Matthew 18.15-20 6 July 2008
“LOSING OUR LUGGAGE”
I start with a vacation story. Not my own, but from Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice. It’s about a character named Auschenbach, a rich and famous author. Problem is that he has lived so long inside his own head—with its many plots and sub-plots—he suffers from a terminal case of anxiety. He is desperate to go on vacation, but he can’t decide where. Finally, Auschenbach decides upon
He arrives there, but he cannot let go. Outwardly, he is staying in the best hotel, eating the finest meals, wearing the finest clothes, and enjoying the best of life. Inwardly, Auschenbach is a mess. Almost randomly, he finds a moment of brief repose on the beach watching a golden child playing in the sun. For that brief moment, he discovers some measure of peace. He rests from the nervous knot in his gut. He forgets himself long enough for the rays of sunlight to penetrate. He realizes that he hasn’t known such contentment for years. But when the child disappears, his anxiety returns. Auschenbach becomes a mess all over again.
He returns to his usual pattern of doting upon injuries done to him throughout his life. What the critic said about his book, what the neighbor said about his suit, what another said about his house. These are his constant companions. Have you ever felt locked in such a pattern, going round and round, going nowhere? Where our souls needed nothing so much as a sorting through and cleaning out?
So Auschenbach decides to go home. After all, why stay in paradise if you can’t enjoy it? But his luggage is lost as he leaves
If you drive or fly away on holiday this summer, I hope to God you don’t lose your luggage. That is always agonizing, isn’t it? Yet in another sense, in the image of Auschenbach standing on that pier and laughing hysterically despite himself, maybe losing our baggage isn’t the worst thing in the world. Losing our sense of being pained and aggrieved. Losing our burdened sense of keeping score. Losing our hurt sense that the world doesn’t treat us well enough and owes us.
Living in
For Matthew, Jesus’ words do just that in terms of cleaning out our spirits and sweeping through our souls lest we become tortured souls like Auschenbach. Matthew’s Gospel, you see, is eminently practical. One scholar suggested it was written as though there were a hostile synagogue across the street. So it concerns itself with how to keep an emotional balance, how to maintain Christian community under stress. Matthew chooses what he chooses of the many things Jesus said to equip us for honest, authentic, and healthy living. That means, of course, forgiveness becomes the centerpiece and reconciliation the hallmark.
Accordingly, Jesus instructs us in Matthew, if you are wronged by someone, then go to the other person and point it out. If she or he will hear you, then so much for the good. If they will not, then go again with two or three others from the faithful. If, however, your honest efforts to effect reconciliation fail, and they have made themselves strangers, then accept that, move along and do God’s work.
Jesus opens the door wide here for reconciliation, but not at all for sentimentality.
Nurturing imagined slights or petty grievances is not tolerated. Deal with it and move on. Christ’s ministry is the point, not our paralyzing self-pity and doubt.
I recall my second year of divinity school. Students called for a special meeting in the Commons. I attended though I didn’t fully understand what it was about. We were bemoaning the lack of community, the onerous demands of professors, the lack of support, how the feeling-tone had shifted even since the year before. In retrospect, the real problem was as Yale grad students, used to being hotshots back in our smaller colleges, we suddenly felt ordinary because now everyone was smart. We were no longer so special, the golden child, or the favored elite. Severed from our secure past, we faced the uncertainty of our future callings.
Long-tenured professor Paul Holmer drew himself up after listening to our plea. This no-nonsense guy talked like George Patton. “From the sound of it,” he said, “you’d think we were a bunch of fragile hothouse flowers. There’s serious work to do in this world. There’s no room for shrinking back. We had better get after it.” The counseling types among us dismissed him as insensitive brute. But he was not. When his wife fought cancer, his teaching assistants regaled us with stories of his tender devotion to her. When on a lark I invited this important theologian to my ordination, he wrote searching personal congratulations, pleading how im-poverished he felt at being unable to be present. I shall always cherish that letter.
Every so often Jesus sends Paul Holmers to clean out our spirits and sweep through our souls lest we become tortured, self-involved souls like Auschenbach.
Jesus is talking about how we can lose burdensome luggage and laugh again.
Notice he assumes something that Kathy observed last week in her sermon. Struggle and conflict are not signs something is wrong. They are a normal part of what Paul the apostle calls “working out our salvation with fear and trembling.” Kathy said, “conflict is a given in all relationships.” Because conflict—internal or interpersonal—is expected, there is nothing shameful about it. Its presence is not a sign of failure. The only failure comes in not facing it, not processing it, but stewing in it, and dragging others down. Or as Kathy put this last week, “Do we have constructive and helpful ways to resolve conflict? Or do we deal with it by disrespecting one another and setting up ‘my way or the highway’ situations?”
Frankly, the more people attempt together, the greater the struggle to be faithful, the more potential for conflict. I cannot believe all that we have attempted and all God has accomplished through us. Certainly the renewal of our building, but not only that: breaking new ground in adult education offerings, setting records in mission giving and mobilizing life-altering mission trips, the influx of many eager new hearts ready to praise and serve God here, new services like our Jazz Sunday and Reaffirmation of Baptism and a personal approach to Confirmation. Our Auction is in full swing again after not even taking a year off for construction.
The good news is that God is at work for good transforming us and making all things new. And transformation—like a grain of wheat falling in the ground and becoming a new shoot of growth—is of course the whole point of discipleship. The bad news is that transformation is always unsettling, as we learned back in my second year of study at divinity school. And if we want to lay back pining for some golden days as God is forever prompting us forward—more faith, more truth, more justice, more hope, more compassion—then we will be very unhappy.
So in the midst of the life journey of transformation that is faithful discipleship, we thank God for the ageless constants reassuring us along the way. This holiday weekend we celebrate our homeland and that of our forefathers and mothers. We have heard from the word of God which never, ever changes, only the richness of its meaning in a given place and time. We also approach this table whose emblems are eternal, enacting the same forgiveness and reconciliation that Jesus presses upon us, the body of Christ, the people of God, the church. Gratefully, there is the sight of familiar markers along the changing road we walk.
Jesus would have us walk through life unburdened rather than weighed down with excess emotional and spiritual baggage across the traveling of a lifetime. More than this, he has shown us the way to jettison the too heavy loads we carry.
If we can let go a little—really, let go of holding ourselves so tightly—we have a shot at real joy. We have the chance to become the people we were meant to be. We have the hope of rising above evil and hurtful acts—our own and those of others. We embrace the promise of what Paul termed becoming “more than conquerors, through him who loved us.” We have the chance to free ourselves from past mistakes ruling the present and our failures dictating the future. We have the ineffable opportunity to allow God to transform us into something new and beautiful. All of that and more at our Lord’s table. Will you come with me? Amen.
