All in all, being your pastor is a joy, it really is. I love Sunday mornings. I love gathering with you around the gifts of God. I love the conversations we have during Bible Study, as we wrestle together with the Word and struggle with understanding its application in our lives. I take my role as a preacher and teacher of the Word seriously, and I am regularly humbled to be invited into so many of the sacred moments of people’s lives. Baptism, confirmation, marriage, and funerals are special times that you have entrusted me to lead. I will be forever grateful for those memories. But, if I am honest, it is not always sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes I am overcome by fears and sometimes burdened by doubts. Sometimes being a preacher is a mask I have to put on because beneath it is a man racked with sorrow and uncertainty about his own life.

But I have yet to give up on this calling. Fortunately, those times when things seem uncertain and too difficult are just fleeting moments in time. I press on, predominantly, because of a conviction regarding the Word of God. I press on because there is a Word which still needs to be preached. This is not a show or just some job I do because I lack the skills to do anything else. No, I really believe it. I believe the Word of God. I trust in His promises, for both me and for you. And there is no end to the need for this Word. This Word has the power to reshape our world, to bring light into the darkness, and even overturn the power of the grave. So, through it all, through the ups and the downs, the conviction remains, and the ministry continues.

Yet, at the heart of it, the thing I cherish most about being a pastor is to regularly be in the role to forgive a brother or sister in Christ. At the beginning of our Lord’s ministry, He had a simple message: “The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the Good News.” Repent and believe. Repent of your sins and trust in the Good News that you are forgiven in Christ your Lord. To me, this is the joy at the center of being a Christian, to be able to speak a word of forgiveness into the life of a repentant sinner. Where everywhere else there is either downplaying the sin or demanding vengeance and appropriate penance, here, among the faithful, there is a call to forgive, to release from guilt and shame.

“Temptations to sin are sure to come,” Jesus says, “but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.” Now, the “little ones” He is speaking of are your fellow disciples. The word translated “sin” is the same word for a stumbling block. The warning is about being the cause of your brothers and sisters in Christ to stumble in their following of our Lord. The better option for one who does such a thing would be to be cast into the sea with a millstone tied around one’s neck and drowned. And as strange as it may seem, the key to avoiding such a terrible outcome is forgiveness.

“Pay attention to yourselves!” Jesus says. Pay attention to what? To your morality or righteousness? To your good works or prayer life? No, pay attention to how you deal with sin in the lives of those sitting around you. He says to you, “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him.” Sin is to be called out, not overlooked. Sin is to be rebuked out of love. If you love your sister in Christ, if you have compassion for her, how can you let her just continue in the thoughts, words, and deeds which lead away from fellowship with our Lord? To love her is to speak the truth of the Word to her, and if she repents, then you must forgive her. You get the absolute joy of proclaiming to her that she is forgiven in Christ alone. This forgiveness is how you care for the little ones. In fact, He says, “If your brother sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.”

Now, the disciples reply appropriately. They get the challenge just like you do. To be agents of rebuke and forgiveness is no easy task, so they say, “Increase our faith!” To forgive once is fine, twice even is doable, but seven times in one day is not. At what point would you stop and say, “No more. Show some real penance, some desire actually to change”? How many times until you begin to add requirements you deem necessary before you forgive? You then become the agents who are adding stumbling blocks before our Lord’s little ones.

Jesus then responds with this little metaphor about a mustard seed-sized faith. He says, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” His point, I think, is fairly clear: Your faith, however small it may be, is enough. The good news is you are not called to uproot mulberry trees. You are called to be a people of forgiveness, a people who come to the aid of the wayward sinner in your midst, to restore them and set them free in the gift of Christ. This is our duty, our responsibility to one another. And to drive His point home, our Lord paints us a picture about the role of servants.

Jesus says, “Will any one of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and recline at table’?” No, that is not how it is done. The servant will come from the field and get cleaned up, put on some fresh clothes, and serve the master. Only after that will he eat and drink. The servant does what he is called to do, he fulfills the role of a servant. And it is the same with you. You are to do what you are commanded, not earning your salvation, not gaining the praise of God and man. Rather, you are to reply, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done what is our duty.”

The message is clear. Pay attention to yourselves and do your duty. And what is your duty? To be agents of reconciliation, to speak the truth in love, and to forgive the repentant sinner. Forgive, over and over again, just as you have been forgiven. And there is a promise implicit here for you as well. For you will fail, at times. You will struggle to be ministers of forgiveness, and you will begin to pile up those stumbling blocks. Therefore, we are reminded that the Word of forgiveness rests in the mouths of others for you. For when you fail, in fact, I say to you once again, repent and believe the Good News. You are forgiven all of your sins. You are set free in the gifts of Christ alone. For in the end, like you, I am just a servant doing my duty.