Debt Service

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 09.14.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 18:21-35

I hate debt.  I hate it.

Part of that comes from my Scots blood, which is just about as cheap as they come.  How cheap?   When I buy delicious, crunchy kosher dill pickles, I save and re-use the pickle juice to pickle my own pickles from home-grown cucumbers.  How cheap?  When I jar the jam that I make from the strawberries in my strawberry patches, I’m too cheap to use Mason jars.  I just wash and re-use jars I’ve saved from other purchases.  So sure, maybe the jam tastes a little bit like kalamata olives.  So what?  I saved a couple of bucks, and the way I figure it, there’s gotta be some funky little vegan store out there someplace selling organic kalamataberry fusion jam in tiny little jars for ten bucks a pop.  It’s a “boutique flavor.”  That’s it.

I don’t just re-use 7-11 cups so I can get the refill price.  I’m so cheap that I wash and re-use Ziploc bags.

I like to think of myself as practical, but my family invariably reminds me that I’m deluding myself.  I just don’t really like to spend money.

But the money I particularly don’t like to spend is the money that I’m going to have to spend money to spend.  The very idea makes me recoil, which is unfortunate, because that means I do a whole bunch of recoiling from our debt-obsessed culture.

Debt and the interest paid on debt are the lifeblood of our economy, the essence of our economic system.

If we want a place to live, we need to go into debt.  If we want to start a small business to sustain our lives, we need to go into debt.   If we want to go to school to get the degree that we’ve been told will allow us to live a satisfying life, we’ve got to saddle ourselves with debt that we’re going to spend much of our adulthood trying to pay off.

I’m convinced that all debt-financed purchasing does, in the long run, is drive up the cost of things.  

So we avoid debt, and not just my own.  I don’t let other people owe me.  I don’t lend, which again, my family will confirm.  “Hey dad, can I borrow a few bucks,” is not a phrase uttered in my house, because it’s futile.  I just won’t.  They go straight to mom for that one.

Because what debt does is put you in the thrall of power.  It makes you vulnerable.  It skews relationships, and stirs anxieties.  

What is worse is the impact it has when others are in debt to us.  The power dynamics created by wealth can blow huge holes in friendships, and can shatter relationships.  But the idea of “debt” goes deeper still.  If others do harm to us, or diminish us in some way, we hold that as a debt against them.  We tally that up, and expect repayment of our resentments with interest that compounds annually, and that expectation and our own unwillingness to release it can grow in our souls like a cancer.

That exchange between peoples, the debts we hold over others, that’s the core of the parable of the Kingdom offered up in Matthew’s Gospel this morning.

It begins with a simple question, asked by Peter as he approaches Jesus.  “How often should I forgive?”  It’s a fair question, and Peter seems to understanding that forgiveness should come frequently and often.  “Seven times,” he asks.

Jesus turns it up to eleven, taking Peter’s suggestion of repeated grace and multiplying it exponentially plus-one, and then...because he’s Jesus...tells a little story.

It’s the time to settle up, and the bill is coming due, and a king is collecting.

A slave is brought to him, and that slave owes him ten thousand talents.  Understand, this is not like owing someone ten thousand dollars.  A talent was the single largest unit of Roman currency.  To earn a talent, a typical laborer in the time of Jesus would have to work for fifteen years.

So to translate into our currency, we know that a fully employed construction laborer in the United States averages just over $29,000 a year.  We multiply that by fifteen, and we get $435,000.  That’s a talent.   Then, we multiply that by ten thousand.

Our unfortunate slave has managed to dig himself a hole four billion three hundred and fifty million dollars deep.

It is an insane amount, completely and intentionally overblown, wildly out of the realm of possibility.  But faced with the prospect of losing everything he has, the slave cries out, “I’ll pay you back, I will.”

Oh, technically, sure.  All he’d have to do is plug that number into one of those online mortgage calculators that were so easy to come by in the first century.  He’d find that if he gets a thirty year jumbo loan at 4.216 percent, he’d be making much more manageable payments of twenty-nine million, two hundred and fifteen thousand a month.  Much more manageable.

The idea behind this is, simply, that it is a debt that could never be repaid.  It just can’t.

The king, though, is unanticipatedly and immensely gracious, and not only does not sell his slave, but forgives his debt.

Five minutes later, the same guy’s walking down the street, and he sees this person who owes him money.  It’s a hundred denarii, meaning just under a third of a year’s wages for that same day laborer.  Nine thousand bucks, using the same measure we’ve already used.

His reaction is swift and relentless, completely focused on his rage at the slight of not being paid back.  How dare you take from me, he snarls.  He presses charges, and off to prison goes the one who owes him money.

The raw injustice of it outrages those around our debtor, and word gets back to the king, and the king reacts the way a just king would.

Bad things happen, for a very long time.  And Jesus says, this, this is how God views our inability to forgive one another.  If you do not find the Spirit’s grace in yourself to show mercy to those who owe you so little, why would the Creator of the Universe show you mercy?

As rough as that parable is, it reminds us of how we as human beings hold on to the ways we’ve been slighted.  We keep a record of things, we do, we tally them up in our minds and calculate every little last slight and injustice and wrong, like some dark version of Excel all spooled up in a deep recess of our cerebral cortex.

This parable is a reminder of the radical, unbearably intense challenge facing anyone who claims that Jesus of Nazareth is their teacher.

It can be a little rough seeming, as Jesus could be on occasion when he was trying to make a point.  There’s some getting medieval, the implicit threat of a God seriously cheesed at those who find forgiveness beyond them.  

But I see this call to forgiveness as arising not primarily from our fear of punishment.  We cannot act in grace if we are driven by fear.  Real gratitude cannot be coerced, as every parent who has ever twisted a thank you note out of child knows.  What Jesus taught was good news, after all, and our willingness to show mercy to other should arise from our radical sense of gratitude at the simple fact of our being.  

We exist, we live, we are, and frankly, we do not need to be.  We just don’t.  Looking out at the endlessness of existence, the wild and glorious nature of creation, I know that as important as I happen to seem to me, there’s just no doubt that God could have figured out how to make this whole thing work without including me in.

Yet here I am.  I’ve been given life. I exist, when I could easily not.  It is a simple reality, so very simple.  It is so simple we forget it like we forget our heart is beating and that we are in this moment breathing, but in it God has been wildly, impossibly generous with us, in the simple fact of our existence and our awareness.  All that is expected, all that is required, is that I pass that same generosity on.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.