Baffled

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
September 17, 2023

19 Proper A 

          Last Monday evening, I made a quick trip to Springfield (Ohio) to see my 91 year old father-in-law and take Fred and his wife Babs to dinner.  We went for a nice drive south of Springfield down to Yellow Springs, then to Young’s Jersey Dairy.  Fred loves ice cream even more than I do, so we stopped at Young’s for an early supper.  We found a table in the cavernous dining room and took a seat.  There was a QR code on the table, which I scanned with my phone for the menu, placed our order, and paid with two clicks.   Ten minutes later, burgers and fries magically arrived at our table.  Fred and Babs were incredulous.  When we finished our meal and were ready for ice cream, we repeated the process and 5 minutes later, our ice cream was delivered to the table.  At this point, Fred said “I don’t know how to live in this world.”  He and Babs were simultaneously overwhelmed, confused, and quite intrigued by this new reality.  A world in which you can order food from your phone, pay for it, and have it appear before you seemed like an amazing but baffling new world.

          I am similarly baffled by the world we hear about in the reading from Exodus, a world in which God acts so decisively over evil.  God heard the cry of God’s people and delivered them from the land of bondage into the land of promise.   God’s decisive action involved a good deal of violence that is disturbing.  Why doesn’t God act so decisively against evil today and could God have found a more peaceful way to liberate the Israelites?  I don’t have the answers to those questions, nor do the commentaries I read this week.  We will have to remain baffled by that world at least for the time being.

The disciples are as perplexed about the new world Jesus describes as I am about the world reflected in the reading from Exodus or as Fred was about a world in which food appears as if by magic.  I am quite sure Peter feels very generous when Peter asks “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”  But Jesus says “Not seven times, I tell you, but seventy-seven times.”  What would a world look like in which everyone forgave seventy-seven times?  Would we not lose count somewhere around 25 times?   Forgiving seventy-seven times seems at best like competitive forgiveness and at worst like keeping score.

Rather than asking us to keep a score card of how many times we have forgiven someone, I think Jesus is really telling us to stop counting.  The kingdom of heaven is not about counting, but about relationships and community, about treating each other with respect and kindness, a world where the guiding principles are love and forgiveness.  Jesus’ parable shows us the preposterousness of asking for forgiveness for ourselves but denying that same forgiveness to others.  We hear about a slave who begged for forgiveness from his lord, which was granted, but then the slave refused to forgive someone who asked him for forgiveness.   The lord hands the slave over to be tortured until the slave can pay his entire debt, which will never happen since making money while being tortured is impossible. 

Jesus calls us to be a community that mirrors God’s forgiveness, forgiving others as we have been forgiven.  In the letter to the Romans, Paul writes to a community that was in the midst of conflict over the eating of meat and whether to treat one day as sacred or all days as equal.  In dealing with that conflict, Paul reminds the Romans that as Christians we neither live nor die to ourselves.  If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord.  So, then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.  If those words sound familiar, by the way, they are the opening words of our funeral service.  Paul’s point is that we belong to God.  If we belong to God, we are to mirror God’s forgiveness and live in God’s mercy. 

Into this world of God’s forgiveness and love, Joan Walden, Flint, and Colvin will be baptized this morning. Just as Fred and Babs had a hard time knowing how to live in a world in which your phone can summon food to your table, we sometimes have a hard time knowing how to live in the world in which Jesus calls us to live.  Jesus calls us to live in a world where love and forgiveness cannot be quantified, where we recognize that the health of the community is dependent on the health of our relationships with each other, and that those relationships are rooted in the love of God as experienced in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  When we wonder how on earth we are supposed to do that, the baptismal covenant comes to our rescue.  Our baptismal covenant describes the way God calls us to live in a world that is rooted in the love of God for all people.  First, because we cannot be a people of radical love and deep forgiveness alone, the first promise we make is to continue in the apostles teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers.  We promise to be a community rooted in scripture, fellowship, worship, and prayer.  When we fail to be that community, we promise to repent and return to God.  We promise to seek and serve Christ in all people, to respect the dignity of every human being, to proclaim the gospel with word and action, and to strive for justice and peace.  When we keep the promises we make in baptism, really keep them, we mirror the world Jesus came to usher in.  But we cannot do that alone.  We are not meant to do that alone.    Joan Walden, Flint, and Colvin are being baptized into the Body of Christ this morning where together we are part of the power deep love and complete forgiveness have to change the world.

                                                                   Amen.