September 28, Proper 21, Transformations 5: Quarreling

Exodus 17:1-17, Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16, Philippians 2:1-13, Matthew 21:23-32

I’m doing this sermon series on Transformations, inspired by the epistle lesson of some weeks ago, Romans 12, which called us to be not conformed to the world but transformed by the renewal of our minds. So are the scripture lessons telling us this week?

We see the Children of Israel quarreling. Last week we saw them complaining. It’s not pretty, but it got results—food last week and water this week. I said that not all complaining is bad, some is allowed, and it depends. I said that the opposite of complaining is not complimenting but silence—not shutting up but the inner composure that you develop in worship and adoration.

Is quarreling always bad? Is it never allowed? Sometimes, when you are suffering, you vent your pain against the guy in charge. Sometimes you offer an opinion and or advance an argument and you end up in a quarrel. It was happening in the church in Philippi. The congregation was taking sides in a quarrel between two good women, Euodia and Syntyche. There are quarrels in our churches in the Classis. In the church I served in Ontario we had a quarrel that I did not handle well.

St. Paul calls the Philippians to be of full accord and of one mind. That is, get past defending your own position. See things from the other’s point of view, and honor their interests as legitimate. Find common ground and reach an understanding broad enough to include you both. No, that’s not what he says. That’s good, but that’s still being conformed to the world. That’s not a transformation.

The transformation is that your common ground is a new reality which is a challenge to you both. The transformation is that the one mind you share is not each other’s common mind but another mind beyond you both. The transformation is when you both renew your minds to share the mind of Christ. That takes regular renewal. You keep renewing it through worship, mostly, and also in private prayer, and in deeds of service to others, the practice of putting others’ needs before your own. You do these things imagining by faith the mind of Christ.

Your imagination of the mind of Christ is not just anything you want but is informed by his story in the gospel. So, let’s see for this week. The Lectionary has jumped forward in Matthew’s narrative to the last week of Jesus’ life. This was the day after Palm Sunday. Jesus had paraded into Jerusalem like he was taking it and then he cleansed the Temple like he owned the place.

So on this Monday morning the authorities of the city and the Temple come to intervene. “Hey, who said you could do all this?” Is it an honest question, like they’re open-minded, or is it a challenge? Do they think they have the right and the power to demand an answer? When a customs officer asks you questions, you’d better answer them, and don’t ask any questions back.

But Jesus is not in their power. He has no need to defend himself. Yes, he knows they are able to get him killed, and he’s not looking forward to the suffering, but he’s not in their power. He is self-determining, and free, and unattached from them, so that he freely can engage them.

Let’s be fair to the chief priests and elders. If somebody showed up at Old First and asked to preach but had no credentials, I wouldn’t let him. If have a preacher friend with a global reputation but for a number of reasons he belongs to no denomination and is an independent agent so I would never let him preach her. It’s a matter of accountability, which on the face of it the chief priests and the scribes are not wrong to expect. Who said you could do this? Who sent you?

But with his question back at them Jesus exposes them. They themselves will not be accountable They will not tell the truth of what they really think. They dissemble. Because of the popularity of John the Baptist they are afraid to say that they really think that John’s baptism did not come from heaven. Jesus knows they aren’t dealing in honest answers to begin with.

Jesus could advance a case for his authority, but he doesn’t advance it. His response is not argumentation but invitation. You see that in his parable. He offers them one last chance. “Many folks have been saying Yes to me, but they’ll soon desert me. You’ve been saying No to me all along, but you still come in. You’d come in behind the publicans and prostitutes, but you’d still come in. But you don’t want to, do you, because you’d have to let go of your position.” Defending your position is the root of quarreling—in other words, refusing transformation.

How Jesus deals with them is how he deals with us. Don’t you find it so, that the questions you ask of Jesus he answers with a question back, and a challenging one at that? He proves himself to you only by means of your own self-examination. You ask, “Is it true?” And he answers, “Do you want this to be true?” You ask, “Is he the Lord?” He answers, “What sort of Lord do you want?”

Jesus never defends himself. Neither does God, for that matter. What Jesus shows us is that God’s interest is not in your conclusion, but in your transformation. He’s renewing your mind. You cannot pay him any mind unless you renew your mind, and to renew your mind is to mind him well.

Religions speak of mindfulness. Usually it’s your own mindfulness, even when it’s reaching out into the world. Christian mindfulness is different. It’s more like a mind-meld, sharing the mind of another. The community of Jesus shares together the mind of Christ.

Now really, this is very strange talk. Your mind is your own. It’s the most private thing about you. It’s virtually impossible to enter someone else’s mind. My wife and I were having an argument (yes, we do quarrel the odd time), and she said to me, “You can’t see into my mind. I don’t care how long we’ve been married, my mind is private from you.” Of course she’s right.

But that’s our metaphor, as strange as it is. I think it means you have to use your God-given imagination to imagine the mind of Christ. Of course the gospel stories help by giving you reliable material. We know what Jesus wouldn’t do. As much as we consider what Jesus did we must consider what he, as a person in his position, did not do. Unlike the chief priests and elders, for example, he did not dissemble in order to protect his position, and he did not calculate what he said in order to preserve his status as the rightful King of the Jews and the legitimate Messiah.

He didn’t do that from the beginning, in his Incarnation, when he emptied himself of the rights and privilege of his divinity. He emptied himself and took the form and status of a slave. Don’t take this wrong. This does not mean he was powerless. Slavery was different then, slaves were often given power and discretion. But the benefit of their power and discretion was never in their own interest. The point about slavery is the absence of self-interest. That’s the mind of Christ. Power without self-interest.

Is this the transformation? Can you imagine it, your own empowerment under the sign of the cross? Can you imagine it, to be a slave and still be free? To be humble without humiliation? Can you imagine being a servant without servility? My basic instinct is to advance my interests and my causes and defend my point of view. Is this really what God wants for us?

You are unable to imagine it being a good thing unless you have your mind renewed. So you have to keep renewing it, and you keep renewing it by means of worship, devotions, seasons of repentance, and deeds of service. These are transformative when your purpose in them is to seek the mind of Christ.

We believe that God does not leave it up to us, but actually shares with us the mind of Christ by giving you the Holy Spirit. God is in you, God is among you. That makes a difference. That should have made a difference to the Children of Israel when they said, “Is the Lord among us or not?” You know how when your mother is standing right there it’s harder to quarrel with your brother? Just out of respect. You know you’re going to be put in your place. And that’s a lesson for all of us to remember when we’re pushing for our position, to respect the Lord who is present among us.

But there is grace in it as well. Renew your mind to receive the Lord among us, and you can leave it to God to empower you and establish your position and to advance your interests, and even, in God’s time and for God’s purposes, to exalt you. The whole issue of quarreling falls away. The transformation you’re after is to share with Jesus his constant God-awareness, the constant presence of God within his mind. A vindicating God. A providing God. A restoring God. A resurrecting God. A God will exalt you because God so loves you.

Copyright © 2014, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

A Poem About Transformation

Coming to God: First Days

Lord, what shall I do that I

can’t quiet myself?

Here is the bread, and

here is the cup, and

I can’t quiet myself.

To enter the language of transformation!

To learn the importance of stillness,

  with one’s hands folded!

When will my eyes of rejoicing turn peaceful?

When will my joyful feet grow still?

When will my heart stop its prancing

   as over the summer grass?

Lord, I would run for you, loving the miles for your sake.

I would climb the highest tree

to be that much closer.

Lord, I will learn also to kneel down

into the world of the invisible,

the inscrutable and everlasting.

Then I will move no more than the leaves of a tree

   on a day of no wind,

bathed in light,

like the wanderer who has come home at last

and kneels in peace, done with all unnecessary things;

every motion; even words.

Mary Oliver, from Thirst

Thank you, Melody, for sending me this.

September 21, Proper 20, Transformations 4: Complaining

One of the great Otto Heinigke windows in the Old First sanctuary. "Go ye also into the vineyard."

Exodus 16:2-15, Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45, Philippians 1:21-30, Matthew 20:1-16

I’m a grumbler, like those vineyard workers. I’m a complainer, like the Children of Israel. I’m a person who files complaints. Just this week I filed a complaint against the workers in Prospect Park who start the leaf-blower going at 6:45 am, right outside my window, even though the city ordinance says not before 8:00 am. I’m the kind of guy who calls up 311.

I mean grumbling is essential to democracy. Finding fault with your officials is a necessary preparation for elections. Democracy is not as much about voting somebody in as being able to throw the incumbent out.

Complaining varies by culture. I’m a dual citizen, and I spend about sixty days a year in Canada, and I can tell you that grumbling and complaining are not only more tolerated in Canada but even endorsed. It comes through on CBC, where the tone of the news is constant indignation, especially against the government, when it doesn’t deliver on what you are entitled to.

In the States, the government doesn’t owe you anything, you’re on your own, including your self-defense. Americans are violent. Canadians complain. That’s why I like it there—I’m a grumbler. When my wife and I are at events together she very often has to shut me up. My very cheerful and loving reputation is an effective cover, don’t you think? Just don’t complain about me.

Complaining comes from feeling that something is not right which could be right, and that this is the fault of whoever is in charge, and that it touches you, so you have to say something. (My two problems are that I think everything touches me, and I feel like I should always speak up.)

Not all complaining is bad. In another parable Jesus compliments a widow who complains. I guess the question is whether you really do have something to complain about.

In this parable, the vineyard workers had nothing to complain about. You understand that a vineyard was much smaller than they are today, and the practice was to harvest it all in one day, so that the grapes could be pressed all at once. As the day wore on, and if the crew was running late, you had to quick enlist more workers. So Jesus has this landowner being more generous with the later workers than he has to be.

He could have kept this under wraps by paying the earlier workers first, but by reversing the order of payment he’s rubbing their noses in his generosity. Or testing them. Well, it’s a parable. It’s about how you experience the generosity of God. When God is good to you but even more good to someone else, you feel it as unfair. And yet you’ve got nothing to complain about. Well, if I can’t complain, then what else am I going to talk about?

The Children of Israel did have something to complain about. They’ve been traumatized. And they have been conditioned by years of slavery not to trust the goodness of the guys in charge. They’re not asking for much— just plain, “What are we gonna eat.” When I was a pastor in Hoboken, I told my congregation I was being called to a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. When I was at the front door shaking hands one of the members said, “Reverend, whatta you gonna eat?” And of course, for the next four years in Michigan I did complain about the food. That was the sin, I think, the fault, my failure—it was in my resentment.

With the Israelites it’s when they start saying nasty resentful things, like: “If only we had died in Egypt.” Excuse me. “When we sat by our fleshpots and ate our fill of bread.” That’s selective memory. Now they’re unfair. You might have something to complain about, but what’s the energy in your complaining? For me it’s jealousy of other people getting preferments which I did not get, and it’s resentment that I have to pay for my mistakes when other people seem to get away with theirs. Well, that’s the extent of my suffering. My life is so lacking in real suffering that I actually don’t have anything to complain about.

If you’re truly suffering, it’s as natural to complain as it is natural for babies to cry when they are hungry. But in the epistle, St. Paul tells the Philippians that it is their privilege to suffer for Christ. If it’s a privilege does that mean you have nothing to complain about? We can guess what their suffering was. In Philippi you could get beaten up just for being Jewish, and Christians were still regarded as renegade Jews who were even worse for their recruitment of Gentiles. Philippi was a Roman military colonia, in which their Christian faith will have been treasonous and their worship illegal.

We don’t know of any active persecution at this time, but the threat, the fear, and the tension were ever present. They had to be so careful, and trust the good will of their neighbors. To complain about their predicament would have been self-defeating. There’s something in that for us in general. Complaining comes easily and naturally, but how often is it not self-defeating. What you want to do is to discipline your complaining.

I’m not saying to stop complaining. There’s lots of productive complaining in the Bible. I mean, God heard the complaining of the Israelites and answered it with manna. Was that God’s intention all along? Then why did God hold off, and rub their noses in their need for God’s providence? Just testing! So that they’d learn to say, “Give us this day our daily bread, and lead us not into temptation?” Do we have to learn that the hard way? Does God have to train us to say that? Is that the transformation? Is that the opposite of complaining? “Give us this day our daily bread, and lead us not into temptation.”

I would say that the opposite of complaining is not complimenting, nor is cheering the opposite of grumbling. Yes, maybe on yelp.com, and maybe according to Park Slope parenting, but not morally, not spiritually. When we come to the heart, when we come to your soul, the opposite of complaining is quietness, and the opposite of grumbling is silence. Not the silence of being shut up, but of your own self-directed repose and your own self-referential inner quietness, your being free and unattached to what the guy in charge does wrong. And if there’s some justice required or some repair to do, you’re more able to address it when you’re not complaining about it.

I don’t mean cynical silence, and I don’t mean stoic resignation. I mean the quietness of worship and the silence of adoration. I mean that the more you develop your attitude of worship the less complaining you will do, and your grumbling will decrease the more you kneel in humble adoration.

Notice how Moses and Aaron called the people to worship the glory of God. They said, “In the evening you shall know it was the Lord who brought you out of the Land of Egypt, and in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord.” It is in worship that you renew your mind and you realize your right place in the world, and in worship that you rehearse your rights and your privilege as not your own, but as God’s beloved.

Worship is the expression of your feelings, yes, but it’s more the transforming of your feelings, and it has something objective and substantial against you in order to renew you and transform you. You want this; that’s why you’re here today. You have come here to have your mind renewed again. Just being here you are transformed, and for this time together you have no time for complaining, and you have no spare breath for grumbling.

There were many good people who complained about Jesus. It’s not because he was not loving and gracious with them. It’s that he was no less as loving and gracious to bad people. He is generous to everyone, not as you deserve it, but as you need it. Jesus does not give out points for good behavior. That means there is no point to be good, except just to be good. Being good has to be its own reward. And being good will not exempt you from suffering and sorrow. That’s the other side of the coin of grace.

In the same way, there is no point to loving, except to love. And the love of Jesus did not exempt him from suffering and sorrow. But he loved because he, though absolutely free, could not help but love, because God was so fully in him, and God is love. Yes, even though God is absolutely free, God is love. Within this love right now you are transformed and the vision of this love renews your mind. You came here today to lift up your heart to the glory of the love of God.

Copyright © 2014, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

September 14, Proper 19, Transformations 3: Rescued

Exodus 14:19-31, Psalm 114, Romans 14:1-12, Matthew 18:21-35

We begin with the Parable of the Unforgiving Slave. This parable is spring-loaded. It has contradictions within it. At first, the king is extravagantly merciful to the slave, and at the end, he has the slave tortured because of the slave insulting his mercy.

Okay, but is Jesus really saying that God the Father is like that with us, both extravagantly merciful and also extremely vengeful and exacting? The church has taught just that. You know, “Jesus loves you more than you can ever know, and if you don’t believe that, he will roast you forever in hell.” That doesn’t add up. It doesn’t hold. That’s what I mean by the parable being spring-loaded.

As I wrestled with the parable, Melody advised me that it was comic, and I should read it as if the king were Tony Soprano. One of his capos comes to him and says, “Tony, I’m in trouble, I gotta deal.” Tony says, “I get it, these things happen. I can be very generous. You show me respect, and we can deal.” Then Tony hears that this capo shakes down a junior underling for not a lot, and Tony is furious and sends his guys to torture him. It’s not just generosity, it’s honor, it’s what’s in your heart. “So you better show respect, or you might find my heavenly Father like Tony Soprano, know what I’m sayin’?” So the last line of the parable is not a doctrine, it’s a punch-line, it’s a wake-up call.

What’s in your heart? You can always count offenses against you. Forgiving another person is not about keeping count. It’s about respect, it’s about respect for God and the mercy of God. You have to have a heart for mercy, that you know in your heart the mercy of God to you, how God is merciful to you beyond your reckoning or measure. Your practice of forgiving another person has to take place within your heart. Because you’ve got to forgive some fellow Christians who don’t even want your forgiveness.

You have to forgive in your heart because you might have to stay away from that person for the sake of your own safety. Because it’s not just every new sin you have to forgive, but the same sin, and it caused you such damage that every time you deal with the damage you have to forgive him all over again, in your heart, countless times. You have to renew your forgiveness like you renew your Metrocard. Renewing your forgiveness is part of the renewal of your mind which is the transformation we address today, the transformation of a broken heart into a heart for mercy.

How do you achieve this transformation of your heart? By exercise? By practice? By self-improvement and self-discipline, by the discipline of forgiving others? By mindfulness of others? All these, but not chiefly these. The most important mindfulness is not what you achieve but of what you have received, that you have received mercy. By believing that you have received more mercy than you can account for. That you have been surprised by God, jostled by God, pushed by God. You have been rescued, you have spared, you have been protected, you have been saved.

Do you think the Children of Israel would ever have entered that Red Sea if there were not chariots behind them? Do you think they’d ever have fled  Egypt unless they’d had to? Like it or not sometimes, you have to receive salvation. You don’t achieve it, you receive it, it’s mercy, it’s rescue. Christian transformation is believing how fearfully you are rescued.

These poor Hebrew peons had never been to the beach. They’d never seen the sea before. They knew the ancient geography, that this Red Sea was an invasive arm of the great encircling sea that was at the rim of the world, the cold, dark boundary of life on earth. Here before them, jutting into the world of life, was an arm of that great and deadly deep. This sea was death to them. They will have been terrified. What about their children? How did they even drag their animals into it? Just so, your own salvation is more fearful rescue than it is self-improvement.

As for the Egyptians, they were both thrilled and frustrated. The Israelites were trapped. But chariots can’t fight when they’re in a column. They have to race around the flank of the army on foot to attack from the side. And the Israelites were protected by the walls of water. But the Egyptians are blood-thirsty, they want revenge, and into the trap they go.

As I said last week, I’m not concerned how historical you take this story. But you can take it as one of the great informing stories of the world, the defining image of salvation for Jews, and for Jesus, and for the renewal of your own minds and how you see yourselves and what is the ground of your transformation. The salvation is how you pass through death into this life, this life right now, your life right now.

You live your lives right now as rescued, protected, and spared. Your transformation is knowing yourselves as saved. Not for judging others as unsaved, but that you know yourself as the subject of great mercy, behind you and beside and before you.

Just so, the parable invites you to believe that the deep truth about yourself is that you are a debtor who is pardoned, a trespasser justified, a criminal rehabilitated, a slave redeemed, that you live and die as the constant beneficiary of an expansive and undeserved mercy which is the love of God.

You like to be self-reliant and competent. But you can believe that you’ve been granted salvation, that you’ve been made right with God, not from your competency but out of sheer grace. Your belief tells you how to see yourself and also other people, especially those who are in your debt. You express your belief in your behavior which is also grace. Which makes for a community who express our transformation, a community with a heart for mercy and for love.

In the gospel lesson it’s expressed in forgiveness. In the epistle it’s expressed as hospitality and welcome. You welcome the person whose religious practice violates your own. You welcome the person whose very identity contradicts your own. The conservative welcomes the liberal and the liberal welcomes the conservative. You are showing respect, respect for the welcome of Jesus who has welcomed you. You find yourself within this little community of diversity not on your own for you are not your own, you belong to the Lord, who has claimed you by rescuing and sparing and saving you. So you show respect. So you open your heart.

You and your children are assaulted daily but the true facts of a world today, the clash of civilizations and the posturing of politic, the burden of indebtedness and the compounding of interest and the exacting of fees, the fear of the future of the planet, a world of aggression and ideologies. Strange that the strategy of God to counter this, the strategy going back to Jesus and St. Paul, is for small communities of transformation. But that’s how you serve God in the transformation of this world. That’s our mission.

And part of our mission is to teach these children who have registered for Sunday School this week. To pull these children with us into the Red Sea before they know any different, that they get comfortable walking between the walls of water, to get used to knowing themselves as saved and rescued and protected, that they know the prayers and the rituals which confirm the mercy in which they find themselves, so that in all the pollution of the hatred and violence in the world they can practice breathing into their bodies the Spirit of God. You might not think of this what we do here today as world-changing. But apparently God does. So respect it, honor it, bless it, support it.

Your transformation is immediate, it is always now, it exists out of time, because it is the work of God in you. The mercy of God is the compulsion and the freedom of God’s own nature, which is love. The mercy in which you exist is God’s extravagant love for you.

Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.

September 7, Proper 18, Transformation 2: Passing Over

Exodus 12:1-14, Psalm 149, Romans 13:8-14, Matthew 18:15-20

For the next few Sundays we will be reading from Exodus. These stories are important for two reasons. First, they are the foundation stories of Judaism, especially the Passover and its annual commemoration. Second, these stories shaped the mind of the Lord Jesus, and he found in them the pattern of his Passion, especially in the Passover. If you want to know Jesus, you need to know the Exodus.

The Exodus stories are wonderful and sometimes horrible. Today the wonderful liberation of the Children of Israel comes with the horrible slaughter of the children of Egypt. Such a story raises two problems: their history, and their morality.

First, their history. These stories tell you what happened, but can you take them as historical? Their details are improbable, unless God really did those terrible miracles. It begs the question to argue that because the miracles are impossible the stories could not have happened. There is no independent evidence from other ancient documents to either contradict or support what Exodus reports. I would say that you can believe that something really did happen back there, something otherwise impossible, but also that the report of it was written down centuries afterward, and that the Exodus stories were carefully crafted not for objective facts but for theological and dramatic purposes, something like Shakespeare with his Histories or the canvasses of Velazquez.

We want to steer between fundamentalism and liberalism. We don’t care to try to prove these stories as factual but neither do we presume to think that we know better than the stories do. The great Jewish scholar Umberto Cassuto wrote that the Book of Exodus is so artfully and subtly constructed that it’s impossible to pull it apart and get behind it, so that if you want to get anything out of it you have to take it as it is with all of its improbable details. We shall let the story speak in all of its literary power so that through it God may speak to us to us today.

Second, their morality. We are rightfully horrified that God could have slaughtered all those Egyptian children, no matter how many Hebrew children the Egyptians had killed beforehand. Not even for God, do two wrongs make a right. Of course, no nation has ever let its slaves go free without bloodshed. Think of our own Civil War. And in ancient times, people just accepted that gods could act like this. But how shall this be good news for us today?

Well, we have to remember that the Exodus stories are not about morality. They’re not about justifying the good and condemning the bad. They’re about God’s election and God’s judgment — God’s election of a humble people, in this case Israel, and God’s judgment on a people of pride and prejudice, in this case Egypt.

Of course we are troubled by questions about God’s jealousy and wrath, but these will be answered for us only in the long-term, as we follow the story of God’s self-revelation through the unfolding history of Israel to its drastic climax in Jesus. Here in the Exodus stories, election and judgment are displayed in naked conflict with the world, which conflict is only resolved for us in Christ, when God enters the world and takes on our flesh and so tragically and wonderfully accepts the judgment on himself. (O’Donovan, Resurrection and the Moral Order, p. 158).

So the Passover story leaves you up in the air with morality unresolved, and you can only come down to land with the morality of Jesus. To read this wonderful and horrible story you have to be like an angel who passes over the violence, because on the doorposts of history you have haltingly spread the blood of Christ, the Passover lamb of the Christian people. Agnus dei, qui tolles peccata mundi, miserere nobis. “O Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.”

The positive and wonderful affect of the Passover for the Children of Israel was their transformation. That night, when they all did one thing together, in fearful obedience to God, that night the tribes became a communion, the rabble became a congregation, the slaves became a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

It was a traumatic transformation, as we will see in the coming weeks. They had not planned for it nor asked for it. They had not asked to leave their homes in Egypt. This God of Moses — they don’t know this God from Adam. After centuries of absence he suddenly remembers them, and says he’s on their side, and by powerful signs and wonders he gives them what they had not asked for.

They had not asked for freedom, just for some relief. They had not asked to be transformed. They did not know where they were going. Moses did not hand out any road-maps. And if God did this to the Egyptians today, who knew what God might do to them next week?

Even to escape the slaughter of the firstborn must have been traumatic. If not for believing the strange instructions they all would have suffered the same as the Egyptians. You see how it works: To survive the judgment you must believe in the judgment. If you trust the Word of this God, the judgment of this God frees you instead of punishing you. For them it was freedom from slavery in Egypt. In your case it’s freedom from the guilt of your sin. Without even waiting for you to confess your sins, God unexpectedly and gratuitously just passed over them. You are free.

So that’s the gospel here. In the oven of oppression and in the face of destruction, these poor slaves and their children find themselves transformed by the grace of God in such an unexpected way. And so you too, you who are the beloved child of God, you find God’s transformation in your own life in unexpected ways, especially where you are most fearful and oppressed. For years your God may have been silent in your life, but now God calls you to receive the transformation God is giving you. To believe it is to receive it, it is God’s gift to you.

What this transformation consists of we will be exploring over the coming Sundays. I’m not sure where we’ll come out. We will not make it a self-improvement plan or a burden of works-righteousness. Today your transformation is simple and immediate: it is simply that you switch environments. You step from the environment of slavery into the environment of freedom, into the Kingdom of God, into the realm of freedom from the power of sin.

In the one environment, sin compels you and it compels your response to the sins of others. In the new environment, sin is there, sins exist, but they have no power any more, they are forgiven, they are like tigers in a zoo or like black-and-white snapshots. In this new environment of freedom, sins are no longer occasions for compulsion but opportunities for the exercise of grace.

Switching between these environment means switching also between the two cultures which have adapted to these environments. Switching environments is immediate, and switching cultures is gradual. You switch gradually from the culture of fear and greed and anger to the culture of grace and hope and love. So therefore this is what your transformation consists of: learning to see yourself as living within the Kingdom of God’s grace and thereby accepting and learning the culture of that Kingdom, which is the culture of God’s love and reconciliation.

You can see that culture in our gospel lesson, in the method which Our Lord requires for dealing with an offense against you by someone also in the church. In the old culture, you rightly take offense, and you complain to other people and you line up your allies against the offender. We do this all the time. It’s being bound to the offense. In the new culture, you loosen the grip of the offense on you. You go to the offender first, and you follow the steps to work it through.

In the end you might not achieve your hoped-for reconciliation, but already you’ve invested in the other person, and so you have implicitly begun the process of forgiveness already in yourself, and that means you are acting in your freedom. The method has its limitations for use outside the church. But even within the church it can be challenging, so you learn to just mostly not get offended. You keep raising the threshold of offense. You just pass over their offenses against you. And then you’re really free.

So the culture of a community of love is by no means that we never offend each other. It’s how we deal with our offenses, being bound to them or loosened from them, in the environment of bondage or the environment of freedom. This is what you want. This is why you are here today. You have entered this environment of the love of God to learn the culture of God’s love within the world. God loved you first, and God will love you all the way.

Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.