A Problem of Debt

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Matthew 6:12; 18:10-35; Romans 13:8

I’m going to step out on a limb this morning and address one of the most vexing and crucial questions of the Christian faith: is it “debts ” and “debtors” or “trespasses” and “those who trespass against us” or, more of recent, “sins” and “those who have sinned against us”.  I was once told that a previous minister in the church I served down in Caledon, ON, Claude Presbyterian Church, had a good explanation.  He was Rev. Mills from back in the ‘50’s.  It was July and there was a couple visiting from the nearby Inglewood United Church as they closed for that month while their minister was on vacation.  When it came time to say the Lord’s Prayer, of course the Presbyterians at Claude said “debts” and “debtors” while the couple from the United Church loudly voiced “trespasses” and “those who trespass against us”.  It was noticeable that the United Church couple suddenly felt self-conscious.  So, after the service Rev. Mills decided to set them at ease and went to them and said, “We’re Presbyterians and we’re mostly Scots.  We say ‘debts’ and ‘debtors’ because, frankly, it’s harder for a Scot to forgive a debt than to forgive a trespass.”  Though it makes sense, that is not the reason.

So, briefly, the answer to that question begins with noting that the prayer appears twice in the gospels and the Greek word that gets translated as “trespass” appears in neither.  Matthew says, “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” and Luke says, “forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.”  There’s an easy reason for the difference between “debts” and “sins”.  Jesus spoke a dialect of Hebrew known as Aramaic and in Aramaic the same word means both “a sin” or “a debt”.  So, to translate what Jesus said from Aramaic into Greek, Matthew went with “debts” and Luke chose “sins” to mean a moral fault against God or another person, or even better, the failure to do that which is good for God and for others when you should have and therefore, you are left owing both an apology and restitution for having either failed to do that good or for having done something offensive. 

So, what Jesus most likely meant in this part of the Lord’s Prayer was, “Forgive us for not doing the good that we should have done for which we are now owing apology and restitution as we ourselves have forgiven the apology and restitution that others owe us for not doing good to us when they should have.”  To Jesus this verse of the Lord’s Prayer is deeply rooted in the Jewish concept that God created us to do good to and for one another; yet, for some reason, which we call sin, we both fail to do that good and rather instead of the good, we do selfishly motivated harm to each other and are, thus, left owing the good that we should have done as well as apology and restitution.

Okay, still awake? Let’s ponder how trespasses got in there?  Well, we owe that to a theologian/pastor of the church from the early 3^rd Century, a man named Origen.  He appears to have been the first to have written the Lord’s Prayer in such a way as to be used in the context of public worship.  He simply decided to use the Greek word we translate as trespasses where Matthew used “debts” and Luke used “sins”.  Only Origen knows for sure why he did this.  I would speculate that as Origen was well versed in Paul and Paul used the word for trespasses more frequently than anybody else in the New Testament when talking about sin.  To trespass or a trespass is a wrongful incursion upon the person, property, or rights of another.  Or, with respect to God, it is to try to claim and do for yourself what is God’s domain to claim and do – playing God.    

Interestingly, this Greek word for trespass also means to stumble into the wrong – getting tripped up by a temptation or by something you didn’t see coming to the extent of falling away into a rejection of God and God’s will.  Life goes that way at times - “I was looking at that beautiful woman, tripped on a stone and over the cliff I went only to land at her place and what happened after that I figured was God’s will.”  Paul also used “trespass” in passages considered to be most crucial for his explanation of how we have been forgiven and justified by means of Jesus’ faithful life, death, and resurrection according to God’s grace.  

So…therefore…Origen was probably just trying to create a prayer for congregational worship based on the prayer Jesus gave his disciples and being well versed in Paul, he used Paul’s language.  It also helps Origen’s case that Jesus himself used the word for trespasses in his little ditty that immediately follows the Lord’s Prayer.  Jesus said, “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.”  The whole discussion here can be simplified into saying that the actual act of forgiving is more important than the words we use to describe what we are to forgive.

So, the “debts” wording is more correct biblically, but tradition has passed on to us a prayer for use in worship that is based on Scripture and the full meaning of sin and forgiveness.  So, we ask, “Which should we pray?”  Well, the World Council of Churches in the late 60’s decided to help us out and created a new version, the Ecumenical Lord’s Prayer, which says, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”  That prayer is really all we need for worship’s sake provided that we have been taught and understand what is meant by sin.  In the first place, sin is our estrangement from God that becomes visible in our lives particularly through selfish self-beneficent behavior.  Sin is when we don’t do the good for God and for others that God requires of us as God is the one who has given us life, life which God himself said was very good when he created it and thus having not done it we are left owing.

Personally, I’m Presbyterian.  I choose to go with debts and debtors when I pray this prayer which I try to discipline myself to pray whenever my mind is idle, or worrying, or self-attacking, or unhelpfully monologuing.  I choose the debt imagery because we are debtors who owe a debt of gratitude towards God for our creation and our salvation in Jesus and his continual working in our lives to make us to be more and more in the image of Christ Jesus as individuals and more and more in the image of God’s Triune self as the body of believers.  Moreover, because of that debt to God, we owe each other a debt of love, which is a debt that is always outstanding.

Paul says as much there at Romans 13:8 (ESV), “Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” Or as the NIV says it, “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law.”  Paul is quite clear that we have an outstanding debt of love owed to God, each other, and all peoples that we must be about paying.  Even when we have been wronged against.  This isn’t something that we can be choosy about.  We cannot decide to love one and hate another.  We owe all people a debt of love.  To withhold that love is Sin.  To act upon another in a way that is not love is to trespass against them.  In this sin-sick world, love seems wasteful, to love is a good way to get hurt.  Quite frankly, to love is to bear the cross and so is what it is to forgive.  Amen.

The Bread of the Day

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Matthew 6:11; Isaiah 25:6-10; Revelation 19:6-10: 21:1-7

Being a minister, I get to go to more than my fair share of wedding feasts, except we like to call them receptions these days.  I have to say that I’ve never been disappointed.  They are always joyous and plenty of fun.  The food is the complete opposite of what we read there in Isaiah.  We don’t eat death.  We eat prime rib or some kind of chicken cooked to perfection.  The deserts are to die for.    The festivities, the toasts are always a hoot.  And then there’s the company.  It’s a rare wedding feast that I know the people I’m sitting with.  It’s sink or swim and sometimes like pulling teeth to get people to talk especially when they realize they’re sitting with the minister.  There’s no worse dinner party Hell than having to sit with a minister.  There’s hardly a worse punishment on earth than being seated with a minister.  But I jest.  Even when seated with people I don’t know, we’ve managed to become friends.  

When we sit together at table for a wedding feast, it is not just a party.  It’s a special meal at which we should take a moment to consider what we’re celebrating. Wedding feasts are special because we’re celebrating what is one of the foundational stones of human community – a union of persons and of families, the hope of a life of growing together, children, a celebration of the very goodness that is steadfast love and faithfulness, a celebration of God’s faithfulness.  

Marriage and the wedding feast are also primary biblical images to help us understand the nature of the relationship between Jesus and the Church.  That relationship is like marriage – steadfast love and fidelity through plenty and want, joy and sorrow, sickness and health.  Ephesians 5:21 and following speaking of spouses says: Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.  Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord…. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her…”.  One of Jesus most used metaphors for what the Kingdom of God is like is a wedding and the wedding feast.  As we see in Revelation, when Jesus returns it is for his wedding to the church and there will be a feast – the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.  On that Day, the old Creation, the sin-sick, dying creation ends and the New/renewed Creation begins with a wedding feast.

Moreover, Jesus ate a lot of meals in the course of his ministry and those meals pointed forward to that big, wedding feast coming.  Jesus frequently taught during meals.  Let’s not forget those two times when he fed crowds in excess of 15,000 and 12,000 people with just a few loaves of bread and several fish.  Those two meals pointed towards that big wedding feast when he returns.  In the early church, disciples gathered in homes on Sunday evenings, the Lord’s Day known as the Eighth Day of Creation which meant the first day of the New Creation.  When gathered, they worshipped and shared a meal which included communion and it was in a sense a rehearsal and a partaking of that wedding feast coming.  Early Christians appear to have believed that the meals they shared were a small taste of that future feast breaking into our time nurturing us for that Day coming, the Day of the Lord, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.  It was in a sense, “give us today our bread of The Day” (capital D).

…and that, my friends, is how I and many other students of the Scriptures believe that we should translate Matthew 6:11 as opposed to: “Give us today our daily bread.”  The Lord’s Prayer we’ve learned to pray is a Middle Ages adaptation of it that turns it into just a daily prayer as opposed to the prayer Jesus gave to his disciple to pray in longing for the end to come, for Jesus to come, and put things right.  We’ve learned it as a daily prayer as opposed to a prayer focused on the kingdom of God coming to earth, breaking into our reality from the future.  I don’t know if that makes any sense.  We’re not just praying here, “Lord, give me the food and the things that I need for today.”  We’re praying for God to give us the bread of the meal of the Marriage Feast of the Lamb.  

The word we translate as “daily” is tricky.  In fact, we don’t really know for sure what it means because the only known use of it is from Jesus’ mouth here in the Lord’s Prayer as if he coined it.  The word is “epiousios”.  Epi means across or over or above.  Ousios means substance or being.  We could make it mean daily bread, but in essence it’s more like “Give us the bread that’s of the above stuff that’s from across, over there.”  It’s more like “feed us the real bread”.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus gave a very long discourse just after he fed the crowd of 5,000 men which would likely have been more that 15,000 if we included women and children.  The subject of the talk was the bread of heaven.  A bit of the discussion included talk about “manna”, the stuff that God daily fed the Israelites with during their wilderness wandering.  But Jesus takes it one step further and calls himself the “Bread of Life” and explains that following him in relationship to him filled with the Holy Spirit is true life that will last to eternity.  Jesus is the daily bread, the bread of the Day, the bread that’s of the above stuff from across, over there.  In him together we are at the feast.

I heard a woman recently talking about the breadsticks they served at the chain of restaurants called The Olive Garden.  The Olive Garden was famous for their breadsticks.  At the beginning of the meal, they brought you a basket of breadsticks which you ate while you looked over the menu and ordered your dinner.  The menus had pictures and everything just looked mouth-watering good and you ordered and you just couldn’t wait to get your meal.  But those breadsticks…those breadsticks were just so amazingly good.  You can’t stop yourself from eating them.  Soon, you don’t want your food anymore because the breadsticks were a good enough meal.  You wish you hadn’t ordered anything because the breadsticks are amazingly more than enough.  Then, the food arrives but you don’t want it yet you try to eat it anyway all the while eating more breadsticks and you wind up miserable because you should have just let the breadsticks be enough.

Jesus, the bread of life, is like those breadsticks.  Once you’ve had a taste of him, the peacefulness of his presence, the rest, his faithfulness towards you, his working in your life to strengthen and heal you, when he speaks words of assurance to you – Don’t be afraid. I am with you.  When you get a hold of Jesus and he gets a hold of you, you don’t want the flashy, overpriced stuff from the menu of life that you ordered thinking it would satisfy you and make you happy.  You just want him; to spend time with him in prayer, studying Scriptures and listening for a word from him.  You just want to share the love that he's made you feel by his faithfulness to you. 

Jesus himself is the bread we are praying for in the Lord’s Prayer.  He is daily at all times with us.  He is the life from above, across, over there, life filled with the Presence of God.  Sitting here at the table of life Jesus is all we need.  When we pray, “Give us today our daily bread” be mindful that it is Jesus that we are praying for.  We aren’t just praying for the food and stuff that we need for daily existence.  We are asking to be filled with Jesus, with the Holy Spirit, the life that comes to us from the future healing of all things.  Amen.

A Down to Earth Faith

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Matthew 6:9-10; Revelation 21:1-22:5

Whenever I read this passage from Revelation about the New Jerusalem coming from Heaven to Earth I immediately think of an old Carter family tune called “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room”.  If you will tolerate me, I’ll sing it for you.  So:

Twelve-hundred miles, it's length and breadth that four-square city stands.

It's gem-set walls of jasper shine, not made by human hands.

One-hundred miles, it's gates are wide; abundant entrance there;

With fifty miles of elbow room on either side to spare.

 

Oh, the gates swing wide on the other side, just beyond the sunset sea.

There'll be room to spare as we enter there; there'll be room for you, room for me.

Oh, the gates are wide on the other side where the fairest flowers bloom;

On the right hand and on the left hand, fifty miles of elbow room.

 

Sometimes I'm cramped and I'm crowded here and I long for elbow room.

I long to reach for altitude where the fairest flowers bloom.

It won't be long before I pass into that city fair

With fifty miles of elbow room on either side to spare.

 

Oh, the gates swing wide on the other side, just beyond the sunset sea.

There'll be room to spare as we enter there; there'll be room for you, room for me.

Oh, the gates are wide on the other side where the fairest flowers bloom;

On the right hand and on the left hand, fifty miles of elbow room.

 

I like that old song, but like so many songs in that Old Time Gospel genre it emphasizes our going to Heaven when we die to the extent that we have nearly lost any idea of the foundational Biblical belief that the movement of salvation is actually the other way – from Heaven to Earth.  Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.  Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.”  He did not teach us to pray, “God get us out of this sin-ridden mess so that our souls can spend eternity in spiritual bliss in a place called heaven.”  

The Christian belief about what happens when we die is not the hub of the wheel of the Christian faith.  How to go to Heaven rather than to Hell when we die is not the Gospel message we find in the Bible.  Jesus preached the Gospel that “the Kingdom of God is at hand, turn around and follow.”  The early church proclaimed “Jesus died for our sins.  God raised him from the dead.  He’s coming back.  Until then, come be filled with the Holy Spirit and follow him with us.”  What we find with respect to what happens to us if we die before he comes back is that if we die before Jesus returns, we will be with him in someplace called Paradise in a state that is somehow disembodied until at a time known only to the Father, Jesus will return, Creation will be made new, and we will be bodily resurrected to live in it.

So, what of heaven then?  We’ve been culturally traditioned from Christianity of the Middle Ages with images of pearly gates, sitting on clouds playing harp, getting angel’s wings, and some other pretty bizarre stuff we think the Bible teaches but it doesn’t.  Biblically speaking, heaven is a behind the scenes reality and not a far away, way up there thing.  Heaven and earth overlap.  If you imagined our reality as happening on a movie screen, heaven would be like stepping out of the movie into the movie theatre.  Heaven is veiled to earth.  We can’t see it.  It has to be opened to us or we have to be taken there in a vision in the spirit by the Holy Spirit.  God the Father is visible in heaven as a really spectacular light show seated on a throne.  Jesus, God the Son, is visible there with a body along with angels and other living creatures.  In heaven, what God is up to can be known while here on earth that information is relatively hidden and so often realized in hindsight. In Heaven there is worship.  On Earth, when we worship both privately or publicly or on our own or together it is a participation in the events of heaven.  So also, it is with prayer.  God has a plan, a will for how he wants history to go that will play out on earth and somehow God’s will includes room for human free will and choice.  The only thing we can say is that in the end, it will be on earth as it is in heaven; God’s presence will be visible here as in heaven and the creation will be filled with worship, and no more sin and death and suffering and evil.

John’s vision here gives us a glimpse of that end.  It is New Creation, a new Heaven and a new Earth, where Heaven and Earth are open to one another rather than Heaven being veiled to Earth; and of the New Jerusalem coming from Heaven to Earth.   For me, when I first caught a glimpse of that, it was a game changer about what the Christian faith is ultimately about.  The Christian Faith is a down to Earth faith not a get me out of here escapist faith.  This Creation and what we do in it does and always will matter.

The New Jerusalem in this vision is a symbol.  It means something.  Jerusalem in the Old Testament is the city, the place on Earth where God chose to dwell, to dwell in his Temple.  The Temple in Jerusalem was the one place on Earth where the overlapping of Heaven and Earth was most transparent.  When Jesus came, he became the Temple, the place on Earth where God lived.  Now, as we are the Body of Christ indwelt by the Holy Spirit, this extends to us.  We, the Body and Bride of Christ, are now the place on Earth where God lives.  We are the place where the overlapping of Heaven and Earth is most transparent.  

Therefore, in our passage today what we are to understand the New Jerusalem to be is us, the Christian church as it is in heaven and which is coming to be on earth.  The New Jerusalem is what we are at heart as the church, the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ.  It is humanity, humans, you and me in community and God the Father Son and Holy Spirit in whom “we live and move and have our being” is in our midst.  

The New Jerusalem is Holy Spirit-filled human community.  It is human community in which the image of the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is growing like fruit on the branches of the Tree of Life.  Because the Holy Spirit is with and in us we are living in the presence of the communion of the Trinity and thriving on it.

In the world of the early church Christians had to gather in secret at night.  They were not safe in the cities in which they lived.  Yet, when they gathered for worship the light of the glory of God was with them and in the New Jerusalem, they were safe.  Darkness was no more.  In the early church they had to meet behind closed doors, but in the New Jerusalem the gates are always open.  The Holy Spirit-filled worship behind those closed doors then, as it is today for us, is the New Jerusalem breaking through from heaven coming to earth.  When we gather for worship the breaking through of the New Jerusalem is what’s going on.  We do not have an escape to Heaven faith.  We have a heaven down to earth faith, a heaven opening to earth.  

The Christian faith is a down to earth faith.  In the past, the church has tended to stress living the faithful life now so that we can go to Heaven when we die.  But that is not the image that John is giving us with the New Jerusalem.  The New Jerusalem follows a “from heaven down to earth” trajectory.  The loving, worship-filled community of disciples created here by the Holy Spirit’s work in and among us is the New Jerusalem imaged in John’s vision.  Our efforts to love one another as Jesus has commanded us are the fruit and the leaves on the Tree of Life that is for the healing of the nations.  The New Jerusalem is here.  It is coming.  And it will come to its fruition on the day when all things are made new.  Living faithfully now is part of the New Jerusalem coming.

I feel as if I’m blubbering a bit here in trying to describe meaning of this image of the coming of the New Jerusalem.  So maybe I should just finish.  The New Jerusalem shows us what the church at heart is and ought to be and what humanity will one day become.  The church is humanity indwelt by God and thus is and ought to be a community that is safe and secure for all peoples, a community whose doors and gates do not exclude people.  A River of Life flows forth from us.  The Tree of Life grows among us.  The Trinity has called us, chosen us, and paid the price of the blood of Jesus to buy us back from the sick futility of sin and death so that we might be a people set about on the work of healing the nations through prayer and challenging people to forgive and to risk being wastefully compassionate by the way we forgive and are wastefully compassionate.  We are part of God’s work of bringing his kingdom and will from heaven down to earth.  Amen.