Sermons by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Clergy Day, March 14, 2000
Homily by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Isaiah 55:6-11 Matthew 6:7-15Lent is a time of purification, of focus, of growth. The collect calls this the battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil. At this end of Lent the daily eucharistic lectionary sets out a path of readings that feels for all the world like a bed of dull scalpels.
"And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him."
Jesus begins by addressing a people who were pretty much into their victimhood, people who lived every day in the presence of Roman garrisons and outposts, people who paid taxes through quislings who grew rich on the extraction of those taxes. He touches his audience at the point of their pain, the point of their righteous anger and says do not pray the way goyim do -- but you must pray as though you have power and responsibility. You are to pray knowing that God knows your need and has a mission.
"Pray then like this: Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name." So transcend your hurt and fear, he says, and pray as though your life has importance and effect. Pray that here, in our time, God's name is revered -- revered because of your actions and commitment.
"Thy kingdom come." Pray that God's rule is established, starting in you, and through you to everyone around your.
"Give us this day our daily bread." Pray that God will give you enough to live each day -- the rest is like manna, if you hoard it, it rots, so give it away.
"And forgive us our debts, As we also have forgiven our debtors. For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."
I think that what Jesus is saying here is this: Pray that God will forgive you your sins against the Holy One precisely to the extent that you have forgiven those who do you wrong, because, as it happens, that is how it works with grace. Forgive those who continue to do you wrong. Forgive those who will never acknowledge that they do you wrong. Forgive those who do not believe that what they are doing to is you wrong. Forgive even those who have died and cannot apologize. Forgive those against whom you must stand up for justice-- yes, forgiveness does not exclude justice, but it does exclude hate, arrogance, of a general sense of moral superiority. Forgiveness even forbids looking hurt or pouting.
As though that were not enough to ponder, I can imagine that Christ goes on, "You are people with power; you live in the kingdom and have tasted something of the glory. People around you will be slow to understand you; people will be slow to recognize the depth of your commitment to them or you love for them. People you take seriously will not always take you seriously. People will listen quietly to your most earnest appeals for the gospel, and go on as though you've said nothing. On a good day they may take the trouble to argue with you. There are people who will listen to all that you have to say, people who will take in all that you are, and offer refutation by means of the one argument that cannot be answered; they will sneer and move on."
Then I can imagine that Christ gets radical, goes to the root of his teaching. "Forgive them all. You can forgive some easily -- you've been there yourself, or you otherwise understand their mistake. The hard ones are those who seem not to value you or your ministry, the ones who reject you or the message you bring; those who argue and those who sneer. Forgive them by going into that locked room in back of your brain, being still, and fully acknowledge the crushing hurt of what they have done." He says, "I promise you that it will hurt, perhaps a great deal, but I also promise that it will not kill you. It is like dying, this giving up the power to hate or resent. It is like dying to know that you will not be vindicated in every human circumstance. It is like dying to fully feel the fact that some of the wrongs that have been done to you will never be recognized, much less apologized for."
To accept that pain is to be released from obsession with the wrongs done to you, real or imagined. It is to go beyond resentment and control to a place where those words are meaningless.
When you return, sweaty, bloody, and exhausted, from that locked room in your brain, you will understand St. Paul's saying: "But God shows love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life."
In my imagined editor's cut of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus closes with the observation that is the spiritual carrot: "Each time you have dared to go to the depths of the pain that real sin brings, and come through it, then both the death and the resurrection of Christ live in your body. Then can you not only be free of the chains of anger and resentment that tie you down to this or that person or event, you can reenter those and similar events as a caring spectator, not a victim -- you know another dimension of what it means to be dead to sin and alive in Christ Jesus."
Well, that's how I imagine Christ teaching those words today. There are many New Testament stories about Christ forgiving people. But there are the other stories that challenge us even more, because they are stories about people whose hearts seem to have changed simply because Jesus was present with or among them. The woman who anoints Jesus (whose love showed how much she had been forgiven), the tax collector who shouts that he's given back double what he's stolen -- these are people for whom forgiveness came through a person who did not approach them as judge, or even as social worker. Jesus walked among them and ate with them, and they experienced the Shepherd's real concern for the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
The Good Samaritan stands out for me because, where the identified good people locked their car doors and drove by, he stopped to care for a member of the oppressor group, a member of the group that did not recognize his religion or his ethnic identity -- in short, he stopped to help a member of the group that considered him not only refuse, but refuse whose continued existence was an insult to them. This act must have been preceded by years of the kind of profound pain that produces real forgiveness -- the answer to rejection, especially rejection by second cousins, is not, "de nada." The hands that tended the one who fell among thieves most certainly -- if figuratively - had nail holes in them.
"Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life."
That prayer explains why -- and how -- one might push on to Easter.
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