Monthly Archives: September 2023

On Loss and Light…

20 Wednesday Sep 2023

Posted by in reflection

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Photo credit: https://pixy.org/361878/

There’s an old adage, at least among clergy, that deaths often come in threes.  As clergy, we are accustomed to walking a community through the death of a loved one.  In death, time sort of stands still, as being present with the grieving, and preparing for funerals takes precedence over all other work that was formerly deemed urgent.  If a second death happens, clergy get a little skittish because of that old adage about threes.  So, death can not only upend a week or two, it can last for weeks on end. 

But recently, I have begun to wonder if subscribing to that adage about threes clouds our vision about what else is happening.  I have had the experience of sitting with someone in the hospital who was approaching death, only to hear over the hospital PA system the tinkling sound that marks the birth of a new baby.  I have had the experience of within twenty-four hours receiving four texts:  one about the death of a friend’s mom, followed by one about a clean bill of health after cancer treatment; another one about a death in the parish, followed by one about the birth of a grandchild.  When we only see deaths in threes, we seem to lose sight of the incidents of life all around us. 

I do not mean to minimize the experience of death – each one is unique and needs time to go through the full cycle of grief.  But I have been wondering if in those darkest moments – whether in death, divorce, or the loss of a job – there isn’t lightness breaking in too.  That tinkling sound announcing a birth did not negate the end of life walk of my parishioner.  But as we made eye contact, that tinkling did help us remember all the moments of life that parishioner had experienced before those last days. 

I do not know what you are going through today:  what losses you may be grieving or what deaths are hanging over you like a cloud.  But as a people of resurrection, I suspect there is life surrounding you too – maybe as quietly as a tinkling, or maybe as loud as a toddler who has found her words.  My prayer for you today is that whatever pain you are experiencing in death today, you might be gifted with eyes to see the blessing of God’s light and life.   

Sermon – Matthew 18.21-35, P19, YA, September 17, 2023

20 Wednesday Sep 2023

Posted by in Sermons

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

One of the tricky things about Jesus’ parables is where to situate ourselves, especially when the parable is a familiar one.  As soon as we hear the words, “…the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts…” our brains jump ahead, “Oh, this is the one where the guy is forgiven of his debts and then two seconds later turns around and refuses to forgive someone else’s debt.”  We may have felt pity for the first slave who owed so much, we may have been shocked by his poor behavior toward the other slave, or we may have even thought, “That guy deserved what he got!”  But the thing that is the hardest to do when reading this familiar parable is to situate ourselves in the shoes of the first slave.  And yet, that is the entire reason Jesus tells the parable today. 

We know where to situate ourselves because of what happens before the parable.  If you remember our gospel last week, we talked about Jesus’ conflict resolution plan.  In the very next verse after Jesus explains how the community of faith is to handle conflict, Peter asks a question in today’s text.  The question is a fair one, and when we’re really honest with ourselves, one we may have asked God ourselves.  Peter asks, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive?  As many as seven times?”  The parable Jesus tells today is in response to Peter’s question about conflict, sin, and forgiveness in the community of faith.  Essentially, Jesus says, “Let me tell you a little story about forgiveness.”  So, we, who have resisted forgiveness ourselves like Peter, can situate ourselves with not just Peter, but with the slave who fails so miserably at forgiveness. 

Now, before you get too defensive about how you would never treat a fellow human being like the first slave treats the second, we need to think about Peter’s question first.  Theologian Stanley Hauerwas explains, “Peter’s question presupposes that he is the one who has been sinned against.  He assumes that he is in the position of power against the one who has wronged him.  But Jesus’s reply reminds Peter that he is to learn to be the forgiven.”[i]  Before we begin to think about offering forgiveness, we operate from one foundational truth:  we are a people who have first been forgiven.[ii]  Our forgiven status is at the heart of our ability to be a people of forgiveness.

But before we even talk about being a people of forgiveness, we need to talk a little bit about what forgiveness is not.  Some of us believe that forgiveness means excusing or overlooking the harm that has been done to us and saying that everything is okay.  For those who hold that belief, forgiveness can be equated with stuffing our feelings down deep inside or downright lying in order to keep the peace.  Others of us believe that forgiveness means allowing those who have hurt us to persist in their behavior.  For those who hold this belief, forgiveness is so important, that we become recurring victims of offenses.  Still others believe that forgiving means forgetting what happened.  For those who hold this belief, forgiveness is pretending an old hurt does not still hurt.  Finally, others see forgiveness as something that we can do at will, and always all at once.  For those who hold this belief, forgiveness must be immediate and offered quickly.  The problem with all these models of forgiveness – of overlooking the harm, saying everything is okay, of allowing recurring behavior, of trying to forget, or forgiving once and for all – is that these models of forgiveness would have been totally foreign to Jesus.  According to author Jan Richardson, in Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness, “…nowhere does Jesus lay upon us the kinds of burdens we have often placed upon ourselves—burdens that can make one of the most difficult spiritual practices nearly impossible.”[iii]

So, if we know what forgiveness is not, we need to know what forgiveness is.  I like what scholar Debie Thomas has to say about forgiveness.  She says, “I think forgiveness is choosing to foreground love instead of resentment. If I’m consumed with my own pain, if I’ve made injury my identity, if I insist on weaponizing my well-deserved anger in every interaction I have with people who hurt me, then I’m drinking poison, and the poison will kill me long before it does anything to my abusers. To choose forgiveness is…to cast my hunger for healing deep into Christ’s heart, because healing belongs to him, and he’s the only one powerful enough to secure it.”  She goes on to say, “Secondly, …forgiveness is a transformed way of seeing.  A way of seeing that is forward-focused.  Future-focused.  Eschaton-focused.  …abuse and oppression are [n]ever God’s will or plan for anyone.  But I do believe that God is always and everywhere in the business of taking the worst things that happen to us, and going to work on them for the purposes of multiplying wholeness and blessing…Because God loves us, we don’t have to forgive out of scarcity. We can forgive out of God’s abundance.”[iv]

So how many times are we to forgive?  Not seven times.  Not even really seventy-seven times or seventy times seven, as some translations say.[v]  The forgiveness that first slave receives is hyperbolically abundant – the forgiveness by the king of ten thousand talents (or the equivalent of 150,000 years of labor)[vi] is almost ludicrous in its generosity.  But that is how abundantly God loves us.  We are invited today to love with that kind of ludicrous abundance too.  For our health, for our faith in the better world God is creating, we pray for the strength to ask God to “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”  We are a forgiven people, who, because God loves us, can forgive not out of scarcity, but out of God’s abundance.  Amen.  

[i] Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew:  Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids:  Brazos Press, 2006), 166.

[ii] Hauerwas, 166.

[iii] Jan Richardson, “The Hardest Blessing,” September 9, 2014, as found at http://paintedprayerbook.com/2014/09/09/the-hardest-blessing/#.VBOogcKwKi0 on September 16, 2023.

[iv] Debie Thomas, “Unpacking Forgiveness,” September 6, 2020, as found at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2748-unpacking-forgiveness on September 16, 2023.

[v] Lewis R. Donelson, “Exegetical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 4 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 69.

[vi] David Lose, “Pentecost 14A: Forgiveness and Freedom,” Sept. 7, 2014, as found at http://www.davidlose.net/ 2014/09/pentecost-14-a/.

Sermon – Matthew 18.15-20, P18, YA, September 10, 2023

20 Wednesday Sep 2023

Posted by in Sermons

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I have been looking forward to this Sunday for weeks!  Although we just had our post-sabbatical gala last night, there are still several parishioners who I expect to see for the first time in months today.  Our staff finally reunited for the first time since sabbatical began this week.  Our choir is back in action at the 10:00 am service and our Sunday School and Adult Formation teams are doing open houses today.  Our Parish Life Committee has brewed up fresh coffee – which is no small feat after transforming the New Chapel for last night’s festivities.  Church members have been inviting friends to join them for church, or maybe you yourself decided today was the day to search for a new church home – either in person or online.  I have felt the anticipation building as this has day approached. 

Into my excitement to kick off a new program year, to invite people to engage in their faith journey, and to share an invitation to others to discover the beauty of this vibrant community, what does the gospel lesson from Matthew offer us?  A text about fighting within the church.  Jesus does not just admit that sometimes, every once in a while, people in the church might experience conflict.  No, Jesus goes into great detail about what to do when you face conflict in the church:  embrace conflict directly, repeatedly, and publicly.  To those of us who were raised in the South, or at least to those of us who were raised in conflict-avoidant families, this text is our worst nightmare!  And this is certainly not the joyful text I was looking for when anticipating this festive day.

Part of what bothers us about this text from Holy Scripture is many of us come to church looking for a break from the conflict that surrounds our everyday life.  Whether we experience conflict in our families, conflict in our workplaces, schools, or service organizations, or conflict in our political lives, the last thing we want to do when we come to church on Sundays is deal with more conflict.  A friend of mine once confessed to me that he was thinking about leaving his current church home over a conflict within the church.  We were both young adults, on our own for the first time since college, and we had images in our minds about what church should be and what we wanted from our church communities.  But instead of bucolic communities of peace, harmony, and justice, we were both finding churches riddled with conflict and disunity.  As we were talking about his frustration, my friend finally confessed, “When I go to church, I just want everyone to get along.  I go to church to escape what is going on in my everyday life, not relive it!”

Now, I could spend the next hour deconstructing his complaint, but there is something powerful at the heart of his complaint, and perhaps at the heart of our own experience of church.  When we talk about church as being like a family, or being like home, what we really mean is we want a place that is a bit unlike our families or homes.  We want a place that is always happy, loving, nurturing, sometimes challenging, but more often comforting.  When we think about the warm, fuzzy feeling we have, the feeling we find at a place like Hickory Neck, the last thing we think is, “Man, I love the way we handle conflict at church!” 

Unfortunately, that is exactly what our text is inviting us to do – to celebrate the way that the church teaches us to fight – or to phrase it a little differently, how the church teaches us to deal with conflict in healthy ways.  In order to get to the point where we can see the gift of healthy conflict resolution as a good thing, we need to do a few things.  First, we need to get to the point where we can embrace the inevitability of conflict in the church community.  For some of us, that is not a big hurdle.  For others of us, the assumption of conflict is difficult.  Perhaps you were raised in a family who treated conflict as something to be avoided at all costs.  Or perhaps you grew up in an environment where conflict was so aggressive you created patterns of conflict-avoidance later in life.  Regardless, if we have come to see conflict as the enemy, accepting the inevitability of conflict is going to be our first task.  In Matthew’s gospel today, Jesus says, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”  But what he implies is that when two are three are gathered in his name, there will be conflict.  Jesus himself is so sure there would be conflict that he develops a whole conflict management plan.  So, repeat after me, “Conflict is unavoidable in church.” 

Now that you are accepting the unavoidable, the next thing we need to do is honor the gift of conflict management Jesus gives us in scripture today.  For those of us who are conflict avoidant, Jesus’ conflict management plan is going to seem daunting.  The good news is scholars agree with you.  Many of the scholars who have written about this text say the step-by-step instructions do not necessarily need to be read as a step-by-step guide to solving conflict within a church.[i]  What is most important is what the instructions convey:  conflict in the church is not to be ignored, hidden, or buried.  Theologian Stanley Hauerwas has this to say about conflict, “[Jesus] assumes that conflict is not to be ignored or denied, but rather conflict, which may involve sins, is to be forced into the open.  Christian discipleship requires confrontation because the peace that Jesus has established is not simply the absence of violence.  The peace of Christ is nonviolent precisely because it is based on truth and truth-telling.  Just as love without truth cannot help but be accursed, so peace between the brothers and sisters of Jesus must be without illusion.”[ii] 

As Christians, Jesus wants us to behave differently.  Jesus wants us to be truthful with one another.  Jesus wants us to deal with one another face-to-face instead of talking behind each other’s backs.  Jesus wants us to work on reconciliation of relationships instead of letting hurt and pain fester and erode relationships.  For Jesus, being right or wrong is much less important than being in relationship.  Being in right relationship, keeping the family together is much more important.[iii]  Jesus wants us to repeat after him, “Conflict is not the enemy.  Letting conflict ruin relationships is the enemy.”

Finally, once we have accepted the inevitability of conflict, and once we have agreed to value relationships over the avoidance of discomfort, we are ready to embrace the gift of our gospel lesson today – and perhaps even claim that this might be the perfect lesson for a Kickoff Sunday.  If you came to church to escape conflict or enter some bubble of blissfully ignorant happiness, Hickory Neck is probably not the right place for you.  But, if you came to Hickory Neck to learn how to transform conflict into something holy, then you may have just found a real home – not a home based on illusion, but a home based on truth, dignity, and respect.  When you accept the inevitability of conflict and the value of meaningful relationship, you receive the tools to work through conflict and land in the reality of reconciliation. 

But here is the best part of Jesus’ Conflict Resolution Class today.  If we can stay on the journey through conflict to reconciliation, gaining the tools that this community has to offer us, then we as a community create something much more powerful than can be contained in these walls.  We create a witness for our community.  We create disciples capable of not only working through conflict within the community, but also capable of modeling reconciliation beyond our community.  Anyone who has read a headline in our country in the last several years knows that our country needs more models for healthy conflict engagement.  That is what Jesus offers us today:  tools to work on our own issues around conflict, tools to become a loving, honest, and reconciling community, and tools to teach reconciliation beyond these walls.  Jesus has promised to be with us as we do our work.  In fact, Jesus is here with us now as we anxiously try to step on that path toward reconciliation.  So, repeat after me, “Conflict is a blessing my church teaches me to embrace.  Thank you, Jesus, for the blessing of conflict and the promise of reconciliation.  Help me to share that gift with others.”  Amen. 

[i] David Lose, “Pentecost 14 A – Christian Community,” September 6, 2017, as found at http://www.davidlose.net/2017/09/pentecost-14-a-christian-community/ on September 8, 2023.

[ii] Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew:  Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids:  Brazos Press, 2006), 165-166.

[iii] Barbara Brown Taylor, The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons on the Gospel of Matthew (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 88-89.

On Finding God in the Busyness…

06 Wednesday Sep 2023

Posted by in reflection

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Photo credit: https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/overcoming-business-our-cultural-addiction

One of the questions I received before heading off on sabbatical was whether my sabbatical was too full.  I chuckled at the question because on paper, my sabbatical did have a great deal of movement and activity.  But I also knew that as an extrovert who was longing to reconnect after a pandemic that forced a period of disconnection, I would be just fine.  What I was more surprised about was my own parish’s response to their sabbatical.  When I have asked them “How was your sabbatical?” many people have responded, “It was busy!” or “That was one of the busiest summers we’ve had!”  Upon further inquiry, to a person, the follow-up comment was how although the summer of sabbatical was busy, it was full of meaningful, powerful, enriching things – none of which they would have missed or wanted to omit from the schedule. 

I often talk about the temptations of busyness – how busyness can keep us from noticing God, or how busyness can make us feel like we’re accomplishing something even if that accomplishment is purposeless movement or busyness for busyness’ sake.  But I never really thought about how busyness filled with the work of God or with encounters with God in community can be tremendously life giving.  In essence, the difference seems to be how we define sabbath or sabbatical.  For many of us, sabbath or sabbatical should mean rest or a slowing down of all things so that we can take in God’s creation and blessing.  And for many, both physical rest and spiritual rest are necessary.  But for anyone who has wasted a day away binge-watching a series, we know that not all “rest” is created equal.  That’s why we talk so much about sabbatical or sabbath being about renewal – about the feeding of our souls.  That renewal might be found in the busyness of yoga classes, labyrinth walks, meditation classes, or movie and game nights.  Renewal might be about surrounding yourself with laughter, storytelling, and dancing.  And renewal might also be about sitting on a bench in solitude, listening to the sounds of God’s creation.

As the school year gets underway, church gets back into its program year, and busyness starts to bubble up in our lives, I hope what we take from our time of sabbatical into our post-sabbatical time is a pattern of making our busyness holy.  Where are you finding God on the football field, gymnastics mat, or the horse stables?  Where are finding God in the lunch meetings, PTA events, or church calendar?  Where are you finding God in phone call to a grieving friend, the meal made for someone recovering from surgery, or the backpack purchased for a neighbor?  Our busyness does not have to be inherently pulling us away from God.  Our invitation is to look for and celebrate God in the midst of the busyness.