Henrietta United Church of Christ

Rev. David Inglis August 26, 2007

Luke 6:32-38

Learning to Pray, Learning to Live: 4. “Out of Debt”

“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Well, there’s no getting around it. We’ve come to the line in the Lord’s Prayer that forces us to look at something that’s unpleasant, unpopular, and unsettling--sin. And not just sin in general, but the wrongs that have been done by us, and the wrongs that have been done to us. Aren’t you glad you came to church today?

I think it was President Grover Cleveland who went to church one Sunday and got back to the White House later than expected. Mrs. Cleveland asked him what had kept him. “The pastor preached a long sermon about sin,” he explained. “Well, what did he say about it?” The President thought for a moment and said, “I think he was against it.”

Pastors have been preaching against sin ever since there have been sermons. And every Sunday, we and a couple billion other Christians pray to God, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” But then on Monday, we might wake up to news of domestic violence, and we find ourself still steaming about that biting comment our spouse or kid made to us yesterday. On the way to work we might hear news about road rage, and find ourself seething at the jerk who cuts us off, and hoping one of those big SUV’s really rams into him one of these times, like soon.

We might shake our heads over stories of retaliatory killings in the Middle East, but feel our own blood boiling and our fantasies going on overdrive when we hear about people who have brutally abused children. We might read about the prevalence of depression in our society, and we hear a voice inside us berating ourselves for the stupid things we’ve said and done. “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” I wonder if Jesus hoped this line from his prayer might do more for us and for our world than it has. Would you like for it to do more for you? I would for me. And it can–if we learn how to pray it--and live it--the way Jesus intended.

I think the best place to start is by understanding what Jesus meant when he said, “Forgive us our debts.” What are these “debts” Jesus is talking about? And why do some people say “trespasses,” and others say “sins”? Have you ever wondered that?

The word “debts” was sometimes used for “sins” in the Bible because, if we wrong someone in some way, we owe that person something to make it right. I’ll give you an example. An upstanding out-of-state family I know has a daughter in her 20's that we’ll call Annie. Annie became very rebellious as a teen, ran with a bad crowd, and eventually hooked up with a guy who was not into working but was into drugs. They had a couple of babies together, and they would periodically drop the kids off at Annie’s parents’ house and disappear for long periods of time. Sometimes they would steal Annie’s parents credit card before they took off, and would run up large bills. Her father said, “If she had taken a knife and driven it right into my heart, she couldn’t have hurt me more.”

Recently, she got diagnosed with a brain disorder and began taking medication for it. She said, “It’s like a fog was lifted from my brain. Now I can see everything clearly.” What she saw very clearly now was how much she had hurt her parents. So she told them how sorry she is for everything she did. She said she wants to do whatever she can to make it up to them.

That’s the sense of being in debt that we have when we wrong someone. That’s why we talk about “owing” someone an apology. Often a heartfelt apology is payment enough. Sometimes some kind of restitution is needed to pay the debt.

Now when we ask God to forgive us our debts, wouldn’t that also include our unpaid debts to God? What do you owe God? Think about that for a moment. . . . There’s nothing we can give God that God needs. But there are things that we can give God because we need to give them--because our lives are impoverished when we fail to give them. Things like our gratitude, our trust, our love, our will, our time, our talents. When we pray this prayer, I think Jesus also wants us to bring to mind the ways we’ve short-changing God, and therefore impoverished our own spirits.

Now how about this word “trespasses” that Roman Catholics and many other Protestants say when we say “debts”? The origin of that was a major third-Century Christian leader whose name was Origen. He started using “trespasses” when saying the Lord’s Prayer, and it stuck until Protestant reformer John Calvin went back to the way it reads in the Bible, which is “debts.” Origen probably used it because Jesus used the word “trespasses when he elaborated on this part of the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus said, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you” (Matthew 6:14).

To trespass means to step over the line, like the line between right and wrong, or to go where we don’t belong. We might think about the line between honesty and exaggeration, or evading the whole truth, or white lies. We might think about the line between generosity and giving to look good, or giving to avoid feeling guilty, or giving to make someone beholden to us. We might think about the line between love and condescending tolerance, or “being nice,” or sugar-coated manipulation. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, I think Jesus would want us to think about those lines that we’ve trespassed over in our dealings with people. Even when they don’t hurt another person in any significant way, they’re all signs that we’re straying away from our highest self, and we’re crossing the line from God-centered living into self-centered living. Praying “forgive us our trespasses” can help point us back toward home, back toward God.

Many Christians today pray “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” Partly this is to overcome the “debts” versus “trespasses” divide in Christianity, and partly it’s to use a word that we better understand. But it’s also based on Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, where Jesus prays, “Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” The Greek word that’s translated as “sins” here is hamartia. It comes from a word that was used in archery that meant “missing the target.”

Annie’s story helps us see how our sin makes us miss the mark and fall far short of who God has created us to be. Annie had been missing the target of everything she had been given life to learn to do–love selflessly, develop her gifts and offer them to the world, help make the world a better place.

And who of us isn’t falling short of the target of who God created us to be? We always will fall short in this life. The question is, are we aiming for the target as best as we can discern it? Are we stretching ourselves to love more deeply and widely? Are we striving to live in our integrity? Are we opening our heart more fully in understanding and in generosity? Are we stretching our self to develop our talents? Are we working to shine our light into the world? The more we practice aiming at these targets, the closer we’ll come to them. But in some profound sense, our life will be wasted if what we’re aiming for is to slide by with the minimum of effort, to keep ourselves as safe and comfortable as possible, or to avoid risking doing anything we might fail at.

And there’s one more aspect to sin that Jesus alludes to when he teaches us to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” which means, in proportion to our forgiveness of our debtors. It’s the sin of unforgiveness, the sin of judgment, the sin of self righteousness that measures everyone by our standards, and that can easily spot the speck in our neighbor’s eye but is blind to the log in our own eye. In case we missed Jesus’ message about the link between being forgiving and being forgiven the first time, Jesus immediately followed the Lord’s Prayer with this disturbing reminder: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” So our unforgiveness is something else we need to ask God’s forgiveness for.

Debts. Trespasses. Sins. Self-righteous judgment. Which did Jesus have in mind when he taught us to ask for God’s forgiveness? Jesus used all four in this prayer and in his teachings. This part of the prayer challenges to become repentantly aware of all the ways we have become separated from God, from each other, and from our highest nature as an eternal spirit created in God’s own image. Sin is the old-fashioned name for that separation, that estrangement, that leads to all our inner conflict, our outer strife, and the haunting emptiness we feel when our lives have gone off course.

Well now, hasn’t this has been fun? Here you came to church this beautiful Sunday morning thinking that you’re a good, law-abiding citizen, at least an average Christian, and a pretty decent church member. And now I’ve gotten you thinking about all the ways you’re a sinner.

Well, I’ve got one thing to say to you sinful people: Welcome to the human race. As Paul so thoughtfully pointed out to us, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Being a sinner doesn’t mean you’re a “bad person.” It just means that you’re a person. And being a sinner doesn’t mean you should live in shame about it. Did you hear that? No matter what you’ve heard the church tell you, Jesus never said or did anything that would suggest that he wanted sinners to live in shame. Shame

only locks us into our sin and separation. Jesus came to liberate us from our sin and shame.

So how can we get liberated from sin and get more fully connected to God, to each other, and to our God-created spiritual nature?

As I’ve pondered this question recently, I’ve gained a new insight into why Jesus kept telling us that when we get down on our knees and ask for God’s forgiveness for our sins, we need to also forgive others their sins. Jesus knew that you can’t really separate the two. The thing that keeps us from receiving forgiveness for ourself and from giving it to another is spirit-strangling judgment.

When we have messed up, we keep going back over the mistake we’ve made, berate ourselves for it, label ourselves as stupid, bad, foolish, incompetent, or a failure, and feel ashamed of ourselves. This keeps us separate from God’s forgiving grace and healing going to work in us, it separates us from other people because we feel so unworthy, and it separates us from our higher nature because our whole focus is on our weakness. If sin is separation from God, others and ourselves, this judgment about our sin keeps us locked into that sin.

When we apply this kind of judgment to someone who has wronged us, we keep going back over the hurtful or thoughtless thing they did to us, nurse our wound and our fantasies of them feeling as bad as they’ve made us feel, and we label the person as uncaring, dishonest, callous, or selfish, and blame them for how we feel. Again, we’ve locked ourself in the sin of separation from God’s healing grace for them and for us, of separation and estrangement from the person who wronged us, and from our higher self.

What’s the answer to these prisons of judgment? The heart of the good news that Jesus gave us is that God sees us, not through eyes of judgment, but through eyes of grace. And God invites us to see ourselves and each other through these eyes too.

When the prodigal son came up the road in rags, his father didn’t see a morally bankrupt failure. Through grace, he saw his beloved son coming home again.

When Jesus felt the nails being driven into his hands and feet by the Roman soldiers, he didn’t see those soldiers as deplorable scumbags worthy of eternal punishment. Through grace, he saw them as men who didn’t know what they were doing, and worthy of God’s forgiveness.

When in our blindness or anger we hurt somebody, when in our selfishness we deceive somebody, when in our preoccupation we miss the mark of God’s high calling for our lives, when in our arrogance we look down on somebody, we don’t have to stay locked in a prison of self judgment. We can receive this grace too. We can confess our sins, and this very naming of these things that separated us from God now opens the door to God’s boundless, forgiving love for us. It reconnects us to our higher spiritual self, the part that is sorry and wants the damage to be repaired. And it empowers us to find a way to seek reconciliation with those we have hurt. God’s grace frees us from our soul-strangling judgment and heals our separation.

And when somebody in their blindness, anger, selfishness, or arrogance hurts us, we don’t have to keep replaying the feelings of pain, powerlessness, and righteous indignation over and over again, or our futile fantasies of their hoped-for pain, as we poison our own body and soul with roiling resentment. We can ask for the grace to see the other person as we are and all humans are--sometimes misguided, selfish, or blind and more preoccupied with meeting our own needs than meeting other people’s. By grace, maybe we can also see them as God sees them–God’s beloved child who is struggling against their lower nature, inwardly suffering from their own mistakes, and learning life’s lessons as they go. And by grace, maybe we can see ourselves as Jesus sees us--not a powerless victim of anyone, but having the spiritual power to do the amazing things he commanded his followers to do in Luke 6:27-36:

This is our high calling, our spirit’s goal, our target we were created to aim for. And it is possible to do these things, if we take the sins we have done and the sins that have been done to us to God in prayer, come to see ourselves and each other through God’s eyes, and become recipients and carriers of God’s amazing grace.