There’s no way around it. This is a particularly difficult and, frankly, chilling passage. After a kind who seems to represent God destroys the folks who killed his slaves and burns their city down, there is a wedding guest who makes an apparently innocent mistake, who didn’t get the memo about wearing a certain wedding robe, and this king sends him into the outer darkness where this is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

There’s another special creature wandering around Seattle these days, also showing God’s love and joy in unique ways. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. His name is Jimothy. He is a wild raccoon with short spine syndrome, which makes him shorter and rounder-looking than most raccoons. He took social media by storm internationally this past July. According to Happy Animal Planet, locals knew about him since last year…

God is love. This is a statement from scripture (1 John 4). It is also my lived experience, and our conviction as Episcopal Christians. Jesus came to train us to see and help us to experience God as love, pervading all things, transforming all things. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and mystic who trained as a paleontologist and geologist, claimed that “love is the very physical structure of the Universe.”

You might notice that the lectionary has skipped Matthew chapter 19, as last week we read from Matthew 18, when we read about the unmerciful servant, and today we’re reading from Matthew 20, the unhappy laborers in the vineyard with surprising salaries.

The theme of today’s gospel reading, and my focus today, is forgiveness. I’m going to tell two true stories that are extreme cases of forgiveness, which I hope will stretch the limits of what kind of forgiveness you think is even possible.

God is doing a new thing in the world today. The Holy Spirit is up to something. We all feel it. Despite the numerous challenges facing our world and the church, new life is emerging. New things are being born.

Jesus and Peter walking on the water. I know I already talked about the movie Bruce Almighty last week, but I can’t help but think of the scene where God, played by Morgan Freeman, walks on water with Bruce, played by Jim Carrey, while he explains to Bruce the rules when handing over his divine powers.

In the moment of the great crowd’s deepest need, great hunger, through Jesus, God provided what the people needed, with leftovers. God not only provided enough. God provided abundantly. Although the people and even the disciples doubted, Jesus had faith that God would provide. And God came through, as God always does when we believe.

Carlos’s experience in that village in Mexico where he was accepted, clothed, and taken care of, despite being naked and covered in tattoos, opened his heart to be good soil for God’s love.

Photo credit: Roman Synkevych on Unsplash