Paying Our Debt

Paying Our Debt

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

June 18, 2017

Scripture: Genesis 18:1-15; Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

If you’re like me, and I suspect that in this respect many of you are, you have debts you have to pay. Financial debts, I mean. Mortgage payments or rent are common ones. Credit card bills are another—that’s a significant one for Jane and me at the moment. Maybe car payments. Utility bills. Maybe for some of you still student loan debt. Medical bills. Those can cause lots of problems for many people. There are all kinds of monetary debts that are just part of our lives in this world we live in.

So just what precisely is a debt? Well, to have debt is to have an obligation to someone that you have to meet. In the case of all those monetary debts I mentioned we have purchased something, or are purchasing something. Someone has either given us what we’re purchasing in expectation that we will pay for it, like a utility bill. Or someone has let us money to buy something—a house, a car, or something else—and we are obligated to pay that money back, almost always with interest. To have a debt is to owe something to somebody.

There are of course debts other than monetary debts. I’ll speak for myself here. I owe nonmonetary debts to all the people in my life who have loved me—my parents first of all, then my late first wife, my wife Jane, my children. I owe a nonmonetary debt to all of the people who have taught me in my life—my public school teachers, college professors, especially my main Ph.D. advisor and the professors I had in seminary. People who have mentored me, especially the late Rev. Dr. Dennis Hughes. Those are debts I can never repay. Mostly what I owe these people is gratitude. Respect too. They have made me who I am, for better or for worse. The debt I owe them isn’t a legal obligation like the obligation to repay a loan or pay for services rendered, but I feel it as a moral obligation even though it’s not a legal one. So there are different kinds of debts with different kinds of obligations that flow from them.

The Psalmist of Psalm 116 that we heard this morning speaks of a debt too. He starts his psalm saying “I love the Lord, for he has heard my voice.” He says “Because he turned his ear to me, I will call on him as long as I live.” He doesn’t refer explicitly to debt and repayment in these opening verses, but in verse 12 he does. He says: “How can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me?” He is feeling a moral obligation to do something in response to God’s goodness. He doesn’t say that God requires anything from him before doing good for him; but God has done good for him, and he is feeling the need to repay what he experiences as a moral obligation.

That I think is how debts work in the dynamics of grace and salvation. Ancient Israel knew its God as good. There is a phrase that recurs in the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms though not exclusively there, that expresses this belief. Psalm 118, for example, begins with it. It says: “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever.” Israel felt a moral obligation to respond to God’s goodness to them, both individually and as a nation.

That’s one of the main ways ancient Israel understood God’s grace, not that they had to do anything to earn it (although that voice is in the Old Testament too) but that they had an obligation to respond to God’s grace. Look, for example, at how the book of Exodus is constructed. It begins with the god of the Hebrews seeing their suffering in Egypt, and that god vows to free them from that suffering. God doesn’t do that because the Hebrew people are particularly good. It’s not because they have obeyed God’s law. In fact, when the book of Exodus opens God has given them only one law, the law of male circumcision. So God isn’t acting here because the people have obeyed some divine command. God acts because the people need God to act. It’s only after God has freed them from captivity in Egypt that God gives the law at Mt. Sinai. God didn’t demand something from the people before God acted to free them, God just asks that they respond in a certain way after God has freed them from Egyptian captivity. Our Psalmist this morning seems to understand matters the same way. He doesn’t say God required anything of him before helping him, but he nonetheless feels that somehow he has to repay God’s goodness to him.

Folks, that’s how it is with God’s grace for us too. I know that many if not all of us were taught something different about God’s grace. We were taught perhaps that we have to live a certain way to get it. That usually meant avoid certain behaviors that were defined as sins. Most Protestants have been taught that they have to believe the right things in order to stand in God’s grace. People can cite biblical passages that seem to assert that understanding, but I understand verses that suggest we have earn God’s grace to mean that if we have faith in Christ we will reap the benefits of a salvation that God has already given us in Jesus Christ, not that we have to believe first in order to be saved as a consequence of our belief. Grace comes first, any obligation we have toward God comes in response to grace, not as a precondition of it.

The Psalmist of Psalm 116 felt he had to repay God. He felt he had a debt to God. Well folks, I feel we have a debt to God too; but it’s not a legal debt. It is a moral debt. It is a debt of gratitude and thanksgiving. It is a debt of love given for love received. It is an obligation I create for myself, not one God creates for me. Saint Paul speaks of it when he says things like “How can you who have been forgiven keep on sinning?” In this way of thinking our seeking to avoid sin is a response to God’s forgiveness, not something that earns us God’s forgiveness.

So God’s grace in which we all stand is free and unmerited, but it has consequences. It creates a moral obligation on us to respond to God’s grace with lives filled with grace. It calls us to respond to God’s love with lives of love. It calls us to respond to God’s love for us with lives filled with love for all God’s people without exception. This obligation is not legal, it is moral. Failing to repay it doesn’t remove God’s grace, but failing to repay it can result in us not living into the fruits of God’s grace. Sure. We can get selfish. We can say well, God loves me anyway, so why shouldn’t I go out and do any old thing I want? We can say that. Saying it and acting on it won’t make God very happy, but we can do it.

If we do, or if we do nothing in response to God’s grace, we treat God’s grace as what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” Cheap grace is grace that doesn’t cost anything. Bonhoeffer said God’s grace isn’t cheap in part because it cost a man, Jesus, his life. But God’s grace is not cheap for the additional reason that it costs us something too. If we really understand it, it costs us our lives. Not literally like it cost Jesus, but still. If we really understand God’s grace we will know that we must do something in return. We must do no less than devote our lives to the service of the one in whose grace we stand.

So let’s pay our debt to God, shall we? Not because we’re damned if we don’t but because we know that we have received the greatest gift God can give or that any human can receive, the gift of God’s grace. God’s grace is free in the sense that God gives it freely, but it is expensive in the sense that it calls us to turn our lives around. It calls us to live lives as free from sin as we can make them. It calls us to the spiritual life, the life of prayer and worship, the life of contemplation and discernment. The life that values the spiritual over the material. Beyond that, it calls us to serve God’s world and God’s people the way God serves them and us, or at least as fully that way as we can. It calls us to lives committed to peace. It calls us to lives committed to caring for all who are in need, or at least as many as we can. It calls us to lives committed to working for justice for all people, for the end of systems that institutionalize injustice—and there are more of them than we know.

So let’s pay our debt to God, shall we? Let’s do all we can to be more faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. Not because we have to do that to save our souls but because we know what God has done for us in and through him. Let’s live deeply into our Christian faith, learn what it can teach us about lives lived in response to grace. Let’s truly live lives of gratitude to our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, to the triune God whom we worship and adore. It’s not that we’re damned if we don’t. Rather, not to live in deep gratitude for God’s grace means we haven’t understood God’s grace at all. In grace we stand. Every one of us. Let’s respond a best we can as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Who Are We?

Who Are We?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

June 11, 2017

Scripture: Genesis 1:26-31; Psalm 8

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

When I was in seminary one of the basic, introductory courses for all students was a class taught by Father Mike Rashko, a brilliant teacher and theologian who could also be very pastoral. The class was called “Christian Anthropology.” When I saw that Christian Anthropology was one of the first classes I would be taking I was puzzled. Christian anthropology? Really? What’s that? What’s Christian about anthropology? Isn’t anthropology the study ancient humanoid ancestors of modern humans? What does that have to do with Christianity? Well, it turns out that while we do use the word anthropology for the study of human evolution the word actually has a different, broader meaning. It means the study of what it is to be human. Which still leaves the question: What does that have to do with Christianity? Turns out it actually has a great deal to do with Christianity, or any other faith tradition for that matter. Father Mike’s class turned out to be about the basic questions of the human condition and our relationship to God.

Human thinkers have asserted many different understandings of the human condition and the relationship of God to creation in general and humanity in particular. One foundational question is whether we humans are basically good or basically evil. It is easy enough to conclude that we humans really don’t amount to much. We are so often weak, fearful, and violent. We so easily get injured. It is so easy to kill us whether the agent of death be an invisible microbe, misbehaving cells, or a nuclear bomb. We so often live in fear, fear of our neighbor, of disease, of suffering and death, of the one who is different from us in some significant—or even some insignificant—way. We fear a national enemy, so we build the most powerful military force the world has ever known with the capacity to wipe out all life on earth several times over. We fear personal enemies, so we arm ourselves to the teeth and tolerate an immense amount of gun violence because we convince ourselves that guns make us safer, not less safe. Thinking that all of that and so much more negative things about us is who we really are is easy enough to do and is one way that thinkers have portrayed us humans over the centuries.

Yet there’s another way of understanding us humans too. We humans are at the same time incredibly weak and incredibly strong. We live through ordeals and losses that ought to destroy us but don’t. We live through times of hell and come out scarred but not broken. We are fearful, but we are also amazingly brave. We face losses and hardships in our lives with a courageous will that refuses to let those things have the last word. We sacrifice our lives to stop a deranged man from harassing two young Muslim women on a commuter train. Military people in combat risk and sacrifice their lives to save their comrades. We’ve all heard those stories. Some of you may have witnessed them, or even done them yourselves. We can be and often are violent, but we are also people committed to peace and the peaceful resolution of disputes. We create systems of oppression, but we also stand and struggle for justice. It is perfectly possible to view us humans as either irreparably flawed or as wondrously capable, or both.

We can see our relationship with God in different ways too. Some people believe that God is simply irrelevant. We are autonomous creatures, they say. We can do it on our own, they say. Other people believe the exact opposite. They say we are utterly dependent on God for everything. They say we can do absolutely nothing without God. So faced with these conflicting opinions about who we humans are, about how God created us, what are we to do? Well, whenever we Christians are faced with a question like that we tend to turn to Bible to find an answer; and while we don’t always find an answer there, or sometimes we find more than one answer there, turning to the Bible is usually a good thing to do. And it turns out that the two passages we just heard from the lectionary readings for today say a lot about who we are and who God created us to be.

We’ll start with the passage from Genesis. It says that God created us, both women and men, in God’s own image and likeness and essentially made us God’s stewards over the earth and the living things upon it. Trust me, there are libraries full of efforts that theologians have made over the centuries to understand what the image and likeness of God means and what this text means when it directs us to rule over the earth and to “subdue” it. I won’t go into all that this morning, not that I necessarily could if I wanted to without doing a lot of research. Suffice it to say that we are created in some way like gods. I take that to mean that God trusts us. Our passage says that God’s actions in creating us was good. That means, I think, that we are created more good than evil, not that you can always tell that from the way we humans act.

Psalm 8 sheds some more light on how God created us. It asks what we humans can possibly amount to compared to the majesty of God and the glory of God’s creation. It’s a legitimate question. After all, none of us could have done what God did in creating all that is. We couldn’t do it as individuals. All of us couldn’t even begin to do it together. Yet Psalm 8 then proclaims what the theologians call a very high anthropology. There’s that word anthropology that I started this sermon with again. It says that God created us “a little lower than the heavenly beings” and crowned us with “glory and honor.” It says God made us “ruler” over all of the works of God’s hands and put everything “under [our] feet.” Wow! Psalm 8 picks up the high anthropology of Genesis 1 and raises it even higher. It says we are practically angels, or even gods, there being some real confusion about what the Hebrew word translated here as “heavenly beings” means. In both Genesis 1 and Psalm 8 we are created very nearly as gods. It sure can be hard to see us humans that way, or at least it can be for me. Yet these two powerful pieces of poetry from the Bible say that that’s how it is, that that’s how we are. So let’s take is as given that that’s how we’re created and see what it might mean about how we are to relate to God and to our lives.

With regard to how we are to relate to God it means first of all that we are free, autonomous beings. We are not the slaves of God the way people were portrayed in the Babylonian creation story that Genesis 1 was written to refute. We are nearly divine, and we have control over the earth. We have control over own lives, which surely is part of what being made in the image and likeness of God means. We relate to God not as slaves, not as indentured servants with no free will, but as God’s supreme creation. We aren’t God, and we aren’t gods; but we needn’t grovel before God. God created us as God’s partners in the work of creation. We need to take our role as God’s partners seriously.

God gave us autonomy over our own lives. We have free will. We have the right and the responsibility to make our own decisions in life. God’s doesn’t control us. God doesn’t dictate to us, but neither does God abandon us or leave us entirely to our own devices. Perhaps we like to read Psalm 8’s “You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings” as meaning that we no longer need God. Well, of course we know that that isn’t true. Maybe we focus on the phrase “heavenly beings,” but that verse also has the word “lower.” We are autonomous. We have free will, but because we are neither God nor truly gods we never lose our need for God.

The great good news of the Christian faith (and of other faiths for that matter) is that while we truly need God, God knows that we need God and is always there with us in everything that comes our way in life. God created us as good, not perfect. God created us to live our autonomous lives with God not separate from God. I think all that means that God calls us to make our own decisions. To discern our own paths in life. But God never leaves us to do those things alone. God knows our needs. God knows we need so often to turn to God for help, for direction, for comfort, for strength and courage as we struggle with life’s difficulties. Yes, God created us little lower than the angels, but we’re still not even angels much less gods; and God know it. God knows it and is always there to help us get through whatever we must get through in life. God is there when things go wrong. God is there when we struggle, when we are afraid, when we’re hurt. God is even there when we die to hold us in unfailing arms of love and see us through to the other side.

So who are we? We are God’s beloved men and women. We are God’s agents in the work of creation on earth. We are God’s stewards on earth, charged with protecting and preserving God’s good creation. We are strong, and we are weak. We are independent, and we are utterly dependent on God’s grace. We are free to go our own way, yet fullness of life lies with us going God’s way not our own. We can do great things. We can solve our problems. We can recreate the world, and can do that only with God’s help and inspiration. We can get through, and we need God to help us get through. That’s who I think we are. We have the gifts we need to take on challenges in our personal lives, the life of our nation, the life of the world, the life of our church. We have the gifts, and we need God’s help to bring them alive in our lives and in the world. The great mercy we have is that God is always there to do that for us and with us. Thanks be to God. Amen.