Provoke One Another
Hebrews 10:23-25
Rev. David J. Clark
While reading the scripture lesson, I stumbled across this phrase that just seemed odd. “Beloved, let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds.” Provoke to love and good deeds? I always associated the word provoke with fights and disputes. We most often hear the word when one nation provokes another nation into war; one party provokes the other into retaliation.
Provoke makes me think about vacation trips with my family. Mom and Dad in the front seat, my brother and me in the back. Long before DVD’s and Gameboys, my brother and I argued and fought in the back seat. After so much sniping, we eventually drew the invisible line down the center of the seat. This is my side; that is yours. Not long after the line was drawn, Rick would reach a finger onto my side, firmly press it into my territory and smirk, then reach out with two fingers, smirk. Provocation. Boom, I’d strike. That’s what I think of with provocation—and that’s the way the word is usually used. One person does something to elicit a negative reaction out of someone else.
When I first saw the Bible turn this phrase around, Beloved let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, I thought, “That’s just like the Bible. Take a perfectly nasty word like provoke and totally change the way we think about it.” The Bible is constantly offering us opportunities to get out of the old patterns of retaliation so that something good may emerge even in a bad situation. When someone does something negative, we respond with positive. It’s sometimes difficult when someone is provoking you to react in negative ways. Smirking brothers will come into our lives.
Beloved let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds.
Provoke. The original meaning is to call out. When we provoke, we call out something within another. Each of us has some bad stuff within, but the Bible urges us to call out the good—our best desires, hopes and dreams and behaviors out of each other instead. The context of the passage is that because we know we are loved and forgiven by God, we can be God’s agents of love and transformation in the world. When you are reminded about how much you have been forgiven for so much, no amount of pettiness, selfishness and cruelty can touch you. When you’ve been forgiven so much, then you extend it to others.
I can still see one of the great provokers in my life. I met her on a work trip to Kentucky. Our youth group was working on a woman’s house, but it wasn’t very much fun. We hated where we were. Porches and front yards littered with old cars, sofas and garbage. We hated it and we began to make fun of the way those people lived and we began to act like a group who would rather be doing something else. We picked on each other. We argued, we made sarcastic jabs every chance we got. In other words we acted just like the older people in our church when they lost sight of who they were.
Eventually the woman who owned the house we were working on came out with tears streaming down her face. She sat us down in the grass in front the house and she stood there, shaking her stubby finger at us and speaking through the few teeth she had left. I mean to tell you she laid into us like I’ve never seen before or since. She railed at us, “What’s wrong with you kids? Don’t you know? Don’t you know I’ve been praying for a long time for someone to show up and help me? Don’t you know how badly my kids need to have bedrooms and a bathroom that works? I’ve been praying for a long time. Don’t you know you are the answer to my prayers? Why don’t you treat each other like the answer to prayer?
From that moment on, everything changed. Instead of obligation, the work became true mission. Instead of tearing each other down, we built each other up. It was amazing. When someone tells you that you are the answer to a prayer, everything changes. It provokes you.
I came here today to tell you that you are the answer to prayer. You are the answer to the prayers of so many who dreamed of a community of faith that would really do something special. Many have prayed for a church built not on the latest gimmicks and flashy signs, but on being people of amazing grace, people who welcome the stranger and don’t feel they have to pretend that they don’t struggle and that they have it all together. Let’s be real and help each other, support each other on this journey of life.
You came here this morning, so I’m calling you out. Pastors are professional provokers. It’s in the job description. Don’t give in to the conforming staleness, judgmentalism, and bigotry of the age. Don’t give in to the materialism and cynicism or the isolationism. We are so pre-occupied with our own personal conveniences that we miss out on what makes for a purposeful and meaningful life: service. My job is to provoke you into provoking each other.
Being a provoker doesn’t mean you have to be a perfect person, it just means you have to be a person doing your best in the situations where you find yourself. Several years ago after a devastating California earthquake, the news camera panned a devastated neighborhood. Houses collapsed horribly in on themselves, downed power lines and people had that utterly shocked look on their faces. The camera happened to spy a woman standing in the rubble of what was once her house where only one ten foot section of an inner wall was left standing. The woman looked at the wall where a single picture hung and she went over to the picture and straightened it out. Stepped back and nodded. The reporter dashed over to her and asked her why she even bothered. She said, “I can’t do much about all of this, but right now I can clean up this teen foot section and straighten out this picture.” When others heard about what this woman did, they got provoked. Signs and banners were hung around the neighborhood: Ten Feet at a Time. Everyone had a place to begin their huge task—right where they were. Ten feet at a time. It was an inspiration for the whole neighborhood. She provoked others to keep trying to keep at it when otherwise they may have been overwhelmed by the job. Focus on what is in front of you.
We are simply called to be faithful in doing what we can do and you never know how it will provoke acts of love and good deeds out of someone else. Provoking can mean simply paying attention to the small things about the people who are around you. Bill Nichols, former General Minister and President of the Disciples of Christ once told about standing in the narthex of the church before worship getting ready to process into the sanctuary with the choir when a woman, disheveled and ragged looking entered the church. He had never seen her before, so he went over to introduce himself.
She didn’t chit-chat, but got straight to the point. She took out a bottle of prescription pills out of her pocket and explained that she had been awake all night trying to decide if there was a reason why she shouldn’t just swallow all the pills at once. She said, “I promised myself I would at least wait and go to church and see if there was a reason to change my mind.” With that, she spun on her heel, walked into the sanctuary and plopped down right in the middle of the sanctuary.
When Bill told this story, he was traumatized--life and death riding on a sermon. I know He thought through his sermon, and beat himself up for not having something better to offer. Although Bill wasn’t very proud of his sermon, in the end, the woman decided not to kill herself. Eventually she became a solid member of the church. But it wasn’t the sermon. Do you know what made the difference? It was how she was treated and welcomed by those who sat around her in worship. People within--you guessed it--ten feet, the people in the pew showed hospitality to her. They may have been struggling themselves, but they noticed her and treated her with compassion and dignity. They saw her and showed some interest in her and didn’t just ignore her, as they straightened their hymnals while she rolled the pill bottle between her hands. These were just ordinary folks with their own problems who may have even argued with their families on the way over to church that morning and continued their argument in the car on the way home—as if that ever happens. But what they did made a difference.
Perhaps we are supposed to hear this message from Hebrews to provoke one another because it can become too easy to ignore each other, and there is so much at stake. Every week people will come to church and with the option of partaking in something that can give life or something that can destroy life. That table is ever set before us. Don’t you know that in this very moment, God has the power to transform life? Don’t you know that people are going to come here every week looking for a reason to do the positive rather than the negative and what happens with that will have more to do with how you treat them than the particular words from Scripture that I speak.
Let’s do something amazing. Let’s build the kind of church together that embraces the hurting, forgives the sinner, that doesn’t make people feel on trial, but embraces them with uncommon hospitality and love. Let’s realize that we are about God’s business, that we are the answer to prayer, that what we do is important.
As we begin this ministry together, we as each other, How will I treat the people that come within my ten feet? How will I treat them in the long line at the Christmas rush cash register? How will I treat them when they cut me off in traffic? How will I treat people at work who struggle?
Let’s build the kind of church were we don’t play church, where we don’t act like once we have our ticket to heaven punched we act like the purity police, but let’s be the church, the expression of God’s work in this world.
Beloved, let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet as is the habit of some. I’ll see you next week. Amen.
