Monday, September 07, 2020

"To Bind Up Our Wounds"

Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”

 

 

 


This morning’s Gospel reading has a very familiar ring to this recovering lawyer. It lays out a 3 step procedure for resolving disputes within a church. The process is designed to reconcile differences which hopefully will result in the reintegration of those who have run afoul of the community. Failing that, it provides a means for communities to police their ranks and remove those who disrupt them.

 


Matthew urges those who have been harmed by others to “
Point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.”          But, as is often the case, those confronted with the harm they have caused others are not always receptive to hearing their failings pointed out to them. Denial is always more than a river in Egypt.

 And so the writers of Matthew lay out a procedure to resolve the conflict within community: Try talking with the wrongdoer along with two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, bring them before the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, kick them out.

Those familiar with Hebrew Scripture will readily recognize this legal procedure. The requirement for three witnesses is right out of the Torah. As is often their custom, the writers of Matthew have dipped directly into the inkwell of Jewish scripture to write their gospel, this passage coming directly from the book of Deuteronomy.

 


 A Pattern That Transcends Time and Culture

If you’re thinking this really doesn’t sound much like Jesus, you’re right. And there is a good reason for that: This simply isn’t Jesus talking to us. It’s the early Jesus movement speaking to itself. 

The key giveaway here is the reference to a church. Jesus was not a Christian and there will be no church as we know it for another couple of centuries after Jesus has died. The gospel of Matthew is a work of the second generation of the Jesus movement living in the period following the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by the Romans in 70 CE.

What had begun with Jesus of Nazareth as a Jewish messianic movement had become an increasingly Gentile body which was now evolving into a separate religion. Not surprisingly, this evolutionary process was marked by conflict. 

The Jesus movement would find itself increasingly at odds with the Jewish synagogues from which they were emerging. Before it was all over, the Jesus followers would find themselves expelled from those synagogues and alienated from their former coreligionists. The Gospel of Matthew is rife with the bitterness which marks this parting of the ways.

So why did the canonizers of the Christian scriptures include these passages in this gospel? If Jesus did not actually say these words, why attribute them to him? And why continue to read them in our lectionaries all these years later?


I suggest that the reason this passage is included is because Matthew knew it had something to say to people of faith in every age that we need to hear. Despite the myth that Reformers spun of a golden age before the Catholic Church corrupted it when all Christians believed the same things and got along famously, in fact a wide range of understandings of what it means to follow Jesus has marked our tradition from its very beginning. And so, not surprisingly, divisiveness and schism have also been an important part of our history from its outset. Indeed, we need go no further than our own parish’s long struggle with the local diocese to know that first hand. 


Moreover, such conflicts are hardly relegated to churches. We live in the most fiercely polarized time in our nation’s history since the Civil War. Many of us have stopped speaking to those whom we have confronted privately to no avail and then publicly with as many witnesses as might encounter our exchanges online. Our social media these days is rife with urgent messages to “unfriend me if you disagree.” So there is a reason that this passage from Matthew was included in the Christian canon. It speaks to a very human pattern of behavior that exceeds both time and culture.

St. Paul knew those conflicts well as the reading from his letter to the Romans today reveals. It is consistent with much of what we hear from St. Paul in his letters to the developing Christian communities. His repeated message often boils down to something like this: Be nice to one another. Act like you love one another even if you have to work at it. Show others respect even if you deeply disagree on issues you both consider to be fundamental. And, remember, others are watching.   

Bear in mind that if St. Paul felt the need to tell his communities to act like mature adults, you can bet it’s because they were failing to do that.


His words today are striking: “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.”

That last line is worth repeating: Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefor love is the fulfilling of the law. When love of our neighbor is our ultimate concern, it supersedes any differences we might have with them. The dignity of their person becomes the bottom line in the way we will respond to them.


Love That Runs Deeper Than Differences


My Dad died about four years ago. My Father and I rarely saw eye to eye on a number of things, not the least of which was politics. Toward the end of his life I spent a lot of time with him over at our family home in Bushnell discussing genealogy, his medical treatment and his estate which I would eventually administer. In his later years Daddy had become a Fox aficionado.  Now I have never had a lot of time I was willing to devote to the fare served up on Fox. So I began to take a book with me to read and a set of earphones to listen to meditation music to drown out the noise of the television.

It was only after a couple of visits that I suddenly realized one night that my Dad had begun to mute the TV when I was there. It was a small concession on his part. But it spoke volumes about the two of us. What we both had realized was that our political differences were less important than the loving relationship we had shared with one another for 63 years. And that became more and more true as he neared the end of his life. I look back with gratitude for that time we had together. And I believe it holds a lesson for my life and for others as well.



 Two Possible Paths

Whatever the result of the election in November, the deep divisions within our nation will not disappear overnight. Much like Matthew’s embittered synagogue exiles, the resentment and rancor that arose during the period of separation of our competing groups will not go away overnight. Indeed, it is in part the failure to reconcile the differences of the first Civil War in our nation that have led to the current cold civil war that threatens the ongoing existence of our nation today. 

Our lessons today present two options available to us. We can, like Matthew, go through all the procedures of divorcing ourselves from one another and going our separate ways, demonizing the other in the process. Or we can take St. Paul’s advice to the Romans. We can look past our differences on the surface to the deeper relations to one another we share and let love of neighbor inform our responses to them.  


Let me be clear here. That first path is dangerous. Abraham Lincoln recognized a similar danger when he said at the dedication of the Gettysburg battlefield, that the question of his own time was whether his nation, or any nation conceived and dedicated to democracy, could long endure as a house divided against itself. Lincoln was clear that the deadly path of tribalism with its mutual anathematization of the other would not lead in the direction of endurance. The same is true in our own time. 

Lincoln also provided us with some advice on how to avoid that fate that sounds a lot like what St. Paul is telling us today. In his Second Inaugural Address, with an end in sight of the war which divided them, Lincoln begged his countrymen and women to act “with malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”  Lincoln called on his listeners to “[S]trive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds.”  

That calling is our calling today.

 


Lincoln believed that human beings could call upon their better angels to find the way to transcend their differences. While I agree, I believe it will require more than that. Clearly it will demand the humility to recognize that each of us, no matter how assured we are of our own understandings, could be wrong. And it will require that we engage in ongoing self-examination as to what motivates our interactions with others. As St. Paul said, if love of neighbor is that foundation, everything else will fall into place.

But if we are being honest with ourselves, we will admit that we cannot live into such a challenging calling alone. If there has ever been a time when we needed G-d’s guiding presence in our lives as a people, it is today. 

It’s important to remember that there are two parts of our responses to our Baptismal Covenant. The first part is “I will” but the second is equally important: “with God’s help.” Our recognition of our urgent need for G-d’s guidance, strength and healing presence in this time of testing of our nation’s soul is reflected in the collect appointed for today and so I close with it.

 


Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

 

 

A sermon preached at St. Richard’s Episcopal Church, Winter Park, FL on September 6, 2020.

14th Sunday after Pentecost, Propers 18

Texts: Romans 13:8-14, Matthew 18:15-20

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

  frharry@cfl.rr.com

  hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

  If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

 Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi

 For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d?  - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures

 Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

   © Harry Coverston, 2020

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