"People Pleaser" | The Rev. Heidi Thorsen | September 17, 2023

Between the words that I speak and the words that are heard, may God’s spirit be present. Amen.

I am a people pleaser. This is something I’ve known about myself since I was a kid: front row of the class, answering all the questions. At some point I learned that making good grades made people happy - so I put a lot of my energy into being good at that one thing. Fast forward a couple decades and now I’m a pastor - probably one of the professions that is most fueled by the desire to please people, and also one of the most likely (in the complicated calculus of what different people in the church want) to let people down.

But you don’t need to be that student or a pastor to be a people pleaser. On some level I think we are all people pleasers, and it just shows up in different ways: in how we dress, in our hobbies, in the ways we are attentive to people around us, or even in the ways that we act as if we don't care about what people around us think. So many of our behaviors are based on expectations about what other people think of us - and what we want other people to think of us. My toddler daughter is an excellent example of how the desire to please others is somehow knit into us. During meal times, she will sometimes, triumphantly, plunk her sippy cup down on the table in an upright position– and she turns to us smiling and clapping, expecting us to smile and clap as well. But other times she flings the cup to the floor, and when she notices any kind of disappointment on our end, her frustration grows exponentially– from a level seven to a level seventy seven, you might say.

And that brings us to our Gospel passage for today. In the opening lines the disciple Peter, always trying to please Jesus, asks a didactic question: “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Peter sounds so much like the front-row, teacher’s pet with this question. Not only does he ask it - he also somehow manages to give an answer within the question itself. Seven times? Peter suggests. You can feel the weight of expectation; Peter’s eagerness to be right. Jesus responds, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” 

This response turns the premise of Peter’s question on its head, firstly because it’s a number so much greater than Peter initially suggests. There’s a degree of absurdity in Jesus’ response - as if Jesus’ point to Peter is that it’s better not to keep track of these things at all. As much as we would like the answer to be straightforward (2 + 2 = 4; forgive seven times and then you’re done), the reality of following Jesus is much more complicated than that. It’s also helpful to note that there are different versions of this text, in different early manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew. Some have Jesus responding “seventy seven times,” others say “seventy times seven.” Even the manuscript history shows a certain ambiguity around the number of Jesus’ answer. All of this points to the same general conclusion: Jesus' answer seems designed for Peter not to fixate on the number. Instead Jesus hints that there may be something a little off with the question itself - that in our desire to please Jesus, we somehow remove Jesus from the equation entirely.

Part of the problem is that faith does not work like an equation, no matter how much we wish that it did. There is no specific number of hail mary’s that can bring us absolution. There is no right amount of altar calls. There are no magic words we can say to bring Jesus into our lives once and for all. There is no cosmic scale that balances our sins against Jesus’ goodness. Instead, faith is a practice. Faith is a way of being in the world. Faith is a way of constantly seeking God’s will in our lives, with Jesus as our guide and our teacher. And yet, again and again we try to simplify our faith into a set of propositions, or (if we can) a number. An equation.

In our own tradition, the Anglican and Episcopal Church, we have something called the Thirty Nine Articles that were put together by theologians in the 16th century to try and give a summary of the theological foundations of the Church of England. These articles cover topics ranging from belief in the trinity to excommunication. Up until the 20th century, clergy in the Church of England had to subscribe to these articles, as a requirement of ordination. It was common for cassocks, the black robes that clergy wear under the white surplice for daily offices, to have thirty-nine buttons, symbolizing each of these articles. Some clergy would leave one or two of these buttons loose, signaling their conscientious dissent from that particular article. Ah, those people-pleasers, with their subtle civil disobedience…

The 39 Articles are yet another example of our human efforts to turn faith into a logical equation– much like Peter’s question about how many times to forgive. And while the 39 Articles might sound like a distant, historical example, it’s worth noting that you can still find them printed in the back of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer in your pews. They are in the back, under the historical documents section, though I’ve heard Anglican clergy today still opine that if we only got back to our roots in the 39 Articles, the future of the church would be saved.

I don’t want to disparage these efforts– because in truth we are all trying to follow Jesus to the best of our ability. And it’s true that there is so much wisdom in our Anglican tradition, as we continue to seek the will of God in our own time. But it’s also important for us to return to scripture, and to see how Jesus himself guides us away from simple answers; away from straightforward numbers and equations that balance.

Returning to our Gospel passage and Peter’s initial question, “How many times should I forgive?”: it might be said that Jesus actually gives two answers to this question. I’m not talking about the two different numbers in the different manuscripts. Instead, I’m talking about the number as a first answer, and the parable that follows as a second answer to Peter’s question. When we look at the gospel as a whole we see that one of Jesus’ favorite ways to answer a question is with a story. What a perfect reminder for us of how faith doesn’t boil town to simple answers. These parables are spacious. They aren’t always as straightforward as one might hope. And they invite us to be active participants in working out what it means to follow the way of Jesus Christ.

In this particular parable we encounter a man, a slave, who finds himself deep in debt to a king. The man pleads his case before his lord, and the lord surprises everyone by forgiving the man’s debts entirely. Already we see how this parable challenges Peter’s question– by inviting him to think of forgiveness not only from the perspective of one granting forgiveness, but also from the perspective of one who has been forgiven. The man in the parable then goes out and runs into another slave who owes him money. Rather than extending the same mercy to this man, the first man demands payment immediately– an action that ultimately lands the other debtor in prison. Word travels back to the lord and (in short) the king is not pleased.

You might read this parable and think, I would never do that. I would treat the other man the same way that I had been treated! And yet this parable shows that forgiveness is complicated. Emotion is involved. Pride is involved. And sometimes we humans act from a place of fear– fearing that we might fall into debt again, if we don’t get what’s ours right now. And so we do the selfish thing, protecting ourselves, because the memory of what might happen if we don’t is a paralyzing thing.

There are no straightforward answers in this parable. It is messy, and uncomfortable, and often that is what life feels like. We long for simplicity. We long for answers to life’s questions– and if that answer could be a simple number, all the better! And yet, what we get instead is Jesus. We get a story that unfolds to us, in scripture. And Jesus’ life itself is the answer, as messy and complicated as that sometimes feels. Jesus’ story is the foundation on which we build our faith.

Our collect, the traditional prayer that we read today at the beginning of our service, sums this up pretty well: “O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.”

Just think about those words for a moment: without you we are unable to please you.

All too often we try to please God while removing God from the equation. We try to please God with prime numbers and right answers and a goody two-shoes, people-pleasing kind of faith. How many times should I forgive someone, God? Seven times? Peter asks. 

But in order to truly follow Jesus, and seek out the will of God in our lives, we might wonder how we can begin to ask the questions differently. How we can ask questions that don’t incline towards easy answers, but instead ask the questions that open us up to a journey of love, growth, and forgiveness. Let’s cultivate a kind of faith that doesn’t revolve around being right; it revolves around Jesus. It revolves around the incarnation of God in this world— and that is bigger, more complicated, and more full of blessing than we could ever imagine. Amen.