September 13, 2026

Do you all know the idiom, seeing red? It's a fairly common turn of phrase in our culture and society today, and it's actually one of the few idioms that we have in English that is, as far as I can tell, exclusively American in origin.

A lot of the turns of phrase and idioms we have come from Europe or come from other cultures that predate our usage of English in the United States. But seeing red dates to somewhere in the early 1900s, and as best as folks can tell, it relates actually to bullfighting in Spain. It's an image of the bull seeing the red sash of the matador, or his capote, the cape that, you know, twirls around. But it's actually kind of an irony because bulls are colorblind. They don't actually see red. What they are reacting to or responding to is the movement of the cape, the movement of the matador in the bull ring.

But this irrationality is in a way kind of sensible to the idiom. When we are victims of violation, when we have been hurt or sinned against, sometimes all we see is red, even if it's an irrational red. We get irrationally angry and upset. Things don't make sense. It is often because it is not just about that specific violation, but that that violation or that moment of sin against us triggers the hurt. The layers of pain. The layers of other sorrows that are wrapped up in that moment of violation. And so this image of seeing red, even if we don't physically see red, even if we're reacting to something other than color, we still have this anger, this hurt, this violation.

Fifteen years ago, September 11th was on a Sunday, a Sunday just like this one. And I more distinctly remember the next day, that Monday morning. I was working at the time at a counseling center in North Little Rock, Arkansas. It was an old kind of Victorian house. And that Monday morning, before our clients arrived, I sat out on the porch having a cup of coffee with one of my fellow therapists, a woman named Diane. And we were talking about what at that time was the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. This counseling agency and the majority of the work we did was with military personnel. Folks immediately and directly impacted by everything that had happened in the years after 9/11.

And it wasn't just, as we talked about it, the death of those 2,977 people on that day. As we talked about the impact that that moment had had on all of the people we work with, the society that we live in at large, Diane and I were realizing and reflecting on how that moment of 9/11 was so much more of a violation. It was a violation of the security and safety we thought we had. The violation of this kind of late 90s idealism we had in the United States. We seemed to be on this upward trajectory. Our economy was doing well. We had this very prominent and impactful role in the international community. We seemed to be in this moment of ascendance.

And all of that came crashing down in the moment of that great tragedy on 9/11. And I want to be careful what I say here. It's not so much that our anger and pain in that moment was irrational, but it was so much larger than just what happened on that day. The violation was so much greater than just the tragedy of that loss of life.

And in some significant ways, this truth lies at the heart of Jesus' admonition to us today in our gospel lesson. Peter's question here is a rather straightforward one. But Jesus immediately jumps to the irrational. Let me explain what I mean.

If we remember back to last week, especially last week when I kind of expanded the scope of what we were reading back to the beginning of chapter 18, this whole discussion began with this question of who is the greatest in the kingdom of God, and Jesus turned that on its head. He spoke about the faith of innocence and the profound witness of children. And then he moved into the actual reading we had where he gave this rather clear and straightforward instruction. This very sensible and principled path to address conflict when it arises. Start with the one-on-one admonishment and then build from there only if necessary.

And Peter's question today kind of builds from that moment. Okay, Jesus, you have given us this very clear framework for addressing conflict. Now, what are we to do about forgiveness? And Jesus seems in this moment to instantly read Peter's mind. Peter's initial suggestion of seven times is very law-abiding. That is in relationship to Torah law, to Mosaic law. Peter is essentially saying, okay, Jesus, you have told me how to address conflict. Now, how long do I have to do that before I can write someone off? How long do I have to wait before I can cast them out of my life, to reject them for the thing that they have done against me?

And here is the first irrationality. Jesus says 77 times 7. That is 539 times of forgiveness, which is not strictly what he's saying. He's not telling Peter, you know, keep a tally, and when you hit that mark, then you're in the clear. No, what he's saying in a metaphorical sense here is you forgive indefinitely. You forgive forever. And that's really tough.

But it gets even worse. Jesus then tells this parable about this wicked servant who has amassed an incalculable debt. A talent was a weight of silver, about 80 pounds worth of silver. And I read one commentator who suggested that 10,000 talents was more than the entire yearly financial output of Rome in the time of Jesus. So, like 77 times 7, this is a metaphor to say that the slave owed an infinite debt that could never be paid off. There was just no way in any lifetime or multiple lifetimes that this could have ever been reconciled.

And yet in this moment, we have a second irrationality. That the landowner forgives this incalculable debt. That this debt of multiple lifetimes of ownership is forgiven. The slave is redeemed by the compassionate forgiveness of the landowner.

And this is irrational because it's clear that this slave does not deserve this kindness. His immediate attitude probably speaks to a personality that was well known. He was probably an irascible, incorrigible character who treated everyone terribly. And we see this. We see this immediately. Because he turns around and abusively treats a debtor of his own who owes something like three months' worth of wages.

This guy owes an infinite debt, a debt that could never be paid off, and the person that owes him owes him something like three months of wages. An infinitesimal amount of money.

In some ways, this character of this wicked slave is not terribly unlike the story we have from Genesis with Joseph today. Because his brothers completely concoct this narrative. We don't really see that in the reading we have. But if we go back and look at Genesis more broadly, there's never a moment in Jacob or Israel's life as he is drawing closer to death where he explicitly says what the brothers say he says. It is as if they get together after he has died, after Jacob has died, and said, "Okay, we are now fearing what Joseph might do to us, so let us tell him this story, let us lie to him about what our father has promised, so that he might have mercy on us."

And it seems very clear throughout the whole of the Genesis narrative about Joseph that he is a very astute and shrewd man. He is very, very aware of what's going on. And I have to but wonder if he hears this narrative and immediately in his mind, kind of like this landowner says, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, of course our father said that." But he doesn't call his brothers to account. He doesn't call them out on their deceptiveness. He forgives.

He forgives even when they are continuing to violate this covenant of brotherhood, as they are continuing to lie to him and not be straightforward.

But both of these narratives, of this wicked slave and of the brothers of Joseph here, speak to something more profound. And it's not something Jesus explicitly says, but it comes out of his admonition here. It is the detachment of forgiveness from consequence. And I think this is something we, in our society, very frequently wrestle with. Because we see the two necessarily having to go together.

And what I mean by that is that I think this is something that many of us often struggle with on both sides of this equation. Whether we are the one who has been sinned against or violated, whether we are the perpetrator or the violator—because like Joseph's brothers, sometimes that violation, when we are the perpetrators, continues to gnaw at us. It was 17 years—17 years Jacob lived in Egypt with Joseph. 17 years that the family had been reunited and lived together. And yet even at the end of that time, they were still fearful of their lives. They still wrestled with the sin of what they had done to their brother. It had continued to eat away at them.

But what we hear today is that this forgiveness is not simply saying, "I have been violated and I'm going to let bygones be bygones." But to say, "I forgive you. I honor and respect the dignity of your personhood. But there's still going to be some level of accountability." The brothers still served Joseph in Egypt. They still had this position of restitution, of working under him to repair that relationship. But it was restitution born of a reconciling act. They still dealt with the consequences of their actions, even as they were forgiven and restored in their humanity.

Back where I began with this image of seeing red, when we get fixated on the violation and often lose sight of this important nuancing that Jesus calls us into. This careful and humane way that Jesus calls us into full and honest relationship with each other.

I reflected as I was preparing for the sermon today on how impossible that can often seem. Like many points in Jesus's life and ministry, it feels aspirational, a nice idea, but out of reach for us, for lived human experience, for our everyday lives, and the reality of pain and hurt that we suffer or that we inflict on each other.

But I want to end on a powerful, life-transforming example of how this actually does manifest. As out of reach as this may seem, there are powerful witnesses to this kind of reconciliation that live among us.

As you all have seen in the communications, is Julian Steele Musser. And his middle name is in honor of a man that Julie and I met when we first joined the Episcopal Church in Arkansas, a man named Marion Steele Hayes. And like us, he had actually grown up in the Southern Baptist Church, and he had married one of the first female priests in all of the South. But he was an Arkansas Supreme Court justice. By the time we knew him, he was retired. But one of his principal legacies as a Supreme Court justice in Arkansas was his steadfast and committed opposition to the death penalty.

And that connected with us deeply in our own experience, but especially for me personally, because when we joined St. Peter's, I was working at that time as the religious outreach director for the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. And Judge Hayes and I spent long hours discussing the challenges and the difficulties of working towards that goal of abolishing this system of death in our country because of the reality of pain and hurt and violation that so often underlies it.

But one of the realities that he and I often also shared in was the transforming witness of those who have been violated. There's a powerful national organization that was very active in Arkansas called MVFR: Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation. These were the family members of people who had been killed, who had been murdered, who had been violated in the most severe way. Their humanity had been destroyed in an act of death. And yet these family members sought not more death, but reconciliation and restitution. They sought what is often referred to as restorative justice.

And I love that word because justice is still on the table. Justice is still at hand. The consequences of actions are still acknowledged. But it is consequence with the aim of restoration. Consequence with the aim of restored dignity.

And one of the most profound examples that I have ever come across of this is a woman named Charlotte Evans. She came a couple of times to Arkansas to tell her story. Her son was murdered at five years old, just out playing in the street, by a 15-year-old kid named Raymond Johnson, who was being stupid, who was wrapped up in the wrong affairs, running with the wrong crowd, and had shot a gun out of a car in an attempted drive-by shooting.

And Charlotte, in the process of the trial, in the process of dealing with the loss of her child, had this moment of superhuman, divine strength, in which she said to Raymond, "I have lost a son. But I forgive you and I adopt you. You are now my son."

And in his arrogance as a 15-year-old thinking that he knew how the world worked, he didn't respond to her. He didn't acknowledge that reality. And he went off to prison. He was actually sentenced as an adult and sentenced to life imprisonment.

And about 10 years later, as a young 20-something, he reached back out to her and he said, "I need a mother. I am broken and I need what you offer."

And they developed a relationship. They found a place of restoration. And he continued to suffer the consequences of his actions. He continued to serve that prison sentence. But Charlotte, in this divinely inspired strength, was able to see the dignity of his personhood. Able to see the potential of a reconciled and renewed relationship.

And I think it is so very fitting today that we have these readings this year with this proximity to an act that was so violating for us as a nation and a country. Because it brings us into mind of what this true and total transformation can look like. How it is that we might live ever more fully into a call of renewed and restored relationship.

And it's renewed and restored relationship with honesty, with transparency, with the recognition of consequence, but ultimately with the real and true profound power of recognizing that every single one of us, even the most deranged, despicable, hurtful person in the world, is a person made in the image of God. Someone with their own power to be transformed and renewed. A person who deserves compassion and love. A person who deserves forgiveness.

And sometimes we find in ourselves those places of brokenness. Where we wrestle. To reconcile ourselves. Or to be reconciled to the ones that we have hurt. And in this moment, we hear in this admonition from Jesus, this promise from God, that we can be reconciled. Even as we reconcile with those who have hurt us.

And as we say every single Sunday in the Lord's Prayer, "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." We have a profound moment today to not just say that, but to really and truly reflect on the depth of what that means. To wrestle with the challenge and the difficulty of living that and embodying it, but also hearing in the words of our Savior the promise that that transformation can have, the promise of what that reconciliation can look like.

And so may we be strengthened today on either side of that equation to be reconciled and to reconcile, that we may ever more fully live into the heart and the life of God that He is calling us into in each and every moment.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

September 6, 2026

Well, thank you for being here again today. I want to especially thank you for coming on this Labor Day weekend, this holiday weekend. I suspect in our family, Labor Day will now have a new connotation for us. And it's funny, Julie's a labor historian, so this was always kind of an important weekend and remembrance day for us anyway.

But as I was reflecting on the readings that we have for this week, and thinking about what we hear, especially in our gospel lesson, I have to admit, this is one of my favorite passages in all of Holy Scripture, and especially in all of Jesus' teachings, because I think it is one of the most difficult passages to hear, and it's one of the most frequent admonitions of Jesus that we just completely disregard. In our societal context today, in our lives as kind of messy, complicated people, we love to stir up drama. And we so very frequently ignore Jesus' commandment here that you first go and try to resolve issues one-on-one before blowing them up and making them this bigger deal amongst your circle of friends or your community of faith or society at large. In our very quick soundbite social media era, we love to just blast out our condemnations of people and then let all of that foment and degenerate into all of the problems we have today.

But it's also kind of awkward because if you notice, we pick up with verse 15. We're sort of jumping midstream into chapter 18 today when last week we were all the way back in chapter 16. And I get why we kind of dismiss chapter 17 in some ways. It's the great image and story of the transfiguration. And we have moments in time in our liturgical year where we celebrate and remember that moment of transfiguration. So it kind of is set off by itself. But chapter 18 has this kind of internal arc to it. And it's almost as if we're picking up sort of three-fourths of the way through a great novel or a great movie, and we're hearing something really important, but we don't really quite grasp it in its full context without understanding what has come before.

And point of fact, next week we will hear the end of chapter 18. We pick up with verse 21 going all the way through verse 35, and we have this incredible sort of conclusionary teaching by Jesus on the power of forgiveness. But where does this instruction about how to resolve conflict, this great teaching we'll hear next week about forgiveness, where does all of that come from? It doesn't just pop up out of nowhere. It begins with this overarching reflection on greatness and humility.

So I want to take us back just a moment to the very beginning of chapter 18 and think through what we're hearing there and the power that it has for us in fully appreciating what it is that Jesus teaches us today. In verse 1, it says, At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? He called a child whom he put among them and said, Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.

If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks. Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes. If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than to have two hands or two feet and to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the hell of fire.

Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven. What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.

It's a powerful reflection. And it's one that I think we often kind of avoid because there are some messy and difficult lessons in that. Lessons ultimately about our own pompousness, our own convictions about our rightness, a continual call to great humility, great humility that acknowledges the places where we come up short, acknowledges the places where we often get fixated on what we think is right, what should happen, how the world should run and operate.

And ultimately, this instruction, this lesson we have about resolving conflict only really makes full sense if we think about what Jesus teaches us in these verses preceding about being that humble and childlike faithful servant. They're only in the context of having our own proper location to our own places of unknowing, are we able to most fully and successfully approach the other with whom we are in discord or with whom we have some challenge.

And I want to be sure here and acknowledge that this is not a call to simply ignore or fail to deal with places of conflict and places of brokenness in our lives, when we have one who has hurt us, when we have been violated or harmed in some way, we are called to be honest about that, to redress it. And if the one who has hurt us is not willing to listen, there is this powerful recourse that we are given to continually adding force and power to that attempt at correction and reconciliation. But that only comes from this place of humility, this place of centeredness in God, this place of acknowledging our own limitations.

And when we think about the impact that that kind of humility could have on the world around us, it is really quite profound. You know, the journey that we have been making through St. Paul's great epistle to the Romans keeps coming back again and again to this theme of love, the centeredness and rootedness of love. And I've made reference to that over these last many weeks. But there too, when we think about what it means to love, when we think about what it really fully means, to live into the abundance of God's love in our life, to be fully enveloped by it, we have to locate it and locate ourselves in this place of great humility.

I think it is incredibly fortunate and opportune this year that we celebrate this Sunday with these readings on this Labor Day weekend when we prepare to acknowledge and pray for our students returning to school. Because it is that one place in our society where we have perpetuated and continue to maintain this great awareness of the importance of knowledge, the importance of learning, the importance of further development and formation.

So many other sectors of our world today, secular and religious, I often find kind of hemmed in, boxed in, with these places of certain belief, these places of rigid conformity, to a set of dogmas, or to a set of principles. And it's not unimportant to have dogma. But places that seem ever more frequently to lack any kind of charity, any kind of humility, any kind of sense, that we still, as we hear in the great lesson from St. Paul in 1 Corinthians, see through a glass dimly or darkly, that we as broken incomplete humans only ever see in part, and that part of our spiritual journey is this ever-increasing awareness and knowledge of who God is, a lifetime of growth, a lifetime of formation, a lifetime of growing in our own spiritual centeredness.

So often we want to hold fast to the things that we think are right, the things that we think are so very clear, the things that we think are unquestionably true. And we lose this sense of the mystery, this sense of the incomplete, this sense of the ever-developing, ever-growing awareness of God. And if we really locate this important teaching we have about conflict today in its proper context, we are reminded that part of the lesson here is for us always to be open to greater awareness, greater understanding, greater mutual connectivity, greater humility.

And when we celebrate and honor our students, when we take this moment every year to pray for them, to pray for educators who teach them, we also acknowledge this important lesson of continuing to learn, this important lesson on continuing to develop, continuing to ever grow more complete in our human and spiritual lives.

And so today, I invite us, as we hear this incredibly important lesson about conflict resolution, to also reflect on the call to great humility, this call to true greatness that Jesus lays out before us, the importance of recognizing the places of humility that we are called to cultivate in our own lives. That things are never quite as they seem. That we always have a place of further awareness.

Just this past week, I really kind of experienced that incredibly fulsomely. Friday especially seemed to be the crux of this journey. As many of you may know, Julie was supposed to be induced on Thursday morning. And when we called the hospital to kind of check in and know when we should arrive, they said, we're sorry. We're completely booked up. There was no room at the inn. And it wasn't until Saturday morning at 2 a.m. that Shady Grove was finally able to get us a room.

And there was this period of great waiting, of great uncertainty in some ways, of this practiced, cultivated patience that neither Julie nor I really had very fulsomely in that moment, especially Julie in wanting to go ahead and move forward. But I too, I had layers of frustration here because I not only was with her in the anxiety of that moment, ready to get the show on the road, ready for baby boy to be born. But in a much more innocuous and less significant sense, I'd been dealing with phone issues with my cell phone for weeks and had finally been told that they were going to send me a new cell phone. And then it was silenced. And even though it was supposed to be delivered by Wednesday, it hadn't been delivered. I called T-Mobile on Friday thinking, okay, we're in this period of waiting to go to the hospital. I'm going to try to take care of this while we're figuring out what's going on.

I ended up being on a phone call waiting to hear something from them for two hours on wait, listening to this repeat of hold music. And in that moment, I was profoundly struck by the significance of none of this being resolved, of waiting to hear from Shady Grove, waiting to hear on my cell phone, waiting, waiting, waiting. There seemed to be no end to it.

And yet I was also profoundly struck in that moment too about how often we get so fixated in our lives about the ways things should be, the expectations we have, and how often we are called to live in this time of openness, this time of letting God handle things, even in the midst of the frustrations, letting things work their way out. And both cases ended up getting resolved, obviously, but it brought to mind how very frequently we get tied up in knots about what we think we should be doing and how the world around us, how God working in the world around us, so very regularly operates on a different timeline, in a different way, with different expectations and outcomes, but it all works for the good, even when it's not always clear to see it.

And I invite us this Sunday as we enter into this call for humility to recognize those places of tightness we have. Those places of frustration where we feel like things aren't moving fast enough or maybe not even moving at all. And to try to take that moment of pause. Try to take that moment of rest. Try to have that childlike sense that things are taken care of, even if we don't quite know how or why or what the result will be. That we are in the hands of a loving God, a compassionate God, whose ultimate aim and ultimate work will bring to fruition the things of goodness, even when we can't see them in the moment of our despair or frustration.

And so let us have that humility today. And let us, even in the times of uncertainty, find that place of centeredness in the waiting, in the conflict, in whatever the brokenness is, that we may ever more fully feel the presence of God and know His presence and power in our lives. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.