Ever since I agreed to come and share this worship service with Greenbelt several weeks back, I have been filled with excitement over the opportunity. For those of you that do not know me, the funny accent that you hear is as a result of 20 years in Uganda and I find myself excited to be here for nearly the same reasons that I get excited about going to Uganda.
I first came to work at Greenbelt in late 2003 in a position that was 20 hours a week and even though most of you did not know it then, those months were a time of incredible healing for me. If you have never immigrated to another country, you do not know how incredibly difficult it can be to have all your experience - both professional and life experience - valued as zero... especially for somebody like myself who had taken great pride in the work that I had done to improve the lives of people in some of the world’s least developed countries. More than taking great pride in my work, I love to create moments where people can connect with God through music and yet until I came to greenbelt, the answer to my request to join the worship teams of the churches I had attended had been no.
Greenbelt is a church at which I have made some deep friendships and I am extremely thankful to God for the friends that I made here. Even though I had made some deep friends by the time I came to work here, their words of encouragement did little to lift me out of the funk I was in because of the constant rejection I received both in the workplace and in the communities of faith. By handing me the job of worship leader and coordinator which eventually came to be a full-time worship pastor position (something I was highly unqualified for and proved it over and over again), it was a powerful statement of acceptance of the gifts that God had placed in me that I so desperately wanted to use and of my ability to be a contributing member of this community. It took me some time to heal from it all and I made some HUGE mistakes in my relationships with people here, but God’s work of healing was evident through the unconditional acceptance of the members of this congregation and just like I said on my last sunday here, I will ALWAYS talk about Greenbelt Baptist in glowing terms not just because my close friends go here, but because of the healing and restoration that happened in my life during the time I was here.
When I started the numerous series of interviews for the position I now hold, there was continual amazement at the fact that a church - ANY church - had hired me as a worship pastor without the necessary education and credentials for the position. During those interviews, I must have said at least 100 times, “I have stopped trying to make sense of how God works”. It really makes no sense in a culture that places a premium on qualification that somebody who is unqualified by the agreed-upon standards would get placed in a position of authority - especially one that is of spiritual leadership... TWICE!
This is not just true for my life, but for the lives of many people that I know in Canada and all over the world. The more you peruse through the bible, the more you come to realize that God is constantly in the business of turning what is considered to be “common sense” on it’s head in order that his work may be done and it is all the more evident as you look at the characters in the bible that he chose to associate with and work through.
It therefore makes sense - by logical extension - that when God walked this earth, his teaching, illustrations and challenges about the interaction between our faith and our lives that SHOULD form the basis of our faith communities would not be filled with regular thinking - common sense. Rather, it would be filled with UNCOMMON sense... and Jesus does not disappoint!
Chapters 5 - 7 of the book of Matthew contain a compilation of teachings and sayings that Jesus made that have famously been dubbed “The sermon on the mount” and have come to epitomize his moral teaching - the intersection between faith and life. As many of you know, this portion of the book of Matthew is (and has historically been) widely regarded to contain the central tenets of Christian discipleship and has been made famous in contemporary society by the adherence of of many religious and moral thinkers such as Leo Tolstoy (a russian writer and philosopher), Mahatma Ghandi (an Indian political and spiritual leader), and Martin Luther King Jr.
Many of the teachings in this “Sermon on the Mount” are in fact UNCOMMON sense, but they are regularly distorted by many in our churches and in North America’s post-christian society so much that even though we may be familiar with the wording, we may not realize how still today, the teachings of Jesus back then are still UNCOMMON sense today even though we may not think they are.
I will focus the rest of my thoughts in the remaining time I have this morning on a few verses in Chapter 5 of Matthew’s gospel and I invite you to turn to it in your bibles if you have them and if not, you can follow along with the text on the screen.
Matthew 5: 38 - 42
“You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.
And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
The first words of this section are a reminder of something that Jesus assumes his listeners already know,
"You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’
This principle was the basis of much of near Eastern justice, and you can find references to it’s origin in Exodus 21: 23 & 24, Leviticus 24: 19 &20 and Deuteronomy 19: 21. Everything that I have read about this particular principle was that it was put in place to restrain unlimited blood vengeance so that the damages one could expect for wrongs done would be considered proportional, equal and fair.
As much as this dictum was instituted to ensure justice, more often than not it led to a tit-for-tat kind of thinking that permeated all relationships and even to this day with a supposedly improved justice system, this attitude is still pervasive. So the very thing that was supposed to ensure that violence did not escalate became a favorable environment for the perpetuation of revenge and so fulfilled what a great philosopher once said, “Built into the foundation of every great idea are the seeds of its demise”. This eye-for-an-eye thinking creates an inescapable cyclical, restrictive way to live that in the end fails to keep things “even” and robs us of our freedom making us bound to a perpetual cycle of action and reaction.
I am persuaded that this is the point that Jesus is trying to make by making reference to what was already established as law and rewriting it in a way that must not have made sense back then and to this day continues to be UNCOMMON sense. And so in this account of his teaching, he uses three illustrations of direct personal offense to illustrate how this new way of thinking should impact and transform the lives of those that follow him. These three illustrations that Jesus uses strike particularly close to home for me because when I experience any of these personally or when I see somebody going through them, I get MAAAAAAD and have been known to react in a, shall we say, less than civil manner.
The first one is:
“Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”
When I first read the phrase “do not resist an evil person” I did not quite understand this until some digging helped me to see that it is set up in contrast to the previous line and so could mean that we are not to pay evil back with evil or that we are not to resist evil with evil means. The strike on the cheek was not just about physical violence, but in the culture was considered to be a great insult and so by extension, not only are we to resist paying evil back with evil, we are to take it one step further and refrain from trading personal insults or physical abuse. The reason I am extremely sensitive to personal insults is because the country I grew up in - Uganda - is split along ethnic sectarian lines. Everybody, and I do mean EVERYBODY had to deal with insults that were usually extremely personal, and people usually made fun of your language, skin color, accent, social status or even access to education - things that you could not even change! I love Canada and I am continually impressed at the lengths to which most of us go to make sure that we are not offensive and yet even in a country with a cornerstone value of tolerance, there are still rare pockets of antagonism across racial lines and I even though I know that I should not, more often than not I am unable to refrain from trading insults or getting physical when I am insulted or see somebody as the victim of racial abuse. Turn the other cheek? Not pay evil with evil? Resist trading personal insults? PUH-LEASE!!
As you can tell, this is an area in which I still need to grow.
Jesus goes on to say:
“And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.”
In this context, I am led to believe that this lawsuit that Jesus is talking about is not based on truth, but on trumped up charges.
Some of you may know that my father retired a year and a half ago after over 35 years as a pastor. Somehow, on an extremely small salary, my parents managed to scrape together the money to purchase the land on which they now live and as they were making preparations to build their retirement home and the leadership training centre that shall be housed on the property, they got dragged to court by somebody that claimed that the land they were preparing for construction was in fact her inheritance and that it had been acquired through fraudulent methods. If you knew my parents, you would know that this was a ridiculous claim and I was especially incensed because they are not wealthy at all. This land purchase had taken EVERYTHING they had scraped together. During the time that we were walking through the court hearings and investigation, to add insult to injury, she went so far to build a house on the property which, thankfully, we were given permission to destroy once it was confirmed that her lawsuit was empty. I was so elated at the court’s decision that I wanted to pick up a sledge hammer on the way back home and personally destroy the house because this lady had kept our family in court or over 5 years! My parents intervened before I could go ahead with my plan and they told me that God had spoken to them to purchase another piece of property - equal in size to their own - for the lady that had dragged them to court for over 5 years. I was FLABBERGASTED! This made absolutely NO SENSE in my opinion and to this day I continue to shake my head at their offer. Supposedly, God confirmed his word to them by leading them to this very passage in Matthew 5. Jesus’ terms of justice and retribution are on a completely different playing field than the justice that I thought my parents deserved and they were willing to allow their faith to intersect with their lives and do the unthinkable in an eye-for-an-eye construct.
I honestly do not know that I could be as forgiving as my parents were and this is another area in which I definitely need to grow.
The third illustration that Jesus uses concerns another situation that makes my blood boil. He says:
“If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.”
I initially did not understand the gravity of this until some digging helped me find out that a Roman soldier could legally make you carry something (usually all his military baggage) for him for one mile. Obviously this had to have been an unbelievable proposition to the people of Jesus’ time that lived in a state of perpetual enemy domination by the Romans. This therefore could mean that Jesus was basically speaking about the misuse of power and instructing those that listened to him to go beyond finding ways to retaliate against those that would abuse their power.
We live in a world in which those in power lord it over those without power and our governments and power structures are rife with corruption and injustice. Usually the people that suffer because of the misuse of power and positions of authority are the very people that those in power are supposed to be looking out for. In the country of my descent, the most recent scandal has been the misappropriation of an enormous grant that was to have been used for research and procurement of drugs for malaria and HIV. While people die by the thousands daily, the perpetrators of this crime are living in lavish estates free of any charges that could be leveled against them. Right here in North America the big news is that there are companies that are being bailed out by the taxpayers and yet the funds that are received are not even being used for the purposes for which they were given... and NOBODY is going to jail for that! The world over is rife with injustice and I get physically choked up every time I have to speak about it because I am unable to mete the same amount of distress to those that have power and misuse it.
I understand at a cerebral level that what Jesus is trying to help people like myself see through this UNCOMMON sense teaching is that by walking an extra mile, I am actually saying, "You may think that you are forcing me to do this, as if I have no choice. However, I choose to to show you that I am free from your tyranny and that I freely do this, because I serve an even higher Authority and I will go with you even further than you expect me to." I understand this at a cerebral level, but I struggle to make my head and my heart... my faith and my life intersect so that I may live it out as well.
Verse 42 of Chapter 5 says this:
“Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.”
Jesus’ charge to his listeners to be generous is an extension of the contrasts that he has been trying to show in the previous phrases about slapping, coats and walking. Generosity is a strong statement of a person’s willingness to do more than just focus on themselves and their perceived injustices and look out to the world and counter injustice, evil and poverty with generosity. So not only should we refrain from paying evil back with evil in ones life, we should look to the lives and communities around us that may be suffering under the weight of injustice and evil and through the power of generosity, pay evil with good.
As a small side note, I’ve recently began to wonder whether this is in fact the ultimate test of our acceptance of Jesus’ UNCOMMON sense teaching. If you concern yourself with the eye-for-an-eye construct and get trapped by the cycle of revenge, you are not able to see the evil around you save for the one that you perceive is done to yourself. By turning this construct on it’s head, not only do you break free of the cycle of revenge, but you become a liberator in the lives of others not just by your example, but by the good you proactively do in their lives and I think that this is what Jesus was talking about when in another instance he says that we, his followers, shall be known by our fruit; by our ability to do good in the face of evil and injustice.
So if you were to leave this service this morning and reflect on everything that was shared, I would hope that it would sound something like this:
Jesus’ charge to us as his followers is that as our faith intersects with our life, we are not to repay evil with evil, but good with evil. Why? The greatest force for Justice in the face of evil is not the punishment that should be issued, but the good that we do in response that should overwhelm the evil and its intent.
During my time as a staff member at Greenbelt, I started to have a conversation with a lady who eventually became my wife about the overly prescriptive nature of the teaching common in evangelical circles. I had not noticed that I too had become a perpetuator of this prescriptive kind of teaching that sets up the teacher or pastor as the source of information and life lessons by which the congregation should then pattern their lives. I believe that this is the reason why congregations get severely devastated when their leaders fail because by constantly telling people how to live their lives, leaders create the unspoken extension that their lives and choices are the example by which the congregations should live. The folly of such a construct is revealed when the flawed, human nature of the leader causes them to falter in their judgement.
Eventually when I screwed up - and I did screw up a lot while I was here - the thing that was always thrown back in my face was that I had no right to stand before the congregation and prescribe how they should live their lives if I myself was not the greatest example. I was stripped of my moral authority to speak authoritatively into people’s lives and so I realized that I would have to change the tone of the messages I brought and move from an elevated position in which I possessed all the answers to the questions of life and faith and bring myself right down to the level of those that I addressed as a person that was just like them - investigating, growing and learning what it means to be a passionate follower of Jesus.
And so this morning I stand before you and all I can do is share with you the challenge that Jesus’ UNCOMMON teaching has been to me. I dare not tell you how to live it out or mention things that should challenge you because as I have admitted earlier and will admit again, everything that I have spoken about is something that I know at a cerebral level but I’m still working on at making what I know and how I live congruent.
If there is a challenge this morning, or a call to action, it would be to go back to this passage of scripture in Matthew 5 and individually see how Jesus’ teaching affects you personally and allow him to use you in extraordinary ways to be a force of good and justice in a world pervaded by evil and injustice. I’m certain that I do not know for sure how that plays out in anyone’s life this morning, but I am confident that as we wholeheartedly seek to allow Jesus’ unconventional teaching, which forms the basis of our faith, to intersect with our lives, God shall ignite in our hearts and minds what we need to do.
1 comment:
Paulo! Thank you! There's a lot of truth covered here!!! Blessings, MaryPat
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