Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen.
Individual salvation is one of the great heresies of contemporary Christianity, and it lies at the root of so much of the trouble in which we find ourselves individually, communally, and as an American and a world people. It’s easy to see it in the yard signs of various political persuasions that say, essentially, God or Jesus or science or loving compassion are on my side and screw the rest of you if you don’t get it. It’s much harder to see this spiritual cancer in ourselves and in the small ways we dismiss or condemn or seek to control those people God has brought into our lives to share and expand and enrich our sense of God’s beloved community.
I know I walk around correcting others’ behavior silently in my mind, or sighing heavily every time I open the dishwasher and see the mess one of my brothers has made. Your focus may be the speed or slowness at which people drive, or the views they hold on marriage, or their irresponsibility with finances or deadlines. Maybe it drives you nuts how uptight and controlling some of your fellow passengers in this great ride of life can be.
I don’t mean to trivialize these differences that provoke us. Sometimes—often, perhaps—they revolve around very real differences in the way value human and planetary life. Is climate change real? Does the preservation of other species matter? How about black lives? Trans lives? Women’s lives? What about the rural poor or the refugees swirling the globe fleeing war and famine? These differences and the ways they lead us to act or not act have real consequences for real people. They can mean the difference between life and death for someone or for some millions of someones. How we act and how we believe matters. What matters even more, though, is how we love—or refuse to love.
All three of this morning’s readings focus on the obstacles to reconciliation and harmony in the community of faith. So important is harmony that Jesus tells his disciples not even to think of approaching the altar if they suspect their brother or sister has a gripe with them. Forget about correcting or controlling others. Jesus doesn’t seem to care who is actually right in the situation. Reconciliation—not adherence to my sense of correct behavior or belief—is of primary importance.
Sin is nothing more or less than the turning away from the loving, indwelling presence of God to seek our own salvation by our own means. Yes, as Jesus reminds us, our eyes and our hands prompt us to turn away from God. We all know the power of advertising to woo us into believing that the “buy it now” button on Amazon will fulfill that nagging need in our hearts. (By the way, it’s no different in a monastery. I pick up the mail and see all the packages rolling in, many of them with my own name on them.) We all scratch that spiritual itch in unhealthy ways. These compulsions are what Moses is talking about when he says “your heart turns away and you do not hear but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them.”
In their essence, these compulsions are ways that we set ourselves up as God, that we seek our own salvation by our own means. As if we could somehow make our lives full and complete and total. Alone. That’s why they lie at the root of sin.
And yet, perhaps the greatest distraction or hurdle in our spiritual lives is the temptation to judge and condemn and control. Although we may notice this poison in the way we treat others or the ways others treat us, it arises first in relationship to ourselves. How many of us know the sting of self-condemnation, which, by the way, is not the same thing as genuine compunction? Compunction comes from a place of humility and self-acceptance. Self-condemnation, like self-righteousness, is built on grandiosity. We focus on all those aspects of ourselves and our lives that we think do not belong. And we work to excise or reform those parts, without relying on God.
As hard as we are on ourselves, we are just as hard on others, applying our own distorted sense of right and wrong, as if somehow God had specially enlightened us to remake the world and other people in our own image. You’ll notice, Jesus never tells his disciples to judge anyone for anything. Instead, he tells them to love, and more particularly to love those they would call their enemies. And as much as Jesus urges us to work for justice, much more does he counsel mercy and compassion and forgiveness. Because justice without mercy is tyranny, no matter whose definition of justice we’re working with.
As one example of this dynamic, civil rights activist and theologian Ruby Sales reflects on the quickness of progressive white Christians to condemn those who disagree with them. She asks “What is it that public theology can say to the white person in Massachusetts who’s heroin-addicted? I don’t hear anyone speaking to the 45-year-old person in Appalachia who feels like they’ve been eradicated, because whiteness is so much smaller today than it was yesterday. Because there’s nothing wrong with being European-American; that’s not the problem. It’s almost like white people don’t believe that other white people are worthy of being redeemed.”
Who is worthy? Is it you? Me? Those who act or think or pray like us? Those people with the right yard signs, or the right voting record, or the right beliefs on whatever issues drive us? Those people who want what we want? And what makes our own hearts worthy or not? What limits do we place on our love for others or for ourselves?
Julian of Norwich tells us that we should never even bother to notice another’s sins unless—and this is very rare—we look on those sins with love because we know that our brother or sister is suffering. To look on suffering with love is the definition of compassion, which literally means to suffer with. For, of course, when we sin, God looks on us and our sins with the eyes of love. God sees that we are suffering, and God loves us enough to suffer with and for us, and to wait for us to turn again to the arms of love.
There is no one and nothing outside the bounds of God’s love. Not the person or the group we would condemn or correct or control. And certainly not those parts of ourselves we would most like to be without. In some mysterious and glorious way, we are all a part of God’s work of salvation. And we will all be saved together or none of us will. Because God is good, and that is everything.
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