Sunday
September 10
Well Begun is Half Done
By Marsh Chapel
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Faith is the power to start over, in the midst of anxiety, and even in the throes of despair. Faith is God’s gift, and the message of the Spirit of the Christ. What the reason can never fully capture, and what the law can never fully define, faith gives: the power to struggle free of despair. Faith says: ‘Start again’…
Faith inspires forgiveness. Of yourself. And of others.
The church is where the deep gladness of faith meets the world’s deep hunger for forgiveness. Where forgiveness takes root, indwells, has a home, is known. Where you are called to learn and speak the language of pardon, in all its glorious grammar, syntax and spelling.
‘And throughout all eternity, I forgive you, you forgive me’ (Blake). You are invited to growth in faith. Faith has as a first step, or at the least a very early step, in pardon, in clemency, in forgiveness. So today, in your first autumn steps, walk the sawdust trail of forgiveness. ‘And throughout all eternity, I forgive you, you forgive me’.
So the fierce prophet Ezekiel warns us and all. Turn back. Seek pardon, offer pardon, start with pardon. And watch for first steps in pardon. Your calling—is it your calling?—is pardon, clemency, forgiveness. We begin so each Lord’s Day, every single week, with the prayer Jesus taught, ‘forgive us our sins (catholic), debts (presbyterians), trespasses (methodists), as we forgive’. The hallmark of faith, the hallmark of the community of faith, is forgiveness.
You have ample space for practice. All communities inevitably are riddled with endless contention and intractable difference. A family, a dorm suite, a team, a business, a church, a country, a globe: endless contention, intractable difference. And the prophet warns, warns, that an honest, true, hard word needs sometimes to be spoken. You need to stop that, because if you do not, the future is not good, for you, or others, or us, or all. Ezekiel is a later prophet, on the edge of the divide between prophecy and apocalyptic, between politics and religion. ‘Turn back, turn back’.
If you had told me in 2015 that we as a country would spend the next nine years in verbal contest with one another, regarding three presidential elections, with no end in sight, with focus on and apotheosis even of a most disreputable cadre of personalities, cacophony of vitriol, and cascade of venom, I would not have believed it. But I have now heard, and seen, and watch the worry birds fly morning by morning. Things change.
James Baldwin: ‘Nothing is fixed forever and forever, it is not fixed. The earth is always shifting and the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down the rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them, because they are the only witnesses we have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to one another, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with each other, the sea engulfs us, and the light goes out’…from Nothing Personal, 188)
You may need to say a straight word to a roommate, teammate, suitemate or fellow inmate: ‘one of us is wrong and I think it’s you’. Then follow with, ‘but maybe I am wrong, let’s talk’. The moment we break faith with each other the sea engulfs us, and the light goes out.
The Psalms are chock full of pardon, clemency, forgiveness. David, however many Psalms he did say, sing or write, knew the first step of faith, the first word in faith. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Create in me a clean heart O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Psalm 51: 10. Sometimes we need to start over, begin again. Sometimes that early step in faith invites a measure of mercy, a feeling for forgiveness.
Annie Dillard: ‘The line of words is a hammer. You hammer against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. After giving many years of attention to these things you know what to listen for. Some of the walls are bearing walls. They have to stay, or everything else falls down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it down. Duck. Courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this is such fine stuff the work needs it, or the world. Courage, exhausted, stands on bare reality: this writing weakens the work. You must demolish the work. AND START OVER. You can save some sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves, or hard won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now. (Are you a woman or a mouse?) (The Writing Life, 73).
Oh. How I hate to scrap that sermon and start over. I do. But. It cannot be helped. It might have been good, but it is not good enough. Scrap it. But it cannot be helped. When it doubt throw it out.
Faith means starting over, in life, in relationships, in work. Every day.
Which brings us to our gospel.
Our gospel dives deeply into the dark waters of pardon, of forgiveness, that for which we pray every Lord’s Day and every day.
Matthew relies on Mark, and then also on a teaching document called Q, along with Matthew’s own particular material, of which our reading today is an example. He has divided his Gospel into five sequential parts, a careful pedagogical rendering, befitting his traditional role as teacher, in contrast to Luke ‘the physician’, whose interest was history. We have moved from history to religion, from narrative to doctrine. Matthew is ordering the meaning of the history of the Gospel, while Luke is ordering the history of the meaning of the Gospel. You have moved from the History Department to the Religion Department. Matthew has his own perspective.
You may be interested or saddened to know that these several Matthean verses are found summarized from in this half verse from Luke: if your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him (Luke 17:3). Brevity is the soul of wit. And the word church is used only twice in the Gospels, both in Matthew. This is the life of the early church on display, late in the first century. (Jesus after all loved both Gentiles and tax collectors, with passion and abandon.)
The word ‘ouch’ has a place in our lexicons and in our lives.
The teaching is to begin alone, to speak privately to your sinful, trespassing, debtor sibling. Then the teaching is to involve two or three others in the conversation, Then, finally, the teaching is to turn to the whole ecclesia (hear ecclesiastical), the community as a whole. One, few, more, many. Okay.
But what if the gospel here, in full and in fine, is not so much about tactics, but about mindset? What if the way to forgiveness is not so much 1,2,3 as it is something far more universal, more permanent, more personal? What if the real marrow of Matthew here is something like—‘when you have a problem, experiment; when you try one thing and it doesn’t work, try something else; in something as precious and lasting as forgiveness, maybe what most counts is not 1,2,3—go alone, go with a few, go with the community—as it is try some different things, experiment, if at first don’t succeed, try again, but in a different way?
Maybe we are meant to hear, here, a summons to varieties of religious expressions.
Hardly anything in life calls out experiment, creativity, and soul more than does forgiveness, whether we are talking about personal life or political life.
This calling you may be feeling toward forgiveness, clemency and pardon this morning may require some creativity, some freedom of thought, some novel approach. And you may be just the person to conduct the experiment. Good for you. In fact, you may be able to expand all of our repertoires of grace.
Matthew is apparently fighting on two fronts, both against the fundamental conservatives to the right, and against the spiritual radicals to the left. In Matthew, Gospel continues to trump tradition, as in Paul, but tradition itself is a bulwark to defend the Gospel, as in Timothy. Matthew is trying to guide his part of the early church, between the Scylla of the tightly tethered and the Charybdis of the tether-less. The people who raised us, in the dark, in the snows of those midnight blackened towns along the train tracks of the Lake Shore Limited, Albany to Buffalo, and on to Chicago, knew this well. That is, with Matthew, they wanted to order the meaning of the history of the gospel. They aspired to do so by opposition to indecency and indifference. They attempted to do so by attention to conscience and compassion. Matthew emphasizes the role of law, of the law, of laws. He is a legalist, whether or not he was Jewish (the general assumption, though some (I) would argue otherwise). The church affirms and protects the conscience (repeat), in a personal way.
“His name shall be called Jesus, for He shall save his people from their sin.”
Many years ago, in late November a 26 year old woman died, a death tragic and needless. She had come in the early snows of that November to our little church, for a few Sundays. So the family asked us to do the funeral and burial, which we did. But we learned later that they also had a long time earlier attended another church in a neighboring town, and a connection with the minister from that church, John, who had baptized the girl 25 years earlier, and who was, and probably felt, left out. A week later the Episcopal priest nearby called and invited us to lunch. ‘I just wanted to catch up with you both’. The door opened on a priest in his clerics, a linen covered table with fine China and crystal, and a full meal. We dined and talked. And there was real grace. Brushing the snow off the windshield that afternoon, I realized this older pastor was just trying to bring a little pardon, a little mercy, a little grace into a time of loss. It didn’t build his congregation, or expand his budget, or add to his Sunday attendance. He just had a sense, a calling to offer some mercy, in a time of hurt, over a common meal. And 39 years 8 months later the memory is as clear as a bell.
The pinnacle of our readings from Holy Scripture this Sunday is in Romans. Paul, as he does in 1 Corinthians 13, so here in Romans 13, sings praise to the God of love, to love, for love, in love. Forgiveness guides us to love. Forgiveness is the heart of love, and love of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the uber driver who gets us to the street of love.
Mark Helperin: ‘I was graduated from the finest school, which is that of the love between parent and child…In this school you learn the measure not of power, but of love; not of victory, but of grace; not of triumph, but of foregiveness’ (Memoir from Antproof Case, 298)…
Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.
The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this sentence, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.
Besides this you know what hour it is, how it is full time now for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed;
The night is far gone, the day is at hand. Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light;
Let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. https://www.christianity.com/bible/rsv/romans/13-14
But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
Faith is the power to start over, in the midst of anxiety, and even in the throes of despair. Faith is God’s gift, and the message of the Spirit of the Christ. What the reason can never fully capture, and what the law can never fully define, faith gives: the power to struggle free of despair. Faith says: ‘Start again’…
Well begun. Begin with forgiveness. You’re half done, when so well begun.
This in a particular, personal way may become your calling. You may look in the mirror and see and say, ‘as hard as this is for me in general, I feel that I am called to be the salt of forgiveness and the light of pardon for those about me…Even though I am not good at it, I still feel called to it, called to grow in pardon, called to know well the grace of clemency, called to practice forgiveness.’
Frederick Buechner’s simple lines are oft-quoted, and should be:
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
