20th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 22B

20th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 22B October 7, 2018 “Sometimes the issue isn’t the issue.”i I was reminded of the truth of these words this past week, as I gathered with colleagues from around the diocese to learn about conflict management. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most of the time, in conflict situations, the issue isn’t really the issue. Those of you who are familiar with organizational development theory will remember the diagram of the iceberg. And those of you who know the story of the Titanic will remember that it wasn’t the part of the iceberg that they saw above the water that did the damage to the Titanic. What they saw wasn’t the issue. It was what was under the water that sunk the Titanic. The Lutheran pastor David Lose starts his blog post this week with that line: “Sometimes the issue isn’t the issue.” And he’s talking about the gospel passage for this Sunday. Our gospel for today is one passage in a series of passages where Jesus has been specifically teaching his disciples about discipleship. Then, Mark tells us that the Pharisees come to where Jesus is teaching in public and they seek to test him by asking him about divorce. Jesus answers them with a question, and then responds that the law was written “because of [their] hardness of heart.” When they are alone, Jesus’s disciples question him further about what he has said, and he elaborates further. And then we see him become indignant with his disciples when they try to keep people from bringing children to Jesus for his blessing. Now there is much that has been written about Jesus’s stance on divorce in this passage. It is certainly difficult to hear in our modern context, where I doubt there is anyone here in this church who has been untouched by divorce in some form or fashion. And I will remind you that in Jesus’s time, women and children were property, and the Jewish law said that a man could divorce a woman “if she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her…” (Deuteronomy 24:1-4) And in Palestine, women were not even allowed to sue for divorce at all. (If you struggle with this scripture, and want to talk to me more about it, then I hope you will call me.) But I want us to remember that “sometimes the issue isn’t really the issue.” The issue here isn’t really about divorce. Sure, that’s what the Pharisees bring up to try to trap Jesus. But the issue here, Jesus is saying, is really hardness of heart. The Pharisees have it. The disciples have it. We have it. And we can see the opposite of hardness of heart in the open-heartedness of the children and the people who bring them to Jesus for his blessing. It is our hardness of heart that leads to our sin and our broken relationships with each other. It is for our hardness of heart-to protect us from ourselves-that God gave us the law. And it is for our hardness of heart that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead, transforming all of creation and us through the power of God’s love. We are saved, over and over again, from our hardness of heart through the grace of God in the Holy Spirit working in and among us, in our lives, in our world. This past week, one of my colleagues and I were talking about how we had seen God this past week in our conflict management training. He observed that we were all asked to bring a conflict to talk about, so we all came with these conflicts, some of which were clearly very painful situations for the individuals involved and the churches. We learned some tools to use to assess them, and we prayed about them together, and we talked about them together, and we created action plans. Then we laid our conflicts and our action plans on the altar at the closing Eucharist where they were --all of them--blessed. Where we came with these messes that we were feeling frustrated about, and probably a fair amount of hardness of heart, we left finding both ourselves and the situations transformed by the Holy Spirit’s gift of new ways of seeing and a good dose of hope. Sometimes the issue isn’t really the issue. If you find yourself in conflict with someone else, I invite you to take a step back and to consider if there might be more to the matter than first meets the eye. Then, I invite you to remember that the only person you can control is yourself. I invite you to ask the Holy Spirit to remove from you your hardness of heart and to help you be more open-hearted. And then pray for the person with whom you are in conflict, or pray for the one you consider to be your enemy. Ask God for that person to receive all the good things that you would want for yourself. God wants us to be in relationship with God and with each other; God’s grace can and will transform us if we will have it. i. http://www.davidlose.net/2018/10/pentecost-20-b-the-issue/