SERMON 13 Sep. 2026 “Grace Doesn’t Stay Pooled”

A visit to hospital or a specialist can sometimes come with a medical bill much bigger than expected. There can be costs we didn’t see coming. And if the amount is more than we can manage, the treatment may be over, the body may have recovered, but the debt is still there.

Recently, I was chatting with someone and the conversation turned to healthcare and medical costs in the United States. For people without health insurance, or without enough cover, a serious illness or major surgery can leave them with a debt they cannot afford. Some carry that medical debt for years.

Apparently, there is a non-profit organisation in the United States that helps people in this situation. It buys old medical debts that hospitals have given up trying to collect. And then it cancels them. A letter is sent to the person saying, “Your medical debt has been cleared.”

Because the organisation can buy these debts so cheaply, a hundred-dollar donation can sometimes wipe out ten thousand dollars of medical debt. Just imagine getting a letter like that. A bill you thought would follow you for years, gone, just like that. How would that feel?

But the debt in the story Jesus tells today is even bigger than this. And it starts with a question from Peter. Peter asks Jesus, ‘Lord, how many times should I forgive someone who sins against me? As many as seven times?’ Peter wants to know how many is enough, where the limit is, if there even is one. Jesus answers, ‘Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.’

This number isn’t new in scripture. Long before, in Genesis, a man named Lamech said he would take revenge seventy-sevenfold on anyone who hurt him. Get hurt, hit back harder. That’s the math of revenge, one wrong multiplying into more.

Later, the law of Moses put a limit on that. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Only as much as you were hurt, no more. Then Jesus takes it in a different direction. Not seventy-seven times revenge, but seventy-seven times forgiveness. He’s not asking Peter to count higher. He’s taking him beyond counting.

Then Jesus tells a parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his slaves.” A servant is brought before him. He owes ten thousand talents.

Ten thousand talents. That’s not something an ordinary person could pay off in a lifetime. Think millions in today’s terms. The servant falls on his knees. “Be patient with me, and I will pay back everything.”

What happens next is unexpected. The king doesn’t give him more time. He doesn’t work out a payment plan. He has compassion on him, lets him go, and cancels the whole debt. The servant asked for more time. The king gave him freedom. But the story doesn’t end there. On his way out, the servant meets another servant who owes him a hundred denarii.

A hundred denarii isn’t nothing. It’s several months’ wages. The debt is real. But compared to ten thousand talents, it’s a different scale altogether. He grabs the man by the throat. ‘Pay back what you owe me.’ The man falls down and begs, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’    Sound familiar? Those are almost the exact words he said to the king. But this time, there’s no mercy. He has him thrown into prison.

What happened to this man? It’s not that he had never received mercy. He had just experienced it. But the moment he walked out the king’s door, he went from ten thousand talents straight back to a hundred denarii. He forgot what he had received.

In the Bible, to ‘remember’ is an important word. It doesn’t just mean recalling something from the past. It means knowing where you came from, knowing what you’ve received, and living today in a way that matches that.

Take the Exodus reading. The sea was in front of them. Egypt’s army was closing in behind them. There was no way out on their own. Then, all through the night, a wind blows and the sea splits open. A path they didn’t make opens up in front of them. They walk through it, out of slavery and into freedom. That freedom wasn’t something they earned. It was something they were given. And this became something Israel would have to keep remembering.

So here, our two readings meet. One man had his debt cancelled. One people received freedom. After the Exodus, God tells Israel again and again, “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt.”

Why remember? Because they were to remember both sides of the story. They had been slaves, and God had set them free. And that memory was supposed to change how they treated others, especially anyone in their own community who was now where they used to be. So don’t mistreat the stranger among you. You know what that feels like. Don’t crush the weak, you were the weak one once.

That’s exactly what the servant in Jesus’ parable forgot. Or, more precisely, it wasn’t that he didn’t know. He knew exactly what had just happened to him but he kept that mercy for himself. It never occurred to him to extend it to his fellow servant.

He’d received grace, but the grace stopped with him. Remembering, in the way Scripture means it, can be uncomfortable. Sometimes we remember what we want to remember and leave out the rest. It doesn’t just ask what we’ve received but also what we’ve done to others.

We have a memory like that too.

In 1994, our own Uniting Church entered into a Covenant with the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress. The Assembly President at the time, Dr Jill Tabart, stood before the Congress Chairperson, Pastor Bill Hollingsworth, and on behalf of the church, acknowledged and apologised for wrongs done to First Peoples.

She recognised that First Peoples had lived on this land long before colonisation. And she didn’t look away from the wrongs the church had done, or She recognised that First Peoples had lived on this land long before colonisation. And she didn’t look away from the wrongs the church had done or its part in that history.

Of course, one apology doesn’t undo history. But remembering it does matter. It helps shape how we live with one another now.

During this Season of Creation, we’re invited to widen that memory a little further. Not just how we’re connected to each other but remembering where we belong. We’re stewards, not owners. Caring for what we’ve received and passing it on well to the next generation is what stewardship means.

And forgiveness asks something similar of us. It doesn’t mean saying the hurt was nothing, or that healing doesn’t take time. But that wound doesn’t have to decide who we become. We don’t have to keep living by that old math, where one wrong multiplies into more.

Peter wanted to know where the limit was. Jesus turns Peter’s attention away from counting, toward something else entirely: what kind of people we’re becoming. And that starts with remembering the mercy that was shown to us. When we remember that, something shifts in how we see the person in front of us.

And passing that mercy on to someone else, that’s the invitation today. To let go of what’s hardened in us and actually live the grace we’ve received. Amen.