+ In the Love of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
A Gospel is an account of the Good News of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. So when Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote their Gospels, they faced a challenge: how could they write about what happened after Jesus’ resurrection? Specifically, how could they write about the church, which didn’t exist until after Jesus’ resurrection?
Luke took the most straightforward approach― he wrote a second book called The Acts of the Apostles. Luke never uses the word “church” in his Gospel, but he uses “church” about 30 times in The Acts. Mark and John don’t use “church” in their Gospels, either. Instead, they hide some stories about the church in some of the stories about Jesus.
I suppose Matthew tried as hard as he could not to use the word “church,” but in the end he decided to use the word “church” twice― first, as we heard two weeks ago, when Jesus said to Peter, “on this rock I will build my church,” and second, in this morning’s reading, when Matthew talks about conflict in the church. Apparently the conflict was so bad that Matthew felt compelled to use the word “church.”
So in this morning’s Gospel, Jesus comes up with a strategy for dealing with conflict in the church. It’s called listening.
Genuine Christian listening, like all forms of genuine Christian love, is something we decide to do, rather than something we “feel” like doing. And because genuine Christian listening is a form of genuine Christian love, in just a moment we’ll look at what Paul says about love in our first reading.
But first, a word about the debt crisis in America.
The national debt is about 14 trillion 700 billion dollars. That’s about $47,000 for every American.
Personal debt is about 16 trillion dollars. That’s about $57,000 for every American.
In other words, the federal government is doing better at debt management than we are!
In any event, that’s a lot of debt, over 30 trillion dollars of debt, over $100,000 for every American, which brings us to the reading from Romans:
“Owe no one anything, except to love one another.”
My brothers and sisters, our national and personal financial debt, as huge as it is, is a mere drop in the bucket compared to our love debt. The symbol of our financial debt is the dollar sign, but the symbol of our love debt is the sign of the cross, the sign of God’s infinite love for us and for the world God created and redeemed, and therefore the sign of the cross is also the sign of our infinite debt of love.
And the only way to discharge that infinite debt of love is through the hard moral work of loving God, loving our neighbors, loving ourselves, and even loving our enemies. Genuine Christian love is hard moral work because it’s something we decide to do rather than something we feel like doing. Genuine Christian love is hard moral work because it depends on Christian willpower.
Let me give you three examples of our love debt:
Last Thursday Ingrid and I saw The Help. When I got home, here’s what I wrote on my Facebook wall:
“Just saw The Help. Powerful, poignant, embarrassing (too many people still think that way and act that way), frightening (too many people still suffer that way), hilarious, and hopeful. I am in awe of the people who found the courage― and the love― to fight. And grateful to Celestine and Lionel for sharing their lives and family with me, and teaching me that ‘I am kind, I am smart, I am important,’ and one other thing: loved.”
Think of your debt to the people who have loved you.
Second example. Tomorrow we celebrate Labor Day. Here’s an account of the origins of Labor Day, taken from Wikipedia:
“Labor Day can be traced back to Canada. In December 1872, there was a parade supporting the Toronto Typographical Union’s strike for a 58 hour workweek.
“Ten years later, Peter J. McGuire, co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, spoke at a labor festival in Toronto on July 22, 1882. Returning back home, McGuire organized a parade in NYC for September 5― exactly 129 years ago tomorrow. Many other trade unions across the country organized similar parades.
“During the economic panic of 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company cut wages as demands for their train cars plummeted and the company's revenue dropped. A delegation of workers complained of the low wages and sixteen hour workdays. Company owner George Pullman ‘loftily declined to talk with them.’ [Which means, to remember this morning’s Gospel, that George Pullman refused to listen.]
On May 11, 1894, 3,000 employees began a wildcat strike, and the American Railway Union called a boycott on June 26, 1894, refusing to run trains containing Pullman cars. Many African-Americans, fearful that the racism expressed by the American Railway Union would lock them out of another labor market, crossed the picket line, which added a racial division to the Pullman Strike.
“The strike was broken up by some 12,000 US Army troops and United States Marshals, sent in by President Grover Cleveland. After 13 strikers were killed and 57 wounded, President Cleveland reconciled with the labor movement, and legislation making Labor Day a national holiday was rushed through Congress unanimously and signed into law a mere six days after the end of the strike.”
Think of our debt to the people who loved us enough to win humane working conditions.
Third and final example. The developing countries of the world owe more than a trillion dollars to institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. So each year the money that developing countries might have spent to feed their children and keep their children healthy, is spent on debt payments, and as a result 11 million children under the age of 5 die each year.
What debt of love do we owe our global neighbors?
The most literal translation of one of the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer is this: “And forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12).
“Owe no one anything, except to love one another.”
Amen.
Comments