Them’s Fightin’ Words
I want to begin this morning by saying that, even though all Scripture is good, and I do love the words of the Old Testament prophets, I’m a little bit glad to be back reading the words of the Gospel again. This morning we’re back on the lectionary readings with these two passages from Romans and Matthew.
And just a forewarning – I’m going to be using a particular word a lot in this sermon. And that word is agape. You may have heard it before. It’s a word that the early Christians, especially in the Greek-speaking world, would have known and recognized. It’s one of the Greek words for love – the highest order of love. The selfless, giving love, exemplified by God’s love for humanity. Agape is the deepest love we have the capacity to imagine.
But first, the words of the scripture from Romans this morning should be at least a little familiar to most of us. We read them every so often as our Summary of the Law – our reminder of how God calls us to live our lives if we truly believe ourselves to be keepers of his faith and people of his kingdom.
And this morning those words, which are so familiar to us, are coupled with this passage from the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus Christ tells us not just that we should love each other, but how to love each other. Especially when that love is troubled by conflict.
The love that Paul is talking about in Romans and the love that Jesus is describing in Matthew – they’re the same selfless, giving, agape love. It’s sacrificial love. It’s love that says that I’m going to put our relationship together above my own selfish interests.
So let’s start by looking at these words from Paul, where he writes – “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”
Paul starts with this idea that we should not owe anything or be indebted to anyone. And as I read those words I can’t help but to be reminded of the Summary of the Law we read at our last service two weeks ago from Matthew 5. Where Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount,
“If anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give them your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”
So from Paul’s words, the implication is that Christians should never ask to borrow anything. And from the words of Jesus himself, we learn that we should always be quick to give what we have – to lend to those who ask from us.
Now, in the time that Jesus was preaching and shortly after, when Paul was writing, there was a lot of suspicion of Christians. There were a few wealthy benefactors among them, but for the most part, early Christianity was a lower-class movement. Jesus spoke to the poor, to the margins, to the people that fashionable society had deemed unfashionable. He hung out with beggars, with prostitutes, with tax-collectors, who were basically seen as state-endorsed grifters. Basically if Jesus hung out with you, you probably weren’t very respectable.
And any time you have groups identifying themselves in ways that go against the norms of respectability, whether it’s early followers of Jesus trying to build a new religion, or poor and struggling people working to scrape a few more crumbs together, or folks tired of the status quo of paying temple taxes on top of city taxes on top of provincial taxes on top of taxes to the Roman treasury… any time you get a movement of people pushing upwards against social boundaries, you get push-back.
Pushback calling them lazy. Calling them parasites. Calling them violent agitators. Enemies of the state. Enemies of the people.
So Paul and Jesus, I think, are being very practical and pragmatic here when they’re instructing people not to borrow, not to take, not to look for handouts, but to give freely of what they have.
It’s hard to be a parasite when you’re asking for nothing and giving everything.
It’s hard to be called lazy when you work for what you have and share with those who have less.
It’s hard to be an enemy of the people when every action and motivation that Christ has is to serve and love the people.
This agape love, this sacrificial love that gives freely to everybody.. it’s biblical and it’s borne of real love that Christ has for the world. And it serves a practical purpose. But at the same time… it’s really hard to do.
But it requires us to give of ourselves. Constantly and without compensation. And we get depleted. We get burned out. We can give and give and give, and at the end of the day still need a little bit for ourselves. To freely give without receiving is wonderful and Godly and righteous… and as it serves a practical purpose to neuter any criticism of Christians as lazy and parasitic… it also creates practical problems as well.
Through a good chunk of European Christian history, Christians were not permitted to charge interest on loans to other Christians. Now, this wasn’t really a huge problem in the early days of the Church, when Christians were a minority and the pagans ran everything anyway. If you needed a loan, not that you were supposed to ask for you, but if you did, you could go on down to the First National Bank of Caesar, fill out your loan application, and the Apollo-worshiping bank manager would happily give you a bag of shekels along with a date he’d expect you to repay him back with two bags of shekels in return. You get the money you need when you need it, he gets a promise of two bags eventually to make it worth his while, and at the end of the loan, if you don’t have his two bags, some Mars-worshiping hulk of a Roman mafia enforcer comes to your house to break your kneecaps. It’s a system that works.
What happened, though, as Christianity grew, not just to become a major religion, but the dominant religion throughout the Roman Empire and then through Europe, is that the church prohibitions against charging interest started to create a serious drag on the economy. Instead of giving freely to those in need, instead of lending without asking anything in return, instead of practicing the agape love that Christ envisioned for us, Christian bean-counters made the calculation that there wasn’t anything in it for them to lend money, since they couldn’t make interest, and so they didn’t. And it got to the point where there weren’t enough Jews or pagans or other non-Christians in the empire (largely because of the success of large-scale conversion campaigns that weren’t always lovey-dovey) – there weren’t enough non-Christians to lend money to or borrow money from, to make the continental economy work.
Now, this is a very broad, very gross over-simplification. Certainly each region was a little bit different in how things worked, depending on exactly where and when you’re talking about, especially in Medieval Europe, the usury laws tend to change back and forth over time. And you absolutely had individuals who didn’t care what the church said and were happy to charge any interest to anybody if it got them a few more gold pieces at the end of the week. But by and large, if you were a Christian, you weren’t supposed to charge interest to other Christians, and when 95% of the population is Christian, this means that there’s not a lot of economic motivation to move money around.
And again – gross oversimplification – if you were to take what I’ve just told you and turned it in for your college history exam as the answer to “Why were the Dark Ages dark?” At best you’d get C- partial credit.
But the larger point I want to make isn’t anything to do with usury laws or economic struggles or social expectations…
The point that I’m coming to and that I hope to make quickly… comes back not to Paul or to what Jesus says in Matthew 5… but what he says in Matthew 18. Which we also read this morning.
Being a Christian as it’s described in the Bible, sounds awesome. It’s a life of agape love. Of freely giving. Of living in constant one-ness with God and constant love for each other.
Yet we see that it comes with social struggle.
It comes with economic struggle.
It comes with real relational struggles that sometimes pit Christians against other Christians.
Because we’re imperfect servants, because we sometimes get depleted and burned out, because at the end of the day we still need enough for ourselves and our families. Because we’re not endless sources of energy and time and resources. Because we sometimes need a Sabbath.
And because we’re buffeted all the time by forces at work in our lives other than our love for Christ – by work expectations, family expectations, social expectations, political expectations – you all know better than I do all the directions we’re all being pulled in at the same time… we sometimes get into conflicts. Conflict, unfortunately, is a big part of the human experience.
And so, Christ gives us these words.
“If another member of the Church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.”
Resolving a conflict begins with a one-on-one conversation. It’s not a public shaming or a verbal beat-down of the other person. I feel like if Christ had delivered this sermon today, he might well have added, “… and don’t go posting all over Facebook and Twitter about it.”
And then he continues, “And if you are not listened to, take one or two others with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.”
I think the key word that Christ is using here is “listen.” Don’t approach the other person alone to beat them up in a dark alley. Don’t go with one or two witnesses to shout them down and intimidate them. Don’t take your complaints about them to your social media pages. Approach them in such a way that they’ll want to listen to you. And unspoken here, but I think heavily implied, is that we need to be willing to listen to them as well.
Again – Christ wants us to mediate through conversation. Not, “here’s what I’m telling you and you’ll sit there and take it.” But a conversation borne of that same agape love. That says, I’m willing to stick my neck out, I’ll come to you, I’ll listen to you and you listen to me. And I’ll do it no matter how hard it is, no matter how much pride I have to swallow, no matter how wrong I think you are, because our relationship to each other is important.”
And Jesus’s last words on this… are a little bit strange, if you think about it… “If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile or a tax collector.”
At first blush it sounds like Jesus is saying, “and if they still don’t listen, just write them off completely – excommunicate them – ostracize them from the community – treat them like you would a Gentile or a tax collector.”
Except that Jesus hung out with Gentiles and tax collectors, didn’t he?
They weren’t subhuman garbage unworthy of his time.
They were people every bit a part of Christ’s community as you or I. They may not have been part of the church. Or part of a specific congregation. But Christ counted them among his own just the same.
To live in the agape love of Jesus Christ is to live a life of calling. Calling to give. Calling to be of service to others. Calling to bring people together.
Yet that constant demand on our time, our resources, our bodies, our energy… creates friction – in addition to all the other conflicts we have going on in our lives.
And so much of our current culture’s solutions to conflict aren’t to deal with it or confront it, certainly not to resolve it. But to advertise it. To loudly declare, to any offense, real or imagined, “them’s fightin’ words!” and carry forward in blustering indignation. To put it on tv and social media and say, “I’ve got 100 followers, or 1000 followers, or 1,000,000 followers, who say I’m right and you’re wrong.” Which only amplifies conflict and resolves nothing. It certainly isn’t the Christian way.
Because the way that Jesus taught us isn’t about beating down, shouting down, or making sure we get our way. But to listen. To be listened to. To engage in honest, difficult conversation. To treat each other the way that Christ treated the poor, the outcasts, the weird, and the strange. To invite them into a place of conversation and honesty and real, agape love.
We are called to be more. To do better. To engage in those difficult conversations. To listen and to hear what people are actually saying, not just what our social media feeds want us to believe about the other side. To live in the agape love of Jesus Christ is to live a life of blessings, but also an obligation to bring that love into our every engagement with the world. Into every relationship, into every joy, and into every hardship and conflict.
This is how Christ demands his Church to live. For our own benefit and to the glory of God’s name. Amen.
Let us pray.
Gracious and loving God, you are a constant blessing in our lives. You have given us a wondrous Creation to call home. You surround us with the love of your church and of your people. You invite us to give freely of all you have given us. Lord, for those times when we disagree, when we fight, when we look on each other with anger, we ask you to put your Word on our hearts. Help us to reconcile. To listen. To make our words peaceful and our actions helpful. Help us to live as you call us to live, through the example of your Son, Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.
I want to begin this morning by saying that, even though all Scripture is good, and I do love the words of the Old Testament prophets, I’m a little bit glad to be back reading the words of the Gospel again. This morning we’re back on the lectionary readings with these two passages from Romans and Matthew.
And just a forewarning – I’m going to be using a particular word a lot in this sermon. And that word is agape. You may have heard it before. It’s a word that the early Christians, especially in the Greek-speaking world, would have known and recognized. It’s one of the Greek words for love – the highest order of love. The selfless, giving love, exemplified by God’s love for humanity. Agape is the deepest love we have the capacity to imagine.
But first, the words of the scripture from Romans this morning should be at least a little familiar to most of us. We read them every so often as our Summary of the Law – our reminder of how God calls us to live our lives if we truly believe ourselves to be keepers of his faith and people of his kingdom.
And this morning those words, which are so familiar to us, are coupled with this passage from the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus Christ tells us not just that we should love each other, but how to love each other. Especially when that love is troubled by conflict.
The love that Paul is talking about in Romans and the love that Jesus is describing in Matthew – they’re the same selfless, giving, agape love. It’s sacrificial love. It’s love that says that I’m going to put our relationship together above my own selfish interests.
So let’s start by looking at these words from Paul, where he writes – “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”
Paul starts with this idea that we should not owe anything or be indebted to anyone. And as I read those words I can’t help but to be reminded of the Summary of the Law we read at our last service two weeks ago from Matthew 5. Where Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount,
“If anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give them your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”
So from Paul’s words, the implication is that Christians should never ask to borrow anything. And from the words of Jesus himself, we learn that we should always be quick to give what we have – to lend to those who ask from us.
Now, in the time that Jesus was preaching and shortly after, when Paul was writing, there was a lot of suspicion of Christians. There were a few wealthy benefactors among them, but for the most part, early Christianity was a lower-class movement. Jesus spoke to the poor, to the margins, to the people that fashionable society had deemed unfashionable. He hung out with beggars, with prostitutes, with tax-collectors, who were basically seen as state-endorsed grifters. Basically if Jesus hung out with you, you probably weren’t very respectable.
And any time you have groups identifying themselves in ways that go against the norms of respectability, whether it’s early followers of Jesus trying to build a new religion, or poor and struggling people working to scrape a few more crumbs together, or folks tired of the status quo of paying temple taxes on top of city taxes on top of provincial taxes on top of taxes to the Roman treasury… any time you get a movement of people pushing upwards against social boundaries, you get push-back.
Pushback calling them lazy. Calling them parasites. Calling them violent agitators. Enemies of the state. Enemies of the people.
So Paul and Jesus, I think, are being very practical and pragmatic here when they’re instructing people not to borrow, not to take, not to look for handouts, but to give freely of what they have.
It’s hard to be a parasite when you’re asking for nothing and giving everything.
It’s hard to be called lazy when you work for what you have and share with those who have less.
It’s hard to be an enemy of the people when every action and motivation that Christ has is to serve and love the people.
This agape love, this sacrificial love that gives freely to everybody.. it’s biblical and it’s borne of real love that Christ has for the world. And it serves a practical purpose. But at the same time… it’s really hard to do.
But it requires us to give of ourselves. Constantly and without compensation. And we get depleted. We get burned out. We can give and give and give, and at the end of the day still need a little bit for ourselves. To freely give without receiving is wonderful and Godly and righteous… and as it serves a practical purpose to neuter any criticism of Christians as lazy and parasitic… it also creates practical problems as well.
Through a good chunk of European Christian history, Christians were not permitted to charge interest on loans to other Christians. Now, this wasn’t really a huge problem in the early days of the Church, when Christians were a minority and the pagans ran everything anyway. If you needed a loan, not that you were supposed to ask for you, but if you did, you could go on down to the First National Bank of Caesar, fill out your loan application, and the Apollo-worshiping bank manager would happily give you a bag of shekels along with a date he’d expect you to repay him back with two bags of shekels in return. You get the money you need when you need it, he gets a promise of two bags eventually to make it worth his while, and at the end of the loan, if you don’t have his two bags, some Mars-worshiping hulk of a Roman mafia enforcer comes to your house to break your kneecaps. It’s a system that works.
What happened, though, as Christianity grew, not just to become a major religion, but the dominant religion throughout the Roman Empire and then through Europe, is that the church prohibitions against charging interest started to create a serious drag on the economy. Instead of giving freely to those in need, instead of lending without asking anything in return, instead of practicing the agape love that Christ envisioned for us, Christian bean-counters made the calculation that there wasn’t anything in it for them to lend money, since they couldn’t make interest, and so they didn’t. And it got to the point where there weren’t enough Jews or pagans or other non-Christians in the empire (largely because of the success of large-scale conversion campaigns that weren’t always lovey-dovey) – there weren’t enough non-Christians to lend money to or borrow money from, to make the continental economy work.
Now, this is a very broad, very gross over-simplification. Certainly each region was a little bit different in how things worked, depending on exactly where and when you’re talking about, especially in Medieval Europe, the usury laws tend to change back and forth over time. And you absolutely had individuals who didn’t care what the church said and were happy to charge any interest to anybody if it got them a few more gold pieces at the end of the week. But by and large, if you were a Christian, you weren’t supposed to charge interest to other Christians, and when 95% of the population is Christian, this means that there’s not a lot of economic motivation to move money around.
And again – gross oversimplification – if you were to take what I’ve just told you and turned it in for your college history exam as the answer to “Why were the Dark Ages dark?” At best you’d get C- partial credit.
But the larger point I want to make isn’t anything to do with usury laws or economic struggles or social expectations…
The point that I’m coming to and that I hope to make quickly… comes back not to Paul or to what Jesus says in Matthew 5… but what he says in Matthew 18. Which we also read this morning.
Being a Christian as it’s described in the Bible, sounds awesome. It’s a life of agape love. Of freely giving. Of living in constant one-ness with God and constant love for each other.
Yet we see that it comes with social struggle.
It comes with economic struggle.
It comes with real relational struggles that sometimes pit Christians against other Christians.
Because we’re imperfect servants, because we sometimes get depleted and burned out, because at the end of the day we still need enough for ourselves and our families. Because we’re not endless sources of energy and time and resources. Because we sometimes need a Sabbath.
And because we’re buffeted all the time by forces at work in our lives other than our love for Christ – by work expectations, family expectations, social expectations, political expectations – you all know better than I do all the directions we’re all being pulled in at the same time… we sometimes get into conflicts. Conflict, unfortunately, is a big part of the human experience.
And so, Christ gives us these words.
“If another member of the Church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.”
Resolving a conflict begins with a one-on-one conversation. It’s not a public shaming or a verbal beat-down of the other person. I feel like if Christ had delivered this sermon today, he might well have added, “… and don’t go posting all over Facebook and Twitter about it.”
And then he continues, “And if you are not listened to, take one or two others with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.”
I think the key word that Christ is using here is “listen.” Don’t approach the other person alone to beat them up in a dark alley. Don’t go with one or two witnesses to shout them down and intimidate them. Don’t take your complaints about them to your social media pages. Approach them in such a way that they’ll want to listen to you. And unspoken here, but I think heavily implied, is that we need to be willing to listen to them as well.
Again – Christ wants us to mediate through conversation. Not, “here’s what I’m telling you and you’ll sit there and take it.” But a conversation borne of that same agape love. That says, I’m willing to stick my neck out, I’ll come to you, I’ll listen to you and you listen to me. And I’ll do it no matter how hard it is, no matter how much pride I have to swallow, no matter how wrong I think you are, because our relationship to each other is important.”
And Jesus’s last words on this… are a little bit strange, if you think about it… “If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile or a tax collector.”
At first blush it sounds like Jesus is saying, “and if they still don’t listen, just write them off completely – excommunicate them – ostracize them from the community – treat them like you would a Gentile or a tax collector.”
Except that Jesus hung out with Gentiles and tax collectors, didn’t he?
They weren’t subhuman garbage unworthy of his time.
They were people every bit a part of Christ’s community as you or I. They may not have been part of the church. Or part of a specific congregation. But Christ counted them among his own just the same.
To live in the agape love of Jesus Christ is to live a life of calling. Calling to give. Calling to be of service to others. Calling to bring people together.
Yet that constant demand on our time, our resources, our bodies, our energy… creates friction – in addition to all the other conflicts we have going on in our lives.
And so much of our current culture’s solutions to conflict aren’t to deal with it or confront it, certainly not to resolve it. But to advertise it. To loudly declare, to any offense, real or imagined, “them’s fightin’ words!” and carry forward in blustering indignation. To put it on tv and social media and say, “I’ve got 100 followers, or 1000 followers, or 1,000,000 followers, who say I’m right and you’re wrong.” Which only amplifies conflict and resolves nothing. It certainly isn’t the Christian way.
Because the way that Jesus taught us isn’t about beating down, shouting down, or making sure we get our way. But to listen. To be listened to. To engage in honest, difficult conversation. To treat each other the way that Christ treated the poor, the outcasts, the weird, and the strange. To invite them into a place of conversation and honesty and real, agape love.
We are called to be more. To do better. To engage in those difficult conversations. To listen and to hear what people are actually saying, not just what our social media feeds want us to believe about the other side. To live in the agape love of Jesus Christ is to live a life of blessings, but also an obligation to bring that love into our every engagement with the world. Into every relationship, into every joy, and into every hardship and conflict.
This is how Christ demands his Church to live. For our own benefit and to the glory of God’s name. Amen.
Let us pray.
Gracious and loving God, you are a constant blessing in our lives. You have given us a wondrous Creation to call home. You surround us with the love of your church and of your people. You invite us to give freely of all you have given us. Lord, for those times when we disagree, when we fight, when we look on each other with anger, we ask you to put your Word on our hearts. Help us to reconcile. To listen. To make our words peaceful and our actions helpful. Help us to live as you call us to live, through the example of your Son, Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.