The Details
August 12, 2012 - Ephesians 4:25-5:2
The work on the
Church building is nearly complete. It has been wondrous to watch the
various pieces come together. First there is the grand vision and
then there are the details. The vision isn’t complete without the
details. We have talked about this renovation as an opportunity for a
new beginning. This is a vision. We have a new appearance. This is
good. It makes us think that things can change. The bright and shiny
look lifts our hearts and our hopes. Still there is more to do.
Beyond the new look is the new us. How will we change? Change is in
the details. How can a new look be reflected in a new way of being?
We have a new outward appearance. Now we can begin to think about a
new inward presence. Our skin is looking good, so how is it with our
soul?
I have been reading
recently a little book entitled Breakfast with Buddha. It is
fiction but as is true of any good fiction it is about life and how
it is lived. This story has to do with a man who is relatively
successful and just a regular guy who finds himself driving a holy
man from the east across the United States. The book is really about
how we see the world and what is at stake with our souls and the
spiritual reality in general. At one point in the book the holy man
says this: Everyday, he said, many times every day, you can go one
way or the other way. You can go with anger or not go. Go with greed
or not go. Go with hate or not go. And so on. Later he said these
feel like small things, small choices, but every day, across one
life, across many lives, if you choose the good way, again and again
and again, in what you are thinking and what you are doing( it
changes you).
We have changed the
look of our outer space. Now, as always, is a good time to begin to
work on our inner space. At the heart of the matter is the need to
turn away from the way of slander and malice and fear and turn toward
the way of kindness and mercy and love. The writer of the letter to
the Ephesians put it as well as anyone and also illustrates that this
has been an issue for the church since the very beginning: Let no
evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for
building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to
those who hear. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger
and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to
one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ
as forgiven you.
When Bishop Reuben
Job wrote his little book on the Three Simple Rules reflecting on
John Wesley's General Rules for Methodist Societies he wrote how the
practice of the first rule "Do no Harm" changed how he
dealt with conflict and disagreement. I have also found, he
wrote, that this first simple step, when practiced, can provide a
safe place to stand while the hard and faithful work of discernment
is done. When we agree that we will not harm those with whom we
disagree, conversation, dialogue, and discovery of new insight become
possible. He goes on to offer more detail: If I am to do no
harm, I can no longer gossip about the conflict. I can no longer
speak disparagingly about those involved in the conflict. I can no
longer manipulate the facts of the conflict. I can no longer diminish
those who do not agree with me and must honor each as a child of God.
(What he does not say and I would add is that I can
also trust that when someone disagrees with me they are not out to
harm me and when I disagree with someone they can know that I mean
them no harm. Together we are discerning a way we can go together.)
It is interesting to
me that when John Wesley first came up with this General Rule he put
it this way: By doing no harm, by avoiding evil of every kind,
especially that which is most generally practiced. Especially
that which is most generally practiced. I suspect that most of us
tend to think of evil as something big and extraordinary,
cataclysmic, even, but perhaps it is useful for us to entertain the
idea that evil is also small and plain and all too ordinary. It is
perhaps most damaging in its simple everyday forms that become
habitual with us, an unkind word, an exaggeration of the facts for
our own benefit or to the detriment of another, meanly assuming the
worst of those who disagree with us and so on. Once again it is in
the details. We can have a grand vision for ourselves and our life
together (love one another) but it will be in the details (actually
practicing kindness and listening without judging) that it becomes
real.
You may not be
surprised to know that such issues are nothing new with us. Thomas
Kempis writing in his classical little book entitled The Imitation
of Christ 500 years ago said this: We cannot trust ourselves
too much, because we often lack grace and understanding. The light
within us is small, and we soon let even this burn out for lack of
care. We condemn small things in others and pass over
serious things in ourselves. We are
quick enough to feel it when others hurt us - and we even harbor
these feelings - but we do not notice how much we hurt others. A
person who honestly examines his own behavior would never judge other
people harshly.
A person who
honestly examines his own behavior would never judge another too
harshly. And I guess this is where it begins really, with confession,
an honest examination of the ways we do cause harm. How can we do no
harm if we have not realized what harm we have done and are doing?
The good Bishop in speculating about why we do not practice this
first rule asks the defining question: Are we ready to give up our
most cherished possession - the certainty that we are right and
others wrong? This raises what I believe we could call a
conundrum: what if being right gets in the way of love? Can we trust
God enough to give up the illusion of our own power to always be
right in order to discover the truth and ultimately the way of love?
We religious types
may be confused by this because we may think that love and what is
right are the same thing so how can one be in the way of the other
but the problem is that love lays itself down for others while
being right insists on its own way. As Mark Twain famously said:
He was a good man in the worst sense of the word. I think
most of us have come across someone who was so right he was wrong.
Perhaps some of us have even recognized that person in our self. It
is a particularly vexing problem among the religious to need to be
the one who is right. Where this rule, to do no harm, comes in is to
raise the possibility that there may be something even more important
than being right especially if what is thought to be right is
actually causing harm. Is there anyone within the community of faith
who has not seen this happening? How many have been hurt, how many
lost to us?
Bishop Job says that
if we were to take this first rule seriously it would mean an
examination of the way we live and practice our faith. And if this
examination were thorough, it would surely lead to a change in the
way we practice our faith. He goes on to say: To do no harm is
a proactive response to all that is evil - all that is damaging and
destructive to humankind and God's good creation, and therefore,
ultimately destructive to us. When I commit myself to this way, I
must see each person as a child of God - a recipient of love
unearned, unlimited, and undeserved - just like myself. And it is
this vision of every other person as the object of God's love and
deep awareness that I too live in the loving Presence that can hold
me accountable to my commitment to do no harm. And then the
Bishop comes out with it: Perhaps the greatest consequence of all
is that we are formed and transformed to live more and more as Jesus
lived. Wouldn't we like to be that Church, the one that
embodies the living Christ in spirit and in practice?! All I know is
that where Jesus abides there is life and joy.
Seeing through the
eyes of Jesus is to see the sacred worth of every living thing and to
see the connection, the interdependence between all of life.
Enlightenment is when we understand that harming another is also
harming our self. It is not enough to be right. We are called, as the
writer to the Ephesian Church put it, to live in love. We are
challenged by John Wesley to do no harm. Will we always succeed? Of
course not. Even the Bishop asked the question: Is it possible to
live in this complex and violent world without doing harm? A
question which, by the way, he did not directly answer except to say
that Jesus himself (remember him?) taught and practiced a way of
living that did no harm and that our taking this simple step of
wanting and practicing to do no harm will change your life in good
and wonderful ways . . .One possibility is that we will learn
forgiveness.
As we should know by
now we don't do any of this in order to be successful but rather to
be faithful. Whatever ones definition of success is, even in the
Church, it is only in the fullness of faith itself that we can
experience the abundance that is of God and prosper as those who are
fully and deeply alive. This abundant life in God is as much about
quality as it is about quantity. It truly is the peace that passes
all understanding. The fullness of faith is not the
certainty that we alone have the right belief but rather the practice
of trusting God entirely for our lives freeing us to be merciful, to
be kind, to give ourselves away for love and peace. It is certainly a
real and good beginning toward being imitators of God as the writer
of our text today implores us to be.
I call upon you, the
good people of this United Methodist congregation on this day that we
each examine our ways and change those things that are needed to be
changed in order to practice doing no harm that we may continue to
grow and increase in love and the measure of the fullness of Christ,
and live in love. We don’t have to have a meeting to do
this because we can each begin with ourselves to practice kindness,
to listen to each other, to be less defensive and more forgiving.
(You don’t have to even tell anybody what you are doing. It will be
fun to see if anyone notices and to see how it makes you feel.) It is
enough to seek a new way even if we are not instantly
transformed to complete perfection in love for (in the words of Annie
Dillard) we are found in all that we seek. And we become what
we think and do. As the holy man in my book put it, Only to try is
important. Even not to have violence in your thoughts is important.
When we practice
kindness we become the kindness we practice. And kindness is akin to
mercy and mercy is at the heart of God. Jesus’ hands were kind
hands. To be like Jesus, and to have a new beginning as the community
of the beloved, our hands will be kind hands. It’s all in the
details.
