after Pentecost
| Old Testament | Exodus 12:1–14 |
| Psalm | Psalm 149 |
| Epistle | Romans 13:8–14 |
| Gospel | Matthew 18:15–20 |
Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The church you created stands as more than a physical building, because it exists through its people, who form a family together in movement. Guide us to become people who support one another through hardships and share your love throughout the world. Strengthen our hands for service and our hearts for love, while giving us strong faith to persevere. You have provided us with tools to accomplish your work, which include your Word, your Spirit, and each other. Guide us to make proper use of everything you have bestowed upon us. Guide us to stay steady while maintaining modesty, as we extend assistance to those who require your support. Amen.
▶ | Hear These Lessons Preached Christ Church, Jefferson & St. Philip’s, Palestine · Proper 18A, September 10, 2017 |
“Almighty God, you have given us grace at this time with one accord to make our common supplication to you; and you have promised through your well-beloved Son that when two or three are gathered together in his Name you will be in the midst of them: Fulfill now, O Lord, our desires and petitions as may be best for us.” — This prayer closes the Daily Office morning and evening. Anyone who says the Office has already prayed this Sunday’s Gospel today.
“Real churches have — or should have — real conflicts. The only real harm that will come to a church community is to refuse to deal with conflicts. Conflicts do not kill churches. Refusing to deal with conflict kills churches.”
“Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas has made the important connection that we can learn a lot about the Christian practice of forgiveness from the character Ian Bedloe in Anne Tyler’s novel Saint Maybe.”
This passage is about God’s kindness. The fact that so many of us will read and preach on the complex measure this passage offers, as a rule, may indicate more our own boundary-less and unaccountable culture than God’s graceful intent.
The sinner is repeatedly offered opportunities to repent. The one who is transgressed against too must forgive the offender. The hardness of Jesus’ rule is that those who follow him must be known as those who forgive — beyond all measure.
It is apparent in the passage that the reason for such a boundless grace is the grace of God himself. We are to forgive as we are forgiven by God. We are to love as God has loved us.
Perhaps the problem is that as we have become less accountable for our actions toward others — our hostile words, our uncaring for our neighbors, our lack of generosity, our lack of forgiveness, our lack of love for our enemies — we feel like we really don’t need too much forgiving.
When we are righteous all on our own, not by action but by hiding our actions and true natures, we don’t need much forgiveness or love from God.
The reality is that Jesus offers us a vision of the kingdom which seeks continuously to reincorporate the lost. The mission of God is clear: in forgiveness and in all things, to bring back into the fold those who are lost. Restoration, recreation, and transformation of all people is the ultimate work of the mission of Jesus Christ.
We are challenged as a church to make this our primary work. What would the world be like if every church in the Episcopal Church understood that it existed for those who were not there on Sunday morning, and that their work was to present the love and forgiveness of God so that individuals would be drawn into a relationship with Jesus and Jesus’ church?
For Matthew, excommunication — removal from the community — is not a communal action but a result of self-imposed actions.
Life in community is to be organized by those who are the “meek and merciful” and “who know that they are the unworthy recipients of God’s constant mercy and forgiveness.” (Allison/Davies, Matthew, 804)
So it is that ultimate removal from the community is a tragic event, and those who commit such actions will be bound to themselves. Are we able to loose ourselves in heaven by living lives of forgiveness?
The real challenge this week is to preach on this passage. The rules and boundaries of community, and the community rule of forgiveness, are not often preached. The idea that we walk by God’s grace and therefore should rest upon such grace before seeking to hold resentment against others is a message many need to hear.
The twelve-step process of Al-Anon and AA is a process that provides a tremendous sense of God’s grace. As a reconciliation tool, the steps help the disciple or follower of Jesus understand that most of the resentments we carry around in our hearts are caused not by others but by our own behaviors. What we loose and bind always depends on us — not someone else.
I am struck by the idea that what seems so easy to seize upon in this passage is this: if a community is wholly focused on the sins of others, it will rarely be a community of integrity, because it cannot see the evil rampant within — and this will frustrate the work of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
“I heard the voice as of a boy or girl, I know not which, coming from a neighbouring house, chanting, and oft repeating, Take up and read; take up and read. … So quickly I returned to the place where Alypius was sitting; for there had I put down the volume of the apostles. I grasped, opened, and in silence read that paragraph on which my eyes first fell — Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof. No further would I read, nor did I need; for instantly, as the sentence ended — by a light, as it were, of security infused into my heart — all the gloom of doubt vanished away.” The paragraph his eyes fell on is Romans 13:13–14. It is this Sunday’s Epistle.
“In this brief but prosperous passage, Paul tells us that as Christians, we are all “morning people.” The time is just before dawn, the sky is brightening, the alarm is ringing, and day is at hand. It is time to rouse our minds from slumber, be alert to what God is doing in the world, and live according to God’s coming salvation.”
“Love is bigger than all the observances and the commandments.”
“For preachers, this text is significant. It lifts up the importance of love as the law’s fulfillment. Yet, simultaneously, it refuses to set up love as a big, shadowy “ought.” Instead, it sets love firmly in the light, God’s dawning light of the new aeon. In other words, we don’t love because we should love. Rather, we love because God’s ever-lovin’ day is about to dawn.”
This passage also appears in Advent, Year A, and there it is a theme of preparation. In this passage Paul continues his focus on love. Followers of Jesus love others; in so doing, they mimic the ministry of Jesus and the work of God. In loving others, they also fulfill God’s law.
Paul offers an apparent view that not loving another will lead to adultery, murder, theft, and covetousness.
Love others — this is the highest rule and the highest goal.
Adeptly, he has moved from discussing what is owed to the authorities to what is owed to one another, which is love. (Joseph Fitzmyer, Romans, 677) Deeds are the way that a Pauline faith is lived. Love lived creates the framework for all other questions about the law, and quickly moves Paul from legality to grace in future discussions. (Fitzmyer, 677; Gal 5:6)
To understand Paul’s treatment of love, you must go to 1 Corinthians 13. In Paul’s economic discourse of love we discover the following: all other gifts are worthless without love. Love is patient and kind, not jealous, not arrogant, not rude; it does not seek its own interest, is not irritated, does not reckon things wrong, does not delight in wrongdoing, rejoices in truth, puts up with all things, believes all things, and never fails. Love lasts, and is superior to all other things. All of which is summed up in verse 13: faith, hope, and love remain, these three, but the greatest is love.
Paul then concludes his reflection on love in Romans with urgency. Now that you have become a believer, you can see this is true. There is urgency, and we must be about this work immediately. Let us live and love in the morning, putting away the behaviors that will cloud and deform this love: drunkenness, debauchery, licentiousness, quarreling, and jealousy.
Let us instead do what Jesus Christ does, and love.
Melito of Sardis, preaching in the second century on this very passage: “the death of the sheep was found to be a rampart for the people. … the sacrifice of the sheep was found to be the salvation of the people, and the death of the sheep became the life of the people.” He then interrogates the destroying angel — at what were you turned away? At the blood of the sheep, or the Spirit of the Lord?
A caution worth naming from the pulpit: the later sections of this same homily carry the earliest surviving explicit charge of deicide against the Jewish people. The typology is ancient and beautiful; the polemic it sits beside is neither, and should not be preached without being named.
“Our Eucharist catches us on the fly between Saturday and Monday. Our stay at the table is short-term. We are soon returning to our daily life, living out our freedom for others.”
“Foot washing in the Middle East during the time of Jesus was an essential and very menial act, usually performed by the meanest slaves.”
Moses attempted to convince the Egyptian Pharaoh to let God’s people go. The Pharaoh’s heart hardened; he refused. Again and again, God has sent signs, portents, and plagues to reveal that God intends to raise God’s people out of Egypt.
The passage appointed for the Maundy Thursday liturgy is about the Passover — that moment when the people of Israel consume a lamb and mark their doors to be spared from the last and terrible slaughter of Egyptians. Stanley Hauerwas once said, “God is getting over God’s tendency to violence.” Regardless of how you read this horrific story, what is paramount is what follows this last of the plagues: the Egyptians allow the people of God to go free. By the blood of the sacrifice, painted upon their door mantle, they are freed. They are delivered. They are passed over by death and have life. They pass over from slavery into freedom. The Passover story adds another meaning, too.
Now, there are two critical arguments here. The Gospel narratives place Jesus’ last supper and death near the time of Passover. The first argument — and I fear it has won out in our present time — is that Jesus’ last supper was the remembrance meal of the Passover called the Seder, celebrated by many religious Jews today. J. Jeremias, in his The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (1966), has influenced a generation of people that this is the case. The argument is based upon a conjecture that an older Palestinian calendar for Passover is now lost. However, this cannot be found anywhere or explicitly referenced.
Clearly, the New Testament authors saw Jesus’ death and resurrection as a metaphor for the Passover. The Passover, if you will, prefigured the resurrection of Jesus. This emerges theologically in the middle of the second century in the work of Irenaeus of Lyons.
However, there is a second case made for a different root for the liturgy we now recognize as the Eucharist: that in fact Jesus’ last supper was not the Seder but the Chabûrah, or Feast of Friends. C. Kucharek on the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, and L. Mitchell’s The Meaning of Ritual, track the Chabûrah as a significant link in the tradition. Their research taps into the ancient text known as The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, or the Didache. The most prominent proponent of this tradition in the Episcopal Church is our very own Gregory Dix, who, in The Shape of the Liturgy, places Jesus’ last supper before Passover — and holds that the Chabûrah was a feast kept between rabbis and their followers. (I take all of this from my longtime friendship with Richard Fabian and his work on liturgy and the Eucharist at St. Gregory of Nyssa.)
I say all this because people will quickly draw a direct lineage between the Seder, Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, and the modern-day Eucharist. What seems important is that, rather than appropriating a perfect liturgy of our religious ancestors, we might see that what Jesus did in his feast with friends was an essential breaking open of the specialized meal for the spiritual into a dinner for all people. Friends here are redefined — not as those given any particular religion by birth or by the nurture of family. Friends, instead, are those whom God loves in Christ Jesus. Friends are those bound by love, and for whom new families are structured out of their participation in a table meant for everyone and not a few. This is accentuated when we take into account the nature of customary seating. Jesus was most definitely killed for eating with sinners. At the final supper he sits with John on one side and Judas on the other — my friend John Peterson is quick to point out. Jesus places his most excellent follower, the one he loved, and his most significant detractor, on his left and his right.
We see something interesting if we keep this in mind and return to the text and how it is used in the New Testament. While there is a reference to the looming Passover, there is no direct reference to this passage. This passage, the Passover passage, is used differently.
Luke refers to the text as a charge to Jesus’ call “to be ready.” In Luke 12, Jesus tells them to be prepared. His time is approaching when he will no longer be with them, and they must be ready and be on the move. (Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, 203) Again, Luke seems to nod in the direction of our passage from Exodus when, in Acts, the tradition of Jesus is vital and not courses of laws, including but not limited to keeping the Passover. (Hays, 220) Finally, in John’s Gospel — which is called the “book of signs” — the idea that Jesus’ legs were not broken, like the pure lamb, was seen as a sign of the sacrifice.
We can spend a lot of time on the kind of food served at the meal, or the meaning of the meal itself. When we do so, we most often miss that it is not the meal, nor the lamb that was slain in Egypt, that is our deliverance. Instead, all of those stories prefigure the unique person of Jesus, who will be our final deliverance. God in Christ Jesus shall bring all of us to the table of friends, where both the good and the bad shall be seated; and from the table we shall all go, united in love, with haste into the world to proclaim a story of deliverance. We are delivered. We know the work of Jesus because we know the old story of God redeeming God’s people from death into life, from slavery into freedom.
Jesus says that where two or three are gathered, he is there. Where in your congregation has conflict been left undealt with because dealing with it seemed less loving than avoiding it?
The blood on the door mantle marked a household for life. What have you marked as belonging to God this week — and what have you quietly left unmarked?
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