Ezekiel 1:1-3
Matthew 18:21-35
“The Way of Life”By: Ken Sauer, Pastor of East Ridge United Methodist Church, Chattanooga, TN eastridgeumc.org
The Book of Ezekiel begins with:
“In the fourth month
On the fifth day
Of the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin.”
How do you tell time?
Notice that the prophet didn’t use the names for the month.
Nor did he recount time from the year of the Exodus forward like many of his ancestors did.
Something had happened in the life of Ezekiel that forced him to start using a new numbering system tied to an event that had stopped time and started it all over for him.
“In the fourth month
On the fifth day
Of the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin.”
Have you ever had to endure an event which was so distressing that it reset your clock?
Something like…
“The year the basement flooded?”
Or, “the year that tornados devastated so many?”
Have you ever been forced to go through a situation so intense that it stuck in your memory as a date in time that changed everything?
“In the fourth month
On the fifth day
Of the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin.”
What kind of event has the capacity to restart a person’s historical clock?
Perhaps your memories include the start of the 2nd World War or the year the Stock Market crashed.
Maybe, for you, your clock hovers around the day when hijacked airplanes took down the World Trade Center buildings in New York and slammed into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
Anyone who is 15 or 16 years old or older remembers where they were when they first heard the news on that tragic day.
We remember our fear and, perhaps, our anger, our confusion, and sense of threat.
We remember our tears and our hearts being broken as we watched those Towers, filled with human beings, crash to the ground!
Since then, everything in our immediate world has been shaken.
We have been chasing enemies all over the earth.
Thousands of men, women and children have died in wars.
Our trust of persons who do not look like us, nor worship like us has been severely hampered.
Every time we try and board an airplane, we are forced to remember the reason why we must take off our shoes, go through the metal detectors, the pat-downs and the rest.
“In the fourth month
On the fifth day
Of the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin.”
Or for us:
“In the ninth month
On the eleventh day
Of the year 2001.”
In the years after the World Trade Center Towers came crumbling down--the stock markets began to fail, the housing market crashed, and many of us became unemployed.
So, on the Tenth Anniversary of 9-11, what are we, as Christians to think or do?
Today’s Gospel Lesson from Matthew 18 propels us to wrestle with one of the most difficult practices of Christian discipleship—forgiveness!!!
Forgiveness is a hard road to walk, but it is the way to life and life abundant.
Forgiveness is the Way of Jesus, the Way of the Cross.
And while revenge may seem to be much easier and more desirable, it in fact is what leads to bondage and death!
Did you know that the Greek word for “forgive” means to “let loose”?
It’s like a really tough knot that suddenly gives way and becomes completely untied.
It’s like a dark bondage from which there is sudden release.
That’s what it’s like to be forgiven.
And that is what it is like to forgive as well!
Have you ever done something that you knew was wrong…
…something that you knew hurt someone else, perhaps someone you loved?
What did it feel like when they forgave you?
Did you get just a taste of the love that God has for us?
Did you see just a little bit of Jesus in that experience?
After Jesus teaches His disciples about how to deal with those who hurt us, Peter asks how many times he must forgive someone.
“Up to seven times?” he asks Jesus.
And Peter, having thought he was being very generous with this number must have been quite shocked when Jesus came back with the answer: “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”
Which, in other words, means beyond all calculation!!!
Whoever is keeping count has not forgiven at all, but is instead just postponing revenge!!!
It’s like what Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13:5: “Love…keeps no record of wrongs.”
In order to make His point even more clear, Jesus tells a story.
In the parable a servant experiences an incredibly undeserved amount of mercy and compassion from a king to whom he owes a huge debt.
After falling on his knees and begging for the king to be patient and wait for him to pay the king back, the king “took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.”
But instead of allowing this undeserved grace he experienced to shape and redefine his life and dealings with others…
…instead of allowing the experience of being forgiven to transform him into a forgiving person…
…the man immediately went to someone else who owed him a much smaller debt and demanded payment without a trace of forgiveness.
When the other guy falls on his knees begging for patience, “he refused. [and] Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt.”
Upon hearing what he has done, the king, who had extended him such mercy, “turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.”
Jesus finishes the parable by saying, “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.”
To put it bluntly, Jesus says that those who refuse to forgive will themselves be refused forgiveness.
But how can that be?
Like I pointed to earlier, forgiveness is a two-way street where both the one who is forgiven as well as the one who forgives are set free.
How can we; sinners saved by grace…
…those who owe a great debt to God but who have had that debt cancelled by Christ’s shed blood on the Cross, by God so loving us—refuse to forgive others?
Our hearts are either open or closed to God’s forgiveness.
If they are open, able and willing to forgive others, it shows that they have truly and for real been open to receive God’s love and forgiveness gratefully and in such a way that saves our very souls…changing us from the inside out!!!
But if they are locked up to the love of God they will be locked up from extending God’s love to others.
It’s basically just a law of nature!!!
Scholar N.T. Wright puts it this way, “Forgiveness is like the air in your lungs. There’s only room for you to inhale the next lungful when you’ve just breathed out the previous one.
If you insist on withholding it, refusing to give someone else the kiss of life they may desperately need, you won’t be able to take any more in yourself, and you will suffocate quickly.”
There can be no doubt that this is a hard lesson for us to learn, both in our thinking and in our acting.
This lesson holds up a mirror for us to see our tendency to withhold the very mercy and forgiveness we have received.
Think about it, the only righteous judge, Jesus, says from the Cross, “Forgive them.”
We, from our positions of self-righteousness, cry out, “Pay me back what you owe!”
The key point to this parable is that the Way of Life which marks out the Christian Life is forgiveness!!!
In Matthew 6, with The Lord’s Prayer Jesus teaches us to pray for forgiveness in conjunction with the ability to forgive.
Here Jesus has returned to the same theme.
Corrie ten Boom, a Christian who was sent along with her amazing family to a Nazi concentration camp for trying to save Jewish people during the Holocaust, survived but her family did not.
She spent much of the rest of her life speaking and witnessing to people about the love and grace of God she had experienced amidst the most horrible of experiences imaginable.
Then, one night after a speaking engagement at a church she was startled to recognize a former Nazi S.S. Man who had guarded Corrie and her family members at the Camp.
Corrie writes, “He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing.
‘How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein,’” he said.
“To think that, as you say, [Jesus] has washed my sins away!”
And then, Corrie writes, “His hand was thrust out to shake mine.
And I, who had preached so often to the people the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them.
Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more?”
Corrie writes, “I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not.”
Corrie could not forgive this man on her own, so she prayed: “Jesus I cannot forgive him, give me Your forgiveness.”
Then Corrie writes, “As I took his hand…a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this [man] that almost overwhelmed me.”
Not only does Jesus forgive us, but it is only through Jesus’ forgiveness that we, ourselves, can possibly forgive others.
It’s been said that every time we forgive someone else we pass on a drop of water out of the bucketful that God has already given us.
What do any of us do when something happens that is so big that it shakes our world, displaces us or uproots us, restarts our clocks, and places us in a situation where it may feel as if we are looking up at hell?
What did Ezekiel do?
Ezekiel says, “I was among the exiles by the river and I saw the Lord!”
In the same place where others were singing laments and moaning, Ezekiel saw visions from God!!!
“In the fourth month
On the fifth day
Of the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin”
Today, as we remember the events of September 11 a decade ago when four hijacked airplanes wreaked such destruction and woe and changed our world forever, we can decide to hold hatred and anger in our hearts or open them to the loving, healing forgiveness of God…
…asking Jesus to give us His forgiveness.
And thus, we can choose to remember the events of 2,000 years ago when God’s own Son, seeing a field of broken lives and desolate hearts, chose to call down from heaven forgiveness, not vengeance, and therefore opened a future marked not by judgment but by mercy, not by despair but hope, not by fear but courage, not by violence but healing, not by hate but love, and not by death but by new life!!!
That’s what forgiveness can do!!!
I read a report about the hijacking of the United Airlines flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.
A telephone operator received a call from one of the passengers, and in the midst of their conversation, he asked her to pray the Lord’s Prayer with him.
Shall we pray it together this morning?
