First Presbyterian Church of Albion, MI September 7, 2014 Rev. Charlotte Ellison Gospel Lesson: Matthew 18:15-20 Epistle Lesson: Romans 13:8-14 Sermon: Living Together As Christ Intended Dear Friends of Jesus Christ, What WAS I thinking when I chose this title? As schedules go, I sit with the scriptures over a period of time and have a sense of where I am going with the message so I am able to craft a title in time for the bulletin, but well before the message is written. What a tar pit I stepped into this time. It’s not a bad topic, apart from being a tad presumptuous—as if you are gathered here to get the final word on all that God requires of us, and that from the likes of me. It’s certainly to the point of our two passages, although Jesus is focused on what to do when things break down and Paul is giving us one more pass at the basics. It’s just that, well, the topic is so broad, isn’t it? How shall we then live? What does the Lord require of us? What does it take to live a good life? What doesn’t it include? When I started—three versions ago, I wanted to parse out, that is, unravel this thing we think of as “life”, all the connections and inter-connections that are the web of our existence—our relationships. We think of our life of faith as having two dimensions—the vertical one, between we and God and the horizontal aspect—of we to one another. By and large, we get into trouble with each other. When we get it wrong with God, well, things go very badly indeed, but when we get things wrong amongst ourselves, of course, they have gone wrong with God, too, because nothing is hidden, apparently, as we have been being reminded incessantly since the Garden of Eden. When we sin, screw up, really get things all gummed up, God knows. And despite our best pretenses, there is no hiding from Him. When we behave badly towards one another, that is often a matter of some debate—for one thing, we all come at things from different perspectives—what I consider offensive may not bother you at all, and vica versa; moreover, our personal interests clash—what is good for me may be fine for you—or not so fine--or even a real violation. My actions are seldom limited to myself in their import. We live together, you see, and so everything I do usually affects at least someone somewhere, for good or for ill. And likewise, a hundred actors in a thousand ways are imposing themselves upon the stage of my life to varying degrees with good and bad effects upon my personal drama, my life. When you think of it, all of what we think of as “life” is this ongoing narrative, this story of people—interacting with people. If there were not conflicts, no troubles, if everything were a state of mutually agreed upon bliss, we wouldn’t recognize the place. Since well before humans scratched hieroglyphs on stone and into clay, we have been reciting stories, re-tellings of human behavior, and far more often than not it was bad human behavior, misdeeds, violations, rudeness and evildoing. If they were not objectionable, remarkable in their offense, they would not be worth re-telling, except regarding the heroic overcoming of some adversity, which is really just a story about something bad again but with a happy ending. That is the stuff of life—deeds, and mis-deeds, and reactions to deeds done and interpretations of motives behind the actions, and offenses, and conflicts, and truces, and treaties, and reconciliations and so on and so on. Life would be so very simple if it didn’t involve other people—but even the most reclusive, if they engage with any other life forms, contends with competing expectations: Angus has very distinct opinions that do not always coincide with mine about what his proper dinner time should be and when he ought to be taken to the park. While I hold the keys and the can opener, he also comes to the negotiations with a toolbox of strategies to bend me to his will. Sometimes, our competing and conflicting interests heat up to conflict, hurt feelings and consequences for bad acts. But after everything is done and dusted, there is more than enough guilt to go around as to why the conflict arose, and truth be told, the lion’s share of the responsibility (and therefore guilt) usually resides with me. It’s not always easy to get along. The closer we become to one another, the more complex that task gets. One need look no further than one’s own family to see the full palate of human needs and wants and conflicts and contradictions. It’s incredible, really. It is like some three dimensional Rubik’s cube or some very complicated weaving that takes the threads of each individual life and intertwines them with the others, some loosely, some taught, and re-connects and re-connects with many other members until the whole affair is bound together and moves as a unity—a family is a system, you see, like an ecosystem, or some interconnected dynamic exchange where some factor affecting one of the parties will inevitably affect the others. Someone described a family system as a mobile—when you touch any part of the mobile, you set the whole thing to moving. I’ve been watching this series ofnPBS called “Last Tango in Halifax” and it probably should have been named Last “Tangle” in Halifax because it is this marvelous tale about a couple who reunite after 60 years and their re-union pulls in each of their now grown families with all of their dramas. It is very good and I commend it to you. But has caused me to think a great deal about human interactions. We’re not very good at them, are we? I mean, since Cain left Able bleeding in the field, we have been doing very bad things to one another on a regular basis. Not all infractions are felonies but by the time you consider our misdemeanors, it is overwhelming how much trouble we can all get ourselves into. And so many have greater impacts, emanating like ripples on a pond, intersecting other lives and on and on. One moment of indiscretion leads to a lifetime of consequences. One missed-turn, one broken trust, one irresponsible act, one impulsive moment, overcome by greed or jealousy or anger can despoil an entire life—many lives. I suppose this TV program is really just a bit of an elevated Soap Opera, but then what isn’t? All of them reflect back, mirror, what IS in life, in sharper contrast and exaggerated colors, perhaps, but nonetheless rely on nothing that is not there in its pure form in our all too human world to begin with. Our interactions with one another are the basis of all narrative art. Well before the Greeks had worked out the Drama thing, people were recounting and interpreting people’s behaviors, weighing and judging whether they were good or bad, evil or inspired by the gods, fatal flaws or a challenge given and met for the heroic reward. “How we are to behave” is, well, the holy grail of civilization. Every religion concerns itself with ethics, the proper behavior according to moral codes of right and wrong and all of them do so because we get it badly so often. * * * Twenty-five years ago, a minister in need of some extra money wrote a little book. He said he had hopes of being able to pay off some old credit card debts—very modest expectations—with his reflections on what life had taught him. His name was Robert Fulgham and his book was called “All I Really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.” It was on the NY Times bestseller list for months, has sold over 7 million copies, has taken care of his debts and created a fairly plump nest egg with its franchise but its genius was its simplicity. It is not a morale code for the ages but it is a good road map for most of our journey. He said: 1. Share everything 2. Play fair. 3. Don’t hit people. 4. Put things back where you found them. 5. CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS. 6. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. 7. Say you’re SORRY when you HURT somebody. They are not exactly the Decalogue but they will get you a fair-piece down the road of life. Some of his later rules are perhaps more frivolous, but equally well placed: 8. Wash your hands before you eat. 9. Flush. 10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. 11. Live a balanced life - learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work everyday some. 12. Take a nap every afternoon. 13. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together Certainly, warm cookies and milk and a daily nap are indisputable “goods”. But mostly, they boil down to: “Play Well With Others”, that notation so many of us received and others only dreamed of on our report cards. And that is the thing, isn’t it? Life is about how we get along with each other—we are directed by God, in that primary relationship that is so deeply essential for any life worth living, toward a self-conscious and reflective, examined life, as principally revealed in our interaction with others, our ability to perceive them as separate from us and as people, not objects, not opportunities, see them reflecting the image of God in the way we do also, and treat them with living care. That is the stuff of life. Most people who behave “badly” do so for a reason—often a good one, often because someone behaved that way to them sometime up the stream. Of course, all of us experience the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in some measure at some time but the problem is the ricochet they set off, the secondary and third and ad infinitum influences of that behavior that becomes so damaging. “Multi-generational trauma” is the term for wounds that keep being self-inflicted, the gift that keeps on giving, like incest or rape, where the parent’s trauma is plaid out in their behaviors to their children, etc., etc. And God, and our relationship with God, calls us back on track, re-sets the counter, so to speak, wipes the slate fresh again and again. That is why we come every week with our satchel of sins, loaded up from all of the things we did and left undone to lay them down and be reminded that they have been forgiven and we have been given the opportunity to start anew, as with each new day, regardless of what yesterday held. We are given a new chance to do better, to do more, to not do the things we ought not to do. Or at least try. That is why we take time to ingest all of God’s teachings—in their many forms—in the codes of conduct and the “laws” that guide our behavior, in the wisdom and proverbs that imprint us with patterns we can recognize in many forms so we will know which fruits are good and which are poisonous. We look to the prophets who give us an image of what “ought” to be, what is coming, what will pass away and what will be lifted up, so we will know what to watch for and how to react. We are given the Gospels to hearten us and strengthen and refresh and renew us with the sure hope that God is moving through all the rubble of our broken and desolate lives to make all things new and to undo the terrible effects of sin, that elemental dislocation that continues to disrupt and destroy all that was made to be good. God’s Word is a lamp unto our feet, a counter-script to the one that is written solely by the wisdom of humans, and is necessary, for us to live life well and be fully alive and it is irreducible and yet it can be contained in a few succinct statements that are infinitely dense, themselves irreducible: God is love. We are to be perfect as God is perfect. We are to love one another, to love our brother as ourselves; we are to forgive the way God forgives and not hold onto offenses; we are to forgive because we have been forgiven; we are to be kind to the stranger and remember the alien because we once were slaves in Egypt, we are to experience joy and peace with God and each other and to say we have one without the other is to deceive ourselves. We are always to remember who we are and be gentle, believing in the salvation that has been laid before us. We are to trust, to believe, have faith and act on it, despite all evidence to the contrary, because that is the way God moves in our world making the invisible visible. And when we fail, which we will, we are to try to make it right, to acknowledge and insofar as possible make whole those whom we have wounded. When we are offended, we are to turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, remember our reward in heaven and hide our good deeds and tithes and do those not for the notice of men but in secret for our Heavenly Father alone to see. We are to remember that we are all in this together, as a community, a family, nay actually one body and just as two people become one flesh so we all, who are in Christ, are parts of the same body and are always the less when one is excluded, or departs. We are to care for the body and its health and when something arises that threatens it, we must move to make it well, at whatever cost, in good order and love, trusting that if someone cannot be reunited in peace then God will deal with them, all to the end of their best outcome, too. All of these things we have been commanded to do and do faithfully. And we have been promised great rewards for our obedience, not a rigid, joyless, law-bound oppression but a free and freeing obedience of love and a discipline that builds up rather than destroys, making us the people we are called to be, in the future that is promised to us. This is the good news: let us live according to Christ and God’s will for us and our community. Amen.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Sep 2014 16:54:41 +0000
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