Proper 14, Year B August 8/9, 2009 Rev Sarah Scherschligt, Prince of Peace ELCA, Gaithersburg, MD Ephesians 4:25-5:2 So, then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry, but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
This past week, as many of you know, was the beginning of Pastor Steve, our Senior pastor s sabbatical. Many people have checked in with me to see how it s going and that alone is an indication that it s going well. Yes, there s bound to be a bit more work, yes, some things might not get done, or done on time, but because so many in this congregation have stepped up in leadership and responsibility, plus the fact that we have a talented and dedicated staff, our church will thrive even in Pastor Steve s absence. Now, it s true, I ve probably been a bit busier this past week. Maybe that s why, rushing around doing errands the other day, I swung into a parking spot diagonally as if I were a candidate on the greatest race. I just didn t have time to take the 30 secs to pull out and try again. I knew as I hopped out of the car and beelined to the store it was a bad parking job I was technically between the lines, but as crooked as possible, and not exactly pulled in all the way either just inches from the car to my right. But it was a quick errand, in and out. I d certainly be done before them. Wrong: the car next to mine was gone by the time I came out. Apparently, maneuvering out of that spot wasn t fun for them. I know that because they left me a note under my windshield: Learn how to park. At least there were no bad words. Here s another parking story, true. One evening at the tail end of a snowstorm a woman (not me) parked on her street. The plows had already come by so the street was lined with snowbanks. She pulled over, parked, and walked the few houses down to her house. The next morning, she came out rushing to get to work. But she had to take it slow that morning because in the middle of the night someone had built a wall around her little red ford focus. It was hemmed in by a fortress of snow bricks stacked 3 feet high. It must have taken hours to build. In front of the wall was an arrow made of snow pointing ahead to a sign written on a brown paper bag that read this is a parking spot. She looked over the snowbank and sure enough, she d unwittingly parked right in front of someone s driveway, hidden by the snow. At least she didn t get her tires slashed. We all know the anger that inspires someone to write a note on a car, or build a wall, don t we? I ve been there. I m sure you have too. Maybe it s not a person s horrible parking job, but your neighbor s incessantly barking dog, or the way that guy in the cubicle next to yours who laughs at his email out loud while you re working, or that kid who just can t keep his room clean, or that parent who just can t stop nagging.
It s hard to live in community. When people live together, or work together, or are church together, we are bound not only to get on each others nerves, but to genuinely hurt each other. Truly hateful words, racism, bullying, violence, these have lasting impacts. Our interactions with one another can cause pain and ruin lives. The letter to the Ephesians our third reading today acknowledges the difficulties of life in community. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling and slander and malice? Wasn t this letter written: To the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus. It was written to a church! Certainly among good Christians, things like bitterness or wrath or slander don t crop up, do they? Aren t we all just kind and loving to one another? Well that s the hope. But Christian kindness sometimes morphs into what we from Minnesota know as Minnesota nice a passive aggressive tendency to be sugar sweet to someone s face and stomp all over their reputation when they aren t in the room. Our congregation, Prince of Peace, is currently blessedly free from the backstabbing and hurtful side conversations that can so often cause real damage to a church s ability to witness to the love of God. But we aren t immune to it. No one is, and so no church is. We each have our buttons, our flash points, and more, our theological differences, our backgrounds, our scriptural favorites, our social concerns, our vulnerabilities, our past hurts, our longings and hopes for the future. These differences crystallize when we face a decision. Churches face decisions. All the time. In just the past couple of weeks, here s a smattering of the decisions we ve discussed as a church: what Sunday School curriculum to use? Or where to hang up a sign pointing people to our garden and youth center? Can we give 200$ to the immigrant who
stopped in at the closest church because she needed help with rent? What color to paint the church? How do we interpret scripture as a community? What kind of music is the most worshipful for this congregation? What should our timeline be for rolling out a new website? When should we take out that dead tree out back? And so on If you have been paying attention, you know that at this upcoming churchwide assembly, our larger church the ELCA - will vote on a couple of issues we ve been weighing for a long time. One topic is whether we will become full communion partners with the Methodists we have such relationships with the Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Moravians and more. It is a formal way of agreeing that our understanding of communion community built in Christ s self offering is close enough that we can act as one. Practically speaking, it means that a Lutheran could serve a Methodist congregation particularly helpful in rural areas where churches with small membership need to share a pastor; or campus ministry settings. The Methodist tradition has a different enough understanding of what happens in communion that this one isn t a done deal. It will be up to the church to decide. The other major topic for the assembly, dwarfing everything else, is the sexuality statement of the ELCA, which clarifies our church s view on a variety of aspects of sexuality, including homosexuality, and will be the theological basis for some policy revisions also up for discussion. At the heart of the matter is whether this church will ordain openly gay and lesbian pastors in committed relationships. Right now the official policy of the church is that if a person is homosexual, she or he needs to be celibate in order to serve as a pastor. With the discussion to come, that may change, though how much and in which direction remains to be seen. The document up for vote is a faithful description of where the church you and me and millions of others already stand on this particular issue. You can read all about it online at www.elca.org. We had discussion series about it last year. The statement was created through a process of self-study, survey, draft, feedback and revision. Some people say things like the church decided this as if the church were some entity that exists outside of the people. In our understanding of church, the church truly is the people, brought together by the Holy Spirit and in conversation with God through Scripture. We are members, not of a church in name or building, but of each other.
One of our members, is going to be a delegate from our synod: Katie Hafner (Pavlak) will go to Minneapolis August 17 th to be part of this gathering of church. She ll join faithful people on all sides of this decision. We don t know what will happen, but we can predict that within our church, some will be thrilled, some will be hurt. Some people will feel justice was served; some will feel the gospel was denied. Some will just be glad that maybe we can stop talking about it so much. As a congregation, we ll want to have conversation about what the ELCA decision means for us. Stay tuned for that. I bring this up today not because I m going to launch forth my hopes for the church concerning this decision, though I do have them, but because it affects our life together and it is a matter for prayer and discernment for us all. I also bring it up today because it shows how kindness and love, and Christian community are more than pleasant ideas. They are some of the most difficult work we ve got. But there is help. For our life in community, as we move forward together through decisions, from paint color to policies surrounding sexuality, at least a few principles should guide us. Enter this text from Ephesians. Here are 5 points I take from it. They aren t the only lessons we can find in here and I invite you to take this text home and study it on your own. Here s what I ve found: 1) Watch your speech. Speech is extremely important to God by speech, God created the world and we create and destroy worlds by our speech too. Just think of the things we can do with our words, we baptize with speech, we marry with a promise, spoken; we say we are sorry, we apologize, we forgive and are forgiven, we say I love you, we sing. One of the keys to a Christian community is to speak intentionally, kindly, and thoughtfully to one another, recognizing that our words have power. Ephesians says Let no evil talk come out of your mouth, but only what is useful for building up. So that your words may give grace to those who hear.
2) Watch your speech, but talk to one another. Communicate. Don t let the sun go down on your anger. This is a difficult one for many of us. It is simply hard to talk with someone about something they might not want to hear. Except that they do want to hear it because it s the only way we grow together. Just imagine if those people who built the wall around the woman s car had just gone to her house and asked her to move her car. A little bit easier, no? 3) And while you re at it, make sure you tell the truth the deepest truth you can find, which sometimes is I don t know what God is saying about this. And sometimes it s I ve been wrong and sometimes it s I am upset by where we are going. If you aren t speaking the truth to the community and if you aren t allowing someone to speak the truth back to you, our whole community suffers. 4) Forgive and be forgiven. Understand that the search for truth in community is likely to rub people the wrong way and in any community, people do get hurt. Ask for and extend forgiveness, and then let it go, remembering that you are in this community, in this church, because God has already freed you through forgiveness. 5) The final and most important lesson for our church, and any community of people rooted in Christ s love, is to remember that God s love is the basis for all our loving each other. All our communication and kind speech and tenderheartedness is possible because God was that way to us. God communicated to us, the word made flesh, scripture; became a member of us by becoming incarnate in Jesus; and opened up made his heart tender to us by subjecting himself to our sins, even when it placed him on the cross. We can only love one another, forgive one another, and be members of one another if we dwell in the truth that God did it for us first. Friends no one is saying it is easy to live together it isn t. From small annoyances to decisions that threaten some of your deepest held belief, life in community is difficult. But friends, following God s example, it is the only way for us to have life, together. Thanks be to God who is the bread of our life, broken into our community to make us all one. Amen.