Sermon — September 18, 2022

The Rev Greg. Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“The manager asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’
He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him,
‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’” (Luke 16:5–6)

Debt relief is as hot a topic today as it was in Jesus’ time. You may have heard this summer about the Biden administration’s new plan for student-loan debt relief. But there’s been another kind of debt in the news recently, one that’s less controversial and, in my opinion, much more interesting: some churches are building a movement to purchase and forgive huge amounts of unpaid medical debt.

What makes medical debt relief so interesting is that it costs almost nothing. It works like this: There are a huge number of outstanding hospital bills in this country that will simply never be paid. Imagine, for example, that you don’t have much money and you have bad insurance or no insurance, and you have a heart attack that leads to emergency heart surgery, and maybe the cardiologist or the anesthesiologist on call is out of network. You may end up with a bill that you simply cannot ever pay. After a few months, the hospital can hand your debt over to a collection agency, but there’s only so much they can do. Medical debt collection is a tough business to be in. After all: they can hound you with phone calls, they can trash your credit score, but they cannot repo your heart. Not yet.

So there’s this huge and strange market for medical debt that’s premised on the idea that it’s better to get something than nothing. You can buy and sell big bundles of debt for literally a penny on the dollar, and if only 1 or 2% of it ever gets paid off, you’ve done all right.

Or—and here’s where the debt relief comes in—you can buy someone’s debt, and then simply forgive it. One church in Durham, North Carolina, for example, is including medical debt relief in its capital campaign as part of their mission, because by raising just $50,000 in funds they could forgive $5 million in medical debt for people in their community.[1]

If you think about this like an economist, this all makes perfect sense. If you think about it like—no offense—a human being, it’s mind-boggling. After all, if my $10,000 debt could be sold to someone else for $100 and then forgiven, then why didn’t I just owe the hospital $100 in the first place?

Our parable this morning is the fourth in a series of five that Jesus tells in this section of the Gospel of Luke about the inextricably linked concepts of wealth, sin, and forgiveness. Last week, we heard the two parables of the “lost sheep” and the “lost coin,” two stories about people who lost some portion of their wealth, in livestock or cash, and then went out to find them and bring them home. Jesus explains them as parables about how God relates to us when we sin and repent, when we are lost and God comes looking for us. Next week, we’ll hear the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, in which the rich man begs God for forgiveness and mercy, having never cared a bit for the poor man Lazarus in his lifetime while he lay on the streets outside the rich man’s gates. And between last week and this week our lectionary skipped over the parable of the Prodigal Son, which we heard earlier this year, in which the younger son squanders his inheritance and then comes home, begging forgiveness from his father, who treats him to a lavish party in return.

These parables can be confounding, this morning’s especially. Jesus seems to commend some very shady dealings. It seems that this dishonest manager been running his boss’s affairs for some time, and abusing his power to line his own pockets. The boss hears some rumors and asks him to show him the books. So the manager goes around and retroactively edits all the loans, using his authority to forgive huge portions of the people’s debts.

It’s a little hard to figure out exactly what’s going on. Is it like the situation of medical debt, where the boss has already written these loans off as unlikely to be repaid, but the manager manages to squeeze out a fraction of what’s owed by forgiving the rest? Is it a last-minute attempt to cook the books, hiding what the manager has stolen from the loan repayments by pretending it was never owed? Is it just a spending spree in which the manager uses the last moments of his power to buy the loyalty of the people in the community, before he’s thrown out the door? At the very least, that last part is what Jesus picks up on, and he’s right. These neighbors are now in the manager’s debt, not just the master’s. They owe him, not jugs of olive oil or containers of wheat, but some serious favors down the road.

Most parables are hard to parse. We sometimes assume the biggest and the most powerful person in the story is supposed to be God. And that can create some very weird theology. Say that God is the master, the one in charge. Is Jesus the steward, who goes around practicing forgiveness and mercy. So God is planning to… fire Jesus for mismanagement? But then he’s pleased when it turns out Jesus deceived him? You didn’t have be at Thursday’s discussion on the Nicene Creed to sense that maybe that’s not how the Trinity’s supposed to work.

Like the lost sheep and the lost coin and the Prodigal Son, this is often read as another parable of sin and forgiveness. And in fact “debt” is very traditional language for sin. The text of the Lord’s Prayer, for example, actually reads “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” (Matthew 6:12) This “debt = sin” image is just so ingrained in theology that we translate it “trespasses” or “sins” instead. Parables are tricky to understand. But if this story about the forgiveness of debts really does have something to do with forgiveness writ large, then there a few things about it that I want to point out.

First: we are all deeply in debt to one another and to God. It’s one thing to say that sin is like a debt. If I’ve wronged you or mistreated you, in some sense, I owe you some kind of repayment. But it goes much deeper than that. Simply by being alive, we are deeply in debt to those who came before us: to those who bore us and raised us, to those who built our cities and our churches, to those who fought and struggled and died for our freedom, in battles and protests and courtrooms. And we’re deeply in debt to God. There is no price that we could pay to purchase for ourselves a life. It is a gift from God.

Second: it costs a lot, in time and money, to repay our debts. It takes just minutes and pennies on the dollar for someone else to forgive them. No farmer in the world could’ve offered to pay that manager 50% of his debt and call it even without being laughed out of the room. But it only takes the manager a second to cut the price in half. Although, to be fair, he is committing fraud. It costs only pennies on the dollar for someone else to buy your hospital bills, when you could never in your lifetime pay them back. And what’s true for debt forgiveness is even true for forgiveness forgiveness. There may come a time in your life when you mess up. (Maybe you already have.) And you can work so hard to make things right, you can try and try and try to be perfect, to never do it again; but even if you succeed, you will never be free from that debt until the person you have wronged forgives it. And they can grant that forgiveness so much more easily than you can earn it.

And third: the forgiveness of a debt creates transforms a relationship. The dishonest manager knows this. That’s why he does what he does. He’s purchasing a literal social safety net for himself after he’s thrown out of his old job. That church in North Carolina knows this. They weren’t just doing this alone, they were organizing other white churches to raise money to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars medical debt, primarily for poor Black people in their state, trying to transform their relationship with a community they’d kept in chains. Forgiveness doesn’t just roll things back to the way they were. It begins to build a new relationship for the future.

All of this is what Paul means when he writes that Jesus, as a “mediator between God and humankind…gave himself a ransom for all.” (1 Tim. 2:5–6) He means that in Christ, God forgave our debts. To whatever extent we owed God something—for the gift of our lives, or as the debt owed for our actions or our inactions—in Jesus’ life and death, God paid the bill. God chose to forgive us our debts, knowing that we could not ever earn enough to pay them off. And God invited us to forgive one another as we had been forgiven.

So maybe there’s a debt that someone owes you that will never be paid off. Maybe they wronged you long ago, but they’re no longer alive, and you’re left with your resentment. Maybe they nearly ran you over or cut you off in traffic on the way here, but you’ll never see them again. Maybe they owe you a literal, actual debt, but you know they just can’t pay. What would it cost for you to forgive that debt? What would it look like to write it off? Would it do anything to transform them? More importantly, maybe— Would it do anything to transform you?In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[1] https://sojo.net/articles/churches-are-forgiving-medical-debt-pennies-yours-can-too

Sermon — September 11, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I once heard an interview with a baseball umpire who’d been recruited to test out a new ”electronic umpire” system in the early days of its development. It used lasers and cameras and computers to detect exactly where the baseball crossed the plate, then communicated wirelessly with a headset in the umpire’s ear, which played a little noise after each pitch. Right down the middle? Ding! Way outside? BAAAAH. The company was just testing things out, and this guy was an umpire for one of those leagues that’s so minor it’s not even technically “minor league.” They called him up with a proposition. “Hey, you have a double header on Thursday, right? How about this? The first game, you call, the way you’d call it, but with the headset in your ear. The second game, for every pitch, just call exactly what the computer says.”

And by about the third inning of that second game, he was convinced: This machine was going to ruin baseball.

His reasoning was simple. While the strike zone is, in theory, a geometric concept, in practice it’s a human one. Negotiating the exact boundaries of the strike zone is part of the game, as the batter tries to shrink it down and the pitcher and catcher try to make it wider. The umpire’s job isn’t to apply an algorithm to determine whether any given pitch is a ball or a strike. It’s to preside over a healthy game. If the pitcher hit the last batter, the umpire might call a few balls on the inside to discourage the pitcher. If the batter keeps mouthing off about bad calls, the umpire’s going to stand his ground, and then some. And let’s face it, baseball is a spectator sport: there are certain pitches that can be called as strikes in the top of the second inning but really need to be balls in the bottom of the ninth, if the batter’s team is down by two, because this is a game, and not a computer simulation.

You may not agree with this umpire. But you can at least understand his point. There are times when the best way forward is not the precise and strict application of the rules, but a certain kind of flexibility. There are times when we think fairness is the most important thing, but in fact it’s forgiveness. There are times when what we want is justice, but what we need is mercy.

If you think there’s nothing more important than calling balls and strikes as precisely as possible in life, then today’s parables might be disappointing. The lost sheep and the lost coin tells us something about what God values, after all. And if this is the way that God behaves over “one sinner who repents,” (Luke 15:7, 10) then our God is an unfair, unjust, unreasonable god. And everybody knows it.

Consider the lost sheep. “Who among you,” Jesus asks, “if you had one hundred sheep and lost one, wouldn’t leave behind the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one who had been lost?” (Luke 15:3-4) And every shepherd in the crowd is looking around, like… Should I raise my hand?

This is a very bad idea! No reasonable person would do this. For the sake of saving one in a hundred, no one would leave the other ninety-nine out alone in the wilderness, vulnerable to wolves or thieves or simply to wandering off themselves, which sheep, it turns out, are rather apt to do.

And what he does next is worse! He takes the sheep, and puts it on his shoulders, and where does he go? Back to the rest of the flock, to make sure they’re still okay? No! He carries it home! Into his house! And he calls his friends and neighbors and he says to them, “Rejoice with me!” And they show up and they’re like, “Man… Where are your sheep?” And he’s like, “I don’t know! Out there! I hope! Isn’t this awesome!?”

The woman with the lost coin behaves in a slightly more methodical way. She only has ten coins, and she’s lost one of them, but there’s no risk to the other nine. So she lights the lamp and she sweeps the floor. She scours her apartment looking for that coin and when she finds it, she is filled with joy. And she calls to her friends and her neighbors, and she says to them, “Rejoice with me! I’ve found my coin!”

But the more you think about this story, the stranger it seems, too. She invites her friends over to celebrate, and how do you celebrate but by throwing a big party—by eating together, like Jesus eats with the tax collectors and sinners? But how many friends and neighbors can you feed for one drachma? It seems to me that the woman may have spent a huge amount of energy searching for this one lost coin and then spent it right away, by throwing a party to celebrate having found it.

And so it is, Jesus says, with God.

We so desperately want things to be fair. We want balls to be balls, and strikes to be strikes. We want people to be held accountable for their actions, punished for their wrongdoing. We want them to apologize so that we can feel justified in forgiving them. We want the ninety-nine sheep to be rewarded for their good behavior, and the one lost sheep to have to deal with the consequences of its actions.

But God is unfair. God’s like the woman who’s lost the coin: she’ll light a lamp to drive away the darkness so she can look for you the instant she realizes you’re lost, even if you’re not ready to be found. God’s like the shepherd who’s found the sheep: he’ll throw you over his shoulders and carry you back home, bleating furiously, without a thought for the rest of the flock. When you have wandered far away, God is so delighted at the prospect of your return that he doesn’t even wait for you to realize you’re lost; he just goes, without a thought of fairness in his mind.

God doesn’t call balls and strikes according to an algorithm. God practices mercy, more than justice; forgiveness, more than fairness. And Jesus invites us, in these parables, to consider whether we might do the same.

There are, no doubt, many situations in which clear boundaries need to be set. There are relationships in which the appropriate response to being wronged is not “It’s okay. I forgive you,” but, “That was wrong. It’s not okay. You need to stay away from me.” Absolutely.

But we spend most of our lives on the edges of the strike zone. And we see the world like typical baseball fans. We think that we are pitching strikes, and they are throwing balls. We think that we are being wronged, when we’ve done nothing wrong. We think that if only life were more fair, if only someone were out there really calling balls and strikes, then—Well, then what? God would smite our neighbors or our spouses or our friends for their thousand tiny wrongs?

Because that’s the thing. We crave justice, but sometimes justice doesn’t do very much for us. What we really need is mercy. We stick to our ideas of fairness, but knowing that we’re right doesn’t do much for us. If we can let go, and forgive—if we can sweep the floors of all our resentments and search what we’ve lost—we might have a chance at feeling a tiny fraction of God’s joy.

God in her mercy has given us the power to forgive, to be as irresponsible and unreasonable as God is, with one another, to display, as Christ did, “the utmost patience” with one another. (1 Tim. 1:16) Not because it’s easy to forgive. Not because the other person isn’t wrong. But because God has displayed the utmost patience with us. Because God has swept the floor and searched diligently for us. Because God has sought us out when we have gone astray and carried us home on his shoulders, rejoicing.

So “to the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God,
be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.” (1 Tim. 1:17)