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.