“How many times do I have to forgive my brother or sister who hurts me, Jesus?” Don’t forget that question from Peter came very shortly after that argument broke out amongst the disciples about who would be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

  Remember, that’s when Jesus picked up a child and put her in front of them all and said, “if you want to be great in God’s kingdom, then be like her.”

  This issue about who was the greatest may have come up on several occasions. And Peter might have even been allowing that given what things were with all the pressure that was on Jesus and all of them, the authorities who wanted to kill them, the people who ridiculed them, the precipitous drop in income they had experienced since leaving their nets behind and going with Jesus, that things between them could get a little testy. So forgiveness might be in order, but how much order?

  Peter was looking for the reasonable limits. “How about seven times, Jesus, isn’t that more than enough forgiveness?” “How about 490 times, Peter?”

  There he was at it again. Jesus was suggesting ways of living that no regular human being could ever live up to. Peter was probably struggling to get even to that seven times mark, but this was way overboard.

  But Jesus talked about forgiveness a lot. It’s right there in the Sermon on the Mount--his greatest hits--in what we call the Lord’s prayer. Jesus says we ought to pray that God would forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And he follows it up by saying, “you can’t get forgiveness from God, without giving forgiveness to others.”

  Like he did most of the time, Jesus was going at it backwards. He was turning everything upside down. We think that forgiveness follows repentance and restitution. If you say you are sorry and promise not to do it again, and make anything right that needs to be right or, at least, do the best you can, then I will gladly, or maybe not so gladly, forgive you. But I will forgive you if you do your part first.

  But God does it differently, backwards. God forgives and then come repentance and restitution from us. Forgiveness isn’t the last step in getting ourselves right with God. It’s the first. And it all starts with God.

  That’s what this business we call grace is all about. God’s grace, God’s willingness to forgive the mess we make of things including ourselves, the sin we contribute to our world, is meant to make us graceful, or people full of grace, who take God’s forgiveness and make it real in our interactions with each other. It doesn’t only make us more forgiving, it opens us up to all kinds of ways of new living. You’ve heard of gateway drug like marijuana that leads to harder and more dangerous drugs.

  Well maybe forgiveness is a gateway characteristic of the Christian life. If you are forgiving others, maybe before too long that’s not enough, and you start being more compassionate. Then the next thing you know you are experimenting with gentleness, and before too long you are hopelessly addicted to caring for the oppressed and making peace. You never know what just might happen when you start with forgiveness, the dangerous places it might lead us. We might end up being the Body of Christ.

Now we have to realize that like Peter, we are always looking for loopholes. And even in this amazing grace Jesus is talking about, we find ways to abuse it. A popular way is that we use the idea of forgiveness to let ourselves off the hook. I can do all manner of evil against you, I can sin in grievous ways against you and then put the ball in your court by saying, “Well, you know, Jesus said forgive 490 times. So it doesn’t matter what I’ve done. The real issue now is forgiveness. It’s on you, the sinned against, not me, the sinner. I may have hurt you, but that’s past, now the important thing if we are going to move ahead is that you forgive me.”

  That’s not what forgiveness is about, an escape clause in all of my negative interactions with you, God, or the planet. Grace is about God helping us to own our sin, instead of it owning us. Grace is an avenue to a new destination where we can live in better ways with God and each other.

Peter had a problem, though. He knew himself. As much as he would like to be like the king in the first part of today’s story who forgave the servant who owed him so much money, like most of us Peter was more like the servant who couldn’t figure out how to let grace take him to a new level. He couldn’t get the new paradigm, the new way of living, that Jesus was talking about where forgiveness and grace trump our need to hold grudges, seek revenge, and hit back harder than they hit you.

  It was a failure of Peter’s imagination. He couldn’t see the new thing Jesus was talking about. He couldn’t catch sight of the new possibilities for his life if he could let forgiveness sink deep within, let God’s forgiveness propel him to something else.

  See this acorn? Do you know what’s inside of it? A tree. And a big one. Peter thinks this whole idea of forgiveness, or at least the way Jesus is talking about it, is beyond what anybody but Jesus is capable of. But for Jesus it is no more improbable that Peter or any of us can live grace filled lives than it is this acorn becoming a huge oak tree. It happens all the time. And with God, what is exactly impossible?

  We need new eyes to see and new ears to hear about the possibilities that come when we lay down our nets and hit the road with Jesus. Jesus shows us how to start looking for the seeds that contain trees just waiting to grow. Those trees are us. That’s what Jesus keeps telling us. It’s possible that we can follow him, and become what he sees we can become. The trees are there, right inside the seeds, right inside of us.

Mary and I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit after she came back from the Fair Trade Summit that took place in town last week. More than 20 years ago this congregation was involved in a project called Jubilee Crafts. We volunteered our time to sell crafts and other items made by workers in cooperatives in Third World countries. We also did presentations about the conditions in the countries, the challenges the workers faced, and the needs they had. We were able to return to the workers many more times the money they would have received if they had marketed their products in ways we are most used to. We returned many thousands of dollars to those workers.

  We thought we had this seed called Jubilee Crafts. We were just trying to help out some folk who we were able to help out. It turns out, though, it was not a seed, but a tree.  That tree is now a whole movement for Fair and Fairer trade. We were taking on the established system and subverting it. And look at that tree.

  We just need better imaginations, rather than assuming things always have to be the way they have always been. We can get out of those traps. That story we read earlier about the Israeli and Palestinian families who decided that rather than let the murders of their loved ones fester, they were going to take steps toward forgiveness, proves Jesus point. We don’t have to live the way we always have. There are alternatives, God’s alternatives. We just have to keep looking for the trees inside those seeds Jesus planted.

  And 9-11 is a test for all of us. Jesus surely didn’t mean for us to forgive something like that. Well, I think he did. As devastating as 9-11 was, it was nothing compared to what Jesus saw Rome doing every day. He was not naive about any of this. Remember that his family ended up as refugees because the baby boys in whole villages were slaughtered because they were looking for him. And everywhere he went, people were still trying to kill him. They finally did, but it wasn’t them who succeeded, it was Jesus. They were angry and frightened of the new world Jesus was offering. But Jesus loved them. And forgave them.

  The point that Jesus was making to Peter is not that we can finally get to the limit of forgiveness, even if it is 490 times. The point is that forgiveness, starting with God’s forgiveness, changes our lives, and the old questions about how much do we have to forgive get replaced with questions about how do we be more like Jesus?

  We are the trees that Jesus believed could take root in this world and provide shade and nourishment and stability and joy and wonder as folk make their way toward God.

  And this thing we call the church is not just some seed scattered here and there. We are trees, spreading out and reaching up, seeking to follow Jesus and be his body, his presence on this earth.

 It’s not impossible. We can bear witness to Jesus. We can live the way he lived. We can believe what he believed. And we can make a difference in this world as surely as huge trees grow from a little seed.