Sermon — September 18, 2022
The Rev Greg. Johnston
“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