Monopoly and the Kingdom of God: Forgive Us Our Debts…

When I was growing up, my sisters and I would often play Monopoly. As a general rule, our family is a family that likes to play board and card games. And we are competitive about it too. Being the youngest of three and the only boy, I was eager to assert my own independence from my sisters. As my sisters counted off the spaces they were to travel on their turn, I would wait anxiously for them to land on one of my rental properties. Like a cat ready to pounce on an unsuspecting mouse, I was ready to yell “rent!” at the top of my lungs. Because I was young and bad at counting (let’s face it, I’m still bad at counting), I would often yell rent before my sisters had finished moving their game piece.

I did this so often, and my sisters got so annoyed by it, that they began to fine me every time I called rent for a property I did not own. This, of course, is not in the official rules of the game. No amount of reasoning or arguing would keep my sisters from fining me. I suppose a simple fix for the problem would have been to stop yelling rent before I was absolutely certain a player had landed on my space. I would try, but my eagerness to win the game trumped any self-control I might have had as an eight-year-old. As you might be able to imagine, the inability to control myself coupled with my sisters’ dogged sense of justice led me to have some serious cash flow problem. Not long into the game, I was unable to meet my obligations and, thus, needed to mortgage properties and take loans from my sisters. My overzealous attempts to take control of the game for myself led to debt and an ultimate early exit from the game.

We like to be in control. Life is a game, we are told, and the more motivated, the more energetic, the more of a risk taker you are the better your chances of controlling that game. So we take risks. Some work, some don’t. All too often we end up in debt to someone, either by over extending ourselves so that we must rely on someone else to bail us out, or literally in financial debt. Our efforts at controlling our own game, our own life, lead to indebtedness and bondage.

The Lord’s Prayer understands the human condition. We are all debtors. We all owe someone something. To pray “And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” is, of course, to realize that we are debtors – debtors to others because we have sinned against them and debtors to God because we have sinned against him. But it is also to understand and come to grips with the fact that we are not in control. Debtors don’t call the shots, creditors do.

When we confess to God that we are in need of forgiveness of our debts against him and against our fellow humans, we are confessing that we are not really in control of the game. We’ve tried and failed. Praying this part of the Prayer gives us an opportunity to find release from our debts and sins. We are freed, not so we can take control of our lives again, but so that we play by the rules of a different game – the rules of the Kingdom of God.

But we can’t stop with the first part of this petition, “and forgive us our debts.” The Lord’s Prayer, as we have learned, isn’t solely concerned with what God wants to do for us personally. It is also concerned with what God wants to do through us.

A few years ago, not far from where I grew up, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a strange man walked into an Amish one room school and shot 10 Amish girls, killing five, before taking his own life. Like all senseless acts of violence, this was a great tragedy. But the world learned something from how the Amish community handled the killings. The families of the slain girls refused to hold the debt.

They could have said that the dead killer and his family owed them something. They didn’t. They could have wanted compensation for their loss. But they didn’t. They could have wanted to zealously take control of the situation by seeking revenge. They didn’t. They refused to hold the debt.

To pray “and forgives us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” is to relinquish the control that we might have over others because of their actions against us. It is to participate in the work of bringing about the Kingdom of God by failing to continue the cycle of violence, hatred, and revenge required by the holding of debt. It is, once again, to realize that we are not God; we are not in control.

You can’t win at Monopoly by being in debt. Neither can you win in this life without accepting your status as a debtor who has been forgiven and who must now pass on that same merciful forgiveness.