How are you doing with murder today? Pretty good? How about your anger? Maybe not as good? I won’t even ask about the name calling you’ve done. But maybe it’d be good to check in on that? What labels have you placed on people this last week? Here are some examples: conservative/liberal, woke/racist, millennial/boomer, sheep, ignorant, moron, etc. Is name calling the same as murder? No. Is it on the same spectrum? Yes. Jesus takes this spectrum very seriously and calls his followers to rise above that spectrum all together to be a community of reconciliation in a world of discord and division. How important is it to Jesus that his followers become a community of reconciliation? He says that reconciliation is more important than the worship you bring before God. This is the lesson in a nutshell, but I want to dig in a bit more.
We live in an angry time. There are loads of articles dating back five years before the pandemic talking about how we live in an age of anger and then the pandemic turned up the heat on the pressure cooker of our society. In our post-pandemic time, it seems as though anger is just below the surface of most people in society. Road rage related shootings are on the rise. People are leaving the retail workforce in droves because of the stress with dealing with the public. Families are splintering over politics. Churches are drawing lines of division over culture wars, politics, understanding of history, etc. Anger is paramount in our culture. As followers of Jesus, we have to ask ourselves some hard questions:
Will we stay on the spectrum of rage the world offers us? Or will we embrace the way of Jesus, refuse to indulge anger, name calling, and drawing lines of us vs them?
Will we become salt and light to society by embodying what it means to be a community of reconciliation?
Jesus moves beyond anger and gets to a serious cancer in communities that largely goes ignored. He addresses the use of “Raca” and saying, “You fool!” to Sisters and Brothers. The legalistic and literal reading of this frees us from the struggle. If you literally don’t call someone a fool and avoid saying “raca” to someone, you’re good. “Raca” is a term of contempt where the person is considered worthless, beneath consideration, or deserving scorn. Calling someone a “fool” is claiming that they have no sense of good judgment. These two issues are the spec of cancer that leads to dividing communities of faith who are called to be “One in Christ.”
There’s a lot of name-calling that happens in Churches between Brothers and Sisters. Labels are created to categorize different groups. While these don’t seem very threatening at first, they are cancers that should not be ignored. One way I see this done often amongst Christians is this, “I don’t see how they can call themselves a Christian and believe (or be a) ______!” Fools! Raca! I see people on both sides of politics do this in the church. Liberal Christians fall into this cancer as well as conservative Christians. Labels, name-calling, and “us vs them” ways of speaking are cancers on a faith community who is called to lift up reconciliation as more important than worship.
Years ago, I listened to a TED Talk called, “The Danger of a Single Story,” where Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” This has stuck with me for years and continually reminds me of the need to seek understanding of other people’s stories to seek reconciliation and unity. People tend to dismiss others because they do not understand where they are coming from. Taking the time to ask questions, hear someone’s story, and see the world from the other’s perspective takes a level of love and care that most people are uninterested in pursuing. There has never been a time when I’ve taken time to hear about someone’s upbringing, background, struggles, and experiences that hasn’t left me in a place of compassion and deeper understanding of who they are and why they respond the way they do.
In our passage this week, Matthew 5:21-26, Jesus lays out a new way of existing in the world. There is a spectrum or rage that people tend to live on and Jesus calls his followers to rise above the spectrum. On one end, you have murder. On the other end, name calling. We live in a world that is deeply divided and we hold the divides of “Us vs Them” by categorizing “Them” with single narratives, labels, and assumptions of their motives. When we do this, we dehumanize them and fail to recognize the image of God they carry within them. As Salt and Light in the world, what does it look like for us to truly be a Church of reconciled relationships where people of different backgrounds, worldviews, political leanings, cultures, etc. can come together as one in Christ? How do we make this more important than our worship on Sunday mornings?