It's About the Money (Matthew 18:21-35; 1st Sunday in Lent; February 22, 2015)

It's About the Money

Matthew 18:21-35
1st Sunday in Lent
February 22, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

There are a lot of things we can talk about in church. We can talk about the weather. We can talk about our families. We can talk about our health. We can even talk about how the weather has affected our family's health. We can even talk about politics and sex. The one thing we can't talk about is money.

Which is too bad, really, because a lot of life is about money. That's why Jesus talked so much about it, maybe more about it than about anything else. So by not talking about it we leave out a lot of life and a lot of what Jesus has to say.

Based on past experience, I can virtually guarantee that all I have to do is to mention money a couple of times over the course of two or three months and there will be murmurs of complaint—“All he ever talks about is money.”

We preachers have become so afraid of offending folks on the subject of money that we leave off speaking about it even when it's staring us right in the face. Take the parable in today's reading from Matthew for example.

It seems to be about forgiveness, certainly. And in part it is about forgiveness. The parable is introduced by a conversation about forgiveness. Peter wants to know if he should forgive his fellow Christian as many as seven times. Then Jesus tells this parable. So we know that Matthew suggests we read it as a parable about forgiveness. Okay.

But I must say first, we have an odd way of reading parables. We've done it for so long that we no longer regard it as strange, but consider this. Here's a parable that begins with the words, “Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. When he began to settle accounts, they brought to him a servant who owed him ten thousand bags of gold.” We read that parable and we never even consider the possibility that it might be about money. The accountant is there. The lender and debtor are there. The amount of money involved is stated. But we never consider that it might be about money. We go straight to the frame story and assume that it's about forgiveness and only forgiveness, which, of course, we imagine has nothing to do with money.

Doesn't that seem odd to you? I sure does to me. So I would like for us to hesitate, to linger for just a few minutes over this parable to see if it has anything to say about money, before going on to what we're already convinced—by 1800 years' habit—it's really about.

So there is a king and it is a day for settling accounts, or as it was called in Anglo-Saxon England, Doomsday. And well it might be called that for the first slave that the parable mentions. This slave owes ten thousand talents (or "bags of gold" as our version has it), and the king wants his money back. Understandably so. What has the slave done with it? We aren't told. But he doesn't have it.

So the king acts according to the usual procedure in such cases and orders the slave and his family and possessions sold. The slave begs for more time and the king replies in a way that no one would expect: he forgives, that is releases him from, the debt. The slave walks away free of any obligation.

The slave, whose bottom line has just improved immensely and who should be feeling pretty good about the universe, meets another slave who owes him money and the same scene is played out again, for much lower stakes. But the debt-free slave does not share his good fortune, nor does he hear the cries of his fellow slave and has him and his family and possessions sold and he has him confined to debtors' prison until the debt should be discharged.

Slaves had little power of their own. They were unable to deal directly with this stingy fellow, so they complained to the king who had the slave turned over to the torturers.

To understand what is happening here, it's important to remember how parables work. They are drawn from social or natural scenes that would be familiar to the hearer. And certainly debt was a familiar part of the social landscape of Jesus' day. Because money was scarce and because taxes were paid in money, most people had to go into debt to pay their taxes, securing their loans with their land. This would work in good years, but bad years would come and, unable to pay off their loans, these folks would be forced off their land. There is some evidence that many of Jesus' followers were drawn from these displaced peasants. They understood debt. The terrible collection techniques, too, would have been all too familiar. Having to sell one's own children to stay afloat financially was common.

Parables are drawn from familiar scenes, but then there is a twist that causes us to question our assumptions, to see things in a new way. Often that takes the form of some absurd element introduced into the parable alongside the familiar. Shepherds, for example, do not leave their sheep and go looking for strays—that's what makes the parable of the lost sheep so powerful.

Here the strange element is the first debt: ten thousand talents. If you're like me, you have no idea of what kind of money we're talking about here unless you look it up. So that's what I did. A talent is a thousand denarii. Well, that's nice, but not too helpful, since I don't know right off the top of my head what a denarius is either. So I looked that up, too. A denarius was a coin that was worth the wages that a laborer would earn in a day, say, in modern equivalents, about fifty dollars. So a talent was worth about $50,000. And ten thousand talents? $500,000,000.

That's a pretty good sized chunk of change, by our standards at least. But that isn't the half of it. The Roman Empire was what economists describe as vastly under-capitalized. Money was scarce. Ten thousand talents was starting to approach the entire annual tax revenues of a small province, say Judea. So we have a king who has loaned his slave money amounting to the equivalent of, say, the annual tax revenues of the state of Iowa.

It's too big to be believable. Kings didn't have that kind of money and, if they did they certainly didn't loan it to a slave. If that weren't strange enough, the king forgives the debt, simply writes it off because of what? because the slave begs? Can you imagine the bank doing that because you couldn't pay a mortgage or car payment?

The parable challenges our thinking. It invites us to imagine something nearly unimaginable: life without debt. It's almost unthinkable. At the end of 2014, Americans owed over 800 billion dollars in credit card debt. That's actually up three percent in the last year. Even more staggering is that Americans owe 1.3 trillion dollars in student loan debt.¹ This is money borrowed against future earnings that may or may not ever happen, since nearly 44% of college graduates are underemployed, many because they have massive student loan debt to pay.²

The parable asks us to imagine life without any of that. Imagine a life without being indebted. A life free from the obligation to pay, or else. Imagine a life in which we didn't work for the bank, to discharge a debt, but because there is meaningful work to do that puts our best talents to work. Imagine a life in which our behavior toward each other was not driven by debt but by love. Imagine a life without debt.

Imagine a world without debt. We might be able to dream it, but it's hard to imagine.

The first slave had an invitation to do just that. The king erased his debt, gave him a get-out-of-jail-free card so that he could leave, not just his own debts, but the entire debt system behind. And instead of taking the king up on that offer, the slave figured that he had advanced within the system and he could now make it work to his advantage. So when he ran into the fellow who owed him money, he pressed his advantage within the system. And so, naturally enough, the king concluded that he didn't really want to be debt free, that is free of the debt system, so he put him back into the system and packed him off to the torturers.

The slave can either live in the debt system or not. It's true for us as well. We can either live in the debt system or not. What we we can't do is have it both ways, claiming freedom for ourselves and laying an obligation on others.

There is evidence that this was real for the early church. It wasn't at all uncommon for a church to buy a slave's freedom. Slaves often became slaves because of debt. The church operated a debtor's safety net to rescue those whose lives were being destroyed by the debt system.

Now we know this is a parable about forgiveness. The context tells us that. And that's what we've always thought, anyway. What reading the parable on its own terms has let us do is to see that the parable sets forgiveness within a framework of freedom from the debt system.

Have you noticed how much of the language around forgiveness is financial language? Someone has done me wrong, so they owe me. And I can settle accounts. I can pay them back, maybe even with interest.

We even think that God plays that game. How many of us, I wonder, have pictured the book of life at the last judgment as a ledger?

It's clear from what Jesus tells Peter that we are to forgive each other, if for no other reason than because we have been forgiven ourselves. But if we put it like this, "Because God has forgiven us, we owe it to God to forgive each other," we're still in the debt system. Jesus invites us to step out of it altogether. We forgive because, having been freed from the debt system, we are no longer able not to forgive each other—we're living under an entirely different system.

Jesus certainly preached forgiveness, but forgiveness was part of a much broader theme of debt relief of all kinds. Over the course of centuries we have diminished Jesus' teaching. Maybe it's because we wanted rich donors in the church and rich donors don't like the idea of debt relief and we were afraid we'd scare them off. Maybe it's because the church is run by us middle class folk, and we like the idea of social relations based on contracts and obligations. Maybe we just can't believe that Jesus meant what he said and God dreams of our freedom from debt, not only as an obligation but also way of living in the universe.

That's a shame, really, because what Jesus is offering is freedom. That freedom is about a lot of things. It's about peace within our relationships. It's about reconciliation. It's about freedom from our own past and its pains and failures. But it's also about our lives in the material world. It's about why we do what we do, and, yes, it is about the money.

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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1. Chen, Tim. “American Household Credit Card Debt Statistics: 2014 - NerdWallet.” Cited 19 February 2015. Online: http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-card-data/average-credit-card-debt-household/.↩

2. Bowyer, Chris. “Overqualified and Underemployed: The Job Market Waiting for Graduates.” Cited 19 February 2015. Online: http://www.forbes.com/sites/thecollegebubble/2014/08/15/overqualified-and-underemployed-the-job-market-waiting-for-graduates/.↩

The Choice (Matthew 16:24-17:8; Transfiguration; February 15, 2015)

The Choice

Matthew 16:24-17:8
Transfiguration
February 15, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

This is a hard text. We can see that it was hard for the disciples and it's hard for us. For one thing, the text is relentlessly political. The story is set in the sight of Caesarea Philippi, a Greco-Roman city built by Herod the Great in honor of the emperor. It embodied in its stones all of the things Jews hated about the Roman occupation. Jewish wealth was squeezed from Jewish peasants and artisans, taken to Caesarea Philippi where it disappeared and was used to fund Jewish oppression.

Roman troops were stationed at Caesarea Philippi and the local population had to provide them with food, so peasants and artisans were squeezed some more.

A Greco-Roman city attracted, not surprisingly, Greeks and Romans as well as other pagans with their demands for unclean foods, their loose morals, and their polluting idols and temples.

It was in this space, charged with political tension, that Jesus posed the question to his disciples, "Who do people say the Human One is?" The answers that he got in return were: John the Baptist, Elijah, and Jeremiah.

Each of these people had famously meddled in royal politics in God's name. Each of them had suffered the wrath of a king. Each of them had refused to yield.

Then Jesus asked them who they thought he was and Peter the Impetuous said what they all were thinking: "You are the Christ," that is, God's anointed. There had been others with the title of "anointed" and the one thing these figures all had in common was that they were all kings, from Saul and David through Cyrus, the Persian emperor who overthrew Babylon and let exiled Jews return to Judea. Peter said this in the shadow of the city that projected Roman political and economic power in Roman Palestine. If anyone had overheard, Peter would have been arrested, tried, and executed for treason, a political crime. And Jesus agreed with him.

And, speaking of execution, when Jesus describes his own future, he sees that he will be crucified, a form of punishment used by the Romans for those who resisted Roman authority.

Peter, as we know, was shocked because he could not imagine that, in a showdown between the emperor and God's anointed, it would be God's anointed who would be put to death. Peter was wrong about that, not because Jesus believed that religion and politics do not mix, but because he misunderstood how power worked in the religion of Jesus. Jesus' strategy was not to avoid politics, but instead to make a show of how theologically bankrupt the Roman regime really was. This strategy required that Jesus provoke a violent response from Rome to show that Roman power had nothing to do with justice--as it claimed-- and, therefore, that Roman power was illegitimate even on its own terms.

Every political system-- ours no less than the Romans-- has a theology. There can be no separation of politics and religion because politics always has its own religion. As someone who values the separation of church and state, I get really uncomfortable when I hear someone talking the way I have been talking. So you can imagine how uncomfortable I am that I'm the one who is talking like this! So, Jesus is set on a course that will trigger an accusation of treason and its associated punishment. That's bad.

But it gets worse: Jesus requires of his followers that they, too, will set their lives on a collision course with the reigning regime, a course that will trigger the regime's response. "Live your lives so that you risk crucifixion," Jesus told his would-be disciples. And, with shaking knees and sweating palms, they did just that.

But that's not what we want. So, we do what we do. We set about making this text not say what it says. We make it say something else instead. We say of something, "It's my cross to bear," something annoying, like a snoring spouse, or even something painful, like an arthritic knee or chronic headaches. Make no mistake, some of us really do struggle with pain that can't be helped, real suffering that may call us to live into it with hope and real courage. But that's not what Jesus means when he says that we must take up our cross if we want to follow him. Jesus means that, in the confrontation between God's dream and the way things are, we place ourselves on the side of God's dream, even if we have to do it with shaking knees and sweating palms.

Of course we'd rather avoid that if we can, so we imagine that Jesus' dramatic words are only for the religious superstars, the occasional martyr, like Martin Luther King, Jr., or Oscar Romero, people who insisted on God's dream so loudly, so persistently, and, above all, so publicly, that the regime had no choice but to kill them. But I'm not so sure we can wiggle out of it so easily.

On Wednesday evening Carol dragged me-- rather willingly, actually-- to hear Michel Martin speak at Luther College. Martin is an African-American journalist. She's also a woman, in case you thought that maybe she was a man from France. She works for NPR and used to be the host of Tell Me More, now, alas, canceled, one of the worst programming decisions NPR has ever made. She talked about race and gender and how social change is happening all the time, and how we are a part of it and that our daily decisions hinder it or help it along.

After about forty minutes, she finished her prepared remarks and there was time for questions. A brave student was among the questioners. She began by observing that other speakers at Luther on the subject of race had been activists who had left the impression that college students need to drop their plans-- and maybe even drop out-- to do "activist-y" things instead. But, she noted that it looked like Michel Martin had been able to be a positive part of social change and still have a career as well as a life.

Ms. Martin's response was that life gives us all sorts of chances to be on the right side. We don't really have to seek them out: they'll come to us. She recounted an experience she had while working for ABC early in her career. She and a crew were sent to interview a boy who had been horribly abused by his parents by being chained in the basement of his family's home. He had only been discovered because his older sister had broken the family rules and had brought home a friend who told her father who happened to be a deputy sheriff who investigated and so the parents were arrested and the boy's life was saved. Martin arrived with her crew at the grandparents' house where the children were staying. The camera was set up and the boy was mic-ed. She was ready to start the interview when she noticed that he was shaking like a leaf. She decided in that moment that she was not going to force this child to re-experience the trauma of his abuse for the sake of a news story. She said, "We're done. We're not going to do this. Go play with your friends."

In the confrontation between God's dream and the world as it is, she took her stand with God's dream against the regime that told her to get the story at any cost. The regime has ways of fighting back, of course. Her producer was furious. She expected to be fired, to have to find a new job, maybe even a new career: crucifixion in one of its modern forms.

It happens to all of us, to each of us. We hear a friend insult someone by saying, "That's so gay!" We can let it go. We can pretend we didn't hear it or that it doesn't do any real harm. Or we can face it head on. We can speak up and disown that sort of gay-bating insult. There is a risk, of course. The regime of homophobia has its own forms of crucifixion and we may lose a friend.

An employer may require us to look the other way when they do something illegal. And then we have a choice. We can go along, feeling badly about it, maybe. Or we can face it head on. We can refuse to go along, or even report it to the authorities. But that may come with its own costs, its own form of crucifixion.

Our lives are full of chances to stake our stand with God's dream or not, to stand with the powerless, the disadvantaged, the excluded, and the spat upon, or not. We can stand with God's dream or we can stand with the way things are. If we stand with the way things are, then we'll probably get along in the world. We'll keep our friends and our jobs. If we stand with God's dream, though, we may pay a price, a big one, maybe. But we'll be following in Jesus' footsteps from Caesarea Philippi, to the mountaintop, to Jerusalem, to the cross, and to the tomb and beyond. It is after all God's dream and while is is a long time in coming, it will not fail, and, if we choose it, neither will we.

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Anxiety with a Side of Fear (Matthew 6:25-34; Epiphany 3a; February 1, 2015)

Anxiety with a Side of Fear

Matthew 6:25-34
Epiphany 3a
February 1, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Being in a room with a crying baby is hard, especially a baby that can't be comforted. Or worse yet being on an airplane with one. The few times I've had that unhappy experience I could feel the blood pressure of every passenger going up.

I imagine that if there's anything worse than being with a crying baby it's being the crying baby. Babies have little ability to tell the adults around them what they need. They just cry. I say they have little ability, but that's more than none at all. Parents learn to tell the difference between the "I'm hungry, feed me" cry and the "I'm feeling scared, hold me" cry. And some parents have learned to use some very basic American Sign Language to talk to and listen to their babies. But even so, babies have a hard time telling us what they want and need.

So they resort to telling us loudly that they are unhappy--they have unmet needs--and they let us figure out just what it is they want. We human beings seem to be hard-wired for it: to figure out what babies need and to meet that need. It's a good thing, too, because human babies are absolutely helpless. Fawns are born and a few minutes later they wobble to their feet. Eaglets batter their way out of their eggs and are soon jostling their siblings to get first crack at supper. Human babies cry to survive. Their ability to make us anxious by crying is a survival skill. Our anxious response to babies who cry means that our little band of humans will survive and replace itself.

The psychiatrist Erik Erikson that we grow through a number of predictable life stages, each having to do with meeting a basic challenge of being human. In the first two years of our lives the basic question that we confront is "What kind of universe is this? Will anyone or anything even notice that I am here? Is it the kind of place where I can live? Will it meet my basic needs?"

Of course we don't do this in so many words. But we do come to have a sense of an answer to those questions by the time we are two or so. Most of us had our basic needs met more or less well enough. We were fed often enough when we were hungry, we were held often enough when we were lonely or scared, the people around us paid us enough attention. We have a basic sense of trust and hope.

At the same time, the universe doesn't exist simply to give us what we want. There were times when even what we needed was slow in coming, even when we were a year old and a lot cuter than we are now. So the sense of the universe we tend to have is that it is mostly trustworthy. Our sense is that our needs will be met most of the time. We matter some to the universe. But, we have some anxiety. Some of us have more and some less, but all of us have some.

That's not a bad thing. A little anxiety keeps us on our toes. It helps us keep an eye out for stalking lions and other dangers that might be lurking about.

And that was fine until some local tough guy got the idea into his head that he could use our anxiety and decided to start calling himself a king. He taught us to worry about the tough guy from the next town. In the meantime the tough guy in the next town was telling his people the same thing. The king's arguments became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our anxiety about the universe is a spark that is always ready to be fanned into a flame. People seeking power have always understood this. In the twentieth century until the advertising industry made a science of it.

If our anxiety is at its root a fear of not having our basic needs met, we would think that we wouldn't be very anxious. After all, we're warm even in the winter--at least when the heating system is working the way it should. We're well-fed--even too well-fed--and our refrigerators and cupboards have enough food in them to keep us alive for quite a few days. We can lock our doors at night and besides we mostly trust our neighbors, so we can sleep without having to keep one eye open. We should be carefree.

Guess what? The places where people suffer the most from anxiety are North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.¹ The places where we are the most anxious are the places where we have the least reason to fear not having the basic needs of life met. Pundits reacted to this discovery by blaming the precarious job market, the loss of control of daily life, and other factors.

Jesus directs our attention in a slightly different direction. He points to the natural world around us. What is the level of suffering from anxiety among day lilies and Queen Anne's lace? How much Xanax do goldfinches need in order to get through their day? When we look, of course, we find that very few day lilies and Queen Anne's lace have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. And, unless the ingredients list on the bird seed I buy is incomplete, very few goldfinches need any Xanax at all.

No, the lilies are beautiful and the goldfinches are carefree. So, Jesus says, we should be the same way.

So, have you ever tried telling yourself when you're feeling anxious, "Stop that! Be carefree. Be unconcerned."? How did that work for you? So now, not only am I anxious, but I'm feeling like a failure because I can't do what Jesus told me to do. Guilt on top of anxiety: that's just where I wanted to be.

No, we can't stop being anxious by willing it so. But that's not really where Jesus is telling us to look.

Our reading began with the word, therefore. Whenever a sentence starts with "therefore", we have a clue that we need to look at what came just before. Unfortunately, that sentence isn't in our reading. But I know because I have the whole Bible with me, so I can just look it up. And I'll even share it with you. And here's what Jesus said just before he said, "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth."

You cannot serve God and wealth. Notice that this isn't a command or even advice; it's a simple statement of fact. We cannot serve God and wealth. It can't be done. We can try. But then what we get is anxiety. The harder we try--as individuals, as families, as towns, as a nation, as a world--the harder we try to serve God and wealth, the more we get anxiety.

Therefore... Therefore don't worry about your life...

Better, but not there yet.

Jesus gives a lovely little list of things not to do. And we can't do them for the same reason that we can't not think of elephants when we're told not to. Our minds don't work that way. But, if I tell you to think about butterflies, there's a much better chance that you won't think about elephants.

So, Jesus, at the end of the list of things not to think about, tells us to set our sights on God and on God's justice. If we do that, if we give our lives to connecting with God and to seeking God's justice, to living justly ourselves, and to seeing that justice is done for others, then we see a way forward. It's not an easy way forward--in fact it will be hard--but it's possible, and that's all we're asking for.

This, then, is God's dream for us: that we might live our lives carefree and unconcerned, trusting in the goodness of God's world and of the God who gave it to us. We live into God's dream by seeking God and God's justice for ourselves, our neighbors, and our world.

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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1. Pederson, Traci. “Anxiety More Common in the Western World, Depression in East.” Cited 31 January 2015. Online: http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/07/26/anxiety-more-common-in-the-western-world-depression-in-east/42253.html.↩