Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A (9-13-26)

Twenty-five years ago on a Tuesday morning that started out pretty ordinary, the world changed in the space of about ninety minutes. If you're old enough, you'll remember exactly where you were when you heard of the attacks on September 11th.

We've spent twenty-five years using a kind of vernacular to reflect on the horror of that morning, and "never forget" seems to ring clearest. It's carved into memorials and stamped on the sides of fire trucks — more of a commandment than an invitation.

And this week, of all weeks, Peter walks up to Jesus with a question about forgiveness. Which made me wonder: what does forgiveness actually demand of a people who have also spent twenty-five years insisting they will never forget?



Before we get there, though, keep one more thing in the back of your mind. We had a baptism that same morning. Water was poured over two children, and we said — out loud, in front of God and each other — that anything they will ever do has already been met with a mercy they did not earn.

Hold that image close.

Peter's question to Jesus comes out of him the way his questions usually do — overstated in hopes for an easier answer.

"Lord, how many times should I forgive someone who sins against me? As many as seven times?"

Most rabbis of his day would have said three, so Peter is really laying it on thick here; I assume in hopes of being told he's done well.

Instead, Jesus tells him he's asking the wrong kind of question altogether. Not seven, Jesus says, but seventy-seven — a number that, if we're being honest, is large enough to make counting all the times we forgive an awful lot of work. Which seems to be exactly the point — as if Jesus is telling Peter to stop treating forgiveness like an account that can be balanced.

And then, because Jesus rarely leaves a hard teaching to stand on its own, he tells a story to go with it.

A servant owes his king an amount of money so large it barely exists in the economy of the ancient world — ten thousand talents, more than the entire province could raise in taxes over years. It is, by design, an impossibly large debt to repay. And the king, astonishingly, simply lets it go. That same servant then walks out, finds a man who owes him what amounts to about a hundred dollars, and has him thrown into prison until he can pay it.

Word gets back to the king, and he's furious. He summons the servant back and hands him over to be tortured until he can repay a debt that was never repayable in the first place. Then Jesus adds a line that should stop us cold:

"So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart."

I don't think that line is as much about God's character as it is about how unforgiveness actually functions. When we refuse to forgive, it doesn't just fail to resolve anything — it hands us over. We build our own cell out of whatever we refuse to release, and then, one way or another, we move in. We're meant to wince at that line, because it's not the life God wants for us.

Here's where I think we get into trouble with forgiveness most Sundays: we talk about it as something soft and undefined — a feeling we're supposed to work our way into eventually, or a single decision we make once and never have to revisit. Dr. Gerry Breshears, whose writing on forgiveness I found myself returning to all week, is much more precise than that.¹

What forgiveness is not:

• It is not forgetfulness — holding a memory and offering forgiveness were never actually in competition, whatever we've absorbed from the culture around us.
• It is not a feeling — you are not required to wait around for some warm rush of goodwill toward the person who wronged you before you're permitted to forgive them, because feelings are unreliable narrators, and a person can forgive with their jaw still clenched tight.
• It does not mean inviting something or someone destructive or toxic back into your life — forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing, and forgiving someone is never the same as pretending a danger has passed when it clearly hasn't.
• And most annoyingly, it is not something that happens once, in a single tidy moment. More often it's something you find yourself doing again on a Tuesday, and then again the following Tuesday — and that returning isn't failure to forgive, it's simply what seventy-seven times looks like in real life.

What forgiveness is, by contrast, comes down to three things:

1. It's the act of handing back to God the work of justice — Paul says as much in Romans, urging us never to avenge ourselves but to leave room for God's judgment (Romans 12:19), which is really just another way of saying the accounting was never ours to keep.
2. It's a deliberate choice to do and wish good rather than evil toward the person who hurt us (Romans 12:20–21) — not because they've necessarily earned it, but because it's a decision more about who and how we intend to be. And when the anger comes back because they never apologized — that's what point one is for.
3. It's an unmerited gift — and it is holy because of that (Hebrews 12:14). Nobody qualifies for it by merit. It is inherently unfair in our human calculus — and that's by design.

Underneath all three of these sits the reason we bother with any of this: the goal of forgiveness is to become like Jesus, and — in some breathtakingly holy way — to be with Jesus, who, dying on a cross for a crime he didn't commit, said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

So let me bring this as close to home as I can, because Jesus doesn't leave this to theory, and I don't think we should either.

Is there a name that came to mind the moment I said the word forgiveness? A parent, an ex, a sibling, a former friend, a child, someone at work? I'm not asking so you'll feel guilty. Just to be honest.

Here's the charge. Whatever number you've been keeping on that person, you're invited to stop keeping it. Not because what happened was small. Not because it's safe to let them back into your life exactly as before. And not because you'll feel ready today, or even this year — some debts get forgiven again on a Tuesday, and again the Tuesday after that.

But you're invited, all the same, to close the account.

Because here's the part I don't want us to miss: the goal of forgiveness was never simply to let the other person off the hook.

It's to let you go.

From that cell — the one we build out of what we refuse to release — it turns out there's a door, one that was never locked from the outside. Real release, on the other side. Not because the hurt didn't happen, but because you were never meant to live there.

Which brings us back to the font. Water was poured over two children that morning, and we proclaimed that God's forgiveness and grace are available to them this day and forever more — not because they've earned it, but because that is simply who God is.

That's what baptism actually is, really: God preemptively canceling a debt, the same way the king in the story canceled one, before anyone had done a single thing to deserve it.

And if God can do that for a child at the font, God has already done it for you.

Which means you have exactly what you need to do it for the person you named earlier.

Not seven times, but seventy-seven.

Amen.

1. The framework above — what forgiveness is not, and the three-part account of what it is, tied to Romans 12:19–21 and Hebrews 12:14 — draws on the teaching of Dr. Gerry Breshears, Professor of Theology at Western Seminary (Portland), including his talk "The Impossible Work of Forgiveness".