Learning a Different Pattern – Br. Keith Nelson

Genesis 50:15-21
Matthew 18:21-35

The agrarian poet Wendell Berry wrote:

We depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.1

We are each radically dependent upon our Creator, who holds each creature in life every moment. And we are horizontally embedded in a web of dependence, one creature upon another, simply by being alive. Berry uses the poignant language of sacrament or desecration to characterize our response to both God and the creatures on whom we depend. How we live in response to the continual gift of creation may either lead us closer to or further from its Giver.

The gospels routinely use the language of indebtedness to name both our vertical dependence upon God and our horizontal dependence upon other people and creatures.

In the Palestine of Jesus, as in much of the world for much of history, the collection and payment of debt was mediated by people and objects. Bits of metal bearing a distant Emperor’s face were earned by the slow accrual of sunrises and sunsets, blistered feet and calloused hands, baskets full (or empty) of wheat.

By the precarious balance of ledgers and the caprice or benevolence of overlords, a family might sleep in peace or be sold to separate owners in chains.

Jesus invokes these experiences and structures in his teaching about spiritual indebtedness. This parable of the kingdom of heaven introduces a king who forgives a debt; a slave who does not; and the ultimate consequences. It seems designed to stretch our moral imagination to the breaking point, and then lead us through that rupture into larger Life.

During this Season of Creation, this parable invites us to examine the reality that we are both limitlessly forgiven and accountable for the consequences when we grieve the heart of God in desecrating creation. That accountability is both individual and collective as we stand before God and one another to reckon with the history of our own suffering land.

Ten thousand talents is an absurd sum of money – more money than would have even been in circulation in all of Roman Judea at the time. The absurdism of how the slave could possibly owe that sum, much less ever pay it off, sets up Jesus’ listeners for a scenario rooted in the world they know, but also fantastical. This slave then immediately runs into another slave, who owes him a hundred denarii. A denarius was a day’s wages, while a single talent was more than fifteen years’ wages. There is a maximalist contrast here between the staggering forgiveness of the king and the stunning inability of the slave to forgive a vastly smaller sum.

Recall for a moment the experience of seeing the full reality of the way you have caused suffering to another. When this reality landed fully upon your conscience, you probably asked: “How can I make this right?” Seeking forgiveness as a response to repentance is a mark of Christian discipleship. In Matthew 5, we hear, “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:23-24).

That passage is provocative in the same way as today’s parable. It makes us ask: If I lived my life that way, how much more vividly would I feel the connection between what I offer or withhold from God and what I offer or withhold from my fellow creatures?

To live in the world is to cause others suffering – a living tissue of indebtedness, to use Matthew’s predominant image. But we must also acknowledge that this debt is distributed disproportionately. Some benefit disproportionately from the sum total of the world’s human-inflicted suffering, from the body and blood of Creation broken “ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively.”

The forgiveness of debts in this parable is a transaction between one individual and another. But what if we were to expand our self-concept to include the groups or identities of which we are a part – both presently and historically – who have not only caused suffering but been its disproportionate beneficiaries? For those of us descended from white colonial settlers, this would entail acknowledging and grieving a history of desecration before we begin to seek forgiveness.

The desecration of the land beneath our feet and of its native inhabitants are deeply intertwined. Fully honoring a liturgical season of creation as Christians and Episcopalians must entail truth-telling, grieving, and the pursuit of repair between native peoples and the descendants of settlers, just as it demands assessing the root causes of our cultural and spiritual alienation from the living earth.

The pattern written into our land has embedded us in unjust hierarchies of victimization. The pattern set by those with power is to extract and exploit resources, out of a lust for security, from the next most vulnerable group, class, gender, or nation.

This pattern of victimization is a refusal to live with gratitude to the Creator within a means sustainable for all life.

It is a pattern codified in the Doctrine of Discovery. If you don’t know the term, the Doctrine is a multifaceted theological, philosophical, and legal framework dating to the fifteenth century that defined land without the governance of a Christian monarch, and thus all indigenous lands, as “terra nullius”: no land, empty land, “finder’s keepers.”

It is a pattern directly responsible for the foundational assumptions toward land in this country and in every country founded under colonial empire: its proprietary ownership; its living or non-living status; its health and flourishing deprioritized to industrial interests; even the origin of the national and state parks system.

And it is the pattern central to the present political administration’s knowing and calculated unraveling of every major environmental protection secured in my four and a half decades of life; withdrawal from all major global collaboration with other nations to sustain planetary life; and denial of the overwhelming scientific data about the changes that will make life as we know it unsustainable.

At this point, I know: you’re probably tired of hearing these things. It is tiring preaching about them.

But before I present the alternative to the pattern, let’s stick with the grief.

The most challenging verses in today’s parable for me come at the end: “And in anger his Lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or your sister from your heart” (Matthew 18:34-35).

If you have been one of the victims of the pattern I just described – and you are a Christian – is God compelling you under pain of torture to forgive the perpetrators of this pattern?

For me, this is where the metaphor of this parable breaks down. God is not a first-century monarch, using prisons and torture chambers to motivate repentance. God suffers with and in every victim, as Jesus himself will die to show us.

To make any good news of this passage as it relates to this question, I must hold it alongside Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:23, about the counterbalancing necessity of seeking forgiveness: “If you remember that your brother or sister has something against you…” The dawning of that remembrance, and the long road to making things right, can be excruciating to the conscience. It can even feel like torture.

Sarah Augustine is a native woman and a Mennonite Christian. She uses a metaphor – a parable, really – of a priceless vase she owned filled with soil from her ancestral homeland. Her daughter broke the vase by accident, shattered it into many pieces, all the soil spilled. She asks: What does repair look like in this situation? Is repair buying a new vase and apologizing? Is repair attempting to glue together the hundreds of broken shards to make a container no good for holding anything?

The original vase and its contents are gone forever.

Her only answer is: Meaningful repair is to ask the vase’s owner, “What would repair look like if it were possible?”; then engaging in that relational process to the fullness of one’s capacity; and only then asking for forgiveness. Augustine emphasizes that this must be relational rather than transactional. Giving money may alleviate an individual’s tortured conscience, but that act alone is restitution. Healing is to be sought for in repair.

Today, and every day, we can accept the unearned forgiveness of God for the part we play in this suffering. Trusting in the forgiveness of God strengthens us to travel the road – the deepening spirals – of repair between people and land and between white settler descendants and native people.

In very different ways, the pattern of victimization outlined above impacts us all. But it is not the only pattern possible.

Astonishingly, a different pattern is still lived out vibrantly and generously by many cultures in the Global South and many indigenous and traditional cultures globally. If we dig back far enough, it is a pattern whose basic relationship to land is common to all societies, a hopeful promise that it still lives in our human ancestral memory. This pattern endows the multiplicity of others within any given circle or system with basic dignity and assumes the participation of these others in the rhythms of work, rest, lament and celebration that sustain life. To Christians in these places and among these peoples, this pattern is self-evident in the life and good news of Jesus Christ. For them, it is the pattern which not only sustains life but renders the highest glory to God.

Let us learn and relearn this pattern together.

1 Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural.

Recommended Resources

Sarah Augustine, The Land Is Not Empty: Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery.

Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery.

Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Forgiveness: An Alternative Account.

The Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery: www.dismantlediscovery.org