We Come Home, Again
A sermon preached by the Rev. Wallace Adams Riley
Rector, St. Paul's Episcopal Church
on Sunday, September 11, 2011 - The 13th Sunday after Pentecost
(Homecoming Sunday at St. Paul's and ten years after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001)
Dear God, take my lips, and speak through them;
take our minds, and think through them;
take our hearts,
and do with them
what only you can do.
Amen.
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Sometimes, even quite often, we lose perspective.
We lose our bearings.
Ten thousand talents? I mean, that sounds like a lot.
But, then again, so does a thousand talents.
Or a hundred, for that matter.
So, when Jesus speaks of a debt of 10,000 talents owed to a king, what does that really amount to?
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Well, it’s estimated that mean ol’ King Herod collected something like 900 talents a year, in total, from all the territories over which he ruled. And that, in turn, 10,000 talents (the amount owed by the slave in this parable) that 10,000 talents would surpass all the taxes collected in all of Judea, Samaria, Phoenicia, and Syria.
In other words, when the king forgives the slave, the seemingly unforgivable is forgiven.
That’s what, Jesus says, that’s what the kingdom of God is like.
The seemingly unforgivable is forgiven.
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Yesterday I shared, with a few folks, a poem that my wife Gena wrote;
and I’d like to share it with you now.
Written in the days just after September 11th, the poem was born of Gena’s experience of driving north on Interstate 395, approaching Washington D.C., when the unimaginable happened:
I accelerate;
move left, the fast lane,
tune in my lifeline, NPR—
Terrorists
Attack
New York City
American Airlines
Towers.
What’s this about?
I hear it,
then see it play out before me—
silver capsule
red letters
darting through the sky,
too fast, too low, the wrong way,
sharply veering.
Metal meets concrete,
strikes without warning.
The nightmare of a soldier-
a burst of orange,
cloud of black
gray is swallowed.
A mighty wound,
gaping hollowness
cannot be touched.
Steel, rubber, metal,
grind to a halt.
I’m not alone,
they see it, too.
Hands clutch shaking heads,
people bewildered,
stopped in a place we do not belong.
I stand in the roadway,
reaching.
My heart floods with tears,
my eyes are dry.
I shake with coldness,
my stomach burns.
I circle my car,
there is no safety in this place.
You are with them,
whoever they are,
I cannot know them,
they are gone.
Nameless to me—
mothers
fathers
children
sisters
brothers
lovers.
You call them by name;
call them by name!
Have mercy,
deliver them from evil.
They are dust,
to dust they return.
Give me a balm
to heal my sinsick heart.
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To think back on that day brings to the surface of memory an impossibly bright-blue September sky,
and then, and then, a mélange of images, images we would forget, if we only could.
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It still is hard to believe that it actually happened, something so horrific,
something so inhumane. And yet it did. And yet it did.
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As Craig Kocher, the Chaplain at U of R, wrote in yesterday’s Richmond Times Dispatch,
That weekend, the places of worship in this country filled with Christians, Jews, Muslims and others reconnecting with their most sacred beliefs, finding solace in prayers and liturgy, offering the best of themselves and their traditions. It was a beautiful, rich sacrifice of praise in stark contrast to the thin veneer of disfigured religiosity the hijackers used to justify mass murder.
That weekend, and even before that weekend, places of worship did indeed fill, places like St. Paul’s Church.
We and countless Americans, and people from all around the world of all faiths gathered in houses of worship, seeking there, seeking here, what no terrorist could take away, seeking what no one and no thing could take away, seeking, in the words of St. Paul, what “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,”[1] can take from us.
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And, indeed, we come here, on this day, ten years later, on this Homecoming Sunday, seeking the same;
seeking the Source, the Source of all we need; the One from whom all blessing flow.
We come here, we come home, because, if left to our own devices, we are like the slave who has been forgiven the 10,000 talents.
If left merely to our own human nature, it is just too easy for us to harbor wrongs, and to let those wrongs embitter us, and, in turn, poison our lives.
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As Desmond Tutu has said, “Without forgiveness, there is no future.”
Without forgiveness, there is no future.
Of course, “forgiveness is not forgetting,” the archbishop reminds us. Nor is it to disregard the seriousness of wrongs committed.
Forgiving is far more serious than either of those alternatives.
“Forgiving,” says the archbishop, “Forgiving means abandoning your right to pay the perpetrator in his own coin, but it is a loss a loss that liberates the victim.”
Yes, it is the one who forgives, the archbishop reminds us, it is the one who forgives who is set free in the act of forgiveness, set free from the death spiral of hard-heartedness and score-settling; set free from the bondage of unforgiveness, set free to live, to truly live as God intends, to live lives characterized by hope, generosity, and compassion.
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And, as the old saying goes, “We love because [God] first loved us.”[2]
Likewise, we forgive because God first forgives us.
Just as God, in Christ, shows us what love is, so God, in Christ, shows us what forgiveness is.
Shows us, and empowers us to forgive.
Empowers us.
Yes, just as the slave in Jesus’ parable was empowered, to forgive, so are we.
Empowered to forgive even the seemingly unforgivable.
This is what happens when we accept God’s radical forgiveness of us.
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We forgive. We forgive, for our own sake, and, for the sake of the world.
There is nothing the world needs more than forgiveness.
And there’s nothing we need more either.
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And so we come home.
We come home, again. And again, and again, and again.
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To get perspective; to get our bearings.
To be refreshed.
To get back in touch with our true selves.
And to return to the Source, to return to the One who gives us what no one and no thing can ever take from us
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Welcome home.
Welcome home, where the King is ready, ready to forgive all our debts.
