Forgiving Debts Amidst Hurricane Katrina
by Paul Canavese
24th Sunday in OT • September 11, 2005
Sirach 27:30-28:7 • Psalm 103: 1-4,9-12 • Romans 14:7-9 • Matthew 18:21-35
The gospel reading today is a familiar one. What’s not so obvious to us is that forgiving seven times or 77 times, and this parable about releasing debt are all huge arrows pointing back into the Old Testament that the Jews in Jesus’ audience could not miss.
Seven is the number of the Sabbath. We all know the first Sabbath: God creates the world in six days, and on Day Seven, God rested. In the book of Exodus (Ex 16:22-30), God tells the Israelites to keep the Sabbath each week: rest on every seventh day. So far, so good.
Now imagine you were a Jewish farmer in Old Testament times trying to make ends meet. If you had a bad year or two, you could probably get a loan from a neighboring farmer. But if things didn’t pick up, your neighbor could force you to sell off your land and maybe even yourself into slavery. This was how the cycle of poverty started, and the rich would get richer, and the poor would get poorer.
God didn’t like this very much, so in Exodus (Ex 23:10-11) and Deuteronomy (Dt 15), God calls for a Sabbath year. On every seventh year, if you owed a debt, it was forgiven. And if you were a slave, you were freed. Can you imagine? No questions asked… on year 7 You get to start all over.
But after every 7th Sabbath year (that’s after 7 times 7 years), God has a real blow-out: a Jubilee year. God calls for all of the above, plus returning all land to its original owners. Even if your family lost everything, you’d get to start over every Jubilee year.
In this Sabbath tradition, God says: The land and the wealth belong to me. There is enough for everyone. God also says, You belong to me. I freed you from slavery in Egypt. You are not allowed to make each other slaves.
God knows that our human systems are not fair. Over time, some people are going to end up poor. So God says, we need to change the system so that we will level the playing field.
If there are people who can’t eat, If there are people who aren’t free, we have to make it right. By changing the system.
You would probably not be surprised to hear that a lot of people did not want to follow these laws.
Then along comes Jesus. In Luke’s gospel (Lk 4:16-21), Jesus shows up in his hometown synagogue, on the Sabbath, and reads from Scripture: "He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives... to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord." He is reading Isaiah’s description of a Sabbath year. And Jesus says, That’s what I’m about.
What is Jesus’ take on the Sabbath release? That’s what we hear in this week’s gospel.
First, Jesus connects this forgiveness of economic debt to forgiveness of sin.
In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, the word for "sin" and "debt" was the same. And the same verb is used in the New Testament to both "forgive" sin and "release" from debt. Jesus is talking about whatever keeps us bound, whatever keeps us from being free.
The Old Testament calls for release from financial poverty and slavery. Jesus adds in sin and everything else that keep us from being free. Jesus knows all of us are bound by something. He also reminds us we have the power to free somebody else
Jesus also blasts open the boundaries of "how much". He is less interested in the minimum, but more in pushing the maximum: Forgive--not one--not seven--but 77 times.
The amounts the servants owe in today’s parable are simplified in the translation we heard. The first servant owed 10,000 talents. Take a guess how much that would be today. Try 4... billion... dollars. Jesus is not talking about just giving one family their farm back. (The second servant owed 5 or 6 thousand dollars.)
What is the message for us today in Alameda, CA? It’s tempting to just take the forgiving sin part, and ignore the rest of it. And as hard as it is to forgive others’ sins, it’s a lot more challenging to forgive financial debts. And taking on poverty seems impossible.
Over the past couple weeks, the news coverage of the hurricane has brought me through a lot of emotions. I’ve been saddened and frustrated and disgusted and ashamed. But I know my initial reaction was to ask: Why didn’t they all follow the orders to evacuate? It’s so far out of my experience to think of not having a car or money or a place to go that would allow me to leave town. This disaster was hitting some of the poorest people in the country, and I had no clue how they lived their lives.
Perhaps the most important outcome is to be shocked with the reality of how many poor people we still have in this country, how bad they have it, and how closely poverty is still tied to the color of one’s skin.
Here are some statistics about New Orleans-- a city that is 70% black-- before the hurricane ever happened:
I felt so ignorant to realize people still have it that bad in this country.
All of a sudden, there are articles with these figures on the front page of the newspapers. Poverty and race are things we as a country don’t like to think about.
This week the U.S. Census bureau issued a report, that the poverty level in this country has increased for the fourth straight year. 4 million more people were living in poverty in 2004 than in 2001. There is poverty in the Bay Area. There is poverty in Alameda. There are members of St. Joseph parish who are poor. And beyond our nation’s borders, we know that the numbers just get worse.
What does all this mean for us as people of faith? What does it mean if we believe in Sabbath forgiveness? What does it mean if we were to pull out all the stops as Jesus suggests?
With Hurricane Katrina, we’re taking the first step, meeting the immediate needs. Our parish community has contributed an impressive amount—over $20,000—for the victims. As you know, this money is needed badly.
But I hear a different challenge coming from Scripture: How can we break the cycle of poverty? How does God want us to change the system? That’s a question for all of us, and one I don’t have the answer to. If only it was as easy as writing a check and placing it in an envelope.
A good start is to educate ourselves. Who are the poor? What is it like to be poor? What do I have to learn from the poor? We need to hear their stories, and let them change us.
Then we can look at our priorities, as individuals, as a church, and as a country. In the early 1990s, Michigan bishop Ken Untener decreed that for two months, the poor should be the first item on the agenda of every parish and office meeting in his diocese. And the question to be asked was, “How will what we are doing here affect or include the poor?” What would change if each of us did that, before we voted, before we bought something, before we made any major decision?
What would a Jubilee year look like today? What would it look like to the people of New Orleans? What would it take not to build back the way things were,
building back the poverty and unacceptable schools, but to give them their farms back, to let them truly start over.
What would a Jubilee year look like today? The Christian organization Sojourners has started a petition campaign to both support the hurricane victims and
call for a “sweeping change” in government priorities to address the needs of our poorest families and children.
What would a Jubilee year look like today? The worldwide Live 8 concerts this summer put a spotlight on African debt, and called for Western governments
to forgive those debts and to “Make Poverty History”. Maybe this is the $10 billion dollar debt forgiveness in today’s parable.
But what do you think a Jubilee year should look like today? What are you being asked to return to the poor, so that they can have a real second chance? Not just in giving money, but in helping God to change the system Jesus calls for each of us to forgive sins and to forgive debts, to set people free.
Lord God, forgive us this day our debts as we forgive the debts of others.
24th Sunday in OT • September 11, 2005
Sirach 27:30-28:7 • Psalm 103: 1-4,9-12 • Romans 14:7-9 • Matthew 18:21-35
The gospel reading today is a familiar one. What’s not so obvious to us is that forgiving seven times or 77 times, and this parable about releasing debt are all huge arrows pointing back into the Old Testament that the Jews in Jesus’ audience could not miss.
Seven is the number of the Sabbath. We all know the first Sabbath: God creates the world in six days, and on Day Seven, God rested. In the book of Exodus (Ex 16:22-30), God tells the Israelites to keep the Sabbath each week: rest on every seventh day. So far, so good.
Now imagine you were a Jewish farmer in Old Testament times trying to make ends meet. If you had a bad year or two, you could probably get a loan from a neighboring farmer. But if things didn’t pick up, your neighbor could force you to sell off your land and maybe even yourself into slavery. This was how the cycle of poverty started, and the rich would get richer, and the poor would get poorer.
God didn’t like this very much, so in Exodus (Ex 23:10-11) and Deuteronomy (Dt 15), God calls for a Sabbath year. On every seventh year, if you owed a debt, it was forgiven. And if you were a slave, you were freed. Can you imagine? No questions asked… on year 7 You get to start all over.
But after every 7th Sabbath year (that’s after 7 times 7 years), God has a real blow-out: a Jubilee year. God calls for all of the above, plus returning all land to its original owners. Even if your family lost everything, you’d get to start over every Jubilee year.
In this Sabbath tradition, God says: The land and the wealth belong to me. There is enough for everyone. God also says, You belong to me. I freed you from slavery in Egypt. You are not allowed to make each other slaves.
God knows that our human systems are not fair. Over time, some people are going to end up poor. So God says, we need to change the system so that we will level the playing field.
If there are people who can’t eat, If there are people who aren’t free, we have to make it right. By changing the system.
You would probably not be surprised to hear that a lot of people did not want to follow these laws.
Then along comes Jesus. In Luke’s gospel (Lk 4:16-21), Jesus shows up in his hometown synagogue, on the Sabbath, and reads from Scripture: "He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives... to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord." He is reading Isaiah’s description of a Sabbath year. And Jesus says, That’s what I’m about.
What is Jesus’ take on the Sabbath release? That’s what we hear in this week’s gospel.
First, Jesus connects this forgiveness of economic debt to forgiveness of sin.
In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, the word for "sin" and "debt" was the same. And the same verb is used in the New Testament to both "forgive" sin and "release" from debt. Jesus is talking about whatever keeps us bound, whatever keeps us from being free.
The Old Testament calls for release from financial poverty and slavery. Jesus adds in sin and everything else that keep us from being free. Jesus knows all of us are bound by something. He also reminds us we have the power to free somebody else
Jesus also blasts open the boundaries of "how much". He is less interested in the minimum, but more in pushing the maximum: Forgive--not one--not seven--but 77 times.
The amounts the servants owe in today’s parable are simplified in the translation we heard. The first servant owed 10,000 talents. Take a guess how much that would be today. Try 4... billion... dollars. Jesus is not talking about just giving one family their farm back. (The second servant owed 5 or 6 thousand dollars.)
What is the message for us today in Alameda, CA? It’s tempting to just take the forgiving sin part, and ignore the rest of it. And as hard as it is to forgive others’ sins, it’s a lot more challenging to forgive financial debts. And taking on poverty seems impossible.
Over the past couple weeks, the news coverage of the hurricane has brought me through a lot of emotions. I’ve been saddened and frustrated and disgusted and ashamed. But I know my initial reaction was to ask: Why didn’t they all follow the orders to evacuate? It’s so far out of my experience to think of not having a car or money or a place to go that would allow me to leave town. This disaster was hitting some of the poorest people in the country, and I had no clue how they lived their lives.
Perhaps the most important outcome is to be shocked with the reality of how many poor people we still have in this country, how bad they have it, and how closely poverty is still tied to the color of one’s skin.
Here are some statistics about New Orleans-- a city that is 70% black-- before the hurricane ever happened:
- 28% lived below the poverty line.
- Half of the households make under $28,000 a year.
- 40% of residents are illiterate.
- Louisiana called almost half of its own public schools “academically unacceptable.”
I felt so ignorant to realize people still have it that bad in this country.
All of a sudden, there are articles with these figures on the front page of the newspapers. Poverty and race are things we as a country don’t like to think about.
This week the U.S. Census bureau issued a report, that the poverty level in this country has increased for the fourth straight year. 4 million more people were living in poverty in 2004 than in 2001. There is poverty in the Bay Area. There is poverty in Alameda. There are members of St. Joseph parish who are poor. And beyond our nation’s borders, we know that the numbers just get worse.
What does all this mean for us as people of faith? What does it mean if we believe in Sabbath forgiveness? What does it mean if we were to pull out all the stops as Jesus suggests?
With Hurricane Katrina, we’re taking the first step, meeting the immediate needs. Our parish community has contributed an impressive amount—over $20,000—for the victims. As you know, this money is needed badly.
But I hear a different challenge coming from Scripture: How can we break the cycle of poverty? How does God want us to change the system? That’s a question for all of us, and one I don’t have the answer to. If only it was as easy as writing a check and placing it in an envelope.
A good start is to educate ourselves. Who are the poor? What is it like to be poor? What do I have to learn from the poor? We need to hear their stories, and let them change us.
Then we can look at our priorities, as individuals, as a church, and as a country. In the early 1990s, Michigan bishop Ken Untener decreed that for two months, the poor should be the first item on the agenda of every parish and office meeting in his diocese. And the question to be asked was, “How will what we are doing here affect or include the poor?” What would change if each of us did that, before we voted, before we bought something, before we made any major decision?
What would a Jubilee year look like today? What would it look like to the people of New Orleans? What would it take not to build back the way things were,
building back the poverty and unacceptable schools, but to give them their farms back, to let them truly start over.
What would a Jubilee year look like today? The Christian organization Sojourners has started a petition campaign to both support the hurricane victims and
call for a “sweeping change” in government priorities to address the needs of our poorest families and children.
What would a Jubilee year look like today? The worldwide Live 8 concerts this summer put a spotlight on African debt, and called for Western governments
to forgive those debts and to “Make Poverty History”. Maybe this is the $10 billion dollar debt forgiveness in today’s parable.
But what do you think a Jubilee year should look like today? What are you being asked to return to the poor, so that they can have a real second chance? Not just in giving money, but in helping God to change the system Jesus calls for each of us to forgive sins and to forgive debts, to set people free.
Lord God, forgive us this day our debts as we forgive the debts of others.