You may not believe this but Jesus is giving you an excuse to leave church early today.  Some people don’t need one, of course.  Like the folks who sat at the back of the sanctuary in Jerry Spivey’s former church.  As soon as the pastor started to offer the invitation they were out of there.  Luby’s, maybe?  Or, was it something else that made them uncomfortable with an invitation to grace?  And, of course, there are the occasional bathroom trips some children make, mid-sermon.  Never have understood that actually.  For one thing, they can sit for hours until their backsides are numb playing video games.  What’s so difficult about one hour for something sacred?  Needing attention, maybe?  I’m from the old school, in case you didn’t already know that.  The old school that believes that stretching the bladder stretches the soul.

Which is why you tend to become more spiritual the older you get.  An old man told a friend recently that he was thrilled because the previous night he’d pulled an all-nighter.  “You stayed up all night long?” his friend asked.  “No,” he said, “I went all night without having to go to the bathroom.”  Until you’re old enough to appreciate that story, you’re young enough to sit through one hour of church without leaving.  But, just in case you need it, Jesus himself is giving you, and me, an excuse to leave church early.  “‘If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar.  First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.’”  Maybe this is why some leave church early, or don’t come at all.  This is tough gospel. 

This is a gospel that says it is impossible to define our relationship with God apart from our relationship with each other.  This is a gospel that says that the acid proof of whether or not we’ve met God is determined by how we treat each other.  This is a gospel that burdens us, yes, I said it, burdens us, with the responsibility of extending the same grace we’ve received from God to others even when, especially when, it’s their fault that something is wrong.  This is a gospel that even demands that we take the first step.  We can’t even wait until the other person realizes what an idiot they were for hurting us or even starts to feel guilty.  Maybe that’s why some people leave church early, or don’t come at all.  This house of God is meant to be a place where people who don’t even like each other are confronted with their grace-given obligation to love each other.  To be of one heart and one mind.  Maybe that’s why the apostle Paul wrote that this “message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God (1 Corinthians 1:18).” 

Only people who were about to perish and got pulled back can possibly understand that gospel.  Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense.  It’s not only backwards that we should love people who hurt us but that we should actually make effort to make things right with no guarantee that we’ll be appreciated for it.  It’s easier to just slip out early, don’t you think, than to sit and listen to that and then be expected to actually respond to it?  This is a gospel that just won’t let us off the hook because we said “yes” to Jesus in early childhood but grew up with a full-blown hatred of anyone who ever cuts us off.  This is a gospel that won’t let us off the hook by allowing us to feel better about ourselves just because we aren’t sitting on death row convicted of first-degree murder.  Jesus said, "‘You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.'  But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.’”  Jesus is just as concerned about first-degree anger. 

If you don’t like this you better stop reading the Sermon on the Mount and, for that matter, the Bible.  This thing about forgiving each other and loving each other is everywhere.  Kind of like what George Bush said about being President.  A reporter asked him if, when he was taking his long walks on his ranch down at Crawford, he was able to forget that he was President.  “Nope,” he said in typical Texan, “being President is kind of just always all over you.”  It is an obligation that goes with him everywhere he goes.  And, if you claim Jesus as your Lord, so is your obligation to work toward reconciling the broken relationships in your life.  If you choose Jesus, which means you choose to accept his choosing of you, then it will always be all over you. 

Newsweek cartoon.  Little boy sitting in front of television with his dad watching the news about the terrorists.  He turns to his dad and asks, “Will we hate back?”  (Newsweek, September 24, 2001)  Sometimes, you’re just reading a cartoon and the gospel catches up with you.  Will we hate back?  When others hate us?  When others hurt us?  How we answer that question is nothing less than everything.  Anger may be the normal human response to any given number of offenses, large or small.  What defines us as Christian is what we then choose do about our anger.  There is no clearer definition of how far God’s grace has gotten with you or me than how far we are willing to extend it to each other.  So, getting “saved” from hell is not the end of the gospel.  It is just the beginning.  No wonder some people leave early.  Or, just stop coming after a while.  It just doesn’t make sense. 

It doesn’t make sense, Jesus even allowed, because “‘You have heard that it was said.’”  It’s those authoritative voices from the past that instructed us in other ways Jesus is challenging.  Holy voices, or so we thought at the time.  Like the manuals the terrorists studied that guided them in their last moments.  Guided them to sacrifice their lives for what they believed was a cause so holy it demanded that they butcher innocents by the thousands.  You have heard that it was said.  We, too, have memorized manuals others have written for us on anger management.  When it comes to anger, what have you “heard that it was said?”

Years ago, the father of one of the young men in my youth group at another church called.  Could we have coffee?  Over cheap pie, he began telling me about why he felt so cheap.  He and his son had been playing golf.  Dad had made a bad shot and it made him angry.  Really angry.  In his anger, and right in front of his son, he slammed his club to the ground.  Now, this was in my pre-golf days.  So, I didn’t understand his anger.  And, this was in my pre-parent days.  So, I didn’t understand what made this grown man start crying.  He was scared to death that his son, having witnessed his anger, might think that was a legitimate way to express it himself.  You might think this dad was over-reacting.  But, which of us parents hasn’t worried late into the night about what our kids are learning from us?  About what we have said that they will memorize and later repeat and re-live.  Just like children learn to sit through worship from parents who go the distance, they learn to manage their anger, first, from watching how their parents manage anger. 

What’s your style?  Shouting till the neighbors wonder?  Slamming doors?  Crying until someone comforts you?  Throwing shoes or books?  Screaming till you’re hoarse?  Pouting withdrawal?  In your face or passive-aggressive?  Listen closely and, when you are angry, a voice you heard long ago will tell you how to handle it, for better or for worse.  You have heard that it was said, “when you’re angry, do it this way.”  In most cases, we do what works to manipulate others with our anger into doing what we want them to do.  We do what works until it doesn’t work, or better, until, by grace, we choose another way whether we get our way or not.  In this case, Jesus said, we’ve been taught by old voices, holy voices we thought, the voices of spiritual law, that only those who carry their anger to the point of murder have anything to fear from man or God.  Jesus draws the circle a little tighter.  “‘I tell you,’” he said, that “‘anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.  Again, anyone who says to his brother, `Raca,' is answerable to the Sanhedrin.  But anyone who says, `You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.’” 

Honestly, I’ve never worried too much about murdering anyone.  And, I’ve never, even in my worst moment of anger, felt compelled to roll down my window and yell at the other driver who just cut me off, Raca!  Not a big wordin my vocabulary.  It’s not a word that made the Webster’s cut.  It’s just an ancient expression of one who has come to the conclusion that, because someone else has offended them, they are absolutely worthless.  To stand in judgment of another is to take a place that belongs rightly only to God.  To take

God’s place, well, is to die.  That’s what got Adam and Eve in trouble and all of their descendants since.  Taking God’s place.  So, Jesus draws the circle a little tighter.  We never have the right to take God’s place and judge another only from the perspective of how their behavior has hurt us.  Unresolved anger, an unwillingness to view life from any perspective but our own, is taking a place that belongs only to God.  That anger you won’t release, whatever it’s doing to anyone else, is slowly but surely killing you.  It’s always the stuff we won’t let go of that’s killing us. 

Honestly, I wish I wasn’t so sentimental.  I wish it was easier to let go.  I’m already driving my oldest son crazy with all the times I ask, “Do you remember when?”  He’s more interested in launching out of here than remembering the launching pad.  I’m mentally photocopying every moment I can store.  If our family was the space shuttle Griffin would have his eyes set to the stars as soon as we launched.  I’d be the one trying to get one more picture of the booster rockets falling off behind us.  But, one thing I don’t miss about the boys being little is their arguments over who got to push the elevator buttons.  Keeping up with whose turn it is.  It’s right up there with arguments over whose turn it is to sit in the front seat.  Of course, my boys are too old now for me to tell you that they ever did that.  But, how many times did I have to pull them apart while lecturing?  “Your brother is more important than the button!  More important that we’re all in the same car than who is sitting in what seat.”  All I want them to do is be grateful.  They have a brother I never had.  So, I lecture and I hope I model a voice they’ll hear even when they’re too old to pull an all-nigther.  Your brother is more important than . . . well, you fill in the blank.

The stories we’ll hear from the World Trade Center event will never end as long as we’re alive.  Yet, even as we hear of tragedy, the gospel, even the hard gospel, keeps rising out of the ashes.  Like the story of Genelle Guzman, the fifth and last person to be pulled out of the rubble alive.  She was on the 64^th floor of the south tower.  She and a co-worker started down when the plane hit the north tower.  By the time she decided to leave, the second plane hit their tower.  It took them forty-five minutes to get to the 13^th floor and that is when they heard the boom.  The tower they were in was collapsing. 

She found herself pinned in the rubble for twenty-six hours, screaming for help until she was hoarse.  With her head pinned between concrete pillars and her legs crushed, she was certain she was going to die.  Listen to her words as she described what happened next and see if you don’t hear gospel in it for yourself.  “‘I yelled out and someone answered back.  They (asked) me, ‘Do you see the light?’  I couldn’t see any light.  Then they decided to come closer.  I put my hands through a little crack and I felt (them) hold my hand.  The fireman said, ‘I got you.’  And, I said, ‘Thank God.’  (“Last tower survivor heard a voice, then felt the touch of a hand,” Dallas Morning News, September 29, 2001)  Guzman could have come out bitter.  Who would blame her?  The rest of her life she’ll be seeing the pictures of the very people who flew the plane into the building that fell on top of her.  It’s going to be all over her wherever she goes.  She’ll never get away from it.  She could have left the rubble as bitter as the hell she was in.  But, she came out not only grateful but giving.  How does that happen? 

It’s in her own words.  Did you hear it?  Listen closer.  Guzman’s own words.  “‘I feel I have to do something special with my life now.  There were so few people spared.  I have been given such a gift, and I have to spend my life giving it back to others.’”  When she finally heard the voice of the one who had come to rescue her and she felt his hand, that’s when bitterness turned to giving on the heels of gratitude.  That’s how it happens.  When you choose gratitude instead of bitterness.  Gratitude that, though you could have been abandoned, you were saved.  That’s when it happens, if it happens at all. 

So, if you’re tempted to cut out early on a gospel that demands more than you’re willing to give, or you just can’t or won’t forgive the ones who have hurt you, then maybe all you need to do is remember when you were trapped.  And, even before you saw the light, you heard a voice.  Then, you felt a hand.  You remember what that hand felt like, don’t you?