Part 3 of 4: The Conflicts and Criticisms of Faithfulness
Pastor Anthony preaching on “The Conflicts and Criticisms of Faithfulness.” Scripture focus is Exodus 6:28-7:7 and Exodus 16:1-8. Preached on July 25, 2021.
This is the third sermon of a four-part series on: “Let Your Life Speak.”
Copyright 2021 by Rev. Anthony J. Tang and Desert Mission United Methodist Church.
Yesterday, here at church, we celebrated the life of Ed Hitchcock who died on July 8 at 89 years old. Many of you may know him as the one who told you that you were either sitting in his seat or the seat he reserved for his hat and that you needed to leave.
I want it to be known that I in no way approve of that behavior. Nobody owns chairs or parking spaces in a church. But there was no changing or reasoning with Ed.
And, everyone who got past Ed’s initial gruffness, discovered next how insulting Ed could be. Yesterday several of us shared how he would refer to us as Frankenstein. Ed has remarked about how he was blinded by the glare off of my head. He criticized my clothes and my hand movements.
If you’ve never met Ed, the question you might wonder is, why would someone seemingly so unpleasant have this entire room filled for his memorial? Basically, no matter what criticism came out of his mouth, we knew the criticism wasn’t true. The real truth was that Ed was a good man, and his inappropriate words… well, perhaps he wanted others to not take him or life so seriously, perhaps he wanted others to toughen up and not be so sensitive, or perhaps that was the only way he knew how to show his affection and love. Maybe it was all three.
Still, no matter which one it was for Ed, an insult or criticism or conflict isn’t easy to receive, is it? So what can we do, or how can we have a healthy response to conflict or criticism that is directed at us?
There’s a part of me that wants to believe that if I do the right things and I am faithful and good, that I will have less and less conflict and criticism in my life. Unfortunately, that’s not the way that the world works.
Conflict isn’t reserved for only those who are bad, nor is the absence of conflict reserved for those who are good. You can run into conflict doing the right thing, doing the wrong thing, and also when doing nothing.
Take our first scripture from Exodos 6 and 7. God is sending Moses on a great adventure. God has chosen Moses, God is blessing Moses, and Moses is doing exactly what God wants. Yet, instead of a lack of conflict, God is sending Moses into the heart of conflict. And, instead of things getting easier, God tells him that things are only going to get harder as Pharaoh’s heart will be hardened. Furthermore, even after Moses proves that it is God sending him to Pharaoh, he will continue to be in conflict.
Following God was not the way for Moses to get out of conflict. Following God actually put Moses deeper into conflict.
In Parker Palmer’s book, Let Your Life Speak, he writes:
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks did something she was not supposed to do: she sat down at the front of a bus in one of the seats reserved for whites-a dangerous, daring, and provocative act in a racist society.
Legend has it that years later a graduate student came to Rosa Parks and asked, "Why did you sit down at the front of the bus that day?" Rosa Parks did not say that she sat down to launch a movement, because her motives were more elemental than that. She said, "I sat down because I was tired." But she did not mean that her feet were tired. She meant that her soul was tired, her heart was tired, her whole being was tired of playing by racist rules, of denying her soul's claim to selfhood.'
Of course, there were many forces aiding and abetting Rosa Parks's decision to live divided no more. She had studied the theory and tactics of nonviolence at the Highlander Folk School, where Martin Luther King Jr. was also a student. She was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose members had been discussing civil disobedience.
But in the moment she sat down at the front of the bus on that December day, she had no guarantee that the theory of nonviolence would work or that her community would back her up. It was a moment of existential truth, of claiming authentic selfhood, of reclaiming birthright giftedness-and in that moment she set in motion a process that changed both the lay and the law of the land.
Rosa Parks sat down because she had reached a point where it was essential to embrace her true vocation—not as someone who would reshape our society but as someone who would live out her full self in the world. She decided, "I will no longer act on the outside in a way that contradicts the truth that I hold deeply on the inside. I will no longer act as if I were less than the whole person I know myself inwardly to be."
Where does one get the courage to "sit down at the front of the bus" in a society that punishes anyone who decides to live divided no more? After all, conventional wisdom recommends mends the divided life as the safe and sane way to go: "Don't wear your heart on your sleeve." "Don't make a federal case out of it." "Don't show them the whites of your eyes." These are all the cliched ways we tell each other to keep personal truth apart from public life, lest we make ourselves vulnerable in that rough-and-tumble realm.
Where do people find the courage to live divided no more when they know they will be punished for it? The answer I have seen in the lives of people like Rosa Parks is simple: these people have transformed the notion of punishment itself. They have come to understand that no punishment anyone might inflict on them could possibly be worse than the punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment.
In the Rosa Parks story, that insight emerges in a wonderful way. After she had sat at the front of the bus for a while, the police came aboard and said, "You know, if you continue to sit there, we're going to have to throw you in jail." Rosa Parks replied, "You may do that. . .," which is a very polite way of saying, "What could your jail of stone and steel possibly mean to me, compared to the self-imposed imprisonment I've suffered for forty years-the prison I've just walked out of by refusing to conspire any longer with this racist system?"
[Parker J. Palmer. Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (Kindle Locations 325-346). Kindle Edition.]
That was a lot I just read, so let me put that into my own words.
Just because someone’s silent doesn’t mean they’re not screaming, right? Just because a couple isn’t yelling at each other, doesn’t mean they’re not arguing, right? Just because someone’s not in jail, doesn’t mean they’re not imprisoned.
I find that people who avoid conflict are some of the most conflicted people. Because they avoid it on the outside, it plays out on their inside and it will continue to do that until the person realizes that no external conflict with a friend or a coworker or a family member or the police or anyone else in the whole world can ever be worse than living in a state of constant conflict with ourselves.
In Parker Palmer’s example of Rosa Parks, she had been living in a state of constant conflict believing that she as a black woman was inferior to white people. And every time she “went to her place” in the back of the bus, it was as if she had told herself that she didn’t deserve the same things that white citizens deserved. By “behaving” herself, she imprisoned herself. And when she broke out of that internal imprisonment to believe that she was a good person and a child of God, then she could accept nothing less than equal treatment and the threat of punishment or even death meant nothing because nothing they could do could ever be as bad as the internal imprisonment she had already escaped from.
In order to live as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ and to be the people we are created to be, we are bound to be in conflict with others. And if we are in conflict with others, then someone is going to criticize us, and I don’t mean the loving, teasing insults of Ed. I mean people are going to criticize us with without love and without affection. How do we face or address these criticisms?
As Parker Palmer tells us, no conflict on the outside can compare to the conflicts we have on the inside. Likewise, what I have learned in all my years of being a pastor is that no criticism on the outside can ever compare with a criticism we judge ourselves with on the inside.
Let me see if I can explain that In a different way.
If someone were to criticize us in a ridiculous way… let’s say someone walked up to you and said, “I hate you because you rode your unicycle over my vegetable garden.” You probably would not be offended, right? You might be confused since you don’t own a unicycle or if you did own a unicycle, you surely didn’t ride it over their vegetable garden. You might be sad that they said they hated you. You might be worried that they’re losing their sanity. There could be many things you might be feeling, but offended and outraged are probably not what you would be feeling and that’s because you know throughout every part of your body, in your head, in your heart, in your soul, from the tips of your fingers all the way down to the tips of your toes, that what they’re saying is not true. Therefore, the problem is not with you, the accused, but the problem is with them, the accuser.
But if someone criticizes us in a way that causes us to react viscerally, or emotionally, or defensively, or offensively, the only reason we are acting the way we’re acting is because somewhere buried deep inside of our psyche, we fear that their criticism might be right or we fear that maybe we’re not as good of a person as we thought ourselves to be.
Now let me be clear. I’m not saying that our accuser is right. They might be totally wrong, but if we fear that they are right, we will be reactionary. I am also NOT saying that we are not good people; I absolutely believe that each and every one of us is a good person, but when someone criticizes me, sometimes I fear that I am not a good person and if there is any part of me that believes this, I will react negatively.
This is not what God desires for us for God does not desire judgement and condemnation. What God desires is life, healing, growth, and health. How do we get there?
Moses got there. In Exodus 16:7-8, we hear Moses and Aaron responding to the complaints of the Israelites saying, “‘[God] has heard your complaining against the Lord. For what are we, that you complain against us?’ And Moses said, ‘When the Lord gives you meat to eat in the evening and your fill of bread in the morning, because the Lord has heard the complaining that you utter against him—what are we? Your complaining is not against us but’ against the Lord.”
Likewise, if we are living the lives God wants us to live and we are doing the work God wants us to do, and others complain against us, then they are not truly complaining about us as much as they are complaining about God.
This is why people say, “Don’t worry about that angry person, they’re really just angry at God and life.” There is truth to that.
In a very practical sense, the way we live the lives God wants us to live is by being the people God has created us to be. And the way we be the people God has crated us to be is by accepting that the only reason we are who we are today is because of our gifts, and also our weaknesses, because of our acts of love, and also because of our acts of failure, because of our perfections and our imperfections. Every event that you remember, and every event you have forgotten, but still resides in your muscles, has contributed to who you are today and you cannot separate the parts of your life you approve of from the parts you disapprove of. And when we accept ourselves for who God has created us to be, then we can realize that the complaints of others are truly directed at God and that can enable us to not be offended or reactionary as much as patient and humble. When someone criticizes us, what can we learn? How do we find the truth? How can we make better choices for the future? How can we use their words to help us be even more faithful to God tomorrow than we were yesterday? Again, I’m not saying that other’s complaints are right or wrong. Simply that we can learn and grow from them when we embrace the truth that we are both who God created us to be and not yet who God intends for us to be.
