"Called to More: Free to Give" (September 13, 2026 Sermon)

Called to More: Free to Give

Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing·September 13, 2026·Guilford Park Presbyterian Church

16th Sunday after Pentecost (Year A)

Exodus 14:19–31

The angel of God who was going before the Israelite army moved and went behind them, and the pillar of cloud moved from in front of them and took its place behind them. It came between the army of Egypt and the army of Israel. And so the cloud was there with the darkness, and it lit up the night; one did not come near the other all night.

Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea. The Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and turned the sea into dry land, and the waters were divided. The Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left. The Egyptians pursued and went into the sea after them, all of Pharaoh’s horses, chariots, and chariot drivers. At the morning watch the Lord, in the pillar of fire and cloud, looked down on the Egyptian army and threw the Egyptian army into a panic. He clogged their chariot wheels so that they turned with difficulty. The Egyptians said, “Let us flee from the Israelites, for the Lord is fighting for them against Egypt.”

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand over the sea, so that the water may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots and chariot drivers.” So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and at dawn the sea returned to its normal depth. As the Egyptians fled before it, the Lord tossed the Egyptians into the sea. The waters returned and covered the chariots and the chariot drivers, the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not one of them remained. But the Israelites walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left.

Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. Israel saw the great work that the Lord did against the Egyptians. So the people feared the Lord and believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses.

Matthew 18:21–35

Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.

“For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him, 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. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. 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.’ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. 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. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

---

An Absurd Parable

All right, I had some fun reading this because it’s an absurd parable. When we try to interpret parables literally—or even just a little bit—we try to do the math and figure it out, and sometimes we forget that Jesus was deliberately trying to be absurd. This guy owed a lot of money—a comically large amount. Some people say it was as large as the GDP of an entire country at that time. It's hard to wrap your head around just how much. In fact, Tom Long, whose commentary I leaned on, says that if you want the specific number, it is a bazillion.

How this slave ran up that debt, who knows? It's a pretty foolish king who wouldn't notice one of his servants running up a bar tab like he's going to the Vegas Strip every single weekend, right? It's an absurd amount. And then the king does something equally absurd. He says, “You know what? I've been touched. You're right, you can never repay this—it's impossible. Go, be free, pay it forward.”

Is that what that slave does? No. He goes away whistling, so happy, and then he finds a second slave who owes him something pitiful by comparison. And of course, we all want the story to go the way it should, right—where slave number one forgives slave number two. But that doesn't happen because he forgets what just happened to him. And so he has that slave thrown into jail and denies him the grace that was first given to him.

And then—probably my favorite characters in this story—the other servants see what's going on. Normally I don't encourage people to be tattletales, but in this situation, that's exactly what they do: they go and tell their master what’s going on. And then the master doesn’t take kindly to it and does another absurd thing: he throws him into jail until he can pay off a bazillion dollars. How do you think that's going to go? I don't know how that's going to work. It's a bizarre story. It is absurd.

Tom Long says we need to loosen our grip a little bit and treat this sort of like a cartoon—kind of like, y'all remember the cartoon with Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner? Some of us remember that. Where the coyote is trying to catch the Road Runner, and he's got this big bomb that he's waiting to drop over the cliff onto the Road Runner, and then what happens to the bomb? It blows up in his face, right? That's kind of what happens to this first slave. He has this bomb that he's going to drop on his fellow slave, and then it blows up in his face.

Now, just because we take these parables as cartoons, as absurd, does not mean they don't have something serious to tell us.

Two Distinct Worlds

And I think this is it: this parable presents us with two very distinct worlds. One in which mercy and grace are so common they are the very air we breathe. The other is one we are all too familiar with, where we are taught to be at each other's throats. And so the sin of this first slave was not necessarily stinginess—although he sounds pretty stingy. His sin was amnesia, because he forgot so quickly the grace that was given to him. Which is why, I think, the people who put together the lectionary paired us with that Exodus passage that Payne read for us today—the story of how God saved the Israelites from a ruthless economy into one governed by grace. And this slave, when he is given grace, immediately goes back to the other side of the Red Sea, for some reason. He goes back into that economy of ruthlessness, where we want to grab each other by the throat and say, “Pay what you owe.”

Today, I want us all to rest in this good news: God does not call us to be perfect. God calls us to remember.

What Our Giving Remembers

And when we invest our dollars, our time, and our talents in this congregation, we are trying—in our own imperfect but faithful way—to lean into that world where we aren't at each other's throats. There's enough of that going on around us right now. But when we come to this church, every pledge we give is an investment in remembering how much we have been given. Every time we volunteer our hours at committee meetings—even if it may not be the sexiest or most fun thing in the world—we are remembering what God has done for us. When we go downtown, as we did yesterday, and hand out more than three hundred care packages at the Pride Festival, we are remembering the grace that was first given to us.

So, friends, we have two worlds before us. I don't know about you, but there's one I've had enough of, and another I need more of. Together, let us remember what God has done, and let us give our time and our talents accordingly.

In the name of God, the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, and may all of us, God's beloved children, say: Amen.

"The Good News Is...Protection and Care for the Vulnerable" (March 15, 2026 Sermon)

Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing

Protection and Care for the Vulnerable

Guilford Park Presbyterian Church
March 15, 2026
4th Sunday in Lent (Year A)

Scripture

Deuteronomy 24:17-22

“You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pledge. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this.

“When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings. When you beat your olive trees, do not strip what is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow.

“When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, do not glean what is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I am commanding you to do this.

Matthew 19:13-15

Then children were being brought to him in order that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples spoke sternly to those who brought them, but Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” And he laid his hands on them and went on his way.

“You were a child once, too.”

You were a child once, too. That's what Mister Rogers said, that's what he wrote down, once upon a time, for the doctors. The doctors were ophthalmologists. An ophthalmologist is a doctor who takes care of the eyes. Sometimes, ophthalmologists have to take care of the eyes of children, and some children get very scared, because children know that their world disappears when their eyes close, and they can be afraid that the ophthalmologists will make their eyes close forever. The ophthalmologists did not want to scare children, so they asked Mister Rogers for help, and Mister Rogers agreed to write a chapter for a book the ophthalmologists were putting together—a chapter about what other ophthalmologists could do to calm the children who came to their offices. Because Mister Rogers is such a busy man, however, he could not write the chapter himself, and he asked a woman who worked for him to write it instead. She worked very hard at writing the chapter, until one day she showed what she had written to Mister Rogers, who read it and crossed it all out and wrote a sentence addressed directly to the doctors who would be reading it: "You were a child once, too.” And that's how the chapter began.^[1]

My friend Tom wrote those words about his friend Fred back in 1998 for Esquire Magazine. You see, Tom made a mistake, a mistake he would later regret. He wrote an article about a very famous person, and in that article, he insinuated something very hurtful, something that wasn’t his story to tell. And it got him into trouble. Tom had developed a reputation for being a ruthless journalist. Ruthlessness is something someone does when they care more about themselves than others.

And so, as he feared that his career had stalled because of his ruthlessness, his editor gave him a new assignment. He called him into his office and told him he wanted him to interview Fred Rogers. “You mean, Mister Rogers? The kid’s show guy?” Tom scoffed. “Yes,” his editor replied, “We’re doing an issue on heroes, and I want you to write a profile on him.” And so, the invulnerable journalist called up the cardigan-wearing Presbyterian minister. “Invulnerable” is a word that means you feel like nothing can touch you, challenge you, or change you. Magical things happen when the invulnerable meet a person like Fred Rogers.

I wonder if the disciples felt invulnerable. “Disciples” is a word for people who want to follow Jesus. If I were his disciple, I would be tempted to feel invulnerable. How does one not feel that way when your teacher is a man who feeds thousands with table scraps, or resists Satan’s seduction, or calms a tempest, or summons the very dead from their slumber? Hang around with stuff like that long enough, and it goes to your head. Which is why, of course, when the children came to Jesus, they shooed them away. “This is grown-up business,” they tell them with the sort of condescension little ones are all too familiar with. “Condescension” is a word for when grown-ups think they always know better.

But Jesus bristles. He bristles because the disciples haven’t been listening. Just a few days earlier, he had placed a child on his knee and reminded them that whoever welcomes such a child in his name welcomes him. Now they are telling children that this is “grown-up business.” This is, of course, a silly notion, because the Kingdom of Heaven is neither “for” grown-ups nor a business.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is, first and foremost, for the vulnerable.”

The Kingdom of Heaven is, first and foremost, for the vulnerable. The kingdom is open to all, of course, but again and again Jesus insists that it is the vulnerable, the overlooked, the little ones, who are nearest its center. And this is good news for kids, especially for those whom Jesus welcomed in today’s passage. Being a kid back then was no easy thing. According to Michael Joseph Brown in his book True to Our Native Land, “Fifty percent of children died before the age of five. They were the weakest members of society. They were fed last and received the smallest and least desirable portions of food. They were the first to suffer from famine, war, disease, and natural disasters. Many, some say more than 70 percent, would have lost one or more parents before reaching puberty. A minor had the same status as an enslaved person, and it was not until adulthood that they would be considered a free person.”^[2]

And being a child here and now, for many, is a similar kind of struggle. My work with A Simple Gesture has made me more aware of the scandal of child hunger right here in Guilford County. Close to one in four children here is food-insecure. In many parts of our county, families live in food deserts, far from a grocery store, dependent on public transportation just to buy food. And if you ride the bus in Greensboro, you are allowed only two bags. If you carry a purse, that counts as one. It should not be this hard to feed a child.

“Let the children come to me,” Jesus said. “You were a child once, too,” Fred Rogers said. Too often, our nation’s policies and priorities tell children and their families: your hunger is not urgent enough.

I began this sermon with an anecdote from Mr. Rogers for several reasons. First of all, this upcoming Friday would have been Mr. Rogers' 98th birthday, and as such, our denomination has designated that day in his honor, celebrating his memory and his message of neighborliness. Second, Fred Rogers was someone who had an innate gift for seeing the world through children’s eyes, to remember what it was like to be a little kid navigating a very big world. And that’s a spiritual gift that we all could do more with these days.

Last night, Tricia and I went to the Tanger Center to see The Sound of Music. It had been quite a while since I last saw the show, so I had forgotten several parts. One of those was how funny “Uncle Max” is. He is Captain von Trapp’s friend and a music agent and producer trying to get the von Trapp Family to perform at an upcoming festival. But beneath Uncle Max’s comic relief is a much more dangerous motive. Time and again, he tries to convince Captain von Trapp to adopt a stance of neutrality (at best) or tacit support (at worst) of the German annexation of Austria. “What’s going to happen is going to happen,” he tells Georg von Trapp at one point, “just make sure it doesn’t happen…to you.” In other words, he implies that von Trapp has the power and privilege to stay out of the mess and let the worst happen to others.

However, I trust you know how the story goes. His heart is hardened for good reason. He is devastated by the death of his wife, the children’s mother, and the sound of music has been verboten from his home. Maria and the children soften the Captain’s hardened heart. Together, they bring melody and joy back to his life, and he learns to see the world as his children do. And, indeed, see himself as his children see him. It is this softening that leads the “invulnerable” Captain to open his eyes to how the fascists are preying on the vulnerability of those around him. And he refuses to be complicit. With the help of the nuns, he defies Berlin’s “invitation” (i.e., command) to join the Navy of the Third Reich.

“Remember that you were once a slave in Egypt. Remember that you were once a child, too.”

“You were once a slave in Egypt, too,” God says to the Israelites. “You were once a child, too,” Fred Rogers says to each of us (not just the ophthalmologists).

You see, the gospel is asking us to remember:

Remember that you were once a slave in Egypt. Remember that you were once a child, too. Remember what fear feels like. Remember what hunger feels like. Remember what it is to need gentleness from a world that can be so hard.

And then let that remembering soften you:

Soften you enough to leave grain in the field. Soften you enough to make room for children. Soften you enough to resist every voice that says, “What’s going to happen is going to happen—just make sure it doesn’t happen to you.” No. Not for those who follow Jesus. For those who follow Jesus, the vulnerable are not interruptions. They are where the kingdom shows up first.

So let the children come. Let the stranger come. Let the hungry come. And may they find, in us, not a closed hand or a hardened heart, but the welcome of Christ himself.

In the name of God the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, may all of us, God’s children, say: Amen.

Notes

[1] Junod, Tom. “Can You Say...Hero?” Esquire, November, 1998.

[2] True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, edited by Brian K. Blount, Gay L. Byron, and Emerson B. Powery, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2024). 120.

www.stephenmfearing.com | www.guilfordpark.org