Proper 18 – VALUE
Sermon for St. Paul’s (Mount Vernon, WA) 09/10/2023
Fr. Keith Axberg, Ret.
Ezekiel 33:7-11 – Our sins weigh against us; how can we live?
Psalm 119:33-40 – Incline my heart to your decrees
Romans 13:8-14 – Love is the fulfilling of Torah
Matthew 18:15-20 – Where 2 or 3 are gathered, I’m there
Give ear O heavens, and I will speak; let the earth hear the words of my mouth! For I will proclaim the Name of the Lord and ascribe greatness to our God.
A story is told of a man washed overboard from a ship at sea. He was stranded on a desert isle. A few weeks later he saw another ship sailing past the island, lit a signal fire and the passing ship stopped. The captain sent a rescue party ashore and the castaway, as you might imagine, was overjoyed to be seen and rescued. The first officer noticed the man had built several huts there on the beach and asked about them.
“Oh, that’s my home. When I landed, I had no idea how long I’d be here, and so I took vines and branches and built myself some shelter. Then I built another hut to store whatever food I could find. This hut over there is my church. That’s where I went to read the Bible and pray.”
The first officer noticed one other hut and said, “And what’s that?”
The castaway said, “That was my first church, but I didn’t care for the leadership, so I left.”
Since the early days of Adam and Eve disobeying God, playing the blame game, and getting kicked out of paradise, we human beings have had a rough time of it getting our act together.
The rules are pretty simple: Love God; love your neighbor; heck, love yourself, too!
But it’s always a fight. It’s always a struggle. Like Cain, we’re scared to death God loves “them” more than us, so rather than work on improving what we can, we simply get rid of the competition. We let the EGO get the better of us.
In Twelve Step programs, they say that EGO means to Edge God Out (E. G. O.)
That’s really what sin is. It’s edging God out. It’s like the fellow who shoves his way to the front of the line without so much as an , “Excuse me,” or “By your leave.” Somehow they think their time or their needs are more important than yours, so they throw elbows or shoulders.
Most of the time I let grace prevail, even though I know that when you give someone an inch they’ll take a mile and at some point you’ll have to draw a line. What we do, though, is we keep moving that line because we’re too tired to deal with it. We may show grace on the outside, while on the inside we’re still Caining Abel, if you catch my drift.
It’s not good to let this stuff eat at you. Ezekiel says, “If your neighbor is engaged in wickedness, you need to call them out on it. If you do and they change, all well and good. And if they don’t? That’s on them. But if you see bad stuff happening and ignore it, that’s on you!”
The problem, of course, is that we can become hypersensitive to right and wrong, or good and evil. We can become hypervigilant so that everything is under scrutiny.
Torah says, “You shall do no labor on the Sabbath – it’s a day of rest, set aside for you and God to spend time together.”
That makes sense. But then you get the rules about the rules. A woman shall not keep a needle in her apron because she might forget it’s the Sabbath and try mending her husband’s shirt.” or something like that.
The goal, of course, is to focus on our relationship with God; to be “holy” because God is holy; to be gracious, because God is gracious; to be loving, because God is loving.
The goal is to cultivate our relationship with God and with one another, and that’s a good thing. But we’re also human, and while being human means to be a reflection of the Divine, it also means we’re angels with dirty faces, like Adam and Eve.
We’re “sinners,” which means we fall short of where God wants us to be. That doesn’t mean we’re wicked, or evil, or dirty rotten scoundrels (although some of you may be – who am I to judge?). But we fall short.
We find ourselves at the checkout counter and, if you’re like me, when I have my 2 or 3 items to buy and go to the “15 or fewer items” lane, I COUNT every item the people in front of me have. I can’t help it. I like numbers. I like rules. I love that superior feeling you get when you see someone with 16 items. I don’t say anything, of course, because I’m a nice guy. BUT I KNOW WHO THEY ARE, AND I KNOW WHAT THEY’VE DONE! Eats away
One of the things our faith calls us to is self-reflection. Jesus never says it’s OK to sin. As humans, we’re going to sin. That’s a plain fact of life. We’re going to fall short. We’re going to let God down; we’re going to let our neighbor down; we’re going to let ourselves down, as well.
In the Gospel today, Jesus tells us what to do when our neighbor lets us down, when they sin against us, when they do us injury.
He says, “When that happens, go to them. Tell them. Work things out if you can.”
That’s all well and good, especially if you’re on the receiving end of that grievance. Basically, Jesus says, “Don’t go whining about it to your friends and neighbors. Talk to your friend about the problem.”
You can’t solve the problem if you go gossiping about people who offend you, or let you down. Too often people don’t really want to solve the problem. They want allies to stand with them as they bully their neighbors into submission.
So Jesus says, rather than take a little problem and blow it all out of proportion, deal with it directly. But be careful. You’re not God. I’m not God. Your neighbor’s not God. So we need to tread gently. We could be wrong. The issue could be a misunderstanding.
Since we are all sinners, since each of us falls short, it’s important to look at today’s lesson and realize that there are times I will be the offender (not just the offended); that I will be the one who falls short; that I will be the one who lets someone else down. So I need to be humble enough to listen when someone speaks.
A woman finds herself fighting with her boss, and her co-workers, and her family members, and her neighbors, and her fellow church-goers, she may have to pause a moment and ask, “Is the world really that full of jerks, or is there some other common denominator at work here creating such a ruckus?”
St. Paul reminds us in his letter to the Romans that we “owe one another nothing except to love one another, for those who love have fulfilled Torah.”
Note: Torah doesn’t just mean the Law of Moses. Torah is the story of God calling us out of slavery (whether to Egypt or Sin), and bringing us home (what we call “salvation”). So by loving, we’re living into who we are as the people of God – people who have been and are being delivered from our transgressions.
That’s our mission. That’s at the heart of the Gospel lesson today: God calling us to come closer, to come up higher, to climb into God’s lap. Even if we’re pitching a screaming fit, God invites us to come where God can hold us, and hug us, and quiet us down so that, if we listen closely, we can even hear God’s own heartbeat in that silence. “Where you crawl together, I am there.”
That is the mission of the Church. If you turn into your prayer book to page 855, you’ll see in the Catechism:
Q. What is the mission of the Church?
A. The mission of the Church is to restore all people to
unity with God and each other in Christ.
Q. How does the Church pursue its mission?
A. The Church pursues its mission as it prays and
worships, proclaims the Gospel, and promotes justice,
peace, and love.
Q. Through whom does the Church carry out its mission?
A. The church carries out its mission through the ministry
of all its members.
Jesus reminds us in the Gospel that in the life of the church, there will always be problems. There will always be issues where we struggle to know the right thing to do. Not everything is a Gospel issue to me, but it could be to you. So Jesus says, “Go; sit; listen; become one again.”
Some years ago Barb and I were living in Spokane; we got a call from my brother in law; my sister (Tina) worked at a butcher shop in Wilbur (a small town about an hour west of Spokane out on highway 2) and while cleaning the deli-meat slicer, she’d cut her finger off. She was rushed to Holy Family Hospital in Spokane, and after several hours, surgeons were able to reattach her finger - reconnecting blood vessels and nerve fibers, and muscles. Whatever they did, it worked. In time, her finger healed. It was a little shorter. It wasn’t quite as flexible as it had been. But the finger lived, because it was once again made part of the body.
It was literally: RE-MEMBERED.
That, to me, has always been an iconic image of what Jesus is talking about in the Gospel today. It’s not so much about Church Order or Problem Solving.
It’s about valuing one another so much that our desire is NOT to lose one another, NOT to cut one another off, but to recover one another in the Name of Christ Jesus, our Lord. When we break Bread and elevate the Cup, we remember what Jesus told us to do: Do THIS in RE-MEMBRANCE of me. He’s not talking about memorizing the service or the prayer book or the bible, or recalling the institution of the Eucharist.
He’s talking about placing your life and the life of your neighbor in the hands of the Great Surgeon, who skillfully puts us back together, even when we’ve fallen apart. Each of us is a valued member of the Body of Christ. AMEN
No comments:
Post a Comment