Sermon on Matthew 18: 21-35 preached at Community of Christ in Whitehouse, Ohio on September 17, 2023
Whoa. There’s nothing like Sunday morning threats. This parable did not end well for the main character (and we always think of ourselves as the main character, right?)! OK Jesus, honestly, how can the kingdom of heaven be compared to this story? Shouldn’t it just be the first half? Can we stop listening after the compassionate part? Now Jesus is both the best and worst storyteller—his parables always have multiple meanings, multiple places to stand. You could turn this one over and over and see something different from every angle. Just try not to hit your head when he pushes you off kilter.
It seems to say, the point of being forgiven by one who has power over us, is that it would change how we live and especially respond to others. There is joy and “laugh out loud” freedom in having debt forgiven—literal monetary debt, or sins against each other, that burden your relationship. When the burden no longer defines you, it is no longer the first thing you think of when you wake in the morning, or what keeps you awake at night. To know that you are forgiven, that your future will no longer be determined by that crippling barrier, is a gift of abundant life, a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven. But listen, heaven—life in God’s presence—is not just for you. God’s people have been and always will be “blessed to be a blessing” from Abraham all the way down the lineage to you and me. It is our calling. All of us.
The design of the gospel is that when your life is changed by grace, you will become an agent of grace and change for others. The surprising joy will spread. God’s reach will spread through us. But that’s not always how we respond.
Like the forgiven person in this parable, we sometimes take that gift, and act like it is only personal. Like it benefits our lives, but nobody else’s. That puts a stop to the spread of God’s kingdom, God’s reach … so of course it makes “the lord” angry! Then we deserve the wrath of the powerful one who has forgiven us.
There was a German pastor and theologian in the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who named this shameful stopping of the flow of grace: “cheap grace”. Bonhoeffer wrote in his book The Cost of Discipleship:
“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
“Cheap” grace. Oof. Isn’t that adjective a gut punch? When we receive grace—undeserved gifts —but then do not become grace-givers, we are making the gifts of God—of great cost and sacrifice —“cheap,” worthy of being thrown away, disposable when it becomes inconvenient. We’re using the gospel as a sedative, instead of a freeing, animating force.
Knowing that we are forgiven is not an end. It is a means, to move us, to get us up on our feet and bringing the kingdom of heaven into the world around us. The kingdom of God is like when someone is forgiven, redeemed from deep and controlling debt, this must turn into a difference in how they respond to others!
Sometimes our response to others who owe us is about forgiveness and sometimes it is about justice, holding people accountable, like our fellow forgiven ones who are cheapening that costly grace. There are regularly points where I feel the Holy Spirit whispering in my ear, “Christian, go get your people. What they’re doing cannot be who we are in public.” Probably she whispers the same in somebody else’s ear about my actions sometimes.
The learning curve is steep here, so who do we learn from about how to give grace freely, but also not cheapen it by thwarting justice and failing to hold people accountable?
Back to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer’s understanding of cheap or costly grace didn’t spring out of nowhere. Key parts of his theology began to develop during a time in the 1930s when he worshiped with the folks of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, while he was at Union Seminary in New York City. His peers at the seminary, in many instances, seemed to him unserious, uninvested in the difference Jesus made in real people’s lives. Bonhoeffer was invited and started worshiping among the African-American Christ followers in Harlem, and it changed him forever. What he heard there from Pastor Adam Clayton Powell Sr. about what it means to follow Jesus when your people are systematically oppressed, was formative. Bonhoeffer carried it with him as he became a key part of the Confessing Church in Germany under the Third Reich, taking the seminary that resisted underground and on the move as they were targeted by Hitler. He turned down multiple opportunities to escape personally to safety, in order to be with those who needed hope, in the midst of the horrors of that regime. If you are not willing to be with those who suffer, he believed, what is the point of Christian faith? He let the grace of God he knew deep within himself, direct his entire life. That’s the cost of discipleship, of actually following in Jesus’ footsteps.
We strive to follow Jesus not just by receiving his forgiveness, but by becoming the distribution network for love and justice. If this parable makes the kingdom of heaven sound extreme, that’s because the world we live in is extreme, and we need to be prepared to live boldly in the midst of it. God help us.
Lee Ann M. Pomrenke 