23rd after Pentecost 2024

Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and blessed be God's family now and forever.

Amen.

Let's pray together.

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

The Lord be with you.

Let us pray.

Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity, and that we may obtain what you promise.

Make us love what you command.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.

Amen.

A reading from 1 Samuel to Abigail, the wife of Nabal, one of the boys reported, Look, David sent messengers out of the wilderness to greet our Lord, and he screamed at them, yet the men were very good to us, and we were not put to shame, and we never missed anything all the days we were with them when we were in the field.

They were a wall to us, even by night, and also every day we were with them, keeping the sheep.

Now know this, and see what you can do.

For evil against our master and against all his house has been resolved.

He is worthless, no one can speak to him.

Then Abigail hurried, and she took two hundred loaves, two skins of wine, five prepared sheep, five measures of parched grain, one hundred clusters of raisins, and two hundred fig cakes, and she loaded them on donkeys.

And Abigail said to her boys, Go on before me.

I am coming after you.

And her husband Nabal, she did not tell.

And Abigail saw David, and she hurried, and got down from the donkey, fell before David on her face, bowing to the ground.

She fell at his feet and said, Upon me, my lord, the iniquity.

Please let your slave woman speak in your ears and hear the words of your slave.

Please, my lord, do not set your thought on this worthless man Nabal, for at his name, thus is he.

Nabal, meaning disgrace, is his name, and he is a disgrace.

Now I, your slave, did not see my Lord's voice, whom you sent.

Then David said to Abigail, Blessed be the Holy One, the God of Israel, who sent you to meet me today.

Blessed be your discernment, and blessed be you, who have kept me today from coming for blood and saving me from my own hand.

Surely as the Holy One, the God of Israel lives, who has restrained me from hurting you, Abigail.

Unless you had hurried and come to meet me, truly by the light of daybreak, there would not have been left to Nabal anyone urinating against a wall.

Later after Nabal's death, Abigail hurried and got up and mounted a donkey with five of her girls at her heels.

She went after the messengers of David, and she became his wife.

David also married Ahinom of Jezreel.

Both of them became his wives.

The word of the Lord.

Be still before the Most High and wait patiently for her.

Let go of anger and forsake wrath.

For the wicked shall be cut off.

And a little more time, and the wicked will be no more.

But the humble poor shall inherit the land.

Better is a little that the righteous person has.

I have seen the wicked oppressing.

They passed on, and suddenly they were no more.

Regard the blameless and behold the upright.

But transgressors shall be utterly destroyed together.

The salvation of the righteous is from the ever-present God.

The redeeming God helps them and delivers them.

For in a great trial of affliction, their abundant joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.

For according to their means, as I can testify, and even beyond their ability, voluntarily with much exhortation, begging us earnestly for the grace of participation in this ministry to the saints, and not simply as we expected, but rather they gave themselves first to the Savior and to us by the will of God.

Thus we exhorted us that just as he had begun, so he should also complete this work of grace among you all.

So then in everything you excel in faith, and speech and knowledge and zeal and in love, ours for your yours for us.

So we want you to excel also in that act of grace.

Not as a command, do I say this rather against the zeal of others?

Am I proving the genuineness of your love?

For you all know the grace of our Redeemer, Jesus the Messiah, and for you all he became poor through the rich, so that you, through his poverty, might become rich by the word of the Lord.

You all have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.

But I say to you, do not set yourself against the wicked.

And when someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to them also.

And when someone wants you to be judged and take your coat, let your other clothing go as well.

And when someone forces you to go one mile, go the second mile too.

Give to those who ask from you, and those who want to borrow from you do not refuse.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, it's wonderful to be back here.

For those of you who weren't here a month ago, my name is Sean Steele, and I'm a colleague priest of Mike, and I'm super grateful to be here and to talk with you today.

So, has anybody seen Bishop Doyle's seven-word biography?

He likes to put this out everywhere.

He does.

It's, I think, met Jesus on the road still walking that's his seven-word biography.

And I was like, Do I need to come up with a seven-word biography?

This is something I need to do.

Because I've thought about this a ton.

And then I finally came up with one.

Are you ready?

Here's my spiritual biography.

I believe.

Help my unbelief.

So what?

So what?

But I think that this is actually probably most all of ours.

I mean, in Jesus on the road still walking.

I think that's what is great about these pithy little statements.

I think this has been the case for Christians for a really long time.

Is they've been trying to figure out, right, what does it mean?

What are the implications when they say we believe that Jesus is Lord?

We accept that Jesus is the Son of God raised from the dead.

We believe.

And then there's that piece, but some of this is really hard to believe.

But so what?

And it's that so what?

That I think we've all been trying to figure out for thousands of years.

The so what piece?

What are the implications of proclaiming this?

Isn't that one of the main reasons that we gather here?

We gather for community and worship, but we're trying to figure this out.

The so what piece in our life.

So when we leave here, right, we have a better understanding about what it means to live with integrity in our faith.

And so I was thinking about the so what of the gospel this morning, not this morning, all week actually, because I've been thinking about justice.

Like, when we proclaim Jesus as Lord, what does what are the implications on our understanding of justice?

Now, I'm going to tell you right now that I'm not going to give you any answers.

Right?

Because this is a really hard one.

And a core belief of mine is that the truth is in the tension.

That I don't think we come to church to get answers.

I mean, sometimes we do, little ones, you know, answered prayer.

But largely we're creating more questions.

We're trying to create tension in the system, kind of like a rubber band.

Right?

That it's only effective when we're creating that tension, right?

We take that potential energy and we turn it into something else because this is a really like hard issue justice.

There's not a simple answer to that.

And you can say, sure, you know, I don't want to ever punch my neighbor in the face.

Right?

Unless he's hitting my kid.

Then I'm pro- See how it gets complicated?

Right?

There's no simple answers.

There's just a bunch of tension.

And so trying to figure that out in the Gospel this morning, like, what's the tension around justice?

And what does that mean?

And what can what can we hopefully leave here with maybe that'll help us just live a little bit more faithfully and with a little more integrity?

So we're in the Gospel of Matthew, and this is the greatest sermon that has ever been preached, according to some scholars, right?

The most famous sermon in the world, Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.

And so it's a very long sermon, it's most of chapter 5.

And we get this little pericope here, this little piece where Jesus says, you have heard it basically say unto you that when somebody hits you, turn the other cheek.

Right?

If somebody takes, wants to send you to court because you owe them money, right?

Then they can take your coat and leave you just in your underwear.

Take everything, give them your underwear too, and just stand naked in front of them.

What he says.

And then he says, if a Roman soldier presses you into carrying their gear for a mile, which they were allowed to do by law, they can make a non-Roman, a non-Roman sold, like a non-soldier, non-citizen, carry their gear for a mile.

Just take it a second mile.

And then he says, be generous when people ask you for something.

And then right after that, he says this really difficult thing.

Those that oppress you, right, those that harm you, your enemies, love them and pray for them.

That's the next piece right after that.

So you're thinking, like, man, I don't like this.

Right?

This is a really hard one for me because I gotta be honest with you, I could have written the code of Hammurabi.

Like, okay, do you guys know the love languages book, the Chapman's Love Languages book?

Has anybody come across this?

It was really popular a little bit ago.

Anybody raise your hand?

I'm gonna ask y'all to do, like, raise your hand, raise your hand.

Okay, so there's this cute, pithy little book that talks about the different ways that we express love.

Well, he also does one on apologies.

Like, like, what are your apology languages?

Because we don't all need the same things when we apologize, right?

We all need something different.

After 23 years, I think I'm finally figuring out how my wife likes me to apologize to her.

This is not easy to do, right?

To apologize.

But when I was reading it, I was like, whoa, one of them is like restitution.

And I was always like a restitution person.

Like, I would always be like, okay, I get that you're sorry, but for me to really believe that, I'm gonna need you to kind of demonstrate that you're sorry.

That is somebody who likes and I give restitution when I apologize, right?

This is the language that I speak.

So when I read the code of Hammurah, when I read an eye for an eye, I'm like, well, kind of makes sense.

Kind of makes sense.

So when you hear this sort of like Jesus saying, hey, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, give when they ask them, I'm a little bit like, where's the justice, Jesus?

Where's the justice in this?

Am I the only one who sometimes wonders, like, Jesus, where's the but I think it's there.

But but I think we have to look closely because what Jesus is saying, it's clearly not Sean taking their eye out as well.

That is not what it means to live justly in the kingdom of God.

What we know, right, is that when in that time, and I think you've all heard this before, because I know Mike Mike Mike preaches and teaches this, but in that time, just as a refresher, that if you wanted to sort of demean somebody who was lesser than you, you would backhand them.

You would slap them with a backhand.

Right?

That was to let them know their place.

So what Jesus was saying in this instance is if somebody disrespects your dignity, your identity, who you are, if they treat you less, then turn the other cheek and basically say, Well, if you're gonna hit me, you're gonna hit me like an equal.

Interesting.

Then give them their underwear as well.

What is that?

What's going on there?

Well, you could technically take a person's coat if they owed you money as a way to kind of publicly shame them.

However, if you stood naked in front of somebody else, guess what?

That shamed them.

Did shame you.

It shame the person looking upon you.

So Jesus was saying, in this unjust system, if somebody wants to embarrass you and shame you in the culture by taking your outer coat, by showing that you're poor and that you owe somebody, just give them everything and show how unjust that system is, stand in front of them.

Now, Roman soldiers could press somebody for one mile.

I mean, they've been rucking with heavy weight for a really long time.

But they weren't allowed to do more than that.

They could get in trouble.

So it's like, hey, you know, they're tired.

This is an unfair system.

They're pressing you into work because if you have to ruck all the way out, you can't work yourself that day.

So go an extra mile.

See what happens.

See if that maybe exposes a little bit about what the reality of this system is for the people, right?

And then Jesus says, be generous, pray for your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, live generous.

So you have this weird sort of way that Jesus is saying that justice, right, is in here, but it's in here in a very particular way where it's not about returning, right, an eye for an eye with violence, but it's also not being some type of weird doormat where you're just saying, well, I'm a Christian, so I guess I should just forgive them and let them just run all over me and everybody I love.

That's what forgiveness is.

I forgive them, I'm just gonna just take it.

I believe in a God who just, you know, took all the punishment, so I'm just gonna take it.

That is not what it means to faithfully be a Christian and to live for biblical justice, right?

To live for the kingdom of God justice.

So what is it?

So you can tell, not a lot of answers here, right?

This is really complicated.

And so then I started thinking about violence.

I think it has to do with violence.

I think that's what's at the core of this.

So, violence, like the root of the word violence and like violation when you get to it, it means to sort of like aggressively push through with force, right?

Push through with force.

Now, if you grew up in a household like I did, uh kind of military household from a father who was a Marine Corps Journal instructor, right?

At PTSD, if you grew up in that environment, right, this is how you understood violence and boundaries.

You hold a boundary right here for somebody.

This is my boundary.

If they violate your boundary, right, they violate it with force, they kind of come at you with aggression, they use violence of some sort, emotional, physical, whatever it is.

The appropriate response is to react with twice or three times that amount of violence and push them as far away from your boundary as you possibly can.

And then you humbly walk back feeling righteous to your boundary, and you say, I dare you to come anywhere near my boundary again.

Am I the only one that reacts when people have a violation of my boundaries with violence?

Right?

That's what we are told we do?

And I think this is what Jesus is saying.

There's a way for us to not be the people that have to return violence with violence and push, and then also not be people who just sort of take the unjust beatings of the world from people with some type of weird self-deprecation.

It's not that.

So what's the answer?

Well, I don't know.

I don't know.

But here's what I'm wondering about.

Here's what I'm thinking about.

I started thinking to myself, man, how come nobody told me there was a third way to set a boundary?

Sure, I'm standing here, just living my life, and somebody violates my boundary, and they push, it's a violation, they use violence of some sort.

I could just push them back and hold my boundary.

I don't have to violate them.

I can just push them back and not disrespect their dignity, not attack them, not perpetuate a constant cycle of violence and violation.

I can just learn to push back and say, this is my boundary.

I understand in some way, this is that love your enemies and pray for them.

I understand that we're all sinful, broken people, and that hurt people, hurt people, and that you're probably operating out of that hurt, but this is my boundary, and I'm just gonna hold it firmly.

They might not like that.

They probably won't.

But I think what Jesus is saying is we have to stop the cycle of pushing violence in reaction to violence.

I think that's what he was telling the disciples to do.

He was saying, push back and hold your boundary.

Don't let them disrespect your dignity.

Hold firm and expose the unjust reality.

Because a lot of times when we hold a nice firm boundary, it exposes the injustice, it exposes their behavior.

So what often happens is when you react doubly with violence and you push back really hard, then that person is like, You see how you hurt me?

It is your fault, right?

And then it gets to this cycle of blame.

But if you just hold firm and you say, hey, look what's going on, you can't do that.

Oftentimes the person has a revelation.

Oh, wow.

I I think I was acting inappropriately.

And because we have grace and forgiveness, we give them an opportunity to say they're sorry and forgive, right?

So, so what?

So I was thinking, like, November, I started getting jittery on the way down here.

A little bit because I get nervous from from preaching.

But then I started thinking, like, I think my my whole being is getting jittery.

Am I the only one who gets jittery in November and December?

Like, it's like the season of people disrespecting my boundaries.

Like, Thanksgiving starts coming, and you're like, oh, dinner with people.

And Christmas and all of the hurt and the pain and the expectations and the shame and the loneliness and all of this uh reality, and people lash out.

Oh, and by the way, uh, I don't know if you knew this, but like we're in a particularly divisive time in our country, and like in the next 10 days there's gonna be a big event that happens, and people might be getting a little weird about this, and disrespecting boundaries and pushing and acting in ways that are violent and like not, you know, not just physically violent, like emotionally violent, right?

Like we're talking about crossing over a boundary in some way, not respecting people's space.

I think this is gonna happen more and more, and I think that this is a good reminder.

I think this is coming at a good time for us to think and wonder about what does it mean for us to be people who are, I mean, I would say non-violent because I'm not entirely sure I'm ever gonna be nonviolent, but I mean, I'm gonna shoot for that, but definitely less violent.

Like way less violent.

And to do that, I think we have to put something in its place.

Right?

So if you are like me and you tend to hold your boundaries by pushing really hard against other people when they cross them, just put in place of that the image that in this season, what would it look like for us, right, to just hold firm on healthy boundaries and act in a way that is kind and generous and gives the best assumption.

You know, St.

Bernay says, I don't know if everybody is doing the best that they can.

I just know that the world is a whole lot better if we all assumed they were.

Clinically, psychologically, the research says it's a whole lot better if we all assumed they were.

So if we're going into the season here of rampant boundary violation, I just I want to keep that in mind.

That's the so what?

Like, how do we leave this place and go into this season, this election season, this holiday season, maintaining our own integrity of who we are, but also not giving ourselves permission to disrespect the integrity of anybody else and call that justice.

So let's just leave here and be people who are trying to figure that third way out.

That way of healthy boundary.

Because I think when we do, we're living in the kingdom.

Amen?

Alright.