PRACTICING RIGHT RELATIONSHIP IN AHAB'S KINGDOM

In Jesus we see the full flowering of an image of God.

And we see a picture of how to live the godly life.

In today’s Gospel lesson, the sinner woman is living the godly life

by her loving, appreciative welcome

            while the pure but judgmental Pharisee is not.

Her very sinfulness has opened her heart to deeper godliness.

But to understand this way of seeing God and godly living,

we need to look back at how we came to view the divine nature this way.

This image of God unfolded over centuries.

Today’s Old Testament lesson is a key turning point

            in that ongoing discovery.

The story of King Ahab’s land grab is a bigger deal

than it appears on the surface.

It’s about how we understand God.

And it shows us the difference between the godly relationships

            we learn in the church and the power dynamics of the world.

Israel’s first image of God was as a powerful destructive force.

God was like a volcano, an earthquake, or a desert storm.

Later they saw God as a powerful creative force.

God said “frog.”

The universe jumped into existence and said ‘Ribbit, hallelujah.”

God was creative, but still a dominating power.

That dominator God was represented on earth by kings,

            who might be good or bad – but they were always god-like

            in that they were dominating powers.

They took what they wanted – like David taking Bathsheba from Uriah;           

            or Ahab taking the vineyard from Naboth.

But when the prophets saw the kings exerting that kind of dominance,

            it didn’t look godly to them.

They brought messages from God

– like Nathan calling David to account;

            and Elijah doing the same with Ahab –

saying this isn’t right.

And that made them rethink God’s very nature.

God wasn’t about domination.

God was about righteousness – right relationships.

In fact, righteousness was actually

the core of God’s identity and they called that

“the righteousness of God.”

They said:  God isn’t a powerful creator or destroyer

            dominating us by force.

The source, the destiny, the foundation, the purpose,

and the meaning of everything  is a network of love,

appreciation, delight, forgiveness, and compassion.

That image of God changed our basic metaphor of the divine nature.

We stopped calling God a super powerful individual.

Instead, we called God the Trinity – a symbol  of relationship.

Our central religious ritual ceased to be a sacrifice

to appease or propitiate a super power in the sky.

Our central religious ritual became Holy Communion

–      an act of unity with God achieved

precisely through unity with each other.

This leads to how we go about being the Church.

First, the Church is a school in which

we learn the fine art of human relationship.

We grow in godliness here by perfecting our people skills.

Second, the Church is a sign and a symbol of God in the world.

We exemplify godliness by the way we treat each other.

The Church is perfectly set up for practicing healthy relationship.

About 10% of church life is written in stone to give us a structure

like a Constitution of fixed principles.

Those things are rooted in theology, tradition, and deep archetypal psychology;

            so we do them – period – whether they please us or not.

But the other 90% of church life is up to us to work out.

There are no fixed rules and frankly

what we do often isn’t that important.

What we do isn’t nearly as important as how we treat each other

            in the process of doing it.

It’s like a family vacation.

Where we go isn’t as important as how we act in the car on the way.

So as we work out how to do church,

            we practice relationship and the world watches.

“They will know we are Christians by our love.”

Or will they?

A new priest in one of our congregations recently told some folks in town,

            “I’m the new priest at St. Swithens.”

The locals replied: “Are they still fighting?”

It reminded me of back when I was a parish priest.

We were remodeling our worship space,

            and someone suggested we didn’t really need an altar rail.

That produced a heated backlash.

People began organizing, lobbying, and politicking full bore.

One Sunday between services we were sitting

            in rocking chairs on the porch drinking coffee.

A visitor walked up, but we were so busy arguing

            over the altar rail, nobody spoke to him.

He listened to us go at each other for about 15 minutes,

            then walked off, got in his car, and drove away.

I don’t know his name.

I don’t know what he needed that day.

I don’t know what grace he was seeking from the people of God.

We were too busy fighting over the altar rail.

Altar rails are optional; a child of God is indispensible.

Whether we shine the Christ light into the world is crucial.

Whether we cultivate right relationships determines

the state of our souls when we stand before the throne.

These things are not trivial.

How we go about being Church is both our catechism and out witness.

We are here to practice Elijah-style righteousness

in a world that operates by Ahab-style

power politics and manipulation,

            a world where business, social, and even family

                        dynamics are driven by ego assertion.  

If we want to learn “righteousness” which means right relationship,

            if we want to learn how to appreciate people

            and form life-giving personal bonds,

if we want to learn the skills we need at home, work, and in the community,              where are we going to look today?

It won’t be a reality TV show or a talk show.

It won’t be an action movie.

It won’t be from our political leaders

            who think compromise is a 4-letter word.

Civic society is self-destructing and civil discourse

            is a dead language.

Look to world and you see the way of Ahab.

But if we church folks believe in the Triune God,

            if we believe that the source, destiny, foundation, purpose,

and meaning of everything

is a network of love, appreciation, delight, forgiveness,

                        and compassion

–      if we aren’t faking the Holy Communion,

–      if we truly believe that we connect with God

by connecting with each other

and that our relationship with God

is as good as our relationship with each other – no better, no worse –

then this is where we learn and practice the art of relationship.

Thomas Merton said, “The saints are saints not by virtue of their own sanctity,

            but by virtue of their capacity to appreciate the sanctity of others.”

We are here to learn how to appreciate each other’s sanctity.

That’s why our clergy are learning

            the relational skills of community organizing, circles of trust,

            asset based community development,

            and new ways of group decision-making like World Café.

It turns out Roberts Rules of Order are not in the Bible after all.

Our clergy are learning these skills so they can spread them

            in congregations.

If we have learned anything from the big church controversies

            of the past 30 years, it’s that when the Church imitates the world,

            when we do business on the Ahab style of power politics,

                        no one wins.

But when we withhold judgment long enough to practice curiosity,

            when we value people over project,

            when we cultivate the moral imagination

to see someone else’s point of view,

then we see the sacred in another human face;

            then God is glorified and our world becomes a kinder home. 

FORGIVEN IS BETTER THAN INNOCENT

Our Old Testament lesson is a real problem.

It says that if commit sin we will suffer misfortune

            for it here in this earthly life as punishment.

That implies that if we suffer misfortune,

            it’s a punishment for our sins.

God gives us cancer or wipes out our savings

            and may even afflict our children just to punish us.

It did not take the Jewish people long

            to recognize that things don’t really work that way.

The world is not that rational or that fair.

Good people suffer hardships while bad people often flourish.

The idea of God punishing sin with suffering

            fell apart long before the birth of Jesus.

Jesus said his Father caused the sun to shine

            and the rain to fall on good and evil alike.

God is not in the business of retribution.

But sin nonetheless has its weight and its consequences.

There is a moral order to the universe.

Great philosophers like Kant proved it through logic.

Even atheists like Greg Epstein insist that there is

            a moral order we need to obey.

We may argue about whether particular things are right or wrong.

But we all know there is such a thing as right and wrong.

Otherwise we couldn’t be having the argument.

When we violate that moral order,

            we put ourselves out of step, out of synch.

Something gets twisted inside us

            and in our relationships with others.

God may not be lurking around to zap us with a disease

            or an accident if we do something wrong.

But the very nature of things gives sin a consequence.

  

Buddhists call it karma.

Secularists say “what goes around, comes around.”

If nothing else, we suffer a wound in ourselves.

We want to think we are good people.

When we do wrong, one of two things happens:

            Our self-respect is broken; or

            We preserve our self-respect by lying to ourselves,

                        or devising false justifications.

            So we cut ourselves off from the truth.

You know what I miss about being young?

It isn’t so much being stronger, better looking,

            and having more hair.

It isn’t even having so much life to look forward to.

It’s that I was so sure of my own righteousness.

I miss being morally sure of myself.

Just one example from many possible examples:

Before I was a parent, I saw what a lousy job

            most parents were doing and knew how much better

                        I would do.

When my children were born, I set out to be so much better

            a father than my father had been.

But I was not.

Knowing there are worse fathers doesn’t help much.

Sometimes I was too angry. Sometimes I was too neglectful.

Other times I was too attentive in an anxious unhelpful way.

Often I pushed my children to succeed 

          at what I wanted so they’d make me proud.

I, was in short, pretty bad at parenting.

It is only by the grace of God my children came out

            to be the good people they are today.

With the passing years, moral and spiritual failures add up.

Regrets add up.

They add up in every relationship and in every part of our lives.

For those who are comfortable in their righteousness,

            the gospel of Jesus Christ may not have much appeal.

They have constructed a self that they are proud of.

They may not feel the need of Jesus.

When I was a recycling vegetarian politically correct young man

            I didn’t feel the need of Jesus either.

But I don’t honestly believe we can live very long without guilt.

I don’t believe even the strongest and best of us can do that

            for two reasons.

First, we have to live in human society

            and the structures of society are  unjust.

The greatest American theologian of the 20^th Century,

            Reinhold Niebuhr, taught us that we cannot be moral people

                                    in an immoral society.

For example, if the whole world were given the chance

            to consume what North America and Western Europe consume,

            it would take 5 planets with the earth’s resources

                        to meet the demand.

How can we justify that?

The second reason we can’t dodge guilt

            is that life is morally complicated.

Often the choices we face are not between right and wrong,

            but between wrong and worse.

Even if we do our best in those situations,

            we come out with a moral remainder.

I don’t know how we can get through life with clean hands.

So a lot of us live with regret.

           

For us, the gospel is not just good news

            – it’s the best news we can imagine.

That brings us to our lesson about the sinner woman

            and Simon the Pharisee.

The woman is a forgiven sinner who loves Jesus more than her own life.

Simon is a righteous man, sure enough of himself

            to judge the woman as sinner and Jesus as a false prophet.

            – sneering at them both from his morally superior seat.

So Jesus tells Simon the parable of the two debtors,

            which concludes that he who has  been forgiven much, loves much.

He who has been forgiven little, loves little.

Jesus does not say Simon has sinned.

He does not accuse Simon of being morally numb to his own failings.

He lets Simon’s self-assessment stand. Simon is innocent.

But because he is innocent, he has only his pride to keep him warm.

He has been forgiven little; and so he loves little.

The sinner woman has lost her pride but gained her Savior.

Contrition has broken her heart open to Jesus.

Being forgiven has healed her wounds and more:

            It has given her with the capacity to love.

So what is life about anyway – a zero defects score

            on some spiritual foreman’s clipboard?

William Blake said “we are put on earth a little space

            that we might learn to bear the beams of love.”

That’s what life is about.

 We “bear the beams of love” when we can endure them,

            when we accept the love of Christ who does not set standards

                        we have to meet to win his approval

                        but rather loves us as we are.

We “bear the beams of love” when we carry them

            to each other as merciful compassion.

 That’s what happens when we give up measuring our worth

            by our righteousness.

We stop living in pride and start living in love.

The love of Jesus is better than being blameless,

            better than moral confidence.

The point of the gospel is just this:

            It is better to be forgiven than innocent.

Every time we come to the communion rail,

            we surrender our claims to righteousness

                         and accept his mercy.

God open our hearts to receive his grace

            that it may  flower in us as the love of Christ.

God grant us the gift to forgive as we have been forgiven

            and love each other as we have been loved.