Debt is on the nation’s mind. We’ve got fourteen and a half trillion dollars of the stuff and no one knows what to do with it. As a taxpayer, my share of the debt is $130,000. Between us, Becky and I, as taxpayers, “owe” the federal government substantially more than we owe the bank that carries our mortgage. The mortgage will be paid off in a few more years. Certainly not so our share of the national debt.
Another way to look at it is that as a citizen, our soon to be one-year old grandson already owes $47,000 to the federal treasury. Happy Birthday, Caleb.
No one knows what to do about our debt and our frustration with debt and debt politics is completely non-partisan. It’s a nice mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.
The fact of the matter is, though, that except when the 24-hour news machine dumps the national debt into my living room or onto my desktop, I think very little about it and my share of it. I have other things to worry about.
We Presbyterians know all about debts. Every time we say the Lord’s Prayer we ask that our debts be forgiven. But I wonder if we Presbyterians are really serious about our debt problem, any more, say, than our friends up the street at the Methodist church are serious about their trespasses. Or any more than we Americans are about the national debt.
Of course, the reason we’re stuck with debts and the Methodists have to worry about trespasses is also all about politics.
The Lord’s Prayer as we typically say it is based on Jesus’ teaching about prayer in Matthew’s version of the Sermon on the Mount. You can find it in Matthew 6:9-13 as originally translated in the King James Version. The King James translators got it right in 1611 as had John Wycliffe in the first English translation from 1395. The Greek word for what’s being forgiven is debts. But that’s not the way William Tyndale translated the word in 1526. He had used “trespasses,” the same word used by Jesus as he explained what he had in mind when he spoke of our need to seek forgiveness (Matthew 6:14-15).
When the Church of England, from which Methodism would someday emerge, wrote its first Prayer Book in 1549, they chose Tyndale’s errant translation, trespasses, because of the politics involved. Wycliffe had been a radical earlier reformer and declared to be a heretic (in fact, a stiff-necked heretic), his body exhumed and destroyed. Using Wycliffe’s translation seemed a bit unseemly to the bishops of Henry VIII’s new church, so they used Tyndale’s version. It was all about politics.
Point to the Presbyterians on debts.
As we come to our heavenly Father in prayer, we seek forgiveness. The image Jesus first uses is that of a debtor seeking the cancellation of an enormous debt. The debt is overwhelming. That’s the point in Jesus’ Parable of the Unforgiving Servant. There was one “who owed him ten thousand talents.” Read $14.7 trillion.
The master forgave the servant his massively unpayable debt. The servant then refused to forgive his fellow servant’s relatively modest debt of 100 denari – probably about $10,000.
When we Presbyterians pray for the forgiveness of our debts, we are confessing that our situation is more than a nice mess. It is a deadly trap with no way out. When our Methodist friends pray for the forgiveness of their trespasses, it is not an apology for having picked some fruit in Farmer Smith’s orchard. They have driven their D9 Caterpillar through the orchard and not a single tree has been left standing.
Technical point to the Presbyterians on debts versus trespasses, but only a technical point.
Presbyterians and Methodists alike, Baptists and Catholics, too; in fact, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Atheists – we are further in debt, have trespassed more boundaries, than we possibly know. Our situation is untenable. The day of reckoning will be far worse than anything August 2 might bring.
But then this, as we will hear this Sunday in morning Bible study, “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ” (Romans 8:1-2).
Our weekly plea for the forgiveness of debts is audacious. We have no right to expect anything. God’s gracious response is all the more audacious. “He said to her, ‘Your sins are forgiven.’” (Luke 7:48-49)