23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Preached at the Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
Recording
https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/love-receives-correction/
Transcript
Thank you to an Assumption parishioner for editing this transcript!
In eighth grade, I was at a Catholic school, meaning that I wore uniforms that year. So, my first year of high school, I had nothing to wear. We had to go to Fred Meyer and buy some stuff. My first day of high school was going great; I showed up in brand new clothes; I was excited about making all of these new friends and having all of these new experiences. And then, it might have been first period or it might have been lunch. I just feel like I went through enough of the day that this is embarrassing; I looked down at my leg, and the size sticker for my pants is still right there on my butt for everybody to see. I was embarrassed. Why didn’t anybody tell me? I cannot have been the first one to notice that I had the size sticker still on my clothes. I am sure all of you have had similar experiences: schmutz on your shirt, something in your teeth, guys maybe your fly was down. When you notice it, you ask, okay, how long has it been this way? Why didn’t anybody tell me? And particularly, if you have a spouse, it is their job to tell you if you have something in your teeth. So, you just smack him and be like, Why didn’t you tell me? Come on, it’s your job. This is a common understanding, a common expectation of human society. We desire that other people would look out for us, that they would take care of us, that they would actively have our interests in mind.
Now, compare that to the cultural zeitgeist. The most famous moral dictum on the Internet, as far as I can tell, is don’t be a jerk. This is the highest standard our society has managed to give to itself as far as what is right and what is wrong. Don’t be a jerk. It seems a little passive. If I lived my life and the only thing people ever did for me was not be a jerk, that is not a very good life. Nobody is looking out for me, caring for me, taking care of me. On my first day of high school, nobody yelled at me, nobody was mean—but they also clearly weren’t looking out for me either.
Saint Paul gives us a different standard—which of course he takes directly from Jesus—that the law is fulfilled in the dictum, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Loving your neighbor as yourself is not ignoring your neighbor since you haven’t done them any harm. Love is active. It pursues the good of the other. It desires to do something for them. I myself desire to have other people do things for me, to look out for me. I desire far more than that they just wouldn’t do me harm. So, if I am going to love somebody as I love myself, then I have to do for them what I want others to do for me. I have to look out for them, take care of them, make sure they have somebody in their corner taking care of their interests.
If this is a common expectation of human society—that we would look out for each other, take care of each other in these small ways—then why have we determined that to do so on moral issues is a grave and capital offence for which you should be strung up in the public marketplace. If someone says to me, “Hey, this thing that you’re doing hurts me or this thing that you’re doing isn’t good for you, it’s taking you away from the Lord and society”—isn’t that so much better than somebody just telling me I have a sticker on my pants? Someone might have taken care of my first day of high school, but who is taking care of my immortal soul? And yet it’s not allowed. We’re not allowed to say, “Maybe your life could be better if you weren’t sinning in this way. Maybe your life could be better if you if you acted differently, if you didn’t hurt me like you’re hurting me, if you weren’t sinning against me.”
The standard of Christianity, the standard of our Gospel reading is also the standard of our first reading from Ezekiel: If I tell the wicked, O wicked one you shall die, and you do not speak out to dissuade the wicked from his way, the wicked shall die for his guilt. But I will hold you responsible for his death. Those are powerful words. Those are strong words, and they worry me because I’ve imbibed the cultural zeitgeist. I am right there: Oh, conflict is not loving.; telling somebody that they’ve acted poorly, that’s being a jerk. I shouldn’t do that. It’s not good for them. It’s not good for me. But the Lord says, if you could have done something about their wickedness and you didn’t, you are as bad as them. I’m putting the guilt on you because maybe they didn’t know, but you knew and you did nothing about it. That’s the standard of Christianity, and it is terrifying.
Jesus gives us a similar standard. If your brother sins against you. Jesus doesn’t say, Well, ignore them, let them be, and then make passive-aggressive comments about them for the rest of your life. Jesus says talk to your brother one on one. Try to solve it. Just you and them. Do your best. And if it doesn’t work, then bring a limited number of people, 1 or 2 witnesses, so that your brother knows, yeah, a sin has been committed. But try to keep it small. And only then, if that doesn’t work, bring it to the Church, the community of believers. Have them help you try to bring this resolution about. Then if he refuses to listen to the Church, treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector. This is the scriptural basis for excommunication. The Church will go through a process with somebody, but if at the end of the day they won’t listen to the Church, they have to be cast out from the community. It is just what Jesus would have us do. Of course, we always invite them back in if should they repent.
This standard is hard because we have made an equation in our mind that says love equals negligence. Those two things mean the same thing. If I leave somebody alone, as long as I am not actively hurting them, that’s the loving thing to do. But Christianity demands more from us. We are children of the living God. We have Jesus Christ as our exemplar and head. We can do more than just, “I wasn’t mean to anybody today.” We have to be actively loving, going out, helping people, and that is especially true of helping their souls. If somebody is risking condemnation, if there is something that they are doing that is pulling them away from God and the community, it is our responsibility to help them in love.
How do we get there? I have to imagine I am not the only one who fears conflict, and I am not the only one who has listened to the culture and believes that calling somebody out on a moral issue is a grave crime, and I should just leave well enough alone. We only have control over ourselves. So, to heal this, first we have to look to ourselves—meaning we have to be somebody who can receive correction with grace and love. We start by allowing ourselves to be corrected. We signpost this to our family and friends. We communicate with them, letting them know that our greatest desire is holiness. If I am doing something that is pulling me away from God and my neighbor, I want to know about it because I want to be holy. Anybody who brings me that information, anybody who shows me a way in which I can be holier is welcome. I will not respond to that with anger or defensiveness, but I will listen and I will consider it because I want to be holy. If you can make that statement to the people around you, you are 95% of the way there. It’s hard. It’s very hard. I can tell you as a as the leader of this community, as somebody who has to preach a homily each week, I get a lot of feedback. I make decisions that don’t make people very happy. Sometimes I say things that people find offensive. It is incumbent upon me when somebody brings me their feedback not to yell or get defensive, but to listen. And it is so hard, even with the grace of Christ. These conversations are never easy. I usually end them wracked with guilt, asking, Am I right? Are they right? Is there something I’m not seeing? I am emotionally unsettled for a while, but I bring it to the Lord and the grace of the Lord allows these conversations to be loving. Somebody feels heard. I remind myself of my desire for holiness and that I need to consider the experience of the people in our community. It’s hard, but it’s worth it. It is worth it. If you can communicate to your family and friends that it is a good and okay thing for them to do, if you can thank them for correcting you, then you will have created a community around you where you have the freedom to correct others. They know that you are a safe person. They have had an experience of you where they’ve seen that it’s okay to bring that to you. That puts the expectation on them to also be a safe person and receive a correction with the love with which it was intended.
My friends, this is the call of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is what He wants our community to look like. It has to start from the top. I have to model it first. There are two things that I need to say. First, if you’ve brought me feedback, thank you. It’s good for me. It is good for me to hear what our community is thinking. It is good for me to know if I’ve stepped in it in a homily. It’s good for me to know if I can do better as a priest or as a Christian man. Second, if I have ever responded to that feedback with anything other than love and consideration, I am sorry. I am a man like anybody else. You’ll catch me on a bad day. There might have been something else going on that day that put me in a bad mood. I will mess this up. But if I have, I am sorry. It is not the way that Jesus would have it be done. In our desire is holiness, if somebody helps us to be better, that is a gift. That is a charity. That is a mercy. My hope is that our whole community can do and say the same. If we were to live this way where we receive correction with joy, where we can give correction in love, then we would be jumpstarted and turbo-charged on the way to holiness. We would actually be allies in helping each other to heaven. It is what all of us want, but these cultural assumptions get in the way. We have got to break those down. I want to get to heaven, and I want your help. Let’s commit ourselves to that today, to do what the Lord Jesus asked us to do, to go to each other individually first, and then to follow the Holy Spirit from there.
Fr. Moore 