish Catholic priest named Father
James. Father James enters the priesthood after his wife dies, and he
takes a small parish off the coast of rural Ireland.
And the movie begins rather shockingly.
In the very first scene, the priest is sitting in the confessional booth on a
normal Sunday afternoon when suddenly a man comes to give his
confession. And the man walks into the booth on the other side of the wall where we
cannot see his face, but can only hear his voice.
And the man begins to tell the priest his story.
How he suffered horrific abuse and trauma as a child, and now as an
adult, he's just done. He feels like he has no option but to do
something about it, and so he's decided to take vengeance.
And he feels like the most terrible and shocking thing he could do is to kill a
priest. And so he tells Father James, "I'm going to kill you, Father.
Meet me on the beach next Sunday afternoon, one week from today." And that's the
first scene of the movie. So Father James leaves the booth and begins what is his
Calvary. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday pass. He goes home.
He puts his affairs in order. He tidies up his bedroom.
He makes visits to parishioners and all the townspeople throughout the week, who
are all like us, incredibly broken people. Alcoholics.
He visits prostitutes. He visits people having affairs.
He even visits a cannibal in prison.
And then the weekend comes, and on Saturday, the day before he is to be killed,
Father James decides to flee. He gets in a car, and he drives to the airport.
But while he's waiting on the tarmac to board the plane, he sees some of the
officers loading a coffin onto the plane.
And seeing that coffin and seeing his own death, but also the death of God, he
realizes he must return home and finish his Calvary.
And throughout the movie, you're left wondering how one man could endure so much
pain. His own grief at the loss of his wife, all the pain of
his community, all the suffering, all the mistreatment, and yet keep on
loving and forgiving and loving and forgiving, all the way to the end.
And the clue as to how comes early on in the movie in another scene in a
confessional booth when this time his daughter comes in.
And her name is Fiona, and Fiona is a recovering addict.
And she confesses to her father that she recently attempted suicide.
And she says to her dad, "You'll tell me it would've been a mortal sin, I suppose."
And then she asks him vulnerably, "Would I have suffered eternal damnation,
Father?"
To which Father James pauses and then gently responds to her, "God is
great, and the limits of his mercy have not been set."
Father James can go to Calvary because he believes in a God of limitless
mercy. Joseph can forgive his brothers this morning because he
believes in a God of limitless mercy.
And in all of our passages this morning, we are being invited to believe in a God
who is more obsessed with extending mercy than we are with withholding it.
"Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive?
Seven times?" I mean, do you hear the limit?
"I tell you, not seven times, but 77 times." No
limits.
"Pay me what you owe. Pay me my 100 denari." Limits.
"And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the
debt." No limits. 164,000 years gone.
As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our sins from us.
Unlimited.
God is great. The limits of his mercy have not been set, and so we must
not set them either.
Thou art the same God whose property it always is to have mercy.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.