Love’s
Tourettes
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18 Year A RCL)
7 September 2014 --8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18 Year A RCL)
7 September 2014 --8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish
Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
God,
give us hearts to feel and love,
take
away our hearts of stone
and
give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
There was a rock band
in Beijing when I lived there before moving to Ashland. One of its members was a senior U.S. Embassy
official, the person charged with most of the financial rules negotiations
between the U.S. and China. This band
had the best name for a Rock and Roll Band I have ever heard: Love’s
Tourettes. Yes, that’s right. It was named after the neurological disorder
known as Tourette Syndrome, marked by severe stammering, inability to get one’s
words out, and occasional uncontrollable bursts of deeply obscene and offensive
language. Almost none of us needed
anyone to explain the joke: sometimes in
love we are so nervous and fearful that words escape us and, as glib as we
might be at other times, we find ourselves grasping for words, unable to
express the simplest of ideas. Sometime
in love, especially when it goes bad or runs into conflict, we are prone to
rage, and the vilest of language just comes out, usually loudly.
Love’s
Tourettes: we become tongue tied for
fear of repelling the beloved, or fear of losing the beloved. We are reduced to rage and blue streaks when
things are going wrong and we fear the same thing. It is the very intimacy and vulnerability we
establish in deep relationship that makes such relationships so painful at
times.
Today’s Gospel has a
set of rules for dealing with conflict within the Church, within the beloved
community. They seek to help us cure
Love’s Tourettes we might have when relationships go wrong among those who walk
the way with Jesus. You know the basic
outline: first talk to the one who has
offended in private. If that doesn’t
resolve it, then go with two other people who can witness the exchange and
bring some objectivity to it, and if necessary, assist each party to listen to
the other and improve their communication.
Finally, if that doesn’t work and the offender persists, “”they shall be
to you as a pagan and a tax collector.”
Well, what does that
mean?
A common reading is
this: this is gradual escalation. Try out a one-one-one talk where public
grandstanding can be avoided. If that’s
no good, call in witnesses so they can help you brow beat the offender into
submission, as Methodists used to say and Baptists still say, “labor with the
brother.” And if that is no good, then
kick his sorry behind out of the community altogether. To me, this understanding is basically, a
polite form of Love’s Tourettes. I may
not swear at you, but I am reduced to inarticulate silence when I say, “I wash
my hands of you.”
I wonder if that’s a
right reading. We know Jesus said “If someone sins against you seven times in a day and says, I'm sorry, keep on forgiving them seven times" (Luke 17:3-4) and that one form of the saying corrects any misunderstanding we might have by adding, "don’t
just forgive seven times, but seventy-seven,” that is, never stop
forgiving. And that original saying is almost
certainly from the historical Jesus, using a
striking and memorable turn of the phrase, and its emendation is clearly the creation of
the later church trying to make rules out of the legacy of Jesus' sayings.
The saying in today’s
Gospel, with its law-like procedural character and concern for rules to run a
community, is almost certainly a creation of the author of the St. Matthew
Gospel. It was written in Syrian Antioch
for a mixed Jewish-pagan church, one with lots of conflicts and intercultural
strife. It is trying to create a
Standard Operating Procedure for managing church conflict. But remember this: Matthew, also called Levi, the disciple of
Jesus that this Gospel was always associated with, was originally a
tax-collector. And a major part of the
church it is written to are gentiles, or less politely, pagans.
So when it says, “let
them be for you a tax-collector or a pagan” I think it is not necessarily
saying this is the last straw and you have got to break of relations with the
person. Rather, it is saying that
communication has broken down. Community
has gone by the boards. The relationship
between the offender and the offended had turned out to be a non-relationship,
or an antagonistic one, like the relationships of Matthew’s Jewish readers with
tax-collectors or pagans. It is not
saying give up on that nasty person because you couldn’t use friendly
persuasion or browbeat them into conformity.
It is saying face up to the face that you relationship is bad. Your communication is non-existent.
Why did Jesus teach
“never stop forgiving”? Why did he
teach, “don’t give up on someone? Why
did he keep on forgiving, even the worst things?
There is a hint in
today’s Hebrew Scripture lesson: “As
I live, says Yahweh God, I take no pleasure when a wicked person dies, but
rather when they turn from their ways and live.” This passage is the scriptural warrant for
the Church’s doctrine of the universal salvific will of God, that God wants
everyone to be saved, for everyone to come out alright. It comes from Jesus’ basic description of God
as a loving parent, who gives good gifts to all his children. It is the principal scriptural problem with
John Calvin’s doctrine of a double predestination, one to salvation and one to
damnation.
The fact that God wishes good for all
is the reason in this passage from Ezekiel for the prophets to warn people—it
gives them a chance to turn back from the things that will destroy them.
God wants us all to come out okay, and
thus we need to help warn people who are going to where things will not be
okay. But this general desire to help
and to show love by engaging and being in loving relationship with others can
have a distorted form: where we try to
remake all others in our own image.
This is why a desire for the brotherhood and sisterhood of the human family
is often corrupted by a proselytizing urge at best or an urge to holy war at
worst.
Recognizing a break down in
relationship, recognizing that someone has become a stranger to us, an alien, a
pagan, or a tax-collector does not mean giving up on them. Quite the opposite: it means never giving up on them, never
stopping to the engage and try to communicate, even when they have walked away
from us.
Never give up. Don’t cave into Love’s Tourettes: This has to do with not just the nature of
God, all-loving, ever able, desiring life and health and prosperity for
all. It has to do with the nature human
beings: always eager to turn things into an us and them game, always ready to
confuse the line between good and evil that runs down the middle of each and
every human heart with a line between one group of people and another or even
one person and another.
This week, Elena and I saw the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's play
"The Great Society." I was struck by the
portrayal of Richard Nixon as an oily, devious snake. We saw the same thing in the film “The
Butler.” Fifty years after he made the statement that
we won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around any more, we (both democrats and
republicans) indeed love to vilify him. His criminal acts that drove him from
the White House, his at times truculent and suspicious personality, are just
too easy a target.
But you know, the Chinese love Richard
Nixon, because “only Nixon could go to China.” And I have a fond place in my heart for him,
despite his flaws. In the fall of 1989
in Beijing, he did something for me, my family, and my colleagues at the U.S.
Embassy. Despite private efforts by
President Bush to repair relations with the Chinese regime after the Tian'anmen
Massacre, relations were getting worse and worse. The Chinese leadership, besieged and
isolated, had focused its anger on dissidents and supporters of democracy. The U.S. Embassy had granted refuge to the
leading two Chinese dissidents in the scary days right after the Massacre, and
as a result, the leadership sent in scores of military troops wearing police insignia
to surround the Embassy compounds to provide what they called “security.” They were a dangerous and harassing presence,
stationed every 2 meters of so, facing in toward the compounds with riot helmets
on and AK-47 machine guns drawn. As
things got worse over weeks, they clearly got the order to specifically target
for harassment the children of the Embassy officers through whom the dissidents
had sought refuge and in whose office complex they had been housed. My eleven year-old son was stopped, screamed at, and had an
AK-47 dry-fired in his face: shooting
without ammunition, to make the target think he was being shot. This also happened to the eleven year-old daughter
of a close colleague. There was a sense
that if things kept going in the way they were, relations would have to be
broken and Embassy staff withdrawn. Into
this came former President Nixon. He
was invited by the Chinese government to come and help repair things. He was briefed as soon as he arrived, and
immediately sent a message to the office of Chinese supreme leader Deng
Xiaoping, whom he was to meet the next day.
He said that he had been told of the situation. “If the extra guards are still present around
the Embassy when I get up tomorrow, I will go directly to the airport and
return to the U.S. I will not meet with
you with this harassment going on.”
The next morning came, and all the military had been withdrawn. Our families could again live in confidence
that we were not going to be harassed or worse.
A couple years later, Nixon returned, and in an Embassy gathering to
meet him, I was able to privately give my personal thanks for what he had done,
and say how much it had mattered for us.
He teared up, smiled, and said, “Thank you for telling me that, you
know, it’s not often these days that anyone tells me I’ve done something good!”
Nixon, me, and my son Charlie.
Richard Nixon, who has become for some such a caricature of evil, himself still cared about being told he had done a good thing. Like all of us, the line between good and evil was down the middle of his heart, and God still enticed him to follow his better angels. All of us are thus enticed by
God to do good, because God loves us all.
That’s why we should neer give up on people.
That’s why we should not succumb to Love’s Tourettes.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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