Reflection and Poem for 16th Sunday after Pentecost Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant
Church of the Holy Trinity, Hertford, NC September 17, 2023
Exodus 14:19-31 Psalm 114 Romans 14:1-12 Matthew 18:21-35
But I Want To Be Right
When I went off to college my grandfather recited a poem which I think he learned when he went to college:
“You can tell a Freshman by his silly, eager look
You can tell a Sophomore ’cause he carries one less book
You can tell a Junior by his fancy airs and such
You can always tell a Senior, but you can’t tell him much.”
The lessons today have to do with being “right” at the cost of relationship. In the question of who is right, we can either end in blessings or curses. Frederick Buechner in his Magnificent Defeat wrote: “And here even for us something of this remains true: we also know that words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion within the human heart that can never be reversed.
In Today's Hebrew Testament lesson from Exodus lesson there is no evidence that Pharaoh ever attended Egypt State U., much less a Senior, and he may have been home schooled, but you could not tell him very much. But here he is, at the head of his armies, chasing the Hebrew people who are trying to leave. In deep hate, he has told them to get out of his sight after he and his wizards lost the battles of the plagues. Then came the big game, the Passover of the Angel of Death, which Pharaoh loses, big time, and he says to the Hebrew's to get out of his sight.
They start to leave but Pharaoh changes his mind. You can always tell a Pharaoh, but you cannot tell him much. He has lost so much except his desire to be right, to be in charge. So he gathers all the Kings horses and all the Kings Chariots and all the Kings men and he leads them to slaughter the Hebrews. Except, he thought that his GPS or Google maps app must not have been working right since it was telling him that the dry land he was storming down was actually the Sea of Reeds. But he knew he was right, and just ask any woman, “Since when can you give a male driver directions!” To give him a break, he may have wondered how come there were waters rising up on either side of the road; but he knew he was right. He was right until all the Kings Chariots and all the Kings Horses and all the Kings men were drowned be, in Pharaoh's hate, and all paying the price of the King wanting to be right.
I did not wait for my senior year to not listen much. Because I wanted to be right. I got a lot of practice because I had an older brother, Paul, a year older than me, who was handsomer than me, cooler than me, more athletic than me and I spent a lot of time trying to prove I was right about something, heck anything, and He was wrong. Not just wrong, but “double dog dare you” wrong. I wanted to be right. Sometimes we would get into physical tussles about who was right. Our mother would separate us and sigh that she had been an only child and had longed to have a brother or sister to love, would urge us to tell each other we were sorry. We would shake hands, surreptitiously squeezing harder than we needed, and say the obligatory words
All the way through Elementary school, Junior high, Senior high, we argued about things like Elvis Presley versus Johnny Cash, Mickey Mantle versus Stan “the Man” Musial, Hockey Skates versus figure skates, the merits and defects of certain teenage girls. You name it - we fought about who was right. He and I graduated from High School the same year in 1964, I was 17 and he was 18 and he went into the Marine Corps while I went to college.
On Christmas Break in my Freshman year, when we were at home together, he on leave and I on break, I was turning 18 and my brother who was one year and 4 days older than me took me out for my first legal beer. That week I was set to go down to my draft board and I was in a struggle on what I should do with my draft status. I was not convinced it was right for me to kill even in the name of my country. Paul and I would argue about Vietnam. One night at dinner, we really got into throwing slogans at each other. My mother was close to tears and my father, who had been a Major in the Marine Corps in World War II, in combat action all across the Pacific theatre, called to an end of it, by putting his hand down on the dining room table and said: “Listen louts!” He turned to me and said, “You, you owe your country your life.” Turning to Paul he said, “You, but not your mind.” Three and a half years later, and a little more than a year and a half after our father died, I graduated from college and I was best man at Paul's wedding. By then, we both learned that being right was not a price that was worth being paid. Paul died about 30 years ago and every chance I get, I tell his grandchildren what a good man he was. And how much they would have loved him and he them. The unfortunate words we, my brother and I, had expressed to each other were spoken within the context of deep love.
Paul, the apostle not my brother, in his letter to the Romans for today speaks of the context of God's love that fills the space between all of God's children. You can disagree all you want, but you are not allowed to pass judgment on each other. We are all beloved children of the living God. Whatever your faith, or lack of it, may be.
In the Gospel story from Matthew, Jesus is asked by Peter, the one who has the patience of a two year old, and who was probably reaching the limits of being really ticked off with a whole bunch of someones, asks Jesus how often should he forgive lousy good for nothing people. I imagine he had probably snarled off a couple forgiveness that week. Peter asks if he had to forgive someone as many as seven times. He was thinking that was a complete number since there were seven days in a week. He then is gobsmacked when he is told that the figure is closer to seventy-seven times. Actually I think it should read seventy times seven, which would put the figure of the forgiveness number closer to 490 times . If the answer had been seven times, I could just imagine Peter would have found it easier to keep score and he might have been hurt and he would snarl; “Okay, that is one forgiveness, you got six more until I let you have it.”
In 1968 I graduated from College and I, 21 years old, got a job as a Social Worker and Counselor with School dropouts and many of them were full of resentments. Thirteen years later, I went to Seminary and worked in churches where there were parishioners full of resentments. I am 76 years old now and for 55 years, a lifetime of listening to people hold on to things that eat them alive. Can you imagine how much energy it takes to hold on to a slight or hurt or guilt? Now think how much of a life is taken up in resentment to hold on to seventy-seven hurts and slights. You would spent so much energy holding on to the past that you would not be able to enjoy any part of the present moment. You would not have energy left to love. If we held on to the eye for an eye mentality we would all be blind. Forgiveness is not just about helping the other person escape from hell, it is about you getting rid of the Hell you are living in with resentment.
Whenever I do pre-marital counseling with a couple; I give a series of assignments and one of them is to have a fight. They usually tell me that they don't fight because they love each other. So they usually just stuff down disappointments. The reality is that they are not perfect people and we will hurt one another and one needs to stop and say, “I realize that I feel hurt by what you have done, and in our love; please we need to work this out together, with the power greater than ourselves.” The hard reality is that we need to learn how to disagree in the middle of love so that we learn that remembering love is what is important rather than being “right”
In the 12 Step Recovery Programs; steps 8, 9 and 10 speak to healing by the person who has inflicted the hurts:
Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others
Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
The truth is that we can hold on to an addiction of being right or we can love, but we can't do both.
But I Want To Be Right
“Love and Charity with your neighbor”
Was always listed as one prerequisite
In words of warning from a Celebrant,
said swiftly if as not a point to belabor.
However, it's not just a point of warning
that I'd really tick the Big Almighty off.
But a hint to heed before a wine quaff,
About whose communion I'd be scorning.
God's always with me, even in sinner's pride,
Never looking away, even with tears in eyes,
Calling me to give up the practice of despise,
And contempt which I've barely try to hide.
The point is the other person doesn't know,
the pain which I hide to keep a status quo.
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