Sermon: Practice, Practice, Practice

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

On this Sunday we give Bibles to our 4^th graders, I thought it was appropriate to have a longer-than-usual scripture reading – and to read from both Testaments.  And yet, these two texts don’t really appear to connect.  One thing is obvious: they are two of the most specific and practical passages in the entire Bible.  Actually, many people think the Bible is full of this kind of direct teaching – like a spiritual instruction manual – but when you sit down to read it, it’s surprising how little of the Bible offers crystal clear direction. But these two texts have directions timeless enough that we can still follow them today, as written. One is actually a recipe.

The truth is, it’s always been a great human struggle to get religion off the written page and into practice.  The Priests of ancient Judaism who began during the Exile in Babylon writing down the first laws of the early Hebrew Bible, and other instructional texts like today’s reading about Passover, were struggling with exactly this challenge. It’s easy enough to attend worship, but it is another thing entirely to live daily in God’s way.  Although Pharisees are often attacked by Jesus and later by Paul, in New Testament times they were very much like good and well-meaning Christians and Jews and Hindus and Muslims today – they were just trying to live out their faith as best as they could under the stress and challenge of daily life.  Their theory of religion was much like the old joke where the Manhattan tourist stops to ask, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” and the New Yorker replies (Help me, choir? “Practice, practice, practice.”) “Practice, practice, practice.” For Jesus and other Jewish teachers, the practice of faith was everything.

To a Christian missionary Mahatma Gandhi once said, “To live the gospel is the most effective way to preach.... the Gospel will be more powerful when practiced and preached.”[1]  “It is a first-class human tragedy,” Gandhi said, that people of the earth who claim to believe in the message of Jesus, whom they describe as the Prince of Peace; show little of that belief in actual practice.”[2]  I think Jesus would agree.  Remember the story of the rich young ruler who asks Jesus what he needs to do to inherit Eternal Life?  Jesus reminds him about faith practice, suggesting he might show greater love for God by giving his wealth away to the poor.  Don’t just TALK about compassion, Jesus says, share what you have with people in need.  Put your faith into practice.  That’s something many of you have said you love about our church – we don’t just worship and pray and study around here, we’re engaged in hands-on ministry – whether in Christian Education or with our Refugee Resettlement Ministry or mission trips or our Yankee Fair. 

Today’s Gospel passage contains very specific instruction about how to practice forgiveness and reconciliation.  How can we use these teachings in our own daily lives? First of all, we Christians need to have faith.  We need to believe in the power of God to actually change the human heart, and human behavior.  This year marks the 60^th anniversary of the death of Gandhi, who successfully struggled against institutionalized racism in the powerful Christian British Empire that ruled his country.  And this year also marks the 40^th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., who followed Gandhi in the practice of nonviolence in the fight against institutionalized racism in Christian America.  Dr. King and other Civil Rights leaders called on our memory of the Exodus, to increase our faith in the power of God to actually change the world.

So, make no mistake, faith comes first, but then we need to apply it.  Church may be the place for holy book-learning, but out there in our lives is where the Christian lab work is going on all around us, every day.  Back when my two kids were little, one time I put them in the double stroller to go with me to the bakery.  On the walk, I reminded them of the rules.  You stay in the stroller and be patient and behave and you will get a treat – no whining, no squirming, no interrupting.

But there was a long line, so I made my first mistake.  We took a number.  I let them walk around.  There were so many pretty, yummy things to see there in the display cases.  “Keep your hands and face off the glass,” I must have said one dozen, two dozen times. Every time, they would pull back from the glass, which was covered with smudges from every kid who’d ever come inside.  They were working their way down the counter, away from me.  Then came a horrible, slow-motion moment when I saw the future:  It was a vision, a moment of prophesy!  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the glass had been removed from the last case.  Absolutely nothing stood between my kids and a huge birthday cake covered with 3 inches of white fluffy frosting.  “Noooooo!” I screamed, and I dove for them, right through the crowd, like a wide receiver going for a Hail Mary pass in the end zone. 

Here’s the thing:  I caught them! Just in time!  It was a miracle, and you’d think that would have been a good thing, right?  But no.  I scared the daylights out of every living creature in the store – especially the two smallest customers, my kids.  They started wailing and screaming at the top of their lungs – and that’s when the entire store looked at me, the worst mother on the face of planet earth!  I comforted them, I bought them cookies, but you could see from the frowns of the folks around me that they pitied the poor children who had to go home with the crazy lady.  This world, my friends, is not full of forgiveness and grace – it is jam-packed with judgment.  And yet, we did our best that day to practice forgiveness.  I forgave my children for doing what came naturally – admiring some of the world’s most delicious treasures up close.  They forgave me – and it wasn’t the first time – for acting like a stressed-out lunatic in public.  But the hardest part was forgiving myself for not being the perfect mom.  Over 15 years now of parenting, my family has had to do this kind of challenging lab work in forgiveness at least 70 times 7 times.

Other families, I know have much more to forgive – and that makes this Biblical prescription for forgiveness both challenging and even, in some cases dangerous.  In my work with victims of domestic violence, I’ve known victims who’ve nearly gotten themselves killed by trying to follow just the one small part of this passage – forgiving their abusers over and over, when the ones hurting them never asked for forgiveness and certainly never were held accountable by one or two witnesses, much less the whole church.  We must remember that we ourselves may not be able to either forgive or to change, but God has the power.  God, after all, parted the Red Sea and led his people to freedom.  And today, this is the miracle of Christ’s church – “for wherever two or three are gathered” in His name, the spirit of God’s liberating and transforming love will work.

It has been 18 years since the end of Apartheid in South Africa.  Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others have been calling their nation to the hard work of forgiveness, through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has held a series of hearings in which perpetrators of violence and victims of that violence come together and share their stories – and bear witness to God’s grace through public acts of contrition and forgiveness.  It has been an ongoing work of holy healing. 

And yet, in an address last November at Washington Cathedral, Tutu admitted this work of forgiveness is never easy.  “Forgiveness is not a sentimental namby pamby thing,” he said. “It is costly. It cost God the death of God’s Son. It is not for sissies. It has nothing in common with …‘forgive and forget’. No, forgiveness stares the beast in the eye, is confrontational. To name the hurt, the cause of the upset and then to refuse to retaliate—it is …restorative, it seeks not to punish but to heal. … Revenge actually does not resolve the problem—it leads to an inexorable cycle of outrage, reprisal, counter reprisal ad infinitum, as we see played out so horrendously in the Middle East. …without forgiveness there is no future….”[3]  After the tragedy of 9/11, Bishop Tutu had offered similar words to our nation, “Ultimately there is no future without forgiveness." [4]

Tutu describes the whole Bible as one great story of reconciliation. He says, “We can say that …the story of the Bible is of God’s attempts to recover the harmony, the togetherness, the community that were God’s intentions in the first place for all of creation.” From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Tutu retold stories too horrible to repeat, but those survivors spoke truth to the reality of evil.  He said, “We …wondered whether there might be atrocities so unspeakable in their horror that they should surely qualify for being unforgivable. Yes there are many of these—what about seeing your children, husband, wife, etc. mown down before you… There have been many such, and worse atrocities. … There are many, many things which are unspeakable …But can we say unforgivable? Yes, humanly speaking there must be a threshold.  Humanly speaking—but you see we are those who have the incredible privilege…to call God ‘Father’ … We who were created in God’s image are …to emulate, to imitate this God, to forgive not only seven times, but seventy times seven, to be as Jesus Christ who as he was being crucified could pray for those nailing him to the Cross…” 

People of faith, we love because we first were loved.  We forgive because we have been forgiven.
Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.