Strict Discipline; 2.16.20; ICCM; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson
Once a long time ago, there was a devout man who thought he wanted to be a monk. He asked to be accepted as a postulant in a Cistercian Order known for their severe asceticism. He followed the pattern of monastic life, including the manual labor, the seven hours of daily prayer, and even the discipline of strict silence. After the first year he was invited to meet with the Abbot who reviewed his progress and asked him if he wanted to speak the two words he was allowed to say each year. The man said, “Food Bad”. With that the monk shuffled down the unheated stone hallways. The next year, when the Abbot asked him for his two-word comment the would-be monk said with a scowl, “Bed Hard!” The Abbot sent him back to his duties. When the Abbot summoned him after another year and asked for his two words, he responded, “I Quit.” “You might as well,” the Abbot replied, “Since you got here, all you’ve done is complain.”
Christian monasticism originated in the third and fourth centuries, when a group of Christians now known as the desert fathers withdrew from the cities of the Roman Empire to the deserts of Syria and Egypt. They renounced their possessions, their social status, the prospect of marriage and family. They believed that money and their comfortable houses and their lives of general ease were interfering with their friendship with God. So they renounced all those things and went to the desert to fast and live quietly.
When they got there, they were distressed to find that although they had left all those things back in the city, they were now afflicted by thoughts about them–thoughts about loneliness, thoughts about love, thoughts about safety. They were haunted by memories of the fine meals and beautiful homes they had left in Alexandria and plagued by thoughts about how their fellow monk in the hut down the road had a better view and a more comfortable mat. The desert monks had escaped the things themselves, but they had not escaped their own imaginations. And so, they began to retrain their thoughts.
The pattern these desert monks developed for that retraining boils down to three steps – notice, quarantine, and replace. That is: before you can stop thinking a thought, first you must notice it. You must notice that you are indeed stuck in thoughts of anger or lust or envy or gloom. Then, the next step is to intentionally set the thought aside.
Let us say hypothetically that you are totally occupied by thinking about an adult child back home, or a grandchild who’s gone off the rails. It keeps you up at night, your stomach is churning, you roll the thoughts around in your head like marbles, “if only she would listen to me, what he needs to do is…, how can I get in touch with her?”
In this example – you might notice that you are imagining the worst case scenario, then having noticed, you might set the thought aside, maybe just for 10 minutes; you might say–“I’m just not going to think that thought right now, I can come back to it in a half hour if I want to, but for right now, I’m walking away from it.” Notice. Quarantine. And then – step 3 – replace the thought with a prayer. Disciplining of our imaginations is not undertaken simply for the sake of discipline. It is for the sake of truer self-knowledge, and of living more in reality instead of living in distraction, and all of that is in turn for the sake of creating space to attend to God
(This account of desert practice draws on, inter alia, Mary Margaret Funk, Thoughts Matter: The Practice of the Spiritual Life (Continuum, 1988), especially chapter one.)
“You have heard it said, ‘You shall not murder’…But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.” “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery … in his heart”
Jesus sounds somewhat extreme here. What might it mean to take seriously the idea that your thoughts and emotions matter? What if your thoughts and emotions can themselves be sin?
Historical precedent suggests that when you take that notion seriously, you get ridiculed. It was 1976 when then-candidate Jimmy Carter agreed to an ill-fated interview with Playboy magazine. After the umpteenth question about whether his firmly held Baptist religious convictions would unduly influence his policy decisions in the White House, Carter began opining about grace, and about sin, and he quoted this morning’s Gospel reading:
I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I’m going to do it anyhow, because I’m human and I’m tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, ‘I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery.’ I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do–and I have done it–and God forgives me for it.
Carter had a big lead before this interview, but when choice quotations leaked to the press, even before the interview was published, he dropped 15 points in the polls. Evangelicals and feminists were, for different reasons, horrified that Carter had spoken to Playboy in the first place, and everyone else, especially Northerners mocked him for his piety and his lame attempt to sound like he was connecting with the common man by admitting the lust in his heart.
Political cartoonists had a field day. Instead of making him seem like an average Joe, the governor’s comments about lust and adultery actually reinforced people’s opinion that Carter was way too pious and way too priggish and took Jesus way too seriously – I mean, really, confessing that you have lustful thoughts as though it were a sin – a serious sin, on par with actually having an affair? Please.
Surely, we are not supposed to take these hyperbolic and demanding things Jesus is saying about murder and lust and false witness at face value. Surely it cannot be that thinking a mean thought about someone is the equivalent of murdering her. Surely our thoughts–the thoughts we keep to ourselves and never even speak of, much less act on—surely those thoughts are less important than our actions. And in addition to being less important than actions, surely also thoughts are less controllable than actions: I can prevent myself from sleeping with someone besides my spouse, but I can’t reasonably be held responsible for daydreaming about doing so.
Jesus, and Jimmy Carter – and I pair the two together in the least partisan way possible – Jesus and Jimmy Carter seem to suggest something different.
Underneath the specifics of murder and adultery and bearing false witness, Jesus seems to be suggesting that we are capable of disciplining our thoughts, at least as capable as we are of disciplining our bodies; and Jesus seems to be suggesting that what happens in our thoughts and imaginations matters.
Perhaps today’s Gospel passage is inviting each of us to give up a thought. Consider renouncing the anxiety about family members back home. Consider renouncing the jealous thoughts about the person with more health or wealth or whatever. Renounce those thoughts, because Jesus told us that they are the equivalent of murder and theft. Renounce them to make a different kind of space in your brain for God, for charity, for love, for whatever wonderful thing you might uncover when you set aside the anger and the anxiety and the envy.
I don’t know how this renouncing will work out for you, but I want you to try it before you toss it aside on the pile we all keep, that pile called “things Jesus says to do but we know no one possibly could.”
Our thoughts about our fears or anger are really just expressions of another underlying belief: that we are alone, that our lives are not enough, that we know best. Those thoughts – those alone thoughts, those isolate-from-my-neighbors thoughts – those thoughts are the opposite of Christianity because in the Christian faith we love one another and we have brothers and sisters and we don’t isolate ourselves. For Christians, the kind of isolation that follows from our fearful, self-pitying, self-justifying, or judgmental thinking is frankly just not allowed.
The hardest thing about Jesus’ words in today’s passage is not that they set a high standard, or that they feel moralistic. The hardest thing about these words is that they are simple – so simple as to feel threatening and strange. Jesus is simply telling us that it is not just our good deeds but even our thoughts that somehow contribute to the Kingdom of God. To think a loving thought is to bring about the Kingdom of God, and to think an angry thought is not.
This seems mysterious to me – It seems as mysterious as God sending Jesus to show us the way. It seems as mysterious as God reaching out and making a community from outsiders, as mysterious as the sending of the Spirit to teach us and lead us in holiness. It seems as mysterious as God feeding us the bread and cup, and making us his body, and giving us his peace. Amen.