Members of One Another, and Christ

Sunday, August 11, 2024 – Gospel John 6:35, 41-51, also 1 Kings 19:4-8, Psalm 34:1-8, Ephesians 4:25—5:2

As I’ve mentioned before from this pulpit, I’ve never been married. It seems I share that life situation with the apostle Paul. Although I’ve enjoyed incredibly close friendships and have learned many lessons about how to have good relationships, I can’t speak to you of marriage from my own experience.

But Walter Wangerin, Jr. can.

He’s the author who wrote the story “Ragman” that I’ve read right after Easter for the last two years here. Wangerin had a way with words that brought stories to life very powerfully. In the same collection of short stories that includes “Ragman,” he has another called “Fights Unfought, Forgiveness Forgone.”

It’s about the fights – or “not quite fights” that he used to have with his wife, Thanne, when they first married. He refers to himself as a stiff-necked, hard-hearted “camel” – a “damnfool” “blockhead” full of pride.

See, he and Thanne had a dance they used to do in their non-fights. He did all the talking, and she was silent until her tears began. To combat her silent strategy, he’d start with loud sighing, then move into declarations of his own guilt (that he didn’t really believe), and finally he’d stomp around the room in righteous confusion and anger.

In response, Thanne would reverse her silence and pour forth a litany of sins he’d committed “in such numbered and dated detail (whether I had intended any of them or not!) that I would stand shocked before the passion in one so short, plain drowning in her venom, aware that things had gotten out of hand, but speechless myself and very weak.”

What Walter calls his “final weapon” in these stand offs was for him to jam his arms into his overcoat, run down the stairs of their apartment building, and storm into the St. Louis night, roaming the streets for three hours or so, hoping his wife would worry about him.

Maybe this kind of dysfunctional pattern sounds familiar to those of you who’ve had your own spouses?

But Paul – the lifelong bachelor – offers us another way to handle our relationships. I believe he actually shows us a crucial psychological lesson for how we are to live together as human beings in community.

He begins this part of the letter with a clear directive. He says we should give up the practice of lying and falsehood and speak the truth to each other. Why should we do that? Not because it’s morally wrong to lie (though it may be), but because “we are members of one another.”

In other words, our situation in Christ is that we are inherently in relationship. We belong to one another. We are responsible to each other.

But I especially love what he says about anger. He writes that we should “be angry, but do not sin.” He’s not telling us we shouldn’t feel anger. Anger is a natural human emotion that we feel when our boundaries are violated. He says we can feel our anger, but “do not sin,” which means don’t act on it.

Then he tells us not to let the sun go down on our anger. Or as I’ve heard more recently, don’t go to bed angry. Maybe you didn’t realize that this advice was biblical.

And then he writes something really interesting – “do not make room for the devil.” I read that as “don’t give the evil liar or tyrant any opportunity to influence your actions.” Or we might also say, don’t be tempted to believe the “fake news” that our inner and outer tyrants want to use to make us hate each other. (This reminds me of the story, often attributed to the Cherokee people, about the two wolves that are at war within us.)

Along the same lines, Paul says that we shouldn’t let evil talk come out of our mouths, but only what will help build each other up. One way we can think of this is that though it might be natural for us as evolving human beings to sometimes have thoughts that are bigoted or biased against individuals or groups based on their religion, political party, or race, we don’t have to speak those thoughts out loud. We can keep them to ourselves.

We should only say what gives grace to those who hear us.

Paul also recommends that we should stop speaking bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling, slander, and malice, and instead “be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” In other words, because Christ, the bread of life, sacrificed himself to nourish the whole world, we are obligated to live like the new beings or forgiven people we now are.

We don’t have to follow the same old patterns our anger tries to get us into.

On one particularly cold St. Louis night, Walter and Thanne followed their usual dance of anger right up to the point when he jammed his arms into his overcoat and stormed out the front door. “But,” he says, “then God piddled on the affair.”

After slamming the door, Walter discovered that his coat was caught fast in it. And he had no door key. He thought about leaving his coat behind walk the streets, but the cold made him think better of that and he was finally forced to ring the bell. His wife peeped out the door, unlocked it, and what did she do?

According to Walter, she “laughed so hard the tears streamed down her face and she had to put her hand on my shoulder, to hold her up.” In hindsight, Walter realizes that in that moment, he could have laughed too, embracing the “armistice” that God so gracefully arranged.

But that sweet reconciliation was not to be. Instead, Walter, the self-proclaimed “dummy” “batted her hand away, cried ‘Hmph!’ and bolted to stalk the night more grimly than ever before.” “Then,” he writes, “he should have wondered about the survival of his marriage, not by fights distressed but by his stupid, blind, inordinate and all-consuming pride. For he had denied the manipulations of the Deity.”

Or, we might say, he had refused God’s mercy. He forgot he and his wife’s membership in one another, and his responsibility to be kind and forgiving of her and she of him. He forgot the new life they had been born into through Christ.

Thankfully, Walter’s story, like Paul’s letter, lives on in print. And through his vulnerable sharing of his own experience, we can, as he writes,

learn from the dummy, ye husbands and wives, ye children and parents, ye politicians so often so unbending from your former policies. Learn, all ye who suffer fallings-out with one another and ye whose inclination is to lick your wounds in cold proud isolation! God doth constantly prepare the way for reconciliation, even by [God’s] gimmickry, if only pride don’t blind you to the opportunity.”