Conflict Redeemed

• Acts 2:14a,22-32
• 1 Peter 1:3-9
• John 20:19-31
• Psalm 16

As a pastor, one of the most critical parts of my job is to help people work through conflict.  Not that I’m always successful.  I am aware of relationships in our community where there is so much hurt and mistrust, and the conflicted parties are so deeply entrenched in their positions, that the most they can manage for each other is avoidance, and when needed, a chilly civility.   And there are questions that touch on our common life, where there are differences of opinion so pronounced, that we prefer not to talk about them.  We have to admit that it is a fact of life that, as the educator Parker Palmer once put it, “community is where you find the person you least want to live with,” and maybe the best we can hope for is to keep such conflicts from flaring into open hostility.  But the resurrection of Jesus offers a better hope than that. 

The story of Jesus is, after all, a story of conflict.  And at time of the Passover, the annual celebration of God’s decisive victory over the oppressors of the people, Jesus took the conflict to Jerusalem.  He brought his challenge to the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes, right into the heart of their stronghold—into the temple.  The gospels tell how as Jesus was teaching in the temple the ruling elite sent one representative after another to spar with him verbally, to try to back him down or trip him up--and how every time, their attacks blew back in their faces. 

Because Jesus turned each loaded question and devious insinuation into a subtle but devastating indictment of his opponents, of their cowardice, injustice and hypocrisy, their complicity with violence and idolatrous religion.  And with each of these encounters the crowd of on-lookers and their enthusiasm for Jesus and his teaching grew.  Until, fearing a total public relations disaster, no one dared ask him any more questions.

But the conflict didn’t end there.  Unable to take Jesus down publicly, the temple elite did what the powerful often do when they have lost their moral and political legitimacy.   They resorted to treachery and violence.   You know the story very well: how at supper Jesus told his disciples that one of them, his closest friends, would betray him to his death; how Judas Iscariot went out into the night, only to return later, leading the temple goons to the garden where Jesus used to go to pray; how he singled him out for them with a kiss.   You know how Jesus refused to fight, or to let his disciples fight for him, and how they scattered and fled as he was dragged away; how Peter followed, but when he was confronted, denied that he knew Jesus, not once, but three times.

You know this story so there’d really be no need to retell it if it were not for the fact that with the coming of Easter, that story so often disappears.  It is forgotten immediately, as if, in raising Jesus from the dead, God made the conflicts that led to his death irrelevant, or miraculously resolved them.   But such radical discontinuity between Holy Week and Easter is far from biblical.  Just look at Peter’s sermon in the Second Chapter of Acts.  It is a bold declaration that God has set Jesus of Nazareth free from the power of death, but it begins with an equally bold reminder to “you, my fellow Israelites,” that “you crucified this man, whom God attested to you with deeds of power, wonders, and signs, by the hands of those outside the law.” 

The Acts of the Apostles tells how the conflict that marked Jesus’ life and death doesn’t end with his rising from the dead, which itself only serves to prove that the conflict runs deeper, and its stakes are higher, than anyone previously thought.  In the resurrection, God’s Holy Spirit not only vindicates Jesus’ movement to renew Israel by a prophetic insurrection from below.  She also gives unprecedented power and universal scope to that movement, so that it breaks out across the world to challenge every “religion” that gives ideological cover to systems of exclusion and domination, and confronts the idols of the nations in the name of Israel’s God of creation, justice, healing and love.

But the Gospel of John tells us that before that can happen, the risen Christ has to reconcile his own community of disciples.  It is a traumatized community, not only because of the horrifying death of the teacher in whom they had placed such hope, but because the treachery of the ostensible leaders of their nation.  And one of their own inner circle aided and abetted that treachery, which they all passively acquiesced to out of fear.  That same fear still gripped them as they gathered for the evening meal on the first day of the week, and though one of them had not arrived, they locked the doors.  Who knows what premonitions of further betrayal haunted their minds as they thought of Thomas the Twin, out there somewhere as darkness fell on the city, doing who knows what, with who knows whom?

It is into the middle of this threatened little circle that the Lord came, bringing his peace.  He showed them the marks of betrayal on his body, and again said “Peace be with you.”  And they would need that peace when Thomas arrived.  We are used to thinking of Thomas as the one who doubted God, but it was not God whom Thomas doubted—it was his friends.  Maybe in the aftermath of seeing Jesus they were full of love and joy, and disbelief that they had ever doubted Thomas, but to him they seemed to be in the grip of a kind of group delusion.  Maybe he questioned why they would say that the Lord come to them when he was not there—what kind of game were they playing, and why didn’t it include him? 

My point is that we don’t know how Thomas’ doubt might have divided this already frail community, if the others had not received the Spirit of peace?  This peace is not simply an inner feeling.  It is an active power, the power to forgive.  The spiritual power of forgiveness, flowing from the crucified and risen Christ, is what breathed new life into the community of Jesus’ disciples, as it has ever since, again and again and again.  It is the power in which we are sent, as Jesus was sent, into inevitable conflict, to speak the word of God’s peace. 

It is also the power of discernment, because forgiveness can never be automatic.  It must be free, a decision given and received with eyes that see clearly the wounds that sin has made in the body of God.   But our standard of judgment must be Jesus himself: Jesus, who said “judge not, lest you be judged;” Jesus, who preferred agony on the cross to violence against those who misjudged him; Jesus, who sat down at supper with the one he knew would betray him and gave him bread and said, “this is my body, given for you.” 

Such forgiveness is hard to achieve, but simple to understand.  You just have to hold out your hand.  We are talking here about the difference between an open hand and a clenched fist.  The open hand is what Jesus presents to Thomas, when he shows himself at last, and Thomas understands that it is the hand of God.  This is a God who is not afraid of conflict, but lets us doubt, and disbelieve, and probe the painful places where the mere idea of God is not enough.  And if we don’t give up, but keep working through the conflict, a time comes when we find we are touching a living body. 

Our community is that body, a crucified body, risen out of conflict, bearing wounds.  And with that resurrection we were also given the Spirit of forgiveness, the power to make peace, to heal betrayal and come to trust each other again.  There is no more important work for us than to learn to use that gift.  Because it wasn’t given for our enjoyment, so we could congratulate ourselves on what a nice, warm, happy family we’ve become.  It was given to us as a mission; it is the Spirit in which we’ve been sent.      

Where murder comes from

• Deuteronomy 30:15-20
• 1 Corinthians 3:1-9
• Matthew 5:21-37
• Psalm 119:1-8

A couple of weeks ago, I was walking to the local supermarket to get something for my lunch.  And I’d just left the sidewalk and was crossing in front of the vehicle entrance to the parking lot, when a large white diesel pickup pulled in from the street behind me and to my left, and came to a stop.  I was already halfway across its path, so I just kept walking.  But a moment or two later, I heard a voice, now over my right shoulder, calling out “Hey, buddy!--“  Now you tell me—has anyone, anywhere, ever really benefited from a conversation that began “Hey, buddy--”?  Anyway, I stopped and turned to face the stocky man with a mustache and short gray hair peering at me through the window of the white truck.  I guess I was supposed to have altered my course or pace of walking in some way, because he proceeded to give a lecture in the most condescended tone, on the importance of “situational awareness” and of working together and using our common sense to insure that everyone gets where they’re going in the swiftest and safest possible way. 

And I stood there and listened, feeling the fury that began to boil in my chest and the steam-pressure building in my head.  But somehow, by the skin of my teeth, I managed not to explode.  When he had finished, I simply said, “Indeed.”  And we looked at each other for a second or two, and when it was clear that nothing more was forthcoming, he drove on to look for a parking spot and I walked into the store. 

But I was angry and humiliated, and still unsure what exactly I’d done to provoke him.  I told myself he was probably just having a bad day, or maybe was someone who goes through life with the experience that others are holding him back and getting in his way.  And I wish I could say that I softened toward him, and let the whole thing go.  But just last Thursday I was walking again through the same parking lot and it all flooded back again.  And I had a moment of vivid fantasy in which I told that man, “My ‘situational awareness’ tells me I’m minding my own business, and I’m being hassled by an arrogant [insert your own church-inappropriate epithet here].”

Of course I’m still glad that didn’t happen.  It would not have accomplished anything, and Jesus, in the Gospel of Matthew tells us that saying to someone, “you fool!” is comparable to murder.  Because anger, when it comes out as personal insult, and verbal aggression, only breeds more anger, and the escalating spiral of reaction can easily end in violence.    Now, I don’t think that Jesus is saying here that we shouldn’t have feelings, such as anger, or lust, or that we must feel guilty because we do.  But he is asking us to be responsible for those feelings, and to handle them with care, because they are powerful forces that can lead to disastrous consequences.

Jesus isn’t thinking here mainly in legal terms.  He is not adding a draconian new section to the religious penal code.   His main point is not that losing your temper or ogling somebody will land you in hell, but that mental, and verbal, and physical violence are all on the same continuum.  Murder is not radically different from calling the guy in the parking lot a jerk; but just a further step along the same road.  So it is not enough simply not to kill people, and then to imagine that we have satisfied God’s minimum requirements, and therefore everything is all is right with our souls.  We need to attend to the seemingly insignificant “lapses” and minor misdemeanors in our thoughts and conduct toward others, because they partake of the same attitudes that produce adultery and murder.

And while I recognize that the exaggerated rhetorical style of first-century moral exhortation can sound harsh to our tender modern ears, I want to emphasize that the point is not so much to make us fear punishment after we die, as to confront us with the real practical consequences of the things we think and say and do here and now.  To illustrate what I mean, I’d like to focus in on one little of piece of today’s long Gospel lesson, for closer study, the verse that says: “if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.”   Not there are words in the Greek text of this passage that are there for a reason, and have been lost in this translation, so let me tell what it literally says: “whoever calls his brother, ‘Raká’, (which is a Semitic word, meaning ‘dummy, fool,’ will be answerable to the Sanhedrin.  And whoever says to his brother ‘you Moré’ which is a Greek word that means ‘dummy, fool,” will be liable to the Gehenna of fire.”

So the first obvious question is, why the redundancy?  Why use two different insults in different languages that mean the same thing?  And why talk about two different punishments for the same, relatively minor, insult?  Here I think it helps us to know that most scholars agree that the Gospel of Matthew was written in a congregation of Jewish Christians which had also begun to incorporate Gentiles.  It was, in other words, a bilingual and bicultural community of faith.  And you could say that for someone who was culturally Jewish, who might be inclined to shout “Raká” when he got angry, the worst imaginable consequence of bad behavior would be to be called before the Sanhedrin, the supreme council and court of the Jewish nation.  Which is, incidentally, what the Gospels say happened to Jesus at the end of his life.

But in the Greek cultural and religious world, where you would call someone you thought was stupid “Moré,” there was a well-established belief in the afterlife, and in places of reward and punishment awaiting the human soul.   By the way, there is a Greek word for such a place, “Hades,” that shows up elsewhere in the New Testament.  But Matthew’s outlook is still predominantly Jewish, and the image he comes up for such a place of torment is on earth, a spot called Gehenna, which was a ravine outside Jerusalem where they took the city’s garbage to be burned.  So, if you put these two parallel statements together, they seem to being saying, “Whatever background you come from doesn’t matter—just think of the worst place you could end up: that’s the direction you’re heading in when you start to call your brother or your sister a dummy, or a fool.”

And I think there’s another reason for this redundancy in the Gospel.  Because trying to live in a bilingual, bicultural community is not easy.  It is not hard to imagine that there were frequent occasions when the attitudes and behaviors of the Gentiles in Matthew’s congregation seemed idiotic to the Jews.  And vice versa.  The words “Raká” and “Moré” might have been on the tips of people’s tongues fairly often.  Which is why Jesus does not stop at instructing us to be careful what we say, lest we all end up together in a hot, smoky place that smells like garbage.  He continues to urge on us the paramount importance of reconciliation. 

This is the true meaning of the righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees—that we do not merely stop short of killing each other, or even of insulting one another, but that we learn how to make peace.  Because we are going to have anger and lust and all kinds of other perfectly natural human impulses, but our task in community is to learn how to deal with those impulses without them erupting into road rage, or ethnic slurs, or sexual harassment.  And it is to learn how to repair the damage, as far as we are able, when our impulses get out of hand.  Which requires God’s help, the kind of help that Jesus came to bring us, when he took a stand for the inherent worth, in the eyes of God, of every human being, no matter how despised and marginal in the eyes of disdainful human beings.  Because when we can prevent our aggressive, instinctual passions from blinding us to each other’s essential dignity, there is still hope for our own. 

          

Light of the World

• Isaiah 58:1-9a, [9b-12]
• 1 Corinthians 2:1-12, [13-16]
• Matthew 5:13-20
• Psalm 112:1-9, (10)

At the beginning of last week our Bishop issued the following statement, which you can find on the website of the Diocese of Northern California.  I have also posted it to St. John’s Facebook page:

Dear Friends in Christ:

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, President of the Union for Reform Judaism, recently said that …[the President’s] executive order [banning refugees and Muslim travelers] "will be remembered by history together with the Dred Scott decision and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II as governmental actions most antithetical to American values. We will resist its implementation by any means available to us."

To which I say, Amen. And in my judgment it is antithetical to Christian values also. I invite you to join me in opposing it, and in making your opposition known. I say this in the hope that together we might uphold core principles above mere politics.

Yours in Christ,

+Barry

Now, I love and respect our Bishop.  I am also bound by the vows of my priestly ordination to be guided by his pastoral direction and leadership.  What’s more, I do oppose the executive order, for reasons which I would be happy to explain to you later, if you really care.  But the hard part for me in the Bishop’s statement was that bit about making my opposition known.  I have, in fact, made it known--to the White House and to our representatives in Congress.  That was easy.  But when I read those words of the Bishop, the first people I thought of were not in Washington, D.C. but here in Petaluma.  I thought of you people, and the fact that I would be preach to you again today.

So I went to the lectionary to study the passages appointed for this week, I read, “Shout out, do not hold back!  Lift up your voice like a trumpet!”  I read “No one lights a lamp and hides it under a bushel basket, but they put it on the lampstand, to give light to all in the house.”  And I kind of groaned a little to myself and thought “Lord, not again.”  Because the truth is, I didn’t want to talk about the Executive Orders.  It wasn’t just that I was worried about offending people, though that was part of it.  I know that there are some among you who voted for this President.  In recent months I’ve had one person tell me on the way out of church on Sunday that what I said in my sermon that morning was dead wrong.  I’ve heard from another that the Episcopal Church has moved too far to the right (though I think he meant to say the left), and he won’t be coming on Sunday anymore.  I’ve had people voice their concern about politics in the pulpit, and others walk out while I’m still preaching. 

And these have been painful moments for me, because I care about those people, and I want them to like me.  I’ve made an effort to follow up with them, to let them know that their concerns are important, and that I hope we’ll keep the conversation going.  I like to think that they’re still my friends.  And having a difference of opinion is not the worst thing that can happen between people, so as I was thinking about preaching today the possibility that someone might disagree with me was not my biggest fear.   What really troubled my heart is my growing sense that it is no longer possible in this country to say anything substantive about public affairs, without appearing to be, in the words of our Bishop, “merely political.” 

Bishop Beisner in his message seeks to appeal to what he calls “core principles,” but the fix we are now in is that we can’t even agree on what the core principles are.  We can point to many causes for this, and none of the pat explanations that blame on one group in society or another for the corrosion of our moral consensus is really persuasive.  Nevertheless, it is tempting to try.   And so, while there has been no shortage of prophetic voices in our land, calling for a truly honest, searching, and inclusive conversation about what constitutes the good life, and the just society, and we can get there at last, those voices have become harder and harder to hear.  Because above them, threatening to drown them out, has been the ceaseless ideological warfare, waged in the field of mass communications with the weapons of propaganda.   

This ideological conflict has become what we mean when we use the word “politics,” which has become a dirty word.  It has not only overtaken our public institutions, and the media, and our schools and universities.  It has poisoned our family dinner tables and has divided our churches.  Everywhere it seeks, not to find the common ground of values that we share, but to force us to take sides.  So it is no wonder that we look for a refuge, for a place that is not a battleground.  It is only natural to want a language to converse in that is innocent of “politics.”  And many of us seek that sanctuary here, in the church, and in her religious language. 

But here it has to be said that the church does not offer a space that is purely private and subjective, where we can be concerned only for ourselves: for our intimate relationships; our personal hopes and dilemmas; our imaginative and emotional experience.   Because the church keeps bringing us back to the language of the Bible.   

And Jesus does not say “you are the light of the mind,” or “you are the light of the heart, shining deep within.”  He says “you are the light of the world.”  He does not say, “you are the sweetness of heaven.”  He says “you are the salt of the earth.”  And the “you” in these sayings is plural.  He is talking about who we are, and what we do, together—a city on a hill.   Just in case we somehow missed the point of the Beatitudes, and think that Jesus spares us the hard and humbling work of hungering and thirsting for justice, of giving and receiving mercy and making peace, he directs our attention back to the law and the prophets; to those books of the Bible that have everything to do with the practical realities of creating a moral community that reflects the goodness and compassion of God. 

Isaiah 58 is a perfect illustration of what Jesus didn’t want us to forget.  Here the prophet tells the people that they cannot restore their nation solely by what we would think of as religion.  It is not enough for them to fast and to pray.  When Isaiah says that the fast that God chooses is to share our bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into our homes, he gives us language that cuts through our ideological defenses.  If we leave off thinking about whose fault it is that the poor are homeless, or who else should be responsible for giving them shelter; if we ask ourselves instead what it would take: what kind of healing of my faith in the restorative powers of community would enable me to open my door, and give a homeless person a place at my dinner table, and a bed in the guest room for the night, we begin to recover our imagination of the core values of a humane world. 

The highest of these values it is the giving human heart, wounded by sorrowing love.  This is the world’s center of moral gravity, and it finds its highest expression in Jesus.   It is from this center that Jesus calls us to be righteous, with a righteousness exceeding that of those paragons of ideological conflict, the Scribes and the Pharisees.  It is not the righteousness of being satisfied that if everyone agreed with my opinion the world’s problems would be solved, but more like that of Paul, who came to the church in Corinth in “weakness and fear and much trembling.” 

And yet Paul knew that in Christ, crucified, he’d found a wisdom that the rulers of this age could not understand.  So we also, who are buried with Christ in baptism that we might share in his resurrection, take our wobbling stands, and lift our quavering voices.  And so we give light to the world, even though we know our own minds are darkened with ignorance and sin, even though we know that the source of the light is far beyond us, and if we tried to look at it directly, without Jesus interceding, we’d go blind.