So, how do you measure up today? I checked myself this morning, and I’m still 5’7” tall, my weight remains stubbornly pre-chubby, my blood pressure was 135 over 73, my blood oxygen level stood at 97%, and my teeth are clean, but not as white as I might want them to be. Overall, I’m not great, but I’m presentable.
And I’ll go through the same morning ritual tomorrow,
maybe with some new standards for self-evaluation. If I get really ambitious, I can download a so-called “360 review,” an inventory that will enable my family and friends and pretty much everybody to rate me on my performance as a husband, dad, friend, citizen, etc., etc., so that I can become more presentable.
We live in a culture that measures everything. We swim in a sea of metrics. Our lives are saturated with polls and surveys, with gadgets that measure our heartbeats and the number of steps we’ve taken, and that will even scold us for too much slacking or snacking. You can hardly buy a pack of gum without getting an email within half an hour asking you to rate your “gum experience.” And if you say it was a mediocre gum experience rather than a distinguished gum experience, somebody somewhere will probably get a couple of demerits.
Olympic races are won by literally thousandths of a second. Professors rate students who rate professors. And on and on it goes. Of course, a certain amount of evaluation and judgment is good and necessary; a sniff test can prevent a lot of problems. But too much of it can diminish our satisfaction with life and wear down relationships, as the perfect becomes the enemy of the good.
As a society, rather than giving people the benefit of the doubt, we’re often quick to size people up – we assess them on their clothes, their appearance, their driving habits, their speech, their real or imagined political opinions, and so we assign them their spot in our grand scheme of things. It’s easy to render a hundred of these snap judgments a day, and it can become so automatic that we don’t even notice that we’re doing it. And the long-term effect of all this is that we gradually become strangers, rather than neighbors, to one another. It can even happen in church.
So it’s hardly surprising that people, and younger generations in particular, increasingly report being depressed and lonely and anxious, and surely part of the reason for that is the suspicion, not only that they don’t measure up, but that they’ll never be able to measure up, and they aren’t even sure what measuring up would mean. All they know is that they’re forever coming up short in a world of visible and invisible benchmarks, and they live in fear of being written up by their employers or written off by their friends. It’s as though we owe one another a huge but intangible debt that never quite gets paid.
This is what makes Presbyterians such oddballs when we pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” It rolls off our tongues more or less unconsciously from week to week, and the only time we really notice it is when we’re in the company of other Christians who use the word “trespasses.” “Debts.” It has a crunchy, feet on the ground, matter of fact bluntness to it, that the somewhat antique word “trespasses” doesn’t. And it’s biblical, by the way. As it appears in Matthew’s gospel, the Lord’s prayer clearly uses the word “debts,” employing a Greek word that originally had to do with digging a hole.
In fact, the Bible throughout is quite definite about this matter of debts, and about how important it is to God. Both our Old and New Testament passages this morning call for the people of God to forgive debts, wiping the slate clean again and again, because that’s how God’s creative and restorative power is at work in the world. It’s how we are imitators of God and how we extend God’s reach. In a strange way, it’s not by doing anything. It’s a matter of relaxing, letting go, letting be.
In biblical Israel, as we have just heard, the land itself was to be given a reset every seven years – the so-called sabbatical year. Just as people took a day off every seven days, so there was to be “a Sabbath of complete rest” for the land, a time when it was not required to work. According to the book of Genesis, God took a break on the seventh day from the work of creation, and God made it clear that everybody and everything was to do the same.
Even more amazing, every fiftieth year, the so-called Year of Jubilee, all debts were to be cancelled, slaves were to be freed, and land was to be restored to the original owners (it was all God’s anyway), in what one commentator has called “a complete socioeconomic refresh.” In short, God declares, “You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.” (Leviticus 25:10)
Jesus echoes the same outlandish grace of God in the parable of the unforgiving servant. Peter has asked him, “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” no doubt thinking that this would be going way above and beyond. Imagine his surprise when Jesus replies, “Not seven times, I tell you, but seventy-seven times.” And he goes on to tell a parable, specifically, about the forgiveness of debts.
Now, to get the import of this parable, it’s important to know just how large a role debt played throughout the Roman Empire in Jesus’s time. Upward mobility was rare and hard to achieve, and downward mobility was common and easy. Everybody was caught in a finely-tuned spider’s web of debt and credit, and the stakes could not have been higher. Perpetually in hock to the Roman government, the Temple authorities, and the money lenders from whom they had to borrow to pay them, the common people knew all about indebtedness, and they knew that a creditor could sell the few possessions they owned, and their families and themselves into slavery, to pay up.
So when Jesus talks about forgiveness in terms of indebtedness, his audience would have been all ears. It’s a once-upon-a-time story, but it’s solidly rooted in their here-and-now. To make his point, Jesus paints with a very broad brush:
“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him…”
A talent was more than fifteen years’ wages at the going rate for a laborer, so our hapless debtor would have to work 150,000 years to pay off the debt…which seems like a long shot. So the king takes what at the time would have been a reasonable and legal course of action: “the lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions and payment to be made.” Taking the only course of action open to him, the slave “fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.” Which was clearly ridiculous and impossible.
The king responds with something equally ridiculous. “And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt.” Done. Cancelled. Go live your life. An act of generosity beyond all imagining. The debt is forgiven, not negotiated. There is no payment plan here. It’s forgiven, not because the servant deserves it, nor because of who the servant is, but because of who the king is. And the story ends with the slave, full of gratitude, going out to share his joy with everyone he meets, right?
Well, not so much. Unfortunately, the slave has a really short memory (how soon we forget!). “That same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii [which was not nothing but was a tiny fraction of what he himself owed], and seizing him by the throat said, ‘Pay what you owe,’” and had him thrown in prison. The other slaves report this shakedown to the king, and the end of the story is not pretty: “And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
Grace is serious business! We are to forgive as God forgives, period. “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Interesting little word, “as.” Does it mean, “Forgive us in proportion to the forgiveness we show others?” Does it mean, “Forgive us through our forgiving, in our act of forgiving others?” And what are we to forgive? Well, what are we not to forgive? What we do know is that, as followers of Jesus, mercy is our default position, even when it is costly, as it was costly for him. What we do know is that we are to be people of clean slates and new beginnings, as our God is a God of new beginnings.
On October 2, our Jewish friends will celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of a new year, to start the High Holy Days, which are also known as the Days of Awe. It begins a ten-day period of self-examination and reflection culminating in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It’s an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and close the book on the past year, to take whatever burdens us and diminishes us and be done with it.
This is beautifully expressed by the nineteenth century Rabbi Alter of Ger, who said, “the human heart is a tablet on which God writes. Each of us has the word life engraved in our hearts by God’s own hands. Over the course of a year, that engraving comes to be covered with grit. Our sins, our neglect of prayer and study, the very pace at which we live, all conspire to blot out the word life that still lies written deep within our hearts. On Rosh Hashanah we come before God, having cleansed ourselves as best we can, to ask God to write the word life again in our hearts.” [Rabbi Kerry Olitzky and Rabbi Daniel Judson, Jewish Holidays: A Brief Introduction for Christians, 4-5]
At the end of this time, God closes the book on the old year, and inscribes one’s name in the Book of Life for the new year. It’s a return to default position. A traditional greeting for this time is “May you be inscribed in the Book of Life.”
What I think Jesus is telling us in this parable is that God has wiped the grit off our hearts to get right down to the word “life,” and has inscribed our names in the Book of Life, and it’s up to us to respond in kind. By the same token, the word “life” is inscribed in the heart of everyone we meet, and we can do our part to help remove the grit that so often obscures it. In a time of relentless change and constant calculation, when everything is put under the microscope, God calls us to practice big grace, as God does.
As a congregation, we have a big sign out front that reads, “Expansively welcoming.” It’s an invitation, not only to others, but to ourselves, to broaden our imaginations, to extend a welcome as big as God’s welcome toward us. It means that we are inviting people with all their rough edges, to join our own less-than-perfect selves on this journey to the kingdom. When my colleagues and I interviewed members of emerging generations who were not currently participating in a faith community about what they deeply longed for in life, the answer they gave most often was, “A place where I can be myself, where I can be accepted for who I truly am.” In short, a place where they can experience God’s big welcome. It’s the place we’re called to be.
On a slightly grander scale, Pope Francis recently extended God’s big welcome by asking the affluent nations of the world to participate in a Jubilee Year in 2025, a year of debt forgiveness like the biblical one. Speaking of the crippling foreign debt that is strangling the economies of many countries in the Global South, Francis has called for nothing less than “a Jubilee debt restructuring and a re-ordering of our global economic architecture to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.” Lest you think this is mere pie in the sky, the last time the Pope did this, a quarter century ago, “The global Jubilee 2000 campaign resulted in $130 billion of debt cancellation for poor countries between 2000 and 2015.” Not bad.
We don’t need to be the Pope to start where we are, on whatever scale we can manage. As is so often the case, it’s the kids who get it right; and I’d like to conclude by sharing a version of the Lord’s Prayer that comes to us from a preschool in the Episcopal Diocese of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which reads as follows. Please pray with me:
Our Father in heaven, you are awesome!
Show us who you are and what you want us to be.
Make earth more like heaven.
Please give us what we need to keep going each day.
Help us when we are wrong and clean us up on the inside.
Help us to let other people off and move on.
Keep us from bad stuff.
You’re in charge!
You’re strong and powerful and always there.
Forever!
Amen and Amen!