September 14, 10:30am (Sare Gordy)
But Jesus is not offering forgiveness as a gift he is recommending it as a strategy! Forgiveness is not some moral achievement it is a protocol of healing or recovery. Forgiveness is not some ethical principle or test of purity it is tactical maneuver of spiritual warfare. We always have to remember this context of mercy and forgiveness.
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“Hope”
The Rev. Cam Miller
September 14, 2008
Good morning.
I had serious trouble coming up with a sermon for today and it was all because of a rookie mistake. I was searching for the big, juicy plum of enlightenment so that I could really “Wow!” us this morning. It’s that old ego…which, by the way, rarely seems to get wiser as we get older.
So there I was rooting around in today’s readings, looking for an “Ah ha!” about “Mercy” to strike when the wisdom is all right there in the pedestrian stories. And truly, today’s readings are as much about the power of story as they are about mercy.
We have two really different kinds of Scripture stories. The Joseph story we heard is part of a much larger narrative that links together an even bigger cycle of stories about the First Families of Judaism. It is the kind of complex story whose smaller lessons – such Joseph showing mercy to his abusive brothers – are not as important in the context of the whole story as the narrative-links it makes to the larger Biblical story.
In other words, while it has some juicy little morsels like today’s excerpt, none of the parts were told for, or are greater than, the whole. It is a Big Story and the little subplots in it are interesting but the Big Story is more important than the little currents running through it.
Matthew’s story on the other hand, is a Little Story that has been turned into a slightly bigger and definitely more complicated story. Jesus, like other itinerant rabbis of his generation, taught in parables. Parables were pithy little stories that punched a simple point and, like a spear, usually stuck in the brains of their audiences.
That is why they taught in parables. They couldn’t read or write and their audience could not read or write. So parables were one-point stories told with a sharp edge that cut into the brain.
The story we heard today has a parable hidden in it somewhere but in the telling, and in being passed on for a couple generations, it has been morphed
from a simple parable into a more complex allegory.
We’ve talked about this before but I will reiterate it now.
Parables were a unique linguistic form used by first century Palestinian populist rabbis. Allegories were a story-form used by educated Greeks and Romans in philosophy, religion an literature. So today’s story from Matthew is an example of a parable that rolled like a snowball out of Galilee and became a big fat snowman in Rome. Okay, that’s not a very good metaphor but you get my point.
The point to Matthew’s tale, which I rewrote to be easier to understand and less offensive to our current sensibilities, is that God is like a king who forgives his slave of an impossible debt, until he discovers that the slave has not learned to model the king’s generosity of spirit and had another slave imprisoned and tortured for owing him money.
In the story as it appears in Matthew, the king has the slave thrown in to prison and tortured. You see, they tortured the debtors to find out if they were hiding any money or resources that the debt-holder didn’t know about.
So as an allegory Matthew’s story says that God is like a king who forgives our debts – which are so huge we cannot possibly repay them. If you do likewise and forgive your fellow slaves, you will presumably go on being forgiven. But if you do not forgive those who have trespassed against you, then God will throw you into a prison and torture you – presumably in Hell. In other words, God’s forgiveness of us is conditional and completely dependent upon our forgiving others.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t buy that God is driven by that kind of stingy, niggling conditionality. That sounds just too narrowly human to be definitive of a Cosmic God. But there is another reason I suspect this story as representing Matthew’s understanding more than Jesus’.
It is difficult to imagine that Jesus, who was a populist reformer and revolutionary after all, would say to his audience, who were brutally oppressed: “You know, God is like a king who threatens imprisonment and torture to those who don’t do what he says.”
Where is the good news in that? For peasants who were living under the Roman Empire and corrupt local figureheads like King Herod, that would make God like just more of the same. Somehow that just doesn’t have the ring of Jesus to it when told like Matthew tells it.
But there is another cultural context we need to think about with both the Joseph and Jesus stories about Mercy and forgiveness. They take place in a culture of blood-libel.
We think of the Hebrew injunction of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” as primitive and vengeful. But what it was really saying to the ancients is that if you kill my sister I do not have the right to bring my clan to your village and wipe out your entire family. Retribution must be proportional.
It was a law and a custom that reigned-in unrestrained and brutally violent blood-feuds. Jesus is contributing to that progressive idea that indeed, mercy is a higher value than vengeance.
On the surface of it we might say, “Well of course.” But when we look at how our own institutions and governments behave todayit still seems like just a progressive idea whose time has not yet come.
To be honest, we do not know what or if there was an original parable from Jesus that compared God to a king with a slave, but we do know that he persistently agitated those around him to consider forgiveness and mercy as alternatives to resentment and vengeance.
But let’s dig a layer deeper.
It is one thing for Jesus to preach forgiveness as a radical strategy to free the mind of brutalized peasants from the toxic consequences of bitterness and resentment.
But it is an entirely different thing for an institution of State violence – like the Roman Church that came to be the religion of Caesars, or the Roman Catholic Church that inflicted the Spanish Inquisition upon its world, or the Anglican Church that acted as a whore for British Colonialism and helped rape people and cultures all around the world – it is a very thing for the perpetrators of violence and abuse to insist that their victims forgive them and show mercy. You see what I mean?
Only those with the power to execute judgment and punishment have the ability to show mercy – victims cannot show mercy toward their abusers unless the power arrangement has been reversed.
Victims and the oppressed can practice forgiveness but I am not so sure that forgiveness is a gift to the perpetrators or the abusers – forgiveness is a strategy to free the mind and the soul of the victim and the abused.
Forgiveness is a strategy for those who have been transgressed against so that they can move forward without the corrosive effects of resentment and the acidic bile of bitterness continuing to perpetuate their injury.
You see, we cringe at the idea of forgiving those who have injured or betrayed or hurt us in some way, because it seems as if we are giving them a gift they do not deserve.
“Why should I forgive him (or her)?” is an almost instinctual response revealing our indignation at the idea we are giving something when it is us who should be getting something in recompense.
But Jesus is not offering forgiveness as a gift he is recommending it as a strategy! Forgiveness is not some moral achievement it is a protocol of healing or recovery. Forgiveness is not some ethical principle or test of purity it is tactical maneuver of spiritual warfare. We always have to remember this context of mercy and forgiveness.
Joseph could show mercy because he had power, and he exemplified forgiveness because previously in his life, that was how he endured betrayal and slavery in order to became free, healthy and strong again.
Peter asks Jesus how many times he has to forgive some jerk in their community that keeps bugging him, and Jesus’ response, “Seventy-seven times” is as if to ask, “Well how long to you want to suffer under the effects of resentment, bitterness and anger?”
Peter asks for a rule or a law or a commandment and Jesus responds with a concrete functional strategy: “Well, how much acid do you want in your heart?” Forgiveness isn’t a rule or commandment, it is a strategy of health.
Now one other mundane little gem in here before we move on in the worship this morning.
The Mainline Protestant and Catholic Churches have made a huge mistake over the centuries. They got fixated upon preserving buildings and rituals when the kingdom, the power and the glory – for ever and ever – are preserved in the stories.
Not that you can’t have both but we got really good at preserving the wrong things.
In truth, we don’t have to know where the special place to meditate is…or how to light the fire…or the special words of the special prayer…(reference to a story from “The Gates of the Forest” by Elie Wiesel used at the Liturgical Reading for this day).
In the story is the wisdom.
In the story is the power.
In the story is the face of God.
In the story is the hope.
In the story is the guide.
In the story is the challenge.
In the story…is the way forward.
It’s pretty cool really. If we turn our gaze to the story, and I’m telling you it happens for me every time and today is no exception, the ancient wisdom gurgles ups through the centuries like oil through sand.
In the weeks ahead we will be listening hard to the ancient stories and their more contemporary counterparts in poetry and prose.
We will be listening hard and I suspect we will get surprised and poked and pierced just like the ancients did. It’s good stuff and worthy of getting out of bed on a Sunday…but then so is all the rest of it. Welcome to September and the wide-open arms of community.
Amen.
