September 13, 2026 | Word Out!
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READINGS
First Reading: Genesis 50:15-21
15 Realizing that their father was dead, Joseph’s brothers said, “What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?” 16 So they approached Joseph, saying, “Your father gave this instruction before he died, 17 ’Say to Joseph: I beg you, forgive the crime of your brothers and the wrong they did in harming you.’ Now therefore please forgive the crime of the servants of the God of your father.” Joseph wept when they spoke to him. 18 Then his brothers also wept, fell down before him, and said, “We are here as your slaves.” 19 But Joseph said to them, “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? 20 Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. 21 So have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.” In this way he reassured them, speaking kindly to them.
Second Reading: Romans 14:1-12
1 Welcome those who are weak in faith but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions. 2 Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables. 3 Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat, for God has welcomed them. 4 Who are you to pass judgment on slaves of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand.
5 Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds. 6 Those who observe the day, observe it for the Lord. Also those who eat, eat for the Lord, since they give thanks to God, while those who abstain, abstain for the Lord and give thanks to God.
7 For we do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. 8 If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. 9 For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.
10 Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you, why do you despise your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. 11 For it is written,
“As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me,
and every tongue shall give praise to God.”
12 So then, each one of us will be held accountable.
Gospel: Matthew 18:21-35
21 Peter came and said to [Jesus,] “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” 22 Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.
23 “For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. 24 When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him, 25 and, as he could not pay, the lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions and payment to be made. 26 So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ 27 And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. 28 But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him by the throat he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ 29 Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ 30 But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. 31 When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. 32 Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. 33 Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ 34 And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. 35 So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
SERMON— Guest Pastor Terry Kyllo
May the words of my mouth, the meditations of our hearts, and our participation in our coming Kindom be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer, Amen.
So, let’s think about our society for a moment before we go back to the Gospel. We have a society right now that is in tremendous amounts of pain. We have a lot of crises coming at us that are underway. Some are calling them “polycrisis:” climate, technological change, a loneliness crisis, groups being separated from one another, economic inequality, and many others. We have many groups of people in our society who’ve experienced tremendous amounts of pain and trauma.
We, as a nation, have said that all people are created equal, and that this is in fact a self-evident thing. And yet, we also have a society which has behaved and organized itself, even in its founding documents, in such a way as to say that some people are not fully human. Thus, we see the results not only of the enslavement of people, of human beings made in the image of God, but also the genocide and theft of land of our indigenous people, indigenous neighbors.
We can look across the landscape in just one, you know, set of perusing the news, and find incredible pain spoken of on behalf of many groups in our country. And that pain is real. And so we are then forced to ask a question: How can we move forward together? Because the reality is, we are all in this together, and yet, you know, how do we, how do we just even start?
This was very much the question in the First Century as well. This is why John the Baptizer, when he began to preach, announced a period of repentance. Repentance, of course, is not as we were perhaps sometimes told, the equivalent of “you are a very bad dog.” That is not what it means. Repentance is simply the term metanoia, which means we have the capacity, because of the grace of God, to change our ways, to turn around and do something different. In other words, we don’t have to keep living this way. We can change together.
And John made that announcement, and then Jesus also came along and made that same announcement, but also announced a time of forgiveness. And of course, you know, when I grew up in the church, I kind of thought of forgiveness as like this storehouse that the church owned and could dole out to people as the church decided; as if somehow the only forgiveness that mattered was the forgiveness that happened on Sunday mornings between the hours of 10:30 and 11:45. As if the only forgiveness that matters is forgiveness between God and ourselves, as individuals.
And indeed, for a lot of centuries, the church kind of behaved this way. It behaved as if it somehow was the gatekeeper to God’s forgiveness toward individual human beings, and if you didn’t achieve some form of that forgiveness, then you ended up in ‘the bad place.” What a sad, sorry reduction of the gospel.
But in the First Century, when John the Baptizer went out and announced forgiveness and repentance, what he was saying is to all of his people that there was in fact hope; that we don’t have to keep living this way. And when Jesus announced forgiveness, he was saying that in fact we can be reconciled to one another.
The word “forgiveness” here is a tricky one. Because I think it doesn’t mean what often comes to our minds. I’m sure Pastor Dan over time, and I know he had some Jewish scholars come in and talk with you, perhaps shared with you about the Jewish concept of teshuvah. You can look it up online. It’s [got] lots of articles about it out there. And sometimes it’s in a shorter form or a longer form. But essentially, it is a form of communal reconciliation—sometimes of individuals to individuals, sometimes of families to families, sometimes of villages to villages, and so on. And it’s, you know, kind of what you’d imagine, I guess, if you think about what reconciliation really means.
It means first that if someone comes to you, or if a community comes to your community, and they say, “Hey, y’all harmed us in this way,” well, you acknowledge the harm. You say, "Yeah, we did that,” Whether we intended to or not, right? That’s what happened. It’s not about our intent. It’s about the harm.
And then we start to think, okay, well, you know, why did we do that? How did that happen? We stop doing the thing that is harming another person or community. We make a restitution for the harm that was done, knowing that the restitution can never undo the harm fully, but it can honor the harm in a way that brings healing
And then, finally, a public reconciliation, where the people who did the harm stand up and say, “Hey, we hurt other people here, we hurt this community here, and we’re sorry for that. Can we move forward together as a community?”
That is what Jesus and John are meaning by repentance and forgiveness—not something that we go and offload on Sunday morning. Now it isn’t that we don’t owe God an apology when we harm our neighbor, because one of the key parts of monotheism is that the God who created us, created other people, created plants and animals in this beautiful world, and this beautiful and fragile ecosystem, and created the universe in all of its magnificent splendor. But because there is one Creator, how can we respect one Creator in a way that allows us to disrespect or harm other beings or people that the Creator has made?
And so, when I hurt you, or when one community hurts another, we certainly owe the Creator that same kind of teshuvah. But that doesn’t lessen the fact that we owe it to each other. And so, in the first century, the Roman Empire ruled—as I am often wont to say, (I love saying that word)—and they ruled in a number of different ways. They certainly ruled through oppression. They were quite good at it, with at least 10 to 15 thousand people a year killed on crosses across the empire, with soldiers all around, sometimes even soldiers from your own community who could find no other work;
a legal system that treated non-Roman citizens very poorly. So, oppression and even economic oppression was part of it.
They also ruled by religion, by shaping the imagination of people to say that Emperor Augustus was the son of the divine Apollo. And so the gods had in fact enshrined the Roman Empire as the only order of society that they blessed.
So, they ruled by oppression and they ruled by religion, but they also ruled another way. They ruled by dividing one group from another. Divide et imperia. Divide and rule. And the way they did this was to set the conditions for scarcity, to put groups of people into conflict with each other, and through many devious means, and to get them harming each other actively, to get them speaking dehumanizing messages about each other, to withdraw from each other, and create more social distance and more distrust; they created rumor networks, to share rumors about all the terrible things that some other group was going to do, or intended to do, or had done toward your group.
And so many people stayed away from each other because they suspected each other of not being reliable partners in community. And so therefore the Roman Empire would say, “Well, this is why our oppression is so important. We have to have the police around to keep all y’all from fighting each other all the time.”
Well, that was a lie. Because Roman Empire was setting the stage for the whole thing.
And so, when John the Baptizer stands up and says it’s time to repent, and when Jesus talks about time for forgiveness, what they both mean is that all the communities in the country who have been divided and ruled are going to have to sit down with each other, despite the fact that everyone’s been hurt, and despite the fact that everybody’s harmed each other, although perhaps not equally, and we’re going to have to sit down at a table and do some teshuvah with each other.
Now, there are some in our time who tell us that that’s weakness. The compassion, forgiveness, reconciliation, is the weakness of Western civilization. Well, they’ve got big platforms; they can say that. It’s completely false.
Because the only way human beings survive and thrive is because of our ability to cooperate with each other, and when we fail to cooperate, to do teshuvah with each other, to try to make things right and begin to behave differently in the future.
Some people call that “being woke.” I call that being real. That’s why we have survived, friends. It’s why we’re here, and it is how we’re going to get through the crisis that we’re experiencing in this moment.
But even with all of that societal work that Jesus is trying to do as he announces the kingdom of God, he’s not just trying to start a religion, some kind of forgiveness factory for us to get to heaven when we die, but actually, create societal renewal through this reconciliation, through this repentance, through this forgiveness.
Peter walks up and says, “Well, Jesus, once people are in the church, once we’re part of a community with each other, what happens if one of us starts harming the other people? How many times do we forgive? Seven times?”
And Jesus in in Matthew says 77 times, which is great because by the time you get to like, I don’t know, 37, you probably can’t keep track of it anymore, and that’s why it says “70 times seven.” Poetically, it’s like: “keep forgiving.”
And then he tells the story about this unjust steward, this steward who is selfish. The steward owed an incredible amount of money, something like 200,000 days of work. Think about that: 200,000 days of work. And the steward is forgiven. He promises to pay it back, but of course the king knows that that’s a fiction. How could he possibly pay that back? Somehow he has embezzled, or borrowed, or stolen, or whatever—a huge, absolutely huge sum of money. Like, like maybe even as much as 40 trillion. Like I don’t even know, right?
And so the king forgives him, though, anyway. But that same slave, having been forgiven by the king, goes out and says “to jail with you” to a person that owed him 100 days of work. And then, in the language of the of the Mediterranean world—which is often filled with exaggeration, so I don’t necessarily want you to understand that Jesus is saying this is exactly how God is going to operate—What I want you to understand is that Jesus is saying to his disciples how important what he is saying is. That even within the church community, even after we have been forgiven, even after we have reconciled, even after we’ve done serious teshuvah with each other, we are still going to harm each other, sometimes just because we’re fallible humans, other times because we actually intend something wrong. The issue isn’t intent, again, the issue is the harm that is done.
That Jesus says it’s very important that we forgive each other within the church, even 70 times seven. Because this kind of reconciliation, within the church, is a sign and symbol and a way to practice this kind of teshuvah, so that we as a church can do it in the larger society and help the society deal with the incredible crisis that was happening in the First Century, as their society was quite literally coming apart. Because trauma and pain pile up. They magnify. My friend Kay Knott, who is an elder in the Upper Skagit tribe—her name is skʷalx̌ax̌alic̓əʔ—attended yesterday a funeral for a man who, at one point, wanted to be a deacon in the church, but he was overcome, because of the trauma of generations, in part. He had a spouse that was killed in a car accident; had children who died in untimely deaths; and he became susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse.
It was not the drug and alcohol abuse that killed him. It was generations of boarding schools, of land being taken away; of every time he drives across the beautiful Skagit Valley, seeing land going up that used to be the territory of his own tribe. Seeing people look at him with derision. Seeing people not respect his own community that had lived on that territory for thousands and thousands of years. That pain is real. That pain, that hurt, that trauma, piles up.
But what Jesus is saying to his disciples in this moment, and what I believe the Gospels are announcing to us, is that no matter how much the trauma piles up, the Creator of the universe is moving in and among us and around us in such a way that true reconciliation can happen.
Now, we in the Lutheran Church have a beautiful gift here. We believe that we “are justified by grace through faith apart from works of law.” What does that mean?
That means that the Creator of the universe has decided, because it is part of the character of the Creator, because it is the choice of the Creator, to love and forgive us, whether or not we can pay back the 200,000 days that we owe.
The Creator is saying that the Creator will move in and among us to create this kind of healing by first announcing to us that we no longer have to compete for who has harmed the least, for who is the most righteous, for who has the most status. And in the story of Jesus, we see that God not only wishes to come and proclaim this through words, but shows us the depths to which the Creator will go to bringthis healing and reconciliation, to bring teshuva, so that we can create a world in which everyone can belong and in which everyone can thrive.
That the Creator is willing not only to speak the words, but to die for them. That Jesus is willing to die, and on the cross announce forgiveness, even to those whose hands bound him to the wood and put the nails through his (probably) forearms, or wrists, and feet.
And so, therefore, when he makes this big story about 200,000 days, and what he’s saying to his disciples, is that this teshuvah, this reconciliation between people, both within the church and in the larger world, is so important to God that God’s willing to become human and die like one of us. So that we might, finally, be able to not only acknowledge our faults, because we’re loved, because we’re forgiven, because we’re accepted, but to forgive others when they have harmed us. Because the beautiful vision that God is working for in our world is one in which all the harms are woven back together into a tapestry of healing and new creation.
Today we celebrate that feast and celebration, that foretaste of a feast to come. But the real work continues in this community, and it continues outside this building, and in our lives and in the streets around us.
May we bring Jesus’s ministry of reconciliation for us and for the whole world into our society, which is fractured and torn, so that we can begin to build a world that God envisions, the kingdom of God, into which God welcomes everyone.
Amen.