Remember, Return, Reach Out (sermon, February 21, 2010)

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

The book of Deuteronomy is believed to be a series of speeches given by Moses to the Israelites who were preparing to enter the land of promise after forty years of wandering in the wilderness. For forty years the Israelites had been wandering in the desert and they were finally about to settle down and begin the life for which their parents and grandparents had longed. Moses would not get to go with them; he had already learned from God that he would not enter the land of promise. But he wanted to make sure that the people were prepared for the life that awaited them there, a life that, compared to their decades of wandering in the wilderness and subsisting on manna, would be the very definition of down to earth. They would build homes, plant and harvest crops, and raise children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

And even though Moses wanted the people to have lives of creature comforts and stability, a life he never really knew, he also worried about what might happen to the people when life got easy. He was afraid that once they got settled the people would do the very thing we human beings do so well. They would forget where they came from. When they no longer lived in tents and scraped manna off the ground for their daily bread, when they became accustomed to a life of relative ease, when this happened--as Moses was confident it would--he waned the people to remember.

A man suffering from Alzheimer’s disease moved to a nursing home, where his memory slowly deteriorated until he no longer reliably recognized his wife of fifty-some years. Still, she visited him daily. One day, after entering his room, she asked him, “Do you remember who I am?” He looked at her hard for a moment and then said, “I don’t remember who you are but I remember that I love you.”

Memories--of people, places, events--help us make sense of our lives. Memories enable us to construct and understand our identity, as individuals, as families, as races, as nations. And the memories that define us don’t have to be our memories; they are just as likely to be memories passed down to us from our parents and grandparents or even from teachers and history books. Of all the things Moses wanted the people to do once they had settled comfortably in the land of promise, the most important was for them to remember how they got there.

*****

What pictures do you carry around in your wallet? Pictures of your children, your grandchildren? Perhaps a picture of the last vacation when all the family was together? A couple of years ago, I was talking to a stranger on a airplane. When he found out I had children, he asked to see pictures. After I showed him the pictures of the kids in my wallet, I asked if he had any pictures of his grandchildren, whom he had told me about with the naked pride of a loving grandfather. He opened his wallet and instead of glossy, color photos of smiling children, he withdrew a creased, black and white photograph, torn around the edges. The photo featured an unsmiling couple. The man wore a suit with no tie; the woman wore a wedding dress. “These are my grandparents,” the man told me. “They were married in 1913. Grandma’s wedding dress cost $14, and Grandpa’s suit cost $35. Eighteen years later, Grandpa died plowing his field with a team of horses; the horses got spooked and they dragged him to death. Grandma never remarried. She raised the children and helped raise me and my siblings, too, after our dad, one of her two sons, died in the war. I always remember her praying. Don’t get me wrong,” he said, as if he should apologize. “I love my kids and my grandkids are the light of my life. But without these two people, none of us would be here -- not me and not any of them.” (1)

Without memory, we have nothing to anchor our lives...nothing, that is, but the present moment. And if we only rely on the present moment to try to understand who we are, we will flounder. A friend of mine once visited a church which had an iron-clad rule for worship: they would not sing a song or hymn that was more than fifteen years old. I might be able to understand such a rule in a nightclub that was trying to stay hip, but a church? Songs and prayers and creeds from the past are the very things that teach us who God is and who we are as God’s people.

Say this, Moses told the people: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien...and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us...we cried to the Lord...the Lord heard our voice and...and the Lord brought us out of Egypt...and gave us this land...flowing with milk and honey.”

Moses wanted the people to remember where they came from because if they did they would surely remember God, whose love and grace and power in the past had given the people the present in the land of promise and hope for future generations.

“Remember that Jesus never asks anybody to simply think about him, or agree with him,” William Willimon once wrote. “I think...the church makes a big mistake in presenting the Christian faith as a set of principles, a set of ideas to agree to. We ought to present the Christian faith as a set of PRACTICES—things that we do, a way of life, something that we take up and follow, a way of walking behind Jesus of Nazareth, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” (2)

Even before the great acts of God in Jesus Christ, Moses understood that telling the people to remember their past would not be enough. Like us, they needed not just pictures in their wallets to remind them where they came from, they needed things to do to put those memories into action. So he tells them to do more than just remember. Moses gives them practices. And the first to return the first fruits of their harvests to God.

When the Israelites harvested their crops and set aside the very first stalks of wheat, ripe pomegranates, and juicy olives for God, it was a tangible act of remembering that the land from which these fruits were harvested was a generous gift from a loving God. But giving away the first fruits is a present act too, an act of sacrifice since it is no easy thing to give away the first ripe crops when you have patiently tended them for a growing season. Returning the first fruits of God is also an act of faith in the future; an act of trust that by God’s grace there will be more fruit to follow, enough to meet the people’s needs.

Moses also tells the people that once they have given their first fruits to God, they should have a big party to celebrate the bounty of the land...a party not just for their group of insiders who all shared a common history, a common set of memories. Moses tells them to invite outsiders to the party as well, Levites--who had entered the land of promise but did not receive land for themselves--and the so-called “aliens,” the the non-Israelites who lived in the land. Moses knew that if the people continually remembered their history and their ancestors, then they couldn’t help but remember that they came from people who had often been strangers in strange lands, aliens themselves, and so the people should reach out to the aliens among them and share their bounty with them.

Deborah spent years running the streets, consumed by prostitution and drugs. Her chaotic and out of control life was her birthright; in a sense, it was the creased and damaged photograph she carried around. You see, she had inherited her mental illness from her parents. She learned to steal from her mother. Her mother’s boyfriends taught her the skills to be a prostitute before she was a teenager. During her years on the streets, Deborah ran up over $30,000 in debt from her emergency room visits and transports to local detoxification clinics. Deborah was arrested a dozen times a year, spending on average a 100 days a year in jail. Deborah’s life changed in when she realized she had to change her life or die on the streets. So Deborah got an apartment through a homeless shelter. The shelter provided her not just a bed and a meal, but also connection and care around the clock. The catch was she would have to be clean and sober; get on (and stay on) her mental health medication; and find a legitimate source of income. (3)

That shelter that finally saved Deborah’s life was a ministry run by a church. That church was full of people who remembered what God had done for them, and those memories inspired them to return their first fruits to the church and then to reach out and share the bounty with others through missions like that shelter. Through such ministries they made the memory of God’s grace a present reality for Deborah and many others like her, people who did not have their own memories of God but who could benefit from the memories of others.

*****

Today is the first Sunday of Lent, and we begin this season by celebrating together the Lord’s Supper. For Christians, this celebration is the equivalent of reaching into our wallets and pulling out a worn and faded picture. As we hear and speak the familiar words of the communion liturgy, as we observe the ritual of elders passing out the squares of bread and the thimblefuls of juice, as we taste the familiar flavors on our tongues we receive once again God’s gifts of the past, present, and future. This meal is a picture we pull out time and time again to remember where we came from, to remember whose we are, to remember the sacrifices that brought us here. We begin this season of Lent by remembering God’s gracious actions, not just for us, but for a wandering Aramean, for a people wandering in the wilderness, for Mary and Joseph in Nazareth, for a man named Jesus, and for generations of his faithful followers. We turn these memories into practices by offering the first fruits of our lives to God and by inviting the strangers in our midst to join the celebration. Amen.

Endnotes:

1. See the photo this story is based on here under “Friesen.”

2. William Willimon, Pulpit Digest, Logos Productions, January 2007, quoted in a sermon by the Rev. Mark Ramsey, "Deeper" at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC, Feb. 7, 2010.

3. From a sermon preached by the Rev. Mark Ramsey, "Deeper," at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC, Feb. 7, 2010.

To Cleave Or Be Cleaved (sermon #5 in a five-part series on the Lord's Prayer, Feb. 14, 2010)

Matthew 3:16-4:11

Whether you doggedly make New Year’s resolutions every year or whether you doggedly refuse to, scientists have recently discovered there’s a good reason it’s so hard to keep them: because willpower is an extremely weak and limited resource.

Not too long ago, an experiment proved without a doubt just how vulnerable our willpower is...and offered one reason why we are so susceptible to the temptations all around us. A group of people were brought into a room one at a time. Each person was given a number and told that they had to memorize it. They were to leave the room, walk down a long hallway to another room, and once there, report their number. Some of the subjects got two-digit numbers, which for most people are pretty easy to commit to memory. But others got seven-digit numbers, and seven is the maximum number of pieces of information that the typical human brain can retain for a period of time.

What the subjects didn’t know was that on their way down the hall to the other room (while most of them were furiously reciting their numbers over and over in their heads), they would be offered a snack by a nice woman standing behind a table. “Thank you so much for participating in our study,” she’d say. “We’d like to offer you something to eat as a way to say thanks. You can have a piece of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit.”

Hmmm...delicious, artery clogging, fattening piece of chocolate cake or fresh, healthy bowl of fruit salad -- what do you think they chose? Well, it all depended on how busy their brain was trying to remember the number they had been given. The people trying to remember seven digit numbers were twice as likely to choose cake. Why? Because their brains were working so hard to retain those numbers that they simply didn’t have the ability to prioritize rational thought -- fruit salad is much better for me than chocolate cake -- over emotional impulses -- chocolate cake tastes so much better than fruit salad. All it took was five extra numbers for people to give in to temptation. (1)

Now does it make sense why it’s so hard to stick to those New Year’s resolutions? It takes a lot of energy and attention to exercise willpower and when our minds are preoccupied with all the demands and worries of daily life--work, family, our health or the health of our loved ones--we just aren’t capable of resisting the temptations we encounter at every turn. And, by the way, advertisers are counting on this. In fact, the scientist who designed the fruit and cake experiment? He is a professor of marketing at Stanford. Advertisers and marketing professionals rely on the fact that when it comes to temptation, we humans are a pretty weak species.

Of all the things Jesus could have chosen to bring the Lord’s Prayer to a conclusion, he chose this: “Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil.” Some time later, we would add a majestic benediction to wrap it up neatly, but for Jesus, the last word of this prayer was “evil.” If we look to Eugene Peterson’s version for some comfort, he fails us too. His translation: “Keep us safe from ourselves and the devil.”

For most pastors, the middle of the night phone calls don’t happen often. So when my colleague Mark’s cell phone rang one night at 4a.m., he answered it. On the other end of the phone, crying and distraught, was Jack.

Jack was a 65 year-old, faithful member of Mark’s church. He enjoyed a good theological debate and often played the devil’s advocate in church discussions, but he had a heart of gold, and was always the first to volunteer for a mission project or to help someone in need. But that night he was in trouble.

Fifteen minutes after the phone call, Mark and Jack met at the church. After sitting down on the sofa in Mark’s office, Jack jumped right in. “In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray every week, ‘God, lead us not into temptation.’ Does that mean God might lead me into temptation? Or that God wants to lead me into temptation? Why would I have to pray that, week after week, unless there was a real chance that God wants to tempt me?”

As Mark put it, “in that moment, whatever this prayer meant for Jack, the weight of his whole life, and his life with God was at stake.” Jack said one last thing: “this has my soul in pain,” and then he leaned back and stared at the ceiling. (2)

If we really hear and receive this portion of the prayer Jesus gave us, how can we not be disturbed? First there is this implication, the one that so unnerved Jack, that God might actually want us to be tempted and that God might cause us to be tempted...and then, before we’ve even had a moment to deal with that, Jesus brings us face to face with the devil: “...deliver us from the evil one.”

As much as we sophisticated 21st-century types might prefer to avoid the whole idea of an evil force or an evil being in our world, if we look around, the fact is, it’s there. Today, at our luncheon after church we’ll hear about evil in the form of slavery that still persists, both in this country and around the world. The reporter Nicholas Kristof writes about a woman who lived through the horrors of slavery. Her names is Jeanne and she grew up in the Congo. When she was fourteen her parents disappeared in that country’s brutal civil war. Most likely, they were massacred, but their bodies never showed up, so Jeanne moved in with an uncle. Just months later, members of the extremist Hutu militia invaded her home and tortured Jeanne’s uncle while she watched. Then they kidnapped his wife, son, and Jeanne and took them to the forest, condemning them to lives of slavery. The boys and men worked as porters and the women were sex slaves.

Because of the brutal rapes, Jeanne first suffered internal injuries and then became pregnant with a fetus that she couldn’t deliver because of her immature pelvis. The fetus did not survive childbirth. Jeanne survived, but barely. She was left for dead by the side of the road.

But someone found her and took her to a nearby hospital where a doctor who has devoted his life to healing the victim’s of Congo’s war operated on Jeanne nine times in the next three years to repair the fistulas, holes in her body that caused her to constantly leak wastes. Finally, the surgeries were deemed successful and she was sent back to her village to live with her grandmother. Three days after she returned home, the militia came to the village and she was raped again, opening her old injuries. She made her way back to the hospital and is once again undergoing multiple surgeries, but it is unclear whether she will ever fully recover. (3) Atrocities like that are happening around the world every day. There is no word to describe that but evil.

****

“Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil”...“Keep us safe from ourselves and the devil.” The English word “devil” comes from the Greek root diaballein, which means to throw between, in other words, to split apart. And isn’t that what happens when we encounter whatever we want to call this force--it is something that splits us apart from God, that tears us away from being the people God calls us to be?

When I discovered that tidbit about the origin of the word devil, it brought to my mind the perplexing word “cleave.” I say perplexing because cleave is one of the only words I know of that describes two completely opposite ideas. One meaning of the word “cleave” is “to cling to, to stick closely with.” But another meaning is “to cut apart,” as in cleaving a piece of meat. So although it may be our sincere desire to cleave to God, to stick close to God, and though we may pray the Lord’s Prayer as an expression of that desire, in this prayer we also acknowledge that there is a force in this world--and perhaps even in ourselves--that attempts to cleave us from God, to separate us from our true identity as followers of Jesus.

As surely as there is a force of evil in this world, whether you think of it as the devil or as a less personal force, there is also temptation. Temptations, big and small, are a part of daily life, whether we believe that God wants to tempt us for our own good or that God is there to help keep our willpower strong. Even Jesus knew temptation.

But notice when Jesus’ temptation happened. It wasn’t a test he had to pass before he could become the Son of God. Jesus faced his temptations immediately after his baptism. Now we may have picked up the idea that once we are baptized into Christ, once we have claimed our true identity as children of God, we aren’t going to have to face temptation or battle any of the evil that resides in ourselves or in the world, but, as one preacher bluntly puts it, that idea is “hogwash.” (4) In fact, it may be only after we receive our true identity in baptism that we begin to understand the real power of temptation and evil. But once we have been baptized, once we have died to self and risen to new life in Christ Jesus, then we have what we need to cleave to God when we find ourselves in the wilderness, facing temptations that seem custom-made to cleave us from God. In those moments, we have the memory of our baptism. Because when we remember our baptism, we remember the truth of who we are and whose we are.

When her husband Drew, a Maine state trooper, died suddenly one day in the line of duty, Kate Braestrup received the news in the living room of the home in which she and Drew were raising four young children. Forty minutes after hearing that she was now a widow, Kate sat in shock with her close friend Monica. When the doorbell rang, Kate answered it and discovered her neighbor standing on her doorstep. This was a woman with whom Kate had exchanged barely a dozen words in the last decade. But there she stood, holding a pan of brownies still warm from the oven, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I just heard,” she said.

Kate writes: “That pan of brownies was, it later turned out, the leading edge of a tsunami of food that came to my children and me, a wave that did not recede for many months after Drew’s death. I didn’t know that my family and I would be fed three meals a day for weeks and weeks. I did not anticipate that neighborhood men would come to drywall the playroom, build bookshelves, mow the lawn, get the oil changed in my car. I did not know that my house would be cleaned and the laundry done, that I would have embraces and listening ears, that I would not be abandoned to do the labor of mourning alone. All I knew was that my neighbor was standing on the front stoop with her brownies and her tears: she was the Good News.” (5)

It might just be that every temptation we face, every evil we encounter is, at its root, something that urges us to turn away from God, away from our true identity, away from what our baptism promised us was true: that God loves us and forgives us and frees us to live abundantly. And so we pray the Lord’s Prayer. We pray the words Jesus taught us, even though some days they make more sense to us than others. And as we pray we cleave to God. And when, in spite of our efforts to cling to God and to our God-given identity, temptation overwhelms us; when we find ourselves face to face with evil, may we discover, right there on our doorstep, the Good News: that before our baptism, before we ever entered a church, before we even knew we could cleave to God, God had already cleaved to us, claiming us as fiercely as a mother claims her nursing child, cleaving to us so tightly that nothing, nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Amen.

Endnotes:

1. Jonah Lehrer, “Blame in on the Brain,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 26, 2009.

2. from the sermon “Playing It Safe,” by the Rev. Mark Ramsey, Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC, October 11, 2009.

3. Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed “The World Capital of Killing,” in The New York Times, February 6, 2010.

4. from the sermon “To the Edge and Back,” by Derek Starr Redwine, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Akron, Ohio, October 11, 2009. Used with permission.

5. Braestrup, Kate, Here If You Need Me. Back Bay Books, 2008.

As We Forgive (fourth in a five-part sermon series on the Lord's Prayer, Feb. 7, 2010)

Psalm 103:8-13

Matthew 18:21-35

A colleague of mine went on a website one day to send an electronic greeting card to a family member. As he browsed through the types of cards, he discovered that right next to the cards labeled “Birthday” and “Anniversary” was the category “Forgiveness.” According to this virtual card maker, forgiveness was considered an “occasion,” something that happens every once in a while, an occasion special enough to justify sending a card. (1)

Is this how we think of forgiveness? That from time to time someone does something so hurtful or offensive that we have to muster the strength to forgive?

The story of Nickel Mines would suggest otherwise. A few years ago, a man entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse and killed five young girls and wounded five others before killing himself. Within hours friends and family members of the victims reached out to the family of the shooter and extended forgiveness.

One Amish historian believes that the reason the Amish community of Nickel Mines was able to so quickly and genuinely extend forgiveness because forgiveness is deeply rooted in their culture. Forgiveness is something the Amish practice daily. It isn’t an occasion you buy a card for, it is something you do every day. Parents practice it in front of their children, neighbors practice it with one another, and siblings learn that they must practice it too. The Amish practice forgiveness daily, not because they transgress against each other more than the rest of us, but because it is how they live out their faith. Every day, they forgive the small things, and it is precisely this practice of forgiving everyday offenses that allowed them to extend forgiveness to one who had done something unforgivable.

If there is any question in our minds whether Jesus would have us practice forgiveness daily or save up our energy for the really big offenses, the answer is in the Lord’s Prayer. We have prayed to our intimate, heavenly Father to set the world right. We have asked that each day our bodies might be nourished with food, and we have acknowledged that the bread God provides us is not mine but ours. And then, having just asked God to give us each day what we need to survive physically, we ask God to provide what we need to survive spiritually. “Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts...” By linking these two petitions together, this prayer suggests that as bread is to our bodies, so forgiveness is to our souls. It is something we need, something we crave, every single day.

Up to this phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, we have been focused on God: who God is--our Father in heaven, what we want God to do for the world--set the world right, what we want God to provide for us--three square meals and the gift of forgiveness. But then with one tiny word--as--the camera turns on us, and here, in the middle of this prayer, we find out what it means to be a Christian, a child of an intimate, loving God, and a follower of Jesus Christ.

And what it means to be a Christian has everything to do with forgiveness: first, God’s forgiveness of us, and bound together with that, our forgiveness of others. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

Before dawn on January 10, 1966, Sam Bowers drove out of Hattiesburg, Mississippi and went to the home of Vernon Dahmer. Bowers was the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Dahmer was a white grocery store owner. That night, while Dahmer and his family slept, Bowers and his fellow Klansman poured gasoline around the house and set it and Dahmer’s adjoining grocery store on fire. Dahmer and his ten year-old daughter were injured and Dahmer died later that day.

What was Dahmer’s crime? He allowed black people to pay their poll taxes at his grocery store.

In August 1998, after four mistrials, Sam Bowers was finally convicted of the vicious murder committed three decades before. The Reverend Will Campbell was in the courthouse for the trial. Campbell was a maverick Baptist preacher during the Civil Rights Movement, the only white person present for the establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He walked with the black students who first integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas as they made their way through an angry mob. When he was the chaplain at the University of Mississippi, he knew Vernon Dahmer and worked closely with him on voting rights issues.

Everyone assumed that Campbell was at the trial to grieve the death of his friend Vernon Dahmer. But reporters were shocked when they saw Campbell embraced not only by Vernon’s widow, but also by the defendant, Klansman Sam Bowers.

When one of the reporters asked Campbell how he could possibly be so friendly with both the victim and the vicious monster who had murdered him, the salty-tonged Campbell replied, “Because, dammit--I am a Christian!” (2)

One thing Jesus’ first followers noticed was that when Jesus healed someone, whether physically or spiritually, the act of healing was nearly always accompanied by a declaration of forgiveness. So the disciples started to wonder: how exactly does Jesus expect us to forgive? At the time, the Israelites had what seems like very reasonable expectations of forgiveness. If someone repeatedly offended you, you should extend forgiveness three times, but not four. After three times, the offender was out of luck and you were off the forgiveness hook.

Now the disciple Peter was a good student and an astute observer. He knew that Jesus cared a lot about forgiveness and that his standards for his followers would be high. So Peter picked a number that more than doubled the rabbi’s proscription. “Lord, how often should I forgive? Seven times?” Surely, thought Peter, this would be more than enough, even for Jesus.

He thought wrong. “Not seven times,” responds Jesus, “seventy-seven times.” Some say the text reads, “Seventy times seven times,” which would be 490, others say seventy-seven, but either way, Jesus is saying that we are to forgive more than we think is reasonable or even possible. As one commentator puts it, Jesus is saying “forgive your brothers and sisters beyond your ability to keep track.” (3) Another says that the simplest meaning of this phrase goes beyond any number. What it means is that we followers of Jesus must “never give up on anyone.” (4)

Why would Jesus ask such a thing of us? Isn’t it possible that some people are just irredeemable? That there are people in this world and in our lives that truly do not deserve our forgiveness--today or any day--because of how they have deliberately hurt us and taken advantage of us time and time again?

Well, in response to such questions, Jesus told a story. It was a fish tale of sorts, a story filled with ridiculous exaggerations and hyperboles. It started with a king who decided to meet with each of his slaves and call in their debts. And a slave came before him who owed him ten thousand talents. Now in these days of trillion dollar deficits and billion dollar bailouts, ten thousand of anything doesn’t impress us much, but if you lived back when talents were a currency, you’d know that this is a sum so large it’s almost absurd -- like if the IRS sent you a letter saying you owed the government a “gazillion” dollars. The sum is astronomical, unfathomable, one that you couldn’t even begin to repay in one lifetime, and probably not in seventy-seven lifetimes either.

Knowing this, the servant throws himself down before the king and begs for mercy. In a surprising turn, the king has mercy on him, erasing this astronomical debt, wiping away any record of the money the servant owed. The king forgives the debt and gives the man a fresh start, even though he had every right to throw the servant in prison for defaulting on the loan.

The servant’s debt was forgiven, but Jesus wasn’t done with the story. He wasn’t done with the exaggerations, either, although his next exaggeration was in the other direction. The debt-free servant leaves the palace and the first thing he does is find a co-worker who had borrowed money from him a few days before. And even though the first servant had borrowed a gazillion dollars from the king, his friend hadn’t asked for a billion or even a million. He’d borrowed a few bucks. They were in the lunch line at the palace cafeteria and he didn’t have his wallet so he asked his friend to cover his burger and fries. Now, this servant whose massive debt had just been erased has the nerve to grab his debtor by the neck and demand repayment for what amounted to a handful of quarters. (5)

This parable certainly seems to suggest that the Amish have it right: if we don’t practice forgiving the small things, it’s going to be nearly impossible for us to forgive the little things. The parable suggests that Rev. Campbell was right too. We forgive, because it is what Christians are commanded to do.

“Forgive us our sins as we forgive our debtors.” One commentator says that “as” this might just be the scariest, most sobering word in the entire New Testament.

The theologian Miroslav Volf says that there are three ways to understand this link in the Lord’s Prayer between our forgiveness and God’s, but that only one of them is right. The first and most obvious is that God will forgive us because we forgive others. In other words, God’s forgiveness is not a freely given gift of grace, but a payment in return for our right actions.

The other way to look at it, which the parable of the debtor supports, is that God’s forgiveness is a free gift, but if we fail to forgive others, then God will take that forgiveness away. Indeed, this is exactly what the king in the parable does. When he hears about the servant’s behavior toward his debtor, the king throws the servant into prison until he repays that gazillion dollar debt; in other words, for the rest of his life. This story makes it pretty straightforward: God’s forgiveness is conditional on our actions. We can’t earn God’s forgiveness, but we can un-earn it.

Volf says that if we read this parable this way, we have taken it too literally. These stories aren’t meant to illustrate exactly who God is or precisely how God’s kingdom works. Instead, this story simply shows that God’s forgiveness and our forgiveness go hand in hand.6

Volf knew firsthand both the power and pain of forgiveness. One day his five year-old brother, Daniel, took advantage of their nanny’s preoccupation with a younger sibling and slipped out the courtyard gate. He walked to a small military base down the road where he liked to play with the soldiers there who enjoyed playing with him to ease their own boredom. On this fateful day, one of them put Daniel on a horse-drawn bread wagon. As the wagon passed through a gate, Daniel leaned sideways and got his head stuck between the door post and the wagon as the horses kept going. He died on the way to he hospital. Volf’s parents extended forgiveness both to the nanny who had not watched Daniel carefully enough and to the soldier who put him on that wagon. They refused to press charges against the soldier and Volf’s father, himself heartbroken, visited the soldier, who was so upset and guilt-ridden that he had to be hospitalized. Later, Volf’s parents explained to their son why they forgave in the face of their grief. “The Word of God tells us to forgive as God in Christ has forgiven us,” they told him, “and so we decided to forgive.” In other words, they forgave, even this excruciatingly painful offense, because they were Christian.

There were two things Jesus gave away with abandon: food and forgiveness. He fed thousands with just a few loaves and fishes, he hung out with people who lived in shame because they had broken all the rules, he forgave the sins of everyone who asked for forgiveness and many who didn’t. Jesus knew that we human beings have two basic needs: to have our physical hunger satisfied and our broken spirits made whole. So he did that, and in this prayer, he teaches us that we can do it to. We can forgive as God has forgiven us. We can forgive because God forgives us.

We forgive because--dammit--it’s just what Christians do. Amen.

Endnotes:

1. Scott Hoezee in a commentary on Matthew 18:21-35 online.

2. from the sermon “Extravagance,” by the Rev. Mark Ramsey, Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC, October 4, 2009.

3. Arthur DeKruyter in a commentary on Matthew 18:21-35 at workingpreacher.com.

4. Frederick Dale Bruner, Matthew: A Commentary, Volume 2,Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1990, p. 235.

5. Scott Hoezee, ibid.

6. Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. Zondervan, 2005, p. 156.

Exodus 16:4-5, 13-21

Matthew 6:25-34, 18:1-5

In her memoir Lit, the writer Mary Karr describes her descent into alcoholism and how she eventually got sober and found God. She tells a story of a literary gathering she attended shortly after she decided to stop drinking. At the fancy dinner that followed, she felt out of place, thirsty, and very, very conspicuous when she refused to touch her glass of wine, even when everyone was making toasts. Finally, she excused herself and went to the restroom, where she entered a stall, knelt down on the floor and, against every instinct, began to pray.

“Please keep me away from a drink. I know I haven’t been really asking, but I really need it. Please please please.” Remarkably, after praying this desperate prayer and taking a few deep breaths, she felt “like a calmer human than the one who’d knelt a few minutes before.” Calmer, and ravenously hungry. She returned to the table to find her wineglass replaced by a glass of ice water. She took a piece of bread from the basket and dunked it in olive oil. “Never,” she writes, “has bread tasted so good.” (1)

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray to the One as close to us as the air we breathe--Our Father--and who is Holy and set apart--in heaven. We begin by asking God, reveal who you are and then, set the world right. This prayer opens with the greatest paradoxes of our faith and then, just when we are dwelling in the wonder and mystery of who God is and how God works, Jesus brings us back to the reality of our daily, earthly lives: every day, every day, we get hungry.

And so, Jesus teaches us to pray: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Or, in Eugene Peterson’s words, “Keep us alive with three square meals.” Apparently this intimate yet holy God is not just involved with bringing heaven to earth, with making this world look more like a place where God’s love and justice reigns, but with the workings and cravings of our very bodies.

As human beings have pointed out for centuries, the cravings we have are not just physical, they are spiritual as well. One writer suggests that at the bottom of all human spirituality is “a haunting sense of incompleteness, a yearning for completion, a craving for certainty, a brokenness hungering for wholeness.” St. Augustine wrote a sentence that has resonated with believers for centuries: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

We all get hungry. We all have cravings. We all experience moments when a restlessness enters our spirit and we long for something we cannot name...something more.

Does this sound a bit ridiculous to you, that we all want something more than what we already have? After all, there is no denying that, compared to the rest of the world, we are rich. No matter what you might wish you had more of or what you lack, we are all rich in relative terms.

92% of people in the world don’t have a car.

1 billion people don’t have clean water.

1 billion people live on less than a dollar a day.

800 million people won’t eat today, 300 million of them kids. (2)

Not only do we have enough food in our stores and in our cabinets to fill our bellies, we actually get to go the store or open the pantry and say to ourselves, “what do I want to eat right now?” We not only get to eat, we get to choose what we eat. The same is true with satisfying our spiritual cravings. Not only can we choose from Christian denominations and churches across a huge theological spectrum, but now even in small town America we can experience other religions as well.

And yet...in spite of this abundance of food, material things, and options for spirituality, we worry about tomorrow...because we all get hungry. We all have cravings. We all experience moments when we long for something we cannot name...something more.

Jesus told his followers they needed to become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven. And one of the undeniable things about children, especially infants and toddlers, is that they are utterly dependent and completely in the present moment. If a newborn wakes up at 3a.m. with an empty stomach there will be no rest for anyone in the house until he is on his mother’s breast or in his father’s arms with a warm bottle in his mouth. If you tell a toddler she has to wait until after lunch to have a piece of candy, as far as she’s concerned, if she can’t have it now, that means she can’t ever have another piece of candy again...hence the tantrum. Children don’t worry about tomorrow, they worry about now and they depend on their parents to meet their needs now.

In this way, the Israelites were forced to become like children when God provided them manna each day in the wilderness, for God provided just enough for one day and no more. Like children, they became totally dependent on God to give them what they needed to live through the day, and, as the days went on, they learned to trust that God would indeed give them enough for each day. The Israelites knew without a doubt that they depended on God. They could not succumb to the illusion that they were in control of their lives...an illusion most of us give into every day in part because we have more than we need to satisfy our cravings, at least the physical ones.

But in this phrase, here in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer, we are reminded that no matter how much we fill our pantries or our stomachs or even our houses, we still suffer cravings. We hunger for more. And it is this hunger, this restlessness, this dis-ease that leads so many people in our culture--so many of us--into the disease of addiction in all its ugly forms.

The word “addiction” comes from the Latin, and the original meaning was to say or pronounce ‘toward’ something. Roman laws used the term “addict” to describe a person who, by official court action, was spoken for or surrendered to a master. Addicts were not free to pursue other relationships or responsibilities. Their lives were spoken for. They were, literally, enslaved. (3)

We are all hungry. We all have cravings. We all experience moments when a restlessness enters our spirit and we long for something more. And this means that we all risk becoming addicted, becoming enslaved to whatever fills that longing, however temporarily. Sex, drugs, alcohol, work, shopping, the internet, porn, success, the runner’s high...we turn to these things again and again to satisfy the longing for more. But if we expect these things to fill our deepest need, they will enslave us, delivering just enough satisfaction to keep us coming back for more, hoping that this time our need will be met and our hunger satisfied.

As one preacher put it, in terms of how it affects us, addiction is slavery.

But in terms of our relationship to God, addiction is idolatry.

There is an urgency to this part of the Lord’s Prayer--“Give us this day our daily bread”...“keep us alive with three square meals”--an urgency that reminds us that “we are addicts whenever we turn our back...on our utter dependence on God to meet those needs.” (4)

To be sure, the challenge of addiction is more acute for some of us than for others, but the truth that Jesus points to in this phrase, give us this day our daily bread, is that we all have a tendency to turn away from God and toward other idols, to think that we simply don’t need God to live.

For forty years, every day, there was manna enough for the Israelites to eat. For forty years they lived out daily their utter dependence on God; they had no choice but to rely on God for their daily bread.

Maybe we wish it were that simple. Maybe we think it would be easier if we didn’t have so many options before us of things to eat and things to do to satisfy our deepest spiritual hunger. Yet we cannot deny that God has created us this way, to hunger, both physically and spiritually. And in that very act of creating us to be restless creatures, God planted in us a deep desire for what only God can provide.

And so, week after week, we come here. And when we walk through those doors we may not leave our addictions behind, but for this brief time of worship we turn our backs on them, we release ourselves from our enslavement to them. We come here and we pray this prayer, in which we acknowledge that without God we would not be alive; we might survive by filling our bellies and our lives with the abundance around us, but we would not thrive. “Keep us alive with three square meals.”

When we enter this place, when we pray this prayer, Jesus invites us to leave behind the world that is all about me and my hunger and my desires, and lay down our worries about tomorrow, lay down the addictions that enslave us, lay down our need to be in control. Jesus invites us to enter this world, the real world in which we are the children of a loving, caring God, a God who has promised to take our burdens from us, to provide for us each day what we need to live--really live.

*****

As I wrote this I read sermons by two colleagues who have preached series on the Lord’s Prayer and who graciously shared their work with me. And while both of their sermons were thoughtful and moving, I struggled with the fact that they focused primarily on spiritual hunger, as I have done. I can’t help feel like if we make this phrase--“Give us this day our daily bread”--just about our spiritual hunger and our need to depend each day on God to sustain us, then we have missed an important part of this prayer.

After all, we aren’t just making an individual request here, we are making a communal request. We are declaring that we--we human beings, we, God’s children--are all in this together: give us this day our daily bread. Keep us alive with three square meals. Not my bread, not keep me alive. Our, us. In this phrase we state our dependence on God and our interdependence on one another.

A group of Trappist monks sat down one evening to dinner in silence. Finally, one of the monks became so overcome by delight in the fresh-baked bread he was eating that he blurted out, “Hey, did we make this bread or did somebody give it to us?” One of the other monks answered, “Yes.” (5) Nearly everything we eat is the product of physical labor of other human beings, without which we would not have bread on our plates.

“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink...do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.” Anchored firmly in the present moment, children do not worry whether their parents will feed them tomorrow. As long as they have been fed today, that is enough, and so if there is food leftover, they share in the confidence that tomorrow, their parents will provide for them again. Today, when you hunger, physically or spiritually, may you turn away from the idols in your life and turn toward to God. And when you receive from the hand of God the Bread of Heaven, may you relish its texture and flavor and taste. May you, for this moment, on this day, be filled with faith and trust that the God who loves you provides you with enough...enough even to share. Amen.

Endnotes:

1. Karr, Mary, Lit, Harper Collins, 2009.

2. from the Nooma video “Rich,” featuring Rob Bell.

3. Nelson, James B., Thirst, God, and the Alcoholic Experience. Westminster John Knox, 2004.

4. from the sermon “Hungry” by the Rev. Mark Ramsey, Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC, Sept. 20, 2009. Used with permission.

5. Willimon, Will, Stanley Hauerwas, and Scott Saye, Lord, Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer and the Christian Life. Abingdon Press, 1996.