A sermon preached at the Congregational Church of Grafton UCC on November 6, 2016
Psalm 17:1-9 Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry
Luke 20:27-38 . . . that wife, now – I nthe resurrection whose wife is she?
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Psalm 17 is often held up as an example of a good prayer – and it is – an example of a good prayer. It’s a prayer which knows, absolutely, that God is there for us. It’s a prayer which trusts, absolutely, that God will support us. It’s a prayer which comes pretty close to demanding that God pay attention, hear our cries, and respond to our needs. The Psalmist even speaks to God in the imperative mood.
You remember the imperative mood from high school English, right? Do this, NOW. Hear! Listen! Pay attention!!
Well, that’s how confident the psalmist is; he – or she – tells God how it should be, and what the answer will be to his/her prayers. That’s one confident pray-er!
Now that seems pretty normal to me – just the sort of thing we usually expect from the Bible. But today’s Gospel lesson is clearly from another place. Every time I hear it, I can’t help but think to myself, golly, if I had a chance to ask Jesus a question, I hope to heavens it wouldn’t be something as piffly as this one.
It is so odd, it’s confusing. The poor woman! She keeps being married off to one brother after another .. . . and don’t you wonder how brothers 6 or 7 felt about this, given that she’d seen brothers 1, 2, 3, 4 AND 5 all die. In this day and age, we’re all wondering if she’s not a serial killer after the insurance money, but all the religious rule-keepers of the day (the people who want every little part of the service to be JUST like it was in grandpa’s day)… well, all they can worry about is, just whose wife will she be in heaven?
It’s really not surprising that Jesus’ response to the rule-lovers was quick and pointed. You’ve gotten it wrong, he says. Resurrection life isn’t about having wife or husbands.
So it seems we have two lessons here: one a model of how to pray and the other a model of foolish expectations. But if that’s what we think, we’re only partly correct.
That’s because there’s something out of kilter in each lesson; neither is really a model of right-ness. Each of them starts from the same place…. Each starts by the writer, or the rule-lover, thinking they’re right. Neither of them has any sense of humility; neither was written by someone who was conscious of their own distance from perfection.
And the first rule of prayer is to begin by recognizing that we – not one of us — start from a good position. We have all fallen short of the glory of God. That’s why we confess our sins on a regular basis – we need to remind ourselves that we don’t stand in the position of perfection.
The Psalmist was so sure of his position that he didn’t feel the need to acknowledge any shortcomings on his part. He must have seen the world in black and white to have ended up there, I think. And those rule-lovers? They were so sure they knew the rules backwards and forwards that they tried to debate with Jesus!
Neither the Psalmist nor the rule-lovers had any sense of their own shortcomings, and not knowing, they weren’t able to ask for forgiveness, much less vision or healing.
Church – this church – at its best, is a place where we can be vulnerable, where it is safe to admit our shortcomings, our sins, our struggles. It is a place where we can stand together and support one another. But when we forget to remember who we are, when we lose our sense of humility & begin to act as if we’re just tidying up the loose ends, well, then we’re really stepping out into the cold, by ourselves, wrapped up in our cloak of self-righteousness.
Now, this is part of the natural order of life. We’re all prone to attacks of self-righteousness. We’re all hesitant to admit our own short-comings, our errors, or fears.
The first time I ever went down to Cape Cod by myself, I was driving up from Philadelphia with a friend. I’d made the trip a million times, for sure, but always riding in the back seat, up through Connecticut to my grandparents’ home in Woodstock, and then via US 44, through Providence and Taunton, and thus to the Bourne Bridge. This time, I was driving. This time I didn’t go to the grandparents’ home. This time, I took 195 through Fall River and New Bedford. And the trip went really well, until we turned to come back to Philly at the end of the week.
All I know is the next road sign I saw said “welcome to Quincy, city of Presidents”. I’d thought I was right, boasted of my competence… and led us to Quincy when we should have been on the far side of Providence. Because I didn’t know we were wrong, I couldn’t get to right.
The first step is a kind of strong honesty, at least with God, admitting our faults. Henri Nouwen, the great teacher of spiritual life, wrote “the whole central idea of meditation is to simply pay attention to God & find your real self in God. . .” We can’t find that real self until we can admit that we don’t know where it is.
When we think we’re in the right, when we’re not able to see ourselves as God sees us, we back ourselves into a world ruled by anger and frustration. Because, you see, if I’m right, you must be wrong. That’s just the way it is. And I’m right, right? And then because you actually don’t believe I’m right, or at least not as right as I want you to think, I get angry.
And anger eats away at joy, dissolves happiness, corrodes family relationships, and destroys community.
Of course, we all get angry. Even Jesus gets angry – remember those money changers? But there’s a difference between the petty angers of running out of something important, and the kind of anger which eats away at community. It’s the difference between immediate problems, and long-term problems. I eat the last of the cereal, and there’s nothing for tomorrow morning – it’s an immediate, easy to solve problem. I tell my friend I think he’s a bigot – that’s a long-term, difficult to solve, problem.
Someone wrote recently – “for every stitch of hate you put in the fabric, you have to unstitch and you have to restitch in a different way later”[1] in order to mend the rent in the fabric of community.
When we begin to see ourselves as imperfect, when we begin to recognize how the fabric of our relationships has been damaged, we’ll naturally try to bring all together again, to fix what’s broken.
All too often, the solution we seize on is that the other person should begin things by apologizing to me. What we don’t realize, at least at first, is that the hot blazing core of anger lives in our own hearts.
The first step in re-building after a fight is healing the anger in our own hearts. That’s why I focused this month in the newsletter on how we get beyond what tears us apart. It’s something that happens all the time – in families, at work, and even here at church.
Sometimes we don’t even realize how angry we are. Sometimes, we feel so justified in our anger that we don’t want to let go. But Jesus tells us, in that story about the poor woman who’d been married seven times, not to get lost in the irrelevant.
Growing out of a fight will never happen so long as we fix our hearts on being right, on getting even, on making the other do what we want. Every person who’s been through a divorce knows how hopeless it is to keep on being angry at your ex after everything’s over. But still, it’s hard to let go of the feelings; that’s why the author of the story I quoted said he often finds he has to begin by asking for the will to let go of his anger and resentment.
The first step in prayer is to know you stand in the need of prayer, to recognize that where you are now is separating you from God and from your community – your family, your work, even your church. Take that first step and acknowledge your need. Even if you have to begin by saying, I don’t know what I need, or I’m just not ready to let go of my feelings, that’s a beginning. And you will grow, throughout this month, as you continue to offer prayers for that situation, for those persons who have made you so very angry.
Then in God’s good time, your healing will begin. In the meantime, come to this table spread for all who stand in the need of God’s healing love.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
© 2016, Virginia H. Child
[1] Eboo Patel
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 