“I’ve often kidded folks that when you start working with people, the first rule that you live with is, ‘People are weird.’ We are all weird, we are all funny combinations of funny stuff. So, what’s that mean for us? How do you love people that are different in a weird sort of way? Well, you just try to help them, wherever they are.” – Dick Leon

Since I am on a business trip to the East Coast of the US this week, I thought I’d make my writing really easy and publish a sermon from my father. Mary from the beautiful Awakening Wonders blog puzzled over how he used his humor in sermons. So, for all of you who love my dad’s Sunday Funnies, here’s a sermon he delivered about 10 years after he retired about forgiveness that is one of my (and his) favorites.

It’s long (about 2,800 words) but it starts with some children sermons humor, wanders through some American Idol (I had no idea my dad even knew about that show) and ends with what my dad called his weekly theological journal – Sports Illustrated. I can hear his voice delivering it as I read it – and the delight and enthusiasm he brought to everything he did. Perhaps you can too.

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Death of the Bookkeeper

By Richard H. Leon

Delivered 6/20/2010 at Bellevue Presbyterian Church

Thank you, too, for your thoughtful questions about how Carolyn and I are doing these days.  We are getting older every day, as you’ve observed already, but we are getting on very well anyway, thank you.  I was a bit shaken this week, however, when I got a letter promoting a “pre-paid cremation!”  I guess they didn’t trust that the bill would be paid afterwards!!  It added, “Hurry, before it’s too late” also!  You can add that to your list of “You know you are getting old whens …”

Scott has asked that I begin this series on “Encounters with Jesus;”  what happens when we meet him and open our lives to him?  So, I’d like to talk with you about God.   That should be no surprise!  It is like the children’s sermon that started out with a question to the kids, “What is grey and furry and has a long bushy tail and runs around the back yard?”  Johnny raised his hand and said, “Jesus.”    The pastor asked him how he came to that answer and he said, “I know you’ve described a squirrel but sooner or later you are going to get to Jesus!”  So, sooner or later I’m going to get to God this morning, so let’s get to it.

Specifically, I want to test you on what your basic image of God is like.  Is it a great grandfather in the sky?  Is it a cloudy nebulous in the universe?  Is it a black woman as the book, THE SHACK, portrays?  Maybe is it a stern judge holding us all accountable for our follies?  Or a straight talking judge like Judge Judy?  I think, bottom line, many of us still hold a view that God is like a bookkeeper in heaven who is keeping track of all our thoughts and deeds for the day of final accounting. 

Well, whatever it is, Jesus has another teaching for us.  Let’s see what scripture says.  Here, by the way, is a good way to read your Bible.  I have found that almost all scripture carries a point of TENSION and a point of SURPRISE.  Think of it.  The Bible is God’s word to us; it comes to us from beyond, outside our way of thinking and knowing.  Therefore, it should produce some tension when we look at ourselves, and it should also produce a surprise when it tells us about God. 

Our text today falls into a neat little three-act drama, one long act and then two little ones.

Act I ~ The Bookkeeper Dies

Our text begins with Peter asking Jesus a question about forgiveness.  He wonders how many times should we forgive those in the church!  On the one hand, we might want to give Peter a small cheer because he is beginning to get it.  He suggests maybe we should forgive someone 7 times, and then that’s it.  No more. In the Old Testament we read from Amos that we should forgive someone three times.  So Peter has doubled that and added one more for good measure.  Not bad!  But,not good enough.  Jesus tells him it should be 77 times!  Wow!  77 times, who can count that high?  Aha, just the point!!   Don’t count like a bookkeeper!  I like this bookkeeping image and want to credit an Anglican author, Robert Capon, for using it first. 

So, to make this more clear and to give the reason for this dramatic shift in the way we relate with others, Jesus tells the story of a king who was playing bookkeeper with his accounts and came upon a slave who owed him so much he could never ever pay it all back.  Notice: Jesus tells us that this is what the kingdom of heaven is like!  One talent equaled 15 years wages for a slave.  10,000 talents … well, you do the math, it is beyond my math skills!!  Jesus is clearly exaggerating for a reason.  This is a huge debt for anyone, let alone a slave.   The king, quite justly please note, ordered him to prison.

Here is the major TENSION of the text for you and me.  If we are going to identify with anyone in the story, it must be this slave.  And so Jesus is telling us all: we owe God more than we could ever pay!

Do you believe that?  Really?  Are we all that bad off?  This is not a happy thought!  I think we resist this idea with all our energies.  Besides, we live in a society that makes this hard to believe.  The title of a recent book called The Narcissism Epidemic says it all.  The authors document how our culture feeds excessive self-love and self-centeredness.  One of the ways we do this is with our excessive praise of what others do.  I am as guilty of this as the rest of you.  I want my kids and grandkids to feel good about themselves and to have good self-esteem, but I wonder if we have gone too far and have fostered excessive self-love.  The authors describe where narcissism comes from and their first chapter is called “Parenting: Raising Royalty.”  The authors comment on this over-praising by saying, “Thinking you are great when you actually stink is a recipe for narcissism!”

Reality TV is a good example of this cultural encouragement to excessive self-love. 

Such as,  American Idol which tells all these thousands of people they are “awesome” and could be the next Idol?  Friends and family must encourage people with little or no talent into thinking they are really good.  And then they run into the reality-therapy of Simon Cowell and that is the end of their run!

I think the tension between Jesus’ words here and our own self-appraisal rests on what we are using as our measure.  If we measure our marital fidelity by the standards of Tiger Woods, hey, we are doing quite well!  At least I hope so!!  There are a lot more bad people out there that we read about every day in the news who make our little foibles look like no account at all!  We aren’t bombing wedding parties or burning schools for girls like the Taliban, we aren’t killing cops, we aren’t running Ponzi schemes, we didn’t spill all that oil!  Besides, we are looking pretty cool this morning and we are actually in church.  Doesn’t that count for something?  Can’t we be judged on the curve?

But, when we use the measure that Jesus used, we might come up with a different answer.  His answer to the rich young ruler was to keep the Commandments of God.  Jesus wants to bring the transcendent relationship with God, not just the relative comparison with others.  We all know the Commandments, I’m sure.  There are only 10 of them, right?  Four point God-ward and you can probably tell me what they are.  No other gods, no idols, don’t abuse his name and keep the Sabbath as a day of rest?  Anyone pass on all of these?  Anyone pass on any of these?

The next six don’t make it any easier.  Honor your parents, don’t commit adultery, don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness and don’t covet your neighbor’s Lexus!  How are you doing?  I actually thought I was doing pretty well on a couple of these … like adultery and murder … until I saw what Jesus did with these.  He gets to the spirit behind them, so for adultery he asks if we ever look at another with lust, and for murder he asks if we ever harbor hate towards someone?  Whoops!  The spirit of the Commandments put us all in jeopardy.  John’s first letter pretty well sums it up for us: “If you say you have no sin, you only deceive yourself and the truth is not in you.”  

Our problem is we want to be measured on the curve, on the horizontal, and we feel pretty good because we can find a lot of people who are doing a lot worse!  God sees it differently. The great Russian author, Dostoyevsky, in his classic work, The Brothers Karamazov, puts it most succinctly several times throughout the book.  This may be his main point, or at least one of them, and it is a quote Carolyn and I have posted in our house:  “When transcendence disappears, everything is permissible.”

As a side note here, if you are feeling some tension between what Jesus is saying and what our culture teaches us to think about ourselves, how do you think I feel telling you this?  I am constitutionally structured to want people to like me.  When I graduated from High School all the seniors put their life goal in the yearbook; mine was “to have no enemies!”  And now I’m saying what none of us want to hear: that we owe God more than we can ever pay!  Is that a good idea?  It is even funnier than that.  I have a muscle condition that is being treated with prednisone and one of the side effects of prednisone is thin skin.  So we have a people-pleasing preacher with thin skin telling all of you exactly what you don’t want to hear!!

Nevertheless, as uncomfortable as this makes me feel, I think I need to say it here because this is what Jesus’ parable teaches us.   The church’s first job is to speak the truth about us and about God.  I do believe anything less than this brutal assessment of ourselves is simply a wishful fantasy.  Jesus gives us “Christian Realism.”  Actually, the good news about God that follows is only good when we know that the bad news about ourselves is real!

Here comes the central SURPRISE of the text. The story continues with the slave making an impassioned plea and in it I think gives us a clue to one of the puzzles of this whole parable.  “Have patience, he pleads, and I will pay you back in full!”  Really?  In full?  The size of the debt amounts to more than he could count let alone pay!  Now, listen to the king’s response.

Surprise: the king forgives him for everything!  This guy asked for patience and he got mercy!  Deep debt is met by deeper grace.  This is huge in any day, but it was more huge in that day when primitive justice called for revenge.  Revenge was the strong virtue of the day.  When anyone did you harm, you made sure you harmed them back!  Sadly, we have many “primitives” with us today who call for raw justice and revenge when any offense occurs!

Remember, Jesus is talking about the kingdom of heaven and he tells us that this is a king of a different kind whose world order is run on mercy not revenge.  Here is the Great Gospel Claim: The Bookkeeper king is dead, and a new grace-giving, mercy-giving King is now in charge. 

This is no fairy tale or movie fantasy.  We all know that this is rooted in the historical event of the cross.  Jesus died there to tell us bookkeeping is dead and to proclaim even more loudly and clearly to the world that the God who made us has come, not to condemn u,s but to save us because he loves us! 

A number of years ago I put together a little saying that I think helps us to remember this remarkable and surprising truth about God.  It goes like this:

Thank God, God’s Not, Just Just!

If God were only just, we would all be toast.  But the good news of the gospel needs to rise above all other views of God that might be working in our heads: he is not the stern judge, or the straight-shooting Judge Judy, he is the gracious king.  He is not a bookkeeper counting all our failings or holding our huge debt up against us; he is the merciful one who says to us: you are forgiven because my son’s death ended my bookkeeping and his resurrection announces to the world that grace now abounds and will persevere to the end of time and beyond! 

That ends the first act.  Even though we might think this is the whole gospel, Jesus has something more for us.  It is the start of God’s work in us, but not the end.

Act II ~ The Debtor Remains a Bookkeeper

This next act is a bit puzzling.  Having been forgiven so much, our debtor goes out and holds someone who owed him but a pittance to the full penalty of the law.  This is not good.  And if we are to identify with this debtor who has been forgiven, we may need to look at ourselves to see if this fits too.

This guy is a real jerk and deserves heckling, trash talking, and a huge round of hissing and booing.  How do we understand this strange behavior?  Well, here is my theory:  I don’t think he ever got it.  I don’t think he ever realized the enormity of his debt to the king.  Didn’t he say he would pay it all back?  How could he, it was more than he could ever pay.  He never got it that he owed more than he could pay!

If I’m right, then this is the crucial lesson: We forgive best when we know the enormity of our being forgiven!  Bookkeeping does die hard in us, doesn’t it!  But, if I’m right here, the very thing we don’t want to hear or believe (the size of our debt) is the very thing that helps us stop being bookkeepers in our life!  This may be a second surprise of this text: that the truth about ourselves we all avoid is the truth that sets us free to be forgiving people just as God is a forgiving God!  It is not simply a “nice thing” to follow the wisdom of Psalm 103: “Forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity …”  it is life changing! 

Act III ~ Bookkeeping Must Die Too

This opens the third act.  Nothing is secret in the villages of Jesus’ day.  The crowd knew the slave had been forgiven big time and they expected something big from him.  Then they see how he treated  another slave who owed him a couple of bucks.  So they tell the king what happened and the king calls him in and sends him away.  Notice what the king now calls his slave: “wicked.”  He was not wicked for amassing the debt or for pleading for patience, but he is wicked for still being a bookkeeper!

Jesus gives us the theology of why we should forgive those who owe us anything: “Should not you have had mercy on your fellow slave as I have had mercy on you?”  Our forgiving others is not a condition for God forgiving us, but is surely should be a consequence.  This is always the gospel sequence ~ first God touches us with his mercy and then we become merciful people.  

There is a bonus lesson in this story for us and I think it goes like this: “It is forgiveness that transforms us and our world.”  Keeping score of others’ debts to us, holding others accountable, paying them back with equal pain, taking revenge on our enemies, all those tactics in life only perpetuate the troubles of the world or the troubles in our lives. 

If there were time I could name how nations have been changed by the powerful use of forgiveness for past injustices: Australia’s apology to Aboriginals, England’s apology just this week for Bloody Sunday in Ireland, the Pope’s apology to Jews for not standing up to Nazi camps,  Canada’s apology for the Lost Children of Native Americans, America’s apology in 1988 for the Japanese internment camps and, the most powerful of all, what Nelson Mandela did in South Africa.   God, the once-Bookkeeper and the now-Grace-giver has shown us the way.  Forgiveness transforms history as well as our personal lives!

I was reading my weekly theological journal the other day, Sports Illustrated, and it carried the great story about James Joyce, not the author but the baseball umpire who stole Galaragga’s perfect game by blowing the call at first base for what should have been the last out of the game!  But here is the best part of the story.  Joyce looked at the tape, saw he was wrong, apologized and asked to be forgiven!  Have you ever known an umpire or referee to do that?  So the next night when he walked on the field for the next game, he was given a standing ovation by the home fans in Detroit and Galaragga himself came up to give him the lineup at home plate as a public gesture of his forgiveness! 

Friends, here are two transforming lessons that emerge when we encounter Jesus:

~ the great Bookkeeper in heaven is Dead, the grace-giving God is Alive and he forgives us,    so if you have not accepted his forgiving grace yet,  Iinviteyouto do it today!

~ when we understand the enormity of our debt that is forgiven, then we are able to let our Bookkeeping die too, so if you are still playing the bookkeeper with others, I urge you to stop it now!   Amen.

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For anyone who’s interested in more about my dad, check out my book, Finding My Father’s Faith. It sounds like a religious book but really it is about getting to know my kind and gentle father as an adult. We talked and accepted that while we had religious differences, there was no reason not to talk about the deep and meaningful subjects in life, bringing us even closer.