Debt Relief
Thirteen Sunday after PentecostMatt 6:7-9a, 12
August 23, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
When it comes to the Lord’s Prayer we Methodists—like the Church of England before us—trespass rather than debt. Presbyterians debt and so do Congregationalists. When we get together with our neighbors across the street we either each do our own thing, in which case they have to wait for us to catch up, or we compromise and agree together to sin instead.
I have joked that Methodists trespass instead of debting because we will forgive trespasses, but we won’t forgive debts. But it’s not as if Presbyterians take this very literally. I can’t image a group less likely to forgive a debt than lowland Scots. They point with pride to the biblical basis for their version, but they live with their choice by spiritualizing debt until it has nothing to do with mortgages or credit card statements.
They say, and we are quick to agree, that “debts” refers to the guilt we have piled up by our sins. We are praying that God will overlook our sins and let bygones be bygones, because, Look! that’s how we are treating each other.
I could certainly preach this and it would be enough of a challenge for all of us. We’d like a clean slate with God. But we find it hard to let go of an injury done to us. The Lord’s Prayer holds up the prospect that we will get from God as we have given to others. It might be time, in Taylor Swift’s words, to “shake it off” and let go of our grudges and score-keeping. It is harmful to us and each other to hold on to old hurts.
I think the Lord’s Prayer can mean that. But I think it means something else first. Just as the clause, “give us this day our daily bread,” means first of all real bread for real bodies, so the clause that asks for forgiveness first of all means the forgiveness of debt, material and monetary debt, before it means anything else.
The abolition of debt as a way of relating to others lay at the heart of Jesus’ message. I am convinced of it. Of course many if not most of you are not so convinced. I don’t imagine that I’m going to change that in the next ten minutes, so I’m going to limit myself to planting a seed and whether it takes root and grows I will leave in other hands.
The first thing that points me toward debt relief in the Lord’s Prayer, other than the fact that the language is the language of debt relief, is the fact that Jesus did not make this up. The laws of Jubilee were part of his Jewish inheritance. In Jewish thinking, in the prophets and in the Torah, vast social inequality was deeply wrong, a corrupted and corrupting violation of the covenant. It was just plain wrong for some to have more and for others to have less. It was just plain wrong for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.
At least in Israel's imagination in Israel everyone started out with an equal amount of wealth in the form of land for tilling and grazing. But you know how it is. Life doesn’t happen the same for everyone. One man lives a long life and has children who can keep the farm going. Another dies young, leaving a widow to raise her children while her neighbors scheme to get control of her land. Bad harvests and good harvests never happen the same to everyone. And, yes, some people work harder and make smarter decisions than others.
Even starting in the same place, the fortunes of one family will rise and another’s will fall. But at some point wealth inequality becomes socially intolerable. It can only go so far until folks show up at the laird’s house with torches and pitchforks. Popular uprisings very often begin with the destruction of the records of debt, whether these records were written on clay tablets, papyri, or leather-bound journals.
General debt forgiveness was an ancient middle eastern strategy for keeping peasants from getting rebellious, especially when times were hard. Debt relief was used to ease social tension.
Israel’s law went a step further. Instead of waiting for inequality to become intolerable, it required a periodic “reset” of wealth. Every fifty years there was a Year of Jubilee. If land had been sold to raise money or settle a debt, it would be returned to its original owners. If someone had been sold into slavery, they were released and could go home again, free. In theory at least, Jubilee would prevent permanent classes of the rich or the poor. In theory. We don’t know how often or even whether years of Jubilee were actually observed. We can imagine that rich people looked for ways to postpone or eliminate the Jubilee altogether, an ancient case of the rich using their power to change the rules of the game in their favor.
Still, Jubilee held up the ideal of economic equality as God’s expectation for the covenant community. The theme runs through the prophets. Jesus invoked Jubilee when he announced in Luke that God had sent him “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Jesus told parables about debts, the best-known of which is the Parable of the Unjust Overseer in which an overseer has an enormous debt forgiven by his master but then refuses to forgive the much smaller debts owed to him by his fellow servants.
The debt regime was crushing the people Roman Palestine in Jesus’ day. Part of his ministry was to undermine that regime. Christians since then, though, have worked to shore that regime back up, beginning with the biblical text itself. Luke for instance has “forgive us our sins (not debts), for we ourselves have forgiven everyone indebted to us,” in its version of the Lord’s Prayer, a little move away from debt.
I have what is called A Reader’s Edition of the Greek New Testament. It footnotes short definitions of the less common words of the text. This lets someone like me with a working knowledge of Greek read without a great deal of flipping back and forth in a dictionary. For the word that means “what someone owes” it offers “wrongdoing” while a line later it has “debtor” for “someone who owes.”
The notes of my trusty New Oxford Annotated Bible tell me that “debts” is a metaphor for “sins,” and sends me for proof to the Parable of the Unjust Overseer, pointing me for proof that debt is a metaphor to a parable which it asserts is about debt as a metaphor!
Our reading from the Common English Bible had, “Forgive us for the ways we have wronged you, just as we also forgive those who have wronged us.” The idea of debt has disappeared altogether! A lot of people have gone to a lot of effort to make sure that we don't get this right!
Our tradition resists the idea that “debts” means “debts” for a simple reason: it doesn’t want to offend the rich. But just because our tradition has gotten cozy with the rich doesn’t mean that Jesus did, or has. Jesus’ attitude may be an embarrassment to the tradition, but I think we are still obligated to remember what he said, not what we wish he had said. When we pray “as Jesus taught us” we are praying for the downfall of the debt regime.
I’m not sure I can even imagine what that would look like, any more than we can imagine what the rest of God’s dream would be like fully fleshed-out among us. I can point to some examples, though, some hints.
For example, when the Great Recession hit and the real estate markets tanked in late 2007 and early 2008, there was a wave of foreclosures that lasted for the next five or six years. Over four million families had their homes taken away from them.[1] The lenders were rescued; the home-owning families were not. That’s the debt regime at its most malevolent.
Right now there are 1.3 trillion dollars in student debt. Students and their parents believed the current version of the American Promise: If you go to college, study hard, and stay out of trouble, you will be able to get a good job that will support a comfortable standard of living for you and your family. The Promise neglects to mention two things: 1) There aren’t very many of those jobs, far fewer than the number of people who held up their end of the Promise; and, 2) unless you are rich you will have to borrow money to go to college. A lot of it. An average of more than $30,000 of it. Many people with student loans will still be paying them off in retirement. Student loans are very profitable and virtually risk-free for the banks. Our society has sold most of a generation of young people into debt slavery from which there will be no release, no Year of Jubilee.
In the midst of examples like these, though, there have been occasional glimpses of hope, hints of Jubilee. Early Christian congregations used to collect money to buy their enslaved members’ freedom. So did pre-Civil War African American churches.
Recently, Jerry Ashton and Craig Antico, two former debt collectors, formed a company that buys medical debt that hospitals have labeled as uncollectable. This is what debt collection companies do. They buy debt at pennies on the dollar and they collect and keep whatever they can. Only Ashton and Antico’s company buys the debts and then forgives them. They’ve managed to forgive four hundred thousand dollars of medical debt in the last year and hope to be able to forgive over seventeen million in the next year. That’s Jubilee for Paola Gonzalez, a 24-year old student with lupus who had a hospital debt of $950. Imagine her getting a call to tell her that her hospital bill had been settle and she owed no money!
Beyond that, life out of the debt regime is hard to picture, so much a part of daily life debt has become. Would our economy be able to operate without debt? Maybe not. If not, is that an indictment of Jubilee or of our system?
Maybe without debt our whole system would erupt in the sort of holy chaos out of which God’s dream emerges. Who knows? We will know that God’s dream is realized, that God’s will is done, that God’s name is made holy when debt is forgiven and the debt regime is no more. Until then, we’ll keep praying.
[1] "Home Foreclosure Statistics," *Statistic Brain*, 2014, http://www.statisticbrain.com/home-foreclosure-statistics/. Accessed August 22, 2015.
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