The Hardest Lesson in the Bible

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
The First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
September 25, 2005

The Hardest Lesson in the Bible
Mark 11:27-33
Philippians 2:1-13

Don’t you love watching our children head off to school in the fall?
Some struggle under backpacks bigger than they are,
as they run to catch buses, calling to friends.
At the start of a new school year
you can almost feel the children’s excitement.
Here within our church family, we’ve got dozens of children
who have headed back to classrooms.
Some are off to school for the first time;
watching them climb those steep steps up onto buses
is such a wonderful lesson in confidence: I CAN do this!
We’ve got children who have made the leap to Middle School,
that difficult transition from neighborhood school
to teeming, frenetic central school.
Still others have left the Middle School for high school:
tentative 9th graders, at once young men and women,
and still child-like in so many ways.

Every child is different, even those in the same classroom,
but they are all doing the same thing,
in first grade, fifth grade, 10th grade:
they are all learning: learning facts and figures;
learning about themselves and others;
and learning how to learn,
what goes into learning.

Some come to class with minimal interest;
Sitting still in a classroom is just one step short of agony.
Others quickly figure out what needs to be done
to get an acceptable grade.
For these children, it isn’t about learning,
it is about a grade.
But there are a small number in every school, every classroom
who love to learn,
who want to know,
who learn for the joy and love of learning.
It is that sense that we try to awaken in our Sunday School.
We want our children to want to learn about God
about Jesus, about the Bible, about their faith.

In Sunday School there are no tests, no quizzes, no final exams.
Our children don’t have to worry about grades,
don’t have to worry about whether they will pass,
whether they will move on to the next grade.
God wants us to come to him by our own choice,
because we want to,
in response to his love for us.
That’s what we try to teach our children,
what we try to help our children learn.
We will all graduate – our salvation comes to us
by the grace of God in Jesus Christ,
not by our performance on a test.
We don’t even need a number two pencil.

The dilemma is that it is easy for us to get lazy,
easy for us to forget that we are still called to learn,
called to learn not just in our years in Sunday School,
but every year, year after year.

We are called to learn
to learn about our faith, ourselves,
our relationship with Jesus Christ.
Only then can we grow in faith,
grow in discipleship.
As disciples of Jesus Christ,
we are on a journey from baptism to the end of our mortal days,
a journey that involves learning and growing.
We learn in church as we worship together.
We learn as we work together on committees
or in other groups around the church.
We learn through our reading the Bible.
We learn as we gather around the dinner table
and share our faith, as well as a meal.

We are all called to learn, but we tend to learn
only those things we want to learn,
and learn only in ways we want to learn.
God has always tried to make things easy for us,
but still we look to cut corners.
When he gave Moses the Ten Commandments,
he gave us ten simple lessons,
lessons to help us live our lives
lessons to help us know God’s love for us.
But what do we do with them?
We become like the students who try to figure out
what they need to do to get a grade that is acceptable.

Look at what we do with the Fourth Commandment:
God makes the lesson about observing the Sabbath quite clear
through words we first hear in Sunday School,
“Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
Six days shall you labor and do all you work.
But the seventh is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.
You shall not do any work.
The Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”
(Ex. 20:8ff)

Seems pretty straightforward, an easy lesson to grasp.
But what do we do?
We think we are doing well if we observe the Sabbath
60 to 70 percent of the time.
That’s the passing grade we give to ourselves.
We are called to honor our mother and fathers;
So, as long as we are good and obedient 75, 80,
perhaps 85 percent of the time,
we give ourselves a passing grade.
If we don’t envy and covet what others have most of the time,
then we can envy and covet what others have some of the time.
If we aren’t filled with lust most of the time,
then we can be filled with lust some of the time.
And of course, if we don’t steal and if we don’t kill,
we can use those perfect scores to pull up our average!

Don’t you see, though: that approach is like studying for the test,
learning what we need to know to get an acceptable grade on the test.
It is not truly learning what God wants us to learn.

Learning why God considers the Sabbath so important;
learning why the Sabbath is as much for us,
as it is for God,
learning why observing the Sabbath as God intended us to
is important to our faith.

We are called to learn what God wants from us
in the commandment not to bear false witness:
that that commandment is not just about lying about a person,
it goes beyond that: it is about anything we say about a person
that is negative, disrespectful, that tears down,
rather than builds up.

You and I are called to work toward having the mind of Christ.
We cannot hope to do that if we don’t learn.
And learning Christ’s mind will take a lifetime.
There is no advanced placement, no accelerated courses.

What is it that Jesus wanted the leaders of the Temple to learn?
They thought they had all the answers.
They thought they had learned all they needed to know.
They were smart men,
all of them the products of many years in school.
But Jesus teaches them a new lesson:
that they don’t have all the answers.
That they had been focused on learning the wrong things.
They could not answer his simple question.
Jesus teaches the experts that they had more to learn.

Paul provides us with a tough lesson,
in fact one of the toughest lessons we can possibly tackle.
Is there anything more difficult to do
than think of others consistently?
We live in a “me first” society.
But Paul does not mince words in what we are to learn:
“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit,
but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.
Let each of you look not to your own interests,
but to the interests of others.” (2.3-4)
Now we hear that and we agree, yes, that sounds good.
But how well do we do with that?
We give ourselves a passing grade if we follow Paul’s teaching,
follow his lesson maybe…. half the time.
We are better when we are around the church,
worse when we are behind the wheel of a car and in a hurry.

What Paul is calling the followers of Jesus Christ to do
is learn to live together in communion, in community.
We can only do that when we live for each other,
when we don’t put ourselves and our own motivations first,

Next Saturday I will host the new members
of this year’s Confirmation Class.
We’ve got seven bright, energetic kids I will work with
over the next 8 months as they prepare
to profess their faith publicly.
This will be the sixth time I have had the Opening Retreat
up at the Manse.
Now we are dealing with teenagers,
so food is central to our time together!
At lunchtime, Pat lays out turkey, ham, roast beef, cheeses,
different kinds of breads, and other goodies
for the students to make sandwiches.
But no matter how ravenous any of them might be
they cannot simply attack the table.
No, each student has a lunch partner,
names drawn from a hat,
and the partners have to make lunch for each other.
Each student has to ask his or her lunch partner
what that person wants, and then make it for them.
They have to ask questions, listen to answers,
learn what the other person likes,
what the other person wants,
even learn that there may be things
the other person cannot eat.
They have to set aside their own interests
and listen to the other,
serve the other,
take care of the other.

Yesterday when the Session was gathered,
we talked about our leadership responsibilities as Elders.
What makes us faithful Elders both collectively
and individually is when we think about others,
not ourselves, when we learn about all the different
boys and girls, men and women who depend on the
many different ministries of this church.
Our job is to learn about them,
and then serve them by providing them with what they need:
encouragement, resources, tools,
genuine interest in their growth and their wellbeing,
whether we are dealing with our own children
or an outside group that uses the building.
As faithful Elders, we know that have been called by God not to manage,
but to lead,
and we lead by serving,
and we serve most faithfully by learning
as we put the needs of other first.

Some time over the past few months,
it is likely that we have sung a hymn that you did not care for;
in fact you might have even said something to someone else.
What Paul hopes we will learn through his words is to
think about the possibility that the hymn that you did not care for,
might just be a favorite of someone just two pews away.
In fact, it may be a hymn that evokes a special feeling
in another person: brings out a strong feeling of faith,
or calls up a special memory.

One of the hardest lessons in the Bible to learn is
is that we are to put the needs of others first.
We are to think of others, learn of their needs
their concerns, their desires, their wants.
As Paul says, we are to “do nothing from selfish ambition
but in humility, regard others as better than ourselves.”

But that is not the hardest lesson in the Bible.
No the hardest lesson in the Bible for us to learn
is that God calls us to learn, learn constantly
Not to work for the passing grade,
but to go beyond that, to learn what God wants for us
and hopes for us.
As we learn, we grow in understanding,
and as we grow in understanding, we grow in faith.
And as we grow in faith, we grow more like our Lord,
our minds more like his mind.
That’s the today’s lesson;
that’s tomorrow’s lesson;
that is the lesson God hopes we will learn every day.
AMEN

Taking One Step Backward

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
The First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
September 18, 2005

Taking One Step Backward
Exodus 16:2-15
Matthew 20:1-16

We are sixteen chapters into the book of Exodus,
about half-way through the book.
In the chapters we have covered to date,
we’ve heard the epic Moses story:
the story we know so well, the story that Cecille B. Demille
made so famous in that great movie, “The Ten Commandments”.

In the first two chapters we heard the story of Moses’ birth;
how his mother Jochebed, was forced to give up her infant son
because of Pharaoh’s order that all male babies
of the Hebrew slaves were to be put to death.
We heard the story of how Pharaoh’s daughter found the baby
in a basket hidden among the rushes and reeds
along the bank of the Nile.
She took the boy for her own and raised him in Pharaoh’s house.
We heard how Moses was forced to flee from Egypt for killing a man,
how he traveled to Midian and there married Zipporah,
and settled into a quiet life as a shepherd.

All that happened in just the first two chapters.
Is it any wonder that Hollywood found in this book
the perfect material for a movie: We’ve got drama, suspense, action.
And it only gets better, when in chapter 3 God calls Moses,
calls him to lead, calls him to serve,
calls him from his life as a shepherd for goats and sheep,
to a life as a shepherd for God’s children.

Moses balked at the call, argued with God,
tried to convince God that he was the wrong man for the job.
But God has a way of always winning those arguments.
And so Moses returned to Egypt
and with his brother Aaron
called on Pharaoh, the king of Egypt,
the most powerful man in the known world.
The two called on him with a simple request:
free the Hebrew people from slavery,
release from bondage the people whose sweat and blood
had built the greatest civilization in the world.
Pharaoh did not know whether to laugh at such an absurd request,
or have Moses and Aaron flogged for their impudence.

Four hundred years had passed: too much time for anyone to remember
how the Hebrew Joseph kept the Egyptians from starving
during a famine that lasted for seven years.
Too much time for anyone to remember
how Joseph had been second in power only to Pharaoh himself.

The next few chapters are marvelous in their color and drama,
as God visits plagues upon the Egyptians.
First the river Nile is turned to blood,
then frogs invade Egypt by the millions,
frogs everywhere: in houses and courtyards,
on roadways and in gardens,
in beds and mixing bowls.
The third plague was swarms of gnats,
tiny irritating gnats, clouds of gnats everywhere,
like thick dry dust blown by a relentless wind.

It was this third plague that got Pharaoh’s attention.
His court magicians had been able to duplicate the blood-red river,
and the frogs, but they were not been able to conjure up gnats.
“This is the finger of God!” they cried to Pharaoh (8.19)
But Pharaoh scoffed.
And then came flies,
followed by disease that killed their livestock,
and then the people were afflicted with boils,
painful, oozing boils that covered their bodies.

By this time the magicians were worried,
but Pharaoh paid no attention to them.
So God sent a seventh plague: thunder, lightning and hail –
hail so big it not only ruined the crops in the fields,
it killed every living thing that was caught outside in the storm.
And still Pharaoh refused to let the Hebrews go,
so God sent plagues eight and nine:
Locusts, followed by darkness, complete and total darkness,
pitch black, a darkness so complete that it could be felt. (10.21)
For three days people could see nothing, do nothing.
For three days the world stopped.

And still Pharaoh would not relent.
So God sent the final plague,
the one that we remember:
the night when the angel of death came over the land of Egypt
and killed the firstborn in every house,
even the firstborn of every animal.
We can only imagine the sound of the crying, the sobbing
the wailing that must have filled the countryside
as mothers held their lifeless children.
But the Hebrews were safe behind doors painted with lamb’s blood.
The angel of death passed over their households.

And with that Pharaoh finally told Moses,
“Take your people and go: all your people and all your livestock.
Be gone”
And the children of Israel marched into the desert,
with Moses at the head of the great sea of people.
But leading them was God:
God in a cloud by day,
and a pillar of fire by night.
And we read, “Neither the pillar of cloud by day,
nor the pillar of fire by night left its place
in front of the people.” (13.22)

But of course, the most dramatic story was still awaiting them:
when Pharaoh changed his mind and took his army to chase
after the Hebrews to hunt them down in the desert,
to bring them back, back to their lives as slaves.
And then came that moment, that moment we can all envision:
When Moses held his staff before the waters of the Sea of Reeds,
and the waters parted.
The children of Israel went through the waters,
safely across the dry land to the other side.
But no sooner had the last Hebrew reached the other side,
when Pharaoh’s army appeared, hot on their trail,
the ground rumbling under the wheels of the chariots
and the furious galloping of the horses.
And then Moses raised his staff again
as Pharaoh’s army raced across the dry sea bed,
closer and closer the shore, closer and closer to the Israelites.
With that staff held high in faith
the waters closed on Pharaoh and his army,
all of them, every one of them.
swallowed by the sea.
With that, the Hebrews were finally safe, finally free of Pharaoh,
finally free to live for themselves, free to live as themselves.
Their prayers, the prayers of their fathers, their mothers,
their grandparents, their great grandparents,
were finally answered.
They had seen God’s power and faithfulness
time and time again in Moses and Aaron
in the plagues,
in the parting of the sea,
in the pillar of cloud by day,
and the pillar of fire by night.
They had witnessed God’s power,
God’s glory,
and God’s love for the them.
They had witnessed God’s promise to them of his saving grace.
All that in the first 15 chapters of Exodus.

And now in chapter 16, with all that drama,
all that power fresh in their minds, so visible, so palpable,
what did they do as they journeyed in freedom,
journeyed to the land promised them by God,
the land flowing with milk and honey?
They began to grumble.
They began to complain.

Just three days’ journey from the Sea of Reeds,
when they reached the land of Marah,
they found the water there bitter,
so bitter they couldn’t drink it.
And so they did what comes all too easily to us:
they complained.
And they did not just complain to Moses;
no the Hebrew is more specific: they complained against Moses
against Moses, as though the bitter water was his fault.
Not long after that, as we heard in our lesson,
when they reached the land called Sin,
they complained again, this time that there was no food.
The Hebrew tells us again that the people complained against Moses

Now both times, Moses did the same thing:
he turned to God for help and guidance.
And God in his faithfulness and love for his children responded.
The first time he showed Moses a piece of wood
to throw in the water that made it sweet and drinkable.
And the second time, he told Moses about
the quail and the manna.

But did you notice that no one, not one person offered to help,
not one person stepped forward and said,
“what can I do……….what can we do to solve this problem?”
Not one person recognized the fact that Moses and Aaron were
thirsty and hungry too, that they too worried about water and food.
God’s faithfulness to his people had been visible, palpable
day after day, month after month.
But the people grumbled, grumbled against Moses.
“If only we had died n the land of Egypt…
you have brought us into this wilderness
to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
And they left a trail of grumbling, and a trail of complaints
throughout the wilderness as they journeyed.
That may be one reason why we turn from the Exodus story
after Pharaoh’s army is swallowed by the sea:
It makes us uncomfortable; it is too much of mirror.
Because we grumble and complain.
Grumbling and complaining is so much easier than stepping forward
to help, to lead, to work with those who are leading.
We prefer to take one step backward to complain,
rather than taking one step forward to lead.

But even if we skip over the rest of Exodus,
Jesus won’t let us off the hook:
his parable of the vineyard makes the point.
The workers who were paid a day’s wage
for less than a day’s work were well rewarded.
The workers who were paid a day’s wage for a day’s work
were paid what they expected to be paid: a fair wage.
No one had anything to complain about.
But what did they do? They complained.

There was a saying that was popularized back in the 1960s,
“If you are not part of the solution
you are part of the problem.”
I have always liked that quote.
It is a reminder, not to complain,
but instead to get involved, participate, help, and serve.
That is what we are called to do as children of God
and disciples of Christ.
Those who wanted water could have said to Moses,
let us dig some wells and see if we can find other water.
Those who were hungry could have searched the area,
and learned what tribesmen before and after have known:
that the manna they ate was there all along,
and still is there to this day,
and the place was and still is a part of
the migratory route of quail.
It seems that the most common miracle that God performs
is simply opening our eyes to see.

We are all familiar with the story of the feeding of the five thousand.
The disciples came to Jesus as day turned to evening.
They said, “This is a deserted place and the hour is late;
send the crowds away that they may go into the villages
and buy food for themselves.”
And Jesus’ response was simple,
“you give them something to eat.”
(Matthew 14:15ff/Mark 6:37/Luke 9:13)
Jesus says to them in effect:
“Why are you looking to me to solve the problem?
Why don’t you do something about it?
Why are you taking one step backward?
Why don’t you take one step forward?”

We are called to step forward,
step forward to serve God and one another
in the name of Jesus Christ.
We are called by God through the Holy Spirit,
and given courage, strength, and energy by the Spirit.
When we step backward, we close our eyes, ears, and minds to God.
God is calling us even now to new ways to serve,
to serve in this church, to serve in the world all around us.
Will you be in the group that steps backward?
Or will you be in that group that steps forward,
that group that says, as Isaiah said,
“Here I am. Send me”?
AMEN

Come Sit Next To Me

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
The First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
September 11, 2005

Come Sit Next To Me
Exodus 12:1-14
Luke 22:7-23

I am hoping that everyone will stay for lunch
following worship today.
We have not had a congregational lunch in months
and Homecoming Sunday is the perfect day
to share a meal together
as we return from summer travels and activities.
The committee that has organized the lunch
has worked long and hard to create a wonderful theme:
“You Oughta Be In Pictures” to complement their work
organizing the photo directory.

I am guessing that a thread
that will run through the conversations
we will have as we enjoy all the wonderful food
everyone has brought will be vacations:
where we went in our travels over the summer.
Some folks went camping, others went to the beach,
others went to parks, or visited families.

For all the different places we went on vacations,
we probably all share a similar routine before we leave:
we stop the mail and the newspaper,
we do laundry, make a trip to the cleaners,
set lights on timers,
leave a key with a neighbor --
the list goes on…
And no matter how well organized we think we are,
the night before departure is always hectic.
The last thing we think about is food;
meals are cobbled together from the few things
remaining in the refrigerator and cupboard.
More likely, we just call for a pizza.

Now imagine you are about to set out on a journey
that will take you out into a part of the world
you know nothing about.
Imagine you are about to set out on a journey
that will take 40 years for you to complete.
Now imagine that the night before this journey,
this journey you and your ancestors
have waited more than 400 years to take,
God tells you to prepare a special meal,
a meal for the whole family.
No, it won’t be potluck;
every family has to remain inside their homes.
But still it will be a communal meal
because everyone will eat the same thing:
roasted lamb, bitter herbs, and unleavened bread.

More than three thousand years later
we still observe that ritual,
still attentive to God’s words to Moses:
“This day shall be a day of remembrance for you.
Throughout your generations you shall observe it
as a perpetual ordinance.” (Exodus 12:14)
On the night before his crucifixion our Lord
gathered with his disciples to observe the Passover.
He took a loaf of bread and the first thing he did
was what we should always do before a meal:
he said grace, giving thanks to God.
Only then did he break the bread apart,
sharing the pieces with those gathered in that upper room.

His words were simple,
“This is my body, which is given for you.
Do this in remembrance of me.”
And then he took a cup of wine.
In the Passover ritual four cups of wine were shared
during the course of the meal.
Jesus would have taken the fourth cup,
the last cup that was shared before the final hymn.
Jesus filled the cup and said,
“This cup that is poured out for you
is the new covenant in my blood….
Matthew adds the words, “for the forgiveness of sins.”
(Matthew 26:28)

For more than 3,000 years God’s children
have gathered at tables throughout the world
to share a meal for Passover or the Lord’s Supper
and remember:
remember God’s goodness, God’s love,
God’s saving grace.

We gather at the Lord’s Table in community,
called by Christ himself,
to share a meal Jesus prepares through us.
It is a family meal, a gathering, a communion;
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with
all God’s children in communion with each other.
We are in communion not only with one another,
as we gather here in this Sanctuary,
but we are in communion with
those at St. Mary’s up the street,
St. Anne’s down the street,
the Blooming Grove Church around the corner.
We are in communion with those in churches
scattered around the county,
and around the states.
We are in communion with those gathered in makeshift spaces
in the flood-ravaged areas of the south,
those who have lost loved ones, homes, clothes, jobs,
lost everything, everything but their faith.
We are in communion with those gathered in South America,
Europe, Africa, The Middle East, Asia, Australia, New Zealand….

The bread might be made of barley or oats or even soymeal,
and the wine might be made from rice,
but the symbolism is the same, the service the same:
The worship leader saying,
"Friends, this is the joyful feast of the people of God!
People will come from east and west,
and from north and south
and sit at table in the Kingdom of God."
People coming to the banquet table from the four corners:
Rich and poor, black and white, a hundred languages,
some sitting in magnificent cathedrals,
others sitting on the ground outdoors.
But in every location, the invitation is the same:
"This is the Lord’s Table;
Our Savior invites all those who trust him
to share this feast that he has prepared."
The invitation from our Lord is to each of us, for all,
to sit at his table.
There are no seats of honor, no preferred seats,
no seats set apart by country, race, age,
language, or gender.
In the Lord’s House, everyone is the same.
We gather around, gather not in fractiousness and friction,
but in joyful harmony, peace and reconciliation.
The invitation our Lord extends to each of us,
is the invitation we are to extend to all,
family, friend, and stranger alike:
“come sit next to me.”

We gather in faith, even as we acknowledge the great
cloud of unknowing that fills us, and calls us.
"Great is the mystery of faith:
Christ has died;….
Christ is risen;…
Christ will come again!"
Words we can say only through faith.

"By your Spirit, make us one with the living Christ,
one with all who confess him as Lord and Savior,
and one in ministry to all the world."
This is the prayer we lift up in hope,
that the meal will make us one with the living Christ.
one in ministry, one in following Christ.

Through this meal, we renew our faith,
renew our covenant to be faithful disciples of Christ,
working to build community:
communion in our church and in the world at large.

The table is set, the meal is ready.
The invitation to this table comes not by merit
but by grace through faith.
“O give thanks to the Lord,
for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever.”
(Psalm 118)

There is no more appropriate way for us
to begin a new year together
together in community,
together in communion: the Body of Christ.

Come to the Lord’s Table
to be refreshed and renewed.
For through the grace of God,
our Lord Jesus Christ invites you and me,
each of us, all of us, with the same words:
“Come, sit next to me.”

AMEN

The Bottom File Drawer

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
The First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
September 4, 2005

The Bottom File Drawer
1 John 2:1-11
Matthew 18:23-35

It was a mistake.
A simple mistake.
It was unintentional……or maybe not.
Perhaps it was intentional;
perhaps it was not a mistake.
He clearly had thought about it before he said it,
before he did it.
Maybe it was just bad judgment;
perhaps emotion got the better of him.

Now as the two sit across from one another,
she looks at him, but he does not return the look.
He looks at the floor, the ceiling,
the back of his hand,
the pen on the table:
anywhere but her eyes.
She can tell he wants to say something,
that he needs to say something.
She’s waiting for the excuse,
his attempt to try to rationalize what he said, what he did.
The words are mumbled at first.
They are a little louder the second time, but still indistinct.
The third time he says it, the words come out with force:
He says he is sorry. He apologizes.

He looks at her, waiting for a response.
She leaves him twisting in the wind for what seems like hours.
But then she responds:
she too apologizes, says she is sorry for her part.
She knows when there is a problem,
a disagreement, when two people don’t see eye to eye,
it is rarely all one person’s fault.
Usually there is equal blame on both sides.
She knows she had a hand in creating his words,
in forming his actions.
She knows she is not blameless.

Differences are patched up,
the icy coldness that had filled the room lifts
and sunshine floods across the table, the chairs, the walls.
He breathes again, stands up straight,
slumped shoulders now square.
The telephone rings and he goes to answer.

As she sits there, she wonders whether
his words had been honest, sincere.
She knows she’s supposed to forgive.
She learned the lessons in Sunday School.
Right there in the Lord’s Prayer:
“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
Her denomination had confused her when
they changed the wording from:
“Forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
but she understood that what mattered was forgiving.

She remembered having to memorize a passage
in Sunday School.
She chose Matthew 18, verses 21 and 22:
“then Peter came and said to [Jesus],
'Lord if another 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 times seven.'”
When she was younger, she tried to keep track of how many times
she had forgiven her pesky younger sister,
looking forward to the day
when she would reach her quota of 490
and would not have to forgive her anymore.

As she waited for him to get off the telephone
she gazed out the window lost in thought.
Ugh, she thought. This business of forgiving is messy.
Why couldn’t Jesus have left that lesson unspoken?
Why did the gospel writers have to include so much
about forgiveness?
There it is in the Lord’s Prayer,
the Sermon on the Mount,
in parables, and other lessons.
But, she thought, the gospel writers were all men,
and they were probably in trouble all the time.
They probably included the lessons as much
to save their own skins
as they did to record the words of Jesus.

She was exasperated and exhausted by the whole business,
so when he walked back into the room she said,
“Okay, let’s consider the matter closed.
Let’s go to dinner.”
But she had not really forgiven.
She had taken the apology
and put it in a file drawer in her mind;
a file drawer we all have:
it’s that bottom file drawer everyone has.
It is the one where we keep things that bother us,
The drawer where we store bad memories;
embarrassing moments we want to forget
but never seem to be able to;
It is the drawer where we store those fears
we try to hard to shake.
It is not the drawer where we store grudges;
no, that drawer is higher up, more readily accessible.
It is the drawer where we put things that
we just can’t seem to let go of, shake,
flush out of our systems.
They’re in that bottom file drawer
in pendaflex files – you know:
the kind of file folders you see in well-organized offices,
with color-coded labels on each folder
to keep the feelings, the thoughts, the emotions organized,
ready to be called up at a moment’s notice,
even if we think the thought is in deep storage.

Every one of us has a special folder for:
apologies we don’t complete accept,
apologies that we don’t completely buy,
apologies that we hear,
but that don’t trigger complete forgiveness,
the forgiveness that we are supposed to offer,
the forgiveness that washes us clean.
A critical part of forgiving is moving on,
not hanging onto the past, the thoughts, the words, the deeds.
But when someone says something that hurts us
or does something that wounds us deeply,
even when there is an apology,
we struggle with the feelings the act or words provoked.
And so we hang onto the thought.
The person who offered the apology hopes to move on,
but we don’t because we have stored the item
in that bottom file drawer.
And then a few weeks, or a few months,
or even a few years later
we will open the drawer and say to the person,
“I still remember the time you said….” or
“I can’t forget the time you did ….”
But when we do that,
we have not offered complete forgiveness
as our Lord Jesus Christ teaches us.

The Bible is filled with stories and lessons about forgiveness,
so many that we have to conclude that God must have
considered offering forgiveness to one another
awfully important.
Just a few weeks back we talked about how
Esau forgave his brother Jacob,
even though Jacob had not sought forgiveness,
may not have even deserved forgiveness.
We heard how Joseph forgave his brothers,
those nasty older brothers who first plotted his death,
and then satisfied themselves with selling Joseph into slavery.
Moses wasn’t a model of perfection:
there was a little matter of his having murdered
the Egyptian for beating the Hebrew slave.
But God clearly forgave Moses.
Each time Moses was argumentative with God,
which he often was,
God didn’t reach into his bottom drawer and say
“I should have known that anyone
who would beat an Egyptian would act this way.”

Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness
are scattered throughout the gospels,
beginning with his Sermon on the Mount:
“If you forgive others their trespasses,
your heavenly father will also forgive you,
but if you do not forgive others,
neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:14)
The word “trespasses” tends to confuse us today.
We think of it as something to do with
walking on someone else’s property.
A better word when we translate from the Greek is “transgression”.
But as Jesus talks about forgiveness, he uses the words
sin, debts, and trespasses all interchangeably.
His focus is not on what it is that we are called to forgive,
but on the act of forgiving.
Call it a sin, call it a transgression,
call it a trespass, call it a debt,
Call it anything you want to:
For Jesus, the result is all the same:
we are to forgive them all.

And Jesus adds a bit of muscle to his teaching,
saying in effect, “Forgive others,
otherwise forget any hope of you yourself being forgiven.”
In our second reading, the slave missed this point.
He wanted forgiveness, but he didn’t offer forgiveness.
And for that oversight, he paid dearly.
Jesus often spoke in parables that can be confusing,
but here he could not have been clearer:
he doesn’t want anyone to misunderstand.

And there is no limit to how often we are to offer forgiveness.
Peter tried to put a number on how many times:
“Surely, Lord, we can’t be expected to keep forgiving,
especially to keep forgiving the same person.
We have to be able to draw the line somewhere!”

But Jesus tried to get his often-obtuse fisherman friend
to understand that we are called to forgive others
as often as we hope God will forgive us.
And the number of times we hope God will forgive us
is a lot more than 490, the seventy times seven
that Jesus uses in his teaching.
Do the math: if we confess our sins to God
and seek forgiveness only on Sunday,
that means God will fulfill his obligation
to each of us in less than 10 years.
So if we start the clock now,
God will be off the hook on Sunday, February 21, 2016.
But God doesn’t do that with us: he has offered us complete
and absolute forgiveness through our Lord Jesus Christ,
and in return, he expects us to offer complete
and absolute forgiveness
to one another in the name of Jesus Christ.

Let me try something this morning.
Let me ask a few questions of you.
Just raise your hand to respond:
Who is perfect here?
Go ahead – raise your hand if you are perfect.
Don’t be bashful.
Anyone? No one!
Okay, next question: who has never said something
that has angered or hurt someone?
Anyone? No one!
Who has never done something
that has angered or hurt someone?
Anyone? No one!

None of us is perfect.
All of us have done something, said something
that has gotten us in trouble, that has hurt someone.
We said or did something yesterday,
and we will probably say or do something tomorrow.
That’s why forgiveness is so important to God,
such a vital part of Jesus’ teaching.
If we didn’t forgive,
our world would have crumbled a long time ago.
Yes: Forgiveness can be hard at times.
And it is easier to forgive a small infraction
than a large one,
something relatively minor,
compared with something major.
But did you notice: Jesus does not qualify the transgression:
he says simply, “forgive transgressions.”
It may not happen immediately
but we are to work toward forgiveness.

And forgiveness must be real.
If we hold onto the transgression,
hold onto our feelings,
if we keep our feelings in that bottom drawer,
and at the same time hold ourselves out
as disciples of Jesus Christ,
you heard what John would call us: liars.

We all have a bottom drawer; every one of us.
Later today, or perhaps tomorrow as you enjoy the holiday
I encourage you to open up your drawer
and see what’s in there,
see who is in there.
Who have you not forgiven completely?
Who have you told you’ve forgiven, but haven’t?
Who have you not forgiven who has sought your forgiveness?
Reach into that file drawer and take out those files,
and put them in the trash, and wash yourself clean.
“for in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself,
not counting their trespasses against them…”
(2 Cor. 5:19)
fulfilling in Christ the promise made through Jeremiah:
“I will forgive their iniquity,
and remember their sin no more.”
(Jeremiah 31:34)
AMEN