No Limits

a Sermon for Proper 19A
Text: Matthew 18:21-35

Where we've been
Ten years ago today, about this time, 4 hijacked airplanes were used as projectile missiles to cause dramatic and traumatic devastation. Three of them reached their targets and one was sent into the countryside. Many, including those aiding the victims of violence, died. Nearly 3,000 in all.

One of our favorite ways to pay homage to this tragedy is to play the “where were you” game. At approximately 10:50, we were no doubt still scrambling for information; still looking to make sense out of what seemed so senseless. I was working in a bookstore. One of our managers sat all morning in his office, coming out onto the book floor to give us updates. I remember the confusion, the fear, the corporate anxiety. We didn’t know anything.

So what did we do? We responded. Actually, we went hunting—to use former President Bush’s language. We went hunting with guns and dogs. We invaded two countries, rounded up and imprisoned thousands. Death tolls at the conservative end count well more than 100,000 Iraqis killed in the last decade.

We changed the way we treat each other, becoming a culture of suspicion. We changed our expectations for air travel, of what we can expect of one another, what we will consent to, even what we expect will bring us security. 

All of this, the past 10 years has been motivated by that moment, that fear, and those accusations. Those suspicions, that willingness to enter into the human desire for revenge.

It's about forgiveness
If you doubt the place of providence—the place of God’s interaction with us—then look at our readings. Look at our gospel. A gospel about forgiveness and torture on this auspicious anniversary. Perfect isn’t it? Notice that Peter’s question of Jesus that kicks off this gospel passage isn’t truly elementary. He isn’t asking whether or not to forgive a transgression—a personal transgression no less—but something more. For those new to faith, this is the starting place. His teaching has gone out elsewhere in this way:

If I’m hurt by someone, do I forgive them or kick them out? Do I retaliate? 

Jesus says

forgive. 

The next question becomes more specific:

Who must I forgive? 

And Jesus elaborates:

Forgive. Not just your friends, but your enemies also. 

So now we get to that graduate level question. The one that is for all followers that get that this is all about forgiveness; that the entire deal of following Christ, of loving God is about forgiveness. Peter asks

"Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" 

Peter’s question may as well be

When is enough enough? Where do we draw the line?

Jesus’s response, a reference to Lamech in Genesis (4:23-24) is to say

Draw it out here—where you will never reach it.

Then he tells Peter this parable about a slave who owes a debt that is impossible to pay off. The slave, looking for some small mercy, hopes to be given an opportunity to give it a shot anyway. Instead, the debt is completely forgiven. Now the slave turns around and abuses another slave indebted to him. The first slave locks him away with no hope of repaying his debt.

At this point, the other slaves sell the first slave out to the lord who turns around and punishes that slave who was once shown incredible mercy, torturing him and putting that impossible debt back onto him.

Forgiveness is not just about GOD.
This gospel is really troubling because Jesus even connects the dots at the end saying

This is what God will do to all of you if you don’t forgive.

Full stop.  Forgive, period.

Remember that this parable deals with Peter’s question: what are the limits of our forgiveness? And Jesus tells him there aren’t any. This whole deal is about forgiveness because the world around us wants retaliation and revenge. Jesus says to forgive without limits.

 Many Christians can connect these dots easily: the lord in the parable forgives an unpayable debt, so the Great Mystery we call God forgives us of our indebtedness through sin. I’m pretty cool with that reading, except Jesus is much more concerned with what we do with that forgiveness. That we don’t indebt others, that we forgive, and that our forgiveness knows no limits. It isn’t just about being forgiven, but also forgiving others. Jesus knows this is hard. He knows that his hearers were raised in a world of retaliation and evil. And He knows that many will hate to hear this because the human mind lusts after revenge.

And yet, the heart loves love.

This message of forgiveness isn’t about a program like paying it forward or random acts of kindness, though these methods are good. It is about recalibrating our hearts to forgiveness. Rejecting our brains’ meticulous revenge fantasies and focusing on our broad, forgiving hearts.

Sharing forgiveness
So here we are on September 11, 2011, ten years later, and we have a gospel message of forgiveness. I’m reminded of the hymn:

There's a wideness in God's mercy
like the wideness of the sea;
there's a kindness in his justice,
which is more than liberty. 

We’re being called to this radical forgiveness like a conviction. We haven’t been in a forgiving mood. As a country, we haven’t had one day in 10 years in which our operating mood was forgiveness. But anniversaries give us the chance to get rid of all that. To exercise old demons; to let go of our own blood lust and forgive from our hearts.

 Don’t we feel it? That corporate and personal need to forgive? Don’t we feel the need to seek forgiveness? To ask God to forgive us? Hasn’t the last 10 years been Hell? The anger, the infighting, the bitterness. That is the stuff of Hell. But we can be forgiven. If we ask for it, God will forgive us.

 Right now, in this assembly, we can ask God and our neighbors for forgiveness. So are we up to it? We can forgive and be forgiven. We can wipe the slate clean and begin to heal this broken world with our no limits forgiveness.

So in a moment we will pray, confess, and receive God’s absolution. And as we do so, I ask that we offer up all the grudges and evil we carry and ask for our own forgiveness—that the grace of God will make it possible for us to forgive—so that when we share the peace, we do so with the wideness of God’s mercy. We’ll prepare the table eat together as one. Then we will throw open the doors to love everyone and let our forgiveness pour out from this place.

What the Darkness Really Hides

a Sermon for Lent 4B
Text: John 3:14-21

First things first—today’s gospel contains perhaps the Bible’s most famous line. Or at least the verse most commonly referenced. In ballparks and stadiums—the man with the rainbow wig would hold up a sign that said simply “John 3:16”. Passing by Vinnagrette’s here on Elmwood, you can usually see it on their billboard on Sunday mornings. “John 3:16”. The verse itself, so readily familiar:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

These words are attributed to Jesus.

As the hallmark for Christian ministry, these words seem a bit…difficult. Let me rephrase it:

God loves us so much that he had his son killed—but don’t worry—if you believe hard enough, you won’t die like him.

Not the cheeriest of lines. Those in the advertising business might suggest that we stay away from that as our tag line, don’t you think?

But in this gospel, Jesus is finishing up this conversation with Nicodemus here, and he’s been trying to explain life and death, and Nicodemus just can’t seem to get it. He keeps trying to take Jesus literally—to him, being born from above means being re-born or born again—meaning literally passing through the womb a second time. What Jesus argues for is a spiritual birth.

I mention this as a reminder of Jesus’s context. Reading Jesus’s arguments here, he seems to be setting up a structure of relating concepts—the spiritual and the physical, salvation and condemnation, good and evil, light and dark. He seems to be setting up a structure of in and out and God, through the Son of Man, has given us a way in. This should be good news. Except that it seems to imply that some will be out. That some will be condemned—that some are already condemned.

And if we know anything about Jesus, we know that he isn’t a big fan of pride and boastfulness, right, so let me connect the dots here…

1. he says “those who believe in him are not condemned”. OK, check.
2. “But those who do not believe are condemned already”. They remain condemned. Starting out behind the eight ball, right? Tough stuff here.
3. He explains that “because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” So he’s declaring who’s in and who’s out.

But right before this, Jesus supposed that “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Jesus kind of comes off like a bad boss—like Michael Scott on The Office here. “Hey, I’m not here to rat on you, except that you’re a rat. Hey, it’s not my fault; don’t blame me. I’m just telling it like it is.”

You know that I don’t see Jesus this way, and I’m pretty sure that you don’t either. But the Jesus of this gospel is a bit troubling. Made worse by the way we use these words to exclude. To judge. To condemn. To be the ones that say to all the others out there that they are wrong, they are condemned, they are out. We can sit back in our ivory towers, shouting down to the ground “don’t blame me—these aren’t my words—they’re Jesus’. I’m not keeping you out, he is.” Like the bully that grabs another kid’s wrist, then forceing the child’s hand into his own shoulder saying “stop hitting yourself”. We can easily hijack the situation for our own ideological abuse.

But Jesus gives us an interesting motif here. He describes truth, salvation, and condemnation with the images of light and darkness. He presupposes the darkness, right? He presupposes that we are in darkness and that a light—Jesus, right?—has come into the world.

Imagine for a moment the solitude of darkness—Imagine getting up in the middle of the night. Your eyes adjust to twilight pretty easily now. You get out of bed and head for the bathroom. Your muscle memory tells you to turn on the light but you remember that sudden light kind of hurts, so you head to the toilet in darkness. In this darkness, you can see shapes and you’re familiar enough with your surroundings that you know what’s there. The big blob to the left is the counter with the sink, right? The lighter thing to the right is the shower. In this darkness, you can see the rugs and the soap dispenser and the toothbrushes, and all of the stuff in the room, even though everything is draped in darkness. You wander back to bed, pull the covers up, and drift back to sleep.

Now imagine living in that world permanently. Imagine the darkness as normal. Imagine that you have to do all of your business, love your friends, cook and eat dinner, do everything in the dark. Now think about that light switch. Think about that flood of light that suddenly blinds you. That you can’t keep your eyes open. We’d avoid it, right? We avoid routine pains, don’t we? So we actually like living in the dark.

Jesus also points out that “all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.” But to Jesus, we all do evil—we all screw up. And out of shame or guilt or whatever, we keep ourselves and our loved ones in the dark. We don’t want our secrets exposed, we don’t want our faces to be seen, right? We don’t want to have to look each other in the eyes.

Jesus offers us an option. He says “But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” The point is that we aren’t the light—aren’t living in light, aren’t people of light—Jesus is the light. But we can “come to the light,” we can move ourselves to the light. We can flip on that switch and see all that is there—the shower that needs to be cleaned, the towels that need to be washed, the garbage can that is full, the Q-tips and toilet paper need to be restocked—and we are different people. We can look in the mirror and recognize that we could use a little more sleep, our eyes still don’t like the light, but they’re getting used to it, and all of this stuff will be here tomorrow waiting for us. And then, when we go to bed in total darkness, we no longer see with dark eyes, but light ones.

The harsh Jesus I described earlier isn’t the real Jesus—it isn’t the Jesus that came to save the world. Jesus isn’t excluding (or encouraging us to condemn our neighbors), but offering us salvation and truth. Offering us the choice to live a life of honesty—physically and spiritually. To be the people we believe ourselves to be.

Our great festive night, The Great Vigil of Easter, begins with a fire built in darkness, which is used to light the Paschal Candle. We follow that candle into a dark church, following the light of Christ in the midst of darkness. That light doesn’t just reveal the room and make us feel safe, it reveals each of us. So that we might look each other in the eye. To see and be seen.