Keeping Score

Pentecost 14A, 9/14/14
Matthew 18:21-35; Romans 14:10-12; Psalm 103:1-13

Gracious and compassionate God, give us your slowness of anger and your abundance of love in our relationships with one another. Amen.

If we were to hold a vote for “the one thing I wish Jesus had never said,” this passage would certainly be in the running for top place.

The God we know and love and worship and pray to is the God of Psalm 103, who is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

The God of Christianity is a God of grace and forgiveness, or so we have been led to believe.

But the God in Jesus’ parable today is one who does deal with us according to our sins, who does repay us according to our iniquities.

Like the king in the parable, Jesus says, God will hold us accountable for every debt, and maybe even torture us until we can pay, unless we forgive our sister or brother from our heart.

Yikes. That sounds an awful lot like God’s forgiveness is based on our own action.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been taught that God’s forgiveness comes through grace, as a gift, that there’s nothing I can do to earn it and also nothing that I can do to invalidate it.

Does that sound familiar to you?

But this parable seems to suggest that if I don’t forgive other people, God will not forgive me when I mess up.

And that’s a scary thought.

It’s hard for us to reflect on the God who judges people, especially when there’s a chance that God’s judgment will be directed at us.

How can the God of judgment be the same as the God of compassion?
How is the God represented by the king in this parable also the God who the Psalmist describes as slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love?

God’s judgment is a difficult topic to discuss, so we’ll keep that topic on the back burner for now.

Let’s move first to the condition that God puts on forgiveness – the condition that makes it sound like God’s grace is conditional.

According to Jesus in Matthew 18, God requires us to forgive our sister or brother from the heart, if we want to be forgiven.

But what is it that we are supposed to forgive, anyway?

A few months ago I got an email from a friend of mine, asking if we were OK. She thought that she had offended me.

I had no idea what she was talking about. Finally I realized that she had disagreed with something I posted online a few days earlier, and she thought that I might still be upset about it.

I assured her that we were fine.

But that interaction brings up a good point.

If we don’t recognize when we’ve been wronged, hurt, insulted, or sinned against in some way, we won’t ever be able to forgive our sister or brother from the heart.

Right? We have to acknowledge that a wrong has been done before we can say, “Don’t worry about it, I’m over it, it doesn’t matter any more.”

So let’s do a little exercise here. The ushers are going to pass out cards to everyone. There should be pencils in the pews in front of you, but the ushers have a few extra if you need them.

This project is going to be confidential, so no peeking at someone else’s paper. It won’t work unless people feel like they can write without being watched.

Does everyone have a card?

What I want you to do is write out every wrong that has been done to you so far this weekend.

Really. That’s the first step towards forgiveness – having something to forgive. It can be big or small – maybe you got into a fight with your sibling or your spouse. Maybe a friend stood you up for coffee yesterday or the neighbor neglected (again) to pick up the present his dog left in your yard. Maybe someone cut you off while you were drying into church this morning. 

If you can’t think of a way that someone sinned against you this weekend, you can go back a couple more days, and think of some of the ways you were wronged last week. I’m guessing that you won’t have to go further back than that to remember something that rubbed you the wrong way.

Some of us will have more to write than others. That’s OK.

Once everyone is finished writing, the ushers are going to hand out seven more cards, and I want you to take them home with you. At the end of each day, you need to write down every action that someone made against you during the day. It’s important to keep track of everything so that you know what to forgive!

And then next week, when you come back for worship, you’ll get a whole new set of cards to last you through the next week.

Oh, and did I mention that every single card that you write, you have to carry around with you, on your person, for the rest of your life?

OK, obviously those last things are exaggerations to prove my point. I don’t really want you to write down every sin that anyone ever commits against you.

But imagine what it would be like if you did.

Imagine what kind of lists you’d accumulate. How heavy the stack of cards would get after a few months.

Imagine how painful it would be every time you looked back at any of the previous cards.

And as we all know, the more we do something, the better we tend to get at it. So if you actually did take stock of all the sins that people had made against you every single day, you’d get pretty good at it. Your list would probably get longer and more detailed each day, and take more time to write, and consume more of your energy.

It would be torture.

Isn’t that what it’s like when we don’t forgive others?

Jesus says that God will torture us unless we forgive our brother or sister from our heart.

The question is, does God actually torture us? Or do we bring that torture on ourselves?

Keeping records of debts owed to us by other people can be exhausting. Trying to remember every wrong that has ever been done to us is virtually impossible.

        

Letting go of that scorecard, on the other hand, can be liberating.

That’s actually why I wanted you to write something on those cards this morning. Not so that you would know what it feels like to account for every sin ever made against you, but so that you would know what it feels like to let them go.

That’s the literal meaning of the word for “forgiveness,” by the way. The Greek word, aphiemi, means “to let go” or “to send away.”

Forgiveness is a way of taking a weight off your shoulders, of lightening the load, of un-burdening yourself of something that you’ve been carrying around, that’s getting in the way of you living life to the fullest.

So let’s let go of our scorecards.

Let’s forgive all those wrongs that other people have done to us.

One of the ushers is going to walk down the aisle again, this time with a box. Please put your card into the box. I don’t expect you to pass it off to your neighbor – you don’t want them to read it – but you should be able to reach over to the aisle to put your card in.

No one else is going to read these cards, I promise. They are all going to be shredded by someone I know, who’s not a member of this church, and who has promised to shred them without reading anything.

So go ahead, let go of those sins that people have made against you.

Until they can get shredded though – until our resentment can get completely destroyed – let’s make do with giving it to God. The box will sit on the altar once everyone has put their cards in.

And hopefully, this box can be a symbol for us of what it really means to forgive.

By getting rid of our scorecards, and by bringing them to the altar, we are offering up our complaints to God and also relinquishing any ownership of those complaints. God can deal with them from here on out. They don’t matter to us any more – we have let them go.

Forgiving our sister or brother from the heart means letting go of any wrong that they’ve done to us – not necessarily forgetting about it altogether, but finding a way to keep that previous negative action from interfering with any future positive interactions.

It’s like First Corinthians 13 says – love keeps no records of wrongs.

Or similarly, in today’s reading from Romans, Paul makes it clear that God can judge, but we shouldn’t.

We might not understand God’s judgment, but that’s not our job. Our only job is to withhold judgment from our brothers and sisters. We can be in charge of our own actions, and we can be accountable for our actions to God and God alone. We can toss those scorecards away from us and move forward assuming the best of one another.

Our job is not to pass judgment on one another, but to leave that work to God.

God is the judge.

We might not understand God's judgment, but we can at least understand that God is the one who has authority, and we don't.

Today’s parable sounds kind of harsh, especially when we get to the application part of it. But basically Jesus is saying what he says over and over again to his disciples.

You guys just don’t get it!

You’re asking the wrong questions.

You want to know how many times to forgive someone, Jesus says to Peter? Well I’ll tell you. If you count how many times you forgive someone, you’re doing it wrong.

Instead, just forgive. Always. And if punishment needs to happen, let God take care of it. Don’t let your judgment of other people color your relationship with them.

Let go of your anger and your bitterness. If you hold on to that, it will eat you up inside.

Let God take care of those ugly emotions. You? All you have to do is forgive. Let go. Move on with your life.

Treat others with the compassion that God shows to you.

And when you do so, you’ll be more fully able to understand the gift of forgiveness that God has already given to you.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.