We Have Heard and We HAve Answered--Come and Offer Your Gift 2-13-11

Our Readings for Today

1 Corinthians 3:3b-9
When you are jealous and quarrel among yourselves, aren’t you influenced by your corrupt nature and living by human standards? When some of you say, “I follow Paul” and others say, “I follow Apollos,” aren’t you acting like sinful humans? Who is Apollos? Who is Paul? They are servants who helped you come to faith. Each did what the Lord gave him to do. I planted, and Apollos watered, but God made it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is important because only God makes it grow. The one who plants and the one who waters have the same goal, and each will receive a reward for his own work. We are God’s coworkers. You are God’s field. You are God’s building.
Matthew 5:21-24
“You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, ‘Never murder. Whoever murders will answer for it in court.’ But I can guarantee that whoever is angry with another believer will answer for it in court. Whoever calls another believer an insulting name will answer for it in the highest court. Whoever calls another believer a fool will answer for it in hellfire.
“So if you are offering your gift at the altar and remember there that another believer has something against you, leave your gift at the altar. First go away and make peace with that person. Then come back and offer your gift.
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God, you are calling us in new and exciting ways. Help us to discern your voice in the glorious busyness of the day. Teach us to be still and to know that you are God. Amen

I’ll bet some of you saw the sermon title and thought “oh, no, the rev is just going to ask me to do something AGAIN!” Not so much—well, not in the way you may think. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day and it’s a perfect day to talk about our hearts—not so much the physical status of our hearts, but the emotional and spiritual nature of our hearts in our souls—these are the hearts of which both Paul and Jesus speak in our passages for today. I imagine that most of you remember Valentine’s Day in elementary school—the angst—what if I don’t get as many valentines as other people do? What if my dimestore valentines don’t measure up against everyone else’s? What if I get a valentine I don’t really want? What if that pesky nerdy little kid gives me a valentine and people SEE it? What will people think? And so for some of us, at least, Valentine’s day became yet another day at school to succeed in or fail. It wasn’t until much later that Valentine’s day took on that more wonderful quiet heart to heart exchange that only comes when life teaches us what it means to really love another. We talk about giving our heart to another and Jesus talks about giving our heart to God—HMMM…What is there to learn here?
I think what these two “gifts of heart” have in common is that we must truly know our own hearts before we can give them to another, be it friend or child, or lover, or God, for that matter. And so, our scripture passages take us down a path—strange though it may seem—of learning our own hearts.
This passage from Matthew is still from the Sermon on the Mount, but the nice, pastoral, kindly teacher is gone. Here we have threats of divine judgment and trips to hellfire. Most of us would agree that we liked the other Jesus better. But this is the Jesus who leads us to the serious discussion relating to knowing ourselves and knowing our hearts. This is the Jesus who says, God can only use you, that is accept your gift—whatever that gift may be—if you are in right relationship with your brothers and sisters. There is no easy out here, no exceptions, no excuses to let us talk ourselves into believing that we need be less than brutally honest with ourselves in this equation.
And then comes Paul, frustrated with the Corinthians, AGAIN, this time because they are saying things like “We are Methodists, we are Charismatics, we are Catholics, we are Baptists!” Oops, just trying to make a point, Paul calls us to be Christians first, as the building built by God—we are the ones who get caught up in how we got here. As God’s coworkers it doesn’t matter who we were or used to me—what matters is what God is doing all along—building us up—building up the church—the body of Christ.
Interestingly, Matthew uses a conversation about anger to introduce this passage that focuses on reconciliation and “right-heartedness”. Anger, he suggests keeps us from loving rightly, from putting the needs and concerns of our brothers and sisters in perspective. This lack of reconciliation is what makes us unable to leave our gifts at God’s altar. This is a tough one for me and I imagine for some of you as well. I have heard myself say many times throughout my life, “what I have most to give is my integrity” and, giving myself a break, I believe that most, if not all of the times that I say it, I am in right relationship with others at least as I understand it to be at the moment. That’s the trouble with insight, with Ephipany, as it were. Just when we think we are where we need to be, along come God’s gift of insight and we see the steeper path in front of us.
Matthew talks of a way to approach personal integrity that makes the inner and outer life congruent—that is what we see on the outside is what we feel on the inside and vice versa. In other words, that which we feel on the inside shapes and controls what we do on the outside. Anger, at others, or even at ourselves, hinders our integrity from shining through. Now Jesus speaks of a broad spectrum of anger—everything from murder to calling people names. I grant you that very few of us are guilty of murder, but nagging anger can keep us from embracing reconciliation, a condition which Jesus takes very seriously. When, instead, we live in alienation from ourselves and others, our gifts to God are tarnished and, in many cases, not even available to bring to the altar.
This week I’ve been reading and watching a little about Sister Thea Bowman, an African-American Franciscan nun who was famous for her ability to be true to herself and to her God in every circumstance. She was a “Diversity pioneer”—calling the church to embrace all as children of God. As I watched some of the videos relating to her life, I thought, she would love it at Open Circle. I hope we are worthy of her spirit. This is what she said about all God’s children: “When all God’s children get together,, what a time, what a time, what a time…If we come together, brining our history, our experiences, our survival and coping mechanisms, our rituals of celebration, our unique ways of thinking and planning and relaxing and walking and talking and working, and praying and paying and being, what a gift we can be to one another and to our churches and to our world…
My grandfather was a slave. And he used to talk about slavery, because he said if we understood about slavery we might be able to understand about freedom. My granddaddy said the worst kind of slavery is not the slavery that come from outside with bonds and chains and forced labor. The worst slavery is slavery that comes in your own heart and your own mind and your own home and in your own church and in your own community. Let’s get in touch with the enslavement that keep us from reaching out to one another and being to one another the cause of freedom and the cause of strength and the cause of life.” Thank you, Thea for your call…
And so Jesus speaks a radical message—calling us to understand that the law is not just a legal code, but one which requires us, just as Thea’s message, to protect all as God’s people…to guarantee the dignity of all, to refrain from calling another a fool, to protect the physical and spiritual needs of all of our fellow and sister travelers on this earth—to do no harm, to “kill” no one whether by actual physical killing or by destroying the spirit, the wholeness of another by treating them as less than God’s child. Rather, Jesus calls us to work for reconciliation and Paul calls us to grasp the one-ness that makes us the building of God.
Jesus calls us to end the enslavement to anger by reconciling ourselves to our neighbor, those things which in Thea’s words, “keep us from reaching out to one another”. Is this not the greatest gift that we have to lay at the altar of God—that reconciliation of our inner heart with our outer circumstance? Not only with each other but with ourselves?
And how, does this affect us here in our own little worlds, in our own little church. I believe that it affects us in ways that we may not even understand yet—but I know that it calls us to a place of respect and gratitude for each one of us, wherever we come from and wherever we are bound. We are, many of us, hurt and hurting people. Hurt and hurting people often make for a messy soup of needs, thoughts, responses, and ideas.
Paul’s words speak to us, call us to move beyond our differences, and love each other into becoming the building of God. Jesus calls us to radical reconciliation—reconciliation to neighbor, to stranger and to self. Thea’s words call us to this same reconciliation, this radical notion of respect for each and every one as a child of God.
This Valentine’s Day I invite you to think about your heart—to ponder with me the wondrous things God is showing us about integrity and loving your neighbor and yourself. Come and offer your gift. Amen and amen.