You Owe Me An Apology!
Matthew 18: 21-35
A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart

Murray spent a whole day saying he was sorry... to total strangers. He stood on the corner of Lexington and 51st in New York City, and apologized to each person passing by.  Even though Murray hadn’t done anything that warranted an apology, every stranger accepted his apology, saying,  “Don’t worry about it.” or  “That’s OK.”  At the end of the day, Murray shouted, “I could run up on the roof right now and holler ‘I am sorry,’ and half a million people would holler right back, ‘That’s OK, pal, just see that you don’t do it again.’”

Murray is a character in Herb Gardner’s play and the film called “A Thousand Clowns.”  Murray’s experience on that day reflects just how many of us feel we have been wronged and are owed an apology.

The most delightfully extreme example of this that I’ve found is in another character in another film: the character of Olive Oyl’s father, Mr. Cole Oyl, in Robert Altman’s film, “Popeye.”
In every scene, every conversation, to other characters, and to no one in particular, Mr. Oyl asserts repeatedly, emphatically, “You owe me an apology!”

Our Gospel text this morning turns upside down giving and receiving apologies, to receiving and giving forgiveness.Peter asked Jesus “How many times do I have to forgive?”  And Jesus told him not to assume he could even keep count.

This week I told an octogenarian member of this community that I was preaching on forgiveness and asked what she thought.  After a pause she said, “I had to forgive my father.”  I listened.  She was ten years old when her mother died, and when her father abandoned her and her siblings.  It took a long time to forgive.  After she was married and a mother herself, she did forgive, she had to forgive, for herself as much as for her father.

Another member of this community told me that he had to forgive those who were directly responsible for the death of a loved one.  He had to forgive in order to move on with his life, as he continued to fight to hold them accountable. Weighed down by rage and resentment, he had to forgive for the sake of his own healing.

Many of us have been harmed, deeply wronged, and are not able to forgive...Many of us have harmed others, perhaps in ways we do not know or understand, and are not able or willing to apologize or to forgive ourselves.  

More than one person in this community, not able to forgive, still prayed for those who had done them great harm.
Forgiveness is not forgetting.
Forgiveness is not denial.
Forgiveness does not condone or collude with wrongdoing.
Forgiveness takes time. It is not easy.
Forgiveness is powerful.
Forgiveness is a spiritual practice, a letting go, that frees us to the possibility of new life.
Forgiveness denies neither truth nor anger.
Forgiveness is not the same as accountability to community, reconciliation or restorative justice.  But it can help bring accountability, reconciliation, and restoration.
Forgiveness cannot be required of another, or of us, it is a movement of the Spirit born out of love.

Romans 5:8 says that “while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”
In the only prayer Jesus taught his disciples, we pray:
Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

As one scholar wrote:  “The question in Christian dogmatics about whether human forgiveness is some kind of condition for God’s forgiveness misses the point ... God’s mercy is without end...forgiveness between human beings is a sign of the presence of God.” *
*(Luise Schottroff, Parables of Jesus)

Relationship is part of human being. Betrayal, abuse and brokenness are part of human experience.  Forgiveness makes it possible not to be imprisoned in the brokenness.

Jewish teaching about the Day of Atonement (M. Yoma 8:9) says, “God’s will to forgive is powerless when people harden themselves.”
Community is a place to practice forgiveness.  Giving, receiving, forgiving even ourselves. Perhaps beginning with the ... smaller trespasses.

Peter asked, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive?  As many as seven times?”  Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven.”  Some texts read, “seventy times seven!”

Throughout Matthew chapter 18, Jesus placed little children and the lost at the center of his teaching.  The vulnerable and violated are to be cared for first.  And conflicts are to be addressed in community.
This week there was an editorial in the Chronicle by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in which he writes that after Apartheid: “South Africa...did not descend into the predicted pit of vengeance ..., or (give) blanket amnesty.  Instead, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ... provided a third alternative:  that of restorative justice.

 He writes, ....World history has proved that forgiveness is never cheap or easy...There can be no future without forgiveness.  Revenge only begets further violence.  America’s strained relationships in the global community are due largely to the fear and siege mentality that set in after the September 11th ... causing many in Washington on both sides of the aisle to reject certain...core American values.... your new president would be surprised if he were to say to the world, “We made big mistakes over Iraq.” And while he is at it, shut down Guantanamo Bay...With honesty, humility and international forgiveness, the United States can and should remain a beacon for liberty for the world long into the future.” (9/12/08)

This morning’s Gospel parable sets God’s forgiveness alongside real world politics and economics.  A royal slave, in charge of finances for the King, has a huge debt (10,000 talents – equal to all the taxes collected from three Roman territories).  This slave desperately pleaded for forgiveness of this debt. The king, rather than sending him to prison, torture or death, did forgive the debt. But then, this same slave turned right around and showed no mercy to a slave under his authority who owed a much smaller debt. Informed of this, the angry king confronted the unmerciful slave and handed him over to be tortured.

The power relationships of Kings and slaves and the cruel coercion of commerce in empire are COMPARED TO the limitless forgiveness and love and mercy of God that free us to challenge and change relationships of power and pain.

A Jewish Midrash on Exodus 24 says, “Come and see what a difference there is between the acts of the children of humanity and the acts of God:  They begin fighting when someone cannot pay a debt.  But God is not so...” *

If we seek God’s forgiveness but do not forgive, how can we receive? Communities can be shaped by forgiveness.
This week a front page New York Times story about the West Bank city of Jenin, was headlined:  “A West Bank Ruin, Reborn as a Peace Beacon.”

Pessimism is a steady companion these days for advocates of Middle East peace.  A lame-duck Israeli government is negotiating with a weak Palestinian leadership in the twilight of an unpopular American administration.  Few forecast success...But a quiet revolution is stirring here in this city, once a by-word for the extremes of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.  In 2002, in response to a wave of suicide bombers from Jenin, Israeli tanks leveled entire neighborhoods.  From that rubble, ... Palestinian security officials have restored order...civilians are planning economic cooperation...

Hamas is weak in Jenin... (and) after evacuation of four Israeli settlements, the area is essentially free of settlers... In Jenin, in the West Bank, high school students ...took part in a one-of-its-kind Bible-Koran contest – 12 teams, each made up of one Jew and one Arab asked questions in Hebrew and Arabic about the holy books...as one Jewish community leader said, ”we have a choice in Israel of making peace or living in a bunker....”

We have a choice in this world, in this community, in our lives.......freed by God’s extravagant forgiveness... and limitless love.....a choice of making peace or living in a bunker.