November 12, 2006
Sermon Title: The Twist
There are two things that can happen when a minister preaches on
Stewardship Sunday: either the congregation stays away in droves, or
the congregation just ignores the sermon, because it usually ends up as
an uncomfortable plea for money. Almost every congregation goes
through a stewardship drive—some more extensive than others, and as
you will see, we’ve gone for the simple route this time out. In the end, I
think we know what we need to do to continue our support of this place
and its ministries, and so the invitation is already out there…give what
you can, maybe a little bit more than last year, and also consider doing
something else, something that is just as important as giving your
money—consider how you will serve the church this year, in terms of
time and talents, because I think we’re going to grow this year, both
spiritually and numerically, and we’re going to need some help doing it—
actually we’re going to need YOUR help, and so consider filling out
BOTH sides of the card you’re going to be receiving in the mail this
week, if you haven’t already.
But before we go there, I want to do something else today, something we
preacher types don’t usually do on Stewardship Sunday. I want to share
with you a different way of understanding what it means to give, what it
means to come to the temple, to come to this place, and give—because
stewardship is obviously not just about our time, about serving on the
committees, working in Sunday School, or giving a small, large, and in-
between amount of money to the work we do in this place. Stewardship
is bigger than even money and time, and I think there is clue here from
Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ words some thousands of years ago about
what the Christ thinks about what it really means to come to this place, to
come to this temple of sorts, and give of our lives. This passage that we
just heard a few moments ago comes from that most familiar of places in
the Gospel of Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount, and the way that
Matthew shapes the material he has about Jesus teachings is to
frontload these three chapters with those famous beatitudes—“blessed
be the peacemakers, blessed be the pure of heart,” and so on—and
then Matthew has Jesus confronting his listeners with the problem of the
Jewish law, those rules that seemed to regulate every aspect of ancient
Jewish life. In considering the law, Jesus radicalizes the teachings of his
Jewish faith—he doesn’t undo them so much as he gets to the heart of
those laws, and in our passage for today, he does exactly that with the
issue of murder.
I want to point out that he does this radicalization by saying something
like “you have heard that the rules are so and so…” and then you hear
Jesus doing something different by expanding the meaning behind the
law. He issues a challenge to his first century listeners by saying that
they don’t quite get the full meaning of these laws they try hard to follow,
and he does that by saying something like “but I say to you that you
should look at it this way…” And it goes on like for most of this chapter
from this point on, and you can then easily see the set-up for his
teachings—he offers the particular law everyone knows of by beginning
with “you have heard” and then goes off and shares his understanding
of how we ought to actually practice that law, “but I say to you…” So, as
we read in the passage, Jesus doesn’t just think that the commandment
against murders is ONLY about the killing of another human being—he
thinks that if we fail to realize that murder can happen in our own hearts,
that we can murder a sister or a brother within our soul when we remain
angry and bitter with them, we could be in the same danger of
punishment as an actual murderer. Its interesting that translators of this
and most recent Bible translations of the Bible put the word “hell” here in
this text, when, in fact, the actual Greek word is not referring to a spiritual
place of where people are believed to be divinely punished, but the
Greek word points to an actual place called Gehenna, which was a valley
south of Jerusalem that was associated with some sort of a pagan fire
ritual, and that somehow became associated with a place of
punishment—Jesus never really spoke alot about hell, or even about
heaven, since he, like most Jews of his day didn’t seem too enthralled
with the questions of the afterlife, as the church would later become in its
history. But still, Jews around Jesus’ time were just starting to begin to
think about the afterlife in general, and they somehow associated
punishment in the afterlife with that valley south of Jerusalem, where non-
Jews practiced their religion, perhaps with some sort of spectacular
burning rituals that scorched the valley and made the whole valley itself
seem as if it was on fire.
That was just an aside, mind you, because the whole point of this
passage is not about that place of punishment as Jews in Jesus’ day
might have understood it: the point of much of chapter 5 of Matthew
seems to be about deepening the understanding of what it means to be
truly ethical, what it means to be a good person, and Jesus keeps
pushing his listeners, challenging them with an understanding that goes
beyond just refraining from murder or adultery or some other
commandment. He wants them to attend to their hearts and to the work
they are called to do in this world, which is to love others as God has
loved them. And so in this text we now find an example of how to live a
life beyond the rules, beyond the “thou shall not’s” that we often think
form the bulk of every religion, including, sadly enough, our own
Christian religion. I think Jesus says something like this to his ancient
listeners: “if you show up at the temple to do your religious duty by
offering your sacrifices and giving your gifts to help support the work of
the priests and to maintain the temple, and you suddenly remember that
you and a family member or a friend have had a falling out and you’ve
stayed angry at that person, if you’ve continued to “murder” them in your
heart, then leave the gift before the alter and reconcile with your sister
and brother, whether they be family, friend, or stranger, and afterwards
come back to complete the work of giving your gift to God.” I mean, its
pretty simple, really—its just a reminder that what we put on either side
of that commitment card you’ll be receiving by mail in the coming days is
not enough in God’s eyes—something else is asked of us, in addition to
our gift at the temple, something even more difficult than time and talent
is asked of us, and that difficult thing is a change of heart on our part—
that is the twist in these “you have heard,” and ‘but say to you” passage
in chapter 5—there is something more than the rules that is required of
us, more than being a good church member who gives a lot of time, or
who gives a lot of money, or who gives both. We are asked to reconcile,
to seek peace with those we have harmed or who have harmed us, and
we are asked to be the one who initiates the process of reconciliation, we
are asked to leave to temple to go after them. Maybe it means saying I’
m sorry for something I did, or something I didn’t do—and the grace of it,
of course, is that forgiveness can be a one-way thing, because it is just
like grace—we don’t get grace because we want it or have asked for it—
we get grace because God has chosen to give it to us, whether we
wanted it or not. But knowing you are forgiven can set you and me free—
anyone who has been forgiven knows the power of simply KNOWING that
they’ve been forgiven by someone they’ve harmed and how that
forgiveness can be the start something new for both the forgiven and the
forgiver.
I’ve been thinking a lot this need for reconciliation in my own life this past
week, and how hard it is to forgive and to apology and ask forgiveness.
Sometimes its easier than other times, as I’ve found this past week. This
past week Douglas and I got a new puppy from the South Haven SPCA,
and so we’ve been dealing with our newly blended household of three
cats and one new puppy. And Chloe, which is the puppy’s name, has
been desperately trying to interact with the three cats who simply don’t
know what to do with her—there has been a lot of hissing, a lot of raised
fur on the cats whenever the puppy comes near, and whenever the poor
puppy comes too near, then the cat’s claws come out. The cats are
very, very bitter about this turn of events, and you can sense they haven’
t quite forgiven us for disturbing their relative peace by introducing a new
friend into THEIR household! So, its clear that in the coming weeks we’
re going to have to become reconciled with our pets, to make good with
them for disturbing their home.
But, on a much more serious note, I had also wondered why I had been
putting off writing this particular sermon until Friday—and I think I now
know at least one of the reasons: I had wanted to put off my own need to
reconcile with someone I had done wrong some years ago—someone in
Los Angeles, actually, whom I had disagreed with, but had done so in
such a wrong, mean, even unfair way that I am still haunted by my
actions, even now. I haven’t change my mind about our disagreement,
but I’m disturbed by HOW I disagreed with him over the issues. I’ve been
putting it off, my attempt to reconcile with him, because my pride has
been in the way, and I don’t want there to be a confusion between my
apology for the WAY I disagreed with him with the idea that we now
agree with each others—I suspect we still don’t. That’s excuse is
pathetic, actually, because who really cares about the issue itself—in
reality, the only thing God seems to care about is my relationship with
that person, not about who was right or wrong on the matter we were
disagreeing about. I know better…but I wish I didn’t know…and so much
of this for me is letting go of my need to be “right” about this issue. But
yet God has chosen to let go of being right about the things I’ve done
wrong in favor of grace and reconciliation with me, and so maybe I need
to do the same. And if God loves me so much as to love me as I am,
flawed and sometimes prideful, maybe the way to love God back is to
love people where they are at, not where I want them to be or maybe
where they need to be—maybe the way to worship God in the temple or
the church is making things right elsewhere, in another place outside the
temple, outside this church.
I think the reason why we are asked to make go back to our brother and
sister we have harmed or who we believe has harmed us, before we offer
our gifts to God is because its hard to enter into our sacred places with
joy if we have unfinished business elsewhere, if we’re distracted by a
personal war which we have yet to make our peace in. In the end, God
wants all of us, God wants all of our attention in those moments when we
find ourselves in the temple, in the church. And when we decide to do it,
to make our peace with another human being, it really can set us free to
be fully here, in this place, ready to give away all of our gifts to God.
There is something about making your peace with another human being,
maybe even making peace with part of your own past that can change
our lives for the best, and can set us free, finally free, from the burden of
that scarred relationship or painful past.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie The Color Purple, based on
Alice Walker’s incredible book. Shug Avery is a blues singer who has
become estranged from her minister father because she decided to sing
secular, non-Gospel music. Shug decides to come back to her
hometown and is staying with a friend, away from her family home. One
Sunday morning she feels like singing and she goes down to the local
juke joint and starts belting out her signature song to a small, but happy
crowd, singing that song had made her famous as blues singer. The
music drifts back towards her father’s church on this Sunday morning,
where the Shug’s father finds himself preaching, ironically enough, on
the Prodigal Son. In response to this blues song coming from the juke
joint, someone in the choir prompts the rest of the choir and the
congregation to sing the old African-American spiritual God Might Be
Trying to Tell You Something and as the congregation becomes louder,
the folks in juke joint begin to hear them. And then you see the folks in
the juke joint, including the band, led by Shug, making their way towards
the church, joining the church choir and congregation in singing that old
moving spiritual. As she enters into her father’s church, she comes up to
him and puts her arms around him, full of emotion and obvious pain, and
she says to him, “See, daddy, even sinners have soul.” And slowly her
father, so moved by this homecoming, returns the embrace of his
daughter. The old Negro spiritual was true, wasn’t it? God was really
trying tell everyone something—Shug, her father, the people in the
congregation and the people in the juke joint, sinners all—God was
trying to tell them that what really matters in this world is reconciliation,
the healing of the breaks within our relationships, and tending to those
relationships rather than tending to what we think is absolutely right or
wrong in this world.
So, what if we did something like that here before we came back to offer
our gifts before God next Sunday? What if we decided to do what Shug
and that person in the temple that Jesus speaks of did? What if we
finished our unfinished business with others that we’ve hurt or been hurt
by or maybe even both? At least, we did what we could do from our end
of the relationship. Maybe I need to write a letter to that guy in LA and
say I’m sorry for the way I acted in our disagreement, that I was wrong for
the tone and tenor of the way I disagreed with him, before I make my own
pledge to this congregation, before I put down what I am committing
myself to, both financially and spiritually. I don’t know about you, but I’ve
got unfinished business, because I know that God wants all of me—my
money, my time, and most importantly, my heart, which, ironically means I
need to tend to the hearts of other people who I have some broken
relationships with. And I’ve got make things up to some cats as well. So,
I challenge you to do what I am going to challenge myself with doing
during these coming days and weeks, before the new year, which is to
add another element to our considerations about the ways we are going
to give to this church in the upcoming year, and that other element is
doing what that person in the temple did that Jesus spoke of—make it
right, make it right, at least from our end, and then come back here and
respond to God’s love and forgiveness of you and me by giving our gifts
to God as generously as we can, and we can do that because our hearts
are freer and we will have become freer, and we would have heard what
God has been trying to tell us, that what is asked of us, in response to
the great gift of love we’ve received through Christ, that what is asked of
us is all of us, every bit and fiber of who we are. May it be so. Amen.
