Pentecost 15 A (lectionary 24A)
Text: Matthew 18:21-35
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
September 13, 2020
Stop Counting
I can never hear this gospel lesson, this particular teaching of Jesus, without thinking of my brother Paul.
Because you see, once when we were in junior high or so, Paul and I heard this Gospel lesson read in worship one Sunday. The next time I did something to my brother – and, believe me, in those days I did a lot of things to my brother – he said to me, “I forgive you once.” A little while later, after something else: “I forgive you twice.” He kept it up for a couple of days maybe, working toward the 77 forgivenesses required, and what he was really working for was that #78! He figured if he could get to #78 he would never, ever forgive me again. And even better, for those of you who paid close attention to the last two verses of our Gospel lesson, he was hoping that our heavenly Father would turn me over to be tortured!
My brother only kept it up for a couple of days, I think; you know how kids that age lose interest. But the Christian writer Frederick Buechner says that if he had kept it up and made it to 77, maybe he would have come to appropriate the real point of the gospel. Or, to put it another way, maybe my brother would have moved from the Peter point about forgiveness, to the Jesus point. The Jesus point, says Buechner, is not that you have to do it 7 times, of course; and the Jesus point is not even really that you have to do it 77 times; the Jesus point is that you have to do it often enough for it to become a habit. Often enough that it becomes your way of life. You know, somewhere on the way to 77 times, you’re just gonna get used to it! And the funny thing about things that become a habit and things that you get used to is that, after a while, you stop counting.
When I was young and first started in my lifelong passion for cooking, I used to follow the recipes slavishly. I used to measure a teaspoon very carefully and exactly: level that sucker off. If it called for a couple dozen cherry tomatoes in the salad, then what I put in there was not 23, and not 25, but twenty-four cherry tomatoes. I counted.
But somewhere along the line in my cooking life, I have stopped counting. Part of it is experience: I know what a teaspoon looks like, so I can pour the spice into my hand til it kind of looks right, throw it in, and there it is, more or less.
But part of it is learning that in cooking, and even in recipes, there is a lot of forgiveness. You use too much of something, or maybe not enough, and the dish is going to come out a little different this time, and maybe that’s good, and maybe not so much, but it’s fine. You’ll know better next time, which is the same thing as saying, you’re getting to be a better cook. What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? You put too much diced jalapeno, and you know that next time you’ll need to cut that back. Your wife might not forgive you for that, but the food will. There’s forgiveness there, a lot of leeway, when you stop counting.
Sisters and brothers, if we are ever going to become a community of forgiveness, then we’re all going to have to stop counting. Stop counting every blessed offense that someone has ever made against you. Note: I don’t mean deny the offense; that’s not what this means at all! I mean stop counting it, in that every-single-and-blessed-one way that you do. You know what I’m talking about: I’m talking about when you count it fondly, and you love when the count gets big, because then you can cherish the count and justify every bit of your offense at the other and justify every bit of your own victimization at the other’s hands.
I mean stop counting that thing from so long ago. Again, I don’t mean deny that it happened. I mean live into the kind of forgiveness that will mean that for you, after all these years, it no longer counts in quite the same way.
How, then, should we count? Jesus says we count like the king who checks up on his accounts receivable and discovers that a certain laborer owes him ten thousand talents, which by current exchange rates – I looked it up – is roughly a bazillion dollars. Ten thousand talents is not running up your credit card too high; ten thousand talents is more like the national debt. So the laborer is summoned. He falls to his knees and begs for mercy, for time to do the impossible, for time to repay what is owed. Inexplicably and without so much as a word, the king relents. The king as much as shrugs and says, “Okay, then. I forgive the debt.”
And just like that, the laborer is free. His totally unpayable debt is vaporized, whoosh! I try to think of what would give me that sense of freedom and what comes to my mind is: Have you ever spoken a word, or sent a text or an email message, that later you wish you could have back, that you wish could be forgiven? Vaporized – whoosh! – is like the sound of every carelessly harmful text or bad email you’ve ever sent, thousands of e-mails being deleted from the trash, one minute clogging the operating system, gone forever the next. Just as liberating as that.
How then should we count? Don’t count and cherish the offenses, but cherish instead the others in your life, as if they really count. Because they do, God says. That laborer owed the king a bazillion bucks. When the king forgives our debt, our king is telling us: you’re worth more than a bazillion, to me. So are all those other people in your life, worth to you. You can count their offenses if you want. But how about building a world, instead, in which each of those people in your life count for more than any offense? In fact, count for more than any bazillion offenses? Wouldn’t that be some kind of a world? And Jesus says, the Kingdom of Heaven is like, a world like that.