In the Name of God:  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

What do you believe?  Really?[1]

I don’t mean, what do you SAY you believe?  I mean, how do you BEHAVE?  What do you DO, day to day?  How are you living out your life?  How do you treat each other? . . . your co-workers? . . . your family? . . . your friends? . . . your enemies?  What do you DO? . . . for I think it’s in your behavior that you can see what you REALLY believe.  Are you REALLY a Christian?

Are you feeling put on the spot now?  Well, welcome to the club.  These are the sorts of questions that I seem to enjoy torturing myself with.  They rose up again when I first read today’s readings . . . and they’ve vigorously pursued me ever since.  Today's readings remind me of Jesus’ statement near the end of the Sermon on the Mount:  “So be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.”  Oh maaaan!  Come ooon!  That’s about as likely as . . . well, you get the picture.

Sure, I believe all this stuff . . . but is there any way actually to DO it? . . . I often fail to forgive, to love, to be perfect . . . so what does that mean then? . . . that, maybe, I don’t really believe what I profess?  Let love be genuine . . . no faking, no pretension, to gritting the teeth and pretending . . . let love be genuine, let it be real.  Love one another . . . outdo one another in putting everyone else first.  (Sigh.)  This stuff goes on . . . and if it weren’t hard enough . . . pretty soon we’re faced with the REALLY hard stuff:  Bless those who persecute you.  Never avenge yourselves.  If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink.   Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

I don’t know about you, but contemplating my own inability to do this sort of thing can make me feel sick, quite literally.  When I compare my way of behaving with these beautiful lessons in living . . . well . . . I feel LOUSY.  I know I’m a sinner.  And I wonder what kind of Christian I am.  How about you?  So is that the point?  Are we all supposed to slink out of here feeling rotten? . . . weighed down by the realization of how far we are from living out our faith?  No, I don’t think so, but how do we, as Cher would say in the movie Moonstruck, snap out of it?

Well, casting about, trying to find a way to "snap out of it" I finally came across an old article from the Christian Century magazine called “The Other Side of Rage.”  It’s by a fellow named Garret Keizer and it’s an excerpt from his book The Enigma of Anger:  Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin.  These titles appealed to me because after I spend a while being depressed about how rotten I am, I eventually get angry.  Keizer has some helpful things to say about this.

He points out that this business of putting everyone else first, this business of forgiving and showering our enemies with blessings can make us feel as though we’re less favored by God than the people who have wronged us.  When I was growing up there was a boy my age I despised.  I was sometimes made to spend time with him because his parents were friends with my parents. 

I’ll call him Edward.  Edward’s parents were rich.  He was smart and very good-looking.  And he was generally well behaved . . . as long as his parents couldn’t see what he was doing.  Out of their sight he was a MONSTER.  It was like Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde . . . he’d torture me, literally! . . . and, of course, he fought dirty.  If I’d complain . . . we might be told to shake hands and make up . . . We might BOTH be told to say “I’m sorry.”  To have to apologize to your persecutor, looking in his eyes and knowing that he’s mocking you, is OUTRAGEOUS!  And it DID then seem like Edward was the favored one:  he got away with murder and I had to forgive him (or at least pretend to) and APOLOGIZE for our disagreement.  Insult added to injury.  I can still get worked up over this. . . .

Keizer in his article points out that this sort of thing seems to be going on in some of the parables Jesus tells.  Those infuriating parables in which we hear of God’s infinite patience . . . with “the other guy” . . . when we hear about God’s unfailing preference for rascals, and his unrelenting disappointment with us, the GOOD guys.  Think of the parable of the prodigal son, or the story of Martha and Mary, or the one about the Pharisee and the publican at prayer. 

Like me, I’ll bet that at least some of you have spent some time identifying with the elder brother, or with Martha, or with the Pharisee  . . . those self-righteous characters who are certain that they’re in the right and are shocked to be told otherwise . . . and if you have put yourself in their place then you understand what I’m talking about.  It’s shocking to hear the other person – the person in the WRONG – be praised.  But if we stop there we miss something important.

If we look closely at the stories in which we imagine ourselves vicariously rejected, we may begin to notice something else, too:  a tone of affection – maybe even complicity – between the “God” figure and the one rebuked.  Remember how Jesus addresses Martha:  “Martha, Martha, you are troubled about many things.”  Martha is the one who invited Jesus to dinner, not Mary, and Jesus does not reject her hospitality even if it may be a bit . . . overwrought.  He does not criticize it until she herself confesses it to be a burden, and then he speaks to her in the tone of a peer.  Mary may sit at Jesus’ feet, listening to his teaching, but Martha stands at his elbow, hearing the gentle admonition of a friend.  Look again at some of these stories and you may begin to see that the one rebuked is spoken to as a peer and as a friend.  Martha is NOT less favored than Mary.

Ya know, when I think back on those times with Edward, I suspect that my mother knew what was going on.  But she didn’t want me to be trapped in a war of vengeance and retribution with this other boy.  She wanted me to break out of it, to be free . . . she wanted me to be bigger and better.

The call to forgive, to feed and bless our enemies, is not a second phase in our humiliation.  It is not insult added to injury.  Forgiveness of this sort is meant to cauterize our wounds.  The anger I felt in my childhood relations with Edward is not a bad thing in itself.  Like all created things, anger in itself is good.  Anger in the face of injury is a mechanism for survival . . . like the clotting of our blood.  In the face of terrible suffering and great injustice, anger and rage are gifts given by God to help us survive and perhaps right the wrong.  Anger can be a creative force for good.  Forgiveness is the scar that comes later.  If we never forgive, and only anger or rage remains, we continue to bleed.  Forgiveness heals.  Forgiveness heals US, the forgivers.  Forgiveness sets us free.

It allows us to step outside of the web of suffering that may otherwise hold us fast.  As Keizer writes:  "The injuries we suffer almost always involve constraint and diminishment; they confine us in a prison of fear, of hatred, of self-loathing.  Anger arises from the desire to break free of that confinement.  Anger shows itself as an impulse to knock down the walls.  Transformed into forgiveness, it walks through the walls – as the resurrected Christ is also said to have done."

Unfortunately, we cannot will ourselves to forgive.  We cannot will our own healing.  I cannot tell you that you must forgive, nor can I command myself to forgive.  The ability to forgive is a gift from God.  It must be prayed for.  But it is also a gift that God is EAGER to give us.

Remember at the beginning of this sermon I asked, what do you believe . . . really?  Well, I’ll tell you something that I believe . . . I believe that God wants us to break out of the prison of our resentments, and fear, and anger, and be free.  God wants to transform our anger into forgiveness.  God wants us to be bigger and better.  God wants us to live into those beautiful lessons for living that we know so well from Jesus.

Remember, I also asked you what you DO . . . how do you live out your beliefs?  Well, of course, none of us is perfect . . . of course, we all are sinners.  So one thing to DO is to pray.  Lay out all of your failings . . . your injuries . . . your sorrows . . . your anger . . . lay them all out before God.  And ask for forgiveness . . . both to be forgiven and for the ability to forgive.

Let your love be genuine.  Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering.  If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

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