Aftermath

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
09.14.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 18:21-35

You can tell a whole bunch about a collision by what comes afterwards. This week, we’ve watched a few different sorts of impacts, some that have created something possibly amazing, and some that have left devastation in their wake.

Midway through the week, scientists at the CERN facility in Switzerland powered up the Large Hadron Collider. This huge ring-shaped particle accelerator exists for one reason and one reason alone: to smash stuff into other stuff. It’s a bit like demolition derby, only using subatomic particles going at near light speeds. Why are scientists doing this? Well, I think part if it is the same reason that back in college me and some friends took my 20 gauge shotgun, a bunch of rotten watermelons and a stack of half-full paint cans to an abandoned lot. It’s cool to watch things go boom. Hey...it was Charlottesville. That’s what fratboys like me did for fun in the South. Well, it’s one of the things, but I’m not going to go there.

But the main reason is that the nice satisfying bang that the large subatomic particles they’re using will make creates an interesting result. It’s not just a little bang. It’s a little Big Bang. For a brief moment, they’re going to generate a tiny version of the energies that may have existed at the beginning of the universe.

Some folks are afraid that might have destroyed the earth, creating tiny black holes that would suck us all up, or unleashing an army of the undead to devour the brains of the living. Well, not so many people besides me are worried about that last one. When they turned the thing on this week, it appears that those worries aren’t justified. What scientists hope for, as they carefully watch the aftermath of those collisions, is the discovery of the new, of new ways to harness energies and matter that might change the direction of technology. These are hopeful, constructive collisions.

Yesterday, we watched as another huge storm in the Gulf hurled itself against our shores. Hurricane Ike hammered away at the sea wall of the city of Galveston and howled through Houston, as millions of Americans either fled or huddled in their homes. In Galveston, the storm may have done near catastrophic damage to large portions of that city, as the ocean rose up and consumed the east side of the town. Such collisions aren’t nearly as promising. Lives are shattered. Homes and the hopes of countless families are broken. Yet even after such horrors, there exists the possibility of healing. Even now, all around this nation, churches and governments and relief agencies stand at the ready, poised to give care and to help people rebuild their shattered lives. The aftermath of such disasters tells a great deal about a people and their spirit, and I’m sure we will do all we can to help with the recovery.

Life is full of collisions. Last week, I talked about the collisions that come inside human relationships, about the conflicts and struggles and tensions and fights that come into each of our lives. Those fights are inevitable. But the measure of them is not just in how they are conducted. We know them, as this smart guy I know once said, by their fruits. We know them by their aftermath.

Last week, we heard Christ’s teaching in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 18:15-20) about how to show Christian graciousness in the midst of conflict. Today’s reading continues Christ’s teaching on fighting. He’s just told his disciples how we’re to constantly work towards reconciliation during a conflict. Once he’s finished, Peter asks him a perfectly sensible question about what happens afterwards. “How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”

That shows that Peter has understood that forgiveness is the goal of Christian conflict. What he’s struggling with is how deep that goes. Jesus responds that Peter is going in the right direction, but that he needs to multiply that level of forgiveness by at least 10. And then, to make his point, Jesus does what Jesus does so often: he tells a story.

It’s a story of a powerful king and his slaves, and of what happens when the king decides to settle up who owes what. One of his slaves owes him 10,000 talents. That’s a crazy number, an impossible debt. A talent was 6,000 denarius. A denarius is an average day’s wages. It is, if you want to think in terms of American currency, like owing someone 6 billion dollars. If you paid off that debt at a rate of a million dollars a year, it’d only take you 6,000 years to do it. It ain’t gonna happen. And that’s the point Jesus is making. This is a debt that can never be paid off, not in a hundred lifetimes.

Yet when that slave begs forgiveness, falling on his knees and asking for just the chance to pay back the impossible debt, what does the king do? He has pity and compassion, and he forgives the debt. Amazingly, impossibly, the guy gets off.

But as the story goes on, we find our newly liberated debtor running across a guy who owes him money. It’s not a small sum, around 10,000 dollars, but it’s easily payable in monthly installments over four years at 5 and three quarters percent. But when the second guy begs for a small portion of the same forgiveness he was just shown, the first guy...well...he refuses. The guy who owed 10K gets tossed into prison.

Then the king hears about it, and he is seriously cheesed. Faced with such a graceless, unforgiving soul, he goes all medieval on his behind. Bad things happen, things that you only see in the Saw movies, things that are worse than being subjected to a thousand years of nonstop Hanna Montana concert videos. End of story.

And then Jesus turns to his disciples and says: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

So what is a Christian aftermath? When we’ve fought with another person, the aftermath is this: we have to forgive them. We have to forgive them whether we’ve won or lost or if the whole thing seems to grind out to a irreconcilable stalemate.

And the truth is, while we can listen to Jesus and say, gosh and golly, that sounds nice...we don’t want to hear this. Even though we’ve been baptized and we’ve sung the praise songs and we’ve prayed the prayers, we don’t want to hear him. We want to cherish that fight, to hold it close to our hearts and sustain it forever. We want to hate them for beating us, or to hate them for opposing us in the first place. We want to cherish our bitterness, or revel in our gloating.

So when we hear Jesus say that we must forgive seventy seven times, we want to smile and say, “Oh, that Jesus. He’s just such a softy. Of course he’d think that. And that’s fine for him. I mean, he’s Jesus. But that’s not the way things are in my life. Because of what [fill in the name of your enemy here] did to me, I have every right to still be angry.”

We want to think that way. But if we do, we don’t have ears to hear, and this is a teaching we need to hear down deep, because this isn’t a Big Happy Warm Fuzzy Huggy Bear Jesus teaching. It’s a teaching with teeth.

And then Jesus turns to his disciples and says: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

When we fail to forgive others, something in our relationship with our Creator is shattered, something that when broken is not fixable. We must trust....we must...fear...that God watches the aftermath of our life’s conflicts with all of the intensity of the scientists who pore over the traces from those colossal hadron impacts, and all of the intensity of those who watch to see how America will respond to the destruction in the Gulf.

You can tell a whole bunch about a collision by what comes afterwards.