Four Words That Will Change Your Life

Sermon for Sunday, November 8

Luke 19:47-20:8

There are four words that might change the world.

It is hard to look at current events and know exactly what is going on. If we are going to be honest, we have a tendency to jump to conclusions rather quickly. Even when we try to be fair-minded and without prejudice, our preconceived notions, our loyalties, and our own position make us want things to be a certain way.

I first noticed this with sports teams. Have you ever noticed that when a team that beats yours is shown to be in shady dealings, you get outraged? But when your team is the offender, it suddenly turns into, “well, everyone does it. What’s the big deal?” Or we engage in the tried and true strategy of deny, deny, deny. We will back our quarterback, our point guard, our star athlete no matter what. It’s harmless. It’s sports.

But this way of being a fan and a die-hard has a way of saturating our lives. We start to divide the world into “sides” and it becomes about “us” versus “them.” And we will do whatever we can to win. And we will never, ever, openly criticize our team. And we get locked into positions so much that our response to doubt is to double down and shut down the part of our brain that considers other people’s perspectives.

In the gospel reading today, the chief priests and their cronies get trapped in their own web. See, they are trying to trip Jesus up. He came into the Temple and drove out the guys selling animals for sacrifices, which disrupted the Temple economy. Jesus called it a den of thieves. So the chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders ask him, “Where does your authority come from?” In other words they are asking, “Why should we listen to you?” “What gives you the right to be here today?”

Now, Jesus could have just said, “God gives me the words and I say them.” He could have said, “I’m the Son of God.” But if they didn’t believe what he said (and they wouldn’t have) that would have pushed them even farther away. Instead, Jesus answers their question with a question. “Where did John the Baptist’s baptism come from? Heaven or his head?”

A lot of commentators look at this passage and they see Jesus cleverly evading and avoiding the question. They see him playing political hardball. They think he’s outmaneuvering the leaders by making them run afoul of the crowds. But that’s taking our lead from Jesus’s antagonists. That’s how they interpret it; but I think Jesus is trying to do something far more compassionate. He’s giving his enemies a chance to repent, to change their minds. They had rejected John in life, but now he was dead and his movement was ongoing. He had practiced a baptism of repentance, and people had come to him and changed their lives. Tax collectors and soldiers came to him to be baptized and walked away living their lives differently. The tax collectors stopped their exploitation and the Roman soldiers stopped their extortion. So Jesus says, “Now that you’ve had a chance to think about it, now that you’ve seen the fruit of his movement; do you think maybe you want to change your answer?”

Have you ever changed your mind? Sometimes it takes years to do it. Sometimes it’s like we wake up one day and we see everything differently. Jesus invites us to change our minds every day. But the world we live in values consistency. We want people to believe the same thing Thursday that they said on Tuesday, no matter what happened Wednesday. We call politicians who change their minds “flip-floppers,” and if they are on the other team, we assume that they did it because they thought they could get more votes that way. But what if they learn something? What does it take to change our minds?

The four words that will change your life are “I might be wrong.” Whenever we fight or argue with someone, I want to encourage us to say or at least remember these words. “I might be wrong.” It’s a liberation of sorts. We don’t always have to be right. “I might be wrong” will rescue us from prideful certainty and make space for humble faith to rock the very foundations of our world. In a world where we are so often mistrustful of the information we receive, “I might be wrong” is a breath of fresh air. I submit to you that we can make ourselves more easily heard if we acknowledge that everything we think, everything we say, is filtered through fallible human people. It’s not weak! It takes strength to stand up and be honest about our uncertainty.

“I might be wrong” is the first step of humility that our culture so desperately needs us to model. There are entirely too many people who are absolutely sure of things that they can’t possibly be sure of. I will be the first to say I fall into this trap sometimes myself. I want to win all arguments because if I win that means I’m right, and if I’m right that means I’m good.

We value “rightness” too highly. Nowhere does the Bible say, “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you right.” Jesus says, if you are his disciples, “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). Sometimes I think the truth sets us free from the need to have all these arguments. I have a friend who serves in a liberal denomination. One of the things he does is to advocate for the rights of people with disabilities. In his advocacy he works with a lot of people who are more conservative than he is. Folks in his church come to him and they say, “Why do you work with those people? They are monsters; they hurt people.” His answer is, when we can agree on how to help, we aren’t enemies; we are on the same team. We have so much pain in our disagreements, don’t we? But when we find common ground; when we find places we can work together, we find out that most people aren’t monsters, they’re just people.

When we are too concerned with issues and arguments, we lose sight of people. Whether it’s how we respond to a dreadful disease, who voted for whom in last week’s election, or how we like our steaks cooked, we split people into camps. Us versus them is no way for us to get through this life. So what’s our way forward?

The prophet Micah says that the Lord requires three things from us. This is what God wants: that we seek justice, that we love mercy, and that we walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8). I think that’s three steps up a ladder. Justice is a right ordering of society. In a perfectly just world, there would be no need and no hunger and no want. I think everybody can agree that sounds great. But we have disagreements about how to get there. That’s what the study of ethics is for. When we have those disagreements, though, that’s where mercy comes in. Mercy says I’m not going to force my way on anybody else. And that brings us to walking humbly. Humility means admitting that, as the apostle Paul says, “We see in a mirror dimly.” We don’t see the whole picture, and we don’t see it perfectly. We can have our convictions, but we need to always be prepared for new information.

The priests Jesus argued with at the Temple weren’t bad people. They didn’t start out that way. They were the people chosen to represent the people to God. They were chosen to offer sacrifices to atone for the sins of the people. The scribes, likewise, were there because they had a love for God’s word, and wanted to study and teach it. The elders were respected in the community because of their age and wisdom. But somewhere along the way, with all the authority granted them by birth, knowledge, or place in the community, they lost sight of their limits. John the Baptist and Jesus came to try to show the people a better way. For the tax collectors that meant giving up their ill-gotten income. For the Roman soldiers that meant no longer bullying people. And for the religious leaders, that meant considering, once in a while, “I might be wrong.”