Nobody has it all together
Rev. Kathryn Ransdell
August 12, 2012
St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church, Vancouver, BC
Phyllis Tickle and others in the emergent church movement suggest that if the church is to transform itself it we must go back to experience first, belief second. Even Karen Armstrong discussed this when she visited Vancouver in March on her Compassion Tour: the early Christians had an experience of Jesus, or Spirit, or whatever you might want to name it, and that experience was so profound that it literally changed their outlook on this life and the way they participated in this life.
Their experience changed what they believed about this world. And, their experience changed the way they related in this world. Because the experience and the belief and the ways of being are connected, on purpose, by God, who likes to mix it up just a little bit. God didn't create it to be this way then leave us to our own devices. -- Goodness knows that we are not creatures of change. -- God then poured out grace on this world that produces a real change in those who open their hearts.
As we wade into this text from Ephesians, we might find that we have categorized this passage prematurely, calling it good advice. It is more than good advice, though. It's almost like the creation story in Genesis...take a little dust, then have God sneeze on it, and voila, you have humans. In some ways, this text is just as mythical...take a few actions, add God's grace, and voila, you have the building blocks for Christian community, not the kind we already know, but the kind that we ache to be, the kind that keeps our souls restless wanting something more, something deeper, something whole.
That's why we can't too quickly dismiss what Paul commands the community to do as advice, proverbs or suggestions. We can't dismiss them as easy or quaint or possible to learn, practice and master by spending 1.5 hours each week in church. In fact, you could say that there is a difference between the movement of Jesus and the Christianity of Paul: While Jesus was here, the people followed one person and listened to that person and deified that person. In the Christianity of Paul, that person is no longer with them so it becomes their experience of one another and their ability to live the way he taught them to live that mattered.
And it mattered because the day-to-day living of the Christian life is the experience of a miracle.
The day-to-day living of the Christian life is the experience of a miracle. Don't believe me? Then think of it this way, with all the ways we argue amongst ourselves, and all the ways we pick fights with those beyond ourselves, and all the ways we refuse to adapt so that the outsider feels welcome among us, it's nothing but short of a miracle that the church is still here.
The day-to-day living of the Christian life is the experience of a miracle for another reasons. If it were not, then all our moral choices and all our pursuit of holiness would be done in our own strength; it would signify our own merit and it would be about us and our ego. This is the constant slinky game we are in...when we are relying on our own strengths and when we are relying on God's grace to shape our way of being in this world.
So there are immense things at stake in the ordinary issues of truth-telling, and anger, and stealing which Paul deals with. Let's take a look at a few of them:
So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors,
for we are members of one another.
Be angry but do not sin;
do not let the sun go down on your anger,
and do not make room for the devil.
Paul tells us to speak the truth to our neighbors and then follows it with "Be angry but do not sin." I think we must be missing some punctuation from the original Greek as if Paul was a referee, "You, speak the truth," and, "you, be angry but do not sin."
Go deeper with me. To speak the truth to one another in love then we have to be with one another. We have to learn how to respect and care for one another. We have to love one another not just a little bit, but that we have so great of love that we are willing to lay down our lives for one another. If I'm coming to church and I don't even know your name, then that might be an indicator that the kind of community that Paul calls us to, the kind that speaks truth to one another, hasn't been built.
"Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil."
Paul is using two different Greek words, the first rightly translated: "Be angry." The second use, "do not let the sun go down on your wrath."
It may be stating the obvious, but I think it's worth saying that there are some basic teachings here:
1. There is a time to be angry. Christians aren't called to be nice all the time. We are called to be angry at systems of injustice and oppression. We are called to be angry when we see the symptoms of society's brokenness: hunger, poverty, homelessness. And there is a time to be angry as we live together as a community.
2. But be with your anger, don't put it on others. You can be angry, but don't cause brokenness in your anger, ie, write the letter but don't send it; scream at the wall, not in the phone; go for a long run and come home rather than running away.
3. The time to be angry is short. "Do not let the sun go down on your wrath." We have relegated this to proverb status dealing with relationships and making couples feel that they cannot go to bed angry with one another. And I've met people who have been married for 50+ years and they said, "The key to a happy marriage is not going to bed angry." There may be a day when I have enough maturity that this might be true, but some things don't get resolved in 3 hours. So for right now, I follow Psalm 4: " In your anger do not sin; when you are on your beds, search your hearts and be silent. Offer right sacrifices and trust in the LORD."
4. There is not a time to hold a grudge. -- do not make room for the devil. If there is anything that can be more destructive to building Christian community is the practice of holding things against one another and not allowing all of us to be on a process of maturing, changing, growing, learning, failing, and getting up and trying again. God help us if the best we will ever be is the first day we ever walk into a Christian community.
The very meaning of being in a Christian community is that we change, we put off our false selves that hold on to being insecure, fearful and small and instead embrace the self as God sees us--beautiful, whole, people.
And sometimes we just misunderstand that the person beside us, in front of us, behind us, is a beautiful creation of God. We misunderstand their action, their motive, their body language. We misunderstand their intent.
I'm reading a beautiful book called "Dancing with a Ghost." It is the story of a crown prosecutor who applied his own cultural standards to the actions of those within the First Nations community and in so doing, he now knows he drew wrong conclusions. As his awareness of traditional Native teachings few, he found that areas of miscommunication went beyond the courtroom into society and causes cross-cultural misunderstanding and too quickly leads to ill-informed condemnation.
Perhaps you saw the Globe and Mail article about the First Nations community and Enbridge. Enbridge interpreted a symbolism of peace as a hostile act, and recorded it to be that way in their minutes.
The Christian experience is all about practicing what it means to put away all bitternness, all wrath, all anger and wrangling and slander. It doesn't mean we get it right, but it means we learn how to do this. We learn how to give up our ego, our need to be right, we give up our arrogance, we give up our need to be seen as if we have it all together.
Because in simple terms, "Nobody has got it all together."
And that's okay. Welcome to the church, where we are not saints, but sinners who keep on trying.
Paul's directions for his community were meant to be more than nice phrases meant for needlepoint pillows. His directions are nothing short of the experience of a miracle.
Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another,
as God in Christ has forgiven you.
Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love,
as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us,
a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
I must admit, I am hungry for this kind of community.
This past week, a person who I have admired, came through Vancouver. She is an ordained Methodist minister and she was in what we call that "first group." She was part of the first group of women that sought ordination and fought that very hard path of acceptance. She is right to say that my generation had it easy, and yet, there is still very real gender biases today. She rose up the ranks of ministry, pastoring a large church in Dallas, until she took a significant life shift, became a spiritual director, moved to Austin, TX, reconnected with her passions and now serves an accepting, reconciling, artsy church in one of the few "blue" oasis-es in Texas.
I made a comment about the op-ed in the Globe and Mail about the collapse of the liberal United Church. In the back and forth, she said, "History might bear out that any attempt at being church in the 20th century was not sustainable."
And she might be right. Because we created a church that was about following a pastor and keeping up the appearance that we have it all together, rather than wrestling with the challenge of community, admitting that we are still in process in this thing called humanity, and experiencing the miracle that is life together. We might look successful in the short-term with buildings, and staff and large budgets, but if we do not have love--love for one another, love for the other, love for the unloveable, then we have nothing.
The experience of the kind of life that Paul describes is a miracle. When we experience this miracle, then, and only then, will we believe.
Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, for man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires (James 1:19-20).
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