First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Lamentations 1 and Luke 17

“It Should be Easy”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

October 7, 2007

            I was blessed as a child to have a terribly ornery grandmother.  And was she so ornery.  She could swear like a sailor and make a sailor think twice about crossing her.  She was this kind of strength and resolve.  She also had a soft side- a tenderness I will always cherish.

            I have mentioned before that she taught me how to drink wine, swear, and play poker.  Now, such is not the usual fodder of a sermon, but something less would be untrue.  During her funeral as I homilized her life I said, “And from time to time she enjoyed a glass of wine.”  This was a very obtuse way of saying she was an alcoholic.  My grandmother was not obtuse.  So my mother, who wouldn’t speak out loud in public to save her life broke the silence by speaking from the pews “They didn’t get the joke.”  I will always remember that moment as one of my fondest memories.

            My grandmother had a way of creating fond memories.  I can remember her trying to kiss our eldest son at early age.  We were saying goodbye and she wanted a kiss from Josh.  Josh didn’t want a kiss or give a kiss so she grabbed him and held him and smothered him with kisses until he was writhing in a good fit.  She looked up and said, “He loves me, I can tell.” 

            I am not sure how this is, but it is for me an unquestionable truth: most of my theological thinking was shaped not in the halls of Princeton or the books of arcane church fathers, but at her kitchenette.  Feminists may claim that men hold all power, but at a very early age, I knew how profound and indelible were the lessons, the decisions, and the deals that were brokered as she sipped wine and played cards. 

            There were two great mysteries of her life that eluded me as a young boy.  The events, the significant moments, were far beyond the grasp of a ten year old.  But I knew they were there.  People say, “Kids are smart.”  And this is true.  I was smart enough to know that something was a bit amiss with her sisters and my Grandpa Paul, her first husband.  Yet as I would come to find, you have to live a bit a life to see the mysteries that elude us, to see them for what they are.

            Years later I would come to find the problem with her sisters.  My grandmother and her sisters were known as Pink, Nay, and Brown.  Some of these were terms of endearment; one was just a name.  I had heard stories of the other two, Pink and Nay; I can remember them from the foggy glimpses of childhood.  But what I remember most was the way the conversation ended when their names arose.  People stopped talking once they came up.

            It wasn’t until many, many years later that I learned the truth.  These sisters were thick as thieves, the kind from which epic stories emerge, and then there was bad blood.  It fell apart.  It started when my grandmother nursed her mother in the last years of her life.  Her two sisters, Pink and Nay, stayed away and feigned the ignorance we offer when knowledge demands more than we are willing to give.  My grandmother did the hard work; she saw her mother to the end.

            She took care of me as well as a young boy so I can remember this, barely.  I remember just a few images, just the slightest glimpse.  These images though didn’t grasp the challenge, the frustration, the burnout, and the anger of caring for a mother in her final years; she cared for someone who never cared for her.

            My grandmother did this.  And her sisters watched.  When she died there was a question of who should get what.  I have seen this terrible moment more than a few times and all I can tell you is write it down, make it clear.  Her sisters wanted their due and fearing that they wouldn’t get it, in a moment of weakness, challenged my grandmother as to who should get what.  And then, in a moment of complete spite, she took everything they wanted, mostly jewelry, and buried it with her mother.

            In the moment before the casket was closed my grandmother filled it with her mother’s jewelry and sealed the lid.  She was so angry and so ornery she didn’t even look back.  Having spent a few days of my life with her I know she didn’t.  I know this instinctively.  I also know she didn’t because she didn’t tell me this story, never spoke of it, and it was more than twenty years before any one spoke of it.

            People make mistakes and we should forgive them.  We should be ready to offer this to all.  And, by all means, we must do whatever is in our power to help our family and friends face the challenges of life with success and surety and mercy and grace.  And this, this should be easy.  We love our family; we are devoted to our friends; why wouldn’t caring for them be the easiest thing in the world?  It should be so effortless, but sometimes it proves illusive.

            In our Gospel lesson today Luke takes four different images and weaves together a very complex pattern. In the first strand he takes the story of the children coming to Jesus, removes the children, and just focuses on the millstone, the way we should take our own life if we bring harm to others.  In essence he says, don’t cause someone to stumble, don’t make someone’s life hard.  And in doing so he hits upon the greatest of fears.  We all fear that somehow what we say, what we do will make someone’s life hard or sad or the worst ruin.

            We are not quite sure what to make of this, this ruin.  He speaks of little ones; this is the passing reference to the children who were at first a part of this account.  And, ultimately, this is what will strike terror in the heart of the disciples.  For they all know how precarious it is to raise children, how desperately parents don’t want their children to come to harm, and to think for a moment they are the cause of the ruin, is just petrifying.  Jesus takes this fear and says, be careful with this, trouble lurks all about. 

            And then he raises the ante.  What if it is not just your children, what if it is the people you live with?  What if this means people like your brothers and your sisters?  What if the people you ruin aren’t just the children you were ill equipped to raise, but the siblings you fought with and tried to love and with whom you made so many mistakes?  In Luke, Jesus turns to the crowd and says, maybe you messed up your kids, and that’s to be expected, but what if you messed up your brother or your sister or even more?  What if those people who wanted you to forgive them, who said they were sorry, and you didn’t believe them, what if those are the people who are suffering today because you didn’t forgive them?

            There are few times in scripture when the apostles cry out.  In fact, I am not sure they do cry out besides here.  There are people who cry out: Blind Bartimaeus, the demons, Peter on the waves, but I am pretty sure this is the only time where the apostles cry out.  In a moment of panic and fear and desperation, when the saying got too heavy they cry, “Increase our faith!” 

            First we should say it is significant that they shout.  In other words a chord has been struck.  Second, we need to notice that they cannot believe it; they don’t know what to trust.  Jesus has said to them, "Love your children so they do not stumble and forgive the repentant so there is no shame", and then they don’t know what to do.  That this is the living God incarnate in their midst, fine; that they should care for others without failing, unimaginable.

            Before we get to the unimaginable we need to pause and ask, "Why is it so hard to love those we love?"  It should be easy.  It should be easy to love your children.  I do.  I love my children.  But should I tell them what they are doing is wrong or let them find it on their own?  Or, will my words of warning make it impossible for them to see the wrong?  Or, are my words of warning all about my own limitations and their life is nothing about this?  This is the chord Jesus has struck.

            Is my brother better off without my advice or should I speak?  To this Jesus brings in the fantastic.  With just a smidgen of faith you can say to the mulberry tree “Live in the sea.” There is a goading here that is not nice.  It is to say, all your worries, all your fears, all the moments of pause where you wonder are without even the faith of a mustard seed.  Such belittling, and it is belittling, is to say, faith is not superhuman, but the very stuff of life.

            Love your brother and don’t hate him; that is what life is.  Forgive your sister and don’t let her abide in your bitterness; that is what life is.  Let the fantastic be something you can’t imagine.  Don’t ever let forgiveness be what you can’t imagine.  I will say that again.  Don’t let forgiveness be what you can’t imagine.  How many of us have looked at a person and said, “I can’t forgive them.  What they did I can’t forgive.”  In other words, I just can’t imagine it.  Jesus says, hogwash.  Maybe without faith, but with faith, it is what is expected.

            This is the reason for the servants out in the field, the table service, who eats when, etc.  This is a communion mandate as it were.  This is what Paul was trying to say about taking the bread without worth.  Don’t take this unless you are willing to forgive.  This is so much different from the paranoia of a personal mistake or trying to take communion without sin.  Here Jesus is saying, I don’t care about what you did, just don’t come to the table until you are ready to live with forgiveness. Have you offered forgiveness, as you want to be forgiven?

            In 1983 my uncle took his own life.  He was for my grandmother the sun and the moon.  People around him coveted the love and attention he was given without condition.  That he took his life undid her.  She set adrift.  Yet, at this moment of being lost she was found: she joined her sisters.  For at this moment Pink, Nay, and Brown had each lost a son tragically.  Finally, they were one again. 

            I will never forget watching their meeting at his graveside.  I watched my grandmother and her sisters who hadn’t spoken to each other in more than a decade huddle and weep.  The mulberry tree had been uprooted and planted in the sea.  The jewels, the casket, the anger just didn’t matter.  It was a son, a child, a loss.  They all knew what each one felt and they were blood.  It was the loss that increased their faith that made forgiveness possible.

            It should be so easy, so simple to love the ones we love, but sometimes it proves illusive, sometimes the words we think we speak with such clarity become so obtuse. 

            I don’t know what my grandmother buried in the casket.  Yet, I do know what was resurrected at the casket of her son.  It was love, and faith, and hope.  Why is it so hard?  What makes the simple so complex?  I don’t know.  But I do know this, if you aren’t ready to forgive, you are not ready for the bread and the wine.  If you are not ready to be one with your brothers and your sisters, then the kingdom of God is not for you. 

            Harsh?  It is what is expected of the slaves.  We don’t get to eat until the table has been set and the master served.  The table is forgiveness, are you ready to serve?  Amen.