Aftermath

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
09.14.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 18:21-35

You can tell a whole bunch about a collision by what comes afterwards. This week, we’ve watched a few different sorts of impacts, some that have created something possibly amazing, and some that have left devastation in their wake.

Midway through the week, scientists at the CERN facility in Switzerland powered up the Large Hadron Collider. This huge ring-shaped particle accelerator exists for one reason and one reason alone: to smash stuff into other stuff. It’s a bit like demolition derby, only using subatomic particles going at near light speeds. Why are scientists doing this? Well, I think part if it is the same reason that back in college me and some friends took my 20 gauge shotgun, a bunch of rotten watermelons and a stack of half-full paint cans to an abandoned lot. It’s cool to watch things go boom. Hey...it was Charlottesville. That’s what fratboys like me did for fun in the South. Well, it’s one of the things, but I’m not going to go there.

But the main reason is that the nice satisfying bang that the large subatomic particles they’re using will make creates an interesting result. It’s not just a little bang. It’s a little Big Bang. For a brief moment, they’re going to generate a tiny version of the energies that may have existed at the beginning of the universe.

Some folks are afraid that might have destroyed the earth, creating tiny black holes that would suck us all up, or unleashing an army of the undead to devour the brains of the living. Well, not so many people besides me are worried about that last one. When they turned the thing on this week, it appears that those worries aren’t justified. What scientists hope for, as they carefully watch the aftermath of those collisions, is the discovery of the new, of new ways to harness energies and matter that might change the direction of technology. These are hopeful, constructive collisions.

Yesterday, we watched as another huge storm in the Gulf hurled itself against our shores. Hurricane Ike hammered away at the sea wall of the city of Galveston and howled through Houston, as millions of Americans either fled or huddled in their homes. In Galveston, the storm may have done near catastrophic damage to large portions of that city, as the ocean rose up and consumed the east side of the town. Such collisions aren’t nearly as promising. Lives are shattered. Homes and the hopes of countless families are broken. Yet even after such horrors, there exists the possibility of healing. Even now, all around this nation, churches and governments and relief agencies stand at the ready, poised to give care and to help people rebuild their shattered lives. The aftermath of such disasters tells a great deal about a people and their spirit, and I’m sure we will do all we can to help with the recovery.

Life is full of collisions. Last week, I talked about the collisions that come inside human relationships, about the conflicts and struggles and tensions and fights that come into each of our lives. Those fights are inevitable. But the measure of them is not just in how they are conducted. We know them, as this smart guy I know once said, by their fruits. We know them by their aftermath.

Last week, we heard Christ’s teaching in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 18:15-20) about how to show Christian graciousness in the midst of conflict. Today’s reading continues Christ’s teaching on fighting. He’s just told his disciples how we’re to constantly work towards reconciliation during a conflict. Once he’s finished, Peter asks him a perfectly sensible question about what happens afterwards. “How often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”

That shows that Peter has understood that forgiveness is the goal of Christian conflict. What he’s struggling with is how deep that goes. Jesus responds that Peter is going in the right direction, but that he needs to multiply that level of forgiveness by at least 10. And then, to make his point, Jesus does what Jesus does so often: he tells a story.

It’s a story of a powerful king and his slaves, and of what happens when the king decides to settle up who owes what. One of his slaves owes him 10,000 talents. That’s a crazy number, an impossible debt. A talent was 6,000 denarius. A denarius is an average day’s wages. It is, if you want to think in terms of American currency, like owing someone 6 billion dollars. If you paid off that debt at a rate of a million dollars a year, it’d only take you 6,000 years to do it. It ain’t gonna happen. And that’s the point Jesus is making. This is a debt that can never be paid off, not in a hundred lifetimes.

Yet when that slave begs forgiveness, falling on his knees and asking for just the chance to pay back the impossible debt, what does the king do? He has pity and compassion, and he forgives the debt. Amazingly, impossibly, the guy gets off.

But as the story goes on, we find our newly liberated debtor running across a guy who owes him money. It’s not a small sum, around 10,000 dollars, but it’s easily payable in monthly installments over four years at 5 and three quarters percent. But when the second guy begs for a small portion of the same forgiveness he was just shown, the first guy...well...he refuses. The guy who owed 10K gets tossed into prison.

Then the king hears about it, and he is seriously cheesed. Faced with such a graceless, unforgiving soul, he goes all medieval on his behind. Bad things happen, things that you only see in the Saw movies, things that are worse than being subjected to a thousand years of nonstop Hanna Montana concert videos. End of story.

And then Jesus turns to his disciples and says: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

So what is a Christian aftermath? When we’ve fought with another person, the aftermath is this: we have to forgive them. We have to forgive them whether we’ve won or lost or if the whole thing seems to grind out to a irreconcilable stalemate.

And the truth is, while we can listen to Jesus and say, gosh and golly, that sounds nice...we don’t want to hear this. Even though we’ve been baptized and we’ve sung the praise songs and we’ve prayed the prayers, we don’t want to hear him. We want to cherish that fight, to hold it close to our hearts and sustain it forever. We want to hate them for beating us, or to hate them for opposing us in the first place. We want to cherish our bitterness, or revel in our gloating.

So when we hear Jesus say that we must forgive seventy seven times, we want to smile and say, “Oh, that Jesus. He’s just such a softy. Of course he’d think that. And that’s fine for him. I mean, he’s Jesus. But that’s not the way things are in my life. Because of what [fill in the name of your enemy here] did to me, I have every right to still be angry.”

We want to think that way. But if we do, we don’t have ears to hear, and this is a teaching we need to hear down deep, because this isn’t a Big Happy Warm Fuzzy Huggy Bear Jesus teaching. It’s a teaching with teeth.

And then Jesus turns to his disciples and says: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

When we fail to forgive others, something in our relationship with our Creator is shattered, something that when broken is not fixable. We must trust....we must...fear...that God watches the aftermath of our life’s conflicts with all of the intensity of the scientists who pore over the traces from those colossal hadron impacts, and all of the intensity of those who watch to see how America will respond to the destruction in the Gulf.

You can tell a whole bunch about a collision by what comes afterwards.

How To Fight

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
09.07.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Romans 13:8-14 ; Matthew 18:15-20

I really enjoy the company of my wife, and have ever since I first worked up the courage to cold-call her and ask her out. She’s one of my best friends in the whole world. She’s fun to talk to, fun to go out with, and a great mom. She keeps me honest, and she laughs at at least a reasonable percentage of my jokes. It’s been 19 years this summer since we started going out...and it’s still great.

But to be honest, one of the best things about being in our relationship is that I’ve had to learn how to fight. Now, you might think that’s not a good thing. Fighting comes easy to human beings. We fight just fine with our enemies and people we dislike. Why should we have any desire to learn how to fight with people we love?

The reason is simple. When you hate someone, you don’t care about what happens to them, so long as whatever happens involves emergency dental surgery while they’re on vacation in some far off corner of Baja Mexico. But when you love them, what happens after the conflict matters. If you do the fight wrong, you can shatter or poison something very important to you. So...you have to learn how to fight.

I’m personally very conflict-averse, so I had a bunch of learning to do. I had a very particular fighting style as a young man, which I like to describe as Armadillo Style. At the first whiff of trouble, you drop to the floor and curl into a non-responsive fetal ball. You lie there for as long as it takes. Is it over yet? Can I come out now? The problem with this technique, beyond the fact that it looks very silly, is that when there’s an actual disagreement that needs to be resolved, it doesn’t resolve it. It just festers, or spreads.

There are other fighting styles. There’s the opposite of the Armadillo Style, which in honor of yesterday we’ll the Tropical Storm Style, in which you just bluster and rage without stopping for hours and hours and hours. You are right, and your opponent might as well not exist. Your goal is to wear them down by simply never for a moment actually listening. Though it seems exactly the opposite from Armadillo Style, the two are basically mirror images of each other...and neither is a loving way to fight.

There’s the Poison the Water Hole Style. There, you don’t go after the person directly. When you’re in their presence, you smile and nod. When you’re outside of that person’s presence, you go around whispering to all of your mutual friends about how wrong they are and how important it is that everyone show them how right you are. If you have incriminating pictures, even ones that are heavily Photoshopped, this is when you show them. All this approach does is spread the conflict.

There’s the Call Them A Nazi Style, which is very popular in political circles. That’s when your opponent is the Epitome of All Evil, a Villain, a genocidal monster, the destroyer of all that’s good and right in the world. In a relationship, this approach becomes “Everything Wrong In My Life Is Because of You and Your Failure to Put the Toilet Seat in the Correct Position.” In the church, this approach usually involves naming your opponent the “Servant of Satan” or “Enemy of God.” This style is very common, but it also means that the relationship has been destroyed.

None of these approaches brings the healing that comes when you approach conflict in way governed by Christian faith. Today, from the Gospel of Matthew, we hear Matthew’s remembrance of Christ’s teaching about how Christians should handle conflict. Of all of the Gospels, it is only Matthew who brings us this teaching. Why?

Of all of the early churches that received these first written records of Christ’s teaching, the one that received the Gospel of Matthew appears to have been in the midst of a struggle. That struggle was the wrenching withdrawal of the early church from the synagogue, as the Jesus Movement went from being a part of Judaism to an entirely new faith.

This was a church that knew about the nature of struggle, and about the deeply personal ways in which that struggle could manifest itself even within the life of the church. So they reached back into the teachings they had of Jesus, and remembered this one. What does Jesus tell us when it comes to conflict? What are the ways we should handle it when the relationship is one that matters? There are three general principles of Christian conflict here. The first is directness. The second is witness. The third and most important is healing. Directness and Witness and Healing.

Directness is what Christ counsels as an essential part of conflict. You don’t fight or argue with another Christian unless you’re willing to be up front and direct about it. That means you don’t ignore the problem or try to hide from it. You bring it up. And when you bring it up, you bring it up to them directly. It’s one on one, openly and honestly. This isn’t easy. It’s easier to hide away in passive aggression or in bluster and bravado. But what Christ calls for is for us to focus on the relationship itself, and to be direct.

Witness builds upon directness. If healing and restoration don’t come out of a direct conversation with the person you’re fighting with, then we are to trust that Christ’s spirit will speak more strongly in the witness of others. Those in conflict are to seek out others, and to bring them into the conversation as witnesses.

Notice what this is not. This is nothing like the Poison the Water Hole Style. You’re not going around behind the back of an enemy, seeking to subvert and undercut them at every turn by turning everyone against them. This also ain’t a posse. Jesus isn’t telling us to bring along some extra muscle to hold ‘em while you pound ‘em to a pulp. The purpose of their presence is to reinforce that message through common bonds of friendship and faith. You’re bringing folks with you to bear witness to the brokenness between you and another person. If that doesn’t work....bring more folks.

Why all this work? Because you want reconciliation. You’re seeking to fight in a way that upholds that central principle of Christian faith...that we are to love one another and care for one another and that this doesn’t change in the slightest just because we’re in conflict.

Which leads us to...healing. Now, it’s easy to read the ending of this little passage as giving us permission to cast aside our opponents. Look at Christ’s statement that we’re to treat those who don’t respond to our directness and our witnesses as Gentiles and tax collectors. You can easily take that to mean that we’re to hate ‘em and never have anything to do with them ever ever again. They become the “other.”

Problem is, when Matthew says that, we have to remember how Jesus treated tax collectors. He was, Matthew tells us in Matthew 11:19, often criticized for being a friend to tax collectors and sinners. How did Matthew know this? Well, according to Matthew 9:9, it’s because Matthew himself was a tax collector.

So when Jesus says to treat them that way, he’s not saying to give up on them, or give up on the love that we have for them. He’s saying that we have to treat them with the same earnest care we are to show to any child of God.

We are to be direct. We are to seek witnesses. But we are also to remember that the whole purpose of conflict...if it’s done as Christ taught us...is reconciliation and healing.

That is how to fight.

Perspective

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
08.31.08; Rev. John An and Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Psalm 90; Romans 12: 9-21

How long did this summer seem to you?

It seems like only yesterday that school was getting out.

Kids were feeling happy.

Kids were finally free!

No school!

Yay!

Parents were trying to figure out how to juggle them and work.

Parents were trying to get kids to summer programs and into camps.

No school!

Boo!

And now another summer is over.

When you’re an adult, those few months of summer are gone like the blink of an eye.

For that, we are truly grateful.

But when you’re young, a summer can seem like forever.

Those few months stretch out to the far horizon.

The distance between June and August is unimaginably large.

But when you’re young, your sense of time is very different.

Even a single afternoon can seem like an eternity.

Especially if you don’t have cable.

It is a matter of perspective.

As you become older, every day represents a slightly smaller fraction of your life.

Because of this, they seem to pass more quickly.

When you’ve seen more of life, time itself seems to grow smaller.

It’s a bit like looking down at this church.

It seems like a big place when you’re standing on the roof clearing the gutters.

It’s less so when you’re at 10,000 feet.

It so tiny as not to be visible at all when you’re in orbit.

It’s a matter of perspective.

Today’s reading from the 90^th Psalm is all about perspective

It’s an interesting Psalm for many reasons.

The Book of Psalms is a collection of 150 individual praise songs.

Those 150 songs are divided up into five separate collections.

Some scholars believe this is to match the five books of the Torah.

Psalm 90 begins the fourth collection of Psalms.

Of all of the Psalms, the 90^th is the only one to be attributed to Moses.

It describes human life, but not from our viewpoint.

This song, this prayer, is about how God sees us and all we do.

For God, a thousand years are as “yesterday when it is past.”

“Yesterday when it is past” is another way of saying no time at all.

Even the rise and fall of great nations, of whole civilizations, are less than a blinking of an eye to God.

For the Almighty God, all of our days of struggling and our planning are as fleeting as a dream.

How can we respond to One so immense and seemingly terrifying?

The Psalmist tells us.

In verse twelve, we hear that we are to count or number our days.

This will give us wisdom.

But what does wisdom teach?

What is the value of our lives, if they are so itty bitty in the eyes of God?

What should guide our decisions, as we move through the transitions of life?

It can’t be the pursuit of wealth, because wealth means nothing to God.

It can’t be the pursuit of power, because everything we have will pass away.

Each of us is moving towards a new stage in our lives.

For many, it means going into a new school year.

There are new classes to take.

There are new teachers to get to know.

There are new friendships to make and old friendships to make anew.

Change is everywhere.

We may struggle to know how to act in a time of change.

How to approach this new part of our lives?

How are we to decide?

Look at your life from God’s perspective.

Many of us think that we can put off living the life God is calling us to.

“I’ve got to get through this one thing, and then I’ll get right with God,” we say.

“I’m not mature enough in my spiritual journey,” we say.

“I’ll get around to living that life later,” we argue.

But God sees your life…all of your life…right now.

The way you live in this moment matters.

The way you deal with every instant matters.

Because in the eyes of your Maker, your whole life is just an instant.

But how are we to live joyously in those moments?

In the Book of Romans, chapter 12, the Apostle Paul tells us.

For life to be joyous, we are to love.

Not just love a little.

We are to love abundantly.

We are to show affection to those within the church.

We are to show love and care even to our enemies.

Every moment, every action, every deed needs to be filled with God’s love.

Because as we approach every change and every choice in our lives,

We have to remember that God’s perspective isn’t just eternal.

It is also defined by a love that claims authority over every tiny fraction of our lives.

So count your days as God counts them.

Be filled with the wisdom that brings joy.

Whatever may come in the weeks ahead

See it and respond to it with that love.