Homily 653 – 11 APE
Holy Transfiguration, Ames, Iowa
August 24, 2025
Epistle:  (141) 1 Corinthians 9:2-12
Gospel:  (77) Matthew 18:23-35

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, One God.

You would think that being an accountant, I’d really know what to say about this lection from the Gospel.  It is about a king wanting to settle accounts with his slaves.  I’m all about settling accounts.

What we may need to think about, though, is that this is in many respects us.  All of us, and each of us.  We will all have to stand before God, and settle accounts.  That’s a bit of a daunting thought.

But this passage isn’t really about the last judgement nor about settling accounts.  It is a passage about forgiveness.  More than that, the passage tell us about our own forgiveness – that we owe a debt we cannot pay – but this passage tells us about that line in the Lord’s prayer:  Lord, forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

In some translations, it is “forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

Plenty of us really don’t understand the debt we owe to God.  Part of the problem is that we see debt as a contractual thing.  It’s something we have to agree to.  Except some debts are inherited.

We inherit the gift, and debt, of life.  We inherit fallen life.  That’s the debt – we cannot save ourselves, we cannot heal ourselves.  We have taken our gift, and we have destroyed it.

We took what God gave us, our connection with Him, and humanity said “no thanks, we’ll be on our own now.”

But God forgives.  God forgives us for taking what He gave and destroying it.  Why?  Because we beg for mercy.  We say to God we are so sorry for breaking what He gave us.  Please, God, we cry, be kind to us, and we will repay you.

But we can’t.  We simply can’t.  I’ve said this before, but a denarii was the wage for a laborer for a day.  At today’s minimum wage, about $60.  A talent was 6,000 days labor.  That’s 23 years.  And the man in the story owed 10,000 talents – so, 230,000 years. One talent is worth about $360,000 in today’s money.  10,000 talents is $3.6 billion – with a B – dollars.

This is only important because of the contrast.  Christ illustrates what it means for us to forgive our debtors.

The guy, freed from $3.8 billion in debt, finds one of his debtors, who owes him 100 denarii, about $6,000, and shows that man no mercy.

I probably don’t have to say here the parallels I see between our modern day, where corporations are bailed out for billions of dollars, yet people are forced into bankruptcy for medical debt of a few thousand.

And in our world, somehow, we’re OK with that.

Let’s go beyond dollars and transactions, though.  What is the value of humanity?  What is the dollar amount of human life?

When I was growing up Steve Austin was the $6 million dollar man.  He had parts of his body, mangled in a spacecraft accident, rebuilt with bionics.  The parts they put on him were valued in those days at $6 million dollars.  In today’s dollars that would be the $35 million dollar man.

But that is just the body parts.  What about the mind?  The thoughts?  What about the love?  Each person is someone’s child.  Each person is possibly someone’s spouse or parent or friend.  What is the value of that love?

Think back to Moses, and his mother.  Not many people, I imagine, know her name, nor the name of Moses’s father.  Both are not named in the book of Exodus.  His father is referred to as “a certain man from the tribe of Levi” and his mother “a daughter of Levi.”  Jewish traditions calles them Amram and Jochebed.  What is their value?  Without them, Moses would not have been born nor protected.

What’s the value of the Kentucky farmer whose son grew up to become the president of the United States who reunited a country and freed millions from bondage?

What is the value of a first-generation American, who spoke German at home, who was a saw blade sharpener at a lumber mill, whose daughter became the mother of my mother?

We speak at times of human rights – what we mean is the rights of every person who lives.  A parallel concept is that of human value – every person holds infinite value.  First and foremost because we are all unique.  There is only one of us.

In effect, when we ask what the value of a human is, we are asking “what is the value of God’s love – our Creator?”  What is the value of life?  Of thought?  That is what we owe God.  A debt we can never repay.  A service we owe to our creator.

What He asks of us instead is quite generous, actually.  Since we can’t repay Him, we are expected to forgive each other.  Stated in a positive way, I choose to love others as God loves me.  For who they are – not who they might become, or who they are when they are good.  God loves me, even though I am fallen, and far from perfect, and consistently selfish.  God’s love is unconditional.  And so – that is how I strive to love.  Unconditionally.  And I encourage all of us to love that way.

“But Father,” you may say.  “you don’t know what they said about me.”  Doesn’t matter.  You don’t know what they did to me.”  Doesn’t matter.  Love them anyway.  I’m the first to admit that sometimes all the love I can muster is to stay away from a person.

It’s OK to not engage with people who are trying to hurt us.  That may be the most loving thing we can do at that time.  Patiently, we can wait for time, circumstances, our own feelings – whatever it is – to subside, so that we can re-engage with those, seeking forgiveness if needed and offering forgiveness in any event.

Because as Christians, that is what we do.  We love – patiently, unconditionally, just as Christ loves us.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God.  Glory to Jesus Christ!