Texts: Deut. 30: 15-20; Matthew 5: 21-26

Shortly after 10 AM on October 2, 2006, Charles Roberts, known as a devoted family man and father of two children, walked into the Amish one room schoolhouse and told the boys to leave. He then systematically began to kill the remaining children, all girls. As the police, responding to the 911 call, broke into the barricaded building, Charles Roberts turned the gun on himself and pulled the trigger. Another community faced another horrific tragedy because of our insane American attitude towards guns bolstered by the NRA and wing nuts who think that any person has the right to have a gun to kill people. But this morning rather than talking about that deeply disturbing face of our society, I want to focus on something deeper, something that our vengeance-oriented society cannot seem to comprehend: choosing life.

Roberts had lived with his wife and two children in the small town of Bart, just a stone’s throw from the West Nickel Mines School where five young Amish girls were murdered. Family members from the Amish community visited the Roberts family to comfort them in their grief and pain. Charlie, as he was known, twisted by anger and hate had never forgiven God because his wife had miscarried a pregnancy some nine years before. Now many of us would say he was obviously a sick man, but it’s too easy to say that someone was “sick,” emotionally disturbed, or even mentally ill. How often do we in our less --well, let’s call them thinking -- moments, the ones that hit our gut in a deep and personal way, how many of us feel that God is responsible for what goes wrong in our lives?

But let’s get back to the Amish and their response. Believing deeply that Jesus offered us a new way to live, they also pray for the perpetrators of horrific crimes. How different than the scene in so many American courtrooms where members of a crime victim’s family cry for revenge couched in the language of so-called justice. We see how anger wells up in us when we feel wronged. Now, I’m not talking about what we might call righteous anger, the anger we feel when we see someone else abused or hurt. The Hebrew prophets expressed righteous anger because their society had forgotten the crux of Torah, as expressed by Hillel the Elder, a rabbi who taught in the century just before Jesus began his public ministry, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and might, and your neighbor as yourself.. All the rest is commentary.”

Righteous anger is a way of choosing life. It leads to constructive action rather than hatred of the oppressor as Martin Luther King said. Righteous anger gives us the strength to deal with the injustices we see around us. It is also a way for us to learn to forgive others and to reconcile ourselves to those who have wronged us. The passing of the peace during our communion service is a reminder that we first must reconcile with each other before we can be reconciled with God. We pray every week as Jesus taught, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” or in other words, “Forgive us our sins only as we forgive those who have sinned against us.” Those are hard words for us in our contemporary society where the desire for vengeance masks as “justice.”

The word forgiveness may be the most provocative word in our culture today. As more than one person has noted, there is an underlying anger in our country that we see regularly in our movies, in the news, and certainly in the road rage on our highways. This deep-seething anger speaks to something primeval in us. The media understands this and stokes the anger keeping the coals hot. But it is an unhealthy anger, not one that is based on the injuries suffered by others, but on the supposed injuries we ourselves have suffered. That anger is a way of spiritual death.

Several weeks ago Frank Rich wrote a perceptive commentary comparing the movies, The Social Network and True Grit, wherein he noted that Mattie, the 16-year old who hires Rooster to track down the man who murdered her father speaks to our deep desire for revenge in an age when the hedge fund managers and Wall Street millionaires walk away from the massive social misery they have caused with their greed to which we shamefully have acceded. What is it in our mainstream American culture that allows the families of murder victims to scream for vengeance in courtrooms but does not allow us who have been robbed by Wall Street to call for true justice?

Righteous anger leads to social change and by that I do not mean the racist me-first attitude of the Tea Party. Righteous anger leads to a restoration of balance and, even more importantly, reconciliation. The Amish went to the wife and children of Charles Roberts because they, too, were in deep grief and needed love when their world had been blown apart by the murders. Note the language in this morning’s Gospel: Before offering your gifts to the altar, reconcile yourselves with those who have wronged you and those whom you have wronged. Forgiveness and reconciliation go hand in hand. We need to forgive each other in order to reconcile with others. Reconciliation means forgiving each other as well as seeking forgiveness for ourselves.

When we are able to put away our unhealthy anger that blocks our reconciliation with each other, we choose life in the fullest sense of the word. As the editor of the words attributed to Moses put it: choosing life means loving the Lord our God and cleaving to the ways set before us, the ways of life and death, and keeping the commandments which tell us how to relate to both God and others. Jesus’ message is pretty much the same in that we are told to love God and each other and that the love of God will help to give us a new direction in our lives, one not taken over by the spiritual death of anger and hate but the spiritual life of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Let us pray: You, O God, have set before us the ways of life and death. May we choose life by loving each other as we love you. Help us to move beyond our unhealthy rage into a world of socially constructive anger to establish and live in the new creation you have offered us. Amen.