August 31, 2008
Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28
Show and Tell
From that time on, Jesus began to show his
disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and
undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders
and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and
on the third day be raised. Matthew 16:21
I’ve been thinking a lot about Hamlet the last few days – and not because of the new Steve
Coogan movie which I’ve heard is, well, bizarre. It’s the speech that’s been on my mind.
Maybe you remember the speech, the one that Polonius gives to his son, Laertes, an 18-year-old
ready to leave home. Polonius is nervous (what parent isn’t?), anxious for his son, who is going
to Paris, where he will be involved in, who know what? Polonius imagines the worst.
Polonius packs him up with all kinds of random advice:
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar…
Give every man thy ear but few thy voice…
Neither a borrower nor a lender be.
And it must follow, as the night follows the day, Thou can’t be false with any man,
This above all: to thine ownself be true. i
Good old Polonius. I feel for him. Just a little over a week ago we unleashed our 18-year-old on
the world. Laertes went to Paris; our daughter went to Clinton, SC, population 8,000 to
Presbyterian College. How much danger can there be at a church related, liberal arts college?
The students at PC are required to take two semesters of Bible. The head of the department is a
friend; I sent him an email that someone sent me regarding how the Bible would be different if it
had been written by 18-20 year olds:
The Ten Commandments would have only been five, double-spaced, and in a very large
font.
Adam and Eve would never have touched the forbidden fruit because it tasted like
cafeteria food.
Moses and the children of Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years. Know why? They
didn't want to look like freshmen by asking for directions.
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Instead of creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh, if the Bible had been
written by college students God would have put it off until the night before it was due
and then pulled an all-nighter.
We tell them and we tell them: don’t put things off until the last minute. Study as you go along.
We give them all kinds of sententious advice; they roundly ignore it.
I sent Sarah a text earlier in the week worthy of Polonius. It said, “Remember who you are.”
She wrote back and said, “yeah, yeah.” No wait, that was her sister. Sarah wrote, “I love you
too, Mom.”
Fact is most of us go out of our way to ignore advice. Ask the healthcare folks: How well do
people follow the advice of their nurses and doctors - or their pastors for that matter? You
might think that’s what Paul is doing in his letter to the Romans -- giving a lot of parental
sounding advice. At first glance it reads like a just another long list of dos and don’ts.
But that is not exactly what’s going on here.
While I was preparing my advice for you today I discovered something: The English translation
of this passage is not very good. The twelfth chapter of Romans isn’t a laundry list of rules, or
advice. In the Greek, the verbs aren’t commands at all; they are in the indicative case – which
means it ought to read:
Love is genuine; love hates what is evil, holds fast to what is good… Love lives in harmony with
others, is not haughty, but associates with the lowly … Love does not repay anyone evil for evil.
But … lives peaceably with all.
It sounds remarkably like Paul’s great hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13. I don’t know if Paul
had any college-aged kids, but he seems to recognize that it doesn’t do any good to wag your
finger at people and tell people what to do. Besides, he’s just spent the first 11 chapters of
Romans outlining the utterly free, gracious love of God, saying things like
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
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But God proves God’s love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. iii
So Paul’s not telling us what to do so much as he’s showing us who to be:
Let your love be genuine, hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good.
Will Willimon tells a story about the transforming power of this kind of love. If you think
sending a kid off to college is terrifying, try having one in the military. All you who have loved
ones on that prayer list in the bulletin know what I mean. The first and most important thing you
can do is pray for them. Then show them, over and over again, in every way you can, show them
who they are.
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Will tells about a guy he met in boot camp at Fort Bragg. They were 18 to 21 year-olds, kids
trying to hang tough despite the terrors of the physicals, drill sergeants and the buzz haircuts.
They were acting tough, but really they were scared to death.
On their first night in the barracks, when the
lights were finally out and they were in bed,
when the yelling and the cursing had stopped and
everything was quiet, they heard someone
speaking quietly. At first they didn’t know what
it was. As they listened they realized it was a
guy they called Sweat. He was from Tennessee;
he ran track for UT - that’s how he got the
nickname.
Sweat was saying his prayers.
Well, you can just guess how well Sweat’s piety went over with the guys in the barracks. There
were hoots, cat calls. Somebody said, “Awww… he wants his mommy.” But Sweat just kept
right on praying. When he was finished he climbed into his bunk and went to sleep.
The next night, after the lights were out he did the same thing again. And he got the same
reaction again, only this time there fewer comments, less insults - on the next night even fewer.
By the fifth night when Sweat said his prayers, nobody said a word. When he was finished, they
heard somebody say, “Amen.”
When boot camp was over the platoon voted Sweat “best cadet.” He wasn’t really the best
solider, but he was what they all wanted to be – as people. iv
Jesus taught his disciples that they would have to suffer various kinds of ridicule and abuse in
order to fulfill God’s plan for them. It’s interesting the way Matthew puts this:
Jesus began to show his disciples that he must … undergo great suffering …be killed, and on the
third day be raised.
There’s a famous Native American proverb that goes:
Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I will remember, involve me and I will understand.
Jesus taught his disciples in every way he could think of, did everything a good teacher could do.
And then, Matthew says,
From that time on he began to show them…
How do you suppose he did that?
There were hundreds of ways.
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He took a child and placed him in the midst of them and he said, “If you want to be great in
my kingdom then you’ve got to become as vulnerable and dependent as this child.”
He showed them what he intended for religion to be by driving the moneychangers out of the
temple.
He gave them pictures of God’s love and sacrifice in parables and stories.
He refused to resist when they came to arrest him. He told Peter to put away his sword.
He allowed himself to be arrested, tried and crucified.
He involved them. He involves us in his suffering for the love of the world. And that’s why it
worked. That’s why it still works -- because people of love aren’t just handing out advice, people
of love are still showing his love by entering into his suffering
Reihold Neibuhr, the great Christian teacher of the last century noted that:
The highest moral and spiritual achievements depend not upon a push but upon a pull.
[In certain cases] you may be able to compel people to certain minimal ethical acts, but
the greatest deeds are done from love, out of affection, attraction to the good, rather than
fear of shame or coercion.v
Or to put it another way: showing love beats telling people to love every time.
I’ve noticed signs about this all over town. All week long, as I was driving around town I’ve
seen variations of this theme on church billboards. Because these passages are part of the
Revised Common Lectionary many churches are emphasizing this or a similar theme today. The
church signs say things like, “If you want to save your life then loose it,” and, “Jesus said, ‘deny
your self, take up your cross and come follow.’ ” I can imagine agnostic or unchurched people
driving by, reading those signs without the slightest idea what they mean. They are just words
on a billboard.
On the other hand, there are people and churches that show-- in simple and amazing ways -what those words mean.
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There is a widow who lovingly cared for her husband during a long illness. While her grief
as still very raw she began volunteering for Hospice, helping dying patients and their
families. I worried about her and I told her so, “Don’t you want to do something lighter, less
intense right now.” She insisted that this was the way she would heal. And she was right.
The pain of her husband’s death has not left her, and it never will, but the people she lovingly
serves make it easier for her to bear.
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There’s Robertson McQuilken. As a young man he’d dreamed of nothing more than
becoming a college president. When a church-related college chose him to be their president
he sensed the call of God in the invitation. He served well. Then one day he realized that his
wife was beginning to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Her disease progressed quickly
until she was no longer able even to recognize him. He made the decision to resign his
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position at the college to care for his wife full time. His colleagues argued with him -anybody could care for his poor wife but not anybody could be president of the college.
McQuilken saw things differently. When they married, they’d promised to be together “for
better or worse, in sickness and in health.” She might not have been able recognize him any
longer, but he still knew very well who she was.vi
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There are the members of this church and other churches who give their precious vacation
days, who sacrifice their own comfort and convince, and sometimes their safety to go to New
Orleans to help rebuild in the hurricanne’s aftermath. We pray for that city and for the
whole Gulf Coast today.
There are times when it feels hopeless, when the pain and the problems seem bigger than our
best efforts. And maybe they are, but that’s not the point. The point is love, love demonstrated
in the self-giving love of God shown by God’s people, people willing to get involved with a
hurting world, love that will not let go, love that shows and tells the mighty power of Christ’s
love.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Susan F. DeWyngaert, D.Min.
First Presbyterian Church
Sarasota, Florida
i
William Shakespeare, Hamlet I, iii, 67-80
Romans 8:1
iii
Romans 5:8
iv
William Willimon, “Advice” Pulpit Resource, Summer, 1999, 38.
v
Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, (Holmes Press, 2007) 92.
vi
Tony Campolo, Carpe Diem (Thomas Nelson, 1995) 179.
ii