'The earth is the Lord's and everything in it.' Last Sunday we celebrated Creation Sunday, giving thanks to God our Creator and reflecting on how we should care for his creation. I chose special readings for last Sunday which highlighted these themes, and Archana preached an excellent sermon to encourage us to think further about these things.
We are still in Creation Season and this will continue until October 4th. But our readings today are the set lectionary readings and may not seem immediately relevant to thinking about our care for creation. However, both our NT reading and our gospel reading emphasise the grace of God and our accountability to him; it is God who has given us everything and to whom we owe everything. Reflecting on these themes should impact how we relate to others and to the created world around us.
In our gospel reading Peter asks Jesus how often he needs to forgive a fellow member of the church. The rabbis tended to say it was sufficient to forgive a brother four times, so Peter is no doubt feeling very virtuous in suggesting seven times. But Jesus' response is to say 'not seven but seventy seven times', as a way of saying that forgiveness should be unlimited. He then tells the parable of the unforgiving servant to make this point.
We'll look at the parable in more detail in a moment, but first, let's note that in the parable forgiveness is described in terms of repaying a 'debt'. As we may know, some versions of the Lord's Prayer use the term 'debt' instead of 'sin': 'forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors'. But, as the parable makes clear, all that our debtors owe us is trifling in comparison with the debt we owe to God.
This parable of release from debt also evokes in some ways the practice of the Jubilee which we find described in the book of Leviticus. Every 49 years, Israelites were meant to return land to its original owners and those who had become slaves to landowners were to be set free. The Jubilee meant release from debt and exploitation. It was an extension of the sabbatical year which happened once every 7 years, when the land was left fallow to recover its fruitfulness. The sabbatical year and the Jubilee year were reminders to the people of Israel that the land belongs ultimately to God, not to human beings and that neither the land nor the labourers should be exploited.
The theme for this Creationtide is 'Jubilee for the earth; new rhythms, new hope.' emphasising that a new rhythm of rest for the land (and sea, and air) is needed in order to protect and preserve it, and that care for the earth is also related to care for those who are exploited and enslaved for the economic gain of others.
So keeping the background theme of Jubilee in mind, what does this parable have to say to us?
Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like a king who cancels an unimaginably huge debt which one of his servants owes him. The slave owes him ten thousand talents, equivalent to more than a billion francs today. It is a deliberately absurd amount and it is impossible for the slave to pay this, so he begs the king, 'have patience with me and I will repay you everything.' The man's pleas are simply cries of desperation for there is no way that he will ever be able to repay such a debt. But the king then does a remarkable thing; he completely releases his slave from the debt. He does this because he has pity on his servant; and the word used here is a strong one, often used of Jesus when he had 'compassion' on the crowd in their need.
The king does not see his slave simply in economic terms, he sees him with compassion, responding to the man's pleas for himself, his wife and his children.
The cancelling of such a huge debt would have been astonishing, but the parable continues in an equally astonishing way: the servant has been shown such overwhelming compassion and generosity, but a few minutes later, he grabs his fellow servant by the throat and demands the payment of the trifling debt this man owes him. The debt he owed the king was hundreds of thousands of times more than this, but he is determined to get what he thinks is his due. When his fellow servant cries for mercy, just as he had begged the king, he shows no pity. He wants his money and cares nothing for the effect on this man's life or family. He also forgets that he and his fellow servant are both slaves to the same king; they are both accountable to the king, and fundamentally everything belongs to him.
The point of the parable is that this unforgiving servant has not understood the enormity of the king's generosity in cancelling his debt and so continues to extort his own little debt from his fellow servant. Jesus is challenging his disciples, and us, to realise that what we need to forgive others is tiny in comparison with all that God forgives us. Of course, it is only in the light of the cross that we truly see both the extent of our sin and the depths of the grace and forgiveness of God. When we have seen this, we will be motivated to offer forgiveness to those who hurt us. Now I know forgiveness is a huge topic and it can sometimes be extremely difficult both to know we have been forgiven and to forgive others. I am not going to address this subject further this morning as I want to look at other themes in relation to the Creation season.
Alongside being an imporant lesson in forgiveness, the parable also challenges us to remember that God gives us everything as sheer gift, but we are then accountable for how we respond to that gift. We should then see others, and the created world around us, in the light of all that we ourselves have received from God's generosity, compassion and love.
We may be familiar with the term, 'money makes the world go round'; certainly money and economic profit can so motivate us as human beings that we stop seeing people and communities with compassion and humanity. We can all too easily as individuals, companies, and even countries, be like the unforgiving servant in the parable, and our overwhelming desire, like his, may be to get what we feel is ours by right, regardless of the consequences to other human beings or the wider creation.
I gave a short talk last week at an ecumenical service for Creation Day. The service also included two short talks about Swiss businesses that are exploiting vulnerable workers and the local environment in pursuit of profit. It was very sobering to hear about a gold mine in Peru where a glacier was being destroyed, water was being poisoned, and the labourers working in the mine were living in complete misery and poverty, exposed to dangerous chemicals and carrying heavy loads without the right equipment and protection, all for the economic benefit of others. Rather like the servant in the parable, the company is taking the local environment and exploited workers by the throat, as it were, and squeezing out of them the riches the company feels are its due, without showing any humanity or compassion. And without a sense that the land, the workers, the gold itself, does not belong to them, but to God.
You may be aware of the Konzern Verantwortungs Initiative, calling for responsible business practices for Swiss companies. Many churches are supporting this initiative and putting banners outside their churches and the council at St Ursula's have also decided to do this. In doing this we are making a statement that economic profit cannot be at the expense of care for the environment and care for vulnerable workers. For us as Christians, it is also a statement that all things ultimately belong to God and he calls us to account for how we use his gifts.
Our reading from Romans this morning also speaks of our accountability to God. Just as the parable in our gospel reading concerns two fellow servants of the king, here Paul makes the point to the Christians in Rome that they are all fellow servants of the same Lord. He urges them not to judge one another or despise those who make different decisions about whether they eat meat or keep certain festival days. The important thing is for them to think and pray and be 'fully convinced in their own minds' before God in the decisions they make about how they live. 'Who are you to pass judgement on the servant of another?' he asks.
Although the original conflict is about what food they should eat and what religious festivals they should keep, perhaps there is a principle here applicable to us in relation to our care for the environment. We all have to make our own decisions about the actions we take and the lifestyles we live, and we are accountable to God for these decisions and actions. It is very easy to judge others and make them feel guilty for not making exactly the same decisions we make, and, as I read somewhere recently, 'there is no Pharisee worse than an Eco-Pharisee'. One person may find it easy to eat only vegetarian food and re-cycle everything but might travel frequently by plane – though not at the moment! Another person may have no car and always cycle everywhere but not always think very carefully about where they shop and the conditions of the producers. We are all of us inconsistent in some way, and we are also at different stages of life with different pressures and constraints on our lives so we may not always make the same decisions about how to live out our care for the environment in practical ways.
The point is that we are all accountable to God for this. Perhaps we might think this lets us off the hook. Great, it doesn't matter what others think about how environmentally conscious I am; I can live as I like. But God sees the heart and knows everything and we each of us need to think and pray and truly ask what God would have us be and do in order to care better for his world and for those in need.
We are not to judge one another but we can encourage one another and work together to be as faithful as we can in looking after God's world. After all, we don't only serve the same Lord but we are brothers and sisters in the same family, as Paul says, and we are called to encourage one another to honour the Father and be like our brother Jesus.
'The earth is the Lord's and everything in it.' Everything belongs to God and not to us and we are accountable to him for how we use his gifts of creation and how we treat our fellow servants. As we receive God's good gifts, and learn more of his generosity, compassion and forgiveness, may we live in ways that honour him.
Revd Helen Marshall