Sermon: "Settling Accounts"

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"Settling Accounts"

By Charles Rush

June 22, 1997

e never been a big fan of country music, but I do love the lyrics and last March I had the chance to drive for 14 hours to Chicago with two sleeping teenagers so I listened to a lot of country music. Country music is real life. I love titles like " You Stomped on my Heart and Knocked that Sucker Flat," or "If Heartaches were Wine, I'd be Drunk All the Time" or " I Don't Know Whether to Kill Myself or go Bowling". That's the way you feel sometimes. It's not like the esoteric stuff that our academics are writing on. I was looking through a recent copy of some dissertations. How about this one ‘Social Constructivism and the Hypertextual Portfolio' or ‘Cytokine Gene Expression During Constitutive and Inducible Hematopoesis'. It doesn't exactly make you want to leap from your barstool does it? Tear open that cover and bore in

I think country music is so apt because our behavior with each other is so child like and childish most of the time. Here is another title ‘ You Stuck My Heart in an Old Tin Can and Shot It Off a Log'. How about this "You're the Reason our Kids are so Ugly". And this one speaks volumes in all of its rudeness " Get Your Tongue Outta My Mouth Cause I'm Kissing You Goodbye". Or this one " Mama Get the Hammer, There's a Fly on Papa's Head".

Pretty Grounding isn't it? Not hard to understand. The Bible does that to us from time to time. You can get lost reading these wonderful stories thinking lofty thoughts about the origin of the universe, about the nature of justification by grace and how it relates to sanctification. Or more likely around here, you can become propelled about some issue of social justice and try to think through the implications of welfare reform and equal education in New Jersey and what the Christian response should be, when suddenly you're grounded like a barefoot boy standing in a puddle during a thunderstorm. The lighting strikes and cuts right to the heart of your existence. It hits you where you live. And suddenly, God deals directly with your heart.

That's the kind of text we are dealing with today. Peter comes originally with this question ‘If someone sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as 7 times?' It's not a rhetorical question. I'm betting Peter has his mental ledger open to a particular account, maybe many. I'm guessing John has interrupted or ignored or insulted Peter for about the eighth time now, and Peter has had enough! He has smiled and gritted his teeth and been civil long enough and now he is ready to stuff it down his throat. But he comes to Jesus to get permission first.

That's real life isn't it? We want God's blessing when we're cursing somebody, so we can feel righteous about giving them what they deserve. And it is usually somebody you know pretty well. You don't really get mad at people you don't know. Who cares if they ignore you? You can ignore them right back. But when one of your own family or your best friend or someone in your church crosses you, now that really hurts. You expect better from those people. They are your interdependents, and when they damage you, you suffer the additional pain of betrayal, that they-of all people-have committed this terrible offense against you. That when it's hard to forgive; that's when it's impossible to forget. That is when you start singing that wonderful country song ‘ You're the Cross I Can't Bear '.

I'm betting that when you hear Peter ask about forgiving seven times seven some real face pops up in your mind and you know exactly what Peter is after when he asks this question. He isn't after forgiveness; he's after revenge! He's wanting to know when it's time to lower the boom, when it's acceptable to launch a retaliatory strike. He's wanting to know how much he has to take from these turkeys that surround him.

Forgiveness isn't natural when you've endured repeat offenses. You get weary with overlooking, worn out with those spots where people keep rubbing you the wrong way until you say, "That's it, no more, I‘ve had enough!" We're all relational accountants at heart, who figure "If you burn me, I'm going to burn you back or at least make sure you can't ever do that to me again." Or maybe you store it away for later, for when you really need it, like "Oh I hurt your feelings, huh? Well, you remember that time you did that thing to me? That was much worse than this, you know! So don't be bustin' my chops about this!" But we all know a relationship is in big trouble when you get to keeping score.

Peter thinks he is being pretty generous here. Seven times is pretty patient. The Rabbis said three times. Way before baseball, the Rabbi's were saying, three strikes you're out. Somebody disses you three times, you are free to wreak God's wrath on their hide. Makes sense, because if somebody does something to you three times, that's not an accident, it's a pattern. It's a habit. Or it's a character flaw, and the hardest thing in the world is to forgive somebody for who they are. Hard enough to forgive them for what they've done, but when they've done it so many times you're blue in the face telling them about it, you start attacking their being. This is familiar to married people. You start saying "You know what's wrong with you is you always" You always is a dangerous road to drive. So is it's partner "You never"

Therapists will tell you that it is not wise to use ‘always' and ‘never' in disputes because it never helps and it's always unfair. But it is close to fair because people are habitually hurtful whether they mean to be or not. And when the people who are supposed to love us hurt us again and again and again, it isn't long before we're ready to walk away singing another country song " If you See Me Getting Smaller, It's Cause I'm Leavin' You ".

And you walk away from the people who have hurt you but pretty soon you will change your tune to another great country song ‘ The Last Word in Lonesome is ‘Me'" because you won't have any family or friends or church community left. Truth is, we're all repeat offenders when it comes to hurting the people we say we love. Every one of us. Says Garrison Keillor:

Everybody has to live life, you know. You can't avoid it, whether you follow your calling or not. And there's no way to avoid doing terrible things and making awful mistakes. And if you do, there will be times when you do shameful and embarrassing things and people will be angry with you and they'll be right to be angry. And there's no way for you to avoid it. You still have to follow your calling somehow.

You can't have a relationship with other people without hurting and being hurt. So you better find a way to deal with it. You can't have a friendship or family or community or church without an occasional wound. That's where we all live.

Forgiveness is serious business. Nobody is saying you should just be a doormat and let somebody walk all over you. And I'm especially not saying you should put up for one minute with verbal or sexual or physical abuse or chronic neglect for that matter, from anybody, without doing something about it. Jesus is talking about real life here. They aren't talking about ignoring the damage we do to one another. What would be loving about that? Forgiveness is a transaction that recognizes the offense, and where possible makes amends, and then finds a way to heal the wound that's been created. But forgiveness puts the responsibility for this healing as much on the victim as on the perpetrator of the crime. The healing has to happen from both sides. And often, that's harder for the victim than for the perpetrator to do.

Jesus tells this story as a kind of counterpoint. It is a story of what our world is like most of the time because most of the time we are not forgiving and look at the damage. The King only gives his servant one chance. The King gets so angry with his servant for refusing to forgive a fellow servant, he revokes his own forgiveness and sends the servant to be tortured. Nobody is truly forgiving in this story and there's a lot of violence and torture. This is what our world is like when we refuse to forgive. So what if somebody has hurt you? What is their offense compared to the importance of your friendship? What is their offense compared to what others have had to forgive of you? What is their offense compared to what God has forgiven for you? And if you hold a grudge, and you savor your anger what good is that going to do anybody? What good is it going to do you to carry your anger around like hydrochloric acid in a paper cup? You might as well forgive, and if you can't forget, at least remember how much you've been forgiven, too. You really better be careful with your anger because it's not just you and one other person whose relationship you might damage. It's all of us. It's the whole family, the whole church family, the whole community, and the whole human family.

A friend of mine from Texas was recently sharing with me an episode with his wife. He was speaking tongue in cheek with me and he said "Chuck, I don't get angry; I get hurt. Sometimes, I get so hurt that my face turns red and all the veins in my neck stand out and I raise my voice and say things I later wish I hadn't said But I wouldn't call it anger because I'm a Christian and a minister."

His wife was giving him the business about something and she started in on one of those dangerous screeds about he always or he never, dangerous screeds, and he walked out of the door and slammed it and got in the car to go get some milk or bread, anything to get out of the house and away from that woman for a while. Now, they ought to have a ‘temper detector' on cars, because we have too many angry people driving these two-ton attack vehicles around as it is, particularly here in New Jersey. Hardly a week goes by when someone isn't laying on the horn, right near you.

My friend was so angry he backed out of the garage, hit the gas a little too hard, turned the wheel a little too sharply and caught the right side running light on the corner of the garage door rail. He heard a loud scraping noise and a crash, and got out to find the light broken and a big ugly scratch on his car! He no longer felt hurt. He felt stupid! He was still angry but now he was angry with himself! He was so disgusted he said ‘I want to eat worms and die'.

People can be forgiving. Garage doors cannot be forgiving. He eventually fixed the car but it doesn't quite look the same. A lot of things are unforgiving and do violence. They are irreversible. Hannah Arendt once remarked that it is the human capacity for forgiveness which creates history because only we can redeem the past from a monotonous and irreversible march from one event to the logical unfolding of the next. Forgiveness opens a new horizon. By the mercy of God, we can forgive. We can say "You are more important to me than to hold this against you. I'm not perfect. I forgive you. Let's move beyond this impasse." We've seen some real miracles of forgiveness in our lifetime. Menahem Begin embracing Anwar Sadat, Shimon Peres shaking hands with Yassar Arafat, mortal enemies moving towards reconciliation. People can forgive very great debts.

My friend's wife forgave him. Eventually he went back inside the house they got to the point where they could even laugh about their behavior and they hugged. And soon they were near to singing another famous country song ‘ Two of a Kind, Workin' on a Full House'. Things were better than before. Of course, he didn't tell her about the car for three weeks. But he is a lucky man. She forgave that too.

Aside from the lofty concepts of the Bible and the mission of our church and the wonderful work we are always about here, forgiveness is where we really live, just about every day. We're all in the country chorus singing the blues, and if we don't learn to forgive, we wind up singing solo with the radio and no one else to take our troubles to. To be honest, there are some of us here today who could work a little harder at forgiving our children or our parents, or each other. Or maybe the person you've had the hardest time forgiving is the one who looks back at you in the mirror every day. But when we learn to love and to forgive, to accept each other with all our chronic faults and flaws, even to accept ourselves, because we know God accepts us and forgives those people we have such a hard time forgiving, why, then we have a great time. And then we know that we are God's children. And we can start singing ‘Jesus loves Me', and ‘This Little Light of Mine ‘and' If You're Happy and You Know it Clap Your Hands'. Because these little children's songs, that is also where we really live isn't it? Amen.

Prayer: O God, thank you for loving us just as we are and helping us to be better. Teach us how to forgive as we've been forgiven, how to live together in peace, how to admit our differences and discuss them and settle them and move on in unity of your Spirit. Help us to absorb your Word in our hearts that our faith will be as much a heart trip as a head-trip. And let our lives be songs of joy and love and grace and peace and praise in harmony with each other. Amen.