Cancelling Debts

Matthew 18:23-35

One of the great things about FairTrade is that it is something that we can do NOW that we know will make a difference.

Often when we face the big issues in our world we feel helpless, because we think, “What difference can I make?” But with FairTrade we know that each of us can make a difference.

However, FairTrade is not the whole solution. In fact there are two other aspects of the MAKE POVERTY HISTORY campaign that will have a much bigger impact than FairTrade.

The first is Trade Justice, (which is about changing international trading laws so that they don’t discriminate against poorer countries).

The second is about cancelling some of the debts of third-world counties.

Unfortunately, both these things can only be done by governments, …and so our only hope is to lobby MPs. But the potential benefit to poorer counties is enormous.

We looked at Trade Justice at our Worship Plus service on Tuesday, (and those of you who are doing the Lent Course can read about it in the notes).

And this morning we are thinking about Cancelling Debts.

Perhaps this is the more controversial idea. On the face of it, there appears to be something unfair about the idea of cancelling debts.

If I were to give you a gift of £100 it would be yours to keep, and I wouldn’t expect you to pay me back.

However, if I were to lend you £100 then I would expect you to pay me back, and I might be rather put out if you didn’t.

We might agree that you will pay me back £10 a week for the next 12 weeks. Now that means you end up paying me back £120, …but if that is our agreement, should you not honour it?

And if you were only to pay me back £50, and then you say that you want me to cancel the debt, …well. I’d have grounds for complaining that you weren’t being very fair.

(pause)

But what if there were some special circumstances?

Imagine that you’re a poor farmer in a third-world country. Your child is seriously ill, and you need £100 for life-saving treatment. You have every intention of paying me back, but after paying back just £50 you lose your job. You now have hardly any income, and you have to choose between paying back the loan or feeding your children. What would you do?

Or imagine that it was a loan shark who had lent you the money. They had started off saying that you could pay back £10 a week for 12 weeks, but then said that you had to pay £20 a week for 20 weeks, (which means that you have to pay back £400 !) Furthermore, they send round some thugs to make sure you pay. But you can’t afford £20 a week. What would you do?

Or imagine it was a con man who had lent you the loan. He had told you about this wonderful scheme that would earn you hundreds of pounds, and if you invest your £100 in this scheme you will earn more than enough money to pay back your loan, …and have lots of extra cash too. But as soon as you invest the £100 you borrowed, the scheme collapses. You lose your £100 and have no means of repaying the loan. What would you do?

You see there are special circumstances when the right thing to do would be to cancel the debt.

And it’s the same with international debt. Many poorer countries are heavily in debt to the richer countries.

• Sometimes they’ve got into that situation through no fault of their own, but simply because they’ve been struck by one disaster after another.

• Sometimes they’ve got into that situation because the richer countries have behaved more like loan sharks, rather than responsible bankers.

• Sometimes they’ve got into that situation because they’ve been conned. They’ve been sold a dream that collapsed.

When poor countries simply cannot afford to repay their debt, surely the right thing to do is to cancel it.

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When we talk about cancelling international debts it sounds rather abstract. But, of course, it has a huge impact on the lives of individual people.

This is George Ibanda. George is 12 years old and he goes to Butansi Primary School in Uganda.

He is wearing his school uniform and carrying text books is directly connected to the campaign to cancel the unpayable debts of poor countries. Uganda was the first country to benefit from debt cancellation. The Poverty Action Fund in Uganda was set up with the money that Uganda is now able to use to pay for education, healthcare and building roads and wells, instead of debt. Because primary schooling is now free, millions of children like George can receive an education that their families could not previously have

afforded.

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Two weeks ago I compared the world to beautiful garden that had become massively overgrown with the thorns and thistles of human injustice.

I said that Jesus had come to start clearing out the clutter, and that one day the whole garden would be restored. But until then, God calls us to work with Jesus in making a start.

Whenever you hear Jesus telling a parable about ‘The Kingdom of God’, he is telling us about what the garden will finally look like, …or about what needs to be done to clear out the clutter.

In today’s Bible reading we heard about a servant who owed 10,000 talents. You might like to think of it as 10,000 bags of gold, because one talent was a huge sum of money, …the equivalent of 20 years wages for a labourer. And so 10,000 talents was an unimaginably large debt.

There was no way that this servant could repay the debt. And so, as was the custom of the day, the master ordered that this servant be sold as a slave, and that his wife and children should also be sold as slaves.

The servant begged for mercy, and in an act of extraordinary generosity, the master wrote off the debt, and then the man go free.

(pause)

That’s how God treats each one of us.

All the wrong things we think, and say, and do in life are like debts that slowly build up. We sometimes call them ‘sins’, but they are just like debts.

Many people feel heavily burdened by the guilt of all these things. But the good news is that, if we ask for mercy, God will forgive us. He will cancel the debt. He will wipe the slate clean.

But the parable, (like many of Jesus’ parables), has a twist at the end.

This servant, who has just had a huge debt written off, meets a fellow servant who owes him a much smaller some of money. (A hundred denarii was equivalent to 100 day’s wages). He grabs him by the throat and begins to choke him. “Pay me what you owe me”, he demands.

Other servants see what’s going on and are outraged. How could he be so cruel to his fellow servant, when the master has just written off his debt of 10,000 bags of gold?

They therefore complain to the master who is also outraged. “You wicked servant”, he said. “I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow-servant as I had mercy on you?”

(pause)

The principle of cancelling unpayable debts is central to the Christian gospel.

It is one of the ways that we clear out some of the thorns and thistles of human injustice in God’s world.

And that’s why many Christians were in the forefront of the Jubilee 2000 campaign.

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Remember Bono meeting the Pope?

The ‘human chain’ of 70,000 people

encircling the Birmingham G8 summit?

Gordon Brown promising activists

his help?

The campaign to cancel Third World debt has been one of the great causes of our time. Many of the world’s poorest countries are crippled by repayments on old loans from rich countries and big financial institutions. Jubilee 2000, the debt-cancellation alliance co-founded by Christian Aid, became a global movement that simply couldn’t be ignored.

• Campaigners sent half a million postcards, emails and letters to the Treasury and Downing Street, calling on the government to ‘drop the debt’.

• Hundreds of thousands of people pressed for debt relief, demonstrating peacefully at annual meetings of world leaders.

• An incredible 24 million people around the world signed a petition – the biggest in history – demanding that poor countries be released from their debt burden.

Breakthrough came at the 1999 G8 summit in Cologne when leaders promised to cancel US$100 billion of debt owed by the poorest countries. It was a desperately needed step in the right direction. Millions of children in countries such as Uganda are finally getting the chance to go to school, because their governments can once more afford to fund education.

But the crisis continues. More must be done: by August 2004, US$36 billion of debt had been written off (just under 40 per cent of what has been promised) and some types of debt will go untouched under the current deal.

‘The Jubilee 2000 Campaign’ made a great start, but there is more to be done. It now has a new name… ‘The Jubilee Debt Campaign’, and it continues to push for the cancellation of 100 per cent of poor countries’ unpayable debt.

The principle of cancelling unpayable debts is central to the Christian gospel.

It is one of the ways that we clear out some of the thorns and thistles of human injustice in God’s world.