For This Reason (Sermon)

“For This Reason”

Matthew 18:21-35

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

9/24/17

         Peter is always pushing boundaries. He’s always trying to wedge his will into Jesus’ teachings. In this instance, he wants some clarification on this whole business of forgiveness. How often, he asks, should we forgive? Upwards of seven times?

         No, says Jesus, not seven times, but – and here the translation you use matters – you are to forgive seventy-seven times – or – seventy times seven.

Now this tests my fourth-grade aptitude in math, but I’m pretty sure that option two equals 490.

One has to imagine Peter standing there in absolute disbelief. What?! Forgive that lying, cheating, thoughtless good-for-nothing four-hundred-ninety times?!

The idea of forgiving the same person, nearly five hundred times, that’s too much to ask, isn’t it? Besides, when does extending that much grace make you a doormat or even an enabler?

Into that moment of mystified resentment Jesus launches into the parable of the unforgiving servant. And he begins that parable with a three-word preface: “For this reason.” The reason to which Jesus refers seems to be the emotional distress that his teachings cause. And he causes distress intentionally – and repeatedly. He uses hyperbole to jar his listeners into imagining their place in the world differently.

Forgiving someone anywhere between 77 and 490 times, says Jesus, is like a slave who owes his master 10,000 talents. There’s no consensus on how to convert that figure into contemporary terms, but a conservative appraisal suggests that 10,000 talents represent more than a hundred thousand years of laborer’s wages. So, when Jesus tells his story and asks his hearers to imagine a slave asking for a little more time to come up with the money, he’s not simply being playful. He’s being preposterous. It is impossible for a slave to pay off a debt of more than 3 billion dollars. This is Jesus’ way of saying that this story is about far more than money.

Likewise, when it comes to forgiving someone else, it’s foolish, in fact it’s utterly useless for Peter to keep accounts. Keeping track of how many times who forgives whom means that forgiveness has never even been offered. And if it has, it has only been offered as some kind of tool, some kind of leverage for one to hold over another. It’s like me saying to you: Don’t forget, I forgave you when you were unkind to me. I forgave you when you misunderstood something I said. Even when you sat in my pew, I forgave you. So, you owe me!

Apparently, that’s how Peter understands forgiveness. And for that reason, neither seven times, nor seventy-seven times, nor four-hundred-ninety times will ever be enough, because he is keeping score. He will always be like the slave who begs for but refuses to grant mercy.

There’s a cliché we’ve all heard and we’ve probably all used at one time or another: Forgive-and-forget. Forgive-and-forget works for spilled milk. It works for an oversight by your partner in Bridge or Spades. And for the record, forgive-and-forget should never even be considered as an optional response when someone sits in “your” pew, because you don’t own a pew, not in a sanctuary in which the kingdom of God is proclaimed. When you find someone sitting in the pew you normally occupy, then for God’s sake, sit somewhere else. And if that offends you, well, forgive me and forget it.

Having said all that, forgive-and-forget does not apply to matters that cause genuine harm and suffering. True forgiveness does not forget intentional betrayal or injury. Indeed, true forgiveness remembers what caused the suffering. True forgiveness looks the offense and the offender in the eye and says, “What happened caused me, or someone I love great suffering. It should not have happened. And neither you nor I will forget it. Nor should we. Our relationship may be different from now on because of what we’ve been through, but I choose not allow that memory, that moment in time to control my future, to limit my joy, to reduce me to something less than I am and can be in Christ. Will you walk with me through this shadowed valley?”

Forgiveness is not fulfilled in one act of declaring forgiveness any more than a marriage is fulfilled in the act of saying “I do.” To forgive is to ask the other person to join you on a journey toward new relationship, new wholeness. That person may not come along with you. They may not even acknowledge the need to be forgiven. And if they’ve truly done something for which you must forgive them, that makes forgiveness harder on you, but no less important. When we withhold forgiveness until it is earned by the other, or when forgiveness becomes a self-aggrandizing gesture, we’re just keeping score. We’re not settling debts, we’re racking them up.

The same is true when we find ourselves needing to confess to someone else and to ask their forgiveness. In confession, we acknowledge to another that our decisions and our actions have caused suffering. That person may not be ready to forgive just yet. But just as we begin the journey of forgiving others, we may begin the journey of being forgiven. Even if the only one who seems to forgive us is ourselves.

Whether forgiving or being forgiven, when humbly offered, the act of forgiving releases us from the toxic burdens of resentment and vengeance. It banishes the demons of judgment. Forgiveness is nothing short of entering a fresh experience of resurrection.

That makes forgiveness a way of life, a cross to bear, a discipline that requires practice. For this reason, we must learn to forgive ourselves first. We must confess our selfish ways, our weaknesses and fears, and offer ourselves grace. To forgive as we forgive ourselves is synonymous with loving our neighbor as we love ourselves.

I think Jesus refers to self-forgiveness when he speaks of forgiving “from the heart.” Not to forgive ourselves renders us ungrateful for the grace God shows to us and impotent to share it with others. For this reason, I struggle with Matthew’s rendering of this parable. I truly believe that the only way we can experience God as the brutal, score-keeping master in the story is by refusing the Christ within, refusing to receive and to share forgiveness. That all-too-human master in the parable has nothing in common with the God revealed in Jesus.

Having said all that, forgiveness doesn’t mean allowing wrong-doing to continue just because we have found strength to forgive. Yes, Jesus forgives unilaterally and completely, but he doesn’t ignore or excuse actions that require forgiveness. The whole point of the Incarnation is that in Jesus, God enters a violent, resentful, unforgiving world to demonstrate love and to work for justice, because allowing us to continue living and acting destructively is neither loving nor just. God has a greater vision for God’s beloved creation.

For this reason, as disciples of Jesus, our demonstration of love and our work for justice begins right here – in our own hearts where we forgive ourselves, and in our own families and churches where we forgive each other. And from here we move outward – hands and feet, hearts and tongues, eyes and ears – all in grateful witness to God’s redeeming love and justice in and for the world.

To an Uknown God (Sermon)

“To an Unknown God”

Acts 17:16-31

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

9/17/17

         A fine line separates the conviction that makes a disciple bold, and the certainty that makes a zealot dangerous. Paul often appears to have one foot on either side of that line. So, he is alternately a bull in a china shop stampeding over breakable treasures, and a humble mystic walking alongside fellow believers with patience and love.

         When feeling bullish, Paul loudly declares an imminent, “fixed day” of judgment. He exudes an almost neurotic urgency to change the world as soon as humanly possible.

         That’s the old Paul, though. The fundamentalist Pharisee, the religious zealot who has proven himself not only capable of organizing and committing violence in God’s name, but quite efficient at it. Let’s face it: Before his Damascus Road experience, Paul was a terrorist.

Afterward, he’s still Paul. He still has the capacity for launching into words and deeds fueled by the blinding passion of religious certainty. And he begins to make room for the Christ within. The emerging Paul has the capacity for confession and compassion. He can tolerate ambiguity. Still, he continues to struggle with balancing his desire to love as Christ loves, and his single-minded passion as a zealot.

         Entering Athens, Paul immediately feels his zealot’s blood begin to boil. Everywhere he looks he sees idols. So, he heads straight to the synagogues and marketplaces to argue with whoever “happen[s] to be there.” In ancient Athens, rhetorical debate is a kind of spectator sport, a cross between Sunday morning talk shows and minor-league hockey. Ever the intrepid one, Paul leaps into the fray and rails against idolatry.

         “What does this babbler want to say?” ask the Athenians.

To find out, they drag Paul to the Areopagus, the site of the most consequential debates in Athens. In this place of intellectual and cultural ferment, Paul has the ears of people whose opinions help to shape the mindset of the empire. And Paul steps onto this very public stage with the hoof of a china-shop bull on one foot and the sandal of a holy mystic on the other.

         He begins by blurring the line between compassion and sarcasm. ‘You Athenians really take your religion seriously,’ he says. ‘And that’s good. You even have a statue set aside to honor what you call An Unknown god.’

         Isn’t that fascinating? In the midst of the pantheon of named, storied, and all-too-human Greek gods, someone in Athens has had the spiritual humility and curiosity to acknowledge mystery.

         Then Paul says that he knows who that unknown God is, namely, “God who made the world and everything in it…[the] Lord of heaven and earth…[who] does not live in shrines made by human hands.”

         Having sparred extensively with lesser partners, Paul enters the Areopagus with ever-deepening wisdom, patience, and mindfulness. Steeped in prophetic mystery, he focuses on this Unknown god as common ground. He knows that God us unknowable. He knows that God is not a created being, nor even some perfect version of humanity. He is learning, as the Apostle John will write, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1John 4:8) As Love, God is the creative energy within all things, the mysterious gravity holding all things together.

         Paul describes the holy paradox. He says that God is real and near enough to be the one in whom “we live and move and have our being,” the way fish live, and move, and have their being in water. At the same time, this mystifying Presence transcends all the rhetoric, all the “art and imagination of mortals.” This eternally present God defies every effort to be completely known. That means God transcends any given religion.

         If this paradox illustrates the truth of God, then building altars and shrines to God becomes one more way to “grope,” as Paul says, for the kind of knowledge that creatures cannot have. Even when well-intended, our altars and shrines are still human creations. Because they must be financed, maintained, and insured, they often do more to keep us distant from God than they do to bring us closer to God. And even when we built them in honor of God, at some level, they tend to encourage a degree of certainty that claims to have solved mystery, to have overcome transcendence. So, they reduce God to something knowable, and if known, then controlled by our theologies, arguments, and traditions.

         It seems to me that as Christians in general, and as a particular congregation who wants and indeed needs to renovate its own physical space, we must keep some uncomfortable questions before us:

To what extent do we turn our churches, our sanctuaries, and our committees into idols?

         What familiar and comforting knowable gods do we tolerate, saying that we need them in order to worship the God revealed in Jesus?

         What non-Christian symbols and powers do we snuggle up to in our places of worship?

         What selfish equivocations do we write into our doctrines and polities that open the door to the kinds of fear, resentment, and greed that Jesus, whom we claim to know so well, specifically condemns?

         I have neither the wisdom nor the authority to declare final answers to those questions. I do think, however, that we’re all very much like Paul. We have the hooves of china-shop bulls on one foot and the sandals of humble mystics on the other. We have the capacity to do terrible violence to each other and to the earth. We can also act in ways of transforming faithfulness and world-healing compassion. We’re both capable of and culpable for worshiping hand-made idols whose strengths only reveal our weaknesses. And while we cannot contain it, we can bear witness to the ineffable mystery of God who lies both beyond our grasp and at the very core of our being.

         In the 14^th century, an anonymous monk wrote a book entitled The Cloud of Unknowing. It’s a guidebook for Christian contemplative prayer, and its basic premise states that there is only one way for human beings to “know” God, and that is to lay aside all of our assumptions, all of our codified beliefs and so-called “knowledge” about God. In an act of willful surrender, we turn our minds and egos over to what he calls “unknowingness,” and there we begin to feel, to taste, and to see God’s true nature. According to the author, God cannot be “thought.” God can only be loved.¹

         The very point of this thing called “religion” is not to know that which cannot be known. It is to love the one who is Love. And I think we do that most faithfully when we boldly, gratefully, and joyfully care for one another and for the earth.

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing

Charge to Congregation:

Care for each other and the earth

as you do would care for yourself

and for any family member.

And always remember, as Mahatma Gandhi said:

“There are people in the world so hungry,

that God cannot appear to them

except in the form of bread.”

The Grace of Confession (Sermon)

“The Grace of Confession”

Matthew 18:15-20

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

9/10/17­

         Matthew 18 consists of a collection of Jesus’ teachings. While it’s unlikely that Jesus said these things in rapid succession, a central theme does hold this patchwork together: the reality of sin and the necessity of forgiveness. Of particular concern in this chapter are the sins perpetrated by church members against other church members, and the forgiveness required to heal the strained and broken relationships.

Indeed, to be the Church faithfully and effectively in the world, followers of Jesus must, in deliberate and disciplined ways, practice confession and forgiveness. We cannot survive as a community without daring to speak the truth in humility and in love when we see something compromising the integrity of our witness. Nor can we survive without daring to admit the truth in humility and in love when we are acting in ways that compromise the integrity of our witness.

         Having said that, when we dare to call attention to the sin of others, we must always be prepared to accept the possibility that the offense we name says more about our own ravenous egos than it does about someone else’s transgression. While that can go on ad nauseam, it’s crucial for us to recognize our limited capacity for truly gracious judgment. Without that humble acknowledgment, we create communities defined by a vicious legalism in which we exchange gifts like patience, compassion, and honest self-reflection for the illusion not simply of righteousness, but of being right. And that’s just a power play.

         It seems to me that, throughout the Gospels, Jesus is marginally interested in our naming the sins of others, and deeply concerned about our ability to confess our own sinfulness and our own limited understanding of the heart and mind of God.

Years ago, a pastor told me that he had decided to omit the prayer of confession from worship. He called it a pastoral move. He said that most people came into church after rough weeks. They felt burdened by six days of expectations and criticism that they simply had to endure. So, leaving out the confession on Sunday was his way of trying to help people not to feel so beaten down and defeated. While I understand his point, I think he missed the point.

Our model for confession shouldn’t be that tragic figure from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale, who flogs himself every night in his closet while remembering his dalliance with Hester Prynne. Confession is not about tearing ourselves down and wallowing in guilt over past or even ongoing mistakes. It’s not about humiliating ourselves for being contemptible failures who don’t deserve God’s grace. In confession, we admit, humbly and completely, that we have all “sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” In confession, we consciously acknowledge before the eternal and unfathomable mystery which is God, that you and I, and all human beings are, ultimately, equals.

Back to Jesus’ teaching: When someone believes that he or she has experienced an injury or insult at the hands of another within the community, go talk to that person. If they listen, beautiful. If not, take two or three folks with you as witnesses. If that doesn’t work, spill the beans in front of the whole congregation. And if even that fails, says Jesus, then treat that person like a Gentile or a tax collector.

The knee-jerk reaction is to hear Jesus telling us to treat as contemptible those who refuse to confess their errors and to correct their ways. But is that really what he is saying?

Jesus is no stranger to the accusations he seems to be authorizing us to make. Back in Matthew 11, when accused by some fellow Jews of the sin of keeping unclean company, Jesus exposes their hypocrisy by saying, “John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’” (Matthew 11:18-19) What does that say about the company Jesus keeps?

In chapter 12, Matthew quotes Isaiah who identifies the Son of Man as the one who “will proclaim justice to the Gentiles,” and “in [whose] name the Gentiles will hope.” (Matthew 12:18d, 21) What does that say about Jesus’ opinion of non-Jews?

I hear Jesus saying that when someone contributes to the community’s suffering, and when that person refuses to accept his or her share of the responsibility, the members of the church are to act, yes. But first and foremost, they are to remember who they are. They are followers of Jesus. And Jesus treats Gentiles and tax collectors as human beings worthy of patience, compassion, and love. Indeed, he welcomes them as neighbors for whom grace is all the more important.

 “Those who are well have no need of a physician,” says Jesus in Matthew 9, “but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means,” he says, “‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’” (Matthew 9:12-13)

Jesus is challenging us not to cast each other away during times of struggle, but to embrace, to love, and to forgive all the more fervently, to listen and to speak to each other all the more honestly.

Forgive as you are forgiven. Love as you are loved. These teachings are synonyms. Our experience of and our witness to the Gospel depends on our willingness to set loose our forgiveness-hindering egos, and to bind ourselves together in love.

As for those last two verses: I admit my skepticism that God’s criteria for action is agreement between two people. That sets bar too low. You can find two people to agree on most anything, whether it’s destroying nuclear arsenals or using them. Two-person agreement reduces the question to a matter of which god do any two people believe in – one of violence and vengeful conquest, one of peace and reconciliation, one of distance and indifference, or no god at all? I honestly believe that the God revealed in Jesus is characterized by grace, peace, justice, relationship, and reconciliation. And right now, I can find more than two people who agree on that. So why doesn’t God seem to be making it happen?

Who am I to say that God isn’t doing that? And if I’m blind to God’s gracious activity in the world, in spite of all that is and appears to be broken, that means I have something to confess. I have to confess that, in spite of what I profess to believe about God, if someone puts more power and wealth in my hands than my human heart and mind can handle, I just might follow that god. I am as vulnerable to greed and selfishness as anyone else. How about you?

Thanks be to God, though. The Gospel remains very consistent with its proclamation of grace, a gift which is, at every moment, offered to Jews and Gentiles alike, to the destitute and tax collectors, to sinners and saints, to the just and the unjust.

Like it or not, we’re in this together. And wherever we are, whoever we are, God is always here, always among us.