Play Nice and Don’t Run With Scissors

A meditation from Ps. 26 and Mt. 11:25-30
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable unto thee, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.

Some of the things that God gives us to do, that He calls the easiest parts, are really the most difficult. He tells us that the burden/yoke is light, but why don’t we take Him at his word?

There are a few difficult points that a business coach has in dealing with corporate teams, and after we shive away the “bragging rights” issues like Salary and Who Has The Window Office, the next concern for the group is always HOW the group acts, mostly among its own members. Concepts like “Customer Service” or “Total Quality” are very easy to learn because they usually deal with how we deal with the people who come to us for help/service, but when we look inward to ourselves and our own group, the water suddenly gets muddy.

The Psalmist uses a phrase that comes up a lot in these groups early on in Psalm 26 with the line, Vindicate me, O Lord, for I have walked in my integrity… The confusion comes from what the I-word means, and how we put it to practice. God says it’s easy, but most times we push back and don’t agree. When I talk to these groups and ask what “Integrity” means, they almost always paint a picture of Being Nice to everybody, being kind and gentle, and not running with scissors. Of course this conflicts with most business operations!  When really in a business term (and theologically) the Psalmist is telling the Lord that he walks the same with all people as he would with God Himself. To walk with integrity is to be the same way towards all people, be it good, bad, or ugly. If the word meant just Being Nice, then I doubt that Paul of Tarsus would have ever made his way to heaven! Ditto Jesus.

The instruction to “walk in Integrity” is one of the most difficult commands in our canon, probably second only to sincere confession of sin. Integrity is a good game to play at, until somebody gets you mad and then, at the heavenly horse track, all bets are off!  How do we act the same toward our enemies and those who hate us, as we do toward our best friends, our family, our mates? Jesus prays forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us, which seems to be a good in-the-moment process at the time we seek absolution, but what do we do at the moment that the sinning against us occurs?

The toughest lesson I had was the realization that even the blackest of black hats is a loving/loved child of God underneath the costume. Someone can violently oppose us, defame us, even call for (or take part in) our death, but part of our call to be enlightened of God is to take that step into Integrity, to be just as adamantly opposed to the outward stand that person makes, but then also be able to bless them and wish them well at the human level. The only way we will be able to build up the kingdom of Heaven is to remove hatred and build peace, and the way to begin building peace is to begin with, as Michael Jackson said, The Man In The Mirror.

Much of what we have to do when we stand in Integrity is simply to be present, both with our fellow humans, and also with God. For the former, it’s to stand up and be counted, and with the latter, it’s to sit down, shut up, and pay attention. When I returned to the Episcopal church many years after weekly passing the plate, it was out of that sense of being present. A priest and father confessor made a statement that slapped out at my political, social, theological… my life perspective with a position so completely opposite that it at first left me speechless in disbelief. And he spoke of “these broken people….” It was as if a light bulb came on in my head (one of those God-inspired “Duuuh!” moments) and I literally stood up from my chair and swore to stand against him (I think there was some mention of theological butt-kicking but the emotions of the moment are lost to memory now.) So the question comes up in that situation of: what do we do with that, when someone so close suddenly becomes “The Enemy.”  Sure, it’s easy enough to dislike some faceless enemy, some despotic regime, but when it’s a friend… what do you do with that?

It took some months to move beyond the black hattedness of my friend and stop seeing him as the personification of ALL that is Bad in the Church. (Some still do, but it’s not really my role to make that call.) What I found was that through the repetition of my Showing Up week after week, rain and shine, want-to and SOOOO don’t-want-to, that I had these little mannerisms in my prayer practice, little gesticulations in the Eucharist that I had learned from him. What he had taught me, many years earlier, had brought me – and still bring me – closer to God, and my continuing to vilify the man under the big black hat only drew me farther away from God. Something had to give.

Suddenly the irony of Matthew’s lines come into play as Jesus himself instructs us that when we are overburdened, the simple solution is to bring it to Him. As my rock-rib Baptist friends would say, lay it all at the feet of the Lord.

Can I add now: easier said than done?

Jesus doesn’t tell us to cast off those burdens that we come at him with, but rather to pick up one more. He realizes in this passage that it’s going to be impossible for us to throw off the human-ness of the way we respond to what goes on around us, it’s still going to be there. But in Him we will find rest.

In him I found that by the very way I hold my hands during prayer, by the words I say and the movements of my body, that there was more to this man than just his politics. I had to ask myself the most difficult question: if he were sitting with me at lunch, would I be amenable, would I even show up, and then if/when I did, what would I say? And it was there in that interior conversation that the lesson came in of what Jesus was talking about: to adamantly oppose what the person stands for, but for the person himself, bless him and send him on his way (and pray that epiphany drops out of the sky on his side of the street!)

Jesus tells in this section that the yoke is easy and the burden is light, but how can that be so? How can it be easy to bear the brunt of the sins against us, or even just the dislike, the abandonment, the removal of love, the divorce, the loss of friends, the senseless violence, the upset? Because we show up at the table the same to all people, and in that sameness we show forth the gentleness of Jesus. Our own epiphany comes when we learn to separate the loving and loved child of God from the child’s theology, politics, or business practices. Walking in that integrity is the most difficult burden that Jesus asks us to take on, and I’m certainly no master of the craft myself. Jesus says “take my yoke and learn from me.” We can’t do it all in a day, but he asks us to try a bit more each day to be more like him, and enlightenment comes with practice. Even if that practice takes more than this lifetime to complete (and it will.)

Approach God, God gives us rest, and in that rest we learn to do this. It’s difficult and we get impatient:

“WHY, Lord, can’t I love that JERK!”

But you keep coming back to the lesson that God deals with us in our Integrity: our ministry is not only to the people that we love the most, but to the ones we are completely indifferent to, and the ones we’d sooner cross the street than have to say “good morning” to. I don’t know the answer to the question about how it is that we show that same Integrity to baby killers, terrorists, and hate-mongers. I don’t know that from the safe perspective of reading about them in the newspaper or hearing their stories on the radio.

Sitting beside the bed of a kid in his last moments, beaten to death on the streets, left alone by parents who disowned him and gave him over to the streets that killed him, I didn’t think of the hoodlums walking away with a bloodied board with nails sticking out of it, and how they punctured his body with.

Instead I thought about angels, and I thought “Jesus, take this child” as he slipped away from the world that treated him so terribly. I don’t think about the dark part of that night, still, because I don’t know the answers.

Take my burden and learn from me, Jesus said. On top of everything else we carry with us, take this burden and learn, and he says, you will find rest for your souls. Try for a day of walking in that Integrity of prayerfully treating all people the same (only the people, not the costumes they wear.)

A day becomes a week, a week becomes a year, and a year becomes a lifetime. The farther we walk down the road, it’s amazing how light that burden becomes.

Keep the Faith!
- Amen

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Tags: compassion, forgiveness, grace, integrity, sermon