by the Very Rev. Jered Weber-Johnson
Click here to watch the sermon recording on YouTube.
I want to begin this morning by saying just how happy I am to be back and just how grateful I am for the time you afforded me to be away on sabbatical. It is not a gift which I take for granted, and I wanted to be sure, in this first time standing in front of you in over three months, to express my deep and abiding appreciation for the efforts and energy so many took to enable me to be away in a season of rest and renewal. As I wrote in my letter to the congregation yesterday, I am thankful for each of you and most especially our lay leaders, vestry, wardens and staff who shouldered extra responsibilities and duties in my absence and who led this faith community with care and grace such that I returned with no pressing crisis or mountain of untended tasks (to my knowledge)! I want to extend a warm welcome to our interim director of music, Mr. Charlie Eidelman, who has already endeared himself to all of you with his joyful spirit and excellence on the organ. And, I want to say a special thank you to my dear colleague, the Rev’d Dr. Craig Lemming, whose excellent leadership and wise guidance, no surprise to any of us, as priest in charge kept our faith community steady through the many ups and downs of this past summer.
And, no doubt some of you are wondering, what did I do with all of that unfettered time away? There will be opportunity, no doubt, to tell many stories and share all kinds of memories from my sabbatical as the year goes on. For now, I will say that apart from a long list of projects both at home and at the cabin, and a stack of books that seemed to grow and not shrink no matter how much I read, it will come as no real surprise that I spent as much time as I possibly could in the woods. Specifically, I hiked as many miles as I could this summer. Of these hikes, the most memorable was my first ever solo backpacking trip on the Superior Hiking Trail, roughly 30 miles a little over two days and two nights starting just south of Finland, Minnesota, and exiting at my favorite day hiking destination, the Caribou River Wayside.
This portion of the trail takes you past stunning overlooks of granite outcroppings and peaceful marshes full of cattails and summer flowers, over beaver dams and through forests of spruce, balsam, and maple, some just beginning to flame with the first reds and oranges of fall. Of course, not all is bucolic and wild. Owing to the nature of land ownership and the distance the trail must traverse, sections of it cross county roads and pass through campgrounds. And, yes, there is even a portion that brings you through the devastation of a massive series of clearcuts – evidence that the land is still being managed and that there are competing demands on the forests of our beloved North Shore, from mining and logging to recreation and the desire to ensure wild places exist for generations to come.
Having grown up in a community where logging was a way of life, I understand that it is a necessary part of our world. We need wood to build homes and make paper, and I get that modern forestry has the ability to manage our forests in sustainable ways such that we can meet a host of competing demands. I get that the timber industry provides jobs and livelihoods all over our state. And, even knowing all of this, it was hard to walk through these clearcuts and not see them as a scar, a wound on the land, as evidence of our collective participation in the ongoing destruction of our natural world, a reminder that each of us is somehow complicit in a system of sin and brokenness out of which we cannot escape and from which we cannot hide. This feeling weighed heavier on me than the full pack on my shoulders as I trudged through the landscape of stumps and broken branches. Yet, as I went, I couldn’t help noticing all the ways life was returning. The sun loving raspberries and thimbleberries were thick on their canes, unshaded as they were. And the goldenrods and asters buzzed with the sound of a million pollinators. The nitrogen fixing alders had grown up thick and the fireweed filled in the gaps between stumps. Even now there were young saplings of spruce finding their way, and in a moment, it was possible to see how one day, perhaps a hundred years from now, this could be a forest again. While the scar would always be evident, the clearcut never forgotten, it was as if the land was showing how it could forgive.
Seeing forgiveness in the natural world might feel, to some of you, as if I am projecting a human concept into places it does not fit. After all, forgiveness is an act of intention, is it not? And in our western way of thinking, we do not assign intention to the non-sentient world. Plants and animals are, you might argue, always striving to survive, to grow and flourish, despite all the challenges and struggles life throws their way. It is the way of nature to persist. The land is not forgiving – it is simply behaving according to the natural order of things. But, what if forgiveness, as a human concept, what if it too were simply the natural order of things? After all, as Christians, don’t we profess and believe that God’s grace pervades all things? That in the abundance of God’s love, forgiveness is extended to all of us, without merit and without limit?
So it is, when Peter asks Jesus this morning, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”, and Jesus responds “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times. (Some translators say a more accurate translation would be 70 times 7)” And then Jesus tells a parable that amplifies the nature of forgiveness. A king settling accounts with his slaves brings one before him who owes 10,000 talents. Biblical scholars and historians tell us that a talent was roughly 15 years worth of wages for a worker, meaning that this particular slave owed more than 150,000 years worth of income to his king – a debt so massive that his children’s children’s children’s children could not have paid it off. It was a sum beyond comprehension. And so the king is intent to sell him and his wife and children to at least recoup some of his losses. But the slave begs to be spared this indignity and the king relents and forgives the debt. And then, as if forgetting this enormous act of mercy, the slave turns around, encountering a fellow slave who owed him about 100 denarii, seizes this fellow by the neck and demands repayment for this debt. Again scholars tell us that a denarius was about a days wage, meaning this other slave owed him about 100 days of wages. Not an insignificant sum, but certainly one that pales in comparison to what the king has only just forgiven. And this first slave refuses to grant mercy when begged, refuses the same forgiveness he has only just received, only now for a far smaller debt, and has his fellow slave thrown into debtors’ prison. The king’s wrath, when hears what has happened, is hot, and has his slave imprisoned and tortured until he can pay his insurmountable debt. It would appear that the only thing that cannot be forgiven is the lack of forgiveness in another.
We might wonder how this slave could have been so unforgiving when he had only just experienced mercy on a scale we can hardly fathom. That is, until we consider the whole story, and recognize ourselves in it. Notice that Peter prompts the parable by asking how much he is expected to forgive a fellow member of his faith community when wronged. Seven times? Seems reasonable if not generous even. A number. A value. A price. How often do we try to treat the world as a series of transactions, a series of measurable and quantifiable gives and takes. We are so conditioned to value people and places and things according to a number, an amount, that we might assess our relationships with a question of what, if anything is owed. In our business dominated world, people are resources with a specific value and land is assessed by how much we can extract from it. But, Jesus seems to imply that God’s value for each of us is infinite, beyond measure, and that though we are complicit in a myriad ways in the brokenness of the world such that what we truly owe is incomprehensible, yet God’s mercy is still greater.
If this is true, that God’s mercy and forgiveness are vast and all encompassing, then they are a reality into which we can live, and move, and find our freedom. It is to say that we might also come to forgive the debts of others just as we have been forgiven. It is to recognize that forgiveness might be the natural order of things, like the land that is always striving to heal and grow and thrive. I know that to speak of forgiveness is to speak of the most difficult and traumatic pains and hurts each of us has ever experienced or committed. I do not pretend that forgiveness is easy or that we can turn it into a law to be commanded. It is simply to say that when we enter into it as a reality that pervades everything, we can become more free, more whole, and at peace.
On my final morning of that backpacking trip, I rose early, alone in my campsite, and struck camp to the sounds of birds and insects waking up. I descended from a ridgeline with views of Lake Superior in the distance all blue and vast and forgetful, and was reminded, as the psalmist writes today, For as the heavens are high above the earth, so is God’s mercy great upon those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has God removed our sins from us.
And as the sun rose to its full height, I could feel the warmth of the sun on the back of my neck and the beads of sweat gathering where my heavy pack rested on my shoulders. At long last I found myself on the familiar portion of trail that led down to the waterfalls of the Caribou River, and I allowed myself to take the side path and stairs down into the last cool shadows of morning at the foot of the falls. It was still early enough that I was alone, and so I dropped my burdensome backpack, stripped down to my shorts, and waded into the bracing waters in the mist and spray. I stood in the cool refreshing pool, the roar of the falls pounding in my ears, and felt the weariness of the miles fall away, and knew what it is to be held and buoyed by something far greater than myself. This morning we are called to remember that like the waters of baptism, God has forgiven us all that could ever be counted against us, has wiped away every wrong and the sin that clings so close, and by God’s grace, we are free.
