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Welcome to the Anglican Parish of St. Andrews Wimbledon
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I'm Sam Posh, I serve as the vicar here. I don't know which of the teachings of Jesus you might think are the most counter-cultural today
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For me, I wonder if one of the most challenging things personally is his teaching on forgiveness
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Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. It's so easy to say, but why is it so hard to do
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So often in the Bible, forgiveness is described like cancelling a debt
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Matthew chapter 18, we're told, The kingdom of heaven is like a king who wants to settle accounts with his servants
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As he began the settlement, a man who owed him 10,000 bags of gold was brought to him
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See, the king has these subjects who owe an obligation to him as the king
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But if they fail to fulfill that obligation it like racking up a debt which needs to be paid and settled one way or the other The debt is real The only question is who pays Forgiveness is when the person owed is willing to cancel that debt
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to wipe the slate clean, which really means they absorbed the cost themselves
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Like if you came to my house and you broke one of my chairs. The chair is broken. The only question
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is who's going to pay? If you say you'll pay to get it fixed, that's on you. But if I say don't
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worry about it, it's fine, it's fine, you don't need to pay. Actually, it falls on me to either fix
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the chair or lose the chair. Followers of Jesus have come to realize that we have been forgiven
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that great unpayable 10,000 bags of gold kind of debt towards God. And Jesus at the cross has wiped
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our debt clean. It's actually perfectly credited us with his account before God. And as that sinks
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into my soul as how much I've been forgiven, I find I am more able to forgive others their debts
