Genesis 50:15-21
Matthew 18:21-35

You never get a second chance to make a first impression.  I hope that is the only place in life where there is no such thing as a second chance. 

We’ve gathered this morning for multiple reasons.  We are here to worship.  We are here saying summer is over and it’s time to rally around the church from our summer wanderings and get ourselves back into the “normal” routine of our lives including more regular involvement in the ministry and life of the church. 
           
There is a more important meaning of today, Rally Sunday. We are here because God has given all of us second chances.  So let’s make today a day to celebrate our second chances and to promise that we will be people who give others second chances.  What about calling this Second Chance Day?
           
The story of Joseph in our first reading is about the second chance Joseph gave his brothers for them to have a relationship.  The brothers expected retaliation for the horrible treatment they had caused Joseph by selling him into slavery and then telling their dad that a wild animal had killed him. 
          
In the second lesson Matthew tells about the time Peter asked Jesus how many times he should forgive someone who offended him. Peter asked a question and offered an answer all in the same breath. Peter's question and answer were, "If someone keeps on sinning against me, how many times must I forgive that person?  Seven times?"  Do you consider seven times to be excessive?  Our outside limit of what would be considered above and beyond the call of duty is probably three or four times at the most.  There is method to Peter's madness about forgiving another person.  The number seven in Hebrew thought was the perfect number.  Peter was suggesting what he thought would be the perfect approach to forgiveness.  And if he did what was perfect, how could Jesus respond other than with great appreciation, admiration, approval, and acceptance!
           
| Jesus said when you have forgiven a person 490 times, you have just begun to forgive.  In other words, forget counting forgiveness on your fingers and toes.  Throw away the calculator.  If you are keeping records on how many times you have forgiven a person, then you can forget it because you have no idea what forgiveness is. Wow! Talk about second chances!   
           
Jesus told Peter and tells us that forgiveness has no limits.  The forgiveness being urged is not the result of careful, reasonable calculation.  Forgiveness is extravagant, effusive, without limit. 
           
Jesus told a story to illustrate his point. Here is what happened.  A king wanted to close out his books and be certain everything was in order.  To do that, he called in his loans.  One servant owed over ten thousand talents.  That was the equivalent of fifteen years labor.  Here was a guy who owed the equivalent of a million dollars.  That's a lot.  This guy had no way to pay back what he owed.  Who could?  The king did the expected, just, legally right thing.  He ordered the man, his wife, and children to be sold as slaves.  Was that harsh?  Well, a million dollars is a lot of money.  What kind of king would give a servant or employee that much money?  Is it harsh that the boss entrusted his employee with that much money?  No.  But what has the guy done with all that money? 
           
To have spent and lost a million dollars is no small feat.  What kind of lifestyle was his leading to blow a million dollars?  Do you feel sorry for the servant?  He did blow it all and has nothing to pay back. 
           
But notice the scene.  In the agony of his situation, the servant falls down at the king's feet and begs for mercy.  He pleads for patience and promises, "I'll pay it back."  Who is he kidding?  He has no prospect of making any money.  There was no lottery where he could win that kind of money.  He wasn't that good at Black Jack and obviously he was no investment wizard either.  What should the king do?  Put him in the slammer.  Let him think things over.  That'll teach him. 
           
Surprise, surprise!  The king has a burst of pity.  He cancels the whole debt, all one million dollars.  What kind of softie is this king?  Obviously, he is soft in the head for one place.  How can he just write off a million dollars of financial injustice?  I realize it was his money that was lost but you can't go around forgiving huge debts like that.  It will throw the whole economy into chaos.  Do you know how fast word travels about something like this?  Why the word will get out and people will waste money like it was growing on trees.  They will be irresponsible and ignore their debts.  When their creditors call for an accounting and paying of debts, they'll just say they can't pay, beg for mercy, and use this king as the example of how they ought to be treated.  I don't know what the king was thinking.  He certainly wasn't thinking about the ramifications of his actions.
           
On his way from this unbelievable conversation with the king, the servant ran into one of his friends who owed him a thousand dollars.  He told his friend to pay what he owed.  The friend said he didn't have it.  He pled for some time to get the money together and pay off the debt.  The servant said, "Not a chance.  You rotten scoundrel.  You never did plan to pay me, did you?  What kind of fool do you take me to be?  Put him in the slammer.  That'll teach him a lesson."
          
Word traveled fast.  Somebody told the king what the servant had done and the king blew his stack.  He called in the servant and said, "You sorry, rotten rascal.  I forgave you a gigantic debt, a debt that never in your lifetime would you have been able to repay.  And what did you do?  You jailed one of your friends for a measly thousand dollars."  You go to jail.  You go directly to jail.  You don't pass go and you don't collect anything except torture.  You stay in the torture chamber until you have paid every cent you owe.”  We can be certain that that will never be and he will be tortured forever. 
           
What an alarming story!  Just when we thought the parable was about forgiveness, the king takes back his forgiveness, reinstates the huge debt, and orders extreme punishment for the servant.  By the end of the story there is little difference between the king and the servant.  Both are vengeful.  The king showed some generosity in the beginning, but when the chips were down, he resorted to torture. 
           
We are stuck with a story about a king who first forgave and then took back his forgiveness, and a servant who was forgiven but failed to forgive.  There really is not much difference in the story between the ungrateful servant who punished, the king who tortured, and us.  After we get over our brief burst of generosity at the beginning of the story, we return to a much more familiar human emotion--vengeance.  That ungrateful little wretch got what he deserved!  By the end of the story we are as indignant as anyone over the servant's failure to forgive.  Our forgiving attitude toward the pitiful little servant at the beginning of the parable is extremely short lived.  We are trapped by the story into admitting that the unforgiving king and the unforgiving servant are brothers to us, the unforgiving hearers. 
           
I read about two friends who were walking through the desert. During the journey they had an argument and one friend slapped the other in the face. The one who was slapped felt hurt, but without saying anything he wrote in the sand: "Today my best friend slapped me in the face."
           
They kept on walking until they found an oasis where they decided to take a bath and rest. The one who had been slapped began to drown and his friend saved him. When he recovered from the ordeal, he wrote on a stone: "Today my best friend saved my life."
             
His friend asked him, "Why, after I hurt you, did you write in the sand and now you write on a stone?" The man, smiling, replied: "When a friend hurts us, we should write it down in the sand, where the winds of forgiveness can erase it. And when something great happens, we should engrave it on the stone of the memory of our lives, where no wind can ever erase it.
           
Early in the human enterprise unlimited retaliation was the way people dealt with wrong done to them. The approach was for a tribe to raid a neighboring tribe and take what could be taken.  To retaliate, the offended tribe would attack and seek to do so much damage so as to render the opposition helpless.  The rule of thumb was, “Do to others so they cannot do to you.”  That approach was so destructive that eventually the rule of an eye for an eye was introduced to restrain greater evil.  Actually, the eye for an eye rule was movement toward limited retaliation.  The rule of thumb was, “Do to others as they have done to you.”  While this was an improvement, if followed, eventually it would leave all of us walking around blind and toothless as Gandhi observed.  As civilization expanded people discovered the positive value of loving their neighbors as a means of improving community life.  And there developed the concept known as the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would like them to do to you.”  Then, along came Jesus urging people not to resist evil with evil and to love their enemies.  The rule of thumb was that regardless of what people do to you, respond to them with unlimited love and forgiveness.
           
While we know Jesus' approach and instruction, we seldom live it.  We still practice an eye for an eye.  It begins at the king's house and extends to the servant’s ghetto.  It is found in the big house and the little house.  It occurs in the White House and in your house and my house.  It is an unjust world and we live for those delicious moments when what comes around comes back around and the wicked get what we think they deserve and accounts are settled.   
           
As a young boy walking around the farm with my grandfather we stopped near an electric fence.  I wanted to be helpful.  I touched a blade of grass to the wire as I had seen my grandfather do but felt no tingling in my fingers that would indicate the fence was operating properly.  Immediately I told my grandfather that there was no current flowing through the electrical fence.  He took hold of the fence and received a strong electrical shock.  I touched it and received no shock.  Then he looked down and noticed I was wearing rubber boots.  I could not experience (feel) the cur­rent because my boots kept it from flowing through me.  This is how it is with mercy.  We cannot experience mercy for ourselves unless mercy flows through us to others.
Anthony Bloom offers this valuable insight.  “I remember a man of some standing who once came to me and told me that a friend of his who claimed no small spiritual achievements had offended him.  “Who should go and make peace with the other?” he asked.  “I cannot answer your question,” I replied, “as I cannot set myself as a judge between you, but one thing is certain to me: the meaner of the two of you will wait for the other to make the move.”  The great man said no word, but went immediately to make his peace with his friend. (Quoted from Meditations: A Spiritual Journey through the Parables, in The Living Pulpit, January-March 2004, p. 31)
           
There are some misconceptions about forgiveness.  Thomas Szasz has observed, "The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.“ (Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, quoted in The Living Pulpit, April-June 1994, vol. 3, no. 2, p. 33.) 'Forgive and forget' is unsolicited advice offered by bystanders but this is impossible unless a person experiences amnesia.  How will the offended person become aware of any contribution he made to the estrangement if he forgets the entire situation?  To forgive neither cancels nor undoes the damage or the offense; rather, the offended person forgoes the attempt to get even and seeks to con­tinue the relationship.  Forgiveness and forgetfulness are not synonymous. 
           
A second misconception is that forgiveness means to pass over a broken relationship and say, "It really doesn't mat­ter."  Relationships do matter and it is the admission of their importance that will cause one to seek to forgive another, rather than to gloss over the breach. 
           
A third misconception of forgive­ness is expressed as condescension and goes like this, "You have hurt me deeply, but I will bear it."  This is merely a form of one‑ups-man-ship that continually reminds the offender of the offense.  It keeps the estranged feelings buried alive by establishing a superior to inferior relationship.  The offended one uses his position of having been offended to wield power over the one who caused the estrangement.   
           
Many years ago a cartoon appeared that was a parable of forgiveness. There was once this old rancher who was tough, mean.  One day, one of his cowboys was caught stealing a cow from the rancher's herd.  When the cowboy was dragged before the rancher and the old rancher looked down at him, the cowboy trembled in his boots.
           
"Hang him," said the rancher.  “It'll teach him a lesson.”
           
Well, time came when the old rancher died.  He found himself standing before God.  When God looked at the rancher, the rancher thought about his life, all the mean things he had done, the way he had lived.  He trembled in his boots.

"Forgive him," God said.  "It will teach him a lesson."

Forgiveness is a rare commodity in our society.   Forgiveness is essential for relationships to be maintained because hurt and estrangement occur that can only be dealt with by forgiveness.  Forgiveness is a change of attitude within the one wronged.  It means to forego all private revenge and to remit the right to retaliate.  When one has been wronged, he has every justification to get even.  The law may be on his side.  Friends support him.  Often even his enemies will admit he has a point.  Forgiveness involves acknowledgement that one has been hurt and estranged and to become aware that the one causing estrangement has been hurt by causing the estrangement.  Forgiveness is an unashamed admission that the relationship is more important than revenge or retaliation.

Let’s strive to be a faith community of second chances.  Let’s rally around forgiveness.  May we be known as people of mercy.  Let’s be people who do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.  May today be the beginning of an ongoing second chance rally.  Having received God’s amazing grace and forgiveness, let us rally together to be a faith community known for our grace and forgiveness and for our warm embrace offering people another chance and another and another.  May this be the place where the second chance rally never ends.