Shame tells us that something about us is unworthy of life and love.  Human beings wield shame as a weapon to control one another, but Jesus teaches us that there is no room for shame in the body of Christ. 

Vicar Jessica Christy
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 23, year A
Texts: Ezekiel 33:7-11; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20

Let us pray.  Loving and living God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of every one of our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer.  In the name of the Father, and the + Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Shame is a powerful weapon.  It tells the shamed person that there is something about themself that they should hate.  When we wield shame against someone else, we tell that person they are somehow unworthy of belonging, respect, or even life itself.  And we are living in a golden age of public shaming.  Our world loves to use social media to subject wrongdoers to the judgment of millions.  On facebook and twitter, we define ourselves and our values by the objects of our scorn.  The internet has made this easy, but the cross, the pillory, and the scarlet letter all testify that human beings have long known how to use humiliation to control each other.  The history of the church shows how often we try to demonstrate our righteousness by what, and who, we reject.  We’ve long acted as if we could exorcize our own sins by pinning them to a scapegoat and casting that person out of our midst.

But Jesus says that shame and rejection have no place in the church.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus recognizes the power of people to hurt one another.  We might be knit together by the Holy Spirit, but we too often treat each other in ways that have little to do with patience, humility, and love.  So Christ says that, when someone in your community hurts you – because someone in your community is going to hurt you – you shouldn’t air your grievance with them in the court of public opinion.  You shouldn’t avoid that person, or gossip about them, or work to drive them out.  Your sacred responsibility is to approach them in private, and to lovingly try to repair the hurt together.  If the other person won’t accept what you are saying, then invite in a few other trusted people, who can help the two of you discern the nature of the problem.  If the other person truly is doing harm, and if they still refuse to acknowledge it, then you need to engage the church to try to fix things.

That all sounds great, but then Jesus drops this scary-sounding line: “If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”  Historically, that’s been read as though Jesus is telling us to kick the unrepentant person out of the church.  In living memory, we have used this text to excommunicate people.  But Jesus doesn’t say anything about exile or excommunication.  He doesn’t say anything about public humiliation, or the severing of ties.  He says to treat the wrongdoer as a Gentile or tax collector.  And how did Jesus treat Gentiles, tax collectors, outsiders, sinners, and everyone else whom the world said he should reject?  He reached out to them.  He ate with them.  He healed them, and he loved them, and he died for them.

In his words and in his life, Jesus teaches us that change has to grow out of relationships.  It is only in love that we can become something new.  If we go about it in any other way, if we try to bludgeon someone into repentance, we will only further wound the body of Christ.  There is no room for humiliation, isolation, or expulsion in the church.  If we act from a place of judgment and shame, instead of a place of fierce, persistent love, we will destroy ourselves.

Because we see in Ezekiel that shame is paralyzing.  When this passage takes place, Ezekiel had already been a prophet for seven years.  For seven long years, he had been trying to convince his people that they were headed down the wrong path, but they weren’t ready to listen.  They didn’t want to believe that they bore some responsibility for the way that things were going terribly wrong in their world.  They covered their ears to Ezekiel’s hard truths.  But in this passage, we see the reality finally sinking in.  Ezekiel’s people at last acknowledge that they have sinned.  But then, they get stuck there.  They cry out, “our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?”

How then can we live.  The weight of their shame is destroying their very will to go on.  They feel so ashamed of themselves that they aren’t working to change their lives, they aren’t trying to return to God – they just want to curl up and die.  Ezekiel has finally achieved his goal, he has finally opened the eyes of his people, but his long-awaited victory rings hollow.  He witnesses that shame doesn’t work, because a message of shame is a message of death.

Shame kills because it tells us that there is something about us that can never be fixed or accepted.  It tells us that we have something to hide, that there’s something that could reveal that we’re not really worthy of life or love.  Shame is that thing that, when we face it, makes us cry out, “How then can we live?”  Shame chokes human spirits, and shame has ended far too many human lives.  It leads us only to death and despair.

So God gives Ezekiel a new message, a word of love to temper his words of judgment.  When God’s people are hurting, God says, no, I don’t want you to hate yourselves.  I don’t want you to suffer for your sins.  I don’t want to lose you.  I want you to return to me and find abundant new life.  Because God’s forgiveness is so much bigger than our shame.  The terrifying, wonderful truth about grace is that there is nothing about us that God finds irredeemable.  There is nothing about us that God finds unlovable.  God sees both our shining goodness and our ugliest, most secret places of shame, and God loves us in our entirety.  God doesn’t want us to keep making the same mistakes, but there’s nothing we could ever do to make ourselves the least bit more or less worthy of God’s love.  And that means that shame has no place in our relationship with God.  In Christ’s resurrection, we are free from the power of death, and so we are free from the power of shame.

This is the way that the gospel calls us to love one another – for if God does not shame us, then how could we ever shame each other?  As Paul writes, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”  God’s law may call on us to change, to confess, to repent, but the entire purpose of that law is love.  Only love has the power to truly transform us.  Only love brings healing and wholeness to the body of Christ.  This means there is no room for shame in our shared life in Christ.  There is no room for shame with God, and there is no room for shame with each other.

Christ says, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them.”  We encounter the good news in each other.  When we witness to the saving love of Christ, we have the power to free one another from shame.  When we love each other in all our sinful humanity, we loosen our bonds of death and despair, and bind ourselves together into a community of life.

And that is what it means to live as the body of Christ.

Amen.

 

Together we are made into Christ’s body, and together we stand at the crossroads of life, find Christ’s path together, and walk it for the life of the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 22, year A
Texts: Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28; also Jeremiah 6:16 (not appointed for the day)

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

A few chapters before today’s reading, Jeremiah declares: “Thus says the LORD: Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.”

But the people said to Jeremiah, “We will not walk in it.” (Jeremiah 6:16)

This is a major crossroads for Peter and the others. As we heard last week, perhaps for the first time, someone following Jesus openly linked him to the promises in the Hebrew Scriptures that God would anoint another David, someone to lead God’s people to restoration. Peter claimed Jesus was God’s Anointed. God’s Christ. God’s Messiah.

But Peter’s enlightenment was shrouded in confusion. At this crossroads, Jesus had a path to take as God’s Christ that the disciples didn’t understand. At this crossroads, the same path was theirs, too. They didn’t understand that, either.

But the question for Peter isn’t whether he made a mistake at this crossroads.

He certainly did. Jesus called him “Satan,” the “adversary,” the anti-Christ, seeking the opposite path God’s Anointed must walk.

But the real question for Peter is whether he wants to learn to take the right path. Jeremiah’s people rejected the crossroads entirely, rejected looking for God’s ancient way of life. What will Peter, what will the other disciples do? Do they want to discover the true path of God’s Christ? Learn that it is also their path?

Do we? Not do we try to discern Christ’s path at the crossroads, which is hard enough. Do we even want to walk in it at all?

Stand at the crossroads and look: the path Jesus takes as the Christ is the hardest path.

Jesus says Peter’s right, he is God’s Messiah. But he’s going to suffer and die. That’s the path of God’s Anointed.

Can we accept this is how God always acts in the world? Giving up power, rejecting violence, offering love until God loses everything?

Forget about what kind of Messiah the Jews of Jesus’ day were expecting. What kind of Messiah do we expect?

We’ve got 1,700 years of Church history where we’ve acted as if God’s way is power and manipulation, control and oppression, as if God is exclusive and violent. 1,700 years of worshipping a conquering, military Christ.

We don’t see the cross as God’s continued path. We treat the cross as a past event, as our get out of jail free card, or as a chance to cluck against the religious leaders who rejected Jesus. We see the resurrection as reversing the whole point of the cross, seeing Jesus as a poor victim instead of a suffering God.

But the path of the cross is the only path God will take in healing this world. Ever. That’s what Jesus is saying. If we’re honest, too often we’re the ones taking Jesus aside, saying, “Don’t talk like that. It’s not going to work in the world to go that way.”

Well, now we know how that conversation will turn out. Assuming power and strength are the way of Christ, supporting and endorsing violence in Christ’s name, rejecting those who do not accept Jesus as Son of God, treating the Christian Gospel as our own personal salvation ticket, refusing to see God’s path of sacrificial love as God’s only way: all that is the way of Satan. Jesus has said so.

Stand at the crossroads and look more: the path Jesus takes as the Christ is the path his followers are called to take. Or we’re not following.

Being “Christ” is always more than Jesus. At the crossroads, Jesus always takes the path to the cross, and he always invites us to follow. It’s the very next thing he says here: “if you want to follow me, take up your cross, too. Deny yourselves. Lose your lives.”

Will we accept that we are also God’s Christ? God’s Anointed? God’s Messiah? Because the path of Christ is the path of the cross. That’s the only option. If we’re doing Satan’s work by trying to keep Jesus from this path, or using God’s sacrifice at the cross to endorse our worldly ways, whose work do you think we’re doing if we refuse to walk the hard path ourselves?

This is the hardest thing the Church ever faces. It’s why we’ve failed at the crossroads so often. Jesus’ path as Christ, one we don’t like to think deeply about or endorse, is also our path as Christ. Any other way is, as Jesus says, Satan’s way.

Paul today shows what the path of the cross actually looks like.

Paul’s talking about a very hard path of sacrificial love here. Genuine love, he calls it.

Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good, he says. No justifying or explaining. Evil is evil. Good is good. And don’t repay evil for evil, return good every time. If it’s hard for us to name what is evil in us or in our society, and not excuse or ignore it, how much harder will it be to always stand against evil with good? Paul says such goodness will overcome evil. But this is a frightening path.

Contribute to the needs of the saints, Paul says. Show hospitality to strangers. These sound doable. But somehow, we don’t often choose a life lived for others. The path at the crossroads that makes us feel secure is the path we like better.

Rejoice with those who rejoice, Paul says. Even if you aren’t rejoicing yourself, share their joy anyway. Weep with those who weep, Paul says. Even if years after their suffering they still grieve, don’t say, “get over it.” Weep with them until they are done weeping. If this weren’t difficult, we’d see this a lot more.

Don’t be haughty or think you’re wiser than you are. The opposite of the world’s ways. This is the path at the crossroads that challenges our ego, our pride, our self-sufficiency.

Don’t seek vengeance, but as far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all, Paul says. There’s no excuse for violence of speech or action, and no divine endorsement of the violence of the state. Peacemaking and non-violence are Christ’s only path at the crossroads.

After Paul, now maybe we understand the reaction of Jeremiah’s people a little better.

But stand at the crossroads and look again: Christ’s path is the path that leads to life.

Imagine a world where Romans 12 is the way of all. No one takes revenge, and all live peaceably. All love is genuine. All seek to honor and lift up others, and no one thinks they’re better than others.

Think of a world where, if evil happens, it always is returned with good. Where all love each other with mutual affection, and all strangers are welcomed and loved.

The secret to the Christ path at the crossroads is that it’s a path that looks hard, and is costly, but is filled with abundance of life and love. The other paths look easier, but cost far more in the end.

If Paul’s vision in Romans 12 was actually lived by all, we’d have a very different world. That should tell us something. There’s a reason Jesus said the paths that oppose Christ are Satan’s paths. They look good, but are rotten and deadly. And lead to more and more evil. But the paths of Christly love, of self-giving, always bring life, even at the start.

But there’s one more thing we need to do whenever we’re at a crossroads: look around.

Stand at the crossroads and look around you: the path of Christ is a path we take together.

All Paul’s words today follow last week’s words, so they all describe the transformed body of Christ we are together. It is together that we become Christ, together that we are saved. And yes, every pronoun and verb in Paul’s exhortations today are plural.

We stand at the crossroads together and look for the path of Christ, the path of the cross. All of these – genuine love, outpoured honor, shared joy, shared tears, peacemaking, the offering of good in the face of evil – all these we do together.

Alone, any one of us could make Peter’s mistake at the crossroads. Together, with the life of the Spirit in us, we strengthen each other, guide each other. Think of the shared wisdom we have together, the many eyes to see, the many hearts to love! Together we look for the path of costly love, and together we take it.

Last week Jesus said that even Hell’s gates couldn’t withstand the love of the transformed body of Christ. What chance does our fear of walking Christ’s path, our reluctance to face that challenge, have against this transformed body in which we live?

Stand, and look. Put out your hands and hold on. Together, with the grace of the Spirit, we will walk God’s ancient path that leads to life for the whole world.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

Transformed, together, into the living, loving, generous, compassionate, faith-filled, diligent body of Christ through the grace of the Spirit, no evil or hate or oppression or violence can prevail against such bodily love.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 21, year A
Texts: Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

These days, sometimes we just want a place to hide.

With news 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we can’t keep up. With the wickedness sweeping through our world, some days we don’t want to catch up. We know the litany – racism, oppression, ecological devastation, sexism, starvation, poverty, war, greed, homelessness, systemic prejudice, broken governing bodies – we know the litany, and that it’s much longer than that. Only one of these would be a huge challenge to correct. Together, they seem insurmountable.

Then we open the Scriptures and we still can’t hide. The Triune God who made all things apparently cares about the healing of all things, including the end of all things on that litany. Everywhere in Scripture we find that God desires justice, peace, non-violence, love, the end of racial, gender, ethnic, class or any other dividing walls between people. We read that God passionately cares that the hungry are fed, the homeless find shelter, the lost are found.

We come here for peace, and we can’t hide in worship, either – those same Scriptures speak here, our hymns call us to love what God loves, our fellow members lead us in prayer that calls us out of our hiding place. Even the pastor won’t ignore these problems, and reminds us of what the Scriptures say about God’s priorities and our lives in this broken world.

We know we can’t have integrity as God’s children and hide. But today God’s Word gives us powerful hope that the things on that litany have an expiration date, they can’t survive. Hope that when we come out of hiding, we’ll find God’s life in us, healing the world. But to see this hope, we need to change two ways we’ve dealt with these readings.

First, we seriously undervalue the meaning of the body of Christ, making it nearly irrelevant to our faith.

We’ve dipped our toe into the waters, but haven’t dived in and swum. In First Corinthians, Paul talks about the various body parts, comparing us to eyes, ears, hands, feet. We’ve gone this far and recognized the individuality of members of Christ’s body. The toe can’t say it’s not important, all parts are important.

But Paul’s point is the body, not the parts. To the Romans today he says, “individually we are members one of another.” Salvation is in the connection, not the difference. We know the toe can’t function on its own. But the toe’s connection to the body means there is no separation in the body. No barriers between the toe and the eye. The same blood flows between them, the same air gives oxygen to them. If the toe gets hit by a hammer, the eye weeps.

So it is with Christ’s body. We know we belong to Christ. But Paul says we also all belong to each other. We cannot exist apart from each other. Our individual egos, needs, desires, are less critical to our lives than our connection with Christ’s body. There is no barrier between God, and us, and neighbor. The blood that flows between us is God’s love and the breath we take together is the Spirit’s life. “We” is more important to our salvation than “I”.

Look at what Paul says here: “Be transformed.” But he’s talking to the whole body.

English doesn’t show the plural as Greek does. But Paul is encouraging the transformation of the entire body of believers. God intends to save the world by bringing all people together in one body, and transforming us, together, into God’s healing, life-giving love.

The gifts Paul talks about are the way the Spirit empowers the whole body to move and work in the world. It isn’t a body conformed to the world’s way: self-interest, greed, and all the things that have led to the pain the world is in today. A body could conform that way, we’ve seen it. We’ve seen Christian groups become embedded in the world’s ways and become unrecognizable as Christian. We’ve seen a nation with great ideals become ever more hateful to the most vulnerable, ever more self-centered. When more and more start shifting a body toward the ways of the world, it becomes easier and easier to give in.

But the transformed body of Christ is shaped by God’s Spirit, transformed into Christ. It has gifts, Paul says, of faithful prophetic word speaking God’s concerns to the rest. It has gifts of generous giving, so all share in the bounty of the creation. It has gifts of diligent leadership, so people are constantly lifted up who help the body move to where it is called to move. It has gifts of cheerful compassion, so no one is left behind, all are joined into this love of Christ. Most of all, it’s a life of sacrificial living and loving, where all lose themselves so others can be found.

That’s what Paul says is Christ’s vision of salvation. Salvation is living in this transformed body, where all belong, all are needed, and all are changed into Christ, together, for the sake of the world.

Second, Christ promises that the gates of Hades won’t prevail against this transformed body, this church.

But Jesus isn’t describing a gated community. Too often we’ve envisioned Christ’s body on the wrong side of the gates, inside, sheltered, where no one can hurt us.

It’s the exact opposite. We’re called out of the world to become Christ’s body, and sent back into the world to live as that transformed body. And nothing can prevail against such love. We are sent out as one body to break down the gates that keep people in, loose the bonds that grip them, break the chains that enslave them, Jesus says today.

That whole depressing litany stands no chance against such a transformed body of Christ. Walls of hate, walls of violence, walls of greed, walls of ignorance, this body shaped in love will break those walls with love. When any walls keep us from others, this body will break them down and welcome those others in, to share the same blood of God’s love, the same breath of the Spirit’s life, to join in this life together. Until all God’s children, every being on this planet, is part of this transformed body of God’s love.

What chance do even the gates of hell have against that? The gates of death? The gates of fear? What systems, what rooted prejudice, what global evil can prevail against such love?

It’s not time to hide. It’s time to join together in Christ, and invite the Spirit to transform us.

This is how God will heal the world, how God’s priorities become reality. Now we no longer fear God’s alignment with justice, peace, non-violence, sacrificial love and life because we’re aligned with God and each other in that commitment.

This is how we live, together, as God’s faithful people and find the healing of salvation, when the Spirit transforms all people of faith into this body that includes all, breaks down all walls that divide, and fills the world with God’s love and healing.

So let’s get up out of our hiding places, join arms and hands and voices, and, transformed by the Spirit, follow where Christ leads. A broken, fearful, suffering world awaits the news that God’s healing and wholeness and love is coming, and nothing can stop it.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen