Series: Leaning into the Peace of God.
Sermon: Silencing the Unforgiving Voices
Sermon by Fr. Rian Adams. Proper 19, Year A. Matthew 18:21-35
Last week I started a series on leaning into the peace of God. The first sermon was how peace of mind comes when we work through conflicts. This week I’m continuing the theme of leaning into God’s peace be facing another form of conflict… conflict with the self.
Intro:
“Dentists Are Seeing an Epidemic of Cracked Teeth,” said a headline in the New York Times last Tuesday.[1]
The author, Tammy Chen, is a dentist in New York City. She says that the pandemic has the dental business booming; “I’ve seen more tooth fractures in the last six weeks than I had in the six months before covid.”
What’s causing this apparent “epidemic of cracked teeth”? She says it’s stress and anxiety. We are grinding our teeth at night because of covid-induced nightmares, covid-phobia, and our infatuation with the 24 hours news cycle.
It all made sense. She even told us how to defend ourselves from the “cracked teeth epidemic.” She recommends a breathing exercise before bed. That sounds straightforward enough. But what she said next… that’s when I hit the pause button.
Apparently, after we do our breathing exercise, we are to “wiggle and flop around on the floor like a fish” to release some tension.
I think most of you are like me, you’re fairly open-minded people. Nevertheless, there is a point of no return. Allow me to confess my edited first thought, “My dear, you are either young or do not have a fused spine because a cracked tooth is better than a fractured back.”
But my second thought was, “There’s something missing from this article because simply relaxing the body and not softening the soul will not keep us from grinding our teeth in our sleep.”
With that in mind, let’s dive into this passage and see where we can find God’s peace.
When I look at the reading, I immediately see some problems, and they are not trivial problems either. But before we dive into them, it’s important for me to admit that I’m taking this text in a very new direction.
Most sermons today will focus on a direct reading of the passage. Preachers will tell parishioners not to be like the unforgiving servant in the story. They will say that Jesus warns against holding grudges, since God has forgiven us of so much.
They will show us how the King forgave a servant’s debt that amounts to 20 million dollars in today’s standards, but that servant would not forgive a man who owed him the equivalent of $20. The sermon will end with an admonition; to forgive lest we end up in a spiritual prison like the unmerciful servant.
That’s a good sermon, and it’s a sermon we need to hear. We need to see the world through the eyes of God’s mercy.
Movement
But that’s not the sermon I’m preaching today because, much like the article from the Times, I think it misses something. It’s difficult to treat the behavior when we don’t look at the soul—the place where the behavior is born and resides.
Let’s try something different with this passage this morning; let’s turn it inward. Let’s realize that each character—the King and the unforgiving servant—are parts of the self.
Carl Jung said, “The one who looks outside dreams, the one who looks inside awakens.”
See, when we hear the parable in the traditional sense, we remain on the surface. Most of the time we’re not as judgmental as the servant who demanded $20 after his king forgave a 20 million debt.
Here’s an important point: Normally, we’re not like that to others, but we are like that to ourselves. According to the National Science Foundation, the average person has about 40,000 thoughts per day. Of those, 80% are negative and 95% of those negative thoughts are exactly the same repetitive thoughts as the day before.[2]
We say things to ourselves hat Jesus would never utter to a human being. Have you ever heard, or even said, “I’ll never forgive myself for what I did _____ .”? That is the voice of the unforgiving servant, and it will steal our peace.
We all know that voice, “God has forgiven you, others have forgiven you, but I will not let you forgive yourself. You’re in a jail of anxiety, depression, guilt, and shame over that $20 bill you stole. If people find out who you really are no one will ever love you.”
He uses shame to silence us. He wants us to keep our stories—even the ugly ones—locked up where they can’t help others. He’s always easy to recognize because he has no mercy.
What I want to know today is can Jesus speak to that unforgiving person inside who tells us we’re not as gifted, smart, privileged, or educated as others, so we shouldn’t even try to make a difference in the world.
I want to know if God can take the tightness and the tension and soften it so that peace can enter it? I have a suspicion that when peace enters our fear, it calms the unholy voices.
How does that happen? I think the first step is to take the microphone away from the unmerciful servant inside.
Let’s look at the reading one more time because it has one more problem. It’s actually the biggest problem in the whole passage. It bothered me so bad last week that I consulted five commentaries, most of my favorite N.T. scholars, and I even resorted to a source that’s unreliable and borders on voodoo, a Google search.
I couldn’t find one person who even addressed this issue, much less responded to it.
This King… he seems like the antithesis of the Gospel. Jesus just got finished telling Peter that he should forgive 70×7, without number, then Jesus turns around and tells a story about a King who’s not even willing to forgive twice.
Why should we forgive without number when God gets off the hook?
Sometimes things are not as black and white as they seem.
If we use our holy creativity with this text, then we can play the part of the King. So when we hear that familiar voice we can say, “No!
You will not shame me over a $20 bill.”
Actually, you can tell him what the king told him:
“Go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.”
Amen.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/well/live/dentists-tooth-teeth-cracks-fractures-coronavirus-stress-grinding.html
[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/family-affair/201712/negative-self-talk-dont-let-it-overwhelm-you
Series: Leaning into the Peace of God.
Sermon, Pride, Prejudice, and Peace
Sermon by Fr. Rian Adams. Proper 20, Jonah 3:10-4:11
Introduction:
Let me tell you a story about how religious exclusion is born. Pride needs all the right answers. Before long, the addiction to certainty strangles love.
To maintain certainty, fear requires hundreds of hours and dollars looking for authorities that agree with its position. When fear empowers pride, prejudice is born.
Finally, the God of their own making gets involved. That’s when “those people” can be persecuted because they are not God’s “true children.” Does that sound like the current news cycle? Actually, it’s the story of the prophet Jonah from the 5th century B.C.
Pride and Prejudice Prevent Peace
Series Recap: So, we’re in a sermon series on Leaning into the Peace of God. Today we’re continuing the theme of how peace is on the other side of conflict. Two weeks ago the conflict was with others, last week it was with ourselves, and this week the conflict is with God.
Act 1: Jonah’s Pride
My guess is there are some people here this morning who have been mad at God. If I had to wager, there are people among us who have lost their faith after a tragedy.
There have been times I’ve said, “God, I just don’t understand why, it’s just not fair.”
The late great philosopher, Tupac, said, “Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else even cared.”
That’s where the story of Jonah speaks to us. Jonah can’t have peace because he won’t confront his pride. If we step back and look at him, we can laugh at ourselves because he’s really a mirror.
Jonah is upset. He’s pouting because God doesn’t submit to his will and obey his expectations. Jonah knows how the world should run. Jonah knows who should be in and who should be out. Jonah has more wisdom than God!
But God normally has a way of speaking to our pride. There is an old proverb that says, “Pride is a mask of one’s own faults.”
God tells Jonah, “Go preach to Nineveh, call them to repentance.” His pride says no.
Jonah boards a ship heading to Tarshis, just to show God who is in charge. Some say Tarshish was in modern day Spain. Keep in mind, this text was likely written in the 5thcentury B.C. when the earth was still flat! People believed you could fall over the edge of the earth into oblivion. Jonah heads to the edge of the map just to escape God’s mercy.
Dwight Moody joked, “God sends no one away empty except those who were full of themselves in the first place.”
Allow me a moment of honesty; my name is Rian Adams, I’m Jonah, and I’ve been to Tarshish. I have a T-shirt that says Tarshish or bust. I’ve Air B&B’d a room and vacationed in Tarshish…. Here’s it gets real… I saw some footprints that looked familiar.
We’ve all been prideful, and we’ve all ran from God at points in our life.
Act 2: Jonah’s Prejudice
There were two reasons Jonah couldn’t have peace to carry out his calling. First was pride, the second was prejudice.
Pride and Prejudice Prevent Peace
Before I dive into that idea, let’s look at the context of the book.
When the Babylonian armies defeated Israel, their God was defeated too; defeat turned their theology to ashes.
Let’s apply that to our lives today: When people have a crisis, the natural response is to either abandon their faith in God, or transfer the blame from God and absorb it into themselves.
The Jews thought God judged the nation because they didn’t keep his laws, and because they were in interracial marriages with Gentiles. That’s when phobia crept into their minds… a fear of the other.
The problem with that idea is the previous prophets foresaw an age when nationality would not stand between God and the human family. The prophet Isaiah said that all people, even to the ends of the earth, would be saved by God (Isa. 45:22).
So when everyone else was doubling down on their racial distinctive, one man challenged them. The conservative isolationists were in power, so he couldn’t speak publicly. So he sat down with his pen and wrote a story about a strange prophet.
Bp. Jack Spong, a mentor of mine, refers to Jonah as “The definer of prejudice.”
It was a tale about a prophet named Jonah. God calls him to go to Nineveh, but he refuses. He hops a ship and heads to the edge of the earth. But the ship winds up in a storm, and the sailors throw Jonah into the sea. Then a whale swallows Jonah. After three days inside its belly, it pukes him up on the beach.
That’s when Jonah decides that it’s in his best interest to go to Nineveh. At least he can tell them God’s going to judge then unless they repent. There’s no way the city of 200,000 people will hear that message.
But miraculously the entire city, even the government and the king, and even the animals repent. BUT… Jonah is mad about it. He’s not mad at the city, or her people, or even the animals, no, Jonah is mad at God. He goes outside of the city, sits on a hill, and demands that God kill him.
His pride put him in the belly of a fish, and his prejudice against the Assyrians put him under a plant wishing for death.
Then the writer kicks the humor up another notch. Recent statistical analysis confirms this idea. A recent research partnership between the best universities in the western world—Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge, and Sewanee, of course—revealed a mind-blowing fact… There is one sure and certain way to make someone who is mad even madder; ask them if they are mad.
God said, “Are you mad Jonah?” God is prodding him, “Hey Jonah, hey, you mad bro?”
Jonah says, “Yeah, I’m mad. And imma tell ya why. Because I knew you would show mercy to that city, and it disappoints me that your character has room for such inclusion.”
Then boom, the story ends. There’s no resolution. We’re left wondering if Jonah ever turned the curve and allowed God to transform his heart, or if never overcame his pride and prejudice.
Jesus even told a similar story about workers who were upset because a landowner who paid workers the same wage who came late to the harvest.
They don’t have peace because the landowner’s mercy is too wide!
Conclusion:
Let’s bring it home: Jonah didn’t have peace in his soul for the same reason the first workers didn’t; they couldn’t work through their theological and spiritual conflicts, and they blamed God
It’s okay to have a conflict with God. Here’s a little secret, God can handle conflict. What’s not okay is to surrender our peace of mind and board a ship to Tarshish.
Amen.
Series: Leaning into the peace of God
Sermon: Ignore the Pharisees
A sermon by Fr. Rian Adams. Proper 21, Year A. Matthew 21:23-32
I heard a story about a marital conflict that started at a reunion.
A husband and wife were sitting at a table at the husband’s 25th high school reunion when the wife noticed a lady sitting alone at a table nursing her third drink.
The wife asked her husband, “Do you know her?”
“Yes,” he sighed,
“She’s my old girlfriend. Bless her heart, and I hear she started drinking right after we broke up, and I hear she hasn’t been sober since.”
“My God!” his wife said, “Who would think a person could go on
celebrating for that long?”
And that’s when the fight started…
Where we’ve been:
This is week four of preaching about conflict! Week one was the conflict with others, week two was conflict within the self, last week was the conflict with God, and today, we’re leaning into the peace of God by exploring conflict with… Pharisees.
How do we recognize it? How do we respond to it? And how do we ultimately let it go and live in peace? Those are the questions the peace of God asks us to answer today.
Resistance and the state of the soul:
Often you can measure the peace of someone’s soul based on how many things they feel the need to resist, fight against, protest, and boycott; if you die on every hill, well, you will die a lot sooner than if you pick a really good one.
The religious leaders in today’s Gospel resisted Jesus. They didn’t fight the oppressive Roman governor, the political pawn of a high-priest, the aggressive soldiers, or even their king who stole his brother’s wife.
They resisted Jesus because he stood for love, mercy, forgiveness, compassion, and religious justice.
Power & Preference?
At this point in Matthew’s Gospel, the chief priests and the most influential men in Jerusalem conspire to kill Jesus. He is a threat to their power.
Let’s name something this morning; on the surface, and it’s easy to judge Pharisees and religious leaders. But, in some ways, in many ways, I almost understand their positions. Were they not just trying to follow their God?
In their time, the law was the only way to please God. In their minds, God sent them into exile and slavery 500 years before because they failed to keep all the 613 rules outlined in the law of Moses.
It seems like they wanted to make sure the people followed the laws and remained safe from God’s judgment. In many ways, they saw themselves as public servants—people called to help the normal person understand the written law’s complexities and oral tradition.
It’s no surprise they set a trap for Jesus. In their minds, Jesus was out of control when he rode a donkey into the temple the day before acting like their Messiah. He even dared to let others refer to him as the anointed one, the son of David.
Then he went over to the tables where people purchased sacrifices to offer to God and flipped them over while he screamed about making his father’s house a den of thieves.
He was a danger to others! He would bring God’s judgment as well as Roman’s punishment.
Is their zeal justified?
Dismiss Foolishness:
How many of you know the expression, “OK, Boomer?”
It’s relatively new on the scene. It became big in November 2019. What does it mean? Well, allow me to read what it means to you from the Wikipedia page:
The phrase has been used as a retort for perceived resistance to technological change, climate change denial, marginalization of members of minority groups, or opposition to younger generations’ ideals…
They are saying that sometimes people, which has nothing to do with age, dismiss views just because if they adopted them, they would have to change their lives… and worse, their preferences.
Here’s a real example I watched in Publix two weeks ago. A woman who was probably late 20s told her mother how hard things were for her and how expensive housing and healthcare was. Her mother said, “Well, if you’d stop eating that avocado toast, or whatever it is, you could afford housing and healthcare.” The daughter looked at her mother, and playfully said… “Okay, boomer.” Then they looked at me because they caught me, in a clerical, laughing at them. I broke the silence and said, you guys just gave me a sermon.” They laughed.
I thought about titling that sermon, “Okay, Pharisee.”
Let’s jump back to these Pharisees in the temple and bring this whole thing home where we live.
Conflicts, especially with the self-righteous crowd, are inevitable. If you want to spot them, pay attention to how they demand authority over the little things in your life. I don’t mean offering you solicited advice; I mean telling you what you should do with your life as if they are the only moral authority.
When we confront self-righteousness and fakeness, we need to address it exactly as Jesus did. He told a story about a man with two sons. The man asks them to go help in the vineyard. His first son said, “No, forget it; I’m not going, it’s too hot outside.” But then he changed his mind and went to work anyway.
The second son promised he would go to work, but he decided against it and didn’t bother to inform his father, hoping his father would assume he was working. In essence, he was a manipulator of perception (e.g., hypocrite).
So when we face Pharisees we shouldn’t let them ruin our peace of mind/soul. We need to recognize them for what they truly are: voices that do not speak to God.
I recall an event a large and fancy diocesan function, the kind you wear your Zegna suit to, where a lady sat at our table who was a negative and bitter person – you could just tell… I made mention that it gets expensive to fix a Mercedes once it passes 75k miles. She looked at me and said, “You should be ashamed; it’s ungodly to drive something like that when there are hungry people in the world.”
That’s when a retired bishop (she didn’t realize it…) spoke up. He said that sounds a lot like what Judas said to the woman who gave Jesus the anointing oil. He said, “that should have been sold and given to the poor.”
Recognize, Act, Let it Go:
So, how do we recognize the Pharisees? They need control of others to give them a sense of belonging and purpose. What do we do about it? We go to work in God’s vineyard, even during the times when we don’t feel like it.
I’m the first son, and I’m the second. We have each one inside. It’s up to us to choose who we want to be.
How do we get over Pharisees? Well… That’s what Jesus’s parable was about… How do you understand it?
Amen.