Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

The Worship of God · August 15, 2010

Litany of Praise

From Psalm 80

Hear us good shepherd, leading us like a flock, enthroned on our highest love!

     Restore us in the awareness of your presence.

When tears become our only language…

     Let us feel your hand upon us.

Let us pray:

     We will never turn away from you, our God;

     By faith in you, we will run the race! Amen.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,

World without end. Amen. Amen.

Pastoral Prayer

Jacob Thorne

Gracious God and Loving God, this morning, we open our hearts and our spirits to you. We pray that you will create in each of us the strength to empty ourselves in order to be more open to your Spirit, to your desires, to your will in our lives. Help us become more vulnerable to you, more vulnerable to your Word to us. Help us to not seek out the save and comfortable places in our lives, but rather, guide us toward the risks of discipleship. Loosen our grip on the certainties that smother other possibilities. Let us pursue the adventure of losing our lives in order to find them in you. Guide us to follow the way of the cross, where we know that despair is transformed by the promise of new life, where we are compelled to reach out to help others.

We lift up our prayers to you, O God. We lift the prayers that are on our hearts and our minds. We know that you hear us. We know that you hold us.  We know that you love us. We know that you are always by our side. We know that we can put our complete and utter trust in you.

So, hear us now as we say together the prayer your Son taught us…

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom, the power, and glory, forever. Amen.

New Testament Lesson

Luke 12:57-59

“And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right? Thus, when you go with your accuser before a magistrate, on the way make an effort to settle the case, or you may be dragged before the judge, and the judge hand you over to the officer, and the officer throw you in prison. I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the very last penny.”

Message

Mediation First!

Tim Carson

Let me begin by taking a poll. How many of you have ever heard a sermon preached on this Scripture? Please raise your hand. Just as I suspected. This is the first time I have preached on it. I’ve had studies on it, referred to it as a part of Scripture comparisons, but not a sermon. And, brothers and sisters, you might be asking, “Why is it that we are examining this?”

It is not because there is any pressing need. It is just because it is a text in the gospels that has not been heard. I like to bring those to the fore, and let the whole community deal with such texts.

In this short passage from Luke, we have a snapshot into one of the issues that Luke’s congregation was facing: How shall we deal with disputes? Luke is astonished that Christians are dragging their dirty laundry through civil courts. “Don’t you have the capacity to settle out of court?” says Luke. “What about mediation?”

On one level, we can extract a relevant message that is directed toward our overly-litigious society, one in which seeking damages from someone every time we suffer has become a way of life, a kneejerk reflex. Of course, egregious wrongs exist and must be addressed; courts exist to protect people and secure some semblance of justice, after all. But the society that is overly saturated with litigation is one that has turned on itself, in which the social contract has broken down and dissention reigns.

However true that is, Luke isn’t really as preoccupied with social ethics as he is with the well being and witness of the Church. He wants to spare Christians any unnecessary backlash and, more importantly, make sure the church is serving as the rare alternative way of life it’s meant to be. So he tells them: How dare you drag your petty grievances before a secular audience, so that you confirm their suspicions that Christians are just as contentious as everyone else! Settle on the way to court! “Good grief,” says Luke, “can’t you take care of your personal matters differently?”

When you think about it, scandals in the church, whatever they are, serve as a double-edged bloody sword. One edge tears apart the interior fabric of the church itself. The other edge calls into question the integrity of the church from the outside and confirms, in the skeptic’s mind, what they believed all along: Those hypocrites!

Even before Luke wrote his gospel, the apostle Paul and many other leaders of the first generation, were writing occasional letters to one another and congregations. We have a few of those that made it into our New Testament, though most of those writers never would have dreamed that their letter would be canonized! They were just writing letters to inspire, correct, and encourage. And they usually reflect some very particular issues congregations were facing in their unique contexts.

Take, for instance, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian congregation (which is really his second letter because the first one he mentions has been lost … at least for now). The context is that Christians in the same congregation are filing lawsuits against one another in Roman civil court (I Cor. 6:1-8). Paul is shocked. How could you, he said, possibly take your grievances outside the household of faith to be judged by unbelievers, an occupying entity no less, those who have no standing in the church, no understanding of the Christian way? Is there no one among you who can serve as a mediator between one believer and another?

So, with Luke, Paul is shocked and dismayed that Christians are asking non-Christians for verdicts, defaulting to secular courts when they should have settled it internally, among themselves.

I had an epiphany this week as I was studying these texts. In the Jewish community, they would never turn to gentile, secular authority to mediate disputes.  They always dealt with it as a family matter. They would take their case before the rabbi, the priest, or the Sanhedrin. They would look for a learned and faithful arbitrator to make judgments based on the Torah and the particular circumstances of the case.

Remember when the children of Israel were migrating from Egypt to the Promised Land, 40 years in the wilderness? The disagreements and disputes became so frequent that it wore Moses out. He eventually appointed elders and judges to receive and resolve complaints.

Ever since that time, faithful rabbis have served as mediators of disputes among the faithful. We actually have recordings of the last century of well-known rabbis in the Bronx and in Brooklyn in New York meditating disputes, holding “court,” as it were, about once a week. As I listened to some of these tapes, I noticed how very practical their council was. Generally, no one was always right or always wrong; everyone had to give something, because life is full of gray areas. And the authority of the rabbi’s verdict was esteemed and honored. 

Do you remember that scene from Fiddler on the Roof when the community is having a lively dispute and debate and someone stops and says, “Wait, let’s ask the rabbi!” And everyone stops and leans in, like E.F. Hutton is talking.

Do you remember the story about the two people who came to the rabbi, seeking his judgment about their dispute? The first person made an impassioned case, citing all the wrongs and how they should be addressed. And after he was finished, the rabbi said, “You’re right.”

The second person also made his case, and brought forth all the considerations the first person neglected to mention. And after he finished, the rabbi said, “You’re right.”

“Wait a minute,” said the first person, “we both can’t be right.” 

To which the rabbi said, “You’re right!”

This tradition of mediation among the faithful has long and deep roots, and Paul would have been familiar with the logic behind it: Let the faithful mediate their disputes within the household of faith. It should only be a last resort that takes you outside.

Of course, with the recent history of the sex abuse cases in the Catholic Church, we have seen how this doesn’t always work, especially in large institutions. Outside legal action becomes necessary when the house is not tended rightly from the inside.

But my insight was this: This handling of disputes by the faithful for the faithful was the norm for the Jewish community. But both Luke and Paul are writing to Gentiles. Gentile Christians! These are new believers who do not know or practice the Jewish traditions of mediation. They are acting according to their old, secular ways and just popping off to civil court to resolve their grievances like they always did before they were converted.

In this sense, they are like children who have no idea how to handle conflict, seek mediation, and find creative solutions to disputes. And Paul is lecturing these new Gentile Christians like a Jewish mother: “Settle out of court, you idiots! How dare you drag this to outsiders! Have you talked to the rabbi?!”

Of course, we here are all gentiles, and we, too, have often neither heeded this wisdom nor practiced it. Like the congregation in Corinth, we are all too frequently inclined to be Christian by name only, and not by practice.

Some present day church bodies have even gone so far as to sue their own members without advance notification of any kind or any previous attempt to mediate the dispute. The church member is just served papers, discovering, after the fact, that their own church is suing them. The consequences of this course of action are always disastrous. They have dragged their dispute before civil courts without any attempt to handle it among the faithful.

For Paul, there is something even more important to address than believers going to unbelievers to make judgments. He says later in this passage, “In fact, to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you” (6:7).  If you ever get to the point where you are doing that kind of thing, it is indicative of the failure of Christian fellowship. It demonstrates how dysfunctional, how toxic, how devoid of love you have become. If you get to that point, you’ve got deeper problems than lawsuits. You have a moral crisis and a crisis of faith. The dry rot has already made its way to the root.

So what’s a Christian to do today? What are the fundamental principles that still apply?

First, litigation should be seen as a last resort after all other means of mediation or conflict resolution have been exhausted. When the bonds of trust and relationship are irreparably damaged, then a higher court, perhaps a secular one, may be necessary. If we do come to that point, we need humbly to confess the failure of fellowship.

Second, Christians want to model a different way to live in the world, a way shaped by the kingdom values of Jesus. How can the world possibly know that the faith we hold makes a difference in our individual ethics and the way we understand defending the common good unless it stands out from the cultural pack? This is a question of witness.

Third, as regards the unity of the body of Christ, insofar as it is possible, Christians should strive to settle their differences within the body by means of mediators of faith. As Matthew 18:15-17 reminds us, practicing Christians should first attempt to work out any grievance confidentially, on a one-on-one basis. If that fails, then efforts may be expanded to include the presence of one or two faithful witnesses. And if that fails, then the issue may be brought to the larger church body. Only after the community of faith has exhausted those efforts and reconciliation and healing appear to be impossible through those means, should they treat the situation as though the offending person is a Gentile. What is implied here is that every effort should be made to deal with the situation within the bonds of Christian fellowship. Beyond that, at the failure of that, one would deal with it as a “gentile” problem, ostensibly dealing with it as Gentiles might, in a secular court.

All of this councils us to begin as compassionately and gently as possible, avoiding escalation, drawing on the resources of the whole Christian community, until we reach the point when the relationship appears to be irreconcilable or the pursuit of fairness or justice unobtainable. Then further action might be justified as a last resort. And even if some legal action does seem justifiable, that does not mean that we haven’t experienced failure, for we have.

Just as war always represents a failure of human community on some level, even when it might be seen as justified as a last resort, so litigation, in general, always represents a rupture of human community on some level, even when it comes following a great wrong. And litigation between Christians always represents the breaking of the body of Christ, even when it seems justifiable.

At the very minimum, we realize that those early Christians were struggling with many of the same kinds of issues that we do. And if we listen carefully, we will also hear that the Christian way requires something outside of the social norm, a way of living that gives witness to the fact that we are not conformed to the world but have been transformed by God through Christ. And if that doesn’t make a difference, well, it should.

Let us pray.

And now let wisdom descend upon us, and faith, and trust, and Spirit a prayer in the midst of difficulty, that we might lean on your grace. For you are the author of it, the beginning and the end of all our stories. So, we pray, in Christ, Amen.

Benediction

May the love of God that surpasses all of our expectations, and the depth of grace in Jesus Christ, and the blowing of the Spirit through each of our lives keep you now and forever. Amen.