The 16th Sunday After Pentecost - The Rev. Bryon Hansen
There are many images used to describe the church – the body of Christ, the Shepherds flock, the Lamb’s fold, the communion of saints, school of prayer and many more. One image that the scriptures for today shout out is this: “The church as a school of love.” School of love.
The Christian community is set apart to exercise love, specifically God’s love. In this school of love, we have the very best teacher. Jesus. Jesus teaches us the way of love and Jesus himself is the very embodiment of God’s love and a big part of God’s love is the gift of forgiveness.
One way I imagine Peter and Jesus’ conversation is Jesus the rabbi, the teacher, instructing the disciples in class and Peter as the diligent student, ready to take notes to secure the “right answers” for his searching questions like, “If another member of the church sins against me, how many times should we forgive? Seven?” The number seven seems about right, after all seven is the number that suggests perfection or completion. Jesus, the iconoclastic rabbi responds not with a precise number but with great exaggeration: “not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”
Another way I imagine this scene is Peter as the passionate and impetuous disciple that he consistently shows himself to be. Maybe in great exasperation, he asks, “How many times?” Perhaps he sees no results in his attempts at forgiving or Peter is tired of forgiving that one church member of the church over and over and over again.
You likely imagine this scene in other ways beyond these three images. Regardless, I suspect every one of us here today has been in the position of the person who offended someone else or in the position of the one being offended and you find forgiveness to be really, really difficult. More specifically, perhaps you’ve had this experience between yourself and another church member.
Recently, I’ve had the experience of being the one who was offended and I’ve been struggling mightily with this forgiveness business.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been the diligent student, seeking out just the right book on forgiveness. I’ve underlined sentences in these books and have taken notes. When we were in London in July, we heard a great preacher at a very cool Anglican church. When I noticed that he had recently written a book on forgiveness, I couldn’t wait to place my order. It’s a great book and it brought me back to those heady days of seminary, taking classes on Christian ethics. It filled my mind but I’m afraid it didn’t travel down to my heart. Then I chose books by wised people that were less academic but filled with such rich fare – books by Desmond Tutu, Henri Nouwen and more. They have been helpful and in some ways went directly to soul but I didn’t find a formula on how to forgive.
I’ve also been exasperated and have cried out to God, not so much wondering how many times to forgive but pleading with God to show me the way and give me the capacity to forgive. And more than once, I’ve thrown up my hands and prayer was more about uttering a sarcastic word to God.
How about you? Maybe like Joseph and his brothers, you’ve had this struggle with members of your family. Perhaps you’ve had this experience with friends, neighbors, coworkers. You don’t want to judge, you want to live unto the Lord, but you find it a big challenge. Maybe you’ve had the experience with another member of the church, a sibling in Christ.
This is one of those instances when being part of the school of love is downright difficult or even feels impossible. Still, this is the behavior we are called to exercise in the Jesus style school of love. I don’t have to look far or search my memory too much to find examples of that like the parable of the king and his servant. The king so graciously forgives his debt and as he returns to his life, he does the exact opposite of what the king had done for him.
In the Gospel of Matthew, the church as school of Jesus’ love is the community that practices a “higher righteousness.” Jesus is the teacher of a higher righteousness. When he says your righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, he is describing a kind of way of being that is deeper than keeping count or merely fulfilling requirements of the law by rote. The commandments and the law are not abolished but Jesus has come to fulfill them. The fulfillment is capturing again the essence of the law which really is the way of God’s heart. Any sincere religious person can do complete a list of requirements but Jesus wants us to go deeper. The higher righteousness, one that exceeds the righteousness practiced by scribe and Pharisee, is a matter of the heart.
Within the Christian community forgive one another from the heart.
In the gathering of the community one of the first things we did today was admit our sin and hear the beautiful declaration of forgiveness which really does what it says. We are forgiven and the announcement of forgiveness is the good news we need to hear, or at least I need to hear, again and again. Your sins are forgiven. That’s the good news that gets in to our ears and travels down to our heart, but that journey to the heart is no quick trip. Sometimes is takes a while or takes a very long time.
I have a friend and mentor, a retired Episcopal priest, who told me about his brother-in-law, a physician. I was complaining about my broken foot and he said this brother-in-law told him that the process of healing nerve endings amounts to about an inch a month. Sometimes, he reminded me, that it often takes that long to forgive and to have our hearts shaped by God’s compassion. Upon leaving our lunch the other day, he said, “Remember … an inch a month.”
That made some sense to me. We are disciples following the living Christ and the journey of following him is indeed on-going. With Jesus there is always one more thing to learn and one more step into the depth of God’s grace. Loving your enemy, being reconciled with another, forgiving one another. These are never learned in an instant. These are behaviors we learn over a lifetime, and Jesus our teacher, is with us on this journey to clear our vision, calm our fear, and enlarge our hearts.
How many times am I to forgive another member of the church, seven? No, says Jesus, seventy-seven, which is a way of saying, “don’t keep score, it is not a matter of counting.” Seventy-seven is a big number just as God’s mercy is large and limitless. Why it takes a lifetime to fathom the height and depth of forgiveness.
The late archbishop Desmond Tutu knew a thing or two about forgiveness and reconciliation, as part of the “Truth and Reconciliation” group in the aftermath of bitter Apartheid. Tutu reminds us that we can forgive and maybe never see the light of reconciliation at the end of the tunnel. If we do that is great, but even if we don’t the act of forgiveness from the heart will embolden us to become more compassionate toward ourselves and others or we can become embittered. In the aftermath of cruddy experiences where trust is broken and you or others have been betrayed, it is quite easy to see how we become embittered, but we must not make our home in embitterment. When that happens we do not do ourselves any favor. To live in embitterment is like being trapped and there is no freedom there.
We pray that God will embolden us, and even use the experience we’ve gone through, to soften our hearts and set us on a track of going deeper with God and our neighbors in this unending school of taking on the gift of forgiveness – the forgiveness that comes from the heart.
After the prayers of the people, we share the peace of Christ, one of the most ancient pieces of the liturgy. Like all the signs and symbols of worship, the peace cannot be reduced to one meaning. It means a lot of things, but here is one ancient meaning that is very compelling. The peace as a sign of mutual forgiveness. Much of the time the sharing of Christ’s peace will not be as dramatic a gesture as falling into one another’s arms or weeping like Joseph but I’ve witnessed how the peace can truly function as a sign of reconciliation. In a previous parish, two people clashed over politics, a red and blue sort of thing. No surprise there. Their disagreement was a touchstone for other disagreements and it went on and it festered and I could not help but notice one Sunday, these two wonderful women embracing at the peace and even laughing and joking with each other after the service. It is as though they had discovered a new sense of freedom.
The peace of Christ removes our sin and the sign of the peace is more than acknowledging that whatever difficulties we’ve had with one another are now past. More so, it looks to the present and to the future – when God’s love will fill all in all, when swords are beat into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, and lion lives peaceably beside the lamb. How fortunate we are to see God’s dream for the world come true in Jesus Christ. Amen.
Genesis 50:15-21
Psalm 103:(1-7), 8-13
Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35