It Was Only Fair
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
Series II, Cycle A
Object:
The blizzard was kind enough to have shown up on Friday evening, so that when it had finished rattling our windows and dumping about ten inches of perfectly packable snow, we were not in school and had an entire day to enjoy it.
By Saturday afternoon, we had shoveled our own driveway and sidewalk. Our neighbor, Mr. Schmidt, had finished hours before, because he apparently made enough money to afford a snowblower. His was the first snowblower on our street. Mr. Schmidt felt he needed a snowblower, because he had built himself a two-car garage (also the first one on the street). The most important consequence of all this was that Mr. Schmidt's driveway was wider than anyone else's, which meant there was more snow piled up on either side of his driveway with which to build snow forts with Mr. Schmidt's son, whom we called Little Mikey.
Little Mikey, my sister, and I set to work immediately after lunch on a snow fort on the east side of the driveway. My sister and I began digging a trench down the center of the snow piled along the edge of the driveway. We assigned Little Mikey to make shelves on the far side of the trench and start piling up an arsenal of snowballs there. There was no one around at whom we could throw snowballs, but we had Little Mikey get them ready, anyway.
Where the driveway met the sidewalk there was more snow piled up from clearing the sidewalk. There we tunneled into the mound of snow until we came out onto the sidewalk. The biggest mound of snow was just across the sidewalk on the strip of grass along the street, because all the snow from the street, the sidewalk, and the driveway apron was piled up there. We were busy hollowing that monster out for a command and control center when Michael stopped by.
Michael was a year older than me (I was about ten at the time), three years older than my sister, and five years older than Little Mikey. The year before, Michael had been run over by a car while he was crossing the highway that no child who lived on our street was allowed to cross -- except Michael. His parents let him to do whatever he wanted. They even let his sister listen to Beatles' records!
After his accident, Michael sort of disappeared from the neighborhood for about a year. We heard that he had to have many surgeries. Once in a while we'd see him sitting on his front porch with enormous plaster casts on his legs and a pair of crutches at his side, but we never went over to chat with him about his accident even though we knew him pretty well -- he had been to our house many Saturday mornings for Monopoly games in our dining room. (Michael always won those Monopoly games.) I don't know why we never went over to talk to Michael when he was sitting on his front porch with those nasty casts on his legs. I think we subconsciously worried about what we could possibly say to someone who had endured such an awful tragedy; it's hard enough for adults to cope in such situations, much less children.
Anyway, Michael came stumping over to Little Mikey's house. He didn't walk very well anymore because of the accident. He asked us what we were doing, and we told him we were making a snow fort. He said if he made a snow fort on the other side of the driveway, we could have a giant snowball fight, and the only rule would be that we each had stay in our snow fort, and whoever blew up the other snow fort would win.
We thought this was a cool idea. Having a limit, a rule was always somehow appealing to us. It added a challenge to whatever we happened to be doing. When there was a rule, we had to figure out a way to succeed despite the limitation. In this case, the limit was also a good thing, because we were afraid of Michael because a whole year of being on crutches had made him strong as an ape. The farther away from Michael we were the better.
To be fair, we gave Michael a lot of extra time to make his snow fort, because there was only one of him, and he started later than we had. While he was digging his trench through the snow pile along the west side of the driveway, we stocked up about ten million snowballs. We knew the snowball fight had begun when an ice ball slammed through our trench wall and smashed into a shelf full of our snowballs. We knew Michael was strong.
But not that strong.
Right away, my sister got pretty scared. Who wanted to get beaned with an ice ball that blasted a hole in the wall of your trench? I'd say about every tenth time one of Michael's ice bombs blasted away a part of our wall, my sister jumped up and threw a handful of snow in the general direction of Michael. It was pretty lame and predictable. When Michael had my sister figured out, he plastered her with a snowball, and she ran home screaming her head off.
Little Mikey and I were in deep mud. Most of our protective trench walls were decimated. Little Mikey couldn't throw any better than my sister. Michael's snow fort was completely undamaged. Not one of us had hit him even once. He just kept pummeling away at our position with ice ball after ice ball. He mocked us. Little Mikey and I huddled in the command and control center with ice balls thunking overhead, and we made a plan.
The game was getting boring. It wasn't fair. Yes, there were rules, but rules are made to be broken. I sent Little Mikey out of our snow fort unarmed. You might think this was cruel, but Little Mikey was a very quick little dodger. We thought Michael would forget about the old game and its rule, because Michael was mean and would enjoy the new game called "Nail Little Mikey."
And he did. Michael got into this new game and started launching snowballs at Little Mikey at the astonishing rate of one every two seconds, but Little Mikey only suffered collateral damage -- a minor bloody nose. Half the snow that Mr. Schmidt had blown up off the driveway was now back on the driveway again. A thought crossed my mind for an instant -- that Little Mikey was going to get hammered for that, because his mother had a heart attack if she found even a tiny dried worm on their garage floor. But I didn't care, because I had this awesome plan.
With Michael's attention securely fixed on Little Mikey, I snuck out of my trench and started coming up behind Michael. My first hit was a tremendous success -- blew his hat right off; the whole side of his head was now sunburn red. It suddenly occurred to me that now I had violated the rule of the old game. Michael would remember the old game, and since I broke a rule, so could he. I started getting pretty anxious about pain, about getting nailed at close range with an ice ball. All this fear fired me up to a sort of superhuman level and I totally got into this pre-emptive strike thing -- the only thing better would have been to have a CNN reporter embedded with me.
As soon as Michael turned his attention to me, Little Mikey shocked us all and battered Michael with two successive snowballs on the back of his head. Michael turned back to lob a shot at Little Mikey and missed, but I nailed him again. Then Michael turned back to me, lowered his shoulder, and charged like a bull right at me. He knocked the wind right out of me. It's funny how quickly the rules go out the window in the heat of battle.
Just as Michael was getting ready to finish me off, Little Mikey came flying over the wall and jumped on his back. Michael collapsed with an agonizing cry that was smothered when his face hit the snow. Little Mikey was sitting on his neck, and I gave Michael the face washing of his life. Somehow Michael managed to lunge up off the ground and stagger away under a barrage of snowballs.
Little Mikey wiped the blood off his nose. I felt like all my ribs were broken. Justice was done, we were thinking. We paid him back, an eye for an eye, fair and square.
Yet, as we stood there like World Wrestling Federation wrestlers who had just bent a metal chair over someone's head, the cry of pain we heard when Little Mikey jumped on Michael's back -- well, it was a bit unsettling. Maybe we had re-broken his legs or ripped up his weakened leg muscles. Michael was the last guy in the world you'd expect to cry. The more I thought about the way Michael was limping away from the fight, the more I felt ashamed. I felt those hot coals heaped on my head that the apostle Paul wrote about in today's lesson.
Little Mikey's mother had a German accent and a very high voice. When she was mad, you couldn't even tell what she was saying. But we knew. Little Mikey had to go inside, and I had to shovel off their driveway otherwise she'd call my mother and my mother would whale on me. Night was falling. I was wet and cold and hungry. It took forever to clean all the snow off the driveway. It was dark when I finished. The snow was so deep and I was so tired, I didn't feel like taking the short cut between Little Mikey's house and my house. So I walked up our driveway to the walk behind our house. I walked by the big bay window that glowed yellow, and I looked in on the kitchen. Peering up into the window, I felt like I was watching a movie: my mother was at the stove cooking; my sister was setting the table.
Then he tackled me.
Since the kitchen bay window stuck out so far, there was a corner to go around to get to the back door. Michael was hiding in that corner. Completely drained and taken by surprise, I fell like a sack of potatoes. Michael rubbed ice into my face, kicked me in the head, and stumbled off into the night.
That afternoon we had repaid "evil with evil" (Romans 12:17). We had not lived "peaceably" with our neighbor, much less "with all" (Romans 12:18). We had satiated ourselves with revenge. We had not fed our enemy or had him over for a nice cup of hot chocolate (Romans 12:20). We had broken the rules we had agreed upon for the conduct of our war. We had assailed Michael with overwhelming force and had delivered what we felt at the moment was a just punishment for Little Mikey's bloody nose and my aching ribs.
But in doing so, we also descended into a hopeless maelstrom of reciprocal violence with an opponent far more vicious and powerful than ourselves. We began to wonder when we would turn around to find Michael standing behind us or lurking again in some dark corner ready to beat the you-know-what out of us.
We had demonstrated to him that even the nicest little kids on the block behaved no better than his abusive parents. We had given him crucial evidence that the world was to be universally despised. We had not attempted to overcome evil with good and had therefore lost an opportunity to show Michael that there was even such a thing as good (Romans 12:21). Although it might be unrealistic to expect such mature, loving Christian responses from children, the apostle Paul did expect such responses from adults.
And for good reason.
It is how our Lord responds to the snowball fights we start or fund or fail to protest each and every day.
Michael never came by to play again. He started smoking and continued bullying. As soon as he could, he bought a car and drove it like a madman, aiming it at stray cats and children on bikes. Amen.
By Saturday afternoon, we had shoveled our own driveway and sidewalk. Our neighbor, Mr. Schmidt, had finished hours before, because he apparently made enough money to afford a snowblower. His was the first snowblower on our street. Mr. Schmidt felt he needed a snowblower, because he had built himself a two-car garage (also the first one on the street). The most important consequence of all this was that Mr. Schmidt's driveway was wider than anyone else's, which meant there was more snow piled up on either side of his driveway with which to build snow forts with Mr. Schmidt's son, whom we called Little Mikey.
Little Mikey, my sister, and I set to work immediately after lunch on a snow fort on the east side of the driveway. My sister and I began digging a trench down the center of the snow piled along the edge of the driveway. We assigned Little Mikey to make shelves on the far side of the trench and start piling up an arsenal of snowballs there. There was no one around at whom we could throw snowballs, but we had Little Mikey get them ready, anyway.
Where the driveway met the sidewalk there was more snow piled up from clearing the sidewalk. There we tunneled into the mound of snow until we came out onto the sidewalk. The biggest mound of snow was just across the sidewalk on the strip of grass along the street, because all the snow from the street, the sidewalk, and the driveway apron was piled up there. We were busy hollowing that monster out for a command and control center when Michael stopped by.
Michael was a year older than me (I was about ten at the time), three years older than my sister, and five years older than Little Mikey. The year before, Michael had been run over by a car while he was crossing the highway that no child who lived on our street was allowed to cross -- except Michael. His parents let him to do whatever he wanted. They even let his sister listen to Beatles' records!
After his accident, Michael sort of disappeared from the neighborhood for about a year. We heard that he had to have many surgeries. Once in a while we'd see him sitting on his front porch with enormous plaster casts on his legs and a pair of crutches at his side, but we never went over to chat with him about his accident even though we knew him pretty well -- he had been to our house many Saturday mornings for Monopoly games in our dining room. (Michael always won those Monopoly games.) I don't know why we never went over to talk to Michael when he was sitting on his front porch with those nasty casts on his legs. I think we subconsciously worried about what we could possibly say to someone who had endured such an awful tragedy; it's hard enough for adults to cope in such situations, much less children.
Anyway, Michael came stumping over to Little Mikey's house. He didn't walk very well anymore because of the accident. He asked us what we were doing, and we told him we were making a snow fort. He said if he made a snow fort on the other side of the driveway, we could have a giant snowball fight, and the only rule would be that we each had stay in our snow fort, and whoever blew up the other snow fort would win.
We thought this was a cool idea. Having a limit, a rule was always somehow appealing to us. It added a challenge to whatever we happened to be doing. When there was a rule, we had to figure out a way to succeed despite the limitation. In this case, the limit was also a good thing, because we were afraid of Michael because a whole year of being on crutches had made him strong as an ape. The farther away from Michael we were the better.
To be fair, we gave Michael a lot of extra time to make his snow fort, because there was only one of him, and he started later than we had. While he was digging his trench through the snow pile along the west side of the driveway, we stocked up about ten million snowballs. We knew the snowball fight had begun when an ice ball slammed through our trench wall and smashed into a shelf full of our snowballs. We knew Michael was strong.
But not that strong.
Right away, my sister got pretty scared. Who wanted to get beaned with an ice ball that blasted a hole in the wall of your trench? I'd say about every tenth time one of Michael's ice bombs blasted away a part of our wall, my sister jumped up and threw a handful of snow in the general direction of Michael. It was pretty lame and predictable. When Michael had my sister figured out, he plastered her with a snowball, and she ran home screaming her head off.
Little Mikey and I were in deep mud. Most of our protective trench walls were decimated. Little Mikey couldn't throw any better than my sister. Michael's snow fort was completely undamaged. Not one of us had hit him even once. He just kept pummeling away at our position with ice ball after ice ball. He mocked us. Little Mikey and I huddled in the command and control center with ice balls thunking overhead, and we made a plan.
The game was getting boring. It wasn't fair. Yes, there were rules, but rules are made to be broken. I sent Little Mikey out of our snow fort unarmed. You might think this was cruel, but Little Mikey was a very quick little dodger. We thought Michael would forget about the old game and its rule, because Michael was mean and would enjoy the new game called "Nail Little Mikey."
And he did. Michael got into this new game and started launching snowballs at Little Mikey at the astonishing rate of one every two seconds, but Little Mikey only suffered collateral damage -- a minor bloody nose. Half the snow that Mr. Schmidt had blown up off the driveway was now back on the driveway again. A thought crossed my mind for an instant -- that Little Mikey was going to get hammered for that, because his mother had a heart attack if she found even a tiny dried worm on their garage floor. But I didn't care, because I had this awesome plan.
With Michael's attention securely fixed on Little Mikey, I snuck out of my trench and started coming up behind Michael. My first hit was a tremendous success -- blew his hat right off; the whole side of his head was now sunburn red. It suddenly occurred to me that now I had violated the rule of the old game. Michael would remember the old game, and since I broke a rule, so could he. I started getting pretty anxious about pain, about getting nailed at close range with an ice ball. All this fear fired me up to a sort of superhuman level and I totally got into this pre-emptive strike thing -- the only thing better would have been to have a CNN reporter embedded with me.
As soon as Michael turned his attention to me, Little Mikey shocked us all and battered Michael with two successive snowballs on the back of his head. Michael turned back to lob a shot at Little Mikey and missed, but I nailed him again. Then Michael turned back to me, lowered his shoulder, and charged like a bull right at me. He knocked the wind right out of me. It's funny how quickly the rules go out the window in the heat of battle.
Just as Michael was getting ready to finish me off, Little Mikey came flying over the wall and jumped on his back. Michael collapsed with an agonizing cry that was smothered when his face hit the snow. Little Mikey was sitting on his neck, and I gave Michael the face washing of his life. Somehow Michael managed to lunge up off the ground and stagger away under a barrage of snowballs.
Little Mikey wiped the blood off his nose. I felt like all my ribs were broken. Justice was done, we were thinking. We paid him back, an eye for an eye, fair and square.
Yet, as we stood there like World Wrestling Federation wrestlers who had just bent a metal chair over someone's head, the cry of pain we heard when Little Mikey jumped on Michael's back -- well, it was a bit unsettling. Maybe we had re-broken his legs or ripped up his weakened leg muscles. Michael was the last guy in the world you'd expect to cry. The more I thought about the way Michael was limping away from the fight, the more I felt ashamed. I felt those hot coals heaped on my head that the apostle Paul wrote about in today's lesson.
Little Mikey's mother had a German accent and a very high voice. When she was mad, you couldn't even tell what she was saying. But we knew. Little Mikey had to go inside, and I had to shovel off their driveway otherwise she'd call my mother and my mother would whale on me. Night was falling. I was wet and cold and hungry. It took forever to clean all the snow off the driveway. It was dark when I finished. The snow was so deep and I was so tired, I didn't feel like taking the short cut between Little Mikey's house and my house. So I walked up our driveway to the walk behind our house. I walked by the big bay window that glowed yellow, and I looked in on the kitchen. Peering up into the window, I felt like I was watching a movie: my mother was at the stove cooking; my sister was setting the table.
Then he tackled me.
Since the kitchen bay window stuck out so far, there was a corner to go around to get to the back door. Michael was hiding in that corner. Completely drained and taken by surprise, I fell like a sack of potatoes. Michael rubbed ice into my face, kicked me in the head, and stumbled off into the night.
That afternoon we had repaid "evil with evil" (Romans 12:17). We had not lived "peaceably" with our neighbor, much less "with all" (Romans 12:18). We had satiated ourselves with revenge. We had not fed our enemy or had him over for a nice cup of hot chocolate (Romans 12:20). We had broken the rules we had agreed upon for the conduct of our war. We had assailed Michael with overwhelming force and had delivered what we felt at the moment was a just punishment for Little Mikey's bloody nose and my aching ribs.
But in doing so, we also descended into a hopeless maelstrom of reciprocal violence with an opponent far more vicious and powerful than ourselves. We began to wonder when we would turn around to find Michael standing behind us or lurking again in some dark corner ready to beat the you-know-what out of us.
We had demonstrated to him that even the nicest little kids on the block behaved no better than his abusive parents. We had given him crucial evidence that the world was to be universally despised. We had not attempted to overcome evil with good and had therefore lost an opportunity to show Michael that there was even such a thing as good (Romans 12:21). Although it might be unrealistic to expect such mature, loving Christian responses from children, the apostle Paul did expect such responses from adults.
And for good reason.
It is how our Lord responds to the snowball fights we start or fund or fail to protest each and every day.
Michael never came by to play again. He started smoking and continued bullying. As soon as he could, he bought a car and drove it like a madman, aiming it at stray cats and children on bikes. Amen.
