I assure you that whatever you fasten on earth will be fastened in heaven. And whatever you loosen on earth will be loosened in heaven. 19 Again I assure you that if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, then my Father who is in heaven will do it for you. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, I’m there with them.”
21 Then
Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother
or sister who sins against me? Should I forgive as many as seven times?”22 Jesus said, “Not just seven times, but rather as many as seventy-seven times. (Common English Bible)
“Seventy Times Seven: A Celebration and
Commission of Valley Christian Church,” Week Five
Watching my parents near retirement age (sorry, mom and dad), things like “lifetime achievement” awards are increasingly hilarious notions to me. Don’t get me wrong—they also commend people for careers well-lived, and there should be great meaning taken in them for that reason alone. But as my mom is increasingly wont to say, they also feel a lot like “congratulations, you’re old and you’ve done some stuff” awards meant to make way for the next generation of lifetime achievement award recipients. And the timing of these awards does not always work out to celebrate a lifetime of achievements.
The American Film Institute has one such lifetime achievement award, much like the Academy Awards do, or the Emmys or Grammys. The 2004 recipient of its lifetime achievement award is a personal favorite of mine, Meryl Streep. She’s absolutely brilliant. And since 2004, she has been nominated for twelve Golden Globes, eight Academy Awards, eight Screen Actors Guild awards, five BAFTAs, three Grammys, and two Daytime Emmys.
So much for the “lifetime” part of “lifetime achievement.”
On the one hand, that says something about the singular talent of a Meryl Streep—that someone could accomplish enough for one AFI Lifetime Achievement award and then basically accomplish enough for a second.
But on the other hand, if the idea of these awards is to recognize someone’s body of work in its totality, maybe we need to be just a bit more patient and circumspect, to let them fully grace us with their presence and genius before rushing to declare their careers so complete. And I think the same is true of churches, especially churches that, like Valley, have been around a day or two now. There is so much to our seventy years of history. But those seventy years are by no means Valley’s lifetime.
This is the final installment of a five-week sermon series to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the planting of Valley Christian Church by Birmingham First Christian Church, and especially as a new minister, having been in Birmingham for scarcely eight months, I am especially grateful to have heard from each of my living predecessors in this office: Rev. John Gregory, Rev. Dr. Jim Clifford, and Rev. Gary Edge.
In April 1951, seventy to eighty members of Birmingham First were, with the congregation’s blessing in the form of seed money and a sterling silver communion set, sent forth to establish Valley as the latest Disciples of Christ congregation in the Birmingham area. Valley’s charter membership would swell to over one hundred twenty, and the records of the congregation’s founding have been meticulously kept in our archives. We spent two weeks unpacking Valley’s origin and evolution stories found in those archives before taking the subsequent two weeks to step back and consider more broadly how we live today indebted to both our past and our future, the past versions of the church and the future versions of the church, and how we can share our faith to help empower that future church.
Today, we are going to try to tie all of that together by talking together about how the Bible tackles the notion of totality, of the wholeness (or infiniteness) of something like community. And truth be told, this passage from Matthew 18 is one of the best ways to start that topic up.
It may not appear that way at the outset. After all, this comes as part of a larger passage on the nature of wrongdoing to one another, and so is all about right relationship in our bonds of family and community. To come at it from a different angle is counterintuitive.
And yet, the numbers—seven and then seventy times seven—cited first by Peter and then by Jesus are anything but coincidental.
Seven is a sacred number in the Bible. It represents the number of days of creation and would come to represent many more epochal moments: the number of years at each sabbath year, the number of sabbath cycles at each jubilee year, and more. Seven is the number of a full creation, or a full cycle, in the Bible. So when Peter asks Jesus how many times must one forgive, “as many as seven times,” he is really asking, “Am I to forgive someone into perpetuity?”
And Jesus’s response indicates that not even that is enough! Peter is already grasping the notion of potentially infinite forgiveness, and by responding with “not just seven times, but as many as seventy times seven,” Jesus inviting Peter to imagine forgiveness beyond even that. Imagine Peter supplying “to infinity, Jesus?” and Jesus replying, “and beyond!” as though Buzz Lightyear were in the Bible.
That realization—that what we are talking here is beyond anything, and certainly our own limited understanding of God’s grace, is what has fueled this entire sermon series. We are celebrating a story that has spanned seventy years, and we are also celebrating the next part of the story, the part we might not be able to quite fully see yet, but is still very much a part of that story—the “to beyond!’ part of the story. Based on previous vision-casting Valley did before my arrival, we would call it our Future Story. Or, the Un-Lifetime Achievement Award.
That part of the story is absolutely part of the seventy times seven, no question.
I know this story is in large part about forgiveness in the context of community and right relationship, and that is not quite the angle we have taken here. But, now one week from our resumption of in-person worship services, I hope that we can look back on these past fourteen months and maybe offer ourselves a morsel of forgiveness for any of those moments during this year-plus when we have not always seen that “to beyond!” part of the story we have been living. If you doubted, feared, worried about whether or how Valley would survive the wilderness, that is okay, and it is okay to forgive yourself those feelings.
We are emerging from seventy years of ministry in a way none of us, in any generation of Valley, thought we would. We must forgive ourselves for not seeing beyond the trees when the forest felt like it was closing in all around us. Once we do, it becomes easier to see and go beyond.
And that is just as true for us personally as it is collectively, as a congregation. I am very much preaching to myself here, as much as I am to all of you. I have had to forgive myself many times these past fourteen months my moments of worry and despair, and I am not very good at extending grace to myself. You may be better at it than I already, or like me you may struggle with it. But think about where in your life you need to forgive yourself for not seeing beyond the trees, for not lifting up your eyes from the earth to the heavens and recognizing the sheer dimensions of divinity that are all around.
Because of this, I am grateful that the timing of our return to in-person worship so happens to line up right after the conclusion of this sermon series. We are returning to a familiar and foundational part of Valley’s history, but in a new and potentially different way. We are returning to worship in a sanctuary that has seen sixty years of worship, but in a way that hopefully propels us forward, into the next chapter of Valley’s story with passion for the Gospel and vigor for our works on its behalf. And we will be doing so surrounded by the divinity of God through the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, which came to the disciples who had gathered in Jerusalem, that has come to generations of the church ever since, and will hopefully come to us as well when we gather together next Sunday.
We have come this far, Valley. May we never stop choosing to go further in the name of the One who created us, who sent Jesus Christ to save us, and who sent the Holy Spirit to guide us this far.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
May 16, 2021