Road to Freedom

Scriptures:       Exodus 14:19-31, 15:1-11, 20-21;  Romans  14:1-12;

Matthew 18:21-35

For the past several weeks, we’ve been following the Israelites on their road to freedom from Egypt – from their enslavement by Pharoah to the birth of Moses, to the call of Moses to lead Israel to freedom.  Last week we were with the Israelites as they ate the Passover meal and prepared to depart from Egypt, as God struck down firstborn of the Egyptians but passed over the Israelites.  After this final, terrible plague, Pharoah and the Egyptians begged the Israelites to leave Egypt, the Egyptians even giving the departing Israelites gold and silver and clothing as they departed.

Today’s Old Testament reading gives yet another turning point in the quest of the Israelites for freedom.  After the Israelites had left, Pharoah changed his mind and said, “What have I done?  What was I thinking, letting our slaves go?  And so Pharoah and his army saddled up and went after the Israelites.  The Egyptians caught up with the departing Israelites at the end of the Red Sea.  Caught between the Red Sea in front of them and the Egyptians rapidly approaching behind them, the people panicked, and screamed at Moses, “Were there no graves in Egypt that you brought us out here to die in the wilderness.  Didn’t we tell you it was better to serve in Egypt than to die out here?” But Moses trusted God and stretched out his staff, his walking stick, and the Red Sea parted…..those of us of a certain age may remember the special effects in Cecil B DeMille’s movie The Ten Commandments, which were amazing by the standards of the day, and stand up pretty well even in our day of computer-generated imagery.  So Israel crossed the Red Sea on dry ground.  Of course, once they got across, the Egyptians followed them, and all the water came crashing down on them, and they drowned.   And then Moses and the people of Israel sing their victory song:  “The Lord has triumphed gloriously, horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.”  Of course, they weren’t in the clear yet – they had left Egypt, but they still hadn’t entered the promised land.  They were in the wilderness, in an in-between place.  There would be many times ahead of them when the Israelites were threatened with hunger and thirst, and there would be many more times when the people would complain to Moses and ask to go back to Egypt.  But the crossing of the Red Sea was a great moment in the history of the Jewish people, an event they would always hark back to when faced with impossible odds.

The Revised Common Lectionary, the cycle of readings followed by Roman Catholic and many Protestant churches – including us – sets this story side-by side with Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness.  Many times, it’s easy to draw connections between the texts; for example, many times the New Testament readings may quote or otherwise directly refer to the Old Testament reading.  With this week’s readings, the connections weren’t so obvious – there are no direct cross-references.  But if we dig a little, we can find connections just the same.

Remember that, in last Sunday’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is teaching about discipline in the church, saying that if your brother – and it applies to your sister as well - sins against you, go and point out his fault when the two of you are alone.  If your brother listens, you’ve regained your brother.  If your brother doesn’t listen, take one or two others and confront him, and if your brother still doesn’t listen, bring the matter before the church, and if your brother still doesn’t listen, let him be as a Gentile – in other words, this person is no longer to be considered part of the community of faith.

And then Peter, quite reasonably, wants to know how far forgiveness goes.  “If my brother sins against me, how many times should I forgive?  As many as seven times?”  Peter clearly thought he was being generous.  But Jesus said, not seven times, but seventy times seven – in other words, indefinitely.

And then Jesus tells a parable about forgiveness in the kingdom of heaven:  He said the kingdom of heaven – the reign of God or the will of God – is like a king who decides to settle accounts with his slaves.  A slave who owed ten thousand talents was brought before the king.  We should understand that ten thousand talents was a fantastic sum of money – if Jesus were telling the story to us, he would say something like “a slave who owed a gazillion trillion dollars was brought before the king.”   You may have heard the saying, “if you owe the bank ten thousand dollars and you can’t pay, you’ve got a problem, but if you owe the bank ten billion dollars and you can’t pay, the bank has a problem” – and that saying certainly applies to this scenario - we’d have to wonder who was more irresponsible, the slave for running up such a debt or the king for allowing the slave to run up such a debt.  Anyway, the king was about to sell the slave and his family to recover the debt, but the slave made a plea for the king to be patient.  And, we’re told, the king took pity on the slave and forgave him the debt.  But then, we’re told, the slave found another slave who owed him 100 denarii – a denarus was a day’s wage, so this would have been a bit over three months’ wages – and tried to collect the debt from this other slave, and when the other slave couldn’t pay, had him thrown into prison.  The king was told what the first slave did, and told the slave, “I forgave you all that debt; shouldn’t you have forgiven the other slave his debt, as I forgave you” and had the slave put into prison.  Jesus makes the connection explicit – the grudges we may hold against others are trivially small compared to our own sins against God and neighbor, and “so my heavenly father will do to each of you if you do not forgive your brother or sister from the heart.”

As the saying goes, “To err is human; to forgive, divine.”  And acting in a way that’s divine is tough.  Forgiveness is tough.   When somebody hurts us, does us dirty, it’s human nature to want to get back at that person.  The law of Moses contains the lex talionis – law of retaliation – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.  To an extent, it’s a concession to the human desire to get even – but also a limitation on that desire, a demand for proportionality – an eye for an eye, not the eye of you and ten members of your family; a tooth for a tooth, not ten teeth for a tooth.  But even this demand for proportionality has limitations – as a saying attributed to Gandhi states, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leaves the whole world blind and toothless.”  And so, as we pray every single week in the Lord’s prayer, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”    And when Jesus taught that prayer to the disciples, he was very explicit in saying “If you forgive others their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others; neither will your Father forgive your sins.”  So our own forgiveness is linked to our forgiveness of others – which was the point of Jesus’ parable.

And yet, to let somebody off scot-free offends our sense of justice. Should anybody be able to get away with just anything?  The answer to that is, of course not, and that’s why, in last week’s reading from Matthew, a procedure for church discipline is laid out – bring your complaint to the offender, then to one or two others, then to the whole church, and if the person still doesn’t listen, disfellowship them.  Actions do have consequences.   While God loved the Egyptians, God didn’t love their actions in oppressing the Israelites, and the Egyptians found out about accountability and consequences as the waters of the Red Sea crashed in on them. And so God tells us, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.”

There’s a difference between justice and vengeance.  Even in our secular justice system, as broken as it is – and it is truly is a mess – there are procedures to allow due process, to allow both sides to be heard and, ideally, an impartial jury of our peers to mete out consequences.   Our society doesn’t condone vigilante justice, doesn’t condone individual citizens taking the law into their own hands.  There’s a difference between holding someone accountable within the context of the community and seeking private vengeance. 

Jesus’ command that we forgive is as much about us as it is about the person being forgiven.  To hold a grudge, to seek vengeance, breaks relationship and cuts off the possibility of reconciliation.  It embitters our spirit, ties our spirit into knots.  It has been said that to hold a grudge is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies.  And, to draw the connection to our Old Testament reading, to be relentless in pursuing vengeance puts us into a situation similar to that of the Egyptians pursuing the Israelites – we can be so singleminded in our pursuit of retribution that we set up the conditions of our own destruction. For us as Christians, forgiveness is the road to freedom – for us and for those who wrong us.

Of course, this week was the 13^th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  “Never forget”, we are told – and it is fitting to honor the memories of those who were killed.  But, in the aftermath of the attacks, our country wanted vengeance.  A personal story of a difficult part of my own faith journey in this regard:  I have to confess that in the weeks right after 9-11, I didn’t want to hear about forgiveness.  I wanted our country to kick some Arab butt, to go medieval on Al Qaeda.  At Old First, where I was a member, the sermons were on forgiveness and peacemaking – a number of Old First members participated in the large marches for peace in Philadelphia at that time – and I felt really alienated from the peace advocates in the congregation, like they’d been replaced by a bunch of pod people or something.   And, truth to tell, I needed more help in dealing with my own anger and disorientation than I was getting.  I think my feelings mirrored the mood of much of the country in a desire for vengeance.  But we all know what happened next – our country attacked Iraq, which hadn’t attacked us; nearly as many soldiers were killed in war as the roughly 3,000 who died on 9-11, with tens of thousands more maimed, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and maimed, and out of the destabilization of Iraq came, among other things, the extremist group ISIS that is creating havoc in Iraq and Syria, and that was too violent and extreme even for Al Qaeda to stomach.  Despite my feelings of alienation from my congregation after 9-11, I still faithfully attended and faithfully fellowshipped –biting my tongue a lot along the way - and faithfully tithed.  The need to be part of the community of the faithful overrode my own disagreements on one issue.  Over the years since the 2003 attack on Iraq, I came to see the wisdom of the peacemakers.  Many of my views on war have done a 180 degree turn, and within the limits of my human brokenness and sinfulness I myself have tried to be a peacemaker.  Like the Egyptians rushing after the Israelites, our country’s rush to judgment and vengeance led our country into unforeseen and undesirable consequences.  The Egyptians would have been much better off just letting the Israelites go….our country might have been better off if, instead of shock and awe, we had we taken a more limited, targeted approach to bring accountability and justice to Bin Laden and his associates….and we will be better off as people of faith if, instead of rushing to judgment and vengeance, we remember our Lord’s command to forgive, as we have been forgiven.

Vengeance asks us to remember and hate the sin.  Forgiveness asks us to remember and love the sinner – to remember that the sinner is a child of God, created in God’s image, just like ourselves; a sinner, broken and flawed, just like ourselves; in need of forgiveness, just like ourselves.

Peter asked Jesus, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how many times should I forgive?”  And Jesus said, not seven times, but seventy times seven times.”  May Emanuel Church be a place of forgiveness and reconciliation, and may we live in a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation toward all with whom we come in contact.  Amen.