Greatly Offended

Matthew 18:21-32

In about two weeks, Pam and I will be heading to Wilmore, Kentucky, for a three day seminar presented by the Charles Wesley Society. As our choir will testify, I am a fan of Charles Wesley. There is almost always at least one Charles Wesley hymn sung in our services, and the choir has done several anthems that were written by Charles Wesley.

Many times, we don’t sing the whole hymn as written by Charles. Oh, we do sing all the verses in the hymnal, but there are often verses the hymnal has left out. The hymn, “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” for example, starts with the 7th verse of a poem titled “For the Anniversary of One’s Conversion.” And while the 7 verses found in the hymnal may seem like a lot, there are 18 verses in the original.

The hymn, “Ye Servants of God,” also is missing a few verses from the original. The third verse reads: “Men, devils engage, the billows arise/ and horribly rage, and threaten the skies/ their fury shall never our steadfastness shock/ the weakest believer is built on a rock.”

Those are amazing words! The first two lines still describe life today: “Men, devils engage, the billows arise and horribly rage, and threaten the skies.” A less poetic way to sum up these linesis that we live in a world where evil is both expressed and addressed, with each side creating a storm because they are sure that they are right and the other side is the devil.

A briefer summary is that we live in a world of people who respond to being slighted by being offended. We are offended whenever someone disagrees with our vision for the world, with our understanding of what is right and good, and with our kingdom on earth. And there are plenty of examples of how we are offended.

Republicans are offended by most everything President Obama does. Democrats are offended by most everything the Republicans do. Some are offended that the government doesn’t do more for its people, while some are offended because they think the government does too much.

The rich are offended by the poor, and the poor are offended by the rich. Some feminists are offended by chivalry, and some traditional men are offended by independent women. Some people are offended by gay marriage, and some are offended that it is still an issue.

People get offended by books and music, and movies, and clothing styles. People get offended when others get special treatment, and sometimes even when they are offered special treatment. Some celebrities were offended when their iCloud accounts were hacked, and a few were offended that their accountsweren’t hacked.

Some black males are offended by white police officers. Some whites are offended by people of color. Some are offended by immigrants coming to this country. Some are offended by Americans wanting to leave this country.

Some athletes are offended by the racist beliefs of the team owners. Domestic violence advocates are offended by lenient policies toward athletes. Native Americans are offended by team mascots. Fans of those teams are offended that someone thinks they are racists for supporting their team.

Some atheists are offended by public displays of faith. Some Christians are offended by concessions to public diversity. Some Muslims are offended by Western culture. And some Christians are offended by any other Christian who doesn’t agree with them on every issue.

Ministers, who should know better, sometimes use our being offended as a tool of manipulation. There is a gimmick where the preacher will deliberately say something to offend the congregation, and then be offended that they are more offended by what he said than what he is offended about in his sermon.

Do I need to go on? As a people, we get offended a lot. We raise the billows of storm clouds of doom, and we horribly rage at each other as we fill the skies with our threats and judgments and condemnations at those who offend our sensibilities, our choices, our lifestyles, and our faith. We accept this as the new normal, and as our right, and even as our obligation to defend our vision of who we are and how we ought to be as a society.

If I were a sociologist, I might make the claim that all this “taking offense” is the inevitable outgrowth of the politically correct movement. You may remember that – it excludes women when you say “mailman,” so you need to say “mail carrier.” It excludes men when you say “stewardess,” so you need to say “flight attendant.” With this movement, some were offended by the resistance to the change to be more inclusive, and some were offended that they were being asked to make the change.

This is why persons as different as Bill Maher and Rush Limbaugh get air time to tell people how offended they are about what is going on in the world. It is how Fox News and MSNBC can claim that the other is biased and wrong about everything. They each have a vision of what is “politically correct,” and they are offended by those who disagree with their vision.

If I was a political scientist, I might claim that “taking offense” might be the natural course for making the world a better place. Taking offense indicates the barriers to change, the places where the line is drawn, and may identify core values that must be preserved. There is a vital competition of ideas, with the give and take, and the compromising and taking stands, which is necessary for moving forward as a society.

That is why many churches get involved in the political discussion. The people of Westboro Baptist Church, for example, have a core value that believes God is offended by homosexuality. Radical Christian identity groups have a core value that believes God is offended by blacks. Some country club-like congregations have a core value that believes God is offended by the poor.

That’s what I might claim if I were a sociologist or a political scientist. But I am not a sociologist, calmly observing the world. I am not a political scientist, identifying core values as they are identified in the give and take of politics. I am a disciple of Jesus Christ. And this is where the rest of Charles Wesley’s omitted verse is affirmed. “Their fury shall never our steadfastness shock/ the weakest believer is built on a rock.”

Christ is the solid rock on whom we stand in faith. And I know that our faith is about forgiveness. Our faith is about the unlimited, unmerited, amazing forgiveness offered to us by Jesus Christ, who loves us so much that he died for our sins. We love to sing about the amazing grace “that saved a wretch like me.” That kind of forgiveness changes our lives. It makes us new persons. It gives meaning to being “born again,” being “born from above.” Christ, who has every reason to be offended by our sins, instead offers us forgiveness.

Simon Peter understands that forgiveness is a “game changer” for the world, that forgiveness has divine power to create a kingdom of love and life together with God. But I suspect that Simon Peter, like most of us, worried that too much forgiveness would make it cheap.I suspect he worried that too much forgiveness would lose its power and authority to change the lives of people for the good. If forgiveness is too readily available, it might become little more than a “Get out of Hell” free card.

So Peter asks the question we all ask at one time or another: How much forgiveness is enough forgiveness? When does it become too much to forgive someone? Where do we draw the line and say “enough is enough”?

And at first, it sounds like Jesus gives Peter a specific answer: not seven times, but seventy seven times. In some of the ancient copies, it says seventy times seven times. Either way, that is a lot of times to forgive someone sinning against you. That is a lot of forgiveness, unless we figure that on any given day we need to be forgiven over and over again for little things, some so little that we forgive them without even thinking about it. If we want to keep count, we might reach the level of forgiveness to be offered in as little as a week.

Just so we know that Jesus is not advocating having a “sin counter” that we wear on our belts to keep track, Jesus tells a story so that we may know that the unlimited, unmerited, amazing forgiveness offered to us by Jesus Christ is not just for our benefit, but for everyone.

A king wished to settle his accounts with his slaves. One of them owed the king 10,000 talents. If you watched the announcement slides for the Quickie Bible Quiz, you saw that 10,000 talents is the equivalent of the annual salaries of 325,000 people. Clearly, this is a huge debt, an unimaginable debt. This is not a debt that can be repaid, at least not by anyone who was hearing that story when Jesus first told it. This is not a debt that I can repay, or any one here can repay. It is not a debt that all of us together can pay. And, in the parable, the slave can’t pay the debt, either.

In the justice of this parable, the king is within his rights to sell the slave, his wife, his children, all his possessions, and oh by the way, he still has to pay the remainder of the debt, which is essentially all of it. The slave, who apparently thought he was “too big to fail,” falls to his knees and begs for patience. The king knows that no one has that much time to repay a debt that big. It is laughable, and the only real option left is for the king to forgive the debt.And that’s what the king does.

This is a life changer for the slave. For perhaps the first time in his life, he is debt free. He can now even think about getting ahead of the game. But to get ahead, he needs the people who owe him to pay up.

So our forgiven slave goes in search of those who are in debt to him. The first one he finds owes him 100 denarii, or about 3 months’ salary. This is a debt that everyone listening to Jesus can imagine. It’s the kind of debt that most of us can also imagine. It is a debt we can see paying off if we are given enough time. While the first debt was unimaginable, this debt was very real to them. This debt is something they can make right.

And that’s what this second slave asks for – enough time to pay off his debt and make things right. But the “too big to fail” slave is impatient, and apparently a little slow on the uptake, and he throws the second slave into prison for not being able to pay his debt immediately.

The other slaves, who are also likely in debt to this first slave, were worried that the same thing was going to happen to them. So they went to the king, and they told the king all that the second slave had done. And the king’s response indicates that he is deeply offended that his forgiveness does not inspire even more forgiveness. And the first slave, who has set the terms of forgive us our debts as we forgive those who sin against us, a standard that Jesus previously set in the Lord’s Prayer, is tortured by what might have been if he had been more forgiving.

Everything that is, is from God. We owe God everything, and what God asks in return is our love of God and our love of neighbors. God has blessed us with life and being, with family and friends, with grace and forgiveness – all of which are gifts for the community we call the kingdom of God. If we are not weighed down by the debt of sin, it is only because we have been given the grace of Jesus Christ. And that is a life-changer in a world of sin.

Jesus told Peter, and each of us, that forgiveness is about more than our debt of sin we owe to God. Forgiveness is about the freedom to share what we have received from God with others.

Instead of being offended, we are to offer forgiveness. There is nothing cheap or easy in doing this because forgiveness is not a “get out of hell” card, but a “enter into the joy of your master” card. Even when the debt, the sin, seems to be unforgivable, we are to forgive.

When we can do this in the name of Jesus Christ, the world will see that“Their fury shall never our steadfastness shock/ the weakest believer is built on a rock.”

Faith We Sing 2269 “Come, Share the Lord”