15th Sunday after Pentecost-Rev Melanie Lemburg
15th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 19A
September 13, 2020
This week, a friend of mine asked a question. She said she had been thinking about forgiveness, especially in light of this week’s gospel reading, and she couldn’t help but wonder what to do with anger? Is it possible to forgive someone and still be angry? Or do you have to give up the one to do the other? And if we do have to give up anger to forgive, how on earth do we do that?
Let’s look for a minute at the context
for today’s gospel reading. Our reading
for today is nestled within some other passages in Matthew that might inform
how we read this difficult parable. This
chapter of Matthew’s gospel starts with the disciples arguing about greatness. Jesus teaches them that greatness can be
found only through humility, and then he warns them about causing “a little one”
to sin. Next he tells them the parable
of the shepherd who has 99 sheep and leaves them to go find the one lost sheep. Immediately following that, we have last week’s
reading which is Jesus’s teaching about how to deal with conflict in the
church, which is immediately followed by this week’s passage-where Peter asks Jesus
how often he must forgive someone who offends him, Jesus answers with a ridiculously
large number and then tells the parable for today.
In this parable, a slave begs the king
to forgive his very large debt, and when the king does forgive this debt, the
slave leaves and goes and demands payment for a much smaller debt from a fellow
slave. The debt-forgiven slave has the
other slave thrown into prison, and the parable tells us that the other slaves
are greatly distressed when they see this, so they go report it to the king. The king calls up the forgiven slave and says
to him, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with
me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow-slave, as I had mercy on
you?” Jesus concludes the parable by
saying, “And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he should
pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of
you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’”
Here are my takeaways from this
parable. First, we cannot maintain both
anger and forgiveness. They are mutually
exclusive. At first, it looked like the king
had forgiven the first slave, but then at the end of the parable, we see the king’s
anger, which must have been so close under the surface, as he revokes his
forgiveness and hands the slave over to be tortured until he can pay his full debt
that the king had just forgiven. Second,
this parable holds up an unflattering mirror before us in that it shows that we
are much quicker to beg forgiveness for ourselves than to offer it to our
fellows. And finally, the key to forgiveness
in this parable, the antidote to our anger when we have been wronged, is named
in one simple, and almost archaic word:
mercy.
One of my colleagues told me about a
previous boss she had in the church who would not let her use the word mercy as
a response when she would write the Prayers of the People; he would never let her use the response, “Lord,
have mercy.” When she finally asked him
why, he responded, “Because people don’t understand mercy.”
And in some ways, it’s true. We don’t
understand mercy. And isn’t that really
the point of Jesus’s whole parable today?
Mercy is such a foreign concept to us, especially these days. What does it even mean to act mercifully, to
ask for mercy from one another? How can
we live more mercifully 6 months into a global pandemic, when we are all tired
and just want things to “go back to normal”? What would it look
like to employ mercy in our common life, in our public life? How might we even begin to go about demanding
it?
I think the first step in this is that
we as people of faith have to recognize the mercy that has already been shown
to us by God. That is the first step in
discharging our own anger about perceived wrongs or injustices that have been
done to us. We must confess our own
faults and failings and then wholeheartedly receive the assurance of God’s
pardon, God’s forgiveness, God’s mercy.
There is a quote from Bryan Stephenson’s
book Just Mercy that we read a couple of years ago that speaks to
this. Stephenson writes, “There is a
strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our
brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding
need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard
to learn otherwise. You see things you can't otherwise see; you hear things you
can't otherwise hear.”[i]
Today, before we take communion, we are
going to pray a litany of forgiveness, where we name our own brokenness,
commending to God those ways that we have failed God and each other and also
commending to God those who have hurt us.
We will receive the assurance of God’s pardon, and then we will taste
God’s mercy as we share communion, receiving the mercy of God that is incarnate
and embodied in our Lord Jesus Christ into our very bodies, hearts, and
souls. As we do this, Bernadette is
going to play one of my favorite hymns “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy” and
I’ll invite you to reflect on the ways you have tasted God’s mercy in your own
life.
The words for the hymn are set to a tune
that rolls like the gentles waves of the ocean, and they are
“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.
There is welcome for the sinner, and more graces for the good; there is
mercy with the Savior; there is healing in his blood.
There is no place where earth’s sorrows
are more felt than up in heaven; there is no place where earth’s failings have
such kindly judgement given. There is
plentiful redemption in the blood that has been shed; there is joy for all the
members in the sorrows of the Head.
For the love of God is broader than the
measure of the mind; and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully
kind. If our love were but more
faithful, we should take him at his word; and our life would be thanksgiving
for the goodness of the Lord.”[ii]
This week, your invitation is to spend some time floating in the wide sea of God’s mercy for yourself and for those around you. Begin to look for ways that you might be called to act mercifully to others. Begin to think about what it would look like to employ mercy in our common life, in our public life, and how might we begin to go about demanding it?
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