Free People Free People

God cancels our spiritual debts—why do we still hold them for ourselves and others?

Proper 18,  Year A

Exodus 14:19-31

Psalm 114 

Romans 14:1-12

Matthew 18:21-35

©2026 The Rev. Seth Olson

This sermon was delivered on the 16th Sunday after Pentecost at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles in Hoover, AL. A video of the sermon may be found here.

Holy God, may my words be your words, and when my words are not your words, may your people be wise enough to know the same. Amen.

Last Sunday, Jesus gave us some remarkably concrete instructions about what to do when relationships break. If someone sins against you, Jesus says, go to them. Tell the truth. Listen. Try to regain one another. And if that does not work, widen the circle. The goal was never punishment; the goal was restoration.

And apparently Peter has been thinking about this, because today, almost before Jesus has finished speaking, Peter raises his hand and asks the question lurking underneath all of it: “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Seven! Peter probably thinks he is being extraordinarily generous. And Jesus says, essentially: Peter, you are still counting.

Before we go any further, though, I want to say clearly what Jesus is not saying. Forgiveness is not denial, and forgiveness does not require us to pretend that something did not hurt. Forgiveness is not necessarily reconciliation, and reconciliation does not automatically mean restored trust, restored access, or returning to a relationship that remains unsafe. In fact, this whole conversation began last week with Jesus telling us to name the harm and seek repair.

So this is not a command to remain in the path of someone who is actively hurting you. This is a conversation growing out of Jesus’ teaching about reconciliation in community: sin has been named, truth has been spoken, and the possibility of repair is before us. Peter wants to know what happens then. How long do I have to keep doing this? When have I forgiven enough?

Jesus answers, “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” and that number may be pointing us all the way back to Genesis. There, Lamech boasts, “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” Lamech imagines a world in which violence compounds: you hurt me, I hurt you more; you take something from me, I take more from you. Every offense accumulates interest, and vengeance multiplies seventy-sevenfold.

Jesus takes that same number and turns it upside down. What if mercy multiplied like that? What if forgiveness became as relentless as revenge? What if, instead of endlessly escalating what people owe us, the people of God became known for interrupting the cycle?

Then Jesus tells a story about a servant who owes a king ten thousand talents, and the number is intentionally ridiculous. One talent was roughly six thousand daily wages, which means ten thousand talents comes to around sixty million days’ wages. Using a modern comparison of roughly $185 for a day’s work, we are talking about something in the neighborhood of eleven billion dollars. This servant does not have a repayment problem; he has an impossible problem.

And just to feel the difference between a million and a billion: one million seconds is about eleven and a half days, while one billion seconds is almost thirty-two years. That is the scale Jesus is playing with. There is no payment plan, no refinancing, no side hustle, no clever budgeting that fixes this. And yet the king simply wipes the debt away.

The servant walks out carrying something he could never have purchased for himself: freedom. Then almost immediately, he finds another servant who owes him one hundred denarii, about one hundred days’ wages. Using the same modern comparison, that is roughly $18,500. That is real money; Jesus is not pretending that the second debt is meaningless.

But compare $18,500 to eleven billion dollars, and the tragedy becomes obvious. The first servant has received a completely new life, but he immediately goes back to living according to the old rules. He grabs the other servant by the throat and says, “Pay what you owe me.” Mercy has happened to him without becoming a way of life within him.

And I think that is the heart of Jesus’ warning. The servant’s failure is not simply that he is stingy; his failure is that he has been liberated without learning how to live as a liberated person. He has been released from an impossible debt, yet when he gains power over somebody else, he recreates the very system from which he has just been freed. He has been liberated, but he keeps living like Pharaoh.

And suddenly our Exodus reading belongs right here. Israel stands at the sea with slavery behind them, Pharaoh behind them, and an entire system of domination, fear, violence, and bondage behind them. God makes a way where there was no way, and they walk through the sea into freedom. But Exodus is not merely the story of people being liberated fromsomething; the rest of the story asks whether they can learn to live as people liberated for something.

Can people who were slaves learn not to enslave? Can people who lived beneath domination learn another way of being together? Can people who have been set free become people who make freedom possible for others? That is one of the great questions running through Exodus, and I think it is the question Jesus places before Peter as well.

Because God’s forgiveness is not simply the cancellation of a heavenly balance sheet. God’s mercy invites us into an entirely different way of being human: a life in which we do not have to keep every ledger forever, a life in which vengeance does not multiply seventy-sevenfold, a life in which another person's debt does not have to become our prison too. We are not merely forgiven people; we are being formed into a forgiving people.

That does not mean forgetting, abandoning wisdom, or ignoring boundaries. It does not mean automatically trusting someone because they say, “I'm sorry,” and it certainly does not mean surrendering ourselves again to someone determined to harm us. But when repair really is possible, Jesus asks whether we can imagine something beyond repayment, something beyond “You hurt me, so now you owe me until I decide you have suffered enough.”

Paul says something similar today when he asks, “Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister?” Ultimately, Paul reminds us, we all stand before the same Lord. We are fellow servants living on mercy. None of us stands before God as the one who managed to settle the account.

So perhaps there is a very concrete practice to carry with us this week. When someone who has hurt you genuinely comes seeking repair, tell the truth about the debt; do not minimize it, and keep whatever boundaries wisdom requires. But then ask yourself: What would freedom look like here—not only for me, but for them?

Maybe freedom means that you stop bringing up the old failure every time there is a new disagreement. Maybe it means refusing to keep someone permanently reduced to the worst thing they have done. Maybe it means no longer recruiting other people to help you collect a debt that has already been confessed. And maybe, where trust can responsibly grow again, it means opening a door that punishment would prefer to keep shut.

Because this is what liberated people do. People whom God has brought through the sea do not build another Egypt on the opposite shore. People whose impossible debt has been released do not spend their lives tightening their hands around everyone who owes them something. People who have been set free by Christ become, by the grace of God, people through whom others discover freedom too.

So yes: receive the mercy of God. Walk out of the prison. Cross the sea. Live as someone who is free.

And then, beloved, go make freedom possible for somebody else.

Amen.

Glory Down the Mountain

If God is always on a mountain does that mean He's always hard to see?

Sermon audio can be found here.

Fog has a tendency to congregate on the peaks of mountains. I know this after spending seven years living on top of a high plateau. For what feels like days, weeks, and even months at a time, a mood-depressing mist can linger sticking to everything it touches. One’s entire field of vision takes on a type of grey, surreal obscurity and very little appears in focus. Higher elevations can even lead to altitude sickness, including migraines, diarrhea, and blurred sight. Despite all of this mountaintop moments remain a beloved catchall for spiritually exhilarating periods of our lives.

Mountains have since our earliest ancestors been the place where humans interact with the Divine. Whether we will admit it or not, we often imagine that God dwells somewhere among the clouds. Of course, this is not our fault. Everything about God seems cloudy. Our hymns reinforce this—think of our current Offertory, “From all who dwell below the skies, let the Creator’s praise arise” (Hymn 380, 1982 Hymnal). The Old Testament suggests this, as Moses exchanged messages with the Almighty on Sinai’s height and in today’s first lesson Elijah was swept up into the clouds by a chariot of fire. And of course, God names Jesus his beloved on a mountaintop. We get it God, you dwell up there, and we, well, we live down here.

Yet, even as Elijah zoomed off in a blaze of glory, Moses chatted with the Almighty, and God transfigured Jesus, I am left wondering what happens when they (and we with them) come back down? What occurs if the mountaintop becomes too foggy not with God’s Holy presence, but with a cloud of unknowing? Where do we meet God, if not on top of a mountain?

We can, of course, look to those who have met God on top of a mountain more recently, like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who in his last public address beautifully depicted his own pinnacle experience. He even spoke of peeking over the peak and into the Promised Land. In his own words:

“I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.
And I don't mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you.
But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

The Rev. Dr. King seemed to know that like Moses he might have made it to the mountain top, but he might not make it into the Promised Land. This prophetic saint of the 20th Century stood on a proverbial mountain, as he felt God calling him home. Only 300 feet above sea level in Memphis he could still see far enough to view his dream of racial equality becoming reality.

This summit experience of that prophetic speech appears so magnificent in light of the Rev. Dr. King’s martyrdom that it overshadows the first 4,276 words of that same speech. In it he did not pontificate on pinnacles, but rather he wound his way through history until he made it to his own day. He believed that something was happening across the globe as people cried out, “We want to be free.”

We can believe that the work of freedom is done by God, or by more mountainous figures, like the Rev. Dr. King, Mahatma Gandhi, or Mother Teresa. We might think that it takes a spiritual peak experience to be called by God into the work of bringing God’s healing to life. And yet, I believe as John F. Kennedy did that, “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.” The work of the Church, the work of the Body of Christ, the work of us who are that Church and that Body comes not when we have a powerful moment, like that of the transfiguration, but when we receive God’s grace and let it transfigure the rest of our life.

This is not always a pleasant experience either. Moses, Elijah, and the Rev. Dr. King all struggled with God, but maybe none of them as much as the disciples. On the one hand, in the Transfiguration they encountered the symbol of the Law, Moses, and the epitome of the prophets, Elijah, speaking with Jesus. Plus, they had heard the voice of God, and had lived! Yet on the other hand, a cloud obscured their vision, Peter blabbered about building booths, fear wrapped around them, and worst of all Jesus told them to tell no one of the experience. But, why?

Throughout Mark’s Gospel account the reader is left wondering, “Who is this Jesus?” In fact, Jesus even seems to turn to the audience to ask, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answers the question acknowledging Jesus as the Messiah, and yet when Jesus describes the type of death the Messiah must die Peter cannot handle it. This is when Jesus calls Peter Satan. So when God transfigures Jesus on the mountaintop this fuels Peter’s understanding of the Messiah that is this person who was to come in and overthrow the occupying forces of Rome. And yet, Jesus understands the truth of this moment far better than the disciples.

The moment of the Transfiguration will remain a mystery until the events that transpire in Jerusalem and result in Jesus’ death. Some would have certainly tried to put Jesus in a position of political power had they heard of this divine encounter on the top of a mountain. Yet, the glorification of God’s Son in the cloud can only make sense in light of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. And this is what we must understand about our peak spiritual experiences: they are not meant to give us something to boast about, but rather are to transfigure our hearts so that we might continue on the journey.

We with the disciples and Jesus are beginning our journey towards Jerusalem through the Season of Lent this very week. We need not go in search of any alps. For Christ wants us to walk with him down the mountain instead. Jesus’ Transfiguration occurred among the clouds, but God yearns to reform our hearts, as we journey with him bringing freedom, release, and transformation to all God’s children starting with ourselves.