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Rez is a community where Jesus welcomes, shapes, and sends disciples for the good of our neighborhood. No matter where you are in life, this is a place for you.
Life Together In The Goodness Of God
Father Sean, thank you so much for the opportunity to speak today. You know, I did this almost every Sunday for over 21 years, and I've not done it much at all over the past 15 years. I should confess something from the start. I have not preached a lectionary sermon for over 30 years. So what is a lectionary sermon? We have four passages assigned to our Sunday. You just heard them. There's four passages assigned to each Sunday in a three-year cycle. We're in year A, and the Sunday is proper 18. So the passage from Ezekiel 33, from Matthew 18, from Psalm 119, Romans 13, they're just not picked from out of the sky. There's a process that led to their assignment to this particular day. Amy is with me, my wife, and we started a United Methodist Church together in 1995 in the North Dallas suburbs. This is when it was easy to start a new church. Not so much these days. And when I was preparing to go start that church, they sent me off to a conference. They called it Church Planters Boot Camp, which sounds kind of scary. It wasn't scary, but I had some great ideas, some creative ideas, kind of out-of-the-box ideas. And I decided on that retreat that I was going to start a church that did not use the lectionary. And instead of four passages, multiple passages, I would choose a passage, and that would be the focus of that day. And our church was going to be edgy. That's why we were going to color outside the lines, and we were going to have a band, we were going to have a big screen, we were going to serve King's Hawaiian as the body of Christ. It was edgy. And it worked, I mean, at least in that context and in that time. But, you know, a friend of mine says there's a gray area between being edgy and being over the edge. And, you know, if I had to do all over again, there would definitely be some things that I would do differently. When I came to this space a little over two years ago, I was shocked at how much comfort I found in the rhythm of the lectionary, the predictable liturgical flow of each worship, the consistent musical transitions that provided the space for us to move along the Eucharistic journey. And week after week, I find it meaningful to hear the four passages that are assigned for that day and to find the common thread. The four passages today were written over a 1,500-year span. What's a common thread? Not the common thread, but a common thread. So let's look at all these passages real fast. Ezekiel 33, the Old Testament reading. And Ezekiel was a young man in about 587 BC, and Israel and the northern kingdom with Jerusalem at its capital was not doing well. And the judgment on Israel for not doing well was Jerusalem was destroyed and they were taken into captivity in Babylon. This is called the Babylonian exile. And Ezekiel was taken from Jerusalem, his home, to Babylon. There he became what we call an exilic prophet, a prophet who prophesies while the people are in exile. And it's really a two-pronged process. Number one, the prophecy is a prophecy of hope. We're not sure how long we're going to be here. They ended up being there 50 years, by the way. But there is hope that we will one day be restored and return to the land. Secondly, a warning, especially in Ezekiel 33. We're getting toward the end of that prophecy, and they're getting closer to coming back to Jerusalem. And Ezekiel wants them to know as a warning, if you don't change the way things are, then you're going to start the whole cycle again. We're going to get back home and be taken away again. And therefore, he says to the leaders, you will be sentinels. Someone who stands on a high wall and looks down to the road and finds people's mistakes, their destructive behavior, and basically names it, calls it out, if you will. In today's passage, Ezekiel says, please call out these wrongs that are being done, but if you fail to do this, your silence will have consequences. So say a bold word when you see destruction, destructive activity happening. In Matthew 18, Jesus gives a similar instruction to the church. If someone sins against us, we should go directly to that person instead of gossiping about that person or rehearsing the injury, curse, rehearse, disperse, or gathering a crowd. And so we are told by Jesus instead to go privately, one-on-one, and if that doesn't work, get a couple of other people, one or two other people, and go to the person. And if that doesn't resolve the matter, then take the person before the church and let the church resolve the matter. This process from Jesus is intended for restoration, not humiliation. Now Ezekiel and Matthew together tell us this. We have a responsibility to one another when someone's headed toward harm, when wrong has been done, when relationships are fractured. Love should compel us to speak a hard word and to act. And even though I'm saying all of this, when I think about doing that in the modern church, I'm getting really anxious. And here's why. I've seen the harm done by these self-appointed sentinels in the church. I've also failed at sentineling myself, making hard situations harder, because I was not in the right place in my own life when I decided to speak into someone else's life. We could say that Ezekiel and Matthew give a lot of power to people who may not be ready for that power. This describes me sometimes, and it perhaps describes the person sitting next to you. So before I become too fixated on someone else's failures, this morning's readings from the Psalmist and the Apostle Paul should be consulted. Listen to the Psalmist. Teach me. The spotlight is turned away from the other and on myself, my heart. Give me understanding. Turn my heart to you. Turn my eyes to you. The prayer is not, Lord, help me fix somebody today. It is, Lord, help me walk in your way. The Psalm reminds us that I may have a responsibility for where my own feet are before I speak into someone else's steps. Finally, Romans 13, the Apostle Paul. We heard Father Sean last week address Romans 12. This passage begins, Oh, no one anything except to love one another. So we're picking up where we left off last week. Ultimately, it points to love. In this chapter, the 13th chapter, Paul names the big four, do not commandments, do not steal, murder, covet, commit adultery. Paul then summarizes, essentially saying, and you can follow all the commandments or you can just follow one. Love your neighbor as yourself. If you follow love your neighbor as yourself successfully, then you will not harm anyone and therefore you will have fulfilled the law. You're truly living a life of love. Paul continues, though, and names some more things that we might get into in some of our not so good days. Throw off the works of darkness, chapter 13, verse 12 and following. Put on the armor of light, let us walk decently in the day, not reveling in drunkenness, no illicit sex, no licentiousness, which is a fancy word that means unrestrained immorality. Bet you didn't think you'd hear that word today. No quarreling, no jealousy, instead put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ. I thought this week, you know, when I do this, I'm doing more than just say I like Jesus, right? I'm putting on the pattern of Christ into my life. May that pattern guide me. Put on Christ. And so at this point, I'm thinking I don't have any time or energy for being a heavenly hall monitor to others. I've got a lot of work to do right here. So this week, the common thread, a common thread seems to be, at least to me, responsibility. Our responsibility for one another and our responsibility to examine our own hearts and maybe get our lives, our lives on the right path before we speak into another person's journey. That means, friends, that Christian correction cannot come from a place of arrogance or superiority or control or thrill or being the thrill of being right. It must come from a place of humility. And the Apostle Paul knows humility. He says to Timothy, he says, I am the greatest sinner of all, 1 Timothy 1. And, of course, he kind of was. Like he literally, before he became Paul, supervised the execution of Christ followers. And then he literally saw the light, got a new name, Paul, and has become the champion, one of the greatest champions of Christendom ever. So he knows what it's like to be off the path in a big way. He also says in the second letter of the Corinthians, he says, I have this thorn in the flesh, and we don't know what it is. He never named it. But I'm just thinking about the metaphor. Like I know how irritating a splinter is. But a thorn in the flesh, Paul says, that cannot be removed. So what Paul is telling us, and maybe this is why, and he actually says, and this is to keep me from being conceited. So whatever it is in his life puts him in a place of constant pain and keeps him essentially right-sized as he seeks to offer these words of guidance to the letters that he is writing. In Romans 12, he says, Do not think more highly of yourselves than you ought to think, but think with sober judgment. And this, friends, is speaking of sober judgment. It'd be a good place, as any, for me to share a little bit of my story. For more than two decades, I've been on a journey of addiction and recovery. And for about the first 12 years of that, it was mostly addiction and not so much recovery. You know? But then, my day of grace, as we say in the 12-step journey, a little more than 11 years ago, where every day since then, one day at a time, I haven't had to take a drink. Now, in the rooms of 12-step recovery, do you know how many definitions that alcoholics can come up with for the word humility? So, Dawn, what are some of these definitions? Thank you for asking. I've already used one, right-sized. One of my favorites is, I'm someone who is teachable. Someone who is believing and behaving as if the rules apply to them. Embracing the reality that I'm not a ten and I'm not a one. And I would say to my 12-step sponsor, what should I be? And Mike said, you should be a five. And I said, well, can I aspire to be a five and a half? And he said, you've just illustrated why you need this program. The one that I think I actually came up with myself is this. Humility is seeing myself the way my Creator sees me. Nothing more, nothing less. And it's from that place of being right-sized in my own mind, in my own journey, having embraced the truth of who I am, nothing more, nothing less than what I was created to be. Then I'm in the best possible place to speak the truth in love. Zan Wesley Holmes was one of the great preachers of Methodism. He was my preaching professor a very long time ago at SMU. And he preached a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan. And he was a fiery preacher, just amazing. And he's talking about in the parable how the persecuted, outcast, unclean Good Samaritan and the wounded and the bleeding and the unclean man, because this man would have been unclean by virtue of the fact that he was bleeding, which is why his own people walked by on the other side. They literally couldn't touch him without being out of commission for a long time. How this beaten man and this Samaritan found each other. And he preached that the persecuted Samaritan and the beaten left for dead man were bound up in their woundedness. And I think that kind of describes us. We are fellow travelers on the road with fellow travelers. And that everyone is everyone in the human family. We are broken people, journeying with broken people, finding our way home together. So the invitation today is not to become heavenly hall monitors. It is to become humble people of love, awake to harm being done, honest about ourselves, courageous enough to speak when needed, gentle enough to speak as those who live by mercy. And so may God teach us the way and make us people who owe nothing to each other except love. Amen.