PROPER 18-A, September 4, 2005

There is a wonderful Jewish story that, at least to me, speaks to today’s three readings. It is about an old man who was standing on a crowded bus. The young man next to him asked him what time it was, but the old man refused to tell him. So the young man turned to his other side and asked that person the same question and this time received a polite response.

The old man’s friends who were with him on the bus sensed that something was wrong. They asked him, "Why were you so discourteous to that young man when he asked you the time?" The old man answered, "If I’d have given him the time of day, next thing he’d want to know where I was going; then he might talk about our interests. If we did that, he might invite himself to my house for dinner. If he did, he’d meet my lovely daughter. If he met her, they would both fall in love. I don’t want my daughter marrying somebody who can’t afford a watch."

I guess that is one reason not to give someone the time of day. There are no doubt others. It is also one way to protect our family and keep it in tack, if that is what we want to do. In fact, I think if we think about it, keeping our family in tack is clearly what today’s three lessons are all about. So let’s think about it.

All summer long we have been hearing the story of the beginning of the Jewish people, our ancestors in faith. We read and heard about the call of Abraham, the birth of Isaac, Isaac’s marriage to Rebecca, the births of their twin sons, Jacob and Esau, the shenanigans that went on between these two brothers, the story of Joseph being sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, the reuniting of Joseph and his family in Egypt where Joseph had become the second most important person in the government.

Last Sunday’s Old Testament lesson was about the call of Moses to lead the children of Abraham out of Egypt back to the land God had promised hundreds of years before to give to Abraham and his children. All throughout that history of Abraham and his children God found ways to keep them in tack, to protect them, to see to it that no matter how harshly they may have been treated or even treated one another, they would never become extinct.

In today’s lesson we heard about preparations for the first Passover celebration, which was also the occasion of God’s providential caring for the children of Abraham. Remember the story? Joseph had been long dead and his descendants had now become slaves in Egypt. God called Moses to lead the people out of Egypt but the Pharaoh would not allow them to leave. And so God sent plague after plague upon the land as a way of convincing Pharaoh to let the people go. But Pharaoh was hard-hearted and refused until the Passover. For on that night, as the story is told, an angel of the Lord killed all the first-born in the land of Egypt including Pharaoh’s own son. But the angel of death passed over the homes of Abraham’s children. That event finally convinced Pharaoh to let the people go.

We know the rest of the story about how God protected his people and kept them in tack, kept them together, throughout the Exodus journey in the desert, the establishing of the Kingdom and the history of God’s protection all the way up to Jesus. And like the old man in the story, God even had laws made so that the children of Abraham would not marry into the wrong family.

All of which brings us to today’s second lesson in which Paul lays down some very specific rules about how we should treat one another as members of our parish family. In the Exodus story we read how God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. God gave those commandments to the people for their own good. For in following and obeying them, the people would be protected not so much from outside forces but would be protected one from another. They would not steal from one another, kill one another, abuse one another, be greedy or jealous of one another. They were to love one another as they loved themselves.

Those commandments were God’s way both to protect his people from themselves and to keep them in tack to enable them to grow as a community of faith. Paul, in his letter to the church in Rome, says the very same thing both to the people of Rome back then and to us today. They and we, you and I, are to keep the commandments not so much because God will punish us if we do not. Rather, we keep them because we know that if we do not, we will destroy this community of faith we call our church. But even more, we keep them because in doing so we know it will enable us to keep our community of faith in tack and together and will enable it to grow.

But Paul goes one step further in describing how we should live our lives. He says that we are to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, we are to model Jesus’ life in the way we live our lives. And how do we do that? Well, that’s what today’s Gospel is all about, isn’t it? It is about how we are to live as a community of faith. It is about forgiveness of one another.

For the truth is we do not keep the commandments all the time. We are not always kind and loving one to another. We sin against one another. We hurt one another. We say and do things that will harm our community of faith, our church family, our own families. Instead of putting on the Lord Jesus Christ, we have taken off the Lord Jesus Christ. Family fights happen all the time and no one of us is immune to them. We even cause them and we do so because of pride and envy and greed and all the rest. We break the commandments and do not love one another as we should.

When that happens, what do we do to restore broken relationships, heal wounds, bring our family back together again? Well, we do what Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel we are to do. We try to work it out. We must go to whatever length we can in order to get another to acknowledge his sin and to repent and return to the community, to the family. We can only do so much. But we have to do at least that much.

Throughout the Old Testament God we read about how the people always seemed to be doing what they knew they should not be doing. They broke the commandments. They married foreign women. They worshipped false gods. They did not love their own flesh-and-blood brothers and sisters. And what was God’s response? God always gave them a second chance…and a third and a fourth. God never, ever gave up on his people. God did everything God could to keep the people in tack, protected and together.

God always exhausted all possibilities. And, again, so must we in trying to keep our community of faith, our parish family, our personal family together whenever we find ourselves being pulled apart because of our own pride and selfishness or that of someone within the family or both. We must always do all we can to keep our families in tack. We do so by doing our part: by keeping the commandments and loving one another as God loves us. We also do so by praying together, as we are doing here today, as we do every Sunday.

The old man in the story had his way of keeping his family in tack. God has God’s way, which is for us to keep the commandments, to love one another the way Jesus did, to forgive as Jesus forgave, and to work and pray together. But we already knew that, didn’t we?