What You Owe
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19 The angel of God who was going before the Israelite army moved and went behind them, and the pillar of cloud moved from in front of them and took its place behind them. 20 It came between the army of Egypt and the army of Israel. And so the cloud was there with the darkness, and it lit up the night; one did not come near the other all night.
21 Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea. The Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and turned the sea into dry land, and the waters were divided. 22 The Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left. 23 The Egyptians pursued and went into the sea after them, all of Pharaoh’s horses, chariots, and chariot drivers. 24 At the morning watch the Lord, in the pillar of fire and cloud, looked down on the Egyptian army and threw the Egyptian army into a panic. 25 He clogged[a] their chariot wheels so that they turned with difficulty. The Egyptians said, “Let us flee from the Israelites, for the Lord is fighting for them against Egypt.”
The Pursuers Drowned
26 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand over the sea, so that the water may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots and chariot drivers.” 27 So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and at dawn the sea returned to its normal depth. As the Egyptians fled before it, the Lord tossed the Egyptians into the sea. 28 The waters returned and covered the chariots and the chariot drivers, the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not one of them remained. 29 But the Israelites walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left.
30 Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. 31 Israel saw the great work that the Lord did against the Egyptians. So the people feared the Lord and believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses.
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Forgiveness
21 Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” 22 Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven[a] times.
The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant
23 “For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. 24 When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him, 25 and, as he could not pay, the lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions and payment to be made. 26 So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ 27 And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. 28 But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him by the throat he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ 29 Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ 30 But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. 31 When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. 32 Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. 33 Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ 34 And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. 35 So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
What do you owe?
It’s a question that I’m sure many of us spend a lot of time and energy and emotion and maybe, perhaps, a sleepless night or two pondering.
What do you owe?
We ordinarily hear that question in terms of personal finance. What bills are still outstanding at the end of the month? What debts are still up in the air? But we know it’s a question that’s bigger than any one kitchen table. As the old joke goes, if you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank. David Graeber famously argues that debt and obligation are among the oldest organizing realities of human society. Long before credit scores and mortgage payments, human beings were already asking who owes what to whom. Because we all owe someone something.
We have always owed someone something.
It is, in a sense, the fabric of our social and political reality. It’s why, as ridiculous as the sums of money are, this parable of Jesus might be among the easiest for us to wrap our heads around in our own day and age. The world that Jesus paints a picture of looks an awful lot like the world that we still live in today. It’s a world of accounts and balances. Debts and repayments. But as familiar as that world is to us, I find that the question Jesus uses it to ask us is still all the more surprising. What does an encounter with the magnitude of God demand from us afterwards?
There are encounters with God whose magnitude is so great that life cannot simply continue as though nothing happened. We see that happen in both of our stories this morning. One man has an impossible debt erased and one people watches an impossible road open through the sea. Both encounter something beyond calculation, and both have to decide, whether consciously or not, what kind of people they will be on the other side of it.
Jesus begins with a king who wants to settle accounts. And there’s one account with an absolutely absurd balance. Other times when I’d preach on this text, this is right around the time I’d wheel out the old abacus and do a song and dance to show just how much this debt would come out to in today’s US Dollars. You know, a whole lot of carry the one here, divide by seven there sort of thing. But all that kind of misses the point. Ten thousand talents is equivalent to seventy bazillion dollars. It’s a made up number, larger than you or I or any macroeconomics professor could ever wrap our heads around. It’s not that this servant is just badly overextended. The point is that repayment is literally impossible. (Kind of like the student loans my spouse and I have.)
His master asks for an accounting, and the servant responds according to the only world he has ever known. Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.
The hell you will!
That’s what makes this scene comedic. He still imagines that this can somehow be resolved through better bookkeeping. That given enough time and enough work and enough austerity, somehow the books can balance. But one doesn’t need to be a CPA to look at that balance sheet and see that debt is never being repaid. And so the master does something the servant just can’t imagine. He doesn’t restructure or refinance the debt. He doesn’t extend the payment schedule or reduce the interest rate. Instead, he releases him. He forgives the debt. That seventy bazillion dollar ledger is simply no longer the governing reality between them. An encounter with magnitude.
And then he goes outside. And who does he encounter? Not a king, but a fellow servant. Not someone towering over him, but someone alongside him. Someone who happens to owe him a debt. A real debt, yes. A consequential debt, absolutely. But unlike his debt to the master, this debt is comprehensible. It’s substantial, but finite. And, given enough time, it can actually be repaid. But we know that’s not what happens. Instead, his old world comes roaring back. He grabs him, demands repayment, and has him imprisoned. In spite of everything that just happened to him, he still sees his fellow human being as nothing more than an entry on a ledger. A chart of accounts waiting to be reconciled. A debt to be collected.
The magnitude of mercy he encountered changed his account, but it has not changed his heart, and that turns what was a comedy into a tragedy.
Because that seventy bazillion dollar debt should have already ceased to govern his life. He had been released from that world, but he walked right back into it. And even though he received a mercy beyond calculation, he continued calculating everyone else. He was free, but he was incapable of living like a free person.
Measure that against the Israelites in our Exodus story. Because they are beginning to know something about learning to live like a free people. Remember, they had spent generations reduced to entries on Pharaoh’s ledger. Their bodies had been nothing more than productive assets. Their future had been treated as demographic threats. Labor measured not in shared flourishing, but bricks. That’s how Pharaoh’s economy works. An entire system that depends upon reducing human lives and all the beautiful messiness they entail to what can be extracted from them. And God, finally—blessedly—brings them out. Through Moses, God performs mighty wonders time and time again that show just how limited—just how finite—the scope of Pharaoh’s power really is. Pharaoh’s claim to ultimate control is exposed as mere artifice, an illusion compared to the magnitude of the Eternal One.
But Pharaoh and his military machine make one final attempt to drag them back into the world they escaped. One final stand to preserve the myth that Pharaoh’s might is right and his economy is good. And where there is no viable path—where there is no reasonable or measured or comprehensible way forward—God makes one. The winds, like they did as they hovered over those ancient, primordial chaos waters of creation, blow. The waters separate. And in its place, land—dry, steady land—where it has no business appearing. A recapitulation of that old poem all the way back from Genesis 1. Cosmic in scope and scale and, at once, profoundly close and immanent. And Israel is, at last, able to pass through. Israel is, at last, free.
And all of Pharaoh’s horses and all of Pharaoh’s men—his entire military machine through which the people of God have been subjugated and exploited and extracted and dehumanized—the technology of his imperial power is swallowed up by those same waters. Because God is faithful and Pharaoh is not. Because God is Lord and Pharaoh is not. Because God is God and Pharaoh is not. But God’s people pass through on dry land. And what do these people do when they have seen something like that? What do these people do when they have experienced something like that?
They sing.
God is my strength and might, and has become my deliverance.
This is my God whom I will enshrine; the God of my parents, whom I will exalt.
They sing. They sing a song that is among the oldest and most ancient extant pieces of text preserved in our entire scriptural witness.
Who is like You, O Eternal One, among the celestials?
Who is like You, majestic in holiness?
A song that has been passed down from generation to generation as memory becoming worship. They sing!
Sing to God who has triumphed gloriously;
Horse and driver have been hurled into the sea.
Israel preserves this story of liberation by singing it, and soon, they will discover that remembering liberation means living like a people whose shared life bears the marks of the God who liberates. And so they begin to learn how to live like free people. Not perfectly and not all at once, but slowly and steadily and sometimes in a roundabout fashion, their lives start to bear those marks.
That’s the difference between our two stories this morning.
Two stories that show us two encounters of the magnitude of God. One servant who resists, holding on to the world from which he had been freed. And a people that walk on dry land, singing songs of praise and thanksgiving that form them into a people that learns what it means to be free. And that’s something that we United Methodists should know a thing or two about. We are, at our core, a people who dare to give ourselves over to that reflexive response to the magnitude of God. We dare to believe that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, our hearts and lives can be formed over time into perfect love of God and neighbor. Not as repayment. Seventy bazillion dollars can never be repaid. We don’t forgive because we can somehow ever pay God back for our forgiveness. We don’t serve because we owe God enough volunteer hours. And we don’t love our neighbors because we think salvation has merely transferred our account from one creditor to another.
Grace destroys that logic. The power of the Holy Spirit destroys that logic. Instead, grace that has been received becomes grace that is embodied.
We have been forgiven, so we forgive.
We have been liberated, so we liberate.
We have been loved, so we love.
We have received, and so we give.
This. This is what holiness of heart and life looks like. Holiness of heart and life is our reflexive response to the magnitude of God. It’s what happens when the grace that changes our account also begins to change our heart, our habits, our relationships, and our life together. It’s not a transaction with God, but a life transformed by God.
The question has never been whether God’s mercy is large enough—we know that it is. The question is whether we will allow God’s mercy to make us large enough to live inside of it.
So, United Methodists of Fairport, what do you owe?
Not ten thousand talents and not seventy gazillion dollars. Not repayment for grace or enough goodness to ever settle your account with God. No. You each owe the world the person God’s grace is making you into. You owe a life responsive to grace. Holiness of heart and life, perfect love of God overflowing into perfect love of neighbor. Because an encounter with the magnitude of God ought to leave something behind in us. A people more merciful because we have received mercy. More committed to freedom because we have been set free. And more capable of love because we have discovered ourselves already loved.
A servant walked away forgiven and kept counting. But Israel came through the sea and sang.
We, too, have encountered magnitude beyond calculation. May our lives show that we know what happened to us.
May the one who began a good work be faithful to complete it in us. The work continues. Amen.