Sunday, 13 September 2020, Pentecost XV, Proper 19A
All Saints Episcopal Church, Beverly Hills, CA
This sermon is available as a video online, starting at 17:47:
https://vimeo.com/457319292?fbclid=IwAR3fZOtbSfWUNJb4p-uQ1erg2KgMMF7onFKXZ0bWJT8fktYh0gMD8LZtKRs
It is a joy to be with you today, sharing the Word of God with the All Saints, Beverly Hills community. I am so glad to be with you.
We have heard two stories from scripture this morning: the first, a principal turning point in the story of Joseph, and the second, Jesus’ other parable of the talents. Both are about forgiveness, forgiveness in extreme situations, forgiveness that comes with a cost.
The story of Joseph is a miracle of narrative subtlety. It is quite the longest single story in Genesis, taking up fourteen of the fifty chapters of Genesis. It has always been understood as a working out of God’s mysterious providence in human affairs, and Joseph himself has always been understood as an embodiment of wisdom, who through his suffering and then in his prosperity, saves his family, secures their heritage, and alters the affairs of nations.
The story of Joseph is embedded in the narrative of his father, the patriarch Jacob. It begins in Genesis, chapter 37, in what seems a quite simple statement: “Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan.” But things in scripture are never simple. The closer you look, the more interesting they become. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, in her brilliant, midrash-based commentary on Genesis, The Beginning of Desire, tells us that the word “settled” - va-yeshev in the Hebrew - indicates a desire on Jacob’s part for a peaceful, stable, settled life after the tumults of his earlier years. That is the story he is telling himself. But it is not the story that God is telling.
To Jacob’s disappointment and sorrow, he finds nothing settled at all. His eleventh son, Joseph, turns out to be a problem - loved by his father above his brothers, Joseph is seventeen years old, and full of himself. He dreams that his brothers are to bow down to him, and instead of holding this sort of premonition in his heart, as Mary later would, he boasts of it to them, his narcissism setting in motion the whole train of his tumultuous life.
His brothers decide they have had enough of him, and want to kill him. But after arguing about it, they decide to sell him into slavery instead. And so they do. Or so it seems: the actual text is a syntactic muddle: the deed itself seems to be done by a group of passing merchants. And when the brothers tell their father what happened, they don’t really tell him, but they show him Joseph’s famous coat covered with blood and let Jacob make up a story for them: He was killed by a wild animal. Something worth noting here, something perhaps relevant now: The origins of this act of slavery are couched in ambiguity. You can’t quite pin it down. So the brothers conspire to construct a narrative that makes the act seem socially acceptable, that deflects their own guilt.
And so Joseph’s life goes on: his work increases his master’s wealth; his sexual virtue leads him to prison; more dreams foretell the future; he once again brings profitable service to his master; then his final rise to the highest possible power. His family has noticed, and as families sometimes do, they get back in touch with their prospering relative. But of course, there is a problem. As the brothers say to each other when they are about to meet Joseph, “What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?” What if, indeed. Eventually the bill comes due.
Another thing worth noting here: It is not until the power dynamic has shifted and the former slave is now in charge that the brothers confront their guilt. Because they have to.
And here is where the story becomes even more interesting. There are several stories being told by different people here. The brothers’ story among themselves and with their father, based on their shifty construct of the original deed, shored up by a made-up, but socially maintained, narrative, has now collapsed, and their only hope is a full and frank confession.
The story Joseph told himself about himself, as we all do, might well have been a version of Gotcha! He certainly has justification for it. And perhaps he has told himself that story before. But in fact he changes both stories, first by craftily ensnaring his brothers deeper into their guilt, and then by graciously letting them off the hook: “Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.” Joseph chooses to avoid revenge, but rather he brings out the truth with a firmer awareness of its horrible consequences, and then, instead of vengeance, he chooses to build up their life together. In fact, Joseph is in the place of God. Joseph chooses to move from death to life, and in choosing wisdom, chooses good. And in doing so he starts in motion the whole future of his family, the nation they will become, and ultimately the salvation of us all.
In some ways the parable of the forgiven and unforgiven debts from Matthew is simpler. The people in it are hardly complex. There is something reductive about the characters in this story, which is, after all, on one level about money, and money can at times diminish human complexity to mathematical terms.
Jesus tells the story in response to a question about forgiveness: How often should I forgive? Seven times? No, says Jesus: seventy-seven times. Jesus takes the question out of the realm of legalistic calculation – I’m off the hook if I refuse forgiveness on the eighth time. I’m keeping track, writing it down in my little personal grievance ledger: Ahah! You’ve reached the limit! Or, perhaps, I’ve reached my limit with you.
But Jesus, as he does so often, moves away from legalism and into the territory of eternity, by using the rhetoric of exaggeration, of absurdity, of essentially infinite numbers: Not seven but seventy seven, or in the older translations, seventy times seven. In other words: Stop keeping track. Stop basing your interactions with each other on piled-up grievances and begin to live another life, the life of infinite love.
We see this absurdity even more clearly in the parable itself. Some scholars think the talent was not so much a unit of money but a financial concept: Approximately 20 years’ wages for an ordinary worker making about one denarius a day. 20 years’ wages was perhaps the usual working lifetime in those days. The ancient economy and ours are wildly different in almost every aspect, but let’s try to get some idea of what Jesus is getting at. In our California economy the minimum wage for businesses with more than 25 employees, which presumably would apply to the king in this story, is $13.00 an hour. A five day, 40 hour week yields the worker $520. Assuming full employment through the year, an annual wage of $27,040. Twenty years is $540,800. A cool half a million or so per talent. The servant owes 10,000 talents: 5 billion, 408 million dollars. Put this against the 100 denarii owed by the second servant. 100 days’ wages. At California’s minimum wage rate of $104 a day, 100 days comes to $10,400. Not an impossible sum for some of us perhaps, but one which any minimum wage employee would be hard put to cough up on demand.
As I said, Jesus uses here a rhetoric of absurd exaggeration: The king forgives the first slave a debt of perhaps five and a half billion dollars, simply because the servant asks. That same slave not only does not forgive a debt of perhaps some $10,000, but throws the second slave into prison until he pays. Which of course is next to impossible if he is in prison.
The contrast could not be greater. An almost infinite debt is freely forgiven. A far smaller amount is not.
Who are we in this story? The king, who takes on an almost incalculable financial loss in his compassion for the first slave? The first slave, a high-level management type, whose work has been a disastrous failure, who begs for and receives forgiveness and then viciously turns on the second slave, a simple workman on day wages? The second slave, an ordinary working guy who has got into debt and can’t pay it off? The other slaves, who are outraged at this injustice and bring it to the attention of the king?
The story is about forgiveness. God forgives as the king forgives. Who should we strive to be like – God who forgives without counting the cost? The first slave, who turns viciously on someone in his debt the minute he thinks he is settled and secure? The second slave, whose situation is in fact hopeless? I would suggest that we are invited to consider ourselves as potentially all three, to ask ourselves, not only what should I do in the future, but what have I actually already done? Have I forgiven? Have I received forgiveness? How many times have I needed to be forgiven? How many times do I need to forgive? Who close to me needs my forgiveness?
And, Jesus says, the consequences are real. There are consequences for not forgiving. Jesus is asking us to choose which model we should follow. As Joseph says to his brothers, “Am I in the place of God?” The surprising answer is, Yes. You were sold into slavery, thought dead, and yet here you are. You have the capacity to choose – to act out of anger, to make real your fondly-nursed and imagined acts of revenge, or to choose another path, one with unknowable results but openness to a fruitful future - to act as God acts, in the full light of reality and truth, knowing this will start another story as unpredictable as the one it grew out of, but with wisdom choosing what will bring life.
Human life is full of restlessness. We all tell ourselves Jacob’s story of a settled life, a story that cannot really be. There is always another Joseph and his brothers waiting around the corner. Injustice is always potentially the fruit of generosity. But in the midst of all life’s uncertainty we are invited to act as God would act. As Avivah Zornberg says,
“In this world, what is most needed is not fear, which deprives man of initiative beneath the sleepless eyes of God, but love – the capacity to act in a world where absolute clarity is not attainable.” (p. 278)
