2026-09-16
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
Pass It On
The Federated Church / Pentecost 16A
Matthew 18:21-35
Rev. Michael Anthony Howard
Sunday, September 13, 2026
Please join your heart with mine as we lift them up to God—
Living Word,
Draw near us.
Take on flesh
and dwell among us.
Open these words to us,
and open us to one another.
And may the words of my mouth,
and the meditations of all our hearts,
bear witness to your Kingdom,
for you are our Rock and Redeemer.
Amen.
1. LOOK AROUND — THE CONSTRUCTION SITE
Look around!
Look at these colors.
Look at these children.
Today, people will stand before us this morning and say, Yes. I want to be part of this!
Look at all these ministries coming back to life.
It’s Rally Day!
And if ever there were a Sunday
to ask what exactly we’re rallying around,
Matthew has given us an answer.
There is something fascinating
about reading Matthew
through this long season after Pentecost.
Week after week,
it begins to feel like we’re reading
blueprints.
Jesus says:
“I will build my church.”
And then Matthew starts
showing us what that thing looks like.
How do these people care for one another?
What happens when somebody gets lost?
What happens when we hurt each other?
How do we tell the truth?
How do we reconcile?
What do we bind together?
What do we loose?
These aren’t simply
instructions for individual Christians.
These are the blueprints
for the creation of a people.
And today—
we are standing in the construction site.
God is making something out of us.
2. PETER BRINGS A CALCULATOR
And right in the middle of the construction site,
Peter walks up to Jesus—
with a calculator.
“Lord, if another member of the church
sins against me,
how often should I forgive?
Seven times?”
It’s actually pretty generous.
Peter wants to know the forgiveness budget.
Surely there comes a point when I’ve done enough.
Seven?
Jesus says:
Seventy-seven.
Or maybe seventy times seven.
… “That’s four hundred and ninety.”
And we usually hear that as Jesus saying:
Peter, your number isn't big enough.
But I wonder if Jesus is saying:
Peter, you’re using the wrong mathematics.
Peter is doing arithmetic.
One offense. One forgiveness.
Two offenses. Two forgivenesses.
But some things don’t come in discrete units.
Water doesn’t.
We measure water in cups and gallons and liters.
But water doesn’t naturally come in discrete units,
it flows.
And Peter, your dollar-store Casio calculator
isn’t going to help you understand the flow of a river.
This is an entirely different calculus.
3. FORGIVENESS IS A CURRENT
Because forgiveness isn’t a commodity.
Forgiveness is a current.
Water has a current.
Electricity has a current.
Blood moves through the body in a current.
And that gives us another useful word:
currency.
Currency is something that circulates.
And I begun to think that maybe
forgiveness is the currency of the Kingdom of God.
Not because forgiveness buys you something.
Not because you can accumulate enough forgiveness
and exchange it someday for admission into heaven.
No.
Forgiveness is the currency of the Kingdom
because forgiveness is what circulates there.
Mercy circulates. Grace circulates. Love circulates.
Forgiveness is a circulatory phenomenon.
4. PASS IT ON
I think that’s why Jesus tells Peter this story.
A servant owes his king an unimaginable debt.
He cannot possibly repay it.
And the king releases him.
The servant walks away having received
an extraordinary current of mercy.
Then he encounters someone
who owes him something.
And suddenly—
the current stops.
You owe me.
You did this.
I’ve already forgiven you.
He receives mercy and converts it right back into a ledger.
The tragedy isn’t simply that he should have been nicer.
The tragedy is that he stopped the flow of forgiveness.
Something came to him
that was meant to flow through him—
and he dammed it up.
He received mercy.
He just wouldn’t pass it on.
5. LET THE HEART BEAT
And if the Church is the Body of Christ,
forgiveness isn’t merely something
individual Christians occasionally do.
Forgiveness is part of our circulation system.
Mercy is our lifeblood.
You are supposed to..
Pass it on!
Grace has to move.
From God to me. Pass it on.
From me to you. Pass it on.
From us into the world. Pass it on.
Peter asks:
“How many times do I have to forgive?”
That’s like asking:
How many times does my heart have to beat?
The heart beats because the body is alive.
Forgiveness isn’t a quota imposed upon Christians.
It’s a vital sign of
the Body of Christ.
6. FORGIVENESS IS NOT PERMISSION
Now, I need to be careful.
Forgiveness does not mean pretending
that what happened was acceptable.
It doesn’t mean
returning to an abusive relationship.
It doesn’t mean
abandoning boundaries or accountability.
The wound matters.
Justice matters.
And you can forgive someone and still say:
You may never do that to me again.
What must not become sovereign is
the desire to make
another person’s suffering
the payment for mine.
I hurt, therefore you must hurt.
Wound for wound.
Debt for debt.
Suffering for suffering.
That’s the old calculus.
That’s the ledger.
But forgiveness says:
What happened matters.
What happens next matters.
But I will not make your suffering
the currency with which my suffering is redeemed.
7. GOD IS MAKING A PEOPLE
And maybe this is what Matthew
has been showing us all along.
Remember what Peter said a few weeks ago?
“You are the Messiah.”
The people had been waiting
for God’s Anointed One.
The person through whom God would act.
Peter says to Jesus:
“You’re the one!”
And what does Jesus immediately start talking about?
“I will build my church.”
My ekklesia.
My people.
It’s almost as though Jesus is saying:
You’ve been waiting on a person.
But what God wants is a people.
A people capable of embodying the life of the Messiah.
A people through whom mercy can circulate.
Because you cannot have a messianic people
without messianic practices.
And forgiveness is one of them.
We receive God’s mercy—
and we pass it on.
8. THE WORLD TO COME SHOWS UP EARLY
There is a theological word
for what happens when we live this way:
Prolepsis.
It means something from the future
showing up early in the story. A foretaste.
The first fruit isn’t merely
a promise that someday
there will be a harvest.
It is the harvest showing up early.
And that's what the Church is supposed to be.
A foretaste of the world to come.
Every time mercy interrupts vengeance—
every time somebody gets fed—
every time the lonely find community—
every time somebody discovers there is room for them—
every time we tell the truth—
every time we repair something we've broken—
every time forgiveness prevents
one wound from becoming another wound—
the world to come shows up early.
That’s what Jesus taught us to pray:
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Not: Get me out of here and take me there.
But: Let there come here.
Because forgiveness is not something
God gives us so that we can get into heaven.
Forgiveness is how heaven gets into us.
And through us—
heaven gets into the world.
9. PASS IT ON
So look around again!
This Sunday we have
New members. Old friends.
Children. Teachers.
Choirs. Ministries.
These beautiful colors surrounding us.
This is the construction site.
Thread by thread.
Relationship by relationship.
Life by life.
God is making a people.
And yes—we’re going to get it wrong sometimes.
We’ll hurt one another.
We’ll need truth.
We’ll need boundaries.
We’ll need justice.
And again and again and again—
we will need mercy to keep moving through us.
So, Federated Church—
Be a conduit of mercy.
God has given us mercy beyond counting.
Pass it on.
God has given us grace enough to begin again.
Pass it on.
God has given us a foretaste
of the world that is coming.
Pass it on.
Put away the calculator.
Let mercy move. Let grace circulate.
Let the heart of God beat through us.
Because mercy has already won.
The question is
whether we will live inside its victory.
In us, God is building something beautiful.
In the triumphant mercy of God.
Amen.
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