“If another member of the church* sins against you,* go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.* 16But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector. 18Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. 19Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. 20For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
Matthew 18:15-20
Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; 32and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
John 8:31, 32
In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said, “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, God’s rule is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, God is inside you and outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living God. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.”
This morning, I’m so happy to have my husband Walt here with us. As we were getting ready to come to church, he asked me, as he usually does, “How do you feel about your sermon, Bonnie?” And I said, “Well, we teach what we need to learn, and it has been a good spiritual practice for me this week to reflect on my own anger and criticism of others.”
Walt is a Marriage and Family Therapist, and he said to me, “You know, every day I talk to people whose lives seemed to be almost ruined by their own anger and criticism of others.”
Think of what a relief it would be if we did not have to carry this ball and chain that we drag around – our anger and criticism – some justified but often not justified, but just a bad habit. To know the truth about ourselves is spiritual practice, and I invite all of us this morning to consider getting to know our own anger and criticism.
Jesus and all the wisdom teachers throughout history have said it. Gandhi said it this way: He said, “The purpose of life is undoubtedly to know oneself.” And Jesus said, “If you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty,” and he said, “The truth will set you free.” We are invited by Jesus to use all of our relationships – our relationships here in church, at work, at school, in our families – as spiritual practice. In Matthew, our scripture reading this morning, Jesus said if someone has sinned against you, go and talk with them. But this morning I’m asking you to consider not the times someone has sinned against you, but they’ve just made you mad, or anxious, or uncomfortable. What do you do then? Do you go and tell the person they are making you mad? Well that may be a good idea, but perhaps the resolution will not be in their changing but in our calming our own anger, our own resentment, our own criticism. Maybe being annoyed about someone else is more about ourselves than about them.
How we become more conscious of our feelings and reactions to one another is a spiritual practice. For we are not all the same. In fact, in church we profess to encourage diversity, don’t we? We say, “Yes! If you’re different, come and join us.” This is our refrain as we serve communion. All people are welcome, regardless of their differences. Everyone here, in Christian community, is welcome.
Now we all come from different backgrounds, different religious backgrounds, we all have different kinds of childhoods, we have different political ideas, we have different educational backgrounds and different values. We even have different personalities. Some of us are extroverts, some of us are introverts. My husband, for example: he likes rock and roll music. I don’t really like rock and roll music. I like musical theater and classical music and a lot of women folk singers. Does that mean that if we don’t agree about the music that we like, that we’re not going to be able to have fun when we want to listen to music as we clean the house together?
Now Jesus has clearly called us to get along in church and in our families and in our communities, and if someone has abused you or sinned against you, of course you need to go and talk to them. But what if they haven’t abused you – you’re just upset. Did Jesus really have any idea of what he was asking us to do? I mean, did he really know how stupid and coarse and annoying people can be? Our conscious mind – we can call it our false self or ego – would tell us these traits in other people are a good reason for us to be angry at them and critical of them.
Many of us were raised with parents and a culture who taught us that there are right and wrong ways of doing things. But I find the older I get, and the more life experience I gain, the more travel and education and spiritual inner work that I’ve done, that I find this kind of duality, in interpreting people as good people or bad people, that what they do is right or wrong, is really just supporting the idea that criticism and judgment are a good thing. And as Christians, I don’t think that’s what Jesus is calling us to do.
I have worked in the peace movement all my life and I have come to realize that many people in the peace movement were some of the most un-peaceful people I have ever met. Jesus asks us not only to tell the truth about aggression and anger but to know ourselves – to know when our anger and aggression is about us and not about others. One of the biggest impediments to our spiritual growth is that we are not able to perceive or see our own hidden motivations. Often our motivation is unconscious. In fact, psychologists tell us it’s pre-rational. It comes from emotional programming in our childhood, through no fault of our own. We can only begin to look at our automatic aggression and anger if we do it with compassion for ourselves. Most of us were not taught how to do that. Becoming familiar with our own judgments and critical selves will help us to understand each other – our own brothers and sisters – why our own brothers and sisters get so angry and so critical of one another. They don’t just storm out or yell at each other or hold onto resentments. They actually start building bombs, building armies and go to war with each other.
When we see the same ego or false self working in our own spiritual development, we are able to understand our human responses on a larger, global level. “Let it begin with me” is the wonderful refrain of a song, and it is indeed a spiritual practice. We will be contributing to world peace when we understand our own anger, aggression and automatic responses. When we look into ourselves more deeply, we may begin to recognize that our criticism and anger is a kind of Pavlovian habit. Many of us are so used to responding not in compassion and love when we feel that we are inconvenienced or challenged, but we automatically go to self-righteous anger and indignation. “How dare they serve me that under-done steak when I ordered it well done?” “Why in the world have they chosen church hymns and a hymnal with words and music that are unfamiliar to me?” “Why is that new minister the way she is?” “Why do they have to have church services at 11:00 a.m. and I can’t see all the football that I want?”
We have these reactions and often we feel self righteous, don’t we?
Many people have begun to study brain research to better understand, personally and as a human species, how we are the way we are. The evolution of animal life on earth and the brains of animals on earth are very interesting to study. It’s like unfolding the divine plan of human consciousness. Anthropology, psychology, cosmology, and many more academic disciplines are all beginning to interrelate and talk to one another in order to help us to understand why we are the way we are and why we have the reactions we do as human beings.
The reptilian brain first appeared in fish 500 million years ago. Talk about being married for 50 or 60 years! How about that for contemplation? Five hundred million years ago. It continued to develop in amphibians and reached its most advanced stage in reptiles roughly 250 million years ago. The limbic system first appeared in small mammals about 150 million years ago, and the neocortex began its spectacular expansion in primates, scarcely two or three million years ago. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t it just humbling and awe-inspiring to think of God’s divine cosmic plan for consciousness –animal consciousness and our own?
We humans still have what is referred to as our reptilian brain, our oldest evolutionary brain part, which controls the body’s vital functions such as heart rate, breathing, body temperature, and balance. The reptilian brain is reliable but tends to make us somewhat rigid and compulsive. The reptilian brain in humans is what, they say, makes us aggressive and territorial. When we feel territorial, let’s imagine we are responding not in the Christ within us but as reptiles.
The limbic brain emerged in the first mammals. It can record memories of behaviors and it is responsible for emotions in human beings.
It is truly remarkable, this evolutionary process of the human family as a whole. And then – this is even more incredible – all of that (you won’t believe this if you’ve never heard this, but it’s true) is recapitulated in the first 15 years of every person’s life. If that doesn’t make you believe in God, I’ll eat my hat! Each level of human development has a biological basis and is characterized by these specific attitudes.
Our first year of life, for example, we are in what’s called the uroboric level of consciousness. Then we move into the typhonic level from ages two to four, and then the mythic membership periods of socialization from four to eight years old, and lastly the mental egoic level of consciousness from age seven to 15 years. It’s amazing. The same evolutionary process from reptiles to humans – humans that can love like Jesus did, that can be Christ-like – is the same process each of us goes through in the course of our own childhood development.
We come to church, I hope, in part, to know ourselves, to learn to be more loving to our neighbor, to ourselves, to learn the truth about ourselves in order to have a kind of spiritual evolution.
Father Thomas Keating, the abbot of St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, developed Centering Prayer in order for us to calm what is referred to as our monkey mind – our reptilian nature. As we rest in daily practice of prayer, we begin to see that we are more than our surface psychological awareness. We are more than our feelings and thoughts. This silence indeed begins to heal our anger, our reptilian automatic responses of territorialism.
“Monkey mind” is a great term, isn’t it? It refers to this part of our brain that is always living in the past or the future. Meditation, Centering Prayer, and many different spiritual practices calm this monkey mind and allow us live in the present moment.
Keating describes the four brain functions as relating to four energy centers found in each of us as individuals. He calls us to get to know our false self – the ego. This is indeed spiritual work. For the ego or false self, he writes, consists “of the programs for happiness that we developed in order to address the fixation of the pre-rational energy centers. All religious traditions recognize this false self and offer various disciplines and rituals designed to transcend it. None of these methods can guarantee success.”
So what does that mean to us in terms of everyday life and our relationship with one another here in church? Let’s think about an emotional response that you may have to someone – maybe in this room or someone in your family – someone you have made a judgment of. You have criticized their actions. Perhaps it’s a kind of reptilian response – an angry response – and perhaps it comes from the ego or false self. Perhaps it’s because of some wounding that you had as a child. I suggest that we look at our critical nature and that we ask it some questions. Anger is what psychologists call a secondary emotion. What comes before anger is hurt or fear. So we need to ask ourselves when we get critical of others or angry – if we’re angry – let’s look deeper at this anger. Is this anger coming from hurt or fear?
Next we can ask ourselves, “Is this hurt or fear something I have brought to this interaction, or perhaps is it something that they are doing to me?” When I believe that my anger and criticism is because of what they did, then I blame them and I feel self-righteous and I usually have a lot of frustration. Next I try to do something that will manage that situation or remove the thing that creates frustration for me. But if we did this, we would be missing an opportunity to develop our spiritual selves, to know ourselves more deeply. We need to know that we are all reptiles. We all have a monkey mind. We would be missing Jesus’ mandate to know ourselves if we didn’t get to know it.
Jesus wants us to speak out against injustice, and so did Gandhi, and so did many of our prophets. But they also asked us to love our enemies and do our work against injustice in love and in non-violence not with self-righteous indignation and anger.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said, “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, God’s rule is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. 2If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. 3Rather, God is inside of you and outside you. 4When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living God. 5But if you do not know yourselves, then you will live in poverty, and you are poverty.”
The truth that will set us free is indeed within us. Our spiritual practice is to know ourselves and to be honest with ourselves about the true nature of many of our automatic responses.
There was an Indian saint, Shantideva, who lived in the eighth century. He tells a story about a man walking on the earth barefooted. All the terrible sharp rocks and cut glass created a terrible problem: he had all cut-up, bloody, painful feet. The problem could be solved by managing the situation by either covering the entire earth with leather in order to remove all the rocks and glass, or he could go inward and create a personal solution and maybe just place a piece of leather on the bottom of his own foot.
May it be so with all of us.
Let us pray.
Gracious God, we come humbly before this communion table. We call out for all the diversity of the human family to be welcome at this table, to be welcome at our church, to be welcome in our families and our communities. Gracious God, may this be an opportunity for us to reflect, at this holy communion table, about all those ways that we meet here, that we come to you for healing, we come to you for mercy.
Amen.