Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 19 (September 6, 2026)
Transcript
This transcript was generated by YouTube AI and further edited for readability.
May only truth be spoken here and only truth be heard. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
It's another Sunday on forgiveness.
Well, I'm still mad.
Maybe that’s why I need another sermon about forgiveness. Maybe 77 of them?
Chances are you’re also still mad about something. You know, it might be something that happened this weekend or this morning. It might be about somebody who's dead. It might be somebody or something that you saw on the news this week.
But chances are, if I need a sermon on forgiveness 77 times, then maybe we all do.
So this week, Max started fourth grade. I have very fond memories of fourth grade. It was a good year. We had a wonderful teacher, Mr. Gard. He had a turtle in his classroom. He was a good teacher. I know. A turtle. What could be better?
And it was also in Mr. Gard's classroom that I met one of my favorite childhood books, because he would read us books at the end of every day, a different novel. This is the book that taught me that a book could make me cry: Where the Red Fern Grows.
If you haven't read it, the dogs die at the end.
Okay. [laughter]
But the book is about a young boy, probably a fourth-grade age, and he has these two dogs, and his hobby is hunting raccoons. So there's a lot of folklore and folk tales about raccoons, these brilliant little creatures, right?
And the little boy's father teaches his son a way to trap a raccoon. This is not actually true. Don't try it yourself.
But this folktale that the father teaches, which is that you take a hollow log or tree and you bore a hole into the hollow part just wide enough for the raccoon to put his little paw in there.
Inside the hollow spot, you put something shiny. Raccoons like shiny things. You put, like, a little piece of tin foil or a nice rock.
Now the raccoon puts his little paw in there and grabs whatever is in there. But now he can't get back out because he's hanging on to something, right?
And try as he might, his fist is bigger now and it won't fit back out.
And the folklore goes that he will stay there till he starves to death or until a little boy can come and trap him.
This is a good parable to accompany Jesus' parable today about what it does to us: the things that we cannot, will not, let go.
What am I hanging on to? Maybe in hope that I will put it right. Maybe in hope that someone will say that they are sorry, come groveling to me. Whatever it is, what am I hanging on to?
Jesus says a person who hangs on to their anger and their resentment is like a man who was forgiven $100,000, a man who had been enslaved by what he owed.
And he begged for mercy, and he was given it and he was set free. He could go anywhere and do anything.
But he turned right around and found something that was still owed to him. And he put his hand around that man's throat and he held on and would not let go because that man owed him something.
And he held on long enough that he lost his own freedom. He was trapped by his own clutch.
And Jesus says, when you've been set free, you might know it up here, right? When you've been forgiven, you might know it up here, but it's here that really matters.
And if you haven't got it into your heart that you're free now, you're liable to find yourselves with a grip on something that you can't let go, and it will destroy you.
That is how serious this is.
And you know it's true. If you've ever had a sleepless night, you know it's true.
For freedom, Christ has set us free.
But it's not enough to know that I should let go. Boy, if that was enough, I'd be all good, right?
Okay. So, we need practical advice.
I'm going to give you the most practical advice that I can muster, and it doesn't come from the Bible, but I think it comes from the lineage. Okay, it's on page 522 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.
If there's someone that I need to forgive, the writer says—and this is a woman who was trapped, she was trapped by her alcoholism—and she testifies that if there's someone or something that she still needs to forgive, and you know what yours is, it might be yourself.
She said, “If I can't forgive, I will end up back in the cage that I came out of. That's how much this matters.”
So her practice that she wrote down for generations of human beings is this.
You pray for the person for two weeks. What do you pray?
You pray for that person to have whatever is the gift that you yourself need and long for.
Mercy, love, peace of heart, compassion, forgiveness.
Pray that God would give them the gifts that you yourself most need for your own heart.
And then an Episcopal priest named Barbara Crafton taught me a further application of that, because sometimes it is difficult to muster the willingness to say the words. And all you have to do, by the way, is say the words, right? That this person would have the gifts that you long for for yourself.
You don't have to really want it in your heart. You don't have to actually believe it. You just pray it.
She said, “If you can't muster that, you just give that person's name to God every day, at least for two weeks, and as often as it comes up.”
I can tell you that it works.
Okay, it works in one of two ways in my own life. I've never gotten all the way to the end of two weeks. Either I'm not willing to keep going, so God lets me stay in my trap.
Has patience with me, because there will be a time that person will do the same thing again and I'll be all het up again, and I'll be willing to go through with the prayers.
But even more often, by the time two weeks is up, I've forgotten to pray because something has been lifted.
God does the lifting, not me. That is the power.
When my hand is open and my heart is set free, then I can change what needs to be changed about me.
I may need to do something different. I may need to ask for something, set a boundary, right? Make a request or remove myself.
But it always works when I'm willing.
So that's the practical advice for: “For freedom, Christ has set us free.”
It is not just for your personal life that this matters.
It matters for our communities. It matters for the groups that you belong to. It matters for Hyde Park. It matters for our country. It matters for the whole world community.
In our age, politics is dominated by resentment, by fingerpointing, nurturing and hanging on to the wrong done, real or imagined.
It is dominated, and we will not make a better world by clutching at each other's throats.
So we have to let go.
Someone did me dirty on Friday.
One, two, three. I need more time.
Be patient with me.
But I know that for freedom, Christ has set us free.
By the way, it's not you.
For freedom, Christ has set us free.
You have the power to take the reality of God's forgiveness and mercy.
The power comes from God.
But that forgiveness and mercy can move from your head to your heart to your hand, how you are in the world.
For freedom, Christ has set us free.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.