Our words must LOOK like Jesus...

NOTE: Here is this coming Sunday's sermon notes. If you are in the area, please join us at 10:30 am. We will also being dedicating our restored Bell Tower, too.

A lot of people – way too many to number – have been wounded and even abused by the Church. For a number of reasons – mostly bad – the so-called Body of Christ and its leadership over the years has regularly neglected, offended, manipulated, violated, betrayed and defiled those who have come searching for comfort, hope and forgiveness.
What’s more this is true in every spiritual community no matter what form or shape it takes: Congregational or Catholic, Buddhist or Baptist, Muslim or Mormon, Jewish or Jain including clergy and laity alike. St. Paul got it right when he said, “All have sinned and fallen short of the grace of God – and I mean all!”

Sometimes it is clergy misconduct, sometimes a treasurer embezzles money; sometimes it is cruel prejudice and other times callous indifference. Sometimes the offense is huge and other times it seems inconsequential. Nevertheless, one of the facts of life in community is that because we hurt and wound one another with such regularity through both our sins of commission as well as omission, disciples have been charged – and I would even say required – to take regular stock of both our talk as well as our walk. This morning’s gospel puts it like this:

Now Jesus turned to address his disciples, along with the crowd that had gathered with them. "The religion scholars and Pharisees are competent teachers in God's Law. You won't go wrong in following their teachings on Moses. But be careful about following them. They talk a good line, but they don't live it. They don't take it into their hearts and live it out in their behavior. It's all spit-and-polish veneer… (So ask yourself: "Do you want to stand out?” Then step down. Be a servant. If you puff yourself up, you'll get the wind knocked out of you. But if you're content to simply be yourself, your life will count for plenty. (Matthew 23: 1-12 in The Message by Eugene Peterson)

You see, we are not the center of the moral universe. We are important and valuable to God and one another – formed just a little lower than the angels as the Psalms say – but none of us has a monopoly upon wisdom or compassion. Not liberal or conservative, male or female, traditionalist or contemporary, young or old or rich or poor. In fact, when we live like we’re the only person that matters in the world we become dangerous. Bill Coffin at Riverside Church in New York City used to point out that, “Many of us have a strong allergic reaction to change (or differences) of any kind.”

The result is an intolerance for nonconforming ideas that runs like a dark streak through human history. In religious history this intolerance becomes particularly vicious when believers divide the world into the godly and the ungodly – (insiders and outsiders, us and them) – for then, hating the ungodly is not a moral lapse but rather an obligation, part of the job description of being a true believer… but the Bible knows nothing of a moral majority… in fact, the Bible insists that a prophetic minority has more to say to a nation than any majority – silent, moral or whatever – because majorities in the Bible generally end up stoning the prophets…and wounding those in need of comfort and forgiveness.

That is the first insight I think that Jesus is trying to help us embrace: owning the effect that the gap between our walk and our talk always creates for ourselves and others. Let’s be clear: in his time Jesus was not claiming that the religious authorities were advancing a broken religion or a corrupt spirituality. Not at all: “our religion scholars and legal experts are very competent in the way of the Lord,” he said with honesty; “you won’t go wrong in following their teachings – but be careful about following them.”

+ Did you catch that? Their teachings – their words, their sermons and insights – are solid and helpful. It is their lives in action that are the problem: they talk a good line but they don’t live it. They don’t take God’s love into their hearts and then share it with others in their behavior.

+ There is a blindness – an arrogance – that wounds despite the beauty of God’s word.

And that is the second insight because in our era, this blind arrogance locks out and drives away more people from church than any other single offense: more than bad preaching, lousy music, shabby conditions, mold, mildew, poor lighting, sloppy theology or even periodic misconduct by church leaders, it is the stench of blind, spiritual arrogance that sends more guests and seekers running than anything else. And do you know why? Because they don’t sense anything of Christ’s sweet welcome and grace when the stink of arrogance is in the air.

It is not coincidental that when Paul went to the thriving metropolis of Thessalonica to build a new church in the year 51 CE, he began “like a nursing mother with her babies.” His ministry started with real and embodied tenderness. The scripture says:

God tested us thoroughly to make sure we were qualified to be trusted with this Message… we never threw our weight around or tried to come across as important, with you or anyone else. We weren't aloof with you. We took you just as you were. We were never patronizing, never condescending, but we cared for you the way a mother cares for her children. We loved you dearly. Not content to just pass on the Message, we wanted to give you our hearts. And we did… You saw with your own eyes how discreet and courteous we were among you, with keen sensitivity to you as fellow believers… You experienced it all firsthand. With each of you we were like a father with his child, holding your hand, whispering encouragement, showing you step-by-step how to live well before God, who called us into his own kingdom, into this delightful life. (I Thess 2: 5-13)

Paul was teaching by how he lived – his actions were the only Bible people could see – so if he was going to be effective in sharing God’s new vision of grace and hope in his day, he had to be certain there was congruity between his words and deeds. Now scholars have noted that at the heart of Paul’s ministry was an expansion of Peter’s vision of radical inclusivity that was shared by the Holy Spirit at the home of the Gentile Cornelius. Do you remember how that story goes?

+ Cornelius the Gentile was inspired by God to invite Peter the Jew to dinner – and Peter was inspired by God to accept. That was the first blessing – the potential for community beyond both racial and religious differences – but the blessings abound for you may recall that Peter freaked out when he realized hospitality was going to force him into eating a whole host of things that his Jewish tradition said were unclean: lobster, bacon, pork chops.

+ So the Bible tells us that Peter kept excusing himself while Cornelius was cooking so that he could go to the roof and pray for wisdom. And each time he went upstairs God sent him a vision of feasting at a boldly inclusive picnic that included all the former unclean foods.

Finally, after three such mystical encounters – it took Peter a LONG time to grasp the significance of this new way of being (which is one of the reasons Jesus nicknamed him Peter – Petras – it means rock or even blockhead) – eventually he discerns the voice of our Living God saying, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” He hears this three times – he’s a very slow learner like the rest of us – before he can reply: “Now I truly understand that God shows NO partiality…”

And that is the message Paul was sharing in Thessalonica. “Paul’s announcement of salvation and freedom from social conventions in a new, divine order,” writes Bruce Chilton, “appealed to many (but) especially to the prominent women of that city who knew that their capacities far out-stripped what their society would let them achieve.”

Do you see where this is going? Paul’s radical inclusivity broke with the social conventions and traditional spirituality of his era but struck a responsive chord within the souls of people who had been marginalized and minimized by the in crowd.

+ You see, the vision and words of Christ are always attractive: come unto me all ye who are tired and heavy laden –come to me all who feel burned out on religion – and I will give you rest in the unforced rhythms of grace – but they have to be embodied before people will trust them – and those who speak them.

+ That means that our words have to look like Jesus: a mother nursing her babes, a father holding the hand of his loved ones and whispering real encouragement, a servant stepping down so that there is room for another to step up. Not judge and jury, gate keeper or morals police – Jesus – for without him there is only the stink of arrogance in the room.

Every church – this one included – has to face this challenge and deal with it with clarity and conviction. We know that we will never get it totally right all the time because we are only human. But we can’t pretend that it doesn’t haunt and sometimes cripple us and wound others either for that would violate our best intentions as disciples.

To be faithful, said one wise old preacher, is to help one another distinguish between the heavy burdens we tend to dump on one another and the light burden of Jesus. And unless we are “practicing and proclaiming a Word that lifts the burdens of others – with our music, our worship, our liturgy, our organization, the way we share information as well as in acts of living compassion – then we are living under the critique of Christ as exposed in today’s scripture.” (Strofregen) The words of Robert Capon come to mind and warrant a hearing when he writes:

The church is not in the morals business. The world is in the morals business… and it has done a fine job of it, all things considered. The history of the world's moral codes is a monument to the labors of many philosophers, and it is a monument of striking unity and beauty. As C.S. Lewis said, anyone who thinks the moral codes of mankind are all different should be locked up in a library and be made to read three days' worth of them. He would be bored silly by the sheer sameness.

What the world cannot get right, however, is the forgiveness business -- and that, of course, is the church's real job. She is in the world to deal with the Sin which the world can't turn off or escape from. She is not in the business of telling the world what's right and wrong so that it can do good and avoid evil. She is in the business of offering, to a world which knows all about that tiresome subject, forgiveness for its chronic unwillingness to take its own advice.

But the minute she even hints that morals, and not forgiveness, is the name of her game, she instantly corrupts the Gospel and runs headlong into blatant nonsense. Then the church becomes, not Ms. Forgiven Sinner, but Ms. Right and Christianity becomes the good guys in here versus the bad guys out there. Which, of course, is pure garbage for the church is nothing but the world under the sign of baptism. [Hunting the Divine Fox, pp. 132-133]

I hope these words make you as uncomfortable as they make me. I also hope that they make the distinctions before us clear because then, dear people of God, then God’s grace will abound and faith will flourish. And as far as I can figure out, that is the good news for today for those who have the ears to hear. Join me as we sing a new affirmation together...