Borrowing and Lending

Preached at Hanover Street Presbyterian Church

On October 16, 2005

By the Rev. Thomas C. Davis, III

Texts:

Exodus 32: 1-14

When the people saw that Moses delayed in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said to him, "Come, make us a god who will go before us because this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt-we don't know what has happened to him!"  Then Aaron replied to them, "Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters and bring [them] to me."  So all the people took off the gold rings that were on their ears and brought [them] to Aaron.  He took [the gold] from their hands, fashioned it with an engraving tool, and made it into an image of a calf.  Then they said, "Israel, this is your God, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!"  When Aaron saw [this], he built an altar before it; then he made an announcement: "There will be a festival to the Lord tomorrow."  Early the next morning they arose, offered burnt offerings, and presented fellowship offerings.  The people sat down to eat and drink, then got up to revel.  The Lord spoke to Moses: "Go down at once!  For your people you brought up from the land of Egypt have acted corruptly.  They have quickly turned from the way I commanded them; they have made for themselves an image of a calf.  They have bowed down to it, sacrificed to it, and said, 'Israel, this is your God, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.  ' "The Lord also said to Moses: "I have seen this people, and they are indeed a stiff-necked people.  Now leave me alone, so that my anger can burn against them and I can destroy them.  Then I will make you into a great nation."  But Moses interceded with the Lord his God: "Lord, why does Your anger burn against Your people You brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and a strong hand?  Why should the Egyptians say, 'He brought them out with an evil intent to kill them in the mountains and wipe them off the face of the earth'?  Turn from Your great anger and change Your mind about this disaster [planned] for Your people.  Remember that You swore to Your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Israel by Yourself and declared to them, 'I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky and will give your offspring all this land that I have promised, and they will inherit [it] forever.  ' "So the Lord changed His mind about the disaster He said He would bring on His people.

Luke 6: 32-36

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?  Even sinners love those who love them.  If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?  Even sinners do that.  And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you?  Even sinners lend to sinners to be repaid in full.  But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.  Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High.  For He is gracious to the ungrateful and evil.  Be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful.

Mark 6: 7-12

He summoned the Twelve and began to send them out in pairs, and gave them authority over unclean spirits.  He instructed them to take nothing for the road except a walking stick: no bread, no backpack, no money in their belts, but to wear sandals, and not to put on an extra shirt.  Then He said to them, "Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that place.  Whatever place will not welcome you, and people refuse to listen to you, when you leave there, shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them."

Sermon Text

This sermon was prompted by a neighborhood ritual, a ritual about borrowing and lending.  If you're on the Jefferson Street side of the church in the morning, and you see me walking up the hill from downtown, and you hear one of our neighbors from across the street holler:  "Rev, I'll have your money on Wednesday," I don't want you to think I'm running a numbers business!  I've just been lending her some pocket money, that's all.  The neighbor is reassuring me that her debt will be repaid.  She borrows three dollars at a time, for cigarettes.  I lent to her the first time without thinking much of it, just being neighborly.  After she repaid me, I thought that that would be the end of it.  But no, within a week or so, she was asking for another loan, again of three dollars, for cigarettes.  Well, I was raised to think of borrowing as a very last resort, you see, something one should almost be ashamed of.  If you wanted something, you were supposed to save up for it, and do without until you had enough.  So, I wondered with some annoyance:  Why can't she just save those three dollars instead of asking me for them?  If she has the self-discipline to pay me back, why can't she apply that self-discipline on the front end, and avoid borrowing?  If she had not paid me back the second time, I certainly would have stopped this neighborly ritual.  But she did pay me back.  And when she did, I noted that she repaid with pride:  "See," she said, "don't I pay back?  I always do!"  I discovered that she has work, and probably could buy cigarettes without borrowing, but she still borrows.  This to me was most curious.  I gathered that borrowing doesn't make her ashamed because she can't see to her own needs.  Rather, the ritual of borrowing helps her to feel worthy, for when she repays a loan she demonstrates that she is a person to be trusted, and yes, even admired.  I was coming to realize that borrowing to her is not at all like borrowing to me.  Borrowing to her is a transaction between neighbors that establishes a bond of good will and trust in a relationship marked by generosity and gratefulness.  Borrowing to me represents an admission of weakness, my inability to be completely self-reliant.  I have come to realize through this ritual of borrowing and lending that my attitudes about people are influenced by the ways I think about money and property, and that these attitudes run so deep in me that they almost never emerge into the sunlight of my consciousness.  When they do, they almost always make me ashamed.

That happened once in Vietnam.  I was cleaning my rifle one afternoon when I heard three shots and screaming.  My Vietnamese counterpart came running into my cabin, enraged.  "What is it," Dai Uy, "what's the matter?"  I asked.  "Your man, he say my sailor steal radio.  So he shoot.  What kind of man shoot another for stealing radio?  We never do that!  Life more important than property!"

"Life more important than property!"  Isn't that along the lines of what Jesus taught: that we shouldn't keep building bigger barns for our stuff, that we shouldn't be anxious about material things--what we will eat or wear--because God will provide for our needs?  Do you remember what Jesus said about borrowing and lending?  He said, "If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you?"  Wow, that's hard for me to get my mind around.  You too?  Jesus, I'm glad you're not my banker!  Isn't lending all about return? 

Well, no, not in the Bible it isn't.  The Hebrews forbad lending at interest, you know.  Lending was for neighborliness, not business.  Lending was an expression of compassion, a way of passing along one's thanks for God's blessings.  So, if your neighbor failed to pay you back, what were you to do?  Shoot him?  Clap him in prison?  No!  Forgive him, taught Jesus.  Forgive him his debt.  My Vietnamese friend understood that:  "Aren't people more important than property?" he asked, indignantly. 

Most Christians would say yes, of course they are.  But I find it very ironic that the prevailing English version of the Lord's Prayer couches the phrase about forgiveness in language most familiar to propertied creditors rather than poor debtors.  Most English speaking Christians these days pray, "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," instead of "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors."  "Debts" is a more literal translation of the Greek word, opheilemata, used in the prayer.  But isn't it interesting that the metaphorical translation enjoys much wider use among us!  What could explain our culture's preference for the metaphorical translation?  Well, who gets most upset by trespassing?  People with property to trespass upon, obviously.  Cultural historians tell us, however, that most of the people to whom Jesus preached had little or no property.  They were dirt poor and up to their ears in debt, because wealth in their ancient economy was amassed by landed gentry squeezing the peasants dry.  So, the greatest mercy one could show in that society was to forgive debts, real debts, material debts, not metaphorical ones.  Jesus was speaking quite plainly where he said, "If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you?" (meaning moral credit).  It is hard for us to hear this very practical moral wisdom of Jesus with bourgeois ears, let alone aristocratic ones.  Jesus said that it's harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.  He understood well how wealth possesses people, instead of the other way around.

When Alice and I lived in Durham, North Carolina, she served for a time as a lay urban minister.  Working on behalf of a downtown coalition of churches, she saw to the daily needs of people like that majority in ancient Israel to whom I just referred: the working poor, the dispossessed, and those who never had much in the first place.  She got to know them pretty well, and what she observed in them surprised her.  She said to me one day, "You know, the ways of people concerning money are counter-intuitive.  You would think that people with a lot would be the most generous.  But it isn't so.  It's the other way around.  People who can't make next month's rent are the most likely to shelter a stranger.  People whose cupboards are nearly bare are the ones who gladly set another place at their table.  Why is that, we both wondered.  Is it because, having so little, their gifts seem not much of a sacrifice?  Or, is it because they have been on the receiving end of charity more than once themselves, and know what it feels like to be abandoned and forgotten instead of cared for?  I can't explain their motivation.  I can only marvel at the generosity of many poor people.  Yes, have-nots are quicker to borrow than haves, but they are also quick to lend, not for profit, but camaraderie.

 Pelonius, the old fool in Shakespeare's play, "Hamlet", said:  "Neither a borrower nor a lender be;" because, he went on to explain, if your loan isn't paid back, then you lose both your money and the friend to whom you loaned it.  Ah, but the apparent wisdom of that advice is based upon the assumption that what counts most in this world is holding on to money, not friends.  Another way of putting that assumption is that property is more important than people.  If we don't make that assumption, if we believe instead that people are more important than property, then we are free to lend, as Jesus urges us to do, not caring whether we get paid back or not, not worrying that a bad debt will inevitably mean a ruined friendship.

I will close with an observation about one of the blessings, the beatitudes, which begin the collection of Jesus' teachings known as the "Sermon on the Mount."  Jesus says in the fifth chapter of Matthew's Gospel:  "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."  Luke doesn't put the teaching that way.  He writes instead:  "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God."  It's easier for most people to accept Matthew's version, for how could poor people, materially poor people, possibly be living in the kingdom of God?  Isn't poverty appalling?  Isn't it dehumanizing and debilitating?  Was Jesus playing around, making some kind of joke when he said, "Blessed are the poor"--not the poor in spirit as Matthew writes-- but the poor, period? 

Well, now that I'm coming to the end of this sermon, I don't think Luke's Jesus was kidding.  And I think Matthew was slip sliding away from something Jesus of Nazareth was trying very passionately to get across to his countrymen, something so counter-intuitive to the way affluent people see the world that they can't believe in it and live by it:  namely, the conviction that people are more important than property.  The poor know that in their guts more than affluent people do.  That's why the poor are better disposed to live in a world where God is in charge, (God's kingdom), where people are more important than property. 

Last week I was listening to the radio and heard a Washington D.C. doctor who runs a clinic for the poor there.  He was talking about the hard life in the ghetto, how it wears people down.  But, he mentioned with wonder the case of an enterprising young woman who was caring for the sick, and earning some money that way.  She is clever, and thrifty.  She eventually made her way through nursing school, he reported, and could have escaped the poverty all around her, moved right on up the social ladder.  But she didn't, because when she got more income, she lent it, or even gave it away to her neighbors, as poor as she once was.  My first thought was:  You foolish woman!  Get out!  Make something of yourself!  Save yourself!  My second thought-- one that does not come easily to me-- was this:  In worldly terms she indeed appears foolish.  But she is spiritually very rich.  She is a wise person, a truly blessed one, for she isn't imprisoned in that ghetto.  She is living on her own accord in God's wide, wide neighborhood, where it's not a shameful thing to borrow, nor a foolish thing to lend, since you don't ultimately care whether you get paid back or not.  Blessed are the poor.  Yep, Luke got it right.