Hilton Head Island, SC – June 9, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 18:15-22; Matthew 18:23-35
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - "Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." (Amended) - Matthew 6:11-12
You wouldn't think that prayer would ever have any kind of a bite in it, especially a prayer that Jesus taught his followers. However, in the Lord's Prayer, and in these two phrases, there is a very distinct note of warning. "Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us": if we think through what those statements mean, we should come away from honestly praying them as more sober and circumspect people.
I. GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD
You may ask, "What is biting in the statement, 'Give us this day our daily bread'?" It certainly sounds innocuous enough. But behind that brief request there is a supposition, which is that we should never ask God to grant us more than is needed for our daily survival. In other words, we ought not to ask God for more than the minimum which is required to keep us alive, if we even ask Him for that. Those who have sufficient food to sustain them should never petition the Almighty One of Israel for filet mignon or Beluga caviar or baked Alaska; "daily bread," the mere necessities, are all we should ever request.
Jesus is telling us that we should limit our petitions to God, that we should never ask for more than we truly need. Everyone needs food, but no one needs four thousand calories a day. Everyone needs shelter, but it is a mistake to try to talk God into the four bedroom - four bath - three car garage - swimming pool - marsh view - 3400 square foot domicile we may always have wanted rather than the four-meager-walls-and-a-roof domicile we need. Were Jesus to put the Lord's Prayer into the vernacular of the present, He might say, "Ask God for what you need, but beware of pestering Him for all the materialistic whims upon which your cockamamie consumer culture is based."
Then too there is a warning for people such as ourselves when we pray the Lord's Prayer, because if we ask God for enough daily bread, we also should be concerned that others around us have enough as well. To request bread for ourselves and to ignore others is to miss the point of why we should ask for bread in the first place. We need food not simply to sustain ourselves, but to sustain us for what we are called by God to do, and that is to give ourselves away to others.
Years ago Desmond Tutu, the Black South African Anglican bishop who won the Nobel Peace Prize, addressed the board of trustees of the Carnegie Corporation in New York. He said, "I have seen a great deal of poverty and squalor in my time, having travelled a few places on the globe. I have seen people, rags of humanity, scavenging on rubbish dumps in Calcutta. And yet, I was never as shocked by poverty as when I saw someone searching for food in an overflowing trash container in New York. Perhaps I was naive. But that spectacle staggered me more than anything I had seen elsewhere. You see, you have the largest economy. You are the superpower par excellence.... Western capitalism has produced a great deal of wealth and prosperity, but have we computed the cost? Has it not perhaps been a Pyrrhic victory with countless casualties in the unemployed, the homeless, and the poor?"
When we ask God for food, we should ask only for enough, and if we have more than enough, which practically everyone in this congregation has, we ought to be as concerned for those whose need is greater than ours as we are for our own needs. That is the "flip side," the reverse meaning, of "Give us this day our daily bread."
II. AND FORGIVE US OUR SINS AS WE FORGIVE THOSE WHO SIN AGAINST US
The traditional recitation of the Lord's Prayer either says, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” or "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." In contemporary American English, the first sounds like we might be going onto land or property where we shouldn’t go, and the second sounds like it has something to do with loans and their repayment. So in The Chapel Without Walls, we say, "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us."
But just what does it mean to say, "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us"? Here again, we have a prayer with a warning. Jesus is implicitly telling His followers, "Don't ask God to forgive your sins if you are unwilling to forgive the sins of others against you." To pray this part of the Lord's Prayer is to ask God to forgive us our sins to the same degree that we forgive the sins of others. If we forgive everything, then we shall be forgiven everything. If we forgive little, we shall be forgiven little.
This was what was behind the things Jesus was telling the disciples in the passage of scripture which was read earlier. If somebody hurts you, try to work it out between yourselves. If that doesn't solve the problem, get a couple of other people to listen to the dispute so they may try to sort it out. If that doesn't work, take the matter to the whole church. And if that doesn't take care of it, treat your adversary as a Gentile or tax collector, Matthew says Jesus said. I seriously doubt that Jesus said the last two sentences, but that is only a personal opinion.
However, I can well imagine that Jesus answered Peter as Matthew records it. Peter wanted to know how often someone could sin against us before we could stop forgiving the person. "As many as seven times?" the Big Fisherman wondered. "No," said Jesus, "Not seven times, but seventy-seven times" (as the NRSV has it), or "seventy times seven" (as it says in the RSV).
Understand that this is not a literal mathematical formula: "All right, friend, that's the fourth time you have hurt me; you have seventy-three (or four-hundred-eighty-six) more to go before I let you have it. Let's see, you have undercut me fifty-seven times; twenty more and you're dog meat. Be warned, you have wronged me seventy-six times; once more and you're going to get a trombone jammed down your throat": no, it doesn't mean that.
What it means is this: the followers of Jesus, if they wish to do as he instructed them, should always forgive everyone everything. There ought never to be any limit to forgiveness. "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us" apparently means that God should forgive us only if we forgive others. If we do, He does; if we don't, He won't.
That's a pretty challenging prayer, isn't it? Anybody who prays the Lord's Prayer had better be prepared to forgive a whole bunch if he wants a whole bunch forgiven. That's a tall order, because sometimes all of us have some tall sins committed against us.
Following the interchange with Peter about how often we should forgive others, Jesus told the parable of the king who forgave debts that his subjects owed to him. He forgave everyone their debts to him, and many owed him a great deal of money all the way down to one man who owed the king very little. That man refused to forgive another man who owed him a mere hundred pennies. The king in the parable told his courtiers that they should throw the tight-fisted sinner into jail. My leftist liberal brain also finds it hard to imagine Jesus said that, but that’s what Matthew said he said.
Robert Karen wrote an article about shame in the Atlantic Magazine. He noted that the root meaning of shame is "to cover." Karen quoted therapist Carl Schneider who said that human beings are creatures who have a psychological and spiritual need for some sort of covering. Then the writer said that shame is "not just something to get over, which the Puritanical church or the rigid school system or Victorian society inflicted on you. If we're truly human and open, we're always at risk of exposure and therefore of violation by others."
What others do to us may be shameful, but what we do to others may be equally or even more shameful. We need to have our shame covered, to have it paved over, to have it obliterated.
"Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us" is a prayer asking God to cover over our shame to the same degree that we manage to cover the shame of others by our forgiveness of what they have done to us.
Recently I received an email from a fine, sensitive woman who has suffered a great injustice from two people who were very close to her. Understandably it has been exceedingly difficult for her to forgive them for what they have done. She began her email, "Forgiveness is such a difficult thing. It means not burying a hatchet, but destroying it." That's exactly the way forgiveness should work, isn't it? We can't just shove the sins of others against us out of sight; we have to try to annihilate those sins, to forgive them right out of existence. And that takes a huge amount of spiritual effort. When we pray "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us," we start the process by which that miracle of divine grace is worked out.
"Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us": did Jesus imply a connection between the two phrases? Are we to be granted the necessities of life by God to the degree that we grant forgiveness to others? Have adult children become less grateful than the adults in previous generations? Should parents therefore forgive their adult children, or should their children forgive their parents, or both? Can "quality time," that cliche-ed creation of the past forty years, become a worthy substitute for oodles of ordinary time in which not much happens other than the mere presence of family members with other family members? Does being there a humdrum lot matter more than being there a qualitative little?
Whatever and whoever else He is, God is a forgiving God. He stands ready at every moment to begin the process for both our sustenance in the provision of daily bread and our renewal in the transformation which is wrought by forgiveness. But our full forgiveness is contingent on our forgiveness of others for all the wrongs and slights they have caused us, or otherwise the miracle of forgiveness cannot work its complete transformation within us.
What a difference it makes when we pray, "Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us" --- and we really mean it!