Misunderstanding is an inevitable part of life. Just because we are human, just because we have limitations and are imperfect, we are going to misunderstand one another. And the sooner we accept that as a part of life and learn to deal with it, the better off we’ll be.
There are several reasons why people get crossways of each other.
Sometimes people misunderstand because they do not hear one another. They literally do not hear what the other has said. And the results can be spectacular.
An old sea captain had been called in by the admiral because there had been an accident in the harbor. It seems that the captain had run his ship aground, and there was a lot of damage and lot of confusion for the Navy to deal with. And so the brass, of course, had to find out all about the accident. The admiral was especially concerned about all the damage to the ship.
And so there was an investigation, and they put the captain in the brig until they could figure it all out. When the admiral questioned the captain about the condition of the ship and got all that he wanted about that, he got a little concerned about the captain there in prison and about what might be happening to the captain’s family. The admiral asked, "How about your wife now? Is there anything we can do for her?"
To which the old captain, who just wasn’t really listening, replied, "Well, admiral, I suggest you put her in dry-dock and scrape her ’til she’s clean again".
Some misunderstandings come just because we do not really hear each other.
Or again, misunderstanding comes about when we listen, but we don’t understand what we are hearing. The words are all there and we got them down, we took them in, but we didn’t understand the context, and so we create a misunderstanding and a conflict.
The pretty young thing had her first secretarial job with a company that made spare parts for the Air Force. It was a lucrative contract, and there was a good deal of attention paid to how accurate the estimates were and how high the prices were to be. Her boss, dictating a memo, tried to say that the figures he had come up with were not too accurate, since they had been calculated with a slide rule (do you folks who have known only about calculators and computers known that a slide rule is an instrument for doing math?)
Maybe she heard it wrong, and then again maybe she got it right, when what came out of her typewriter was this gem of a sentence, "These figures are not too accurate, because they have been calculated with a sly drool. "
Some misunderstandings come about because we do not understand what we do hear. When you just plain don’t understand the context, your intentions may be the best and your heart may be in the right place, but you just don’t have the background or the context to understand what is being said, and so there is a misunderstanding.
So I’ve said so far: misunderstandings may come because we do not hear each other; misunderstandings may come because we don’t have the background and the context within which to understand one another.
And there’s something else too. Sometimes misunderstandings are deliberately brought about by those who want conflict to occur. Let’s not be naive this morning; in every human setting, whether it be the family or the church or the nation at large, whatever it may be, there are those who create conflict on purpose. There are those who love to play the game, "Let’s you and him fight". And deep wounds, serious misunderstandings, can result.
There was an occasion in the early Christian church when all of these things happened to the Apostle Paul and his relationships with the church in the city of Corinth.
Paul, we believe, had been criticized by some of the leaders in and around the Corinthian church -- criticized because he had not shown up when he was supposed to, criticized because he had urged them to take an unpleasant course of action to discipline a church member who was out of line, and criticized because, some said, he was arrogant and selfish and egotistical.
Paul’s reply, Paul’s defense, is recorded for us in the second chapter of Second Corinthians. And in Paul’s actions and his reply are some very important principles for us. What do you do when someone has misunderstood you? How do you read it and what do you do about it?
I really have two sermons for you today. Two sermons out of this passage. One of them has to do with how we as human beings handle personal conflict. And the other is for the larger setting we are celebrating today -- the Martin Luther King Birthday and the climate of racism in our nation. Two messages -- but, you’ll be glad to know, not twice the usual amount of time.
Keep your Bibles open to Second Corinthians chapter 2 so that we can look at these verses together.
Now the first thing I want you to notice is that Paul wanted to avoid a painful visit. Paul wanted to find a strategy that would keep away from negative confrontations. Verse 1: "I made up my mind that my next visit to you must not be another painful one. If I cause pain to you, who is left to cheer me up, except you whom I have offended?"
The first strategy in dealing with misunderstanding is to avoid negative, destructive, painful, meaningless settings. Now if you’re like me, sometimes you think you can settle an issue by yelling louder than the other guy. We yell and posture and shout and argue. But what good does it do? What does it accomplish? When you’ve finished that argument and you and your wife or your husband or your child or your parent go off into separate corners to prepare for Round Two, what have you settled? What have you really done?
A whole lot of us have not learned that shouting at each other across the Grand Canyon doesn’t do very much to settle misunderstandings. Paul says, "I made up my mind that my next visit to you would not be another painful one. If I cause pain to you, who is left to cheer me up, except you whom I have offended?" The first principle in clearing up a misunderstanding is to recognize that a painful visit might not help. Avoid a negative and destructive confrontation.
But now I’d like you at the same time to notice that that does not mean that Paul backs off of the conflict entirely. That does not mean that Paul clammed up. Just because Paul chose not to visit Corinth, because visiting them would guarantee a fight, that does not mean that he chose to crawl off into a corner somewhere and hope that the problem would just go away. Instead, he says, in verse 4, that he sent a letter -- what we now call the "painful letter" -- and explains what it was all about: "’That letter I sent you came out of great distress and anxiety; how many tears I shed as I wrote it! Not because I wanted to cause you pain; rather I wanted you to know the love, the more than ordinary love, that I have for you."
Paul’s strategy was to find a means of communication through which he could make himself completely clear. In choosing to write a letter, in which he could weigh each word carefully; which could be read in the presence of the whole church, so that everybody heard the same thing at the same time; which could be read and re-read, so that the Corinthians could get deeply into it a second and a third time – in doing all of this Paul was choosing to confront positively. He was doing his best not to avoid meeting the situation, but rather to meet it in a way that would increase understanding and would allow him to make sure they had heard, really heard.
I have a friend of whom a mutual friend said the other day, "When he gets two opinions about something, he never knows what to do about that, and so he does nothing." And what we agreed on is that my non-confronting friend, who is really trying so very hard never to hurt anybody’s feelings, ends up hurting them even more because they think he doesn’t care when he never brings up the point at issue. They think he hasn’t tried to understand them.
Paul’s style is that when there is a misunderstanding, you do what you can, you find a way, to communicate clearly, concisely, but with love, what you are saying. And that way you can avoid a painful visit.
So now, review with me, what do we have so far?
I began by saying that some misunderstandings come about because we do not hear each other, we just don’t listen. And I’ve shown you how in Paul’s case he chose to avoid a heated, negative, destructive setting in which it was all too likely that neither he nor the Corinthian Christians would hear each other.
Then I said that sometimes misunderstandings come about because we just don’t understand each other well enough, we don’t know the background and the context to understand. And I’ve tried to say that Paul dealt with this problem by selecting a tactic that would allow him to communicate clearly, calmly, exactly, carefully.
But I also pointed out at the beginning of this message that sometimes misunderstandings come about because someone wants them to come about. Someone says, "Let’s you and him fight." Someone stirs the boiling pot until it overflows.
And here again Paul is on target. Paul is on target because he names the culprit for what he is. Paul is not afraid to beard this lion in his den. Listen to verse 11: "Satan must not be allowed to get the better of us; we know his wiles all too well." “Satan... the evil one, the destroyer …must not be allowed to get the better of us; we know his wiles all too well."
We just need to recognize that in the real world there are folks whose motives are not good and who will do whatever they can to get us into a conflict situation, and the sooner we learn to recognize that game and call it what it is, the better off we’ll be. That’s evil, that’s the work of Satan; avoid it, fight it, don’t be drawn down by it.
Now that’s sermon number one. Let ‘s go for sermon number two.
We can use all of this and apply what we’ve learned to something that is very particular to today, Martin Luther King’s Birthday, and to the state of racism and race relations in these not always United states.
First of all, there is still racial discord because we do not listen, really listen to each other. There is discord and misunderstanding just because people do not see one another as persons and do not listen. One church member went through a painful experience a number of months ago, just about got arrested trying to register at a motel, and as nearly as we can tell, it was very little more than a hotel clerk who looked up, saw someone young and male and black, and all the bells went off in her head. Those tags became a danger sign to her, and she never even heard him say, "I’d like a room for the night.” Before he could open his mouth, she was yelling at him and throwing him out and calling the police.
We need to stop and remember that the state of race relations in America today still depends on those who choose not to see and not to hear anyone different.
And, at the next level, I believe we also need to recognize that there is misunderstanding still because we haven’t learned to hear one another in context. We haven’t learned how to deal with the insecurities and the fears and the unspoken feelings that are still down there. And as long as we refuse to face the racism and the feelings that still lurk within, we’ll not get very far.
Lately I seem to find myself counseling with a number of interracial couples, both before and after marriage. There seems to be one common denominator. They will say, "When my mother gets me aside by myself... when my brother stopped coming by my house … when I went to my wife’s parent’s church … and so on … then I heard the real feelings. I heard, ’Don’t ruin your life.’ I heard, ’Can’t you find one of us?’" And the fears are very deep; the feelings haven’t been faced and dealt with. Learning to hear one another hasn’t really been learned yet by a whole lot of folks, black and white, brown and yellow and red. Being a certain kind of person carries with it a set of feelings that we don’t always take the time to hear.
But now a while ago, I mentioned that Paul sees a deeper side to human conflict. Paul sees that there is an evil side that you can never forget about. And so let’s name it today. There are still those who do not want understanding between persons of differing racial backgrounds. There are still those who are about the business of sowing discord and misunderstanding, and we need to name that as the work of Satan. We need to flag that with the devil’s nametag.
When in the very neighborhood in which I live, as do several of you, folks calling themselves skinheads and American Nazis can attack blacks and Asians in the park and can vandalize a synagogue, then we need to name that as the work of monstrous evil. And we need to fight it in the name of all that’s holy.
When all a man in Boston had to do was to finger a black man for the murder of his wife and his baby, and everybody believed him … it all seemed so plausible … and later we discover that he had done this thing himself and had cynically set up an African-American, knowing that people would believe that … when that can happen, then the work of Satan is alive and well. And I can only say with the Apostle Paul, "Satan must not be allowed to get the better of us; we know his wiles all too well."
When federal judges who have made civil rights decisions get bombs in the mail; when the headquarters of civil rights organizations are not safe from terrorism; when power hungry politicians prey on the fears of the uninformed, we as the church of Jesus Christ must say, "Satan must not be allowed to get the better of us and create discord.”
This morning I echo the apostle Paul in hoping that this visit to the state of racism in this nation is not a painful visit. But it is intended to be a visit, a communication, by which we can learn to hear the truth, care for the truth, and care for justice. And just as Paul chose to write a letter so that he could share as clearly and openly as possible the truth he knew, so also today we hear another letter, sent to us by that servant of God, that drum major for justice, whose ministry we celebrate. Martin Luther King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth … we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the magnificent heights of understanding and brotherhood. [I hope for Christians who will] carve a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment."
Today, if we are serious about who we are as a community of faith, we begin again to hear one another; to know one another’s hearts, and to take up the cause of justice, so that on that great day when the lord Jesus Christ gathers up His church, this church, it will not be a painful visit, not a day of misunderstanding, but a day to love and to be loved.
