Because We Belong

Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35

Why are you here?

 

Assuming you didn’t just fall into worship by accident – which is not impossible for the livestream - why did you make your way to the church website or the phone conference for this service? Why did you register ahead, put on your mask, and carefully enter the church this morning?

 

The answer that comes into your mind might have to do with people or music, communion or scripture, or things you’ve agreed to do to help make this service happen. But Paul and Matthew are unanimous in asserting today that there is only one right answer.

 

You’re here, I’m here – together, electronically and physically – we are here because we belong to the one Lord.

We do not live for ourselves, we do not die for ourselves,

says Paul.

We live to the Lord, we die to the Lord, we are the Lord’s possession.

We are not supposed to be here for our own reasons. We are church, we are here, only and above all because we belong to Christ, to God, heart, soul, mind and body - completely.

 

The act of faith in Christ is about yielding ourselves entirely to God, rejoicing and thriving in God’s direction and control of our lives.

I know that can sound kind of creepy to many of us – we know the evil of the lie that one human being can be owned by another; and we’re taught to value independence, to belong to ourselves, thank you very much.

But our Christian faith, our spiritual growth, is always a journey toward the kind of union with Christ that “puts God in the driver’s seat.” Belonging to God is a deep commitment of love and trust that transforms our selves and lives. Belonging entirely to God frees us from all other claims – the claims of the anxieties and hurts that fill our everyday life.

 

Both Paul and Matthew appeal to that core truth today as they consider how we respond to differences, divisions, and injuries within our Christian community.

 

“How much am I supposed to forgive my sister or brother?” Peter asks Jesus.

“More than you can count,” Jesus answers. “There’s no “enough” with forgiveness among those who belong to God. There’s only more than enough.”

 

Then Jesus tells a story about someone who owed more than any of us can conveniently imagine. When you hear “ten thousand talents”, think “the US national debt” (a number with twelve zeroes after it – before you even get to the decimal place! Compare that with your credit card, or home cost, or income.)

This isn’t a personal debt. It’s a world-eating, unimaginable debt – a debt that owns the person who owes it.

 

We can feel the astonishment in Jesus’ story as that impossible debt is canceled. We can share a sense of overwhelming freedom at the gift of a life – more than a life, a whole world of release and renewal. And then we’ll feel the shock when the newly-freed person holds tight and brutally to another debt, rejecting that gift of freedom; choosing to belong – still or again – to the constricting world of power and anger, anxiety and need.

 

Modern psychology is happy to tell you that forgiving others means letting go of our hurts, and that’s good for us. But that’s not what Peter and Jesus are talking about today. When Jesus tells us to forgive without limits, it’s not advice to let an abuser off the hook, or to ignore someone who keeps stealing from you.
Matthew does not imagine that we can ignore one another’s hurts in the Christian community and expect to be forgiven, or that forgiveness is an act of will. 

Matthew is talking about belonging to a community where all forgiveness is the unrelenting, more-than-enough forgiveness of God. This whole conversation about forgiveness is set in the context of the accountability process Jesus has just set out – we heard it last Sunday.

 

If your sibling sins against you – if your fellow committed Christian hurts you – you take it up directly with them. If that doesn’t resolve it, get others of the Body, others who belong heart soul and body to Christ, to address it with you. If that doesn’t work, get the whole community of God’s own engaged. 

 

If that process doesn’t work, that means that the offender isn’t actually one of those who belong to God.  They’re people God wants to welcome, yes. They just are not currently part of the community of overwhelming, unlimited forgiveness.

 

This seventy times, more-than-enough forgiveness isn’t about choosing to ignore an injury or forcing ourselves to forget. It’s a result of that process Jesus lays out – a process of rooting ourselves together in our shared experience of absolute trust in Christ, making ourselves a community committed to belonging to God: heart, body, mind, and soul.

 

Paul tells us the same thing: that the divisions and differences that scare us, that feel like they could tear the church apart, are meaningless against the reality that we belong to God, not to ourselves. That we together belong to God completely.

 

The vegetables and festivals, the eating and not eating, that Paul talks about are the first-century Roman equivalent of the ways we – intentionally or not – separate our righteousness from one another’s today.

It’s like the question of whether the marriage, ordination, and full inclusion of gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgender, and otherwise “queer” folk are a sin that offends God and destroys communities, or faithful love and service taken directly from the teaching of Christ which makes us all stronger. 
Meat and vegetables, festivals and fasts were to the Romans what conversations about race and racism may be to the church today.  Active anti-racism work is love, repentance, and spiritual growth to some of us; to others of us, it’s the dangerously offensive territory of “politics in church.”

In generations past, it was the difference between “slavery is in the Bible, ordained by God,” and “it’s a sin and a crime to claim to own another human being; Christ makes us all free.”  It’s been the differences over the work of women in the church, or who receives communion, and how and when.

For some of us, these days, it’s wearing masks in church or gathering for worship at all. Both may feel to some of us like a sinful disregard for others.

 

These are some (but hardly all!) of the ways we cause hurt, loss, fear, and grief to one another.  Those things dig deep into our spiritual selves when they make us feel excluded from community and separated from God.

What holds us together in the face of those injuries – what has allowed us to find a way forward together, to recognize a sin we all share and renounce it, or learn to love our differences – is that we belong, together, to God, who is the only judge of our righteousness and faith.

 

Paul tells you and me, here and now, the same thing he tells the Christian community growing in Rome in the first generation after Jesus’ death and resurrection. “It is before God, not you, that your sisters and brothers stand or fall. And the Lord is able to make them righteous….” Yes, even those who you know are absolutely getting it wrong.  

 

Paul tells us this so we can stop believing that a faithful practice different from mine is a sin, or designed to hurt me. Instead, Paul tells us to look only at the truth that God is in charge. Paul tells us to remember that we owe ourselves, heart, mind, soul and body, to God. And that God’s claim on us stands between us and the judgement or insults of others, and between our judgement and those same others.

 

There’s only one right answer to why we are here – why we gather in Christian community. It’s because we belong to God: heart, body, mind and soul. Because we each and together belong to God so completely that we can be free of every other claim. And when injury and anxiety, human pain and sin cannot hold us, we are free to forgive our siblings beyond all measure, and be forgiven ourselves, free to be loved entirely and without limit.