When forgiveness is still far off

Robert Berra

Year A Proper 19

SMEC

Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35

Y'all.

Have you ever been reading the Bible--particularly the New Testament--and thought to yourself, “I wish Jesus had been more reasonable.”

And I suspect I might not be the only one to read and hear scripture--and we nod our head 'yes'--but we are also thinking “what did I just read?”

The readings from today bring up a double whammy of questions.

1.      Do we really have to forgive that much?

2.      Does God really hold our choice to forgive as being that important?

If I’m honest, I’m not as good at forgiveness as I would like to be.

It does not come natural to me.

But it has become a beautiful part of my life because, as a priest, my responsibility in a community is to point to the possibilities of reconciliation and to grant absolution on behalf of the church.

Still, forgiveness is hard.

Forgiveness is so hard, it is known in psychiatric settings and other helping professions as “the other ‘F’ word.”

But you know this, too, I think.

I suspect that there are a number of people in this room who come here with hearts heavy from recent pain and injury.

I suspect I’m not the only one here who has a few open conflicts that have grown cold.

Estrangements going back years.

Regrets going back years.

And here’s the kicker—

I’m much better at forgiving people who do something wrong to me than I am at forgiving those who hurts others I love.

I can turn my other cheek to be struck, but I will not hold someone else’s cheek out to be struck.

In those cases where I am angry and unforgiving on behalf of others, the compassion I’m supposed to have for the person who did something wrong comes into direct conflict with the sense of duty and obligation I feel like I have to care for the person who was hurt.   If you’ve ever had to cut someone out of your family for the sake of others in your family, you know that dynamic.  You know that tension. That discomfort of choosing not between good and evil, but choosing between the competing goods of being compassionate and yet also protecting others.  

And yet, here are these passages on forgiveness.  and they refuse to go away.

And I think Jesus makes this parable so hyperbolic—so exaggerated—so over-the top—because he knows how hard a thing it is to forgive.

I mean, the passage is over the top.  The debt that the first servant owed could translate to as little as 10 million dollars. There is no hope at all for something like that to be repaid. None. The servant’s debt is forgiven by the king— who in mercy foregoes the satisfaction of selling the servant’s family to others in slavery, thereby leaving the servant in pain for the rest of his life.  The king could here have said, “I know I’ll never get this money back, and even selling you and your family will not approach the debt you owe, but I would at least have the satisfaction of knowing that you will live and die in the agony of separation and loneliness.”  

Instead, forgiven.  All of it. 

That wouldn’t actually happen—who would write off that kind of debt?  

The king even writes off the foolish attempt by the slave to protest that he would eventually repay it.

Then the unforgiving servant goes after another, who owes him the equivalent of a third of a year’s wages.  Chokes him out and gets him thrown in prison.  But really, what is this going to do?  Even if the first servant thinks he’ll still get the money to repay the king, at this rate he’d have to shake down 450,000 of his fellow-servants to do it. 

But as it turned out, the debt came back.  The king called it in after hearing that the first servant did not heed his object lesson on mercy.  He sends the servant to be tortured until the debt can be paid off, which we established above, means never.  Everlasting torment.  There are a few rare places where Jesus is so forceful with the prospect of perpetual punishment. This is one of them, as are the warnings for hypocrites, those who tie up heavy burdens they themselves are not willing to bear, and those who care not for the hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, imprisoned, or those deemed a stranger among us.

This, frankly, can make the Lord’s Prayer a frightful thing—because in it we prayerfully assent to that notion that God can act unto us according to our own standard of forgiveness.  “Forgive us our trespasses, insofar as we forgive others.”

If there is a commandment in Christianity at all, if there is something that cannot go away about how we understand our relationship to God and our neighbor, it is the persistence of forgiveness.  It is that we have to hold out forgiveness to those who do wrong to us and evil to others precisely because we know that same forgiveness from God.

And I almost hate to say that because I’m also mindful of how passages on forgiveness like this have been misused in the past--how the quick jump to demand that someone forgive their abuser can put the abused person right back in the abuser’s power. Many a battered partner or exploited child has been sent back to their abuser with no serious call for the abuser to be held accountable for his or her actions.

So I think it’s important to mention a few ways in which forgiveness goes wrong.

First

Forgiveness does not mean that we have to minimize the evil or the hurt that we experience.  The Christian commitment to truth means that we cannot lie about the hurt we experience or the pain others feel in an effort to get to forgiveness faster.  If someone wrongs you, you get to be honest about that pain instead of trying to “walk it off.” Evil and pain exist, and to pretend that they do not, and to pretend that they do not matter—just for the sake of the comfort of those around you—is not a path to truth or healing. Over time, the hurt may lessen, but you do not have to pretend it didn't exist.

Second

Of the number of ideas that are “almost Christian, but not quite,” there is the phrase “forgive and forget.”  I’m sure you have heard that phrase.  Forgiveness is possible, and it’s an obligation of the faith, but we are not likewise required to forget—nor, sometimes, can we forget.  I kind of get why “forgive and forget” is a shorthand for our faith.  Forgetting in this sense could be a shorthand for what it means to forgive. It means that we release the other person from our power; we give up our claim on them—for revenge, for retribution, for restitution.  But that is release—it is forgiveness—it is not forgetfulness.  It means that we do not remember in such a way that implies that we have a claim on the person. 

Case in point, we gather every week to remember the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus.  We bring to life that last supper, at which he sat with his disciples—who would become deserters and betrayers—and yet he both died and rose breathing forgiveness.  But we do not forget. We do not say that the crucifixion wasn’t that bad after all because Jesus rose from the dead, and so it can be forgotten. we instead say that evil is real, our capacity to hurt others is almost unbounded (see: Auschwitz), the torture and crucifixion was a moral catastrophe— but we follow savior who suffered the worst we could inflict, and a God whose love and redemption proved stronger than death, and a spirit who promises access to this loving power. We remember, not because the crucifixion and the betrayals and the desertions didn’t matter, but because our story as Christians is one of the power and possibilities of redemption and a love that conquers all adversity.

Third

We can forgive, but we are not required to continue in old patterns of relationship.  If you notice from the parable, the king did not keep the unforgiving servant in charge of the finances.  Likewise, in winning back a fellow believer, as our gospel passage from last week put it, we do not need to continually put the same people in the breach to be abused and mis-used again and again.  The relationship of the forgiven to the community may need to change.

Yes, some of the ways forgiveness gets talked about makes it harder than it has to be, but it’s still hard.

Now here's the thing.  To my bones, I believe that if our reading of scripture does not lead us to healing and liberation, we have misread scripture.

And I believe that the point of the Gospel of Matthew is less about what we do, and more about who we become.  But what Matthew also makes clear is that we are not in this alone.  God does not leave us to our own devices only to pull the rug from under us at the end.  We are invited to a life of growth, of healing, and training in holiness even when it’s borne from being broken on the wheels of living.

That brokenness is our human condition. God knows it.  And God knows the difficulty of forgiving.

And I stand before you today with some trepidation because I am aware that I cannot tie heavier burdens than I myself am willing to bear, and forgiveness is a goal that no one but you and God can set the timeline to.

So, what shall I say?

MLK Jr. once said “If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl; but by all means keep moving.”[1]

Forgiveness may be far.

But are you at a place where you can bring your pain to God?

Can you trust that God is big enough to hold your anger?

Will you let a member of this community sit with you in your sorrow?

Will you seek the help of a community that can bear what you cannot carry alone?

If you are here, living with the shame of knowing you have injured another, are you ready to make amends? 

Would you let yourself be surprised by redemption?

---

[1] MLK, Jr. Spelman College Museum April I960, pp. 10-11. https://literarydevices.net/if-you-cant-fly-then-run/

Clapping Back at Jesus

Trinity Cathedral

Year A Proper 15

Isaiah 56:1,6-8
Psalm 67
Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28

But the [Samaritan] people [of the town] refused to welcome [Jesus], because He was heading for Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do You want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?” But Jesus turned and rebuked them and they went on to another village.… (Luke 9:54-55)[1]

I’ll come back to that in a moment.

One of my favorite pieces of contemporary slang is “clapback.” According to Urban Dictionary, a clapback is basically a comeback or a retort, most likely pumped with attitude and sass. The term goes back to at least Ja Rule’s rap titled “Clapback” in 2001. It’s the rhetorical backhand that is the response you give when you are insulted. The term is mostly used in social media settings to describe when folks start trading insults and feuds come and go fast and furious.

Of course, there are many ways you’d use a clapback- particularly effective is pointing out the hypocrisies of whoever just insulted you. Or when you can point out people abandoning their ideals for the sake of expediency. That gets pretty easy when so much of one’s life and thoughts are online.

So, the concept of a clapback is not a new concept at all; just a new word for what happens when you have a beef with someone and you go about conversation.

The term has been echoing through my head as I’ve been reading our gospel passage over the course of the week.  The gospel passage has not one but three examples.  First, Jesus claps back at the Pharisees and instructs his followers on the spiritual meaning of a matter of the law.  Second, Jesus claps back at his disciples who just aren’t getting it. But then, a Canaanite woman claps back at Jesus, and this is important—she wins. She gets what she wants.

Consider the scene:  Jesus is walking along with the disciples, and then there is a woman who is misbehaving in a couple of different ways.  First, she’s a Canaanite; Canaanites and the Jewish people did not get along.  In fact, they had beef going back at least to the time of Moses and Joshua, when the Hebrews forcibly conquered Canaanite land after the Exodus and the wandering.  Second she’s a woman addressing a group of men; that’s pretty transgressive.  Third, she’s yelling at them from a distance, which is just rude.  It’s not uncommon to ignore those who are breaking so many social mores at once.

Jesus doesn’t even address the woman until the disciples are annoyed enough to ask him to do something about it.  When he does, first he says, essentially, “I have nothing for you.  I’m here for those of my religion, of my nation.”

But she doesn’t go away.  She doesn’t shrink back.  She comes right up to Jesus and kneels at his feet.  Close enough to touch.  She wasn’t invited.  She wasn’t bid to do this when she asks him again for deliverance for her daughter. 

Jesus then makes a more pointed stated. Just a minute ago, he simply said who he was here to serve.  Now he’s going to tell her who he will exclude.  He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

I need y’all to hear me, and more importantly to hear Jesus.  Jesus just called the woman kneeling at his feet and begging on behalf of her daughter a dog.  We have a derogatory term in our language for female dogs.  We need to recognize that Jesus called this distraught mother kneeling at his feet our word for a female dog.  Let that image sink in. 

Then comes the clapback. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

She says, “Fine, I’m a dog, but sometimes people treat dogs nicely.”

I’m not sure what was in the woman’s mind at this moment.  Was it shame at being brought further down?  Was it a willingness to shame Jesus into action?  was it sass or desperation?  Was it both?

I don’t know.  But it was enough to change Jesus’s response. He is impressed with her faithfulness and heals her daughter.  All while the disciples are standing there.  I wonder what was going through their minds.

Now there are two paths to interpreting this story at this point.  The first is to ask whether Jesus changed his mind; or repented of his own hard-heartedness.  The text is silent on Jesus’s internal monologue; and that’s frustrating.  We are so used to thinking that Jesus is sinless that the idea that Jesus would individually express the systemic sin all around him in the culture he inhabited leaves our theological constructs with a problem.  By that I mean that our understanding of Christ being a sinless perfect sacrifice on the cross could be endangered by admitting that Jesus had to repent of something evil.  But, frankly, making Jesus’s sinlessness obvious was not a concern for Matthew while he was writing, so we have this story that does nothing to make our theology neat and tidy. 

Thanks, Matthew. 

In any case, this interpretation means that Jesus learned not to be racist, and this is the turning point of the Gospel at which Jesus knows that the Gospel is for everyone and must be available to everyone, regardless of any human-made divisions.  Jesus’s mission will bring into reality the dream of Isaiah’s prophecy we also read today: that God’s house will be a house of prayer for all, and all are welcome to gather.

The second, more traditional understanding seeks to preserve Jesus’s sinlessness, and it does so by suggesting the episode was a test—that Jesus was going to heal the daughter all along, but he had a point to prove. It comes to the same conclusion:  that the Gospel is for everyone and must be available to everyone, regardless of any human-made divisions. 

But the traditional interpretation immediately raises the question: Who needed to be tested? Usually, people say the faith of the woman needed to be tested.  But frankly, she seemed to have the faith bit locked down.  She’s the one bugging him relentlessly.  Why further test someone who is so obstinately seeking Jesus out because she is already convinced that Jesus can help her.

So I am going to go ahead and for the sake of argument assume the traditional stance.  Jesus is sinless, and in this case, he is testing someone--but he already knows he’s going to help the woman.  The woman seems faithful already.  I think that means we have to look at the disciples.

There is a popular image of the disciples as good-natured bumblers.  Salt-of-the-earth fishermen.  Fine people; if a little slow on the uptake as to what Jesus was laying down for them. 

But there’s a pesky story that has never been far from my mind since I read it years ago.  Namely, that among the disciples there were at least two who had no issue with the ideas of destroying all of the men, women, and children of a village, all because the villagers had heard about Jesus and didn’t want any trouble.  In other words, the disciples had among their ranks a few who openly advocated for the genocide of a village of a different ethnic group because of a perceived offense.

That’s pretty far from a definition of ‘good, fine people.’  The disciples, given a little bit of power, were ready to go into ethnic cleansing.

The culture they lived in upheld these ethnic divisions. We see those divisions when the disciples want to destroy a village; we see it when they wish this foreign woman at Jesus’s feet would just shut up.

So, if Jesus knew what was going on and what he would do for the woman that might mean he wanted to teach the disciples something in this interaction.

I suggest that he wanted them to witness the moment when his message went from being one to Israel only and became something for everyone.  And I think it was important that the disciples saw that change as a result of an impetuous woman’s clapback.

So, here is a powerful man; the messiah; getting told off by a foreign woman—in front of his followers no less—and Jesus does not try to save face by reasserting his ‘no.’ He acknowledges the justice and compassion of the woman’s cause, and relents.

That is amazing. Typically, when you’re surrounded by your friends and someone comes at you, you don’t back down.  Not in front of your people.

But Jesus did.  And in the process, Jesus showed by example that the gifts of God’s gracious reign are for everyone.

Now, we stand outside of the text; but by being in the stream of the Christian tradition, we may as well be standing around Jesus and the woman, too.

We’ve just listened to Jesus respond in a racist way to a woman, and then change his tune.  Our Lord and Savior got called out for his racism, he accepted that he responded to the woman according to a racist social structure, and he rewarded her faith with divine healing.  In so doing, he showed the disciples what it means to repent of the evil that surrounds them and us.

You can probably guess where this sermon is going next.  We’ve reached a point in our national life where the KKK, neo-Nazis, and white nationalists feel free to take to the streets.  This is not news to those of us who study hate groups.  These white supremacists have been telling us that for the past 8 years that their recruitment has increased, sometimes exponentially.  Even if they were exaggerating, the images of Charlottesville serve to convince that the groups may still be exaggerating, but they are not lying.

Now, we sitting here may not claim racial superiority.  If you do, repent and return to the Lord today. 

But there are a number of us who are in a position to either aid or abet racism or challenge it. 

You see I am from Mobile, AL.  My hometown has an infamously distinguished pedigree of institutionalized racism.  And if you sitting here, and white, you probably know what I mean when I say that , there are conversations that white folks will only have with other white folks.  Nothing but my skin color grants me entrance to these conversations, and they are not pleasant conversations.  And these conversations make me a party to continuing a conspiracy of white supremacy that I want nothing to do with and cannot easily avoid.

I’ll give you an example.  In 2002, I was starting my undergraduate degree, and hoping that after military service, I might find a career in the FBI or some other law enforcement organization.  Sitting in the office of the college recruiter, he looked at me, and began the conversation that white men only feel comfortable having with other white men. 

He said to me, “Robert, you have two things going against you in this world; you are white, and you are a man.  You should consider taking a degree in finance instead of criminal justice; that way you will be more hirable than those who will take a degree in criminal justice.”

In a world in which women earn at best 77 cents for every dollar a man earns, and in which the poverty gap between whites and blacks is steadily increasing with black unemployment double that of white unemployment, I was shocked and frozen by what he said.  For this man and many like him, any perceived loss of power is considered a threat.[2]

In this recruiter’s office, I was being brought into a conspiracy to maintain supremacy over others.  It was a wake-up call for me; yet while I did not challenge him then and there, I never took a class in finance.  I’ve always wondered what he told women and African Americans he counseled. 

Perhaps you have also known those conversations. In the course of our work, our days, and our lives, we may find ourselves in a situation in which someone we speak to wants to know if we are a safe person to talk to about keeping and maintaining supremacy, just as the college recruiter did with me.  It comes in conversation:  a sexist joke, an observation about how races do certain things, a slang term for someone from a different country.  When that happens, it is assumed we agree with the other person, or we are essentially being asked if we are in the conspiracy of this world, to keep those divisions in place.

You know that you have a choice—an uncomfortable choice: half-hearted agreement in the hope that the conversation shifts to something more pleasant, or silence, or confrontation. 

The Gospel passage today begs us risk confrontation.  It may mean that we have to tell someone why we cannot participate in such a conversation.  It may mean remembering aloud to the other person that our connection to God and to all of humankind renders racial divisions meaningless at least, and malicious at most.  And that can be a hard thing to say.  My own track record in confronting such speech is not as good as I wish it was. And yet the imperative is there—whether we are the ones who clap back at racism, or have our ideals thrown right back in our face when our silence equals complicity.

The good news is that we do not do this alone. We never have.  The presence of God makes all things possible for those who face enormous odds.

I want to go back to disciples. Well after this moment with the Canaanite woman.  Well after thar desire to destroy a village, the Holy Spirit descends upon them and empowers them.  Suddenly, they are baptizing Gentiles and coming to grips with this inclusive work of God.  Then, in the 8^th chapter of the book of Acts, Peter and John and Philip go to Samaritan villages, to preach the Gospel and live in peace among the ones they rather have seen killed.  After Jesus ascends to Heaven, the story of the early church is the story of recovering racists trying to keep up with an inclusive God as they get kicked in the pants by the Holy Spirit into situations and with people they would not have chosen on their own.

That’s the work God hands to us every new day.

Shall we get to it?   

---

[1] In my sermon, I mistakenly said this in not in the yearly lectionary.  It is, Year C, Proper 8.

[2]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/09/women-and-equal-pay-wage-gap_n_3038806.html, http://www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/wealth-gap-grows-between-black-and-white-us

The Currency of the Kingdom of God

Year A Proper 24 St. Matthew's, Chandler

Exodus 33:12-23
Psalm 99
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 22:15-22

In the fall of 2007, as I began my student teaching, I was also deciding that I wanted to go to graduate school. I had taken a history class on holy war, and the subject fascinated me. I’ve always been interested in why people do the things that they do, and the class ignited within me a desire to study how religion can be used to make people violent. That’s how I ended up at ASU from 2008-2010, studying for my master’s degree. I was in the Religious Studies department studying the things that interested me:  politics, religion, war, the use of torture, the relationship between the religious and the secular, and the role religion plays in conversations about sex and gender.

Perhaps you have noticed—none of these topics are considered polite dinner conversation.

And there are reasons for this.  Politics and religion are difficult to talk about.  The political climate in our country is incredibly polarized and often reduced to talking points being hurled back and forth.
And so I come to find out that thanks to the preaching rotation, the Gospel reading from the lectionary that I am preaching on is one of the Bible’s most explicitly political passages.

What do you do with that?

Contemporary American thought tends to support keeping religion and politics separate. We do not often want to hear politics preached from pulpits. We tend to think that religion and our faith is above politics—or at least that it should be. We tend to think that religion should remain unstained by political processes.

Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Maybe religion stains politics. We’ve seen through history and in current events that mixing religion and politics can yield deadly results and oppressive policies. Maybe, we think, it’s better to see religion as purely the realm of the spiritual, and politics the realm of the physical and material—what we experience in the real world, outside of the church. And so we separate Church and state in our own lives and minds.

Still, the Gospel reading shows Jesus in the thick of a political situation, and reminding those around him of their responsibilities to God.

I beg your indulgence, because in a time when many of us tend to live dualistic lives in between the secular and the religious, I believe it makes a difference if one’s faith leads one to allow constraints and divisions and oppressions that are already present in the world (and in the church), or leads one to participate in a faith that seeks to reconcile all to one another.

I’ll come to that in a moment, but let’s begin at the beginning. What’s going on in this story? What is so political about it? Jesus has come into Jerusalem just days before his death. He and his large crowd of disciples and followers are in the temple. He has been telling parables in which the Pharisees appear in a bad light. Jesus makes them appear to be hypocritical and unbending religious purists.
The Pharisees have had enough. So the Pharisees think about ways to embarrass and discredit Jesus. Maybe, they think, we can get him to say something embarrassing or treasonous. The Pharisees send some of their own to Jesus with a question, along with some folks named in the gospel as Herodians.

Some background may be helpful here, because this is an odd part of the story. And it reminds me of a novel full of political intrigue. You see, the Pharisees and the Herodians would not have liked each other. ‘Herodian’ means a supporter of Herod Antipas, who was not a very nice guy. He’s the guy who had John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, beheaded.

Now, imagine, if you will, that you live in a country in which a close family member was executed. Imagine this family member was executed on the whim of a state official. Now imagine that this official’s flunkies come up to you to question you about patriotism and taxes. You will have some idea of how Jesus felt when confronted by the Herodians.

Herodians were folks who supported the Roman occupation of Jerusalem. Pharisees did not like the Herodians because the Pharisees were not fans of the occupation; the Pharisees thought the Herodians were sell-outs to Rome. But a mutual hate can make for strange friends, and Jesus made both the Pharisees and the Herodians nervous. Jesus threatened the power they had fought to keep. For the Pharisees’— it was their bid for the people’s religious lives. For the Herodians— control of the occupational government. This meant that both groups had the most access to power; and someone like Jesus, who called their use of power into question, was a problem to be ‘resolved.’

The group comes up to Jesus, and they ask their trick question; a yes or no question which should have embarrassed Jesus no matter which way he answered it. If Jesus said to pay the tax, He would appear to be a sympathizer of the oppressive government and lose credibility with many of his followers; in that case the Pharisees win.

If Jesus said not to pay the tax, he would be guilty of treason. An agitator. The Herodians would not let someone who openly protested their rule live. Rome does not like rebels. If Jesus says not to pay the tax, the Herodians could have him killed, and the Pharisees still win.

Pretty brilliant, right? Politics as usual in occupied territories.

Jesus throws them a curve ball by asking for the coin. The coin was a denarius. And it looked a lot like coins we would see today, but with a major difference. Our quarter doesn’t name George Washington as God; the denarius did name the emperor as God. For a Jew to be carrying a coin that called anyone but the God of Israel divine—in the temple of all places!— would have been embarrassing. That the Pharisees and Herodians could produce the coin probably made them a bit sheepish.

Jesus then asks who is on the coin. They answer ‘the emperor,’ and Jesus famously replies “Give to the emperor that which belongs to the emperor, and to God what belongs to God.”

With this response the Pharisees and the Herodians are humiliated. They walk away amazed; surprised that they did not see that response coming. Jesus managed to take their yes or no question about taxes and turn even that to God.  What Jesus did was take the limiting question posed by those who ruled a worldly kingdom and he expanded the vision upward.

I want to suggest that the gospel reading for today is more than Matthew bragging on Jesus’ rhetorical skills, more than a tale showing Jesus’ political prowess, more than a scriptural permission for Christians to pay taxes, and more than a handy reading to pull out and read for church pledge drives.

The gospel reading today is a challenge to us because we are all called to ask a few questions:

If we owe something to God, how do we tell what it is?
Just as the denarius bears Caesar’s image— what bears the image of God?

What is the currency of the Kingdom of God?
Does this have bearing on our politics today?
In asking these questions we are called to a process of formation; a process of sifting through our lives to find out what bears the image of what would want to rule over us in this world; and what bears the image of God. It is a matter of discerning what is from the kingdoms of this world, and what is part of the Kingdom of God.

This is an act of discernment that we engage on our own and in community.

What makes this task difficult is that we are not just in the world or just in sync with God. We are both of God and in the world.

We look at both the best and the worst of what we carry within us—our actions, our thoughts, our reactions—and like coins in our pockets, we prayerfully examine these things closely to see whose image we find on them.

In allowing God to do this work inside us, we learn something about God and God’s desire for the world we see before us.

Then we begin to see the world according to the economy of the Kingdom of God—that every person bears the inscription of God. Remember the line from the Book of Genesis (1:27):

So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

This is the point of departure about who we as people of faith say we all are. And it was so important that it was repeated three times in the same breath. All humankind—all—bear the image that God created, the image shared by Christ when he walked the earth as God incarnate, and the image which the Spirit enlivens daily.


But sometimes that image of God in other people is hard to see. The world and other people try to stamp other inscriptions on us all. Inscriptions of race, gender, nationality, ability, wealth, and many others.

How do these inscriptions influence us to act?

To take a look around our country:

Inscriptions of race can determine whether one’s death is considered a tragedy or an event to be written off and ignored because the media reports that the person “was no angel.”

Inscriptions of gender can determine what positions one can hold in business, government, the church—if not on paper, at least in practice.

Inscriptions of nationality can determine whether or not one can be treated as a person by the government-- Whether or not one is known as an ‘illegal’ or subject to enhanced interrogation techniques, otherwise known as torture.

Inscriptions of ability can determine whether you are seen as a child of God or a cross to bear for family and friends.

Inscriptions of wealth can determine whether or not you are respected, or considered a human being of worth.

These inscriptions are powerful. They still have a hold on me: on how I see others and on how I see myself. It takes a daily effort not to see the person in front of us as the sum of what marks society inscribes on us, but as Children of God, bearing God’s image, and of precious worth.

Then we are called to act on our discernment. To act as though our recognition of what is God’s and what is the world’s has meaning that is more than a theological proposition, but a compass to guide our actions in life. This may have political consequences.

The effort is to see what God sees; to acknowledge the different set of standards of God’s Economy— an economy based on life, and redemption, and warmth, and love—instead of an economy of cold metal, and paper, and scarcity, and apathy.

Then we give to God what is God’s by recognizing the image of Christ in the stranger and the friend, the sick and the well, the hungry and the filled, the imprisoned and the powerful, the rich and especially the poor.

And ultimately, we may find that recognizing what belongs to God is more rewarding than to bow to the inscriptions the world fosters, or bow in homage to systems that betray or deny the inherent worth of others. In so doing, we give back to God— and give to neighbor— that which bears God’s inscription: love, hope, light, pardon, faith, and help.

To recognize the dignity of others in spite of what the world has set as important is a step toward acknowledging a part of the reign of God; and acting on that reality. The acknowledgement sets our sights higher than the powers and principalities and rulers and authorities of this world.

…and that may have political consequences.

May your discernment of what bears God’s image in your life be fruitful.

Amen.

Disciplinary Schemes

Sermon 9/7/14

Proper 18, Year A RCL

Track 1

Exodus 12:1-14

Psalm 149

Romans 13:8-14

Matthew 18:15-20

I have been reflecting recently on the ritual of the courtroom.  Have you ever thought about how scripted and prescribed the actions are?  Think of how often you have seen the courtroom scenes play out in media—TV shows like Matlock, Law and Order, Boston Legal, and movies like 12 Angry Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Time to Kill, A Few Good Men, Legally Blonde.

The ritual of the court comes from centuries’ worth of tradition, legal interpretation, standards of order, policy, hierarchy, and practice.  The system may look different depending on what culture you may be in.  For instance, our court system practices according to an adversarial model in which parties square off to plead the case in front of a (hopefully) impartial judge and/or jury.  Other systems operate under an inquisitorial model in which judges act as investigators and examiners.  In any case, we are familiar with a lot of the rituals that have developed.  The practice of standing when the judge enters the court room in something of a procession.  The swearing in of witnesses.  The requirement that the defendant must stand for the reading of the verdict.  The emphasis on maintaining order, decorum, and dignity, or else risk showing contempt of court.   These are common fixtures of the popular image of the court system, the parts we see in media.

And there is a reason for treating this system with gravitas.  The court system is the institution we have invested with the authority to judge us, to imprison us, to possibly even kill us in the name of each other.  Such power should carry a solemnity. And regardless of whether or not the pageantry—the liturgy—of the courtroom is intentional, it serves the purpose of marking liminal spaces in the lives of those whose future is decided in the courtroom.

I would suggest we would lose some confidence in the system if the power with which the court acts were to be treated in a trivial manner by the people who wield that power.  In essence, the court has a reputation to maintain, and ritual mystifies and legitimates its practice.

I have also been thinking about the power of the ritual, and its effect on the people who go through the system.  If one is found guilty within the court system, they are found guilty within this highly ritualized system that then pronounces judgment; a judgment which may often include separation from society—prison.  In extreme cases—separation from society by death. 

The court in our name pronounces sentence according to a proscribed form that has as its goal to pronounce with finality the reality we will recognize.  The individual is guilty, as punishment, and possibly for our safety, the person is to be separated and grouped with others who had transgressed our laws.

Highly ritualized and choreographed acts.  The person is given a new status.  Criminal.  Guilty.  Convict. 

We see these images on the news, even if the trial is not in our own sphere of friends, cases are often reported as at least local news.  We are frequently treated to national stories of court cases.  The person led away in handcuffs, perhaps even shackles on the ankles, in jumpsuits marking their new status in our society.

But the ritual of the trial and conviction is only half the story.  What I’m interested in is the ritual that does not happen.

Have you ever noticed that the person convicted does not return to court to be ritually restored to the community?  The release of a prisoner has a script, absolutely.  But it does not have anywhere near the same level of ceremony.

As I think about the stigma that ex-convicts live with, I wonder if our practice of putting them in prison with ceremony and finality and publicity without the same level of ceremony and publicity in welcoming them back into society means that the status the court confers upon prisoners is never actually lifted.

I wonder if things would be different if we as a society gathered to acknowledge the debt as paid and to welcome the formerly imprisoned back among us with as much decorum as when we imprison them. 

These are musings I have had for years; thoughts that recur somewhat frequently especially as I follow the uneven justice that our institutions administer.  No system is perfect, right?  All human institutions carry the capacity for sin, right?

The reflections came back as I was thinking about our gospel reading for the day.  The reading is given as Christ’s own institution of church discipline.   And anytime we talk about discipline within the communities we inhabit, it would be pretty natural to read the Bible with our cultural context informing our vision of the text, perhaps without our knowing that this is what we are doing. 

One way that may look is this:  When we read this passage through the lens of our notions of discipline conditioned by our society’s conception of justice, it’s possible to see this passage as answering the question of when we are permitted to break contact with someone who wrongs us.  In that lens the passage reads like three strikes and the person is out.

In the Christian context, the passage is saying something different.  The passage is telling us the lengths to which Christians must go to stay in community.

It is our judicial context that leads many to think that the separation of one who does wrong from the rest of society is for our own protection and that person’s penalty.

By contrast, what this passages intends is for us to recognize that once a wrong is committed, the person who did the act is spiritually in danger, and at risk of alienation by her or his own choosing, and so the community has responsibility to act to keep them in relationship.

These differences between our judicial system and the church point to a set of assumptions about who we are when we gather that are at odds with each other.  Our culture has us as bound together by social contract, which we are free to accept or deny.  But as long as we live within the political bounds, we are governed by the rules of the realm.  The church is different, even as the church is treated in culture and in practice as a voluntary association of like-minded individuals.   The Church at its best and most reflective of Christ is the acknowledgment that we are the Body of Christ despite the differences we see or learn in our society.  As the body of Christ, we cannot say that we have no need of each other (1Corinthians 12).  No, Paul says in our readings from Romans today:  Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments are summed up in this word, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.  This is not the teaching of our culture, which as a whole seems to emphasize our right to be free of each other.  Our faith, instead, calls us to tangible relationship and care for those around us.

These differences point to another way in which Christians can exist within our culture.  But it is also harder; so much harder.  Especially if you are as judgmental a person as I am.

I’d like to highlight 4 practical implications from this passage

1)      It’s not uncommon to hear that we may have conflict in every other area of our lives but somehow the church and its members are supposed to be immune to this.  After all, we’re Christians!  “In this passage, Jesus seems to assume that there will be conflict among his followers.  What makes us Christian is not whether or not we fight, disagree, or wound one another, but how we go about addressing and resolving these conflicts.”[1]  These guidelines may be directed to those within the church, but they offer an example of the way Christians can show Christ to others who know little more about us than that nationally Christians have a reputation for judgmentalism and hypocrisy.

2)      It is not in keeping with this passage to refuse to exercise forgiveness when it is genuinely sought. After all, the passage seeks to keep all in community.  In the verses just after this passage, Peter asks the question:  How many times must we forgive?  Jesus’ answer?  Essentially:  Always forgive.

3)      It is not in keeping with the passage to ignore the harm done to another person for the sake of maintaining niceties.  After all, this passage assumes that sin exists, and that the harming of another is never to be overlooked.  For the church to preach the demands of forgiveness without thorough attention to the demanding need and careful attention to repentance would risk passive, if not outright, violence to the injured.[2] 

4)      It is so normal in a situation in which we have been wronged to absorb that hurt and take it to others to talk about.  It’s actually comforting, isn’t it?  Without the input of the person who hurt us, we can tell the story our way (The way it *really* happened, according to us) and receive our support, and have people affirm that, yes, the person who harmed us is a scoundrel.  This passage counsels that the first thing we do is fight that natural tendency, and address the harm with the person.  Directly.  The potential benefit is enormous:  regain a member of the community without having to deal with the distortion that comes through hearsay and rumor—or the festering that comes through inaction and stasis. In the passages just before this one in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells the story of leaving the 99 sheep for the one. It is hard not to then see a connection to this discourse on discipline. To retrieve the one who by sin alienates herself or himself from others is more important than sitting in smug satisfaction with those who have never strayed.

Beloved of God, there is a difference between justice as it is practiced in our world, and that which Christians are called to enact in communities in which we find ourselves.  It is a harder task, to owe all nothing but love.  It is a harder task to seek a reconciling justice with which to replace punitive retribution.  But it is our task to be the leaven wherever we go, to make true the statement that justice is love when love enters the public realm, and to seek justice that builds community instead  of writes off others’ lives.  Practice a love that rebuilds and reconciles in the wake of sin both great and small, both in private and in public.  And may doing so inside and outside of the Church show that a different way is possible in an unforgiving world. 

---

[1] Jin Kim, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Season After Pentecost 2 (Propers 17-reign of Christ). (Louisville, KY: WJK, 2011,) 46.

[2] Closely following Dale P Andrews, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Season After Pentecost 2 (Propers 17-reign of Christ). (Louisville, KY: WJK, 2011,) 49.

Hope and Optimism

Proper 14 Year A RCL

Track 1

Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28

Psalm 105, 1-6, 16-22, 45b

Romans 10:5-15

Matthew 14:22-33

I want to begin by wrapping up a thought I introduced last week.

Last week, I mentioned in my sermon that the narrative we hear in the gospel lessons for last week and this week take place within a day of Jesus’ life.  Not only that, it is the day on which Jesus hears about the death of his cousin John the Baptist at the hands of a cruel man seeking to preserve his own reputation—Herod.

Last week we heard about the feeding of the five thousand men, besides women and children.  But recall how it began:  We are told that upon hearing the news of John’s death, Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw the crowd and went about the work of healing and feeding.

Jesus finds his time interrupted, and while he was gracious, this week, Jesus is more forceful:  Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds.

We all know that moment, or at least we have retrospectively recognized those moments, when we are dismissed by someone.  Sometimes it happens graciously; sometimes not. Still Jesus does so, and for the second time in 24 hours, Jesus is making it clear that he needs to be alone. 

He was trying to get time to himself.  I believe that, in his humanity, he was trying to come to terms with grief. 

The experience of grief, and its own way of overwhelming us, is universal to the human experience, even as it is expressed in a myriad of different ways.  One way in which we experience grief is to sometimes sense within ourselves a constriction of our empathy toward others.  It is almost a sense of pulling back from identifying with the plight of others, as though we do not have the emotional and relational reserves to handle the chances and changes of another’s life in addition to our own.  Another way we experience grief—which I think may be more common because of the way in which we order modern society—is to find ourselves having to act as though grief is not a large part our life, and we seem to go through the weeks and months following a loss as the walking wounded.  Sometimes it shows to others, sometimes it does not.  We go to work, we spend time with friends, we perform any number of tasks, as we also try to put our lives back together.  The work of grief takes a significant amount of labor on our part, even with God’s help, work that might be invisible to the rest of the world. 

And if I am honest, I relate with Jesus more in this story than in many others.  In a recent experience of grief, I found it necessary to take significant time to be alone.  I felt as though my mental capabilities were cut in half and clouded.  It took longer to do tasks.  I cut social engagements when I felt like I needed to.  It took time to discover what the new normal would look like.

Jesus still manages to do great things for people, but it seems to me that the fatigue he might be feeling propels him to be alone with God in prayer. 

It does not take long before our attention is brought again to the works of power that Jesus performs in his ministry, but I suggest it is equally important to note these pauses Jesus had to take.  In Jesus’ own times of need and solitude, we see what full divinity looks like when it is dwelling in full humanity.  And, at least to me, Jesus’ experience seems utterly familiar.  Perhaps it does to you, too.

Yesterday, actually, was personally a day of such pauses in grief.  This sermon came in fits and false starts even up to a few hours ago.

I have been watching the increasingly terrible situation in Iraq for the past few weeks, which this week truly took a turn for the worst as Islamic militants with the group known as ISIS began the systematic slaughter of Christians, other religious minorities, and Muslims who do not agree with them.  ISIS has posted videos of the executions to the web, as well as some pictures, which are truly horrifying.  You know which of the victims are Christian because, after their execution, the bodies were hung on makeshift crosses.  Families who fled the cities after being given the ultimatum to convert, pay a special tax, or be executed, are stranded in the wilderness and dying of thirst and hunger.  Some families are reported to have thrown their children off a mountain to their deaths to save them from either dying slowly of dehydration or from being beheaded.  The Anglican Vicar of Baghdad, Andrew White, reports that a child he baptized was cut in half by members of ISIS. 

[This article addresses the question of “what can we do?” The article contains links for donations to relief organizations, to which I’d add the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East.]

Add to Iraq the long list of tragic or frightening world events that occupy our thoughts and news feeds.  Israel and Gaza.  Refugee children at our border—not to forget the children who did not escape the violence in their homeland.  Ukraine and Russia.  South Sudan.  There are others.  All of these take a toll, and are then added to our own list of private tragedies and hardships.

It is no wonder that so many of us experience a type of burnout on compassion.  It is no wonder that we sometimes find apathy a preferable option.

And when I speak to people it seems like I’m hearing that faith can be kept—at least in terms of believing—but where is hope?

It seems like it’s one thing to have enough faith to get out of the boat and walk on water—but what do we do when we do not know how long we have to walk before we meet Jesus’ hand in a way we will recognize?

And it’s one thing to want to talk about Peter walking on water, but what do we do when one’s view of the world seems more attuned to the plight of Joseph at the bottom of a pit.

It is somewhat difficult to tease apart hope and faith. 

And yet while hope seems to be talked about less often, Hope does something, the same way that faith and love do.

And over this week I have been thinking about the difference between hope in the Christian sense and optimism.  It seems paradoxical, but I find myself hopeful even though I will not call myself an optimist.

Optimism is defined as hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something.  So far that could match the Christian hope in a very broad sense.  But there is also the optimistic principle that we live in the best of all possible worlds. To my ears, optimism seems to remain focused on the conduct of this fallen world, which will often disappoint us. 

Christian hope is something different.

The catechism in the Book of Common Prayer notes that the Christian hope “is to live with confidence in newness and fullness of life, and to await the coming of Christ in glory, and the completion of God's purpose for the world.”

Hope in this sense takes a longer view, beyond this world, and fixes our hope in the consummation of God’s purpose and the reckoning that comes with it, instead of seating hope in the here and now, where both justice and love seem so easily thwarted.

It is a common criticism of Christianity that says that believers are led to care too much about the afterlife at the expense of the work Christ has given us to do in caring for others.  I agree with this critique.  As MLK said "Any religion that purports to care about the souls of men but doesn't care about the social conditions that damn him or the economic conditions that strangle him is a moribund religion awaiting burial."  In talking about hope in such a final sense—attuned to the notion that we are heading to a decisive End that we do not yet see—I do not mean that Christians should return to a state of simply waiting on God to fix things on our behalf.

Yet to undercut any conversation about the purpose to which we are moving does not serve us well.  We lose the long view God has given us as the hope for our world.  If we lose that, we lose one of the grandest proclamations we have that undergirds much of the optimism we find in this world.

There will be times when our optimism will line up with the Christian hope.  And there will be times when our optimism is dashed because it does not hold a view as expansive as the hope we have in Christ—and the world will thwart our best expectations.  I suggest that we would be well-served to learn how to discern the difference and hold fast to hope and faith in God instead of a lesser vision and short-term goal—still always acting in accordance to our hope in Christ and seeking the Good that God puts before us to enact. 

In that way, perhaps waves and strong winds of this world may appear less frightening, and our grief and frustration find expression through a God who understands our own need for comfort.  And so we too can walk these stormy waters, seeking the hand of Christ who beckons us forward.

Amen.