After a hymn sing Sunday and a week off, I'm back on the preaching wagon. Here's my latest sermon, from yesterday. The primary text is Matthew 18:21-35, and I tied in Romans 14:1-12 as well.
Alright, I’ll admit it: I’m addicted to my cell phone. I honestly can’t leave home without it. And I know I’m not the only one these days that’s like this. Many of us have our little things that we never leave home without. Cell phone, wallet, keys, and day planner, for me. I know some people who can’t leave home without some makeup on. Some people can’t leave home without their purse. Others won’t leave without a lucky charm. And almost all of us refuse to leave our house unless we’re wearing clothes, which is generally a good thing. We all have those things that we carry with us wherever we go. And this morning’s text from Matthew speaks to this phenomenon.
Peter, the representative of the disciples, asks Jesus a question about how often forgiveness is necessary to someone who has hurt us. What’s the protocol here with forgiveness? What’s required in order for the forgiveness to take hold? And Jesus, as he so often does, responds with a parable, the parable of the unforgiving servant. And this is how the story goes.
There once was a king who was trying to settle all his debts, get his books in order. So he called this one servant in, probably a middle management administrator in his kingdom, and tried to collect on this guy’s debt. But this servant had a debt of practically infinity – he owed 10,000 talents! Now the talent was the largest monetary unit, and 10,000 was the largest number imaginable in those days, so this servant literally owed the largest possible debt someone could owe. It was impossible to ever pay it back – he was doomed. So he pleaded with the king, “Please be patient, I’ll do everything I can to pay back this debt.” But the king knew that was impossible, and in a spirit of ultimate grace he cancelled this servant’s debts, all of them.
The servant, free of debt because of the king’s grace, went out to collect the debt someone else owed to him. He had loaned another servant about 100 days wages, and now it was time to pay up. But the debtor was unable to pay, and he pleaded with the servant, “Please be patient, I’ll do everything I can to pay you.” And this was a significant debt, about $11,500 in our terms, but definitely a debt that could be collected with a little patience. However, the servant trying to collect decided not to extend grace to this debtor, and threw him into prison until he paid his debt (which would now be hard to do since he was sitting in prison).
When the king heard about this, he got really peeved. “This guy owed me an infinite amount of money, and I gave him infinite grace. But now he’s treating people like this? Because of how he acted, he is indebted to me again. He forgot his debt was cleared, or didn’t believe it was, so now it’s not. He is imprisoned by his debt, and is back in the situation he was in before.
When we first read this story, it seems so easy to come down hard on the unforgiving servant, as he’s so often labeled. This guy was let off the hook by a benevolent king, and he refuses to let others off the hook. What a jerk! Or, as the king said, “what a wicked servant!” What a mean-spirited servant!
Well, let’s give this servant a break, okay? After all, we don’t really know all the facts. We know he pleaded with the king for patience as he tried to pay off a debt impossible to pay off. And the king threw the rule book out the window and went beyond giving him patience. He said, “Hey, don’t worry about it. It’s all in the past. That debt is water under the bridge, so let’s just call it even.”
Well, this of course would blow anyone away, for a king to be so merciful, so forgiving, so full of grace. But it’s not the standard practice, nor would anyone expect it to be! In fact, the king canceling the outrageous debt seems so absurd that perhaps the servant doesn’t really believe it’s true! Maybe the king is setting him up. Kings wouldn’t be above that, you know. So perhaps the servant is trying to cover his bases by collecting on his own loans, and that way if the king takes back the whole grace thing, he’ll be able to show he’s working on repaying the debt.
Or, maybe he realizes his debt is cleared, but he’s trying to collect on his loan so he can pay the king something as a way of saying, “thanks for not making me pay everything.” Maybe it’s a way of trying to impress the king. He’s taking it upon himself to show the king that he’s changed, that he’s finally able to manage his finances.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that he goes away from the king and simply forgets about the grace given to him. He just doesn’t think about it. It’s already been erased from his mind when he deals with his own debtor, and he doesn’t mean to be as hard-hearted as he ends up being.
Yet another way to look at the servant’s actions is that he finds that being cleared from debt is a liberating experience. He finally feels freedom from financial worries, and now he’s trying to free the other servant of his debt. You need to pay me your debt so you too are free of indebtedness, you too are liberated from the bondage of debt. Maybe this is it. Maybe he’s only trying to help the poor sap, but he goes about it all the wrong way.
Paul writes of this in his letter to the Romans. In this morning’s Romans passage, Paul addresses a church dealing with disputable religious matters. This is not a church dealing with petty differences in opinion. You do communion by intinction with cardboard-y wafers and wine, and we do it by kneeling at the altar rail with real bread and shot glasses of grape juice. You dunk people for baptism, and we sprinkle. You like this kind of music, and we like that kind of music. No, the church Paul speaks to is dealing with real, difficult issues. It’s a church tackling all the hot-button issues – and we know all about that, with the election rearing its ugly head soon on the horizon.
And what’s one of the most disputable issues in any church, in any organization, in any relationship? That’s right, money. Money can ruin a relationship. That’s why they say to never rent out to family or friends, and never lend money to family or friends. That’s why money is the number one most difficult issue in most marriages. Money divides. Money causes disputes. And it’s because when it comes to money, we have a tendency not to operate with any sort of grace or gentleness. Instead, we act in a wicked or mean-spirited way, and it leads to trouble and division.
But Paul advocates in Romans 14 for the use of gentleness, patience, and grace in dealing with disputable matters. He insists that unity in the body of Christ does not require agreement. He allows both sides to live out their convictions as long as they are actions done with reverence to God. And his point is that whatever we do, grace and gentleness must be at the center of our actions.
The servant in Jesus’ parable failed to act in this way. Perhaps for one reason or another he was doing what he thought was right by trying to collect the debt from his fellow servant. But regardless of his motives, he failed because he forgot to be filled with grace and gentleness and forgiveness in his dealings. The king was forgiving, gentle, and filled with grace. The servant was not. The servant received grace at the feet of the king, but when he left the king’s presence, he left the grace behind. He didn’t take it with him. He didn’t live out the grace given to him.
I suppose you see now where I’m going with this. When we come to meet with God here in this holy place, we come indebted to him, weighed down by our sins and our mistakes. These things we’ve done which we shouldn’t have done, and these things we should have done but haven’t done, are the things we label sin. And these sins break our relationship with God. They leave us in a state of helplessness, a state of owing more than it’s ever possible to pay back. We are completely indebted to God, and we won’t ever be able to pay off this debt. So we come and kneel at the throne of grace and beg for forgiveness. We’ll make it up to you, we say, knowing that there’s no way that we’ll ever be able to make it up to God. It’s ridiculous to think we can pay back God for all our sins, but we pretend like we can anyway, because we’re that desperate for forgiveness.
But then, as we kneel at the feet of God’s throne, in a miraculous, forgiving, gentle act, God wipes our debt clean through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ. In the ultimate act of grace, God the king wipes out we the servants’ debts. And we are free and clear of all our sins, all those things weighing us down. And we praise and worship this wonderful giver of grace!
But then we file out of our tidy little Sunday morning service, go on with our tidy, well-maintained little lives, and act as the unforgiving servant. And most of the time we mean well, but we end up failing, just as the unforgiving servant. We don’t fully believe that our debt has been cancelled even though that’s what we were told. Or we try to impress God anyway, try to earn the forgiveness and grace as if it isn’t a done deal. We still think what we do matters when it comes to God’s grace, so we try to impress God with all our wonderful deeds. Or maybe we just simply forget about the grace given to us, so we fail in our dealings with others because we check our grace at the door.
For about 10 years now, I’ve had the tradition of spending a day each summer golfing with my grandfather. At 83, he still golfs several times a week at the same golf course, Chesnut Ridge. One year, we showed up at Chesnut Ridge to golf, and because it was a busy day they paired us up with a guy golfing alone. It’s standard for golf courses to combine twosomes or single golfers into larger groups on busy days so they can get more people out on the course. Anyway, we’re paired up with this guy that my grandfather knows, because he knows everyone who’s played that golf course once in the last 50 years. And this guy had a mouth on him. He used every swear word I’d ever heard, and I even learned some new words that day. Well, he hits a bad drive on 13, and here come the swear words again, one right after another, like sausage links strung the whole way around a butcher shop. Finally, he looks at me and says, “Kid, I hope your dad isn’t a minister, because I’m using some pretty foul language around you.” In fact, another few swear words came out almost involuntarily as he spoke that sentence. Well, after a few minutes of my grandfather and I doubled over in laughter, we finally explained to him that my dad is a minister. In fact, my mother is too. And at the time, I was thinking about entering the ministry as well. This guy’s face turned bright red. And his language the rest of the day was clean as a whistle. His mouth was on its best behavior from hole 13 to 18.
I tell you this story because it’s just one example of how people tend to clean up their act when around clergy. As the child of two pastors, I have seen this phenomenon played out often. As a seminarian and now as a pastor, I too have become someone that people act different around. And honestly, I’ve been on the other end too, always sitting a little straighter and managing to include more holy talk in my conversations when I knew the pastor was in the room during youth group.
And we do the same with God, don’t we? We tell people not to swear “in church,” as if it’s somehow okay to swear away from church. We treat everyone kindly and gently at church, because how would it look to turn over the tables in the social hall out of anger? And let’s be honest: we do it because it’s easy to act on our best behavior at church. It’s easy to be filled with forgiveness, gentleness, and grace here. But the real world doesn’t operate in this way. The real world is just, and fair, and everyone pays what they owe, even if it’s as much as 10,000 talents! The real world doesn’t operate with forgiveness, with gentleness, with grace. So why should we?
We’re unsure exactly why grace was left with the king and not carried with servant in his own dealings, but we see that it was. The servant didn’t live out the grace given to him, didn’t take the grace of the king with him as he went out to meet those yet unaware of the grace. And often we leave God’s grace at church instead of taking it with us, for one reason or another. We worship in the presence of grace on Sunday, then live Monday through Saturday as if Sunday didn’t even happen. The servant separates his relationship with the king from his relationship with others. We separate our dealings with God from our dealings with the world. We consider our relationship with God and our relationships with the world to be mutually exclusive. We just don’t make that connection in our lives – we live one way here in church, and another way when we’re away from this building.
And when we do, we find ourselves in the same situation as the unforgiving servant. We find that when we fail to live a continuous lifestyle of grace, we become again imprisoned by the sin that we allow to exist in place of that grace. By leaving grace where we think it belongs, at church, we reserve our freedom from sin to be only in that place. But God calls us to a much more fulfilling life of freedom. God calls us to a life free from all bondage of sin, 24-7-365. Only when we accept God’s grace into our hearts and lives are we truly saved from sin. Only when we allow grace to dictate are we really clear of all our debts. And when we reject the infusion of grace into our Monday to Saturday lives, we remain imprisoned by sin.
We are called to live out God’s grace not just in some moments, in some places, with some people. We are called to live continuous lives of grace, around the clock, no matter where we go, or who we meet, or what we do. We are called to a life of forgiveness, gentleness, and grace, grace which cannot and will not be left at the door of the church as we leave. As John Wesley famously said, “The world is my parish.” Yes, the world is our parish. The world is our church. The world is desperately in need of the grace that we so carelessly and thoughtlessly leave here in this building. The world yearns for the grace that we visit once a week instead of allowing it to take control of our lives, infusing itself into every moment, every thought, every relationship in our lives. Let us remember this undeserved and absurdly abundant gift of grace already given to us. Let us remember it not only here, but continue to seek new ways to experience that grace everywhere. Let us open ourselves up in all places to all people, allowing that grace to fill us anew each day, so full that grace overflows from us and reaches others who have yet to experience the wonder of God’s grace. We must allow grace to accompany us out of those doors in the back and into our Monday through Saturday lives. Then, and only then, can we be fully free to live the life that God desires for us. May it be so in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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