{"id":3543,"date":"2023-09-10T11:00:53","date_gmt":"2023-09-10T15:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=3543"},"modified":"2023-09-14T16:09:31","modified_gmt":"2023-09-14T20:09:31","slug":"well-begun-is-half-done","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2023\/09\/10\/well-begun-is-half-done\/","title":{"rendered":"Well Begun is Half Done"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to hear the full service<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Click here to watch the full service<\/a><\/p>\n

Matthew 18:15\u201320<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear just the sermon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Faith is the power to start over, in the midst of anxiety, and even in the throes of despair. Faith is God\u2019s 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: \u2018Start again\u2019\u2026<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Faith inspires forgiveness. Of yourself.\u00a0 And of others.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The church is where the deep gladness of faith meets the world\u2019s deep hunger for forgiveness.\u00a0 Where forgiveness takes root, indwells, has a home, is known.\u00a0 Where you are called to learn and speak the language of pardon, in all its glorious grammar, syntax and spelling.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018And throughout all eternity, I forgive you, you forgive me\u2019 (Blake).\u00a0 You are invited to growth in faith. Faith has as a first step, or at the least a very early step,\u00a0 in pardon, in clemency, in forgiveness.\u00a0 So today, in your first autumn steps, walk the sawdust trail of forgiveness.\u00a0 \u2018And throughout all eternity, I forgive you, you forgive me\u2019.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So the fierce prophet Ezekiel warns us and all.\u00a0 Turn back.\u00a0 Seek pardon, offer pardon, start with pardon.\u00a0 And watch for first steps in pardon.\u00a0 Your calling\u2014is it your calling?\u2014is pardon, clemency, forgiveness.\u00a0 We begin so each Lord\u2019s Day, every single week, with the prayer Jesus taught, \u2018forgive us our sins (catholic), debts (presbyterians), trespasses (methodists), as we forgive\u2019.\u00a0 The hallmark of faith, the hallmark of the community of faith, is forgiveness.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>You have ample space for practice.\u00a0 All communities inevitably are riddled with endless contention and intractable difference.\u00a0 A family, a dorm suite, a team, a business, a church, a country, a globe:\u00a0 endless contention, intractable difference.\u00a0 And the prophet warns, warns, that an honest, true, hard word needs sometimes to be spoken.\u00a0 You need to stop that, because if you do not, the future is not good, for you, or others, or us, or all.\u00a0 Ezekiel is a later prophet, on the edge of the divide between prophecy and apocalyptic, between politics and religion. \u2018Turn back, turn back\u2019.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>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 <\/span>cadre <\/span><\/i>of personalities, <\/span>cacophony<\/span><\/i> of vitriol, and <\/span>cascade <\/span><\/i>of venom, I would not have believed it.\u00a0 But I have now heard, and seen, and watch the worry birds fly morning by morning.\u00a0 Things change.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

James Baldwin: \u2018Nothing 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\u2019\u2026from<\/span> Nothing Personal, 188)<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You may need to say a straight word to a roommate, teammate, suitemate or fellow inmate: \u2018one of us is wrong and I think it\u2019s you\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 Then follow with, \u2018but maybe I am wrong, let\u2019s talk\u2019.\u00a0 The moment we break faith with each other the sea engulfs us, and the light goes out.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>The Psalms are chock full of pardon, clemency, forgiveness.\u00a0 David, however many Psalms he did say, sing or write, knew the first step of faith, the first word in faith.\u00a0 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.\u00a0 Create in me a clean heart O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Psalm 51: 10.\u00a0 Sometimes we need to start over, begin again.\u00a0 Sometimes that early step in faith invites a measure of mercy, a feeling for forgiveness.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Annie Dillard: \u2018The 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?) (<\/span>The Writing Life, <\/span><\/i>73).<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh.\u00a0 How I hate to scrap that sermon and start over.\u00a0 I do.\u00a0 But.\u00a0 It cannot be helped. It might have been good, but it is not good enough.\u00a0 Scrap it.\u00a0 But it cannot be helped.\u00a0 When it doubt throw it out.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Faith means starting over, in life, in relationships, in work.\u00a0 Every day.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Which brings us to our gospel.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Our gospel dives deeply into the dark waters of pardon, of forgiveness, that for which we pray every Lord\u2019s Day and every day.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Matthew relies on Mark, and then also on a teaching document called Q, along with Matthew\u2019s own particular material, of which our reading today is an example.\u00a0 He has divided his Gospel into five sequential parts, a careful pedagogical rendering, befitting his traditional role as teacher, in contrast to Luke \u2018the physician\u2019, whose interest was history.\u00a0\u00a0 We have moved from history to religion, from narrative to doctrine.\u00a0 Matthew is ordering the meaning of the history of the Gospel, while Luke is ordering the history of the meaning of the Gospel.\u00a0 You have moved from the History Department to the Religion Department.\u00a0 Matthew has his own perspective.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You may be interested or saddened to know that these several Matthean verses are found summarized from in this half verse from Luke: <\/span>if your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him (Luke 17:3).\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>Brevity is the soul of wit.\u00a0\u00a0 And the word church is used only twice in the Gospels, both in Matthew.\u00a0 This is the life of the early church on display, late in the first century.\u00a0 (Jesus after all loved both Gentiles and tax collectors, with passion and abandon.)<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>The word \u2018ouch\u2019 has a place in our lexicons and in our lives.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The teaching is to begin alone, to speak privately to your sinful, trespassing, debtor sibling.\u00a0 Then the teaching is to involve two or three others in the conversation,\u00a0 Then, finally, the teaching is to turn to the whole <\/span>ecclesia <\/span><\/i>(hear ecclesiastical), the community as a whole.\u00a0 One, few, more, many.\u00a0 Okay.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But what if the gospel here, in full and in fine, is not so much about <\/span>tactics,<\/span><\/i> but about <\/span>mindset?<\/span><\/i>\u00a0 What if the way to forgiveness is not so much 1,2,3 as it is something far more universal, more permanent, more personal?\u00a0 What if the real marrow of Matthew here is something like\u2014\u2018when you have a problem, experiment;\u00a0 when you try one thing and it doesn\u2019t work, try something else;\u00a0 in something as precious and lasting as forgiveness, maybe what most counts is not 1,2,3\u2014go alone, go with a few, go with the community\u2014as it is try some different things, experiment, if at first don\u2019t succeed, try again, but in a different way?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe we are meant to hear, here, a summons to varieties of religious expressions.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hardly anything in life calls out experiment, creativity, and soul more than does forgiveness, whether we are talking about personal life or political life.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This calling you may be feeling toward forgiveness, clemency and pardon this morning may require some creativity, some freedom of thought, some novel approach.\u00a0 And you may be just the person to conduct the experiment.\u00a0 Good for you.\u00a0 In fact, you may be able to expand all of our repertoires of grace.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Matthew is apparently fighting on two fronts, both against the fundamental conservatives to the right, and against the spiritual radicals to the left.\u00a0 In Matthew, Gospel continues to trump tradition, as in Paul, but tradition itself is a bulwark to defend the Gospel, as in Timothy.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That is, with Matthew, they wanted to order the meaning of the history of the gospel.\u00a0 They aspired to do so by opposition to indecency and indifference.\u00a0 They attempted to do so by attention to conscience and compassion. Matthew emphasizes the role of law, of the law, of laws.\u00a0\u00a0 He is a legalist, whether or not he was Jewish (the general assumption, though some (I) would argue otherwise).\u00a0 The church affirms and protects the conscience (repeat), in a personal way.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHis name shall be called Jesus, for He shall save his people from their sin.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Many years ago, in late November a 26 year old woman died, a death tragic and needless.\u00a0 She had come in the early snows of that November to our little church, for a few Sundays.\u00a0 So the family asked us to do the funeral and burial, which we did.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 A week later the Episcopal priest nearby called and invited us to lunch.\u00a0 \u2018I just wanted to catch up with you both\u2019.\u00a0 The door opened on a priest in his clerics, a linen covered table with fine China and crystal, and a full meal.\u00a0 We dined and talked.\u00a0 And there was real grace.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t build his congregation, or expand his budget, or add to his Sunday attendance.\u00a0 He just had a sense, a calling to offer some mercy, in a time of hurt, over a common meal.\u00a0 And 39 years 8 months later the memory is as clear as a bell.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The pinnacle of our readings from Holy Scripture this Sunday is in Romans.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Forgiveness guides us to love.\u00a0 Forgiveness is the heart of love, and love of forgiveness.\u00a0 Forgiveness is the uber driver who gets us to the street of love.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Mark Helperin: \u2018I was graduated from the finest school, which is that of the love between parent and child\u2026In this school you learn the measure not of power, but of love; not of victory, but of grace; not of triumph, but of foregiveness\u2019 (Memoir from Antproof Case, 298)\u2026<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.”\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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;<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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;<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. <\/span>https:\/\/www.christianity.com\/bible\/rsv\/romans\/13-14<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Faith is the power to start over, in the midst of anxiety, and even in the throes of despair. Faith is God\u2019s 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: \u2018Start again\u2019\u2026<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Well begun.\u00a0 Begin with forgiveness.\u00a0 You\u2019re half done, when so well begun.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This in a particular, personal way may become your calling.\u00a0 You may look in the mirror and see and say, \u2018as 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\u2026Even 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.\u2019<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Frederick Buechner\u2019s simple lines are oft-quoted, and should be:<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world\u2019s deep hunger meet.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world\u2019s deep hunger meet.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to hear the full service Click here to watch the full service Matthew 18:15\u201320 Click here to hear just the sermon   Faith is the power to start over, in the midst of anxiety, and even in the throes of despair. Faith is God\u2019s gift, and the message of the Spirit of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3543"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3546,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543\/revisions\/3546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}