Are you feeling the intensity of the changing season?  Are you feeling the frenetic energy that marks the end of summer – even if you don’t have kids in school, or you are not in school yourself, you can’t help but be affected by the traffic, the increased number of people everywhere you go.  And then there’s the emotional intensity of a presidential campaign in its final stretch.  Another hurricane has caused a massive disaster in the south.  Everywhere we turn there are more urgent needs for our attention, our time and talent and money than we can possibly respond to.  It’s quite overwhelming, really.

      And in the midst of this, we have a Gospel lesson that, at first read, is also pretty overwhelming and seems to offer no comfort whatsoever.  It is the end of the teaching on how to live in community – what is sometimes called “Matthew’s advice to a divided community.”  And it sounds, frankly, like Matthew’s Jesus is at the end of his rope.  The passage seems to try to scare the community into forgiveness with the threat of torture if we do not forgive others’ debts – or trespasses – or sins.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve often winced at the words in the Lord’s Prayer that plead, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” or “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” because actually, if God only forgives us as we forgive others, we are in a heap of trouble.  Besides, with my prison ministry hat on – or with my mom hat on, I know that threats of punishment are not effective long-term strategies for behavior modification.

      So what’s going on here?  Peter, who is, “the rock,” also recently known as, “Satan,” asks, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive?  As many as seven times?”  Peter is actually suggesting something extremely generous when he asks if he should forgive seven times.  Three times was the conventional number.  (And it still is for many people today – the three strikes laws testify to this.)  Peter’s number is more than double what is expected.  Imagine how he must have reeled when Jesus responded, not seven times, but seventy-seven.  Some versions of the story even say seventy times seven.  In other words, more times than you can keep track of.  Forgive someone who sins against you more times than you can count.  Imagine how painful and messy that could get.  It sounds like a “pernicious invitation to self-destruction” to use the words of one of our own resident theologians.  What kind of fool would do that?

      The answer to that question lies in the text that follows, in which it becomes clear that forgiveness and mercy are the same thing.  And mercy has to do with what is undeserved (whereas justice has to do with deserving).  Mercy, unlike justice, is offered where there is no legitimate claim at all.  Mercy or forgiveness presupposes a certain empathy – a certain sympathy for the trespasser, the sinner, or debtor.  Mercy is both the motive and the standard for action in Jesus’ teaching, and this story illustrates that.  But the numbers are way over the top.  They are impossibly high.  What kind of fool would forgive too many times to count?

      Jesus answers that question with a parable that suggests that God is the fool who does that.  God is the fool that does not count the cost of mercy.  God is the fool whose love for you does not depend on your ability to repay your debt to God, even if it has grown as high as ten-thousand talents, which is an ancient way of saying “a zillion dollars.”  God is the fool whose compassion for you “does not depend on your YES or your NO to God’s call.  God does not keep score of your willingness to love, stretch, forgive, grow, become more of who you are meant to become.  Nor does God ever tire of calling you to a fuller life.  God will not give up on desiring more of and for you.”1

      And since this is the nature of God, our proper – indeed our expected – response, is to pass it on.  The torture that happens when we don’t pass it on is actually self-inflicted.  I think of the last part of the story as a description of what happens when forgiveness is withheld, rather than a prescription.  How often we keep ourselves and others who have sinned against us in various kinds of torturous positions – prisons really – until enough “time has been done.”  That might be justice but Jesus is calling for mercy.  Jesus is saying, “for the sake of the community – of the family – have mercy on one another – more than can be measured.”  Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that “forgiveness is not just an occasional act; it is a permanent attitude.” It is God’s permanent attitude. 

     Jesus is proposing forgiveness, God’s permanent attitude, as a spiritual discipline – a habit of life.  Matthew the Evangelist is applying Jesus’ teaching to the community, with which he seems more than a little frustrated.  Someone in our Tuesday morning Bible study this past week noted the irony that the way Matthew tells it, the same God who, through Jesus, urges us to forgive one another seventy-seven times, then turns around and clobbers the servant after his first failure!  I wonder if we could imagine forgiving Matthew for losing his patience with a community of Jesus-followers unable to forgive its own members.   

      You know research has been done on subjects who have unresolved grievances that did not involve physical violence.  (Do you think the researchers had a difficult time finding subjects?)  The research shows that simply imagining forgiving the offender led to improved immune system and cardiovascular functioning during the visualization process!  When subjects forgave, they reported feeling greater hopefulness, they felt more spiritually open, and an improved sense of self-efficacy.  And the feelings lasted for periods of several months.  Forgiveness is a creative and transformative process that promotes healing and growth and well-being and freedom.  If, as I said last week, the Biblical definition of sin is “broken relationship,” then forgiveness is “restored relationship” with self and with other.

      Developing a spiritual practice of forgiveness does not mean not getting angry or afraid.  It does not mean keeping silent about offenses or letting bad behavior slide.  And forgiving is not the same as forgetting.  Forgiving is about remembering in a new way. Forgiving is about remembering in an entirely new way.  It’s re-writing the narrative – the story that gets told over and over (out loud or in our heads) of the abandonment, or betrayal, or the violation; when we simply did not get what we wanted, what we needed, or what we deserved or what we thought we were going  to get.

      So what does it mean to remember a new way?  Here are three things.  First, it means remembering the incident or the offense and taking it less personally.  I had a friend who used to say, “I’m not much but I’m all I can think about!”  There are so many examples of the benefits of taking things less personally.  Second, remembering in a new way means taking responsibility for our own feelings and experiences – our reactions, our actions, and our inactions – before and after the offense.  We all tell stories in which we abdicate responsibility and solidify our victimhood.  Remembering in a new way means rethinking all of the parts in the drama, including our own.  And third, remembering in a new way means re-telling the narrative as a story of reasonable or even good intentions, or a story of inevitable conflict, with the hurt that resulted as more of a ‘blip,’2 than something from which we cannot recover or from which we will not move along.

      Brendan Corkery’s parents and godparents are about to give us an opportunity to remember our baptismal covenant in a new way.  Thank you all for that.  I encourage you to carry two questions from our scripture readings around with you and ponder them during the baptismal covenant that we are about to renew, and in the intense days and weeks to come.   From Romans: Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? And from The Gospel of Matthew:   Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?