Rev. Robin Martin
Interim Rector
The school board spoke to the parents and children in the hot and hazy, slow and lazy days of late summer: September shall mark for you the beginning of a new year. Get out your credit cards and descend like a plague of locusts on the nearest Staples store. When you arrive, buy everything on this list that your child may be prepared for the first day of school. Do not omit any item and do not make any substitutions that your children may stand waiting for the bus, fully and properly equipped for the year ahead. Thus spake the school board
I’ve always loved this time of year. Even though I grew up in the deep South where it was always as hot and humid as it’s been in Philadelphia this past week as the new school year opened, I always felt a deep sense of anticipation. There were old friends and classmates with whom to reconnect, and always a smattering of new kids to be inspected and befriended. Whether I could articulate it or not, there was curiosity about what I would learn, how my world would be enlarged and enriched. There was, and is, an energy, an expectancy about the autumn that eventually trumps even my reluctance to let go of the slower pace of summer.
I’ve always loved the passage we hear from the book of Exodus this morning as well. It captures that sense of urgent expectancy when things are about to change dramatically, but we don’t know quite what that change will look like, or how it will feel or what it will ultimately require of us. That was certainly the case for the Hebrew people in Egypt at that first Passover, but isn’t it also the case for you and me? It doesn’t matter whether we expect change to be positive or not, there’s always an edge of anxiety when we know things will be different. Those of us who know the rest of this story know about the cycles of faithfulness and rebellion, the cycles of need and response to that need that the people would live through over the next forty years as they left the hard certainties of life in Egypt for the unknown demands of the journey to an unknown future.
And so we begin another new year in this community of faith because our life, like that of most of the culture in which we live, is shaped by the school year. This very morning is the first day of the first month of the year as we experience it. We celebrate together and organize ourselves for school, for Sunday School. We greet old friends and acquaintances and check out and start to befriend the new faces that may be scattered among us. And whether we can articulate it or not, we wonder how our world will be enriched and enlarged in this new year. How will look and feel? What will it ultimately demand of us?
Paul, in his letter to the Romans and Jesus in the gospel of Matthew help us begin to understand what the demands will entail. Paul exhorts the Roman Christians to owe no one anything, except to love one another. His reasoning is simple. No matter how complex and convoluted the laws, the rules, the customs and traditions of the community may seem, they’re all meant to boil down to one thing: Love your neighbor as yourself. He goes on to explain that love does no wrong to a neighbor. That’s why it fulfills the law. That’s why it’s meant to be a core value of the children of God in the communities they form.
Easy to say but, as we all know, not so easy to do sometimes. And it sounds even less easy and much more anxiety producing the way Jesus talks about it. “Somebody done you wrong?” he inquires. “Meet with that person one-to-one and tell them about it.” His point is that whenever you and I can listen to one another and work it out there’s healing and the relationship and the community are both renewed and strengthened. But Jesus also knows that doesn’t always happen. “Person won’t listen to you? Take another person or two along so what you say can be confirmed by witnesses,” he advises. That’s what Alcoholics Anonymous would call an intervention. But even that isn’t always effective so Jesus says that then, and only then, the matter should be brought before the entire community. If the person refuses to listen even to the church, then they should be expelled. Ouch. That sounds harsh. That sounds like something we would never do in a million years…at least not so directly.
And yet, there’s a great deal of wisdom here, and in many ways it serves as a counterbalance to what we can and often do when we are estranged from one another. I wonder what life would be like at church, at work, with our friends and families if we took Jesus teaching about what it takes to mend and maintain relationships more seriously. Jesus says, “Be honest and forthright with someone who harms you.” The problem is that we’re often afraid to do that even about the little ways we rub each other the wrong way. We’re more inclined to jump to a variation on the second alternative. We’re more inclined to go and tell one or two or a hundred people what so-and-so has done or said without ever giving so-and-so a chance to clarify or maybe even apologize. In other words, we are often more willing to talk about someone that to talk to them. It feels safer and it doesn’t require us to examine our own part in what has transpired.
But that harms not only the person about whom we talk. It harms us and the people who listen to us and eventually the entire community. I have a suspicion that one of the things people come to church looking for is a safe place to be, a safe place to be not only physically but also emotionally and spiritually. And the one thing that can guarantee that kind of safety is honesty, holy honesty, honesty as a sacred tenet of our covenant with one another. Scripture admonishes us to speak the truth…in love; not vengefully, not destructively, but in love, the kind of love that does no wrong to a neighbor…even the neighbor who may have wronged us. Not easy, but the only way toward more abundant life.
We are not and will not be a church that calls people to account in front of the entire congregation, though there are some churces that do operate that way “because Jesus said to.” We don’t, in part, because we know things are not usually so clear cut as that. We don’t because we know that sometimes accountability and reconciliation may take years to come about and giving someone a boot out the door probably won’t enhance the possibility of healing. But as we begin this new year, we might want to rededicate ourselves to creating a safe place where we can encounter God and one another knowing that hard truths can be spoken and real reconciliation can occur.
You see, God is always about the business of leading us, of leading St. James’ Church in Downingtown to a new place. And what God desires is that you and I embrace the challenge to live in love as we journey forward together. As we commit ourselves to live more honestly and compassionately with each other here it can and will affect and infect how we live the rest of our life. It can and will enlarge and enrich the world.