A New People: Sermon for Pentecost 13

I was privileged to preside and preach at All Saints' Episcopal Church, Oxnard CA, this last Sunday: English at 9:15 and Spanish at 11:15.  I share the English text of the sermon with you:

Exodus 12: 1-14
Romans 13: 8-14
Matthew 18: 15-20

    Today’s lessons seem quite different from each other, but actually they all center on a very important theme: how God is creating his new people, saving us and showing us the Way.
    The lesson from Exodus is the story of the first Passover.  It describes how each family of the people of Israel is to sacrifice and prepare a lamb, doing two things: First, they take some of the blood of the lamb and smear it on the doorposts, so that when the angel of the Lord comes to execute judgment on the people of Egypt he will pass over the houses of the families of Israel.  Second, each family shares a meal of the meat of the lamb to prepare them for the journey, the Exodus, they are about to begin.  They are saved by the blood of the lamb and they are bound together in a ritual meal of the flesh of the lamb.  These will become important symbols for all Christians.  We are saved by the blood of the lamb, Jesus Christ, who is the Lamb of God.  And we share the eucharistic meal of the body and blood of that Lamb, Jesus Christ.
    In the Gospel this morning, Jesus tells us how we should live together as a people.  He knows that sins against each other are inevitable among human beings, even among those who are washed in the blood of the Lamb and fed at His table.  So he gives us instructions on how we should deal with those sins.  First of all, we should not pretend that we do not harm each other through our sins.  We do.  We have done so in the past, and we will do so in the future.  Pretending nothing has happened, hiding the truth, only makes it worse.  The thing to do, he says, is to confront it directly.  The first thing to do is to go quietly to the person who has hurt you and point it out.  How many times have we said or done something that has hurt someone else and we don’t even realize what we have done!  It may be that simply pointing it out is enough.  Have you ever had someone tell you how you have hurt them, and you didn’t even know it?  It is like a dagger through the heart!  In many cases, that is enough.  But if it isn’t, then Jesus suggests a graduated approach.  First one or two, then an internal church meeting, if the matter is really important.
    I think that the real point of this process, though, is in the sentence: “Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  Remember what Jesus said to Peter?  The very same thing!  Jesus is telling us something incredible: that the power to determine the values of life is being trusted to the people of God.  Into the hands of the new people of God is being given this divine power.  The Church, the new Israel created in the blood of the Lamb and given strength for the journey in the new Passover meal of the eucharist, is trusted by God to discern and proclaim the truth and to reconcile those who stray away and hurt each other through sin.
    In our reading from Romans this morning St. Paul takes this a step further: How do we actually live day by day with each other once we have become God’s new people, his new Israel on the way out of Egypt to the Promised Land?  How do we move from conflict resolution to life together?  “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” Move away from the impersonal kinds of relationships that are defined by the law, what we should not do, and by business, using the metaphor of debt and payment, to define how we live with each other.  Move toward a personal relationship, defined by love.  “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
    We are saved by the Passover blood of Jesus Christ, and strengthened by the eucharistic meal for our journey, our Exodus.  Let us understand that we have been set apart by God as his  people.  We are invited by Jesus to live in honesty, truth and charity with each other.  We are empowered to discern and proclaim the values God wants us to practice.  We are called by God to love each other as we love ourselves. 
    And this is all the more important because we don’t have all the time in the world.  Things are moving more quickly than we think.  Don’t delay.  We should start living right now as if the Kingdom of God has already started.