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.

No Retaliation

a Sermon for Epiphany 7A
Text: Matthew 5:38-48

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you give us the tools of great change and the opportunity to make the choice. Help us to see your ways for us as the right choice. Amen.

Retaliation and escalation
Jesus begins the gospel with a familiar phrase: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.'” Now, I know that you know where this comes from and what it is about; I am just reminding you. To do that, we’ll have to go back thousands of years, long before Jesus and even the Torah (from where this phrase comes). Long before all of this, there was a different law of the land. A law, unwritten, but understood universally:

If you do something to me, I do something to you.

It is as simple as that. OK, not just as simple as that, because we didn’t just retaliate, we had to do more: we had to teach them a lesson. They had to know that they shouldn’t have done it, and won’t do it again. So if they hit you, you maimed them.

If you do something to me, I do something bigger to you.

Sometimes that lesson wasn’t actually for them, but for other people. So if someone stole your goat from you, you would kill them. You had to show what happens when someone messes with you. If they insulted your wife, you killed them, and their wife. If they went after your kids, you killed them, their wife, and their kids: you wiped the whole family from the face of the earth. That was just what you did.

Besides, they were clearly evil people, anyway.

You can see how this thinking has persisted throughout history. Look at mafia movies:

“Eh! He disrespected me, so I shot him in the head!”

And every week (I guarantee it) there is at least one movie at the theater that encourages over-retaliation. At least one movie that glorifies vengeance. The first one that came to my mind was from a few years ago: Taken with Liam Neeson; a movie in which a man’s daughter is kidnapped, and he proceeds to kill all the people involved in the kidnapping. And we want him to! We watch him get his bloody vengeance and we don’t want to see him show any mercy! He has a movie out this week, Unknown, which appears to have a similar vengeance plot.

Enshrining Evil
There seems to be something in us: something that wants to seek vengeance, to retaliate violently. Something that is in us at a truly base level. Which is why it was so remarkable that GOD would instruct the people with this teaching: “An eye for an eye,” because he tells them not to over-retaliate, to not teach people lessons. If someone steals your goat, you steal it back—you don’t burn his house down or anything else.

But, Jesus recognizes the problem: it actually enshrines violence. It makes retaliation OK, and He isn’t OK with that. Because we love vengeance, so we seek out the most “appropriate” retaliations. If someone messes with us a certain way, we desire to mess with them back—to hurt them in the very way they hurt us.

In the immediately preceding passage, Jesus makes a similar claim about oaths. He says that when you swear an oath, when you pinkie-swear with someone, you are saying that you will be honest and not steal or you will do what you say you will do. At the same time, you also communicate that the rest of the time, you don’t have to be honest. You communicate that it is OK to lie and cheat and steal all the rest of the time. So don’t swear any oath. GOD sees you—even inside your head—and knows when you lie or cheat or steal, so be a person who never lies and cheats and steals and you will never need an oath.

Oaths enshrine evil just as “an eye for an eye” enshrines violence.

Jesus’s way: The Love Revolution
Jesus offers us a different way. But for some reason, we don’t understand it. It has to do with our reptilian brains—the oldest part of our brain—that is hardwired with two options in response to adversity: fight or flight. Either we retaliate, or we run away. This is also the way of the world. The part we’ve inherited from thousands of years ago that yearns for violence. The part that says that the most preferable option is to fight back. That good people fight and cowards run away.

So when we hear Jesus say “But I say to you Do not resist an evildoer,” we hear that as cowardly—as encouraging us to run away. We have to make it fit in that ancient paradigm: it is either one or the other: we have two square pegs and two square holes. And the peg Jesus hands us is round.

To make sense of this, Jesus gives us these three, very visual examples of this third way; and we might mistake them because they are so different from the world:

In the first he says, If somebody hits you on the cheek, offer him the other. Look at this: this is what turning your cheek looks like. You are giving them another shot. That is not running away and that is not retaliating.

Then he says, If somebody sues you for your coat, give them your cloak as well. Imagine the courtroom scene. You are the defendant and the charges are being read and you stand up, and start taking your clothes off. You just take them all off, including your shoes, and you ball them up and walk them to the other desk and you hand them over. Then you walk back and sit down. That is not running away and that is not retaliating.

The third one is awesome—but we screw it up so badly. We misunderstand it. Jesus says, If someone forces you to walk a mile, walk a second one. We hear that phrase, go the extra mile as if it were the ultimate do-gooderism. Good job! You did a little extra! That Protestant Work Ethic thing really suits you! But here is what Jesus is really saying. A Roman soldier would come across a Jewish peasant force him to carry something like 120 pounds of gear. And if the peasant valued his life, he would do it. Now, the image hits home at the important juncture at the end of that mile. Imagine the soldier, chuckling with his buddies about this guy carrying his stuff. He turns to the peasant and says:

“We’re here. I’ll take my stuff back.”

And the peasant responds:

“Actually, I want to keep walking. I’m good.”

This isn’t weak-kneed flubberings and it isn’t work a little harder, either. It is a different kind of option.

Jesus wants us to get that this is a love revolution.

We’ve been reading The Secret Message of Jesus each Sunday, and last week we covered the idea that violent revolution is not revolutionary. That overthrowing a violent regime with a violent revolution is just perpetuating a cycle of violence: it is replacing violence with violence. And more, it enshrines a cycle of violence. Our own revolution enshrined a culture of violence for us. It told us that it is acceptable and there are times to fight fire with fire.

That is the way of the world. Not the way of Jesus.

Jesus encourages us to fight fire with water. To violence, love is the water.

It Begins Here
This whole arc, Matthew 5, the first third of the Sermon on the Mount builds from the Beatitudes to this moment. We learn that we are to be and live a certain way, not act a certain way. We are to love. When Jesus says to love your enemies, I think he really intends to say that when we have a love revolution, there are no enemies. Everyone gets loved.

In the last year, we’ve seen bitterness and anger at St. Paul’s.
That is the way of the world, not the way of Jesus.
Anonymous letters, backbiting, potshots from the peanut gallery, back room conversations about people and their families.
That is the way of the world, not the way of Jesus.
People have even used our youth as weapons.
That is the way of the world, not the way of Jesus.

This ends today.

When St. Paul’s is on track, it is the epicenter of the love revolution. We might track evil in, like mud on our shoes. Just tap your shoe, and knock it off. This is a new place, not of this world. Something new.

Here and now—we love. We are a new creation built on love.