15th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 19A

15th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 19A September 17, 2017 I’m just going to go ahead and lay it out there today. This parable in our gospel reading for today is especially challenging. I mean, in case you missed it, let me just read the end for you again: “And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would 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.” I don’t know about y’all, but I know I am in trouble. (Just this past week, my family and I were talking about how I still haven’t forgiven my brother for using his Mr. T stamp that he got in his Wendy’s Kid’s Meal and stamping it all over my beautiful bedspread 35 years ago!) So what’s going on here in this gospel? Peter and the disciples are clearly embroiled in some drama, so Peter comes to Jesus and asks him, “How many times do I have to forgive?” Peter thinks it should be 7 times, which is considered a perfect number, but Jesus says, nope that’s not enough how about 77 times (or some translations have this as seventy times 7). Either way, both of these are like infinity. And then Jesus tells the parable. But here’s what you need to know about the parable. The amount of wages that the slaves are indebted is really important here and would have immediately jumped out to Jesus’s listeners. The first slave who owes 10,000 talents… well that is the equivalent of 150,000 years worth of wages. It’s not something that slave could have paid back even in multiple lifetimes. But the second slave who owes the first slave 100 denarii—that is the equivalent of 1 day’s wage. So it is something that ostensibly could be paid back over time. It’s pretty ridiculous, then, what the first slave does—how he is forgiven this tremendous debt by the king and yet he cannot forgive this much smaller debt from his fellow slave. It’s ridiculous. So, what if Jesus is telling this ridiculous parable to show Peter, and us, that we are asking the wrong question? The questions shouldn’t be “How many times do I forgive?”. Instead, it should be “How do I forgive?” Because deep down in our hearts, we know that we are much more like that first slave, who has been forgiven so much but for whom it is so hard to forgive just a little bit. And let’s face it. It is so very hard to forgive. So maybe we aren’t asking the right question—not how many times do I have to forgive, but how on earth do I do it? Yesterday, I listened to a podcast as I was running. It’s the Onbeing podcast by American Public Media—where the host Krista Tippett interviews a whole variety of people about different things that mostly have to do with faith and our common humanity. The one I listened to yesterday was an interview between Krista and a Lakota (Native American) poet named Layli Long Soldier and the interview is titled “The Freedom of Real Apologies.”i Long Soldier had written an award winning book of poetry called Whereas, which is an emotional response to the 2009 Resolution passed by the US Government apologizing to the Native American people. As I listened to the conversation between these two women yesterday, I was struck by a couple of things. First, denial is the enemy of forgiveness-both in the giving and in the receiving of it. If we cannot admit that we have wounded someone or been wounded ourselves, then forgiveness cannot be offered or received. (That is part of what is so ridiculous about Jesus’s parable—that the first slave is in complete denial about how much he has been forgiven already when he refuses to forgive the other slave his relatively small debt.) Second, forgiveness happens because of and is completely woven through with grace. Long Soldier speaks about a time when her father apologized to her. She describes it as being the “the most effective and the most miraculous apology that [she]’d ever received in [her] life.” Here’s what she said about that encounter: “…When I was in my 20s, he came to visit one time and unexpectedly, he was sitting at breakfast with me and apologized for not being there. And I think there was something in the way he said it. He cried when he said it. And I could feel it, I could physically feel that he meant it. And really — and I can say this to this day — in that moment, all of it was gone. Like, all that stuff I’d been carrying around — it was gone. It was lifted. And I feel, in many ways, we started new from that point on. I really have not had the need to go back and rehash things with him and so on. We started from that place forward. We’ve known each other in a different way.” How do we forgive someone who has wounded us? First, we admit that we have been wounded. Then, we pray for God’s grace to forgive. I don’t think it is something that we can really do on our own. For most of us, are hearts are too hardened, too wounded. But God has already forgiven each one of us so very much, and God will grant us a portion of God’s grace to forgive one who has wronged us if we are open enough to ask for that. So, this week, I invite you to reflect on where you are on your journey to forgive one person who has wounded you. If you are ready to begin to forgive, then pray for that one person every day this week, and also pray daily that God will give you the grace to forgive. And then wait and trust that God will give you what you need in God’s time. i.https://onbeing.org/programs/layli-long-soldier-the-freedom-of-real-apologies-mar2017/