5/10/20
1 Corinthians 1:10-18
Mark 12:1-17
It is not easy being a person of faith in this
time. I would say this is the case in
many different ways. We hear about
Christians being judgmental, we hear about Christians being really stupid. We hear about Christians doing really dumb
things, and personally, I find myself embarrassed by many of the other people
of faith who call themselves Christians.
For example, you’ve probably all heard about the pastors in California
who sued the governor for his “shelter in place” ruling because they feel this
restricts their ability to worship together.
This kind of non-feeling, refusal to care for the people in their
communities and the people around the world embarrasses me and makes me afraid
to call myself a Christian in some places.
And this behavior is frankly just the least of the embarrassing things
that people of faith have said, done, or proclaim in the name of a loving God
that I find horrifying, unkind, and certainly unloving.
But the truth is that all of us, ALL of us who claim to
follow Christ are in the process of becoming Christian. What I mean is that none of us, not one, has
perfectly learned yet to love God with all our hearts, soul and minds, let
alone learned to love our neighbor as ourselves. None of us has yet perfected healing one
another with our listening, with our touch, with our love. None of us remembers in every moment to thank
God, and to be God’s completely faithful servant. We are all learning to feed the hungry, love
each other, see each other person as the brother or sister that they are, give
beyond ourselves. Becoming a Christian,
having a relationship with God, going to church every week: no matter how far
we are on our journey, none of these things makes us perfect - none of these
things makes us as Christ-like as we strive to become, once and for all. But they are all a start, a part of our
journey as Christians.
We continue to strive and struggle to be loving, giving
people. As Jesus himself said, he did
not come for those who are well, he came for those of us who are not yet
there. Church, faith, is not a haven for
the righteous. It is a place where
people who know they are limited and that they have failings come together in
mutual support, in love, in service to one another and to the greater
community. Throughout my life I have had
many different people tell me that they don’t go to church because of the
hypocrisy they find there. When pushed
on what that means, they tell me that the people they met in church were like
everyone else. They weren’t better than
other people. They made mistakes, did
things wrong, did not always even see that they did things wrong. Sometimes they were unkind, sometimes they
were unloving. As a result, people
stopped attending church. I have to
admit, I find this responses very confusing.
Of course, we are not better than others, and you will find unkindness
and lack of love everywhere. We are here
because we are on a journey, striving to love God and one another. We will never reach that perfection, and,
truthfully, neither will they.
This struggle to be whole, this struggle to be
Christ-like, this struggle to love and be in relationship with one another is
not anything new for Christians of any age.
The passage we read today from 1 Corinthians addresses that. While our
struggle to become Christian takes many forms, in this passage Paul is talking
about the challenges Christians had at the very beginning, and that we still
have, to be in loving relationships even
within our Christian community. We hear
Paul admonishing a congregation for failing to get along with one another, for
fighting with each other. Paul’s
solution is simply to tell them all to agree with one another. But we know that
is not so easy. Even before Paul, we see in the gospel lessons for today people
of faith who were struggling with Jesus.
And Jesus is telling us parables of conflict, of anger, among people who
should have been loving to one another, should have seen their dependence and
connection to one another, should have shared, and been kind and loving to
those sent to collect for the master.
But they couldn’t. They
didn’t. And the same remains true for us
today.
I read an article this week by Karoline Lewis in which
she wrote,
“We are no strangers
to the kind of division in communities of which Paul speaks -- racial,
denominational, and political. And our strategies for negotiating these
divisions leave much to be desired. It often comes down to choosing sides, as
if the spectrum between the two poles did not exist. It would be better if we
only chose sides. Instead, we choose which side we are on and then, to make
ourselves feel better or justified about our decision, we proceed to suspect,
demonize, and tear down the other side. But as Elias Chacour (Father Chacour is
the Archbishop Emeritus of the Melkite Catholic Church for Akko, Haifa,
Nazareth, and all Galilee, an advocate for non-violence, working toward
reconciliation between Arabs and Jews with whom our group had a chance to meet)
says, “The one who is wrong is the one who says ‘I am right.’”
We are also no
strangers to the kind of division that the gospel provokes. And sometimes we
forget just how divisive the gospel can be. Choosing regard over rejection,
respect over diminution, love over hate, peace over conflict is not as easy as
we hope it could be, as we wish it would be. It seems like it should be easy --
and that’s the problem. Why is it that we find it so difficult to make what
appears to be a rather obvious choice? A choice for love? What stands in our
way? What is at stake for us that we are reluctant to admit or to say out
loud?”
She went on to talk about a group that she is with of
Palestinians and Israelis who’ve lost loved ones in the conflict and she said
one of the fathers of those who had died said this: “No wall, not matter how
high, can stop two kinds of people, one determined suicide bomber and the one
determined peacemaker.” http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=4249
Paul and Jesus are both calling us to be the peacemakers
who cannot be stopped. But we know from
personal experience that getting along with one another is hard.
Truthfully, even hearing one another accurately is not
easy. Most of you, no doubt are familiar
with the childhood game, which we called “operator” when I was a kid. A group sits in a circle and one person
whispers a message to the person on their right. That person then passes that message on to
the person on his or her right. The
message passes all around the circle until the last person finally repeats the
message out loud. It has usually become
something very different from what it was originally. As this simple child-hood game shows us, even
hearing clearly the words of one another can be challenging.
Hearing
the message within our words is even harder.
I have found myself reflecting during this time when there is more quiet
for reflection, on a relationship I’ve had with someone I’ve known now for 30
years. This is someone who simply never
understands what I say to him. I will
think I am telling him the sky is beautiful and he will become offended
thinking I am telling him that he is not beautiful. I keep trying to have conversations with him,
but he is always offended by what I say, and always insistent that I am being
uncaring with my words. I don’t know why
my words affect him like this. I will
probably never know. But I know that communication
is just hard. Today is mother’s day, and
we know that even within our families, it can be so hard to hear and understand
one another. Communication is
challenging. We are all watching this
service today because we believe in a marvelous, amazing, wonderful God who has
called us to be here, whatever that looks like for you, to be on our spiritual
journeys, to be in a state of prayer and praise together. But that wonder, that gift, that awe does not
mean that it suddenly becomes easy for us to really communicate, to understand
one another, or to then choose to be in relationship with one another. Our churches have struggled with
understanding one another and with divisions between us from the
beginning. That continues as we move
through time.
I’m also not convinced that all disagreements are bad
things. When we can be in the place of
hearing the different opinions, hopes, dreams of one another, we can grow from
the experience. Without those challenges,
growth is not as forthcoming. Hearing
only our own thoughts and feelings, we can fail to see the amazing places God
would show us and move us. But getting
to that place where we can hear those differences and share them is not
easy.
I have to admit, even for pastors, though part of my job
is to love the entire congregation and to be able to listen, hear, and support
every person in a congregation who seeks that support, there have been times when
this has not always been easy. It has
not always been easy for me to be in a community of very differently minded
people. And it can be especially hard
when those differently minded people are very vocal about those opinions, and
sometimes are unkind in the expression of those opinions, as some people in our
churches tend to be. For a year, many
years ago, I served as an interim music minister in a congregation that was in
a difficult place: many parishioners were elderly and dying, the congregation
was very diverse in ways that brought both gifts and, in their case, much
conflict into the fellowship, they were a redevelopment church that wasn’t
quite ready to make the radical changes necessary to keep it alive, and they
had gone through a series of challenging relationships with previous pastors
and music directors. Because of all they
had been through, they did not trust others easily and were especially suspicious
of people they didn’t know, especially if they had been hand-picked by outsiders
to the congregation, and had been “assigned,” as I was, to serve in that
particular church. When I was hired on
there was, predictably, a lot of hostility thrown my direction. One example that might illustrate the point
- I came on board about a month and a
half before Easter. At our first choir rehearsal,
I brought out Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus to see if it was an Easter possibility
and to get a sense of the abilities of the choir. We ran through the piece one time, after
which I began to make suggestions, as choir directors are supposed to do, on
ways we might improve our performance.
But just as I got the first sentence out of my mouth, one of the choir
members demanded of me “How old are you?”
Stunned by the interruption, I answered that I was 30, which at the
time, I was. She responded, “Well we’ve
been singing this longer than you’ve been alive so we don’t need you telling us
how to do it!” A fine start to our
friendly Christian community relationship. As I said there was a great deal of hostility
and it came from several corners. It was
not long before I could identify my self-appointed “assistant choir directors”
and could count on their “suggestions” and other comments as one might count on
the structure of any organized group.
But I also began to try to befriend the especially hostile members of
the choir. And, also predictably, their
hostility lessened in almost direct proportion to how much time I took to hear
them, how accurately I listened, and how deeply they felt I understood. Unfortunately, there remained a couple women
that would not let me in. In the end,
their continued hostility probably formed part of my decision to leave at the
end of that first year, though I was an interim music director and at the time
I told myself I was leaving because the interim work was finished. I look back on that experience with
sadness. It was hard to get close to
these women. It was hard to want to get
close to them in light of their hostility.
But I wish I had tried a little harder.
As their personal stories were revealed to me by others in the church, I
learned that they were in a lot of pain, pain it was not easy for anyone,
within or without of the church, to break through. But in that painful place, these parishioners
needed others to hear them, they needed friendly caring faces to acknowledge
them, they needed someone to say, “even when you hurt me, I still love you,
accept you as my sister and will stand with you.” Instead, I allowed their anger and hostility
to drive me out, and in so doing, I added, I learned later, another layer to
their feelings of abandonment and pain.
Even in Christian
community there will be times when we cannot work through differences and find
we have to worship and love God in separate places. But we are called to love and to work at
wholeness in all our relationships, no matter how they end, with everything we
have. Perhaps if I had worked harder, if we had worked harder, even with my
leaving, there might have been healing that happened for myself, these women
and the community. Perhaps, had we worked
harder, we might have seen God’s action in this situation, God’s movement in
each other, God’s face in one another.
I don’t think that we are required to always agree with
one another. Sometimes being in
relationship with each other looks like agreeing to disagree after we have
heard and loved one another. Sometimes
being in Christian fellowship will mean we have to work, searching even harder
for solutions that are acceptable to everyone involved, despite our
differences. But God is in the challenging
people of this world and in their work, as much as God might be present in our
own work. God loves those we do not
understand as much as God loves us. And
God calls us to love and to be in community with all of our neighbors, even
those who make us see red, those who hurt us, those whom we feel we cannot agree
with. Maybe God presents God-self most firmly in people we struggle to hear and
know. For in that struggle we grow in
our patience, we grow in our ability to see God as bigger than we knew God to
be before, we grow in our ability to love and therefore we grow in our process
of becoming Christian. It is part of our
Christian call to sit in those uncomfortable places with those people who anger
us and look for where God’s face and God’s words are even in their words, even
in their messages.
Brian Peterson said, “True love is not measured by how
good it makes us feel: it would be better to say that the measure of love is
its capacity for tension and disagreement without division.”
Psalm 27 ends with the words, “‘Seek God’s face!’ Your face, O God, I will seek.” In the end this is our call. When we seek God’s face in each other, even
in those we struggle to love and understand, our struggles with one another
will be different. For in listening to
each other, we open the space for God’s words to come in, for God’s face to
shine, for God’s help in our journey to become Christian. Amen.
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