Sermon: I thought I was doing the right thing
I’m
thinking about an eight-word sentence that seems to stand in the background of
the reading and shine through it: “I thought I was doing the right thing.” Or, it might even be, “I thought I was doing
what God wanted.”
It’s one
of the ways Paul describes the way he lived out his faith in God before he
really saw, heard and came to grips with Jesus.
He was
a zealot – a man of deep faith, committed to God, educated to know and defend
God’s name, and ready to attack those who were enemies of God’s law for the
world.
Today,
I don’t think he would have been a suicide bomber. But he would have been a commander of a
religiously-inspired militia with orders to search and destroy, engaged in one
of the “holy wars” that trouble us. In
the right circumstances he would have been a fundamentalist sniper or bomber. He used violence against others -- even
lethal violence in the name of God, and he says quite honestly, “I thought I
was doing what God wanted. I thought I
was doing the right thing.”
There
are different ways, of course, that this can be said – with different emphasis
and meaning, and for different purposes.
It can
be a statement of self-defence – a way of excusing or even justifying what one
has done and the kind of activity one was involved in.
“I was
just following orders,” is a defence we associate with the Nuremberg trials of
Nazi officers and soldiers after the Holocaust of the Second Great War. Good soldiers, they were following the orders
of their superiors; good Germans of the time, they were serving the will of the
god they were taught to believe in.
Like
suicide bombers today blowing up infidels to begin a holy war. Like Klansmen a few generations ago lynching
people who were muddying the pool of God’s chosen people. Like religious people who cause of the kind
of god they believe in, pray for gays and lesbians to contract AIDS. Or maybe like us a generation or two from
now, when our culture’s consumerist lifestyle further degrades the Earth. Will we say, “We honestly thought God wanted us
just to enjoy all this stuff”?
That’s
twelve words. But it amounts to the same
thing in the end. “I thought I was doing
the right thing. I was doing what the
god -- or the gods, of my time wanted.”
It’s an attempt to defend what is increasingly indefensible in the face
of mounting evidence to the contrary.
Which
can lead to a second way – a second spirit in which this statement can be
offered – a spirit of shame for what one has done, when
the reality of it really sinks in, and one can only be bewildered at how
thoroughly everything is changed.
I
wonder if this is the way Paul felt these words – “I thought I was doing what
God wanted” – in those first few days and maybe even weeks and months after his
experience of Jesus as the Word of God on the way to Damascus. He was arresting, killing and terrorizing
people in the name of God – treating them as less than full brothers and
sisters because they believed in and understood God differently than he
did. And after he came to see and know
Jesus as the Word of God, and the way of Jesus as the way of God, how could he
not be deeply ashamed, wracked with guilt, aware only of his own deep error?
“I used to speak against him, attack his people, and I was proud. I’m the biggest sinner of all,” he says in
the opening sentences of the letter to Timothy.
Echoes of shame persist even years later.
I wouldn’t be surprised if all of us can identify with this – if at some
point in our life, maybe more than once, maybe even continually in some way,
each one of us feels or has felt this kind of shame for something we did, some
activity we were involved in, some way we were or are. “I was just doing what I knew how to do,
doing what I had learned, doing what everyone else was doing … and I’m so ashamed
when I look at it now.”
I
wonder if this is also where we are at this point in time in relation to what
we’re learning through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the
residential schools, our historical treatment of the First Nations, and the
racism deeply rooted in Canadian society.
It’s understandable that we feel shame, and the problem is that shame is
paralyzing. It immobilizes the soul. Often it leads to denial as the only way out
we can imagine. If we can only deny that
it was really that bad – or is that bad, we don’t need to feel so ashamed.
Thank
goodness there’s another way, though – a third way of speaking that honest
statement, “I thought I was doing the right thing; I thought I was doing what
God wanted.”
It’s
the way of grace – of experiencing and knowing God’s grace, and of
gratitude – of honestly confessing how limited our first experience of God was,
and being truly grateful for the grace of being able to grow in our knowledge
and understanding of God.
This
is what happened to Paul, and what enabled him to be the leader that he was for
the church of his time. He began as we
all do, with a true but limited knowledge and experience of God and God’s good
will – a limited experience of God that he made so absolute that he felt
justified in dismissing, demonizing and attacking people who didn’t believe and
live as he did. But along the way – on
the road to Damascus and for three years in the desert in prayerful and
probably guided retreat, he came to see God in new ways, came to grips with the
radicality of Jesus as the Word of God in real life, and grew beyond what he
had known and been. And he knew deep
down it was a loving and patiently nurturing God who helped him do this.
The
challenge for us – as it was for the churches for which 1 Timothy was first
written, is to be open in that same way to God and to the way of God in our own
life and in the world today.
How
many times do we find ourselves saying, “I thought I was doing the right thing”
in a defensive
spirit.
How
many times in shame, feeling immobilized and paralyzed by guilt and regret?
And
are there situations today – either individually or as a church, where we find
ourselves saying, “I thought I was doing what God wanted,” or “We thought we
were doing what God wanted” in a spirit of honest and humble gratitude
for the ways in which God is patiently helping us to grow in our understanding
and knowledge of what is right?
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