My first year of seminary I sat with several other seminarians in the common room of our dorm building and watched a movie titled Saved.  This movie, Saved, is based in an evangelical high school.  The lead character, Mary, and her best friend, Hilary Faye, are the “leaders of the pack” in this school, always joyfully spouting off Biblical passages and pointing fingers at those in their school leading their lives in ways they didn’t think were in line with a godly life.  Well, Mary accidentally gets pregnant, a “mistake” that in the end brings her closer to Christ, brings her into a truly deep and meaningful relationship with Christ.  In this journey she sees the danger of pointing fingers at other people and saying how un-Christian they are.  She also, in this journey, loses her best friend Hilary Faye.  She not only loses this friend, in fact, but this friend starts trying to “save” Mary.  When Hilary Faye fails at “saving” Mary, Hilary Faye turns mean and spiteful.  Suddenly you begin to really see the difference between Hilary Faye’s faith and Mary’s faith.  Hilary Faye’s is based on some kind of idea of a godly life, while Mary’s has become based on an actual relationship with Christ.  At one point in this movie, when Hilary Faye is fighting with Mary, trying to “save” her, Hilary Faye yells at Mary, “You are slipping into the flames of hell!”  Mary responds by saying, “I am filled with the love of Christ!” and turning her back and walking away.  As Mary is walking away, Hilary Faye takes the Bible in hand and throws it at Mary, trying to hit her in the head with it.  It lands on the ground and Mary stoops to pick it up.  Mary holds the Bible out in front of her and says, “This is not a weapon!”

This is not a weapon.  I wish we had all been so lucky throughout history to know that.  We have a history in this religion of forgetting that the Bible is, in fact, not a weapon.  We have stood behind it to kill hundreds of thousands of people, some of whom were even Christian, in the Crusades.  We have used it to exclude people.  The Ku Klux Klan has thrown it in people’s faces, so sure that what they believe is supported by Biblical text.  People on television, in politics, in churches use it to show that they’re right and others are wrong.  People from both factions in the Episcopal Church are using right now, spewing Biblical passages at one another to prove who is right and who is wrong.  All this time they just seem to have forgotten that the Bible is not a weapon.

The writer of 1 Timothy is writing to a community being persecuted by the government.  The writer begins by showing the universality of the Christian faith: that the Christian faith is for all, even for kings and all who are in high positions.  The writer urges this community to, in the midst of this persecution, make supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings for everyone.  This is followed by a “creed for life”: the fundamental basis of all intercessory prayer is that there is one God.  We bring to God our concern for others because he is our common Father.  To his plea for unceasing, universal prayer the author adds a direction regarding the spiritual conditions for effective prayer.  “I desire, then, that in every place the men should pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or argument.”  Both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament emphasis is laid upon the right heart as essential to the prayer, as essential to relationship with God.

The author’s plea, then, is for this community, for us, here and now, to pray for all people, to pray for one another, and to do so without anger or argument.  In order for us to truly pray, in order for us to truly be in right relationship with Christ, we must do so without anger or argument with one another. We must do so, as Mary in Saved says, “filled with the love of Christ.”  We are, in fact, called to love one another just as Christ loves us.  In John chapter 13 Jesus says, “…love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”  Love one another just as Jesus has loved us.  Pray for one another and love one another, without argument and without anger.

This passage brings to mind the parish, St. Luke’s, which raised me up to send me to seminary.  It’s the only Episcopal Church in Boone, North Carolina, where I finished my last two years of college.  St. Luke’s has three Sunday morning services: an early Rite I no music service; this was followed by a family service with a family choir, piano, and band; the last was a traditional Rite II service with an adult choir.  When I arrived, there were two services: early morning Rite I, no music; and later morning traditional Rite II service with the adult choir singing on one side of the church, leading half the hymns, and the family choir singing on the other side of the church, leading the other half of the hymns.  Shortly upon my arrival I overheard some bickering between parishioners, heard news of some very important meetings with the choirs and the priest, and just felt some overall tension.  I distinctly remember a potluck lunch after church one Sunday.  You couldn’t have cut the tension at that picnic with the sharpest knife in the world.  Here’s what happened.  The parish had three services, which worked well because then the family choir and the adult choir got to lead different services.  The two services also had a very different feel to them.  One, the family service, was more contemporary and laid back, with praise music.  The other, the traditional service, was more traditional, very liturgical, with music from the hymnal we have in these very pews here at Trinity Parish.  The priest who was there when I arrived had come to the parish and almost immediately combined the family and traditional services.  This caused a lot of fighting between the choirs, and within the parish as a whole.  There were many people who came to the family service because they felt more comfortable there, and vice versa with the traditional service.  There was so much fighting that the priest resigned and the diocese had to step in to stop the fighting and help the parish heal.  Let us fast forward to June, when I went back to this parish to preach.  They have a new priest, three Sunday morning services, and they all get along.  Now when they do combined services or combined events, like a parish potluck, most people take part.  It truly is a loving parish.  When I told my husband Greg, who has visited this parish with me, this story, he couldn’t believe it.  The parish, he says, seems so healthy and full of love. 

They finally realized that they were fighting over nonsense stuff, really.  They finally realized that in this spirit of anger and arguing, they had lost the spirit of God.  Even though they were “praying” together every Sunday, their hearts and minds were so overcome with anger that they could not truly pray, for themselves or for one another.

I think about this a lot when I see people pointing their fingers at one another.  “I’m a better Christian than that person.”  “She’s a sinner.”  “He doesn’t know his Bible.”  “Their lifestyle is ungodly.  Don’t they know they’re slipping into the flames of hell?”  “Our church is better than their church.”

I am so overcome with grief when I hear I hear Christian people arguing with one another, using the Bible, or the church, as a weapon.  This religion, this church, has survived for centuries despite the arguing and finger pointing.  But we are slowly losing members across denominations.  People feel this spirit of anger.  They hear the arguing.  All it does is turn people away.  They see the hypocrisy between the way Christ calls us to love and the way in which we lose sight of that love, for Christ and for one another, in our arguments with one another.

But there is good news yet.  We can change this, one parish at a time.  We can change this.  We can decide to stop pointing our fingers at one another, decided to stop living out of a spirit of anger and argument, with one another, within our own families, within our communities.  People will know us by our faith.  People will know us by the spirit of love we offer to one another in this church, in our families, in our communities.  People will know us by the loving prayers we offer to God for one another, prayers offered in the true spirit of Christ’s love.