I am going
to make two points.
I need you
to do a little mental work with them.
One point is
about our covenant relationship.
The other
point is about our language,
the way we talk to each other and
about each other.
What I need you
to hold in mind is the connection.
The way we
talk is a specific piece of the covenant.
Just hold on
to that and it will all be clear.
The way we
talk is part of the covenant.
The Bible’s
basic plot line is about how God saves us.
Salvation means
making us whole, healing us, and as the Catechism says,
reconciling
us to God and each other in Christ.
It’s about
our relationship with God
and our relationship with each
other.
God always – always – does that as a
group project.
God forms a
covenant establishing a relationship
among those people with himself in the middle of it.
God made a loose
covenant with all humanity in last week’s lesson,
when he set the rainbow in the sky.
In today’s lesson,
God makes a special covenant with
Abraham
to form a great nation, a covenant
people.
In Moses’
day, God spells out the terms of his covenant with Israel.
He will be their
God and they will honor God
by practicing justice and mercy
toward each other and the aliens in
their land.
Finally, God
expands his covenant to everyone
in a bond of love sealed with the
blood of Jesus.
In that
covenant, our covenant, we learn to love one another
as Jesus loves us.
Being a
covenant people requires us to act differently,
talk differently.
It’s a
behavioral thing.
The law of
Moses,
the teachings of Jesus,
and the Epistles of Paull
are all about how we act and how we
speak.
Covenant religion
is not popular these days.
Churches are
shrinking.
Church leaders
explain that people are turning away from faith.
They just
don’t believe in God anymore.
But
sociologists tell us, it ain’t so.
People still
believe in God as much as ever.
We have not
turned away from God.
We have
turned away from each other.
People want
to practice their own little religions.
It’s their
life and they’ll live it their way.
We want to
pray our own way, meditate our own way,
think our own thoughts.
I get it.
I have been
up to my eyeballs in the Church for decades.
I know
Church people are all too human.
We can be a
pain in the neck.
I totally
get wanting to steal away with Jesus.
But that
isn’t how it works.
God isn’t in
a spiritual zone we reach
through secret mystical techniques.
God, in
Jesus, joined the human race.
God invites
us into relationship with him
as a package deal with each other.
God loves us
through the agency of each other.
Being the
agent of God’s love isn’t easy.
Loving
people at their worst isn’t easy.
When St.
Paul told the first Christians to bear one another,
his words literally mean to put up
with each other.
Bear one
another.
Must Jesus bear the cross alone
And all the world go free?
No, there’s a cross for everyone
And there’s a cross for me.
In today’s
lesson, Jesus says, take up your cross
and follow me.
That means
something a lot harder than
crawling through broken glass.
Our cross is
each other.
We sometimes
bring each other joy.
But we sometimes
are pretty difficult.
People treat
each other badly in large and small ways.
We naturally
want to flee into solitude.
But Jesus
showed us another way.
He loved
people, forgave people, prayed for people
even while they were crucifying him.
loving each other especially when we
are not
very lovable.
We practice
love in all aspects of our lives.
But Church
is the one place that exists precisely
for the purpose of practicing this
kind of love.
We practice
by keeping the covenant,
living according to its terms,
and one of the terms is how we
speak.
We get picky
about 4-letter words.
Well, the
Bible doesn’t say anything about 4 letter words.
But Jesus is
crystal clear on one point about our language.
In Matthew
25: 22, he tells us how not to talk to each other.
Jesus says, Anyone who says to his brother or sister “raca”
is answerable to the court.
Raca is a general Aramaic insult, any sort
of put down or shaming.
Jesus goes
on: Anyone who says, “you fool” will be
liable to the hell of fire.
He will not
stand for our insulting each other.
Insulting
each other is a hell fire offense.
The
President tweets raca and you fool about his adversaries
several times each week.
But he
didn’t invent it.
Fox News
made it the norm of public speech in the 80s.
And MSNBC
replicated their language for the left.
But the
journalists didn’t invent it either.
They got it
from stand-up comics
in the 60s who discovered you don’t
have to be witty,
clever, ironic or any kind of funny.
You can just
be rude and insulting
and people will roll in the aisles
laughing.
Put it
together, and rude insulting language
has become par for the course in our
unchurched culture
– left, right, and center.
But Christians
are not like other people.
We have a
covenant.
We don’t act
like other people
and we don’t talk like other people.
We vow to respect the dignity of every human being.
and to seek and serve Christ in all persons.
We don’t
have to agree with each other about issues,
but when we insult or belittle the
person we disagree with,
when we call them a fool, we’re
talking to Jesus.
Christians
don’t talk like that.
Jesus says
that kind of talk is a hell fire offense.
It ain’t me
saying this. It’s Jesus.
So, anyone
who doesn’t like it can take it up with him.
If you want
to talk like people on tv and social media,
you’re free to have at it.
Just don’t
call yourself a Christian.
Christians don’t
talk like that
and if you use our name while
spewing those words,
you bring shame upon us
and build a wall between other
people and Christ.
is a sacrifice, well Jesus paid it
all for you.
This is what
he’s asking back.
It’s at the
heart of the covenant deal
at the heart of how we are saved,
how we are reconciled to God and
each other in Christ.
Hate speech
is no part of the Church.
This Church is
where we become more like God,
not in knowledge or power but in
love.
This is where we take up our cross,
where we learn the hard discipline
of covenant love,
the love God has given us to share
with each other
that we all may become
whole together.
