Our gospel makes it very clear this morning that we should be a forgiving people acting in his name with human kindness. We are taught that the wrong way to deal with our given world is to have an unforgiving spirit.
In our gospel lesson this morning, we are presented with a man who experiences a "category 5" personal disaster. He is a slave who finds himself in debt to the tune of 10,000 talents. This is an astronomical figure on the order of the current damage estimates coming in from New Orleans. No one person, certainly no slave could pay this. The debt is forgiven. And this parable is often interpreted as being an allegory for the magnitude of debt that the Father forgave when he sent his son Jesus to die for us.
Most of us seem unaware of this gift and remain unchanged by God's generosity. This indifference is reflected in the story as the slave refuses to forgive the rather small debt that is owed to him by another. We are, the Lord teaches us, to become sufficiently grateful for the gift given to us by his Father for our lives to be changed, changed enough to give us a new ethic, an ethic of forbearance, forgiveness and human kindness.
And it is in this part of the story that we find our greatest connection to our lives this morning. Today we remember the many who died on September 11, 2001. Tonight we, the survivors and their friends, family members and neighbors, of that terrible act of terrorism, will gather with other churches and ask God for guidance, strength and wisdom. Today we also remember the many who died and are still dying in the Gulf states, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama from Hurricane Katrina. We gather in prayer and ask for guidance, strength and wisdom.
Importantly, we ask that we be given the right spirit for this day. We are among the living. We did not die from terror or storm. The floods rose and the buildings fell, but we were not counted among the dead. We have been given a gift.
There is nothing special about us that made God choose us to be survivors and others to die. In Biblical terms, "the Lord maketh the rain to fall upon the just and the unjust alike." Many devout Christians, Jews and Muslims died on 9-11 and continue to die in New Orleans. We, the living, are not special. We are simply, alive. They are not. They cannot choose earthly futures. We have earthly futures to choose.
We can choose how we are to act. Will we act in gratitude for the gift of continued life? Or will we act as we often do, as if the gift of life is no gift at all? Will we mistreat people around us? Or will we be forgiving when those around us irritate us, hurt us, or get in our way? We can choose how to act.
As we choose, we must reject the inclination to act in unforgiving ways. Jesus makes this rock-hard clear this morning. We ignore the spirit of human kindness at our own peril. The spirit that Jesus warns us against, the spirit of "unforgiveness" is a slippery slope that feels perversely good, but is ineffective, unproductive, and makes matters worse for ourselves. We can even lose an important, essential part of ourselves. We can lose our humanity.
I contend that we have within us, given to us by God, the capacity to forgive. Forgiveness and human kindness are so much a part of our psyches that some psychologists who study the biological basis of emotion say that forgiveness and human kindness are expressed at the cellular level by our very DNA. They developed over eons as part of our evolved selves, one of God's many gifts as he made us and remade us over the unfathomable passage of time on our thorny path from the caves to the modern world. Forgiveness and human kindness are part of what makes us human. Forgiveness and human kindness are a hint of something greater, an aspect of the divine that is found in this world and the next. Or as Alexander Pope wrote, to err is human, to forgive is divine.
But how much should we forgive? [pause] How much do we want to remain human? How much do we want to reflect what is best in this world? How much do we want this world to be a better place?
We shouldn't stop forgiving, unless we want the world to become a worse place, a less Christian place. The world we liv in is often a dangerous place, filled with mean and hostile people. We, ourselves, contribute to the world's hostility and meanness when we refuse to forgive.
I've worked in a number of business environments that were hostile and unforgiving. It was considered foolish, in those places, to show any hint of having a forgiving nature. Forgiveness and human kindness in a competitive environment are sometimes seen as an indication of weakness, an opening for opportunistic workplace rivals.
And so we become unforgiving and mean in an environment of meanness and we begin to lose an element of our humanness. We begin to succumb to the illusion that the tough work environment is the real world of "dog eat dog," a place where survival of the fittest is the rule. We succumb the untruth that forgiveness and human kindness are somehow unnatural, something that has no place in the so-called real world.
But unforgiving workplace values only seem to be the values of the real world. We need to remind ourselves that we are more than our jobs. We were human beings before we sat at a desk for long hours and worried about performance reviews and back-biting co-workers. The performance review that all of us conduct on our deathbeds will only include measures of human kindness and how much we were able to forgive and make peace with our families and friends.
Studies show that success in the work place is most often related to how well we are able to work cooperatively with other people. There are exceptions. Some rise to the top and in the process destroy the careers of their co-workers. But most successful people in all walks of live know how to work with others, how to promote social cohesion -- how to forgive the faults of others and get on with assigned tasks, and how to express human kindness. Studies show that this is true in business, in sports, in church groups, in the classroom - everywhere that teamwork is required.
Forgiveness and human kindness have always been a part of human nature. Any world that is without forgiveness and human kindness - that world is the exception - that world is an artificial environment, one that is "unreal."
Jesus was confronted that day by a person who wanted to know if there were limits to the forgiving aspect of our human nature. Jesus's answer was essentially, 'stop forgiving and you stop being human.' Our nation was threatened on 9-11. Our humanity was threatened also. Each of us had to decide which spirit - hostility or human kindness - we would adopt in response.
On 9-11, I was a school teacher at Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School. Many of my students had parents who worked in the financial district. My fellow teachers and I walked the hallways counseling students. We used our cell phones to contact parents. We sat in our classrooms on Rumson Road as police cars roared past, sirens expressing the wailing in our hearts, on their way to the ferries at Atlantic Highlands.
As a history teacher I assured my students that our country was not going to fall apart. I told them of the many acts of terror that our nation had endured in the past, many of them far worse than the attack on the World Trade Center. I told them stories about Pearl Harbor. I told them about the French and British invasions from Canada during the French & Indian War and the American Revolution. I told them stories from the Cold War, about the Cuban Missile Crisis. And my common theme in all these stories was about how we Americans were a tough and resilient people.
That afternoon I caught some of my students planning acts of vigilantism. We didn't know anything about the terrorists that day. But my students were going to find themselves some Muslims and beat them up. My students were looking for someone to blame, someone to hurt, someone with whom to even the score. I put a stop to it on the spot.
When we are hurt, we want to strike out. We want to find someone to hurt. We want to find someone with whom to go to war. Our rage becomes blind rage, the kind that refuses to see the humanity in others, the kind that demonizes the people who we want to hurt.
The spirit of hostility can also lead to smug indifference as we write off people we don't like, people who are from different cultural or ethnic backgrounds. Last week, some who had forgotten about the debt that we all owe God tried to blame the people of New Orleans for their own plight. One federal official who was interviewed the day after the hurricane said that the people of New Orleans who were left behind were just a bunch of looters who disobeyed the legal requirement to evacuate. He justified the suffering as if the many innocent and helpless deserved to be abandoned because of the actions of a few lawless types. His was a voice of darkness, of hostility. But truth has a way of coming out in the light of dawn. The pictures of the dead and dying that we all saw on television made it impossible to blame the victims. We saw that most of those left behind were ordinary Americans. Many were children. Others were sick, elderly or wheelchair dependent. Many didn't have cars, or were so poor that they couldn't afford gas.
We saw people who had cars and could afford gas, but who bravely remained behind to protect their elderly parents. We saw people put their children, and their neighbors, first. There were health care workers who appear to have remained behind to care for elderly nursing home patients whose relatives had not come to evacuate them. There were medical personnel who saved the lives of Intensive Care patients without electrical power, without electric lights. All of these images together, of the innocent victims and the heroes touched our hearts because they had the right spirit.
We need the right spirit too. God commands it. Hostility and hardened hearts will not sustain us in the months ahead as we rebuild the Gulf Coast of our country. The spirit we need is that of human kindness, a spirit that tells us that no one deserves to die in a hurricane, including those who don't evacuate for whatever reason including the "sin" of being poor. We left the poor behind! The people with the fewest resources. Before we as a nation ever leave another poor person behind to face catastrophe, we should remember that God's own Son was poor. What is God thinking about us now?
Jesus made it crystal clear that he was not setting us up as judges, but rather helpers and healers. Hostility is alien to discipleship. Healing, helping and compassion are the essence of the spirit of human kindness.
Paul had this in mind when he wrote to the Romans, "Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister?¼ For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God." Rom 14: 10a, 10c. It's not up to us to do the judging. It's up to us to do the healing.
Two weeks ago as the hurricane approached landfall, I said something from the lecturn that I'd like to repeat. We can imagine a world in which God didn't allow 9-11 to happen. We can imagine a world in which Hurricane Katrina fizzled out in the Gulf of Mexico. But we can't choose to live in that world. We can't choose to live in a world created by our imaginations. This is reality. And we can only live in the world that we have been given. But we can choose how we are going to live on the world that we have been given.
So who do you choose to be? How do you choose to live? Imagine being on the outside, looking at yourself. Which would you rather see, someone who is hostile to others? Or would you rather see a person who has the potential for spiritual growth, someone who is so grateful to God that they can see value in all of his children?
I have a little story that illustrates this.
Some years ago, a minister friend of mine was the executive director of one of our urban ministries in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. At that time there were quite a few so-called "boat people" coming to Florida from Haiti. My friend's ministry provided food and shelter for many of these desperate people. In one of the local churches, there was a woman who opposed giving assistance of any kind. The woman gave angry speeches, appeared on radio talk shows, filed legal actions and generally did everything that she could to make my minister friend's life miserable.
One day the woman, who had a beach-front condominium, woke up and looked out her window. A great ocean storm had raged all night and was just starting to die down. There on the woman's beach, her beach, the beach at which she prayed each morning, was a broken boat and the bodies of 29 Haitians - families - children!
"My life changed at that moment," she later recalled. "I realized that I was a sinner and that I'd sinned against God... and against these people." She became a great advocate for Haitian refugees after that.
We, too, have a choice: hostility or humanity. If we lose ourselves, we will compound the losses of 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina with the loss of our souls. If we embrace our better halves, we will find a path toward healing our broken selves and our devastated, but resilient country.
Prayer: (paraphrase)
God, please bless America. Land that I love.
Please stand beside her and guide her, not with judgement or bombs or politics; but rather with the spirit of human kindness.
God, please bless America. Land that has been devastated. Please heal us. Please help us to heal others. Please help us to be resilient as our mothers and fathers were resilient.
God, please bless America. For we would be a great people. But we are sinners. So we only ask to be a forgiven people. We thank you for the great gift that you have given all the peoples of this world, the gift of your Son, given for our sinful ways.
God, please bless America. Forgive us our sins as we struggle to forgive those who sin against us.
Let us all say the Lord's Prayer.