14 Pentecost, A p18, September 10, 2017
Exodus 12:1-14 Psalm 149
The Beatles sang, "All you need is love." And St. Paul would agree because long before the Beatles he wrote "Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law....love is fulfilling the law." But don't try this on the traffic officer who is writing you a traffic ticket. "But officer, I love you and St. Paul said that loves fulfills the law." The officer would respond, "If you loved me and others you would not have sped and endangered lives."
Love is an over-used word, and rightly so. It happens in many forms and we can be skeptical about it until we have the experience of being loved and loving others and then we can agree about the importance of love. Love is the experience of such mutual regard that it means people know how to behave towards each other and thus fulfills the laws as the rules of right behaviors.
What we also know about love is that we can fail at love. We can fail to act in ways which honor the best of what mutual behaviors should be. As much as we might like to romanticize the primitive church as being purer in love than we are because they were closer to the time of Jesus, it is not the case. The record of the New Testament indicates that they were like us as being all too human with the tendency to fail at love and to sin against God and to sin against each other.
When everything is loving and fun, it seems superfluous to ask if Christ is present. In love, Christ seems so obviously present that his presence "goes without saying." But what about when loving behaviors fail? What happens when the community is messy? What happens when reconciliation, discipline and reparations are required? Can the presence of Christ be apparent then?
The appointed Gospel for today is about what to do when love has failed and members of the community have sinned against each other.
The Gospel story we have read today seems to present some historical anachronism. The word church is found on the mouth of Jesus in a time when the church was not yet in existence. The Gospels can be seen as presentations of the theology of the early church under the guise of the stories of Jesus.
I would call today's Gospel, a presentation of the body of Christ theology of St. Paul. St. Paul called the church, the body of Christ. The church is a mystical corporation. The historical person of Jesus in his Risen life became a mystical body known in the gathering of people who decided to identify with Jesus and his teaching. Groups attaining personal identity is a well known sociological phenomenon, whether it is the Marine Corps or America or one's university as one's Alma Mater. The interior merging of individual identity into a group identity creates the phenomenon of another body or another person. In a football game, the group identity might be called the Twelfth Man, the home field advantage because of the home crowd.
In the gathered church, there becomes apparent the extra person, the person of Christ.
The Gospel lesson teaches us that the body of Christ is a presence which occurs when the members of the church gather in a situation of church discipline. When there is community dissent, the help of Christ is needed even more than when loving behaviors prevail.
The Gospel message for us today, is that in the situation of the sins of the community, Christ promised to be present to help bring resolution, discipline and reparations. But we should be reminded that the presence of Christ is not automatically apparent. Why?
Every member still needs to be in the right motive for gathering. What is the right motive for gathering? Gathering in the name of Christ. If the members of the community gather for their own egotistical ends or to push their own agenda, then the presence of Christ may not become apparent. But as hearts are committed to Christ and his love, then the presence of Christ becomes apparent in the group wisdom becoming manifest in difficult circumstances.
Today we are encouraged to gather to experience the presence of Christ, in all circumstances that might arise in our community. Each of us needs to keep ourselves fixed on Christ as the motive of our gathering and we as members of the body of Christ can learn to take direction from Christ as the head of the body of Christ, the church.
Yes, each of us might stay at home and experience our own personal presence of Christ, but there is something enhanced and different as we gather to realize another kind of presence of Christ in the gathered church. And it is under these conditions we gather today, to pass the peace of Christ, know ourselves reconciled to each other as we approach the table of the Lord again to realize his presence in the Bread and the Wine event which Jesus commanded us to keep. Amen.
Exodus 12:1-14 Psalm 149
Romans
13:8-14 Matthew
18:15-20
Lectionary LinkThe Beatles sang, "All you need is love." And St. Paul would agree because long before the Beatles he wrote "Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law....love is fulfilling the law." But don't try this on the traffic officer who is writing you a traffic ticket. "But officer, I love you and St. Paul said that loves fulfills the law." The officer would respond, "If you loved me and others you would not have sped and endangered lives."
Love is an over-used word, and rightly so. It happens in many forms and we can be skeptical about it until we have the experience of being loved and loving others and then we can agree about the importance of love. Love is the experience of such mutual regard that it means people know how to behave towards each other and thus fulfills the laws as the rules of right behaviors.
What we also know about love is that we can fail at love. We can fail to act in ways which honor the best of what mutual behaviors should be. As much as we might like to romanticize the primitive church as being purer in love than we are because they were closer to the time of Jesus, it is not the case. The record of the New Testament indicates that they were like us as being all too human with the tendency to fail at love and to sin against God and to sin against each other.
When everything is loving and fun, it seems superfluous to ask if Christ is present. In love, Christ seems so obviously present that his presence "goes without saying." But what about when loving behaviors fail? What happens when the community is messy? What happens when reconciliation, discipline and reparations are required? Can the presence of Christ be apparent then?
The appointed Gospel for today is about what to do when love has failed and members of the community have sinned against each other.
The Gospel story we have read today seems to present some historical anachronism. The word church is found on the mouth of Jesus in a time when the church was not yet in existence. The Gospels can be seen as presentations of the theology of the early church under the guise of the stories of Jesus.
I would call today's Gospel, a presentation of the body of Christ theology of St. Paul. St. Paul called the church, the body of Christ. The church is a mystical corporation. The historical person of Jesus in his Risen life became a mystical body known in the gathering of people who decided to identify with Jesus and his teaching. Groups attaining personal identity is a well known sociological phenomenon, whether it is the Marine Corps or America or one's university as one's Alma Mater. The interior merging of individual identity into a group identity creates the phenomenon of another body or another person. In a football game, the group identity might be called the Twelfth Man, the home field advantage because of the home crowd.
In the gathered church, there becomes apparent the extra person, the person of Christ.
The Gospel lesson teaches us that the body of Christ is a presence which occurs when the members of the church gather in a situation of church discipline. When there is community dissent, the help of Christ is needed even more than when loving behaviors prevail.
The Gospel message for us today, is that in the situation of the sins of the community, Christ promised to be present to help bring resolution, discipline and reparations. But we should be reminded that the presence of Christ is not automatically apparent. Why?
Every member still needs to be in the right motive for gathering. What is the right motive for gathering? Gathering in the name of Christ. If the members of the community gather for their own egotistical ends or to push their own agenda, then the presence of Christ may not become apparent. But as hearts are committed to Christ and his love, then the presence of Christ becomes apparent in the group wisdom becoming manifest in difficult circumstances.
Today we are encouraged to gather to experience the presence of Christ, in all circumstances that might arise in our community. Each of us needs to keep ourselves fixed on Christ as the motive of our gathering and we as members of the body of Christ can learn to take direction from Christ as the head of the body of Christ, the church.
Yes, each of us might stay at home and experience our own personal presence of Christ, but there is something enhanced and different as we gather to realize another kind of presence of Christ in the gathered church. And it is under these conditions we gather today, to pass the peace of Christ, know ourselves reconciled to each other as we approach the table of the Lord again to realize his presence in the Bread and the Wine event which Jesus commanded us to keep. Amen.
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