Luke 16: 19-31

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried.

In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’

He said, ‘Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house— for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ He said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

Sermon Text

Justice is one of the highest ideals which we aspire to as human beings. There has never been a group of people that formed without aspiring to be just, at least on the surface. We look at things like law codes and complex administration as the basis for advanced society. Alongside things like writing and pottery we see in the administration of justice something that goes beyond the mere existence of humanity as animals like any other and the establishment of the human condition as something altogether more special. Justice is that thing which makes us, not just intelligent or rational, but human.

The problem with our conception of justice is that we usually see it in terms of a reactive force. Justice is what happens when a person does something wrong and is punished for their impropriety. When we picture lady justice, blind fold around her face and scale in her hand, we cannot escape the sword she holds in the other hand. The menace of justice is more fascinating to us than it ought to be, and I think that that is in part just because it is easier to tie crime to punishment than to see any sort of beneficent action justly administered to those in need. There is causality behind one thing, a person violates a social principle or law and faces repercussions for that violation. The other exists irrespective of the person’s morality – people receive their due even when they have not done anything to actively earn that good thing.

The Church has contributed to this misunderstanding of what justice can be. If you, like me, grew up hearing about the ultimate contrast in the universe being God’s mercy and God’s justice, then you know what I’m talking about. For those who aren’t familiar with this, the paradigm goes like this: God, being absolutely good, must punish evil. Therefore, God executes God’s justice when God punished wrongdoing. God, however, being absolutely good, is capable of infinite mercy, and therefore God is also quick to forgive others. The two opposite ideas, Justice and Mercy, are then seen as a push and pull within the person of God.

This is a false dichotomy all the same. To say that God is just only when God punishes people puts up the idea that God primarily exists to punish people. To say that God is merciful only when God fails to be just is to say that justice is a purely punitive force. If we believe that God is good, all of the time, then there must be a deeper unity to the things that God does. One of the ways that this unity manifests is in the perfect justice which God demonstrates in all that God does – not only in retributive displays against wrongdoers but in restorative actions meant to bring people back to God and generative actions that sustain God’s creation.

One of the ways we can understand the nature of God’s justice is in looking to our own legal system. Despite their many faults, courts of law are meant not only to punish people, but to ensure that people receive their due. If I owe you money and I fail to pay it out, then I have cheated you out of your money. If a court settled that matter, then they would first ask me to pay out the amount I was owed and then deliberate on if my delayed payment caused harm enough to warrant additional fees or punishments. The function of the court in this way is not primarily to administer a punishment to me for something I did wrong, but to get me to do the right thing I had neglected up to this point.

Legal metaphors fall short in God’s economy of grace once we go beyond this kind of broad imagery. The truth is that God is not weighing scales when God thinks about us. God is not counting, on one hand, the good things we have done, and on the other the bad, God loves us entirely and seeks to further our relationship with all members of the Trinity and with one another. This desire to see goodness applied to our life means that God’s justice is oriented primarily toward the good of God’s people, secondarily to any matters of crime and punishment.

The story we read from scripture captures God’s justice in the call for us to care for one another and the vision of consequences for those who fail to do so. Despite the truth of what I just said, that God is not primarily concerned with punishing wrongdoings, there are still expectations that we as people of God are given for how we ought to be. As our discussion last month of faith and works showed, a faithful person will never be perfect, but if fail to show any signs of their faith in how they live out their life their faith is likely not as serious or authentic as they might like to believe. We are called to follow God’s example and care for people, an act of justice in itself, and through that merciful outlook to bring God’s kingdom to this earth.

The example given in our scripture is of a rich man and a poor man, one who has every good thing in life and the other who sits hungry and covered in sores, sleeping with feral dogs. The rich man and the poor man die on the same night, both are Judean, both claim the God of Israel, but one finds himself in the perdition of Hades and the other in the comfort of Abraham’s presence. God took the poor man into his arms, while the rich man was cast aside for never regarding the plight of the poor man who lived outside his gates. There is no doctrinal difference between the two, only the acknowledgment that one of them was poor and in need and the other was rich and did not care.

Justice in the way we typically think of it on earth would be impossible here. No crime was committed by not feeding this man, and many would argue that the livelihood of someone outside of a person’s family is not their problem. This earthly perspective would see the punishment of the rich man as unfair, and the admonition of Abraham that there was no hope for people like him because they had been warned already as far too severe. With God, though, our earthly perspective is simply not enough. If we wish to truly understand the way that God would have justice completed in this world, we must see good and evil as more than just the things we do.

The failure of the rich man to actively seek the good of the poor man is counted as though he had directly hurt him. There is, therefore, no difference in a biblical mindset between withholding what is due to someone and taking it from them directly. If I come into your house and steal your food from your cabinets, no one would doubt that I had done wrong. What we must understand, biblically, is that it would be equally wrong for me to allow someone’s cabinets to be empty as long as I had the power to prevent that. We are not called simply to avoid doing evil but always seek after doing more good. Sometimes that means directly, through taking cash or goods from our hand and putting it into someone else’s. Other times it means giving the reins over to people who know better than we do. Either way, the truly just thing for us to do is to act, not simply to abstain.

God’s justice saw the poor man being cared for after death, but it is not God’s will that people should only have comfort in the world to come. The eternity of God’s kingdom was established the moment God mercifully let the sunrise on sinners like you and me. With every drop of rain that sustains our fields and keeps our world going, God is showing God’s commitment to sustain us in this life as well as the next. The only way that scarcity enters the world we have built up around us, a world of untold plenty and connectedness, is in our decision to withhold resources from those in need. As God allows the sun to shine on the wicked and the good, so too must our love be all-encompassing, and our own mercy be poured out upon all who are in need.

This all-encompassing love meets its greatest challenge, not in our desire to do good, but in our ability to appropriately manage our attention. It is not always easy, or even possible, to stay engaged with every problem that we possibly could at all times. We as human beings developed in communities of about 250 for most of our existence, and that development means that we are not equipped to carry all the worlds burdens at once. The advent of a 24-hour news cycle and online news sources has made it so that we cannot get away from endless bad news that we would love to do something to help with.

Since we are constantly seeing so much, it can be hard to consistently help any one thing. We’ve seen time and time again people lose support once their story leaves the news cycle. There will come a time in a year or so when we do not remember the people of the Ukraine as intensely, and the work that needs done there might just struggle to get done as the world moves its attention elsewhere. On one hand, this sort of shifting attention is unavoidable, on the other, it is simply tragic. When we end our time together I’ll talk about some more consistent ways we can regularly give to meet the needs of those around us, but suffice it to say for now that we cannot just wait till our heart is moved by some incredible disaster.

Likewise, we have to teach ourselves not to prioritize disaster only when it happens to people we like or agree with or resemble. We all felt pain for those displaced by war in the Ukraine, but what of those displaced by war in the middle east? Refugees from South America and Africa and non-European nations, do we have the same sympathy for them? Whether conscious or not, we do create hierarchies of need and care in our minds, and those hierarchies inevitably bleed out into the ways we speak and act and advocate. When we have our James bible study next month, we will look at his teachings that particularity is one of the easiest sins that we can fall into. The Gospel is preached to all people, the kingdom is open to all people. If in Christ there is no East or West, then there can be no divide between our care for those around us.

Justice is the end result of the virtues we have discussed up to this point. When we live prudently, deciding what we must do in any circumstance with a sound and even mind, we will naturally come to a place where we can respond to the problems of the world justly. When we acknowledge the complexity of temperance, we can see how important it is to be merciful even as we strive to use only what we need in all respects. When we understand the hard work of being courageous, then we will stand up against the inequity of a world that does not work for the good of all people, but only those for whom such advocacy is convenient.

Justice is the act of making sure all people receive their due. It is the upholding of those divine principles which we depend upon. When we hold justice up as our banner, amazing things can happen. As today is a Sunday reserved for the United Methodist Committee on Relief, I want to specifically plug them as a way to be proactive in our administration of justice. UMCOR is among the first to respond to the needs of people all over the world in the midst of disaster. Whether it be floods, earthquakes, mudslides, or tidal waves, UMCOR is there to provide for those in need.

Beyond UMCOR are all our local resources for those in need, Open Heart, the Mission, the CHANGE initiative, and food pantries galore! We can learn to be better stewards of justice through careful study of materials created by people who have worked in ministries of peace and reconciliation. We can change the world we live in when we see justice as the active advocacy for the good of all people, and not simply the passive waiting for the bad in the world to simply be done away with. The lesson of the rich man and Lazarus is not just that we should learn our lessons well to avoid the rich man’s fate, but that there is room for all in the company of God’s redeemed. The table we set now can make a big difference about what table we will sit at later, so make the choice today and show love and care to all who are in need. – Amen.

1 Kings 3: 16-28

Later, two women who were prostitutes came to the king and stood before him. The one woman said, “Please, my lord, this woman and I live in the same house; and I gave birth while she was in the house. Then on the third day after I gave birth, this woman also gave birth. We were together; there was no one else with us in the house, only the two of us were in the house. Then this woman’s son died in the night, because she lay on him. She got up in the middle of the night and took my son from beside me while your servant slept. She laid him at her breast, and laid her dead son at my breast. When I rose in the morning to nurse my son, I saw that he was dead; but when I looked at him closely in the morning, clearly it was not the son I had borne.” But the other woman said, “No, the living son is mine, and the dead son is yours.” The first said, “No, the dead son is yours, and the living son is mine.” So they argued before the king.

Then the king said, “The one says, ‘This is my son that is alive, and your son is dead’; while the other says, ‘Not so! Your son is dead, and my son is the living one.’” So the king said, “Bring me a sword,” and they brought a sword before the king. The king said, “Divide the living boy in two; then give half to the one, and half to the other.”

But the woman whose son was alive said to the king—because compassion for her son burned within her—“Please, my lord, give her the living boy; certainly do not kill him!” The other said, “It shall be neither mine nor yours; divide it.” Then the king responded: “Give the first woman the living boy; do not kill him. She is his mother.” All Israel heard of the judgment that the king had rendered; and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him, to execute justice.

Sermon Text

Prudence. You don’t hear that word too often anymore. As a name it fell out of fashion sometime after Queen Victoria reigned and as a word we use to describe aspects of our life, we have replaced it with more common phrases like “reason,” or perhaps even the more general idea of “wisdom.” Yet, prudence is a concept in and of itself. The way the term is used in Greek, as phronesis, is closest to the Hebrew concept of “hakmah,” practical knowledge of how to live a good life. Specifically, it is defined as “to be able to deliberate well about what is good and expedient for [oneself,]… about what sorts of thing conduce to the good life in general”[1]

But enough technical talk – to be prudential is to be able to reason what the right response is to any given situation. As the “mother of the virtues,” prudence is what allows us to find the place between extremes which we need in order to live a good life. Not only that, but it is one of the easiest of the virtues to see demonstrated in an over-the-top example within scripture. Solomon’s verdict in the dispute between the two women in today’s scripture reading is a very literal demonstration of why the middle point in a discussion is not always the right one.

A tragedy in the middle of the night leads to a woman kidnapping the child of another woman in her household. She tries to pass off the stolen child as her own, but the mother knows her child and does not fall for the trick. She seeks arbitration before the king and the two both state their case. Solomon sits for a time and then decrees his judgment. The child will be split in half so that each woman is given an equal share of them. A completely equitable solution to a difficult situation. This motivates one woman to stand up and defend the child while the other is willing to take the view that if she can’t have the child no one should. Solomon uses this to learn which mother is the true mother and all people marvel at the ruling.

In life, we do not make decisions about splitting children in half, at least I hope that is not something you all have ever had to do. Instead, we make decisions all the time where we have what one person wants, what another person wants, and the perfect middle place between the two. Choosing one solution makes one person happy, the other clearly is to the benefit of the other half but choosing the solution in-between – well that often isn’t to anyone’s benefit. Ann M. Garrido, in her book “Redeeming Conflict,” describes our tendency to make decisions that are meant to make everyone happy, thereby making no one happy, using this story as a template. “Cutting the baby in half,” is how she describes any halfhearted attempt at problem solving.[2]

We can imagine equally extreme examples of this kind of decision making. Cars, houses, countries, all can and often have been split in half by people unwilling to address the problems that persisted within them. The problem with these scenarios is that they are occasional. We mock them for how over the top they are. Even Solomon’s story, tragic though the framework is, seems almost comical on reflection. Solomon was trying to provoke a response from the women involved, but to go so far as to say a child should be cut in half – that’s strange, it’s twisted, it might even be a bit funny. Conflict though, seldom leads to laughter, or even smiles, when it first breaks out. Though conflict is essential to all growth and healthy relationships, it is a hard thing to navigate.

These conflicts exist within ourselves and between ourselves and those around us. When I am trying to decide the best course of action for something, I will naturally come to blows with my own inner monologue over one issue or another. Part of me may see utility in one thing, another part of me some other action, meanwhile my selfishness and my pettiness have their own agenda. Between people, I don’t have to explain what conflict looks like. We all have had plenty of it. We’ve probably had a decent amount of it between ourselves and people in this room – maybe even people sitting next to us in the pew!

In all these issues, we are called to be wise rather than clever, to be prudent rather than cunning. There are places and times for thinking around certain issues, but those times are few and far between. If I am working with someone, I want to think that they have my best interest in mind and the best way to initiate such a relationship is through being the first to extend that courtesy. From now on I’ll be assuming one on one relationships here for our discussion, we could talk about institutional trust but that’s a whole other matter. I can extend my trust to the person standing next to me a lot easier than I can a contractor selling me a quote or an orthodontist building a deck onto their house.

For individual interactions, we need to see the ways that our responses impact all people involved in a given situation. What am I doing that helps me? What am I doing that helps them? What is hurting either of us? What interactions are best for us both? Relationships, like much of our life outside of them, have been painted as a battle to be won. It isn’t just about deciding who is going to take out the trash, it is about me triumphing in not having to do it today! It isn’t about figuring out who has the right of way, it is about showing that idiot waving at me that he’s had it the whole time and HE is the one blocking traffic!

Most conflicts are able to be settled without this mindset. We all come to moments where only one person can get what they want out of something, but I struggle to think of them except in extreme circumstances. Usually, when there is something that needs figured out there is a solution that does more good for all people involved. Fighting to “win,” is really just fighting for a lesser outcome with more fallout.

I mentioned the idea of taking out the trash, which is overly particular. Let us think about it in a wider context. My wife and I share a house together. In this house, there are a goodly amount of rooms and lots of stuff that needs done on a regular basis. On our fridge is a list of things to do and which day they should get done on. We could go through and pick our favorite chores to do and do them, we could try and game the system so the other does more and we do less, or we could do most of them and let the other pick up what’s left. Which is the best choice? For us in our household, there is a right answer, and it mainly has to do with our relative health.

Grace has arthritis, she has a herniated disk, she is not able to stoop and bend and crawl in the way that cleaning sometimes requires, not all the time at least. Therefore, the responsibilities associated with cleaning fall more on my shoulders than hers. This is an equitable solution that sees us both benefiting. I do have to do more cleaning on a regular basis, that is true, but it means that Grace does not have to hurt herself by doing things that I am the better fit for. In other household situations that balance shifts. We are equal in the amount we cook, laundry shifts back to me, while shopping falls more often on her. The “right choice,” is not for us to evenly divide every individual task or to try and win out with the balance we would like best – it is finding what makes sense for our situation.

This goes to every conflict. If you are at work and someone is trying to avoid doing their share of the work, they might be unable to do that work because of something else in their life. Sure, there might be some less reasonable thing behind it – laziness or lack of interest – but I know when I have a week where I don’t do as much as I should or where things drop off my to-do list that should have remained there, it is usually a result of something pulling me away from that work. Either it is my own mind waging war against me or the simple conflicts of daily life fighting for my attention.

In these workplace scenarios, sitting down with someone and talking about the issue can help a lot. It isn’t just in professional settings or households that this kind of thinking matters, but in every situation where we are working with other people. I bring up Jesus’s strong declaration, “Wherever two or more are gathered, I am there also,” because it is a promise given to us for the moments where there needs to be a solution outside what one party or another wants. When an argument breaks out about what is best to do, it takes Jesus reaching down and clamping us on the shoulder to remind us that there is more than “your way,” or “my way,” to get to a destination.

I’ve framed this conversation in terms of our interpersonal conflicts and relationships, but prudence as a virtue is something that goes deeper than even that. Every aspect of our life requires us to find the right way to proceed, the right path to grow up in. Prudence is called, “the mother of virtue,” because the entire science of living right is finding out – not the most average answer to life – but the most good answer. Cowardice and recklessness are on the same continuum, but it is living a life that leans toward courage that we find courage. Temperance is found between greed and abstention, but every individual appetite requires its own response. Prudence, the art of learning to solve problems in ways other than extremes and splitting down the middles, is the way we all learn to live a good life.

When we come into any conflict, or simply are facing the basic conflict that is within ourselves every time we make a decision, let us do so with a prudent mind. We are not here to win in any aspect of our life, but through prayer and love of one another, to seek what is best for all people at all times. Do what is right, do what is good, and do what you must to see a world of true community come to be. – Amen.

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[1] Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. VI

[2] Ann M. Garrido. “Problem Solve.” In Redeeming Conflict. (Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press. 2016)

This sermon was made possible with the help of Grace Kreher, MDiv. In honor of her contribution, please consider donating to Project Transformation.
https://projecttransformation.org/washington-dc/get-involved/donate/donate-now

Philippians 3: 17-21

Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us. For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.

Sermon Text

Temperance and Methodism go a long way back. From the moment that John Wesley first penned his general rules till today, there has been a connection between our denomination and Temperance with a capital T. The word is usually used today exclusively to discuss alcohol. The Temperance Movement was the deciding force behind prohibition at the outset of the 20^th century. The leaders in that fight? The organization that would go on to form the General Board of Church and Society and the United Methodist Women. Temperance, however, goes beyond whether someone chooses to drink “spiritous liquors,” and bleeds into every aspect of our life.

I will be using temperance and self-control fairly interchangeably in our discussion today, because the two words are more or less identical. In the same way that a temperate climate is not too hot or too cold, a temperate person knows how much of something they need. While every virtue is about balancing out the two extreme dispositions on either side of it, temperance is the science of finding that balance in our physical appetites. We become temperate as a people when we are able to find things that we want and say no to them when we do not need them, or when partaking of them would cause more harm than good.

We are all people who have our fair share of appetites within us. Appetite, as I would use the term, is any desire we have for anything. There can be healthy appetites and unhealthy ones, ones built from our biological needs and ones built from our perceived needs. The list of appetites we might have are endless, but we can discuss them in general terms as desires for food, for intimacy, and for pleasure. Sometimes these categories overlap, but as a general framework, most things that a person can be temperate about are underneath these umbrellas.

For many of us, there are few extenuating circumstances that lead to us pursuing our needs in an inappropriate way out of anything but our own conscious choice. We might make a fool of ourselves at a social event because we, “like to be social,” with our drinking. The wandering of our eyes that lead to us objectifying those around us as things to be desired are excused because, “We are only looking.” There are many times where we do these things with full control over our ability to say no to them and yet we choose to do them anyway.

For those of us with the means to control ourselves and our appetites, the problem becomes one of discipline and self-determination. It is within our control to change the channel or to exit a webpage that we are using as an exercise in objectification. We have the means to step away and come back to a situation when we are more fully in our senses. Moderate consumption of most things can allow us to more properly enjoy the benefits of the thing in itself. Self-control in these material aspects can help us sharpen our mind, to be better more generally at building up our other virtues.

            Here, however, I want to shift our discussion. The ability to say no to the things we want is in many ways a privilege. With notable exceptions which we will discuss below, there are many ways that our ability to make decisions about what we do or do not do are complicated by circumstances or by health. A person who is struggling with an eating disorder is not choosing to binge or to avoid food, they are fighting with their own mind to regain that control, but they are not simply choosing to do one or the other. In the same way a person addicted to alcohol or drugs are no longer making decisions completely out of their own strength or will. I cannot speak for addiction, but as someone with depression I know that when your own mind turns against your well-being, wishing to be better is not enough in itself to change the situation.

            Too often our response to those who are struggling in these ways is to impose our neurotypicality upon them. We have full control over our faculties, we have no struggle with how we interact with food or alcohol, therefore they too must simply be lacking the hutzpah necessary to get the job done. This cannot be the way we approach these sorts of things. For every person who is able to power through whatever they are dealing with, there are ten more people who are simply unable to tackle these things alone. Honestly, I question if any of us truly do not struggle with self-regulation in one place or another. The only thing that we do by villainizing or infantilizing those who struggle in these ways is to cause serious harm to them mentally, socially, and physically.

When we approach any person, and address any aspect of their life, we ought to do it compassionately. This can take many forms. Expressing, not only consternation with someone’s abuse of substances, but support for them and genuine love. To help them seek treatment and to be there with them as they walk that long road of recovery. Similarly, we must be more aware of how we talk about people’s eating. Originally, I included more talk about food and our relationship to it in this sermon, but after consultation with a peer of mine, we realized something. Disordered eating is so common, that it would be irresponsible to talk about it as an accessory issue to anything else. Disordered eating is more common than we may think, and the pain that we can cause just by asking why someone is or is not eating is immeasurable, let alone should I discuss it poorly on a Sunday.

The difficulty of discerning how we can be temperate and encourage people to do the same is that there is a lot more that goes into the particular ways we engage with the world than just doing or not doing certain things. For some of us it come down to learning how to delay gratification or simply take in less than we might otherwise. For many others, the battle is much harder – it involves consultation with mental health professionals and a long battle against forces outside and within us that would see us destroyed either through over or under consumption of the things we need to live. We cannot make a general teaching on these matters because each person must find their own way to the healthy relationship they might have with food or drinks or any other manner of thing.

I do, however, think that there is a human appetite that is much more easily regulated by most people, and that is desires for intimacy – both emotional and sexual. When God made humanity long ago, we are told in Genesis that the first human was not content until they had a partner. The singular person in Eden became two people, “the man,” became distinctly separated into two beings – Adam and Eve. The two humans in the garden showed us an eternal truth. People need people. We desire intimacy of all kinds, and we need relationships to strengthen us – friendships and romance alike. For some people the desire for one or another may be more important, but for most people we want to be connected to others in some way.

We can go astray in these desires in a multitude of ways. Firstly, by projecting emotions on others they need not rest upon. We’ve talked about parasocial relationships before on Sundays, but these manifest when we imagine deeper relationships with people than are reasonable to exist. We see them when we decide that the barista really gets us or our doctor is a close friend despite our only occasional appointments. Even people we know in real, everyday life, can take on aspects of these sorts of relationships. In these cases, we are seeking validation and support from people who simply cannot or should not give it.

For those who are married or in committed relationships, we can also engage in a way of seeking support that becomes a form of infidelity. We confide all the deeper parts of our life to someone who is not our spouse, replacing our partnership with them in all but legal and functional terms. These emotional affairs can manifest in many ways but are not good. It is not to say that we cannot have friends we go to and discuss matters dear to us, but when that replaces our desire to talk to or share with our partners something is amiss. Again, relationships manifest differently, so I can make no hard or fast rule, but if you find yourself getting all your emotional support outside of your partner, seek to fix that problem before it metastasizes.

The other relational issues we have are matters dealing with sexual drives and physical intimacy. Most people have them, just a fact of life. However, I want to dispel a few things that I think are important to clarify. Ministers have lectured on chastity and fidelity forever, so I don’t want to tread on that familiar path. In fact, the effects of how we have taught on them has fractured the church. Frequently young people cite the inability for the church to teach on sexuality in terms outside of shame and guilt as one of the reasons they could not stay within it. It is not as though people want to run out and do whatever they want, they just don’t want people breathing down their neck or telling them how evil they are for being human.

We do not have time to discuss every facet of human sexuality today, or the ways that we in the church have failed to discuss it appropriately. However, the clarifications I want to make today are in reference again to issues of appetite, we are talking about temperance after all. Specifically, I want to address issues of modesty and of the conception that men are biologically driven in a way distinct from women. Both of which the church has poorly taught about for decades. Both of which, feed into a dangerous idea we all hold for how we live and act with one another.

Firstly, modesty. I grew up in a world where every time we had a church event that involved swimming, the girls in the trip were given a list as long as my arm of what was and was not acceptable. Schools would kick girls out of class if their skirt was half an inch too short. The instances went on and on and on. Yet, men received no instructions. We could wear whatever we wanted and never faced any threat of being kicked out. The “modesty” a woman did or did not show would impact her life, but the impropriety of men was never judged in the same way.

The reason behind all this attention is tied to that second issue I want to dispel, the uncontrollable sexuality of men. This disgusting idea is that men simply are made to reproduce, and they cannot be controlled. Women, therefore, must safeguard them, must do everything in their power not to tempt or tease. The woman is supposed to monitor her language and her actions, lest a man suffer. That’s unbiblical. Jesus said a man who can’t help looking at women should pluck out his eyes, better to be blind than to make a woman into an object and yourself a sinner. We live in a world where women are constantly looking over their shoulder, constantly made to carry defensive weapons, to never go out at certain times or to certain places. I refuse to believe that isn’t in part because we teach that they alone can change a man, and we expect far less of men whose only job is to get married and not stray from that marriage.

Is there a place for discussions of modesty? Maybe, but I think different outfits have their purposes. Do I criticize a woman for wearing a bikini or a man for swimming shirtless? Or do I teach people, especially younger people, that the choice to objectify is a choice we make as we see a person. It only has to be a person in clothing, the choice to sexualize that clothing is ours and ours alone. An old story says that a monk walked past a group of nuns, and crossed to the other side of the road out of respect. The mother superior called after him, “If you really called yourself a monk you never would have looked long enough to see we were women.”

Temperance, in appetites of any kind, is not easy. For some of us it takes addressing deeply rooted mental health concerns. For others simply saying no to the things we would like because it is the right thing to do. As a people it means not tolerating the ways our culture has reduced sexuality to one group chasing another, it means fighting against the rape culture that pervades so much of our society. Temperance, the art of finding the space between two extremes, is one of the hardest virtues to perfect within us. However, I pray that together we may honestly begin to understand the ways we are called to give up and take on the many different appetites God has given to us. – Amen.

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Deuteronomy 31: 7-8

Then Moses summoned Joshua and said to him in the sight of all Israel: “Be strong and bold, for you are the one who will go with this people into the land that the Lord has sworn to their ancestors to give them; and you will put them in possession of it. It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not fail you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.”

Sermon Text

 We will be spending Lent looking at seven principles for a good life. I’m not pulling from a self help book or Ted-talk to draft this list. Instead, our list will come from two sources – the first is called Nicomachean Ethics and the second the Summa Theologiae, the first by Aristotle and the second by Saint Thomas Aquinas. Thrilling, I know. The good news is, I’m not going to be reading from them at all, in fact I’ve mostly just stolen the list and a few general principles from them. While we will certainly learn some things over the course of our Lent together, my goal is not to have us all be philosophers by the end of the season. Instead, I hope we understand a bit more about what we all agree makes people good.

Since ancient times we have described our positive aspects as human beings as “virtues,” and our negative tendencies as vices. A virtue is, at its most basic, a positive quality of a person which they improve through effort and practice. We are not born with virtue, even if we are predisposed one way or another toward them. No one is born brave, they have to learn what bravery is. No one is born knowing self-control, they have to learn what is too much and what is too little. In every way that a person can be good, that goodness is something they develop over time, with only God knowing the work that was done ahead of time in their unique personality and mental dispositions.

Goodness is also universally understood to be between two extremes. If I am, for example, trying to truly be good at stewarding my money, it will not do any good for me to never spend what I earn. At the same time, it would be horrible if every dollar that entered my palm immediately found its way into a cash register or an online payment system. A person who wants to be good at spending, saving, and giving money must not be a spendthrift or a miser – they have to find the perfect space between the extremes.

I say the perfect space, because seldom is the middle of two extremes the right place to be. Sometimes it is possible to be equally prone to one thing or another, but as I wrote this down I could not think of a single thing where that would be a good thing. In a moment we are going to be talking about courage, which sits between the extremes of cowardice and recklessness. If we are as likely as not to run away from something that challenges our safety or general wellness as we are to run directly into danger, then we are not going to dependably respond in an appropriate way to any conflict we face. You want someone who is brave to be willing to take risks, but not to be in anyway cowardly, so the perfect space between is closer to recklessness than it is cowardice.

With those ground rules underneath us in terms of understanding what virtue is and is not, we can begin our Lenten focus on the seven virtues acknowledged by the Christian tradition – the classical virtues of courage, temperance, prudence, and justice as well as the three theological virtues faith, hope, and love. We begin today with the easiest to understand, courage – also known as fortitude – and make our way down through the harder ones, culminating in the three virtues revealed to us in the writings of Paul and the life of Christ – faith, hope, and love.

Courage is an easy thing to imagine. Closing our eyes, we can think of the heroes we have lifted up in fiction and in history for being willing to stand up in the face of adversity. Our Biblical figures of Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, and all the disciples stand up to people and circumstances no matter the trouble they face. We all probably have a favorite historical figure which we can lift up for their bravery, whether it is someone who risked everything to do what was right like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or rejected public opinion to help those in need like Bea Arthur. We know what a brave person looks like.

The problem begins to emerge when we try to act into the image of these heroic figures. Either we imagine that we would be as brave and courageous in the face of adversity, only to back down the second someone says something even mildly critical of us, or we jump into perceived situations of adversity with all our energy and cause undue harm to people who have done nothing to us. Unrelated to these situations of direct adversity, we may imagine risks where there are none or take risks that we actually never should have to take. Driving a bit too fast in one hand and slowly wheeling our way through life in the other.

The average person in this room does not have to stand up on matters of life and death on a regular basis. We go between different places and situations with only the next immediate thing on our to do list on our mind. When our life is privileged enough to be removed from real immediate danger, the stakes which we are gambling with are often significantly lower than people in less stable situations or locations might have to face. Yet, we want to live lives like those who we hold up as heroes. Thus, whether knowingly or unknowingly, we elevate the stakes of our daily interactions to be greater in some ways than they ever could be and in other ways far less impactful than they truly are.

Let me put that into a sharper focus. There was a day, back when I was in college, where I ran into a friend of mine out on the steps of the student union. We began to talk and something that had been on the news the night before crossed our conversation, we disagreed about what that news meant for the world around us. Rather than talking through that any further, we went to verbal blows with one another over his staunch Calvinist thinking that God willed this, very bad, news to take place and my more Arminian assertion that human beings caused the trouble through their own actions. The news we were debating was important, but our reactions to them were not nearly so important, and probably nothing was more harmful to the Kingdom of God than strangers seeing two Christians yelling at each other on the steps of a university building.

We both felt like we were being courageous defenders of God’s truth, but, really, we were both being reckless. Spend anytime in the comment section of any online news article and you’ll meet Christians on both sides of any issue feeling that they must stand up against someone else’s comment. While I do believe that we cannot give people a free pass to spout nonsense simply because it is an online or public space where they are doing it, I think that we often jump to attack other people out of a feeling of wanting to appear brave in the face of adversity, rather than an actual need to speak out against the people who are causing harm in those spaces.

To pull from another example of my own past missteps again, I want to talk about a series of online interactions I had with a family friend who – surprising no one – I no longer have contact with. The issue which caused this fracture was simple, vaccination. You see, long before the COVID-19 pandemic I was still an advocate for vaccines – its not just a phase with me. The issue at hand was childhood vaccines, and this family friend had been dragged into a community that believed all sorts of lies about “vaccine injuries,” and “natural immunity.” Despite reaping the benefits of three fully vaccinated children, she actively campaigned against other people getting MMR vaccines for their children, or any other inoculation for that matter. She always wanted people to, “follow the evidence,” to see the truth.

This, naturally, upset me. This was a legitimate source of anger on my part. The things she said were false, they had real consequences in the lives of other people, and they were things I knew enough about to speak against. What form would that take though? Would I lovingly take her aside and address the root concerns of her mistrust and misinformation? Of course not, I wanted to be brave, and I wanted to be the big hero, so I just made it my business to make a stink about her posts whenever she made them.

Links to articles and memes meant to disprove her arguments, factually correct but horribly misguided. I campaigned long and hard in a battle only I was fighting, while her passive dissemination of information went further than my aggressive refutation ever would. Was I wrong in my opposition? No, these falsehoods she proliferated were dangerous and needed to be opposed. However, in my attempts to reveal the lies that these ideas were built upon I convinced no one and ostracized more people than I ever might have helped. The battle was lost before it ever was begun.

Courage, is not rooted in ourselves, it is rooted in our conviction to do what is right. It is not manifested in aggression, but in a willingness to stand firm. We think of bravery as fighting dragons, but it really is more subtle an art than that. My great-grandfather was brave when he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, my grandpa when he parachuted into Viet Nam, but they were not heroic in my mind for that reason. No, Pap was brave because he stood up for people who others were taking advantage of, not by getting in every little fight but by refusing to budge. Grandad was a hero because he was not afraid to go toe to toe with people who threatened the ones he loved, but also because he knew that handling things gently saved all parties some trouble.

Our problem, in this day and age, emboldened as we are by digital communication, is not that we are not brave enough to stand up against things we know or perceive to be wrong, but that we are reckless enough to pursue them without thinking through our actions. We take risks that never need to be taken, because we see the world as a place to be conquered rather than the people around us as worthy of defending.

Of all my beliefs and opinions, one stands out as the most controversial of all. I really love Star Wars, as some of you know, but my absolute favorite Star Wars movie is The Last Jedi. Few movies have more devoted defenders and more passionate critics, and I will freely admit that of all the stupid arguments I’ve had in life more than a few have centered on this movie. The end of the film has a powerful statement about reckless desire to appear strong rather than really be strong. One of our heroes, Finn, despite all warnings that it would not actually work, attempts to destroy a First Order superlaser siege cannon by flying directly into it. As he accelerates his salt speeder into the maw of the laser, he is knocked out of way by another protagonist – Rose Tico. Tico reprimands Finn, reminding him, “We’re going to win this war not by fighting what we hate, but saving what we love!”

As trite as that may sound, we have to see courage as taking necessary action to stand up for the good in the world, not reckless action to attack things we dislike. Sometimes that means acknowledging the humanity of people we disagree with so that we don’t fight them so much as try to help them. Other times it means going against the grain and saying something uncomfortable, maybe even admitting we were wrong in the past. We are courageous, not when we make a big fuss and invite people to see us as defiant, but when we stand up as true advocates for what is right and good in the world.

The first virtue we seek to understand is courage, and as we prepare to celebrate Communion, I hope that you find yourselves emboldened by the example of Christ. Christ, who knew no sin, was willing to stand up to evil in every form it presented itself, yet it was in dying that he truly showed his bravery. We do not take up arms this day, but crosses, and we serve the Lord our God through a willingness to be bold in defense of all goodness. Let us be unafraid, but let us be wise in our response to the injustices of the world. – Amen.