First Baptist Church of Gaithersburg, MD, October 4, 1979; Cresthill Baptist Church, Bowie, MD, June 8, 1980; Calverton Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD, May 16, 1982; Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC November 24, 1985
Back in my early teen years I was a Monopoly freak. Not an ordinary freak, mind you, but a Monopoly freak. My best friend and I would sit at the table in our basement for hours upon hours, rolling the dice, going to jail, dealing for Boardwalk, putting up hotels at a rate that would make Marriott dizzy, and generally wallowing in imagined luxury. Monopoly was our game, and we played it with a vengeance. We yelled and screamed at each other, and occasionally brought down upon our heads the wrath of my father, trying to take a nap; and we played so much and so long that my friend's grandmother coined a new name for the game. Bringing to it her own sense of values, she called it Monotony!
But the reason we could play for such a long time and could get so wrapped up in doing each other in was that we altered the rules to suit ourselves. We first decided that whenever anyone bought one of the properties in a set, then the rest of that set was off limits to the other player. No broken sets, and thus, in the end, great long rows of hotels and houses and high-priced properties. Everything on our Monopoly board was in the high rent district!
And another significant rule change was that we allowed credit. If you didn’t have the cash to pay your rent, that was OK. Even without the blessings of MasterCharge we just made notations on a piece of paper as to who owed what, knowing that sooner or later you would have to park on my Park Place and. I would earn all that debit back. Of course sometimes it didn't work out that way, and we would find that one or the other of us just continued to get deeper and deeper into debt, and we finally decided that when you got up to a million Monopoly dollars behind, you were finally out. Run up the tab to seven figures, and you lose.
Our parents were grateful that we had finally found a way to end these games; my mother was glad to see the top of her table occasionally, my little brother had hopes again of getting somebody to repair his tricycle for him, and all was blissful in the household again, until we hit on a new device: we would just forgive debts and start all over again. And so with abounding generosity, when one of us would run up the proverbial tab to a million Monopoly bucks, we would just write off a few thou and keep right on going. The prevailing philosophy seemed to be, "If it's hopeless, so what; if it’s insurmountable, forget it. If it is so gigantic it can't be paid, then you don’t have to pay for it. We discovered all this well before the U.S. government did … wonderful, but a bookkeeping nightmare!
Something like that Monopoly-monotony game must have been what those who heard Jesus that day were thinking about. They heard him tell a story about a king who decided to settle his accounts, to collect the debts owed him. The king took out his ledgers and listed all those who were in his debt, and then he began to summon them before him. The first among these was a man whose debt was an enormous sum, a debt of 10,000 talents. In contemporary terms that is something like $10,000,000. An impossible debt, a crushing obligation.
And so the king determined to do what any creditor would do in the circumstances; he began the proceedings necessary to liquidate his debtor. The man's property was to be sold, and in fact, he himself and his wife and his children were to be considered as part of his assets, and they were to be sold into slavery so that this unspeakably sizeable debt could be satisfied.
But then Jesus asks us to picture this ne'er do well, this hopeless case, pleading for just a little more time to take care of his problem, "Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay you everything." And I can really imagine Jesus’ eyes twinkling just a little at this stage in his parable, because this really is ludicrous, isn’t it? "Have patience, indeed; just a little more time, huh? You see, Jesus chose a figure so impossibly large that everyone knew it could not by any stretch of the imagination be dealt with. Maybe you could pay off ten dollars a day for the next 2,739 years?! Ridiculous! Meaningless!
So what does the king do in the face of this plaintive plea, this incredible whine? "Out of pity for him the lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt"
Now isn't that a bookkeeping nightmare?! Multiplied millions just lost, forgotten about, written off, forgiven: You can bet that that would send shock waves through the king's treasury! And I suspect it sent shock waves, too, through those who listened to Jesus teach. After all in an uncertain time, in a land whose political and economic fortunes were never very stable, you just did not pledge the future too hastily. And so for a mountainous debt to be forgiven with a wave of the hand must have struck them as little short of miraculous. It just would not, could not have been done.
But Jesus is not finished. He has/only told half of the story. He is about to drive home a lesson in human behavior that we shall not soon forget. Because, you see, the conventional wisdom is that when you receive a great gift, like a sudden windfall of $10,000,000, you can find it easy to be generous. We would naturally assume, wouldn't we, that one who had been given so much would now find it easy to be generous himself? Not so, not so; listen to the story as Jesus tells it:
"That same servant, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii (that one comes to about $20.00) and seizing him by the throat he said, ‘Pay what you owe’. So his fellow servant fell down and besought him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you’.” Familiar words, right? Must have been the usual script for debtors, whether you owe $20 or $l0, 000, 000; have patience, and I will pay.
But the resolution of the case is quite different; it follows an altogether different script. Our first debtor, he of the giant appetites, now refuses the pleas of the one who owes him a mere pittance, and it's off to prison until the debt is paid.
And as Jesus goes on to complete this story of contrasting debts, he brings back in the king whose $10,000,000 made such a nightmare for his bookkeepers, and has that king reconsider his early generosity in the light of the obstinacy and the meanness of his servant, and quickly then Jesus allows us to see that what ms involved here is not so much money as it is attitude, not so much a mountain of debt but a question of forgiveness. "I forgave you because you besought me; and should you not have had mercy on him as I had mercy on you?" And having rescinded his earlier forgiveness and having put the servant in jail after all, the commentary is offered, "So also my heavenly father will do to everyone of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart."
I say that it is not finances but forgiveness which is Jesus' theme here, and he has put in harsh and negative terms an idea which is echoed throughout the New Testament in many other passages, some of them softer and more positive than this, but nonetheless the same basic concern: that there is a proportionality between the forgiveness I receive and the forgiveness I share. Every time we pray the Lord's Prayer we find ourselves repeating that deceptively simple petition, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." And once again we are being reminded that in the economy of God there is an essential condition which has to do with our ability to be forgiven by him, and that is that we must approach others with a willing and a forgiving heart.
Look with me for a few moments at the anatomy of forgiveness; let's see just what kind of an act forgiveness is and let's examine how it works, how it must work in our own lives and in our church. After all, if we are to take seriously what our Christ says to us about forgiveness, and how a forgiving spirit is precondition to our receiving the Lord's forgiveness, then nothing else matters quite so much as this. It may look to us like some sort of horrendous bookkeeping nightmare, if you are into calculating and counting up all the ways you've been hurt. But Jesus lays an unusual stress on forgiveness, and we need to penetrate its meaning.
I think that first of all the Lord wants us to know that forgiveness is and act of understanding, that it involves our understanding just how enormous a debt we own to God, that we are hopelessly in debt to our Creator for giving us life, for sustaining us, but most of all for taking these stained and broken lives of ours and choosing to enter them in the person of the Christ and offering us forgiveness. The hymnwriter has said it well, "But drops of grief can ne'er repay the debt of love I owe".
Forgiveness, I say, involves understanding, it is an act of understanding. It means that we stand back from our situation for a moment and understand that it means something radical for our lives that God is mercy and that in that mercy he has chosen to disregard the bookkeeping, he has chosen to forgive us, even though we have violated him and have betrayed him in a thousand thousand bitter ways.
But if the Lord in telling this parable wants us to know that forgiveness is an act of understanding, he moves quickly to insist that forgiveness is also an act of the heart. To be able to forgive is vital if we are not to block the spirit of God, and that must be a genuine forgiveness, something felt from deep within.
You know, there are many things which influence us by our living in and around the capital city. One of these is that everything is viewed in political terms. And because of this, I suspect we find it hard to believe in acts of the heart. Everything here is calculated, it is self-serving, or so we believe. We are suspicious of forgiveness, because in a politically charged atmosphere it seems to be less than genuine, less than heart-felt. When two political types give each other the very devil during the primary campaign, but then miraculously transform into bosom buddies in the interests of party unity, we suspect that something other heartfelt forgiveness is involved.
And we translate that into other facets of life as well; we calculate our forgiveness: I'll forgive you if – I'll be forgiving of that wrong when it can gain me an advantage. And we do not see that the kind of forgiveness we have received from God is free and open, it is without selfish motivation. It is of the heart, it simply follows what love demands.
I am saying that forgiveness is an act of the heart; I am saying that we need it to open up the channels that will blockade the spirit of God, who addresses the hearts and souls of men and women and who challenges our selfishness and our meanness of spirit. Our Lord has only words of warning for those who do not forgive their brothers from their hearts.
But if forgiveness is an act of understanding, understanding the nature of God as mercy; and if forgiveness is an act of the heart, an outflow of genuineness which opens channels for God to communicate with us, it is also supremely an act of will. This climaxes our look at the anatomy of forgiveness this morning.
Forgiveness is an act of the will; it is a choice. Feelings are necessary, attitude change is essential, but nothing really matters yet until we come down to the crunch and decide to forgive. I like the way C. S. Lewis observed that, “Love is not just a tingling sensation in the gizzards.” Love, and by extension, forgiveness, involves more than just feeling, it involves will, decision, it means follow-through.
A few years ago it was Martin Luther King writing of the strength to love and speaking of the ways in which black men and women in American were called upon to forgive their oppressors. Many years before that it was John insisting in his letter that one who says he loves God but does not willfully, actively love his brother is lying and the truth is not in him. In countless of our own lives it has been the discovery that we cannot live in the tensions brought out by the failure to forgive, that something deep within us keeps on summoning us to decide to forgive, to forgive and to forget, to put behind us those things which mar our relationships and blockade the spirit of God. Forgiveness is an act of will, a conscious decision, and we are making that decision maturely, forthrightly when we come to see that we can forgive those who do not deserve to be forgiven, because, after all, none of us deserves to be forgiven.
I have an idea, for example, that many of us do so many impossibly insulting and injurious things to one another within our marriages that nothing short of outright forgiveness will save modern marriage. I have been with couples where the conversation is nothing more than trading putdown remarks, and it seems that all that is holding the marriage together is a common need for someone to whip. That's going to take some forgiveness, some very tough forgiveness, because in many of our marriages nobody really deserves to be forgiven. But you see forgiveness is an act of the will, you decide to forgive and to forgive from the heart, and watch that marriage be transformed.
And I've talked with and counseled with a good many college students who have been working on coming to the place where they must decide to forgive their parents, to forgive them for demanding too much too soon, for living out the affluent lifestyle instead of giving themselves, for giving things but not selves. And I have concluded with more than one of them that the only answer which satisfies is to decide to forgive, to see forgiveness as an act of the will. Not to wait for a tingling sensation in the gizzards, but to do it. To forgive.
And then there is the church. We of the church are the folks who say that we have responded to this Lord who has written off the 10,000 talents. We have admitted to the idea that we are sinners in need of forgiveness, we have approached the waters of baptism with the understanding that there we were testifying to our acceptance of the free grace of a merciful Lord. Every Sunday we utter brave and lofty words about our unity, about our love for one another; we analyze endlessly the nature of the Christian church and always come up with the notion that it is koinonia, it is fellowship, it is a common spirit. And then we blunder on out into the world, unreconciled, without forgiving one another, without taking one another seriously. And as we do so, if we are to believe this scripture, we leave without really experiencing the forgiveness which God continually offers us.
If I were to be totally realistic this morning, totally without diplomacy and polish, I would remind you that church is one of the last places where contemporary men and women expect to find a forgiving spirit. Someone once wrote a parody on one of the verses of the hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Instead of those lofty but utterly visionary words about not being divided, all one body we, one in hope and doctrine, one in charity -- instead of that some wag has written, “We are all divided, countless splinters we. One lacks hope, another faith, and all lack charity.”
Contemporary men and women, I am saying, no longer expect to find churches to be places where forgiveness is there for the asking. Churches in all too many instances have become those gatherings where you have to watch out for the land mines lest you step into dangerous territory. Churches have become, in the minds of those who seek forgiveness, those who need forgiveness – churches have become the folks who instead of forgiving are busily mouthing standards of behavior and of orthodoxy which they themselves do not really uphold. Churches, in the minds of many, are more known for their pettiness and their failure of nerve than are they known as were those of the early Christian community, “Behold how these Christians love one another.”
Church people, I fear, are like that wife about whom her husband said, “Whenever I do anything my wife doesn’t like, she becomes historical.” Someone corrected him, “I think the word is hysterical; your wife becomes hysterical.” “No,” replied the husband, “she becomes historical, she remembers every mistake I ever made."
Forgiveness: an act of understanding, knowing of a God who forgives as an act of grace, though none of us could lay claim to deserving it: a bookkeeping nightmare.
Forgiveness, an act of the heart, laying bare again the possibility of a new spirit, a changed attitude, an outpouring of the spirit of God.
But most of all, forgiveness, an act of the will, a toughminded decision to forego retaliation, an insistence upon doing the loving and caring thing. Forgiveness which avoids that meanness of spirit, that pinching and grasping which so marks our lives. Forgiveness which makes possible for us in fresh ways the good gifts our Father waits to supply us.
