Love's Tourettes (Proper 18A)

  

      Love’s Tourettes
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18 Year A RCL)
6 September 2026--9:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of St. Luke, Grants Pass (Oregon)

Readings: Ezekiel 33:7-11; Psalm 119:33-40; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20

 

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.  The rules are based on the idea that over time, we are influenced by those we spend our time with, for good or for ill.  If we’re with someone who makes us a better person, that’s good.  If it’s a case of a bad apple spoling the bushel of apples, that’s bad.  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..., 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.  This is probably the original form of the saying from the historical Jesus, using a striking and memorable turn of the phrase, and its emendation to just seven times and by adding the words “if they say they’re sorry,” 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 your 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 heaven, and one to damnation and 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.  

 

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 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 at best by a proselytizing urge and at worst an urge to holy war. 

 

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 applies not to life in the church, but also life in any community.  In our currently bitterly divided country, it seems we often simply will not talk religion or politics, or anything else of importance, with anyone who differs from us.  This is unfortunate, since it makes it impossible for anyone on either side to change.  We mustn’t let our grievance against anyone, no matter how justified, make us simply cut them out of our life.  I’d like to give one example from my own life, when I was working for the Department of State at US Embassies overseas, one that involves President Richard Nixon. 

    

 

50 years after he made the statement that we won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore, 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 George Herbert Walker 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 staff 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!” 

 

Richard Nixon, who has become for many 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 never give up on people.  That’s why we should never succumb to Love’s Tourettes. 

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.