Sept 21, 2008 - "Good Work and a Sabbath's Rest"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky

Pentecost 19
September 21, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

SERIES: The New Monasticism
GOOD WORK AND A SABBATH’S REST

Exodus 16:2-15; Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45; Philippians 1:21-30; Matthew 20:1-16

It’s been a turbulent week in Louisville. One week ago we gathered in this place not knowing that a storm was brewing outside that would significantly affect our lives for the rest of the week; a storm that continues to affect many of us even still. Mary Oakley said except for the indoor plumbing, it felt like her childhood. On a lesser note, the turbulence continues to build at Valhalla as the U.S. tries to hold on for a Ryder Cup victory. And the baseball world says goodbye tonight to perhaps its greatest sanctuary, Yankee Stadium.

Of much more significant note, it has been a turbulent week on Wall Street. This is a storm that has been brewing for some time. Warnings have been sounded from many corners. The storm is still raging and we are uncertain of the effects and what the recovery will look like and when it will be.

Storms of nature and economics have a way of reminding us what really matters and where our security truly lies. Monastic spirituality can do the same, drawing us away from the false securities and superficialities and craziness of our age, calling us to the wise living of our days.

The prophet Jeremiah says,” Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls” (6:16). Are you a weary soul looking for rest? Jeremiah calls us to search the ancient paths.

That is what we are doing these days as we consider a 1500 year old spirituality shaped by the monastic rule of St. Benedict, a rule which is heavily informed by a 4000 year old biblical spirituality.

The Benedictine motto that rules monasteries is the Latin phrase ora et labora (to pray and to work). The goal is to create a healthy rhythm of prayer and work, study and service for the purpose of spiritual transformation. In a few weeks we are going to look in depth at monastic prayer. Today I want to look at shaping a healthy rhythm of work and rest in our lives.

Exodus 16

Our scripture lesson this morning illustrates this for us in a story of divine provision, human work, and a Sabbath’s rest.

The Israelites were complaining about having nothing to eat. There was no electricity in the wilderness. All the food in the fridge had gone bad. And the spoiled children that they were, they just knew they were going to die of starvation and discomfort.

So God told Moses to tell the people that daily manna would be provided. Their job was to go out each day and do what was necessary to gather it. On the sixth day there would be enough manna for two days which they were to gather in order to rest on the Sabbath.

Simple plan. Work six days. Rest on the seventh. God will provide.

Now this simple plan only works when greed is kept in check, when desires do not lead us into debt, and when companies care more about their employees than their stockholders. Unjust social systems sometimes force unhealthy living through overwork and poverty wages. There are outside forces that make a healthy balanced life of work and rest extremely difficult.

However, for most of us, the responsibility for a healthy lifestyle falls on us. We are responsible to do good work and take a Sabbath’s rest.

If you are a student, perhaps you will want to think about your responsibility to balance school work with ipod/MySpace time. Even as a child or teenager, you can work on developing a healthy, balanced lifestyle that very few adults illustrate for you.

Work

The Rule of Benedict calls us to good work. He says: Idleness is the enemy of the soul. Therefore, the community members should have specified periods for manual labor as well as for prayerful reading. When they live by the labor of their hands, as our ancestors and apostles did, then they are really monks. Refrain from too much eating and sleeping, and from laziness. [1]

Benedict stressed the dignity of work for all, both the wealthy and the indigent. In his day, this was a revolutionary idea. Those born into noble homes expected servants to manage the annoying minutiae of their lives, but in Benedict’s monasteries, everyone tilled the fields, watered the crops, harvested the corn, weeded the gardens, worked in the kitchen, and served others in a variety of ways. [2]

The monastery had no slaves, modeled not on the secular world but on the servant ministry to which Jesus called his disciples (John 13). Tasks were rotated, and monks undertook the work in a spirit of humility for the well-being of the whole community. [3]

Everyone in the monastery did everything. And it was good work for the well-being of the whole community, which included serving the needy. Benedict says: Relieve the lot of the poor, clothe the naked, visit the sick, bury the dead, go to help the troubled, and console the sorrowing.

The monastic life calls us to engage in good work without being overworked. There is to be a rhythm of work and rest.

But we do not always embrace healthy rhythms of work and rest.

One reason has to do with what has been previously mentioned: unjust social and economic structures that force seven day work weeks for poverty wages, and these structures must be challenged.

There is also the way in which many of us allow our work to define everything about us. It is our status in the world and the rewards are often more clearly visible through promotion and position and pay, whereas with other ways of being in the world - spouse, parent, child, volunteer - the rewards are not so clearly visible.

If you read the business magazines you get the impression that if you work only forty hours a week, you will never get ahead. If you read the next article, you discover that those who work seventy hours a week are called names like “workaholic.” And in our society that’s considered a badge of honor. We often call ourselves workaholics with a hidden sense of pride.

But when we overwork it wears us down and it wears down our family and others with whom we share life together.

We work ourselves to death because workaholics are our cultural heroes. And we want to be heroes. Workaholics get the promotions and the praise. We don’t pass out rewards for practicing a healthy rhythm of work and rest. We idolize the American way of life which is in many ways a sick society with misplaced priorities.

A large part of our sickness as a society is the preeminent place we give to work. The idolization of work I think does more to contribute to the breakdown of the family than anything else. We would like to atribute our problems to other factors and other groups of people, but I think the problem lies elsewhere. The drive toward efficiency and productivity is a great enemy of the spiritual life.

Perhaps some of us need to ask ourselves the question: Have I been frenetically pushing the limits, rushing from one place to another, taking on too many responsibilities because I favor rewards for my busy-ness?

Often you will find within the workaholic a person who uses their work as a sort of “anti-sanctuary,” an alternative busy place to go to avoid the difficult task of looking into one’s own soul. [4] If we stay busy, we think to ourselves, we can hide the secret fears and failures of other parts of our lives.

Work is not what defines the Benedictine. Work is important. But work never comes first. The monastic does not exist for work. What defines the Benedictine monk and what defined Christ and what must define us as followers of Christ is a single-minded search for God. Creative and productive work are simply meant to enhance the world and sustain us while we grow into God.

In our culture we tend to value work solely as a means of making money. Benedict tells us to see our work as an opportunity to serve those around us and make the world a better place. Work is to be connected to our spiritual life. Work is made sacred when it is centered in a prayerful life. Good work is not based on efficiency, productivity, and profit. Good work is work that enables us to love God and neighbor best. Good work does not bring harm to creation or to the lives of others. Good work is holy work.

The monks at Gethsemani here in Kentucky have for generations been known for their cheeses. One monk quipped that in order to make their cheese-selling holy, they would need to open a franchise near Bethlehem and call it “Cheeses of Nazareth.”

One of the gifts of monastic spirituality is to call us away from the centrality and idolization of work. Robert Benson writes, “Perhaps we need to remember that the work we do is not the center of the universe. (But rather) the work that we do is to be done in the service of the Center of the Universe.” [5]

In the Middle Ages a traveler asked three hard-at-work stone masons what they were doing. The first said, “I am sanding down the block of marble.” The second said, “I am preparing a foundation.” The third said, “I am building a cathedral.” Remembering the greater cause of why we are doing what we do is one of life’s more demanding difficulties.

Benedictine spirituality calls us to something so much more difficult than hard work. And that is a healthy rhythm of work and prayer and rest.

Rest

The Rule of Benedict calls us to good work . . . and a Sabbath’s rest. Included in this rest is silence and stillness and prayer.

If Robert Benson is right and our work is not the center of the universe, we are free to rest from our labors. To be monks and nuns in the world is to make space for rest. If God can rest from creation on the seventh day, so can we. For one day a week, the world can go on without us. And for periods of time throughout every day, we need to go on without the world. We need rest. Monks and nuns have bed times. And they observe them religiously, literally. Bedtime is a spiritual event.

The mere presence of a monastery stands tall as a counter-cultural symbol, a reminder of alternative ways of living centered in something other than productivity. The church as a monastery should stand as a counter-cultural symbol against distraction and busyness, and teach the world to take care of the life God has given us.

The church as a monastery provides a refuge for people living busy lives, those caught up in the distractions of this noisy, confusing, and disordered world. It is a sanctuary, a place of peace and calm, where the ways of the world do not follow. [6]

To quote Benson again: “Perhaps the answer for all of us who are weary is to do less and not more. To walk slower rather than faster. To be more present to this day than we are to tomorrow. To just stand there sometimes rather than just do something.” [7]

“Be so still inside that you can listen at every moment to what life is offering you,” says Brother David Steidl-Rast. [8]

We must take time for silence and solitude, rest and reflection. The Rule is built around silence and we ignore Benedict’s call to silence and stillness at the peril of our spiritual lives.

We live in a world in which we are encouraged to multitask. We eat fast food, expect overnight delivery, and sign up for instant messaging. We get too little sleep, have too many commitments and too much on our plate most days and weeks. So we look for books that can help us pray our way to powerful Christian living in ten minutes a day, and we wonder why we are often left feeling somehow devoid of God’s presence in our lives. [9]

If the way in which I live does not have some silence and solitude and stillness and rest, then there is only one person to blame in the end. There is only one person who can, in fact, get me to do less and not more, to stop moving and be still, to slow done instead of speed up. And I am that person. [10]

There is within us all a longing for a deep connection to the silence, to the “great Solitude at the Center of All Things,” as Merton once called it. It is in returning and rest that we shall be saved, says the psalmist. But we must stop and sit down and be silent. For in the rest, I began to see things a bit more clearly and to be drawn a little more powerfully back into the life of work and community and prayer that has been given me to live. [11]

Conclusion: Time / Restlessness

There is about many of us a restless and anxious distraction that characterizes our lives. Part of the restlessness is built-in. St. Augustine prayed, “O Lord, you have made us for Thy self, and we are restless until we rest in Thee.” Part of the restlessness is God-given. Part of our restlessness will always be with us.

This divine inner restlessness should, at times, direct us outward toward others and toward a purpose beyond ourselves, doing something with our lives that matters in the world.

But the restlessness that harms our souls is not put to rest by staying busy; it is by living an integrated life of work and rest, prayer and service, a life centered in contemplation, a life that seeks an intimate union with God.

There comes a point when our restlessness should direct us inward. Rather than driving us outward, hoping to satisfy our unrest with more activity, more people, more work, more entertainment, more distraction, we must allow our restlessness to lead us beside still waters and to lay us down in green pastures and to restore our souls in the quiet presence of God.

A healthy spiritual life that you find embodied in most monastic communities is the desire to be an “active contemplative,” to live a life shaped by the rhythm of work and prayer, service and silence. Living such a life is a test of the maturity of a person’s spirituality.

It has been said that the task of life is to keep your world in order. To seriously follow the spiritual journey, particularly amid our world’s busyness, we must learn to guard the preciousness of time by savoring the beauty of prayer and reflection, work and rest. Life in God is about the nourishment of our souls, bodies, and minds. And it’s about living in the context of a community that supports us in our common goals.

We are called to be examples of a saner lifestyle, creating a schedule that honors our spiritual life, consecrating time to a higher purpose than productivity and consumption. Our goal is spiritual transformation.

So honor the life you’ve given by doing good work and practicing a Sabbath’s rest. Amen.

_______________________________

1. St. Benedict, The Rule of St. Benedict, ed. Timothy Fry, Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1998, ch. 48
2. Carmen Butcher Acevedo, Man of Blessing: A Life of St. Benedict, 84
3. Elizabeth Canham, Heart Whispers: Benedictine Wisdom For Today, Abingdon, 1999, 91
4. Abbot Christopher Jamison, Finding Sanctuary: Monastic Steps for Everyday Life, Liturgical Press, 2006, 19, 21
5. Robert Benson, A Good Life: Benedict’s Guide to Everyday Joy, Paraclete Press, 2004, 68-69
6. Wayne Teasdale, A Monk in the World, New World Library, 2002, xxv
7. Benson, 68
8. As quoted in Esther de Waal, Living With Contradiction: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality, Morehouse, 1998, 79
9. Benson, 24
10. Ibid., 37
11. Ibid., 42-43

September 14, 2008 - "Forgiveness and Reconcilliation"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky

Pentecost 18
September 14, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

SERIES: The New Monasticism
VOWS OF COMMUNITY: FORGIVENESS AND RECONCILIATION

Exodus 14:19-31; Psalm 114; Romans 14:1-12; Matthew 18:21-35


We are spending this fall looking to the monastic life as a model for congregational life. One thing you cannot escape in a monastery is community. You have to learn how to live together in peace. Any community, even a monastery, requires the practice of forgiveness and reconciliation. Community relationships are simply impossible without it. Because we all hurt others and get hurt by others. No one knows this better than country music writers.

One of the many things my theology professor Frank Tupper did for me was not only open my mind to profound theology, but he opened my heart to country music. Frank has spent the past three gatherings of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship hosting a breakout session on Country Music and the Spiritual Life. There’s a lot of country music I cannot stand, but some of the lyrics are priceless. Country music is real life, especially when it comes to heartache. I love titles like:

“You Stomped on My Heart and Knocked that Sucker Flat”
“If Heartaches Were Wine, I’d Be Drunk All the Time”
“You Stuck My Heart in an Old Tin Can and Shot It Off a Log”
“Mama Get the Hammer (There’s a Fly on Papa’s Head)”

You don’t get stuff like that anywhere else.

On my way to pick up Ryan from pre-school this week, I drove by Harvey Brown Presbyterian Church. I’ve been able to tell by the sermon titles on the sign out front that they follow the lectionary also. The sermon title for this week sounds like a sacred hymn turned country song: “O Grudge That Will Not Let Me Go.”

Those are the kinds of lines that get you in touch with the real world. And many a day, those lyrics form the prayers of our hurting hearts.

In Matthew 18, Jesus has been talking about what to do with our hurts. And when Jesus talks he is always teaching us that the kingdom of God works not as the world works, but as a new way to live based on forgiveness.

The Christian community deals with offense and pardon differently than the world does. Or at least it should.

But the Christian community struggles with forgiveness just like the world does. If you have no one you find hard to forgive, you are either a very rare person or a very young person. Chances are that for most of us when talk turns toward forgiveness, faces of those who have hurt us come to mind.

Peter is obviously thinking of someone he finds hard to forgive. He asks Jesus the question, “If someone sins against me, how often should I forgive? Seven times?” It is a very generous offer. More than twice what is required by Jewish law. But Jesus says, “No. Seventy times seven!”

And the disciples are stunned. Are we supposed to forgive someone 490 times? Well, the point is not that we forgive someone a particular number of times. The point is not to put a limit on forgiveness but rather live with a heart trained in unlimited forgiveness. By the time you forgive someone ten or twenty times, forgiveness becomes a practice of the heart.

And we must learn the practice of forgiveness. If we think back to last week where Jesus talked about confronting those who have hurt us for the purpose of reconciliation, there is no point in me confronting you about your sin if I have not first been shaped as a person who is capable of forgiving you for that sin.

The church cannot take a gospel message of reconciliation to the world while being unreconciled to one another.

To make his point, Jesus tells quite the absurd tale that his listeners would have no doubt found amusing.

A slave approaches the king with a debt of over a billion dollars. Well that’s a laugher! An Egyptian Pharaoh couldn’t come up with that kind of money, much less a slave. The point of course is that the debt we owe God is so enormous it is unrepayable.

The king threatens to sell the slave and his family.

The slave asks for patience, saying he will pay the debt. Another joke. It would take him well over 100,000 years to pay that kind of debt.

The debt is so enormous, and the request to repay so ridiculous, the king does not extend patience but compassion. The king forgives the debt, writes it off entirely, and sets him free. Extravagant forgiveness. Pure grace. He is forgiven.

But now the story turns dark.

The forgiven servant goes out and refuses to forgive a debt of $3000 owed him. The servant had learned nothing from his compassionate master. The king hears about it and throws the slave in prison for the rest of his life.

And so we ask ourselves: What have we learned from our compassionate God? Do you know what it is like, do you recall experiences where you knew God had forgiven you? When tears flow from your heart. When scales of guilt are lifted from your soul. Or a gentle rain begins to fall upon your sin-parched life. You were forgiven and you knew it.

What have we learned from our compassionate God? Have we been willing to take the beauty of forgiveness and share it with others? With all that we’ve been forgiven as the beloved children of God, we really have no right to withhold the blessing of forgiveness from anyone else.

Most of the time we try not to make our lack of forgiveness too obvious. We keep it subtle. Someone says something negative about you and you hear about it. You make a mental note not to forget. A church member did something years ago and ever since then you’ve been secretly hoping they’ll go to church somewhere else. Are there people here to whom you smile politely, but you wouldn’t choose to sit by in worship?

Sometimes the whole idea of forgiveness is too difficult to even think about. There are wives who hate their husbands for a betrayal that will never go away. Former friends who said angry, calculated, spiteful words that neither will ever forget. Children who can’t get over what their parents did. And fathers who hate their son-in-laws for what they are doing to their grandchildren. It’s hard to forgive. Sometimes we would rather lose a sister or a brother than go through the pain of forgiving them.

In this parable, I don’t know that Jesus is prescribing judgment as much as he is describing the harsh reality of an unforgiving heart. When we fail to forgive as the servant in the parable, we choose prison. We choose to lock our selves up in our bitterness.

Jesus wants to make us aware that there’s a direct connection between forgiving others and being forgiven. Those who don’t offer grace to others don’t experience grace for themselves.

In our best moments, we’d like to leave our bitterness behind. We recognize that our refusal to forgive hurts us. But how do we make the resentment toward those who have hurt us go away?

It is the work of God within us. And God does that work by forgiving us day after day after day, failure after failure after failure, sin after sin after sin. After being forgiven so much, we learn to forgive others.

Forgiveness is the attribute of those who have been forgiven. We discover the sometimes painful truth that we are like those who have hurt us. When we’re unwilling to forgive others it’s because we’ve forgotten the grace we’ve been given. C. S. Lewis said, “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”

An embarrassed employee is summoned to the boss’ office expecting to hear a blistering dismissal. The company may file criminal charges. The boss asks if he is guilty. The clerk says he is. But then the old man shocks him, “I’m going to forgive you. You’ll be the second person in this company who has been pardoned. What you did, I did long ago. We both belong to grace now.”

We all belong to grace. Stanley Hauerwas says, “We are members of a community of the forgiven.” [1]

Forgiveness is what makes us God’s people. The willingness to do the hard work of constantly reconciling our selves to one another makes us the church. The church that doesn’t forgive one another has ceased to be the church.

We forgive as God does, not winking at evil, but taking evil seriously and still opting for grace. Forgiving another doesn’t mean we’ll forget what they’ve done, that our wounds will completely heal, or that we’ll feel warm and fuzzy, but it does mean that we will see them in the light of God’s grace.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to forgiveness is that most people have a hard time actually believing they are forgiven. It is arrogance to keep carrying the guilt and shame when God says your sins have been pardoned. As John Claypool observes, “A lot of people lay down their burdens at the altar, but then pick them right up again and carry them out the door unchanged.”

Another obstacle to forgiveness is the false self-esteem of being the victim. There is a strange cult of victimhood these days. We take pride in being offended. It gives us the moral upper hand. And it allows us to escape our own responsibility for a breach in relationship. It becomes our excuse for failure. We wear our wounds like a badge of honor, hoping others will feel sorry for us. And with all the benefits from being victimized, why would we want to forgive? Of course, when everyone is a victim, no one takes responsibility and nothing gets solved.

In the Jewish Talmud a person is required to ask forgiveness three times in the presence of witnesses. If forgiveness is not granted, then the responsibility for the original offense falls on the person who refuses to forgive. After all, he or she is the one who will not let the wound heal.

Jesus goes further than that. He does not even require that forgiveness be asked before it is given. Because that’s how God is. And regardless of the repentance of the offender, forgiveness is necessary for our own souls, and for the healing of the wider community. A refusal to forgive is actually a sin against the community, the church.

And you have to ask yourself, is this the kind of person you want to be? Angry, bitter, plotting revenge, finding pride in being “the offended one”?

Our choice is to live in the injustices we’ve suffered or in the mercy we’ve received. God doesn’t ask us to create forgiveness out of nothing. God invites us to join in what God has already given.

But listen, forgiveness is the best revenge. Forgiveness heals our wounds. Forgiveness repairs the torn fabric of human society by removing one more ounce of hostility from the world.

I read this week about a television show “Forgive or Forget,” in which guests appear who have done things that have hurt their loved ones. They confront each other to see if forgiveness will happen. The host of the show goes by the name of Mother Love. And at the close of each episode, Mother Love says, “Never underestimate the power of forgiveness.”

The monks of Blue Cloud Abbey in Minnesota know that power. They gather each Thursday evening to participate in a ritual of communal reconciliation, confessing and forgiving those attitudes and actions that have negatively affected community life in recent days. Then they join together in worship and Holy Communion, followed by a buffet feast of joy. [2]

Forgiveness and reconciliation are holy moments of grace and great joy. Outrageous love can heal because “love covers a multitude of sins” and “keeps no record of wrongs.” Touched by God’s grace we become gracious ourselves.

You may recall the story of Shakespeare’s King Lear. He doesn’t wait to die to give up his kingdom, but goes ahead and divides it between his daughters Goneril and Regan. For this he asks little in return, only hospitality - a place for him and his knights to stay. But all the gifts in the world don’t make these two daughters generous. They pretend to love Lear to get their inheritance, but his kindness doesn’t make them kind. Like the servant in Jesus’ parable, the sisters quickly become defensive of what they’ve been given. Why should they share it? They push their father out. His grace doesn’t make them gracious. King Lear is a tragedy that ends in darkness and tears, but there is a gorgeous reconciliation between Lear and his youngest daughter Cordelia. The power of forgiveness produces a final moment of joy and hope.

Come, let’s away to prison;
We two alone will sing like birds in the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: and we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh.

We are the church when we pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh and share the outrageous, unlimited forgiveness of God.

___________________

1. Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew, Brazos Press, 2006, 166

2. Dennis Okholm, Monk Habits For Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants, Brazos, 2008, 82-83

September 7, 2008 - "How to Have a Good Fight"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Pentecost 17
September 7, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

SERIES: The New Monasticism

HOW TO HAVE A GOOD FIGHT

Exodus 12:1-14; Psalm 149; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20

We have before us in today’s texts and the ones for next week the most important words to a church in order to protect it from disaster. They are words that address disagreement, confrontation, forgiveness and reconciliation.

At work within these texts are two monastic values the Rule of Benedict addresses in detail but are foreign to contemporary church life: discipline and stability.

THE CALL TO LOVE, THE REALITY OF CONFLICT

All of which is wrapped up in the call to love even in the midst of conflict.

Benedict says the Rule is given in order to amend faults and to safeguard love. [1]

The apostle Paul writes, “Owe no one anything but to love them.”

When you sign up to be a disciple of Jesus you are taking a vow against hatred; you’re making a promise, in so far as you can with God’s help, to see all people through eyes of love. That includes our enemies. Jesus couldn’t have said it plainer: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

We continually bear out the truth the Bible teaches that human beings are broken by sin. So it ought not surprise us when people can’t get along. The Bible doesn’t teach us to expect a world where everybody naturally loves and respects everyone else. But Jesus does tell his disciples to “love one another.” And Jesus seems to think that the Holy Spirit will enable members of his body to do that. Indeed, that’s how Jesus says other people will know that there is good news for the world - because a church exists where people genuinely love one another. It’s a little scary to say it, but I think John Howard Yoder was right when he said, “Where Christians are not united, the gospel is not true in that place.” [2]

We all inevitably create trouble for the people around us. Not just because all of us are flawed, though we are; it’s also because we are simply different from each other, with different temperaments, and different ideas about how to proceed. And our differences rub up against each other.

There is possibly a place where differences do not rub up against each other. In his book The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis imagines hell as a vast, gray city that spreads out forever, inhabited only at the edges, the enormous center of it filled with millions of vacant houses on endless empty streets. All the houses were once occupied by citizens of hell, who disliked their neighbors and moved, and disliked their new neighbors and moved again and again. Preferring vast distance to dealing with difficulty and difference. [3]

We can’t love each other without some conflict. And we can’t keep loving each other without reaching through conflict to be reconciled. Jesus gives guidance as to how.

ACT I - ONE ON ONE

First: “If a brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If they listen - a most important Benedictine, monastic word - if they listen you’ve got back your brother or sister.”

Notice two things:

One, Jesus is talking about people in a covenant relationship. When he says “brother,” he means a member of the family of faith, the church. Maybe an official church, like Crescent Hill Baptist, or an unofficial church, as in friends who live in a covenant of faith, or a family, the church in your house. He is talking to people in a love relationship, and he’s saying these things all for the purpose of staying faithful to each other.

It’s what Benedictine monastics strive for when they take a vow of stability. It is the promise to stay in one place for the rest of your life. Can you imagine in our highly mobile society that sees mobility as a symbol of our freedom, can you imagine deciding that you are going to remain in one place for the remainder of your life?

Whatever could be the benefit of such a vow? Well, Benedict would say that you can only grow in the spiritual life by staying with one community. Where people get to know you through and through and hold you accountable to grow and change. The vow of stability also helps the monastic avoid the temptation to believe that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence in another faith community. [4]

So, this guidance from Jesus on confronting one who lives with us in covenant community is for the purpose of helping us stay faithful to each other.

A second point about this guidance is that it is primarily for serious offenses. It’s not about someone who rubs you the wrong way or disagrees with your position or looks at you funny. It’s about someone who sins against you. Disagreements and annoyances are normal parts of relationship. What mature love does with those is to bear them with patience. But to be sinned against - lied to, betrayed, attacked, abandoned, having someone not live up to their responsibilities to you - this is serious because it has the potential of breaking covenant. And that’s why Jesus says we are to confront it.

And you do it yourself, just you and the other alone, face to face. We keep the matter private. There’s no spreading of the news to others. We must not go about condemning the offender. You don’t gossip about your hurt, but neither do you nurse it in wounded silence. You could do that if it were all about you, but it’s not about you. A relationship is at stake. And not just a personal relationship, but a community covenant relationship. The purpose of this guidance is not to help justify the anger or hurt feelings of the offended but to restore relationship.

So you take the initiative. Isn’t that something? Jesus hands the initiative to the sinned-against. He tells us to make time to talk, one on one, with those who have done us wrong.

We take the initiative because, in some cases, the offender may be unaware of the offense. It is a gesture of reconciliation. The one who has been offended bears the responsibility of initiating reconciliation and mending the breach. The offended is not to sit back and wait for the other to apologize.

If this guidance gives us pause, I think it’s meant to. The very difficulty of deciding to go to someone like this invites us to pause and consider how we ourselves may also have been at fault. Maybe we’ll come to see that the greater sin was our own. Maybe we’ll go and tell them more about our sin than theirs.

David Garland wants us to notice that this call to reprove a fellow Christian is preceded by demands to be humble as a child, to purge one’s one sins, and to seek urgently after the one who strays like a shepherd after a lost sheep, and that it is followed by a demand for unlimited forgiveness. [5]

Barbara Brown Taylor suggests we ask some questions before we proceed, such as: Am I sure I know what I’m talking about? Have I given the other person every benefit of the doubt? What are my motives in confronting her with my feelings? Do I want to make him feel bad, or do I really want peace? And remember, Taylor says, being right is less important than being in relationship. [6]

Those are important questions to ask before pressing on to the difficult task of saying hard truth to people who have sinned against us.

It’s all the harder because of the tone it must take: not castigating or shaming, just telling the truth in love. This is a call for direct confrontation but not verbal abuse. Do you remember those words from Ephesians? “Speak the truth in love. . . Be angry, but do not sin . . .Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up . . . And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” Kindness is the best chance we have of winning back a brother or sister. Scripture says it is the kindness of God that leads us to repentance. And that is the point - not to get something off your chest, or to heal yourself, but to restore relationship. And that’s what makes it a good fight.

Even if harm was done deliberately, your attitude of love and gentleness may very well lead to reconciliation. What matters is repairing the relationship between the two family members. It’s about winning your brother or sister, not winning an argument. It is possible to win the argument and lose your brother.

If the person listens, which would seem to include hearing, accepting, repenting, and perhaps requesting forgiveness, then you have gained your brother or sister back to full relationship, to make the flock whole again.

Sometimes, though, it doesn’t succeed. Some of us don’t listen well, even when we are lovingly confronted with our sins. So Jesus goes on.

ACT II - TWO OR THREE ON ONE

“But of you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by two or three witnesses.”

Now, what is this - a posse? No, this is about people in covenant who aren’t about to give up on each other. To bring witnesses is to convince and persuade not to judge and convict. It’s about how incredibly precious our relationships under God truly are, and how all of us are harmed when even two of us are estranged. Jesus learned this from the Law of Moses in Deuteronomy (19:15).

So, you take one or two with you, and not your best buddies either, maybe their best buddies; but most importantly, one or two people who live in covenant with both of you, helping you both hear and say and see what’s true. It may be that we are wrong and we need wisdom outside ourselves.

But of course, even this can fail.

ACT III - THE CONGREGATION ON ONE

If it does, then Jesus says go ahead and bring in the whole family, the entire congregation. Let all of you stretch toward the healing of a wound and the restoring of relationship. This is the length that covenant love will go to. We’re to go as far as we possibly can for the sake of reconciliation.

Frank Stagg says that these instructions picture a community where every member watches over another, the whole church assumes responsibility for every member, and every member is accountable to the whole church. [7]

To engage the congregation is to get the congregation to exercise its moral influence, not its disciplinary muscle. [8]

The goal of Benedictine discipline “is always meant to heal, never to destroy; to cure, not to crush.” [9]

And the church, Jesus says, must pray together before disciplining the erring person.

And if in the efforts of everyone together, the other refuses to be reconciled, what then?

ACT IV - WHAT TO DO WITH THE UNREPENTANT

Then, Jesus says, “If the offender refuses to listen to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

This gets to the act of church discipline.

Part of the discipline is to let them go. Honor their freedom. Let them be as separate as they choose to be. Tell the truth about what has broken. Grieve them and let them go. It may seem harsh. It has been used as the basis for that ugliest of words, “excommunication.”

What it’s really about is an utter commitment to the practice of covenant love. So vital is it that when it’s threatened we risk hard conversations, make every attempt to get it back. And it’s so cherished that when it dies, we don’t pretend it hasn’t. This too, in fact, is love for members of the family who won’t reconcile: to accept and formalize their choice to be separate, and to honor love by giving burial to what has died between us.

We often see our sin as a personal matter between ourselves and God or us and the offended party. But it is a matter of the Christian congregation to which we belong, and may damage its life.

These instructions are set in the context not of self-righteous vindictiveness, but of radical caring for the marginal and straying, and of grace and forgiveness beyond all imagining.

This is a people who are to love another so intensely that they refuse to risk the loss of the one who has gone astray - or the loss of ourselves in harboring resentments. [10]

But whatever others do, we don’t stop loving. Not ever. As a matter of fact, did you notice something odd about how Jesus said to treat those who finally refuse all our efforts at reconciliation? He said let them go. But he also said, “Treat them like Gentiles and tax collectors.”

In one sense, treating someone as a Gentile and tax collector means rejection, exclusion, excommunication. In another sense, and quite ironically, it means the radical, offensive inclusion demanded by the gospel itself.

How did Jesus treat Gentiles and tax collectors? He had lunch with them and went to parties with them. He gave covenant love to anyone, and he never broke covenant with anyone, not even with us. And he never set limits on human forgiveness.

Listen to how the Rule of Benedict describes our love for the offender. He writes: The [monastic community, or the church] must exercise the utmost care and concern for the wayward because “it is not the healthy who need a physician, but the sick” (Matt 9:12). Therefore they ought to use every skill of a wise physician and send in . . . mature and wise members who . . . may support the wavering sister or brother, urge them to be humble as a way of making [amends], and “console them lest they be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow” (2 Cor 2:7). . . . As the apostle [Paul] says: “Let love be reaffirmed” (2 Cor 2:8), and let all pray for the one who is [not reconciled]. [11]

So my fellow Gentiles, no matter what others may choose to do, as followers of Jesus we are never in position to break covenant love with anyone.

We come to the table of One who never has broken covenant relationship with us. And never will. He reached out to us to the point of death. And is risen and lives among us as we gather together, reaching out to us still, calling us to forgiveness and reconciliation.

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1. St. Benedict, The Rule of St. Benedict, ed. Timothy Fry, Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1998, Prologue
2. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church, Brazos, 2008, 128
3. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Simon and Schuster, 1946, 20-21. Barbara Brown Taylor connects Lewis’ vision of hell with Matt 18:15-20 in The Seeds of Heaven, Westminster John Knox, 2004, 87-88
4. Christopher Jamison, Finding Sanctuary: Monastic Steps for Everyday Life, 117
5. David Garland, Reading Matthew, Crossroad, 1993, 190-191
6. Taylor, 88-89
7. Frank Stagg, “Matthew,” Broadman, 184
8. Garland, 191
9. Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict: Insights For the Ages, Crossroad, 1992, 104
10. Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew, Brazos Press, 2006, 165
11. St. Benedict, Chapter 27

August 31, 2008 - "Vows of Community"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Pentecost 16
August 31, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

Series: The New Monasticism

VOWS OF COMMUNITY

Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28

We continue our conversation on the church as abbey and monastery, and ourselves living as monks and nuns in the world.

Last week we considered Vows of Transformation and Service.

For the next three weeks we will consider Vows of Community.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux called community his greatest penance, punishment for his sins. It can be that difficult. But community is also the only hope for conversion any of us have. It can be our salvation.

Robert Bellah, Parker Palmer, Robert Putnam and other insightful analysts of western, postmodern society have identified loss of community, rampant materialism, and extreme individualism as among the sources of extraordinary stress in the lives of people.

Today many Christians long for more vibrant community, and yet most of us lack the required skills and practices. With our wariness of vows and commitments, and our individualistic and mobile lifestyles, we are not very good candidates for community life. And yet, life in community is central to Christian identity, purpose, and ministry in the world. [1]

The monastic model of community addresses all of these deeply spiritual needs. And they do so in ways that can guide the church as it seeks to develop spiritual health and transformation in the lives of people. It begins with a commitment to community.

Community is holy. The intimate connection of human beings sustains us and challenges us as we seek transformation in the image of Christ.

Tomorrow begins a new ministry in our congregation. We are calling it a Connection Ministry. We have 33 individuals who have agreed to stay in monthly contact with 12 households each for the sole purpose of staying connected as a congregation and making sure we know of needs in the lives of our congregation and seek to meet those needs through prayer and relationship.

To be healthy Christians we need a commitment from others to live in community with us and to make a commitment ourselves to be there for others.

The degree of commitment varies among Christians. The Rule of Benedict describes four types of monastics, which I think can easily relate to four types of Christians and church members.

The first type he calls Cenobites, the best kind of monk. Cenobites are seekers of the spiritual life who live with others in a monastery (or church) under a Rule or covenant. They are not a law unto themselves. They allow the purpose and discipline of community to give aim to their spiritual life, rather than each person doing their own thing. [2]

The second type are called Anchorites or Hermits. They live alone in a monastery outside community. Benedict did not favor this type of monastic. He knew that solitude was crucial to the spiritual life. And he said the only people who should live as hermits are those who have come through the test of living in a monastery for a long time. [3] While community is crucial to transformation, living as a hermit in solitude could be something Christians do from time to time for retreat and reflection, but not as a permanent lifestyle.

A third type are the Sarabites. Benedict describes the Sarabites as the most detestable kind of monastic, who with no experience to guide them and no rule, have a character as soft as lead. Their law is what they like to do, whatever strikes their fancy. [4] They separate themselves from a disciplined life and spiritual guidance and serious purpose in order to concentrate their energies on themselves. They live lives of moderate commitment. They listen to no one’s wisdom but their own. [5] They lack the humility to at least listen to tradition and learn from the lived-out experience of others. [6]

Similar to the Sarabites are the Gyrovagues, who spend their entire lives drifting from region to region in different monasteries (churches). Always on the move, they never settle down, and are slaves to their own wills and gross appetites. [7] They go from community to community, never staying anyplace long enough to be called to accountability by the community. They take from every group they visit but they give little or nothing back. They know how to shop for a monastery or church but they do little to build one. They live off a community but they are never available when the work of maintaining it is necessary.” [8] They are what we might call spiritual shoppers or church hoppers. They run away from commitment to community.

This violates the monastic vow of stability, which involves not simply remaining in one place but a deeper stability, the stability of a mind that stays still and does not endlessly search, constantly switching from one thing to another, hoping for something new or better somewhere else. Whenever anything becomes too demanding they move on to something new. [9]

The kind of community we are looking for is the kind described by Paul in our scripture reading this morning. It’s a description of how we are to live in Christian community, but also how we are to live with those outside Christian community. It is a way of living together characterized by love, peace, goodness, and service.

Paul says, “Let your love be genuine. Love one another with mutual affection.” It is not surprising to find love as central to biblical community. But often we have placed other things as central: political and theological ideology, beliefs, behaviors, similar socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. Scripture calls us to something deeper than that - a community that is characterized by mutual, genuine love.

It’s been said that home is where one is truly loved. We are seeking to make a home here for weary travelers where all can be loved and cared for. Paul reminds us that love issues forth in action, in physical expressions of care and compassion.

He says, “Contribute to the needs of the saints.” Such a call reminds us of the description of the early church where Luke tells us people would sell what they had and share with those among them so that no one was in need. An essential part of being community is we take care of one another’s needs as cenobites who live in covenant together, not as gyrovagues who only take and never contribute to the community.

Paul calls us beyond ourselves to extend love and community to strangers. It is the primary monastic virtue of hospitality. “Extend hospitality to strangers,” writes Paul. “Proper honor must be shown to all,” wrote Saint Benedict. Namaste. The God in us bows in reverence and honor to the God in others.

Hospitality has been described as “making room inside yourself for another person.” [10]

Maria Russell Kenney makes the observation that hospitality is not found among the spiritual gifts listed in 1 Corinthians 12, but in our text for today, Romans 12, what is sometimes referred to as the “Conduct for Christian Living.” Some of us appear more “gifted” than others at extending hospitality, like Margaret Graves who said she learned it from Mildred Birch. But like prayer and worship and study, offering hospitality is a spiritual discipline in which we are all called to learn and grow. The fact Margaret said she learned it from someone else reminds us it is more of a spiritual practice to be learned than a spiritual gift to be received. [11]

Hospitality to the stranger is a way of love to which we are all called. There is nothing that would characterize us as a monastic community more than the practice of hospitality.

Many of us are familiar with hospice, that profound ministry of caring for the dying that makes all the difference in the world for the dying and their families. The earlier idea of hospice care was rooted in monastic spirituality, not as care for the dying, but as hospitality to the living. Hospice originally referred to places of rest, food, and companionship offered to pilgrims, travelers, strangers, and those in need. [12]

Chris Rice has written about the transforming power of hospitality to the stranger. I think you will find that his words resonate with our experience. He asks: What will happen as we reach out across divides to the stranger? Mess will surface, both personal and institutional, mess that we’ll have to cry out for the Holy Spirit to touch and heal. Who “our people” are will begin to change, bringing a mixture of joy and fear as strangers become companions. Through a continual interplay of God’s grace and our perseverance, small signs of hope will begin to break in, giving glimpses that the way things are is not the way things have to be. Our vision of transformation will begin to change as we see that the depth of social division and how it has infected our world is deeper than we imagined. In short, what will happen in the exchange with the stranger is that a whole new set of challenges will emerge through which we will have to learn how to be the church.” [13]

I think he’s been living among us for the past eighteen months. Because that’s exactly what is happening to us. And the diversity of our congregation will continue to transform us as individuals and as a community if we will open ourselves to one another, and make room inside ourselves for the stranger, so that strangers become family.

Hospitality transforms and heals. It builds a bridge between enemies and everything else that divides us. [14] Hospitality is an act of peacemaking.

Paul says “Live in peace with one another.” And that’s hard work. How to settle disagreements and seek forgiveness and reconciliation is the topic of conversation for the next two weeks. But before we’re willing to pursue harmony and forgiveness, we must make a vow of promise to community.

We must never forget that God is present among us through one another. One writer put it this way: “The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” [15]

To live in peace is not a call to ignore evil, but it does mean we respond to evil in ways this world does not understand. You did not hear it this past week at the Democratic National Convention. You will not hear it this week at the Republican National Convention. Neither candidate would get elected if they put forth a Christian perspective on evil and peacemaking.

Paul says, “Hold fast to what is good. Hate what is evil, but do not repay anyone evil for evil.”

Paul Dekar writes some powerful and profound words about evil in the human soul and evil in the world and how we as Christians are to live with it. He says:

We are called not to reject the dark side of the human soul. We are clearly called to discriminate and to choose what is good, what is right, neither to perpetrate evil, nor to cooperate with it by silence or passivity. As long as humans make the error of imagining that evil can be done away with by amputation, coercion, or total war, we will inevitably create more evil. It is in the nature of evil to be against something. If we are set against evil, we will become like it by using its methods and terms. We will create more evil in the very attempt to eradicate it.

(Our torturous treatment of other human beings at Guantanamo prison is a prime example. In our attempt to eradicate evil we perpetuate it.)

God, on the other hand, seeks to save rather than destroy, so God chooses to suffer. God does not perpetrate evil, says Dekar, but experiences evil by suffering, and it this way wrestles with it and overcomes it. The victory of Christ is not that of a warrior with a sword but that of a wrestler who stands his ground. The One who harrows Hell is the Crucified One, covered with wounds but undiminished in mercy and compassion. [16]

Evil makes us angry and rightfully so. But as followers of Christ, we are called to use the energy of anger not in the service of evil but of compassion. [17]

“Bless those who persecute you,” writes Paul.

And “if your enemies are hungry, feed them.”

That is community and hospitality of a new world order. Jesus called it the kingdom of God.

Paul concludes this list of commandments for Christian community with the call to “serve the Lord.” This is crucial because it places the reason for community above our love of community and roots our love for community and our desire for harmony in a greater context.

In his book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer concluded that “the one who loves their dream of community more than Christian community itself will destroy Christian community.”

Whenever life becomes about me and my ideals, community isn’t possible. If pursuing community itself becomes our aim, we lose the sense of welcome, because receiving the stranger might unsettle our balance. The reason for community is to help us follow Christ and to help us help others live Christlike lives. The reason for our communities must be missional. The reason for our communities must be the ongoing ministry of Christ in the world.

One of the primary virtues of monastic life is that it calls us to a purpose greater than ourselves. It teaches us to put others ahead of ourselves. Only then is community possible.

To live in a monastic community is to find yourself with an ongoing opportunity for genuine Christian love in the practice of acceptance of one another, a place to pursue compassion and selfless love toward each other.

The personal vow of community is to say to one another: “It will be OK. And if it isn’t, you will be OK. Because whatever happens, you have me.” [18]

On our spiritual journey - the journey that really matters the most - we must resist the temptation to go it alone. The fact is: If we want to have life in Christ, we must have life within the body of Christ. It takes a community of faith to raise a Christian. We call it the family of God.
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1. Jon Stock, Tim Otto, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Inhabiting the Church: Biblical Wisdom for a New Monasticism, Cascade, 2007, , vii
2. Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict: Insights For the Ages, Crossroad, 1992, 31
3. St. Benedict, The Rule of St. Benedict, ed. Timothy Fry, Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1998, chapter 1.
4. Ibid., chapter 1
5. Chittister, 34
6. Esther de Waal, A Life-Giving Way: A Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, The Liturgical Press, 1995, 19
7. Benedict, chapter 1
8. Chittister, 35
9. de Waal, 20
10. Lonni Collins Pratt and Father Daniel Holman, Benedict’s Way: An Ancient Monk’s Insights For a Balanced Life, Loyola Press, 2000, 69
11. Maria Russell Kenney, “Hospitality to the Stranger,” in Schools For
Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism, Rutba House, 2007, 46-47, 53
12. Paul Dekar, Community of the Transfiguration: The Journey of a New Monastic Community, Cascade, 2008, , 108-109
13. Chris Rice, “Lament For Racial Divisions Within the Church and Our Communities Combined with the Active Pursuit of a Just Reconciliation,” in Schools For Conversion, 62
14. Dekar, 109
15. Dekar, 103
16. Dekar, 112-113
17. Dekar, 101
18. Pratt and Holman, 134