My Need to be Right

Genesis 50:15-21, Romans 14:1-12, Matthew 18:21-35

September 14, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

As our children begin the Fall Sunday School program this morning, I am reminded that someone once told me that they thought that the central point of Christian Education for children was to teach them the difference between right and wrong. So let’s consider a couple of stories we heard this morning and figure out who was right and who was wrong.

Joseph was right. He had these dreams that showed that he would be powerful someday and his brothers would be under his control. He wanted to let his brothers know there was a good reason he was their father’s favorite, it just wasn’t an arbitrary choice. Joseph’s brothers were right. Joseph was an obnoxious, arrogant git, someone who reveled in being the favorite of his father and paraded around in the fancy outfit Dad gave him to show how much he loved him. He didn’t do his share of the work. He was unpleasant to be with. They all would be better off without him. Joseph would have been right, on meeting his brothers again many years later when he was powerful, to sell them into slavery or throw them in prison for what they had done to him. Right?

In the story Jesus tells, the Master is right; his servant owes him an enormous debt, too big for him ever to repay, so the only way to get some money back, his money that he is rightfully owed, is to sell the servant and his family into slavery and at least recoup something.

The servant is right in his attitude toward his fellow servant who is in debt to him. The debt needed to be repaid. If the man would not repay, then he was in his legal rights to have him thrown into prison. Maybe then his family would be motivated to cough up the cash in order to get him freed. And the Master, in the end, was right to punish the servant for seeking compassion and debt relief for himself but being unwilling to offer similar debt relief for another servant in a similar situation.

Joseph, his brothers, the Master, the servant, all of them are right in what they think and feel toward the other people in their stories. Those who have been wronged are right in seeking to have things made right. It’s sort of like all those folk who got those variable rate mortgages and had the whole thing explained to them up front and now they want the government to bail them out of the fix they got themselves into. Or those people who keep building homes along the Gulf Coast where they know hurricanes come every year. Or teenagers who have sex and then get pregnant or get diseases and expect family or taxpayers to take care of them; they knew what they were doing had consequences. They knew it was wrong.

In the midst of this clear definition of right and wrong, something else happens, however, something that messes up this simple right and wrong equation. Joseph meets his brothers, and, so happy is he for the chance to be in relationship with them again, to reclaim his family, he forgives them and welcomes them to share his prosperity with him. The Master hears the pleas of his servant and, realizing there is no chance he will ever be able to repay the debt and that his family will suffer, decides not just to give him more time to repay but to forgive the debt altogether. The decision for compassion and mercy does not mean that right is not right and wrong is not wrong; it means that people who make the decision for compassion and mercy see that there is more to morality, more to religion, more to human relationships than right and wrong. They find power not in being right, but in being loving.

Alan Miller, the Conference Minister of the Penn Northeast Conference, used to take a little sign with him to churches in conflict and ask them to post it on a bulletin board in their meeting room. It said “If my need to be right is more important than my relationship with you, then we will never be God’s community.” The church, Alan said, is a place where building relationships of love is more important than any position, no matter how right that position may be. Paul is saying the same thing to the Roman Christians when he tells them not to judge their brothers and sisters.

Now in case someone mistakes what I am saying, I want you to notice here that the people who make the choice to be generous and forgiving in these stories, those who decide not to pass judgment they would be right to pass, those who value relationships over being right, are the people who are in positions of power. Joseph had the power of life and death over his brothers, as did the Master over the servant. This is really important, I think. I would not look at a battered woman or an abused child and say that they should let their abuser hurt them in order to stay in relationship with that abuser. There are situations when wrong must be addressed, and those who have had all power taken away from them are in that situation.

But most of us do have power in many situations in our lives. Even if we are not a government official, like Joseph was, or the owner of vast estates and servants, like the Master, we may be like the servant who, though he had no power in his relationship with his Master, did have power over a fellow servant. You and I are in a dozen positions of power every day. Some of you are supervisors of other workers, some of you are teachers or professors or administrators. Some of you are parents. Some of you are more popular or athletically or academically gifted at school. All of us interact with clerks and cashiers, waiters and waitresses, service people of all kinds every day. As American citizens and taxpayers, we are as a nation in power over peoples around the world who are in debt to us economically or afraid of our military. Yes, we are a powerful people. And in many situations, large and small, we probably think we are right more often than not, and maybe we are.

A group of folk in the church have been reading an amazing little book called Anatomy of Peace. I highly commend it to you. The book tells the story of a group of parents whose problem children have come to a camp, sort of like Outward Bound, to try to help them straighten out their lives. At the same time the parents are working with a man named Yusuf to help them figure out how to help their children, among other things. At one point, Yusuf and a parent named Lou are having a debate about the importance of being right. Yusuf asks Lou, “Have you ever been in conflict with someone who thought he was wrong?” Lou answers, “No, but that doesn’t mean they’re not.” “True,” Yusuf replies, “But you see no conflict can be solved so long as all parties are convinced they are right. Solution is possible only when at least one party begins to consider how he might be wrong.” Lou blurts out, “But what if I’m not wrong!” Yusuf explains that the “deepest way in which we are right or wrong is in our way of being toward others. I can be right on the surface – in my behavior or positions- while being entirely mistaken beneath, in my way of being. I might, for example, yell at my kids about the importance of chores and be entirely correct about their importance. However, do you suppose I invite the help and cooperation I am wanting from them when my heart is at war in my yelling?” Yusuf goes on to explain to Lou that when he is in a position of power and is convinced he is right and the other is wrong, Lou is seeing the other person as an object, not a human being (p.56). Seeing the other as human makes all the difference.

Joseph’s brothers saw Joseph as an object in the way of their getting more of their father’s affection and reward. The ungrateful servant saw his fellow servant as an object in the way of him getting his money back. Their need to be right was more important than their relationships. Joseph and the Master were somehow able to transcend their rightness and see the others as human beings with whom they shared a relationship.

Post-apartheid South Africa, as it crafted its revolutionary Peace and Reconciliation Commission reclaimed a piece of African philosophy as well as Desmond Tutu’s deep Christian beliefs in the importance of relationships. That African philosophical concept is called “Ubuntu.” It is often translated as “humanity,” but the concept is that to be human is to be in relationship. Human is not a singular or individual concept, but we are only human to the extent that we are in relationship with other humans. If my relationships with other humans are broken in any way, then I am less than human. My first goal needs to be repair of our humanity, not making sure my right way is followed.

My father used to say, “There are two ways to do things: my way and the wrong way.” From his point of view, I spent a great deal of my life doing things the wrong way. Even though I knew I was right. In my adolescence and young adult years I was full of righteous anger toward him, blaming him totally for the break in our relationship, for the hurt I had experienced when he was powerful in my life and I had little power in relationship to him. One of the few regrets I have about my life to this point is that he died before I understood clearly enough my own power as it had grown in our relationship, before I clearly could see that sometimes he actually had been right and that ultimately, the repair of that relationship was more important than my need to be self-righteous about who he had been in my childhood. I am fervently hoping that, God working in both of us, we will meet someday in the new heaven and earth and find the breach repaired, our humanity restored in that relationship.

The theologian Jim Wallis wrote, “Jesus did not say ‘Blessed are the peace lovers,’ which, of course, we all claim to be. Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the peace makers,’ which is a decidedly different undertaking.” And, I might add, a much more difficult one, full of risks. As long as our need to be right is more important than our relationships, personal or global, there is no hope for peace. But I love Jesus, and even though I fail at this regularly, I am, to use Gloria Steinam’s word, a “hope-a-holic.” What about you? What work lies before you this week in your quest to be fully human? Amen.