Not Fair!: How to Fight like a Christian | Lakeside Light Podcast

Thank you for joining the Lakeside Light Podcast, where it's light to help you clear your way, and a light version of our full televised Sunday services, which you can find on our website at LakesideChurch.org.

This audio podcast is a weekly sermon message of intellectual, spiritual, and sometimes humorous nourishment for the road.

Enjoy.

Let us pray.

Holy Spirit, as your word is read and preached, pass among your gathered people, opening minds to increase understanding, opening hearts to bind us together in your love.

In Jesus' name we ask it.

Amen.

Today's reading first is from Romans thirteen verses eight through fourteen.

Owe no one anything except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

The commandments you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and any other commandment are summed up in this word You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is already the moment for you to wake from sleep, for salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.

The night is far gone, the day is near.

Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

Let us walk decently as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in illicit sex and lasciviousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.

Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.

The next reading is from Matthew eighteen, verses fifteen through twenty.

If your brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.

If you are listened to, you have regained that one.

But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.

If that person 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 and a tax collector.

Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.

For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.

For the word of God in Scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

Let us pray.

O Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts and each of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

Well, I wasn't in the pulpit last week, so guess who's talking about Dolly Parton today instead?

That's me.

Famously, uh Andy Warhol once said to Dolly Parton, you could be a great preacher.

To which she responded, What do you mean?

I am a great preacher.

And she was.

She was the great Dolly Parton, was a great preacher.

Her songs preach even now, and her life certainly preached.

One of the stories about Dolly that's been making the rounds in the last couple weeks, as we've remembered her life, reminded me of today's scriptures.

It's a story that you may know.

It's the story of Dolly's lifelong relationship with Porter Wagner.

Parton joined the Porter Wagner Show in 1967 as uh Wagner's girl singer originally.

And she originally, by the way, only agreed to be on the show for five years.

Um and then, though, after those five years, she was um encountering a fair amount of success and maybe even starting to steal the show a little bit.

And so after those five years were up, she decided to move along and to get out from under Porter Wagner's control, but uh he didn't seem to want that.

And though a lot of the details have gone to the grave with Dolly, we do know that he seemed to pull every trick in the book he could manage to keep her under his production and under his control.

And so it wasn't until 1974, seven years after she started with him, that she was finally able to pull away.

You may know this origin story, right?

This is the origin story of I Will Always Love You, the amazing ballad uh that she wrote for and then sang to uh Porter Wagner.

The story is that she sang it to him as a way of saying goodbye to him, and he said, That's the best song you've ever written, and so I'll let you go as long as I can produce and record it.

Right, the rest is history.

Um Parton and Wagner parted ways in 1974, and after that they were a bit alienated from one another.

There was um not a lot of time spent together after that for a while, and then five years later, in 1979, Wagner sued Dolly Parton.

You might know this part of the story too, right?

He sues Dolly Parton for three million dollars for breach of contract.

He claims that he had made Dolly Parton a star and was entitled to a percentage of her career for the rest of her life.

And so, in response to this, Dolly Parton reaches out to Porter Wagner and offers to settle out of court one-on-one.

And though his claims were unfounded, she said she would give him a million dollars.

And he accepted that, perhaps because he realized that that was more than he deserved.

So he accepted a million dollars from Dolly Parton.

But as years went on, Wagner continued to spend wildly, and he fell on a bit of hard times, such that later in his life the IRS was pursuing him for hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid back taxes.

So as the story goes, Dolly caught wind of this situation.

She reached out to Porter Wagner and offered to buy back his catalog.

And she would buy it back at a generous rate to make sure he could pay back all of his debts.

She bought back his cat, he bought his catalog, he paid off all his debts.

And then as time went on, he became financially solvent again, and so he reached out to Dolly and he said he would like to buy back his catalog from her.

And she said she would be willing to sell it to him.

And as the story goes, this this interchange happened via fax.

I just think that's funny.

But she he asked how much he should pay her so that he could buy back his catalog, and she said she would, via fax, give it give it to him for zero dollars.

Give it back to him for free.

Free of charge.

In 2007, they sang together at the Grand Old Opry.

She sang, I will say, I will always love you again to him.

And six months later he died.

Dolly Pardon knew how to fight like a Christian.

She knew how to preach.

Paul writes in Romans 13, Owe no one anything except to love one another.

Over the next few weeks, um, we're gonna do a little bit of a mini-sermon series because each of our lectionary gospel passages, all from the Gospel of Matthew, all of these readings are Jesus talking to his followers, and he's talking about social, how to interact with one another, how to be Jesus' followers in a really practical way.

And especially when you read these three passages in conversation with one another, they start to paint a picture of a God who understands justice a little differently than we do, right?

A God who is like no fair.

Next week, we'll hear how Jesus invites us to forgive one another 70 times, seven times, and then the following week we'll hear the parable of the landowner who pays everyone at the end of the day equally, even if the work is not equal.

And in today's reading, Jesus is unusual in what he says because he is very practical and very direct, something he rarely is for us, right?

He gives very clear-cut instruction.

What are we to do when we are wronged by someone?

How should we, as Jesus' community, handle conflict?

And please note that at no point does Jesus assume we will never have conflict if we are part of his community.

That is a given from Jump, right?

So how are we supposed to deal with this?

Here, Jesus tells us what to do if a brother or sister sins against you, and he gives us clear instructions.

First, he says you go directly to the person to discuss the wrongdoing one-on-one.

And then he says, if that doesn't work, if things are not resolved, you bring in one or two other people to be a part of the conversation.

And if that's still not enough, you broaden the circle to the whole community, the ecclesia, right, to your church community, you broaden the circle.

And if that doesn't work and there's still not a change, there are lines here, right?

Such a one, he says, will be as a Gentile or a tax collector to the community.

So they will be no longer considered a part of the inner circle of the community in the same way.

These are helpful uh rules to live by.

I think it is also helpful to think about these instructions as instructions about what not to do, right?

What are the ways we are tempted to handle conflict that Jesus is counter-instructing, offering alternative approaches to?

Matthew Meyer Bolton does a really great job in SALT Project, a blog he helps oversee, uh delineating a lot of the ways we are tempted to deal with conflict.

Ways that are not life-giving or community-building, and so Bolton speaks to each of them separately, and what Jesus is speaking against first, right?

We are tempted to avoid conflict, to just ignore it.

And clearly Jesus is speaking against avoidance.

We're also tempted, instead of going directly to someone, to what we would say, triangulate, like go around them, gossip, maybe, but sort of work outside of the actual relationship.

We're tempted to tell other people about a person and what they have done wrong and how it has offended us rather than addressing our concerns directly to the person or people involved.

So Jesus speaks against that third.

Here's another thing we are often doing.

We're tempted to gang up on each other, right?

Maybe recruit a lot of like-minded people to be on your side, or to create an echo chamber of grievance, right?

To sort of only speak to the people who you know will agree with you.

So instead, Jesus offers this one or two, not uh not the whole community yet, start small, and one or two people from the community, so it could be people who agree, it could be people who don't, right?

Fourth, we're tempted to air out our grievances in front of overwhelmingly friendly audiences where accountability or alternative perspectives are minimized, which is different than bringing it to a larger, full community.

And then, of course, fifth, we're tempted to regard our opponents as if they are unwelcome or better off elsewhere outside of the community entirely.

And while Jesus points out there are times when an offender insists on destructive behavior and it is impropriate to say no to them, this is only a last resort.

And of course, notice what Matthew does here, right?

He refers to tax collectors and gentiles, which would be the same characters we know Jesus ultimately incorporates into the community.

Jesus' instructions are straightforward, but they're not magical, right?

They do not work in every circumstance.

I would note especially the power dynamics here.

He's talking about equals brothers and sisters within a community.

But even though they are not magical applications that we can use for every possible conflict, they do highlight some underlying principles, right?

About how to deal with conflict.

There's direct communication, right?

We err on the side of direct communication, either starting small and then widening the scope, starting with individual interpersonal relationships and then slowly and intentionally and with care, broadening the circle as needed.

And of course, hovering over all of this, the fact that Jesus is talking about this at all is the principle that how we handle conflict matters.

It matters to Jesus and it matters to our communities.

It has large consequences.

Jesus even says what is bound on earth is bound in heaven.

What is loosed on earth is loosed in heaven.

How we interact matters in the big scheme of things.

Reconciliation, repair, even just between two individuals, is holy work.

It is sacred work.

And it has a ripple effect into the world.

Last week we also uh lost another saint of the church, Wendell Berry, a Kentuckian as well.

Here's what Wendell Berry has to say about peaceableness.

Peaceableness.

Peaceableness, the act of peace, the verb of peace, right?

Peaceableness is not the amity that exists between people who agree, nor is it the exhaustion or jubilation that follows a war.

Right?

It is not passive.

Peaceableness is the ability to act, to resolve conflict without violence.

If it is not a practical and practicable method, right?

If we cannot enact peaceableness, it is nothing, says Barry.

As a practicable method, peaceableness reduces helplessness in the face of conflict.

We're not helpless in the face of conflict, right?

In the face of conflict, the peaceable person may find several solutions.

The violent person, only one.

Later on, when Parton would describe her decision to buy Porter Wagner's entire song catalog and then give it back to him for free.

Dolly said she wanted his kids to have it.

Right?

It was about her relationship with Wagner.

It was about their individual relationship, certainly.

But it was also about something bigger.

It was about the next generation, the generation after that.

It was about a broader sense of repair, a wider sense of reconciliation.

What is the opposite of generational trauma?

Ultimately, doing the work, the everyday practical work of God, is about doing work of tikkun olam, right?

This Hebrew word of repair of the world.

Jesus invites us into the work of repairing, of mending, of being knitted back together again and again and again, right?

And Jesus promises that when we attempt that work, he will be there with us.

Where one or two are gathered, I am in the midst of them.

As conflicts happen, because they will, conflicts will happen as our blood rises and we see or experience genuine wrong, wrong in the lives of others, wrong in our lives, when we are tempted to revenge instead of repair, to rejection instead of reconciliation.

Friends, maybe remember that Jesus is in our midst.

Or if that doesn't inspire you, maybe close your eyes and imagine someone else in your midst.

Maybe uh the rhinestoned cheerleader in a big old blonde wig is giving you two thumbs up and a megawatt smile and reminding you that grace is bigger than fairness.

And there's always going to be the promise of the light of a clear blue morning.

May it be so on that.org for more information.

Have a great week.