Inclusive Community
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18 Year A RCL)
10 September 2017 --8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18 Year A RCL)
10 September 2017 --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.
I remember clearly the moment when I
understood where the Spirit was calling the church in terms of acceptance of
gays and lesbians. I was in discernment
for holy orders in a parish outside of Washington DC that was mixed: it had
many progressives, but it also had conservatives, and it was divided over the
question. Some felt that the five or so
“clobber passages” in the Bible teaching that same sex activity was an “abomination”
were definitive in establishing norms for sexual ethics and morality; others
thought that the great narrative of Acts 15 was central: the early apostles voted to accept gentiles
as full fledged members of the church without them first becoming Jews even
though previous scripture labeled them as unclean.
In this story, inclusive acceptance is at the heart of the Christian
calling. I was at a diocesan discernment
conference for those preparing for Holy Orders.
My conservative parish priest was with me. I had been overwhelmed and happy to see a
great variety of people in the seats preparing for the priesthood: all colors,
ethnic backgrounds, and life-situations.
But after the conference, my priest turned to me, and in hushed,
conspiratorial tones aimed at letting me know that I might be included in the
Rector’s close circle of intimate advisors and co-workers, he said this to
me: “Tony, did you see that person in
the row right behind us?” He was
referring to a younger person of ambiguous gender identity who was seeking the
priesthood. I had learned from her in
one of the work sessions during the day that she was a trans-woman, and had
started out life as a boy. She was inspiring in the faith sharing exercise, and
was being sponsored by a priest I knew, respected, and loved. I replied, “Who do you mean?” The priest replied, with clear disgust in his
voice, “You know, that freak!” I looked
puzzled. He replied, with acid frostiness,
“You had to have seen it: That he who thinks he’s a she and has mutilated
himself to make the point instead of repenting and trusting Jesus to heal
him.” He said this with loathing and
hatred and I flinched. All I could say
was, “Well, I know the priest who accompanied her, and I trust his pastoral
judgment.” He replied, with anger, “This
is exactly the slippery slope I predicted when we began accepting unrepentant sexual
perverts as priests. The future
leadership of the Episcopal Church more and more is going to look like that
damaged freak because we have abandoned the Bible!” I walked on in silence. His unguarded moment of frankness had shocked
me. I was sure I had looked clearly upon the hatred at the heart of those
wanting to divide the Episcopal Church over gays, lesbians, and Gene
Robinson. From that moment on, I was
firmly in the Acts 15 camp.
Today’s Gospel has a set of rules for
dealing with conflict within the Church, how to maintain the beloved community.
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 rejection and shunning. I
may not curse you, but I have cursing in my heart 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. The great hint? The first words out of Jesus’ mouth here: “If
any one sins against you in the church.” The church is an institution of Matthew’s
time, not Jesus’. The Gospel of Matthew 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 most of the people in
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 off relations with the person. Rather, it is saying that you must face up to
the truth 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 a wholly antagonistic one. “Treat them as tax collectors or pagans”
means face up to the fact that your relationship is bad. Continue to engage, but as you would with a
stranger, not an intimate.
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 all right. 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 mistaken doctrine of a double predestination, the pre-selected
elect to salvation and the pre-selected damned to Hell. 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.
Jesus says God sends the blessing of
rain and sunshine equally to the righteous and the wicked. When we ask him for bread, he does not send us
stones. And Jesus says we should be as
perfectly compassionate as this Heavenly Father. God is a great source of light, love, and
life. You cannot get close to God without some of that rubbing off. It is like approaching an open fire hydrant
in the summer heat: you will get
wet.
God wants everything to come out okay
for us all, and gives the blessing 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. It is why my former priest, who now has left
the Episcopal Church, says he loves those he privately calls freaks and
perverts—after all, he says, he reaches out to them and calls them to
repentance and the abuse that he calls “reparative therapy.” Jesus calls us to reject such twisted desire
to help, which is really no love at all.
Recognizing a break down in
relationship, recognizing that someone has become a stranger to us, 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. Like God, we must be all-loving, desiring
life and health and prosperity for all.
We poor human beings are always eager to turn things into an us vs. 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.
All of us are enticed by God to do
good, because God loves us all. That’s
why we should not give up on people.
That’s why we should not succumb to the urge to shun, to shut down
engagement and conversation. But it is
also why we must be honest in recognizing when community has been damaged or
broken, and respond with invitation and witness as if to an outsider. But above all, we must always reach out,
and be the loving hand of God for others.
We must never, ever, give up on them.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment