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Running a Tab 9.13.26 · St. Paul Podcast

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hi everyone and welcome to the St.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Paul Podcast.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: My name is Mark Needhammer, Senior Pastor at St.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Paul Lutheran Church, located in Davenport, Iowa, part of the Greater Quad Cities area of Iowa and Illinois.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right here each week you will find beautiful music and a message of hope and good news to guide your life.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm hopeful that this podcast can inspire you and help you on your journey of faith as you grow in love and trust in our God.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: How do you keep score with the people you love?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you don't think you do, but most of us are running some kind of ledger, even a quiet one.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: Who apologized last, who's been let off the hook one too many times, who still owes us something, even if we'd never say that out loud.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: We're better at counting than we like to admit.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: Today's gospel reading walks straight into that instinct and then blows right past it.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: It starts with a disciple asking Jesus a very reasonable, very human question about forgiveness.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: How many times is enough?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesus answers with a number that isn't really a number at all before telling a story about a debt so enormous it stops making sense as math and starts making sense as something else entirely.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: So here's Matthew chapter 18.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Then Peter came and said to Jesus, Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: As many as seven times?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus said to him, Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy seven times.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him, and as he could not pay, the Lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children, and all his possessions, and payment be to be made.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denari, and seizing him by the throat, he said, Pay what you owe.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, Have patience with me, and I will pay you.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: But he refused.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: Then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: When his fellow slaves saw what happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: Then his Lord summoned him and said to him, You wicked slave, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave as I had mercy on you?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: And in anger his Lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: Is forgiving as many times as Jesus says possible?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: Is it possible to forgive a debt as large as that one?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: Are we ever guilty of withholding forgiveness like that slave here?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: It turns out that keeping track of numbers and keeping track of people are different things.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: So here's my sermon on math and care for neighbors.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Warning, I'm starting today's sermon with a terrible dad joke.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Embrace yourselves.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: It is said that there are three kinds of people in the world.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Those who are good at math and those who aren't.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: I know that's terrible and probably not a great way of starting a sermon, but please don't kick me out.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: I like it here.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: I tell a bad math joke today because, yes, in a particular way, that whole gospel reading, that whole thing I just read is about math, or at least the desire to always be counting.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesus, for his part, uses his own kind of math-related humor to get at a really important lesson for us today.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: So let's back out of this story a little bit, because there's some really interesting movement happening in this reading as a whole, uh, from Peter's question through the parable.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: The movement takes us from math to humanity, from counting to the image of God.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: It takes us from anonymous accounting to deep compassion.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it begins with a really earnest question from Peter to Jesus.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus, how many times must I forgive?
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: As many as seven?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Peter was feeling pretty confident in his question about that number.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: No rabbi of the time was going to require someone to forgive another seven times.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: That is a lot.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's a very generous number.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: So Peter was showing his work.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: He was showing how pious and forgiving he really was, I think.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: But no, Jesus says, not seven.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: Peter, you must forgive 77 times.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: An absurd number, a hyperbolic, exaggerated figure.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: This is our first indication that Jesus is either really bad at math himself, or he's setting Peter up for something that is to come.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: So he launches into this parable.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: The kingdom of heaven, Jesus says, is like a king who is owed a debt and wanted his money.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, nothing too strange here.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: This is a pretty good setup.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: We can roll with this.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: But then in the parable, the debt is revealed.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: The servant owed the king 10,000 talents.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now, a talent is not a uh it's not really a value, it's not something we can convert into other currency straight away.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it a talent was more of a measure of weight, usually silver.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: And nobody's absolutely absolutely sure how much, but it said that one talent was equal to about 130 pounds of silver.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: So at today's uh value of silver, 10,000 talents would be worth somewhere between 900 million and just over a billion dollars.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of Jesus' joke in here, too.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: His story is about a debt so absurd, so huge, so incredibly unfathomable that nobody could believe it.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: How could a slave rack up that much debt?
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Then again, why would a king run a bill that high up on anybody that won't happen?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: He may as well have said that the slave owed him 110 bajillion dollars, and it would have had the same meaning.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: But the king forgives.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then the plot thickens.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: That slave who had this massive debt wiped off, he was owed money by someone else.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: Not as big though, about three months wage.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: So not huge, but not insignificant.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: And this slave fails to show anything approaching compassion.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: Everything in this story from Peter's question about how many times must I forgive through this parable of forgiveness, followed by the unwillingness to forgive, it's all about math.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's about what you can count.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's about what counting must take place, it's about proper data entry into all of the spreadsheets, what and who is owed, and then all debts and accounts must be settled.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is not an unreasonable line of thinking in a certain way.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Our world runs on accounting.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's how any of us have any money at all.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: We work and we are paid so that we can purchase goods and services.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: But the world economic system functions on these practices.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it's fine, it's good even as long as there's no abuse.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: From a young age, we're all we all learn how to barter and we create our own charts of value.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: If you've ever had lunch with a school-age child, you know how this works.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to trade, one Dorito is equal to about three small Cheetos.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: Two medium Cheetos, depending on who you're talking to.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Half a peanut butter sandwich, that's worth two or three lunchable stacks in trade.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's how lunch goes.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: But what happens when we only see dollars, currency, commodity, self-imposed or determined value on something else?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: What when that happens, we lose sight of what's far more important than goods or economics, and we lose sight of people.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: So let's go back into that parable.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: The slave who was ow who was forgiven his$110 bajillion dollar debt, realizing that he too was owed that sum of three months' wage, called the debt to be repaid, and he ignored something really important.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: Did you notice the words that that slave said to him?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: That debt-stricken person falling on his knees, begging, pleading for mercy, says, Have patience with me, and I will pay you.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: We heard those words earlier in this same story, in this parable.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: He said those same words to the king who granted his forgiveness.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Have patience, and I will forgive, and I will repay you.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: This person, having been forgiven of that immense debt, was blind, though.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: He was so callous that he was unable to see the humanity of the one who owed him that he threw him in prison.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: He was so selfish that he couldn't see his own face staring back at him as he was pleaded to.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't see a human.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: He turned to math, to debt, what he was owed.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: And he turned what he was owed into something more important than the life of another human being.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's the challenge here.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus knew that the society of his day, and this really hasn't changed to today, is transactional.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: And in some ways this can work.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: If we're talking half a peanut butter sandwich or chips, we have no issue.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: But a person is not a sandwich.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: The moment we apply the same ledger to each other instead of sandwiches, something has gone wrong.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: A human being was never a good or a service to begin with.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: They are made in the image of God, and you can't trade that.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: But if we're going to try to exist in a society where we can only treat others with compassion if the ledger is even, then we're starting to ignore that God-imaged, God-breathed goodness in each other.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: A few years back, two men started to make this shift.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: These two had spent their whole life, their careers as debt collectors.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: They spent decades calling people at dinner, chasing down unpaid hospital bills.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: Then they decided to switch sides.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: These two, Jerry Ashton and Craig Antico, spent years in the credits and collections industry, much of it working with healthcare.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: And somewhere along the way they started noticing something about the calls that they were making.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the people they were chasing down, those with all this unpaid debt, were not deadbeats.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: They were patients who just couldn't afford the bill.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: So they quit collecting the debt and they started buying it instead.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: On the same market debt collectors use, they bought this debt for pennies on the dollar, except when they bought it, they didn't go and collect it.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: They forgave it.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: No calls, no catch.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: The person just got a letter in a thin yellow nothing owed.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: By the time this had been running for a few years, it had wiped out billions of dollars in medical debt for people who had no way of paying it back.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it all started with two guys who used to just see numbers on a screen, spreadsheets.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: And they started instead to see people behind the numbers.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: This reading, this parable could lead us down the path of blind idealism, unrealistic economies, and even transactional forgiveness, which is occasionally how this parable is presented.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: But it's worth noting how Jesus introduces the parable.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: He says, This is how the kingdom of heaven can look.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: The Jesus of Matthew's gospel seems particularly focused on how it is that we live together in our communities.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: Matthew's book does not ignore spiritual matters or issues of salvation, of course, but Matthew's Jesus has a lot to say about how we live with each other, how we encounter diverse people.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's as if Jesus seems more concerned with how we live and how we care for our neighbors than he is about our salvation.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: Which makes some sense.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: That was what Jesus did.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: So what comes next?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's that call to live well together.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: Seeing the humanity and others, finding those places of poverty and hunger and unrest, and showing up not just with handouts, but with concrete ways of fostering human dignity and decency.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus was just as concerned about God's kingdom being present here in this place as he was in heaven.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: So this reading is not about some future world of blind forgiveness.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's the way of life we're called into today.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that way of compassion will work.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: The path to living peaceably together is not some fantasy.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: It may just mean remembering that other people may be more important than ourselves, that everyone has a story to tell, people to love, the dreams to pursue, if only given the opportunity.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: You don't always have to do the math.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: Give us to day our daily bread, forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us, save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's quite something to know that each and every day God looks at us, each one of us, and says, You're mine.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: I love you.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: What would it look like if we saw each other with the same compassion?
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: That is the blessing this week.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: We are free from counting and grudge holding, and blessed to see God in the faces of others.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: Paul Lutheran Church.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: Our commitment to endeavors that lend hope to other people stretches across the country and around the world.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: We hope that in a good way you feel a part of that reach.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: Tune in next Thursday for another edition of the St.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Paul Podcast.