Down to the Hard Work of Reconciliation - Part 1

Matthew 18.15-20 (NRSV)   If a brother (or sister) sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the brother (or sister) listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.  If the brother (or sister) refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.  Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.  Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.  For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.

Down to the Hard Work of Reconciliation – Part 1

Throughout scripture, it is recognized that sin, the breaking with or turning away from God, is a harming, real, lasting, living thing that brings with it . . . broken relationships, broken people, hurt within and hurt without . . .

In this passage from Matthew, Jesus is recognizing the impact of that broken being on the body of believers as a whole.  In a very real sense, this is about unity.

The Genevan fathers read this text as a command from Jesus that within the body, we strive for agreement rather than seek for revenge.  It is the recognition that wrongs will happen even within the body and that we must address them.

We are not to simply do nothing, to pretend as if nothing happened, allowing our wounds to fester.  We are not to plot out our own course of getting even.  We are not to withdraw our affection and support from another within the body because they wounded us.

We are to make the effort to restore right relationship between us. And the responsibility rests as much with the one wronged as it does with the one doing the wrong.

This, then, is the Jesus twist: the one wronged has as much responsibility for dealing with the wrong as the one having done the wrong.

The reason is obvious: if it’s about unity rather than about staying even (what we think of as justice) – if it’s about unity, it does not matter who makes the first move.  

What matters is that the move – the move towards restoring relationship – be made.

In Leviticus 19.17-18, God instructs as to what the unity of family – the kind of unity Jesus speaks of – looks like:  You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself.  You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

When it comes to family, I don’t know about yours, but in mine, we are seldom, if ever, all in the same place at the same time.  In fact, most of the time we’re so out of step with each other that we couldn’t even walk in a parade together.

But that’s all right, because family isn’t about that.  It’s about the quicker ones waiting for the slower ones because we were made to walk together . . . it’s about knowing ourselves to be linked across time and space . . . it’s about welcoming each other home . . . every time . . . it’s about simply being – in family, you don’t have to prove who you are or that you belong – you simply are.  Some families are better at it than others, some are worse.  But no family looks at you standing at the door and asks who you are.

In Matthew 18, Jesus’ use of kinship language of brother (and sister) is important – it matters to these ‘rules’ and how they work.  This is a family affair.  

When it comes to family, we approach each other with an intimacy seldom found anywhere else.  Jesus’ point is that this level of intimacy – the closeness of what we call family – is to be found in the gathering, in what we call church.

Advent Reflection: Finding Hitler in the Manger

Adolf Hitler is so iconic for evil that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to consider him as a mere human being.  I try but do not, I suspect, get close.  Why would this be an exercise undertaken during Advent?

I am reading an Advent devotional book composed of writings by Dietrich Bonhoeffer entitled God is in the Manger .

Much of the writing is taken from correspondence during his imprisonment, which ended in his execution upon orders from Hitler just weeks before the end of the war, at a time when it was obvious that the end was imminent and that his ‘side’ would lose.

What goes on in the human mind that, upon realizing his own end draws near, insists on taking others with him?  I want to say that I cannot understand it, but the truth is that I can.

Hitler’s legacy is writ large upon the pages of history, but many of us have our own moments of selfish cruelty, don’t we?  The moments when, realizing the loss of our own hopes and dreams, we lash out at others: aiming, consciously or unconsciously, at breaking their dreams, as if our own brokenness insists that everything and everyone else be broken too.  The moments recorded only upon the hearts of those we damage.

It is the revenge impulse of the angry child, deprived of its toy, that breaks Mama’s prized vase.

Wouldn’t it be nice if a neon sign blazed from our foreheads when such moments occur:

Warning!  Danger!  Seeming adult is an angry child today!  Approach at your own risk!

For my own part, I regret the vases I’ve broken over the years.

I never thought I’d look to the manger and find Hitler there.  But Bonhoeffer was right: it is not our Hitler selves who inhabit the manger; it is God.  And this Advent, that’s where I want to be too: helpless, hopeful, and doing no harm.

The Walking Wounded

There are so many of us walking wounded these days - perhaps all days - some with wounds writ large on the face of history - some the harder-to-see wounds real nonetheless.

What prescription do we seek?  What cure can we find?

Medicating of self?  One more drink - one more pill?  It works - until it doesn’t.

Examining and reexamining with friends and strangers what went wrong and why?  Hard to know when we slip from needful reflection to needless self-infliction, reliving the pain over and over again.

Blaming God or the cosmos at the injustice of our peculiar suffering?  As if suffering were ever a matter of justice.  Suffering, after all, is different than pain.  The pain of the moment may be unjust.  But the rental space in my head that is suffering, the afterburn of pain, isn’t about justice, it’s about health and wellness – or its lack.

These are the things I think about today as I consider so many among us who are the walking wounded.  I wonder and hope and pray that my noticing, all our noticing, matters.  I know that our not knowing does – its own form of wound – as the one barely able to put one foot in front of the other must wonder what they have to do to get a busy world just to notice.

God notices.  This I know.  Deep down.  In the place I have no other name for and so call my ‘knower’.  Deep down in my knower, I know God notices.  That carries me.  But some days, to borrow from a quote I heard a long time ago, I just need skin.  Some days, so do you.  On those days, I am hoping and praying that I offer you the face of God and that you offer the same face back to me.

Come, let us walk together.

No need to talk.

Just look at me and see my wounds and know you do not travel alone.

The Bringer of the Dawn

When I was a student chaplain in the children’s hospital section of Robert Wood Johnson hospital in New Jersey, I was called to sit and wait with parents whose son was being cut out of his car by the jaws of life.  They had been to the scene and sent to the hospital to await his arrival.  Down I rushed, in my standard black suit with my chaplain badge prominent around my neck.

When the mom saw me, a horrible thing happened.  She dropped to the floor – literally dropped – as if the very life had been sucked out of her, she dropped and began screaming her pain and agony.

She thought my presence meant he had died.  After about the half second it took me to realize what was happening, I did the only thing I could think to do – I dropped to the ground beside her.  I laid as close as I could get to her and put my face right into hers.  I called her by name.  And I began to tell her that her son was not dead. . . that she had seen him with her own eyes and knew he lived.  I touched her, I held her, I pulled her face into mine and we laid in the middle of that hospital hallway floor together until she could see me and hear me and believe me.

I’m sure it was only moments, but it seemed like forever, that time when she could see or hear nothing except me dressed in black, come, she was sure, to tell her the worst news of her life.  Somehow the moments passed and slowly we arose, hands held together and slowly she could believe that if I was an angel, it was not as the Angel of Death that I came, but as the Angel of Love.

That’s how I see God in my woundedness . . . lying there on the floor beside me . . . speaking softly, gently, persistently, into my heart, that my worst fears are not true, that God is right there, that the dawn comes.  I, of course, was and am limited by skin, but not so God, who lies not beside us, but crawls up inside the hardest parts of us . . . the dark places where no dawn has ever been . . . and whispers . . . I am here . . . fear not.

God of the dawn, yes, but even more, God of our darkness. . . Lord of our sickness . . . Ruler of our lies . . . Healer of our brokenness . . . Companion of our lostness . . . Lover of our worst selves . . . Inhabiter of the worst of our black holes . . . there in all of what we would hide even from ourselves, lives the Bringer of the Dawn.

Diminished

A young friend sat with a new friend and heard a story of evil unspeakable.  I do not know the details.  I do not have to.

It is not to our own evil that I speak, but to the evil of others, not us, but still somehow very much us.

Being a minister, a pastor, means that people share themselves with us in ways unique . . . we walk with them through dark and lonesome valleys as much as over joy-filled mountaintops.

Their wounds are shared with us . . . and in a sense, their wounds become ours . . .

The cost of the journey to the pastor, the therapist, the professional listener, even has a name: “compassion fatigue”, as if you could become tired from caring about other people.

The name is not adequate.  It is too understated and too overstated, all at once.

It says too much to say that caring about other people makes you tired.  People are not a set of jumping jacks or a run around the track to be recovered from.  A good nap, that’s what I need . . . or so suggests the notion of fatigue.  But it says too little to say that it’s merely fatigue, this cost to my body and soul of the lent ear.

I think, perhaps, that John Donne hit closer to the mark: we are not fatigued by the pain and wounding of others . . . what we are is diminished . . . somehow made less than we were before . . .

The evil that others do to still yet others diminishes me.  It makes me less than I was.  Less sure.  Less confident.  Less important.  Less human.  Less.

In empathy, I can cry for their loss, their hurt, their woundedness, but I am also crying for my own less-ness.

Let it be said that in the listening, there is holy space.  There is room for the divine silence that is really the divine anguish, expressed beyond something as ordinary as sound.  It is the place of the rent curtain, of Rachel weeping for her children, of the earth splitting itself and the sun disappearing from sight in the sky.  It is the place beyond words where only the Holy Spirit travels, alone, comforting and comfortless.

Yet into such breaches does the pastor walk, often unwittingly, only to be blind-sided by yet another story of horror made ordinarily surreal by the comfortable living room surroundings in which the story is so often told.

Feeling helpless and hopeless, the pastor listens, nods the head, tries to seem caring and wise and come up with something important to say, something, anything, that will somehow magically change the past.  And then she remembers what she has learned time and time again . . . the past cannot be changed. . . it is the listening here and now that matters . . . there is healing in honoring the story and the teller . . . there is honor in the lent ear, reminding the wounded one that her story matters, that she matters.

It is not everything.  And it seldom even feels like enough.  But it will have to do, because it is all there is.  This ground is not the ground of redemption or purpose.  There is no purpose in the gratuitous infliction of pain and harm upon the defenseless.  There is only pain.  The pain matters because the person to whom it happened matters.  They were made less than, they were diminished.  And in hearing their pain, so am I.