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                                                                         Church of the Redeemer

                                                                                         September 7, 2008

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

                                                                              The Rev. Dorsey W. M. McConnell

                                                                       On Becoming a Watchman

Texts:  Ezekiel 33: 1-11, Matthew 18: 15-20

So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me…. 

Jesus said, "If your brother sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If he listens to you, then you have gained your brother….”

            If you have been here before, you may have noticed something different about the beginning of this service, in which we included Jesus’ summary of the law: the two commandments to love God with all our heart and mind, soul and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves.  The first is exactly as hard as it sounds, while the second couldn’t be easier: we almost always love others to the exact extent we love ourselves, which is bad news for everybody.  Nonetheless, these two commandments are the lock on the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven, the key to which is the Gospel, and that is why we are going to be looking at them a lot over the next year; they are both diagnostic, showing us how far we are from being good people, and they also point to the power and generosity of God’s grace, his own mercy which he desires to give us in such a way that our lives can find a new meaning, out of which we begin to be able to love God with all that we are, and love others in the same way.  But in order to begin this work, we have first to come to terms with the things in us that keep getting in the way.  Both readings appointed for this morning, from Ezekiel in the Old Testament and Matthew in the New, say very clearly that before God can help us, He must correct us, and He will use other people to do that on His behalf.       

I have never enjoyed being corrected.  I especially did not like it when I was younger, and now, in middle age, though I have accepted that a certain amount of correction is just a normal part of life, I still have to admit I don’t like it any more than I did when I was twelve.  Marriage, and parenting, and ministry, the three great endeavors of my life, are all areas in which the people closest to me can clearly see my faults and then have to decide whether and how to point them out.  Sometimes they are tactful, even gracious, sometimes not.  My wife tends to be gentle but insistent. Members of this parish can be straightforward, but are usually gracious.  On the other hand, my teenage son is fairly brutal, but I gladly return the favor, so it’s all good.  However, in the end there is one thing in common about all this correction, whether it is from my son or my wife or a Christian brother or sister, which is that I know they love me, and I know that in their love, God is trying to point me toward His love, and that knowledge often pushes me to get over my defenses, swallow hard, admit the wrong, repent, apologize, and try to do better next time.  I don’t like it, but whenever I do it this way, I always feel better afterwards, and I know that, at least in that small corner of my character, the Lord has made an inroad, and taken another step toward making me more like Him. 

            Ask most people on the street, however, and I think you’d find this experience is not normative.  Moral correction through personal intervention is not generally seen in our culture as an act of love.  People will often talk about the faults of others behind their backs, but will not bring it up with them directly.  And they do not expect others to confront them directly about their own failings.  This is seen as “judgmental”, even “intolerant;” people are seen to have a right to certain behaviors on the grounds that they are personal and private, even when they are clearly not, so that any direct criticism of them is seen as by far the greater evil.  So there is a sort of conspiracy of silence and gossip, one reinforcing the other, leaving us all whirling around in our own sin, unaware of most of it, while feeling free to talk about the sin of others, though never in a way that might actually be helpful to them.  We may, thus, have succeeded in not being judgmental or intolerant, but in a way that is a great failure of love: a failure of our love of God, in that we don’t care enough about Him to take serious stock of ourselves in the light of the standards He has set, and a desperate failure of the love of our neighbors, whom we often witness doing terrible things to themselves and to others, without daring to intervene.

            If the fear of loveless condemnation is at the root of all this evasion (and I believe it is) then Ezekiel has a clear word for us.  “You, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel, whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me.”  Can we hear what he is saying?  The voice of correction in the Spirit of the Lord is the voice of the watchman, not the voice of the executioner.  It is the voice of the parent who calls the child back from running alone across Hammond Street.  It is the voice of the friend who says gently, “Do you think you might be getting in the habit of drinking too much, lately?”  It is the voice of the spouse who says, “Darling, I’ve noticed that, when you get like that, our children are afraid of you.”  These are the voices of love, not condemnation, for love without discipline is no love at all.  And Ezekiel declares that this prophetic word--  that speaks of the danger we are in by virtue of our failure to love God, and of the consequent weakness of our souls that makes us unable to love our neighbor-- this prophetic word is the beginning of correction.  Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel goes even further to point out that this word belongs, not just to the preacher, the pastor, the evangelist, the bishop, the priest, but to the whole fellowship of the Church: we all are to love one another and trust one another so greatly that we can find the courage to speak such a word to each other, and find the humility to bear hearing this word from each other, knowing that as we do so we grow,  and as each of us grows, we build up the body of all Christ’s family to be strengthened in love and patience and courage and (dare I use the word?) virtue of all kinds. And a Church that begins to act like this will, in Jesus’ words, “shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father.”  

            Now, I am aware that what I am outlining here is hugely counter-cultural in Chestnut Hill.  Our felt obligation always to be polite, coupled with the high value we place on personal privacy militates against going this far in our love for one another.  But I would point out that going this far from the culture is not half again as far as we have already gone just by showing up here this morning!  Most of our neighborhood, most of the city of Boston, most of New England, is not, I guarantee you, spending this hour in a public gathering sitting in wooden boxes under a vaulted ceiling singing strange words of love to someone named Jesus whom they can’t even see and nonetheless claim to know.  The fact that you are here at all makes you, in the eyes of the world, a very odd duck.  So, let’s not be embarrassed in taking this step towards deeper love, even if it means being a little daring and enduring a little discipline.  More important is the imperative that we get this right, that as we learn to care enough about one another to speak the word of truth in love, that what we are speaking is in fact Christ’s word and not just the word of our own personal inclinations,  that we don’t use this license to speak rashly to one another.  But, how do we know the Lord’s word?  How can we discern the difference between God’s will and our own, so that we can with our words and actions, lighten one another’s burdens, and not add to them?

            Here, again, is Christ’s answer:  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.”  First, we must acknowledge that this commandment is both unavoidable and impossible for us to keep.  “How can you love God whom you cannot see, says Jesus in another place, if you cannot love your brother or sister whom you can see?” And since I have to admit I am weak in the love-my-neighbor department, I have also to admit that I am by nature impossibly weak when it comes to loving God.  So, the great commandment takes us straight to Jesus Christ, and to his Cross.  Since of my own will, I cannot love in the way I am commanded to, I must rely on His love to correct me.  For He is ultimately the watchman who warns me, and the judge who convicts me, and the fountain of mercy who pardons me by virtue of His blood poured out.  Only as I begin to grasp how much God in Christ loves me, how utterly, passionately, unreservedly, He extends his grace to me, even at the cost of His own life, because He delights in me—only as I begin to grasp the extent of His love will I, by this same grace, begin to love God in return, first with some of my heart, then with a bit more of my heart, with some of my mind, and a part of my soul, and a bit of my strength, then more and more until I can do nothing else but love him, until not loving him seems like trying to run while holding my breath.

            This love that comes from the Cross of Christ into our sad and tired hearts, and through them returns in gratitude and joy to the Father—this is the love with which we can indeed love God, and which alone allows us to love ourselves and our neighbor.  In my case, I know this transformation is going to take a while, and I suspect it will with each of you as well.  That’s why the best way to act on this sermon is probably not, for example, to draw aside that special person at coffee hour and let them have it, with the things you have been dying to get off your chest for years!  Instead, you might try beginning to get to know them and take what you learn, in prayer to the Father.  As you ask God to help you love Him, you may discover that you begin to love the person in question, and you may find that what you had in mind to say, isn’t at all what God would have you say.  You may find, in fact, that before you say anything you need to bear with the other in a charitable and dedicated determination to become their friend.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian and martyr under the Nazis, taught that the beginning of the ministry of the watchman, the ministry of correction, actually lies in learning first how to hold one’s tongue.  This is not the same as avoiding confrontation out of fear or out of some mistaken notion of privacy; but is a sign of the love of the Cross, love in which we are patient and forbearing as Christ has been with us, until the time when we know there is enough trust and love that the word of truth can and must be spoken.  And sometimes that moment may look very different from any correction we have ever experienced or imagined.

            There is a story about the abbot of a monastery in the early church who owned a very beautiful book of the gospels.  Well, one of the brothers stole it, and though the abbot knew right away who the thief was, he said nothing.  The brother took the book to a dealer in town and asked him to buy it.  The dealer said, “Leave the book with me for a day, while I see whether it is worth the price you are asking.”   The dealer took the book to the abbot and said, “A man is asking a certain price for this, and I want to know if that is fair.”  The abbot said, “Yes, it is a beautiful book.  That is a fair price.”  When the brother went back to the shop the next day, the dealer said to him. “I will pay what you ask.  I took the book to Abbot Moses who says it is a fair price.”  The brother said to the dealer, “The book is no longer for sale;” then he ran to the abbot and begged his forgiveness.  The abbot forgave him, but refused to take the book back.  “Accept it from me, brother, as a present.”  That brother turned out from then on to be a paragon of repentance and humility, since he always had before his eyes a visible reminder of God’s grace and truth in dealing with his sin.

            May the Lord make us to one another such visible signs.  If this spirit of grace infuses our approach to each other then we will in fact have nothing to fear as we learn to become each other’s watchmen, but will have only joy as we grow in the love of Christ and help one another to do so, greeting with thankfulness the word of truth that comes to us, no matter who is the bearer, knowing that the mouth which speaks it belongs to the Lord Jesus who came that we might have life and have it abundantly.