Matthew 5:21-37 Jesus Discusses Anger, Sex, and Oaths

Epiphany 6A 2017

Deuteronomy30:15-20; Psalm 119:1-8; 1 Corinthians 3:1-9; Matthew 5:21-37

                                                           Rev. Adam T. Trambley                                  

February 12, 2017, St. John’s Sharon

The gospel reading this morning comes from the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus is saying some rather difficult things.  He’s suggesting that people will spend all eternity burning in hell for calling someone a fool and that saying, “by God, I’ll do it” comes from the evil one.  Certainly, we want to take what Jesus is saying seriously, but at the same time, I don’t think he wants anyone showing up next Sunday and asking, “Do you have a Braille bulletin, because I was at the video store, and 50 Shades of Gray was on sale, so I just grabbed a pen and gouged my eyes out lest they tempt me to sin.”

The examples that Jesus is giving are not really the point. The point of the whole Sermon on the Mount not about the activities mentioned, although they are important. The point is to work on our hearts so that we would become the kind of people who naturally choose to do the difficult things Jesus is describing.  We want to be people of such love that we would not call people destructive names, or look on them with lust, or be less then entirely honest.  Jesus is telling us to be people that would reach out and reconcile with our brothers and sisters, even if it is difficult.  He is telling us to be people that choose right relationships over religious rituals, that choose what is best for other people over how we can use them for our own ends, and that choose life and blessings over death and curses at every opportunity.  Jesus wants us to be the kind of people who not only choose to avoid the big evils, but who also choose to avoid all the little evils in our life.

In the end, we only have two basic choices.  We are either walking toward God or we are walking away.  Moses in the first reading lays it out clearly for the people of Israel.  You get to choose this day whether you want to serve God and keep his commandments or if you want to serve all the other idols that compete for our attention, whether those idols are power, pleasure, wealth, fame, or any of the false promises that sound good but lead nowhere. 

We can understand this basic, binary choice if we think about things from an eternal perspective.  If we have all the time we need to work out our issues and learn from our mistakes and figure out how to do what we want to do, then the very basic question of existence comes down to whether or not we want to love and serve God as his creatures, giving him glory and honor and praise and living out his amazing will in our lives, or do we want to do something else --and that something else usually means that we want to be in charge and that we going to keep as much power and glory and control over our own lives as we can.  When we decide that we want to be our own god, our path is our own destruction because we cannot ransom ourselves from death, we cannot live and move and have our being under our own power, and we cannot bring healing and salvation to repair the damage we inevitably do throughout our lives.  In the end, the question that Moses presents to Israel and that Jesus is asking us is not, “Does my divorce mean that I am condemned?” or “If I can’t be nicer to people, am burning in hell?”  The question is whether or not I want to move as quickly as I am able toward God and his way of life or not?  Because if my life is pointed toward God, then God will forgive and heal and offer the support and the tools I need to reach him.  The Sermon on the Mount, in fact, offers a handbook for helping us reshape the contours of our heart for a deeper and deeper love that leads straight into God’s heart.

Jesus teaches us how to love more deeply by holding up a mirror showing the ways we are most likely to fall short.  He requires a brutal honesty and an unflinching look at who we are and what we want to be.  When we see ourselves and our imperfect behaviors in this scriptural mirror, we can follow our external behaviors back to their roots in our hearts and see what we need to reshape there.  This passage of the Sermon on the Mount looks at three things: anger, sex, and honesty.

Jesus says that if we murder someone we are judged.  Murder, in effect, says that what I want is more important than someone else’s life. We know that no matter what harm someone has done, no matter how much they are interfering with my agenda, no matter what offence they have committed, I’m not entitled to sit in judgment over them and kill them.  We can recognize just how wrong murderers are who have decided they get to make those final judgments based on their own sensibilities.  Jesus takes our moral understanding concerning murder and pushes it even farther back.  Not only don’t we get to carry out the murderous deeds that puts ourselves in mortal judgment over people, we aren’t supposed to have any sliver of attitude that believes that we are more important than others and therefore would get to pass even minor judgement over them.  When we get angry, when we call people “fools” or “idiots” or worse, when we refuse to stop and reconcile with them, we are deciding that we are more important than they are, that our agenda is more important than theirs, and that our needs, wants and comforts should take precedence.  What Jesus is saying is that when we find ourselves with these attitudes, even if they only exist in our heads or under our breath, we are basically murdering people in our hearts -- we are just too law-abiding, too scared, or too lazy to actually follow through with how we feel.

These attitudes Jesus condemns, however, offer us a warning that can trigger deeper self-awareness and transformation.  When we find ourselves angry or swearing at people, we can start to ask ourselves some difficult questions:

·      What expectations do I have about this person that they aren’t meeting?   The follow up to that question is why is this person responsible for living into my expectations?

·      Or, what am I afraid of in this situation?  Often our anger follows from our fears.  How is my safety, my reputation, or my sense of self being threatened? The follow-up to these questions is that since God is my safety and my refuge, why am I afraid?

·      Or, what about myself am I mad or disappointed about, or in what ways does this person resemble the parts of myself that I don’t like?  Because usually our anger is mostly about us.

Looking at what Jesus says about lust and sexuality here, the first thing to note is that he is clearly speaking to men.  Women can probably apply some of the things he is saying to their own lives, but the message is to men, and that message is that women are not there to be the objects of sexual gratification, real or imagined.  Instead, sexuality is one of the building blocks of a strong marriage, and Jesus is telling the men to take marriage seriously.  The divorce provision in this passage especially is couched in terms of not divorcing your wives so that they don’t have to go out and find another husband to survive.  Unmarried women in that time period didn’t have many options except to get married, and if a woman was unmarried because her husband had just divorced her for no good reason, her prospects were not all that promising.  Jesus is saying that you can’t put women in that situation because you found somebody else that caught your fancy.  Jesus is also saying not to allow your fancy to get caught by somebody else, but to keep your thoughts and your eyes in check.  Since people are going to think adulterous thoughts before they do adulterous deeds, deciding not to entertain the thoughts is important to maintaining healthy, long-term marriages.

I say entertaining the thoughts for a reason.  We all get all sorts of unhelpful thoughts in our heads all the time.  Maybe they are angry thoughts or lustful thoughts or messages that we are no good or any number of other things.  The fact that those thoughts come is morally neutral.  Thoughts and feeling come.  They aren’t good or bad.  But what we do with them can be.  We can either choose to acknowledge them and think about something else, or we can hop on and ride that train of thought wherever it takes us, and usually it doesn’t take us anywhere good.  We have a responsibility to work on controlling where our thoughts take us, for our own benefit and the benefit of others. 

This passage is not meant to be a judgment for people who got divorced in the past.  Jesus is trying to keep people from going through the particularly intense pain of divorce, not trying to punish people further who have already experienced it.

Finally, Jesus talks about oaths.  He is well aware of all the bizarre levels of promises people make.  We know on the playground, if I say something, I might not mean it, and if I cross my fingers while I say it, I don’t have to do it, but if I pinky swear it, then we’ve gotten serious.  Apparently, the people in Jesus’ day did similar things, and he wasn’t a fan of that behavior.  Instead, he just wants us to be truthful.  Say what we mean and do what we say.  If we are honest on an ongoing basis, we don’t need to swear oaths or make promises because people will know that we are trustworthy.

Of course, we fall into a couple of traps before we can get to that place.  One trap is we are always tempted to say what people want to hear instead of what is true or what we plan to do.  Rather than doing the hard work of having an honest relationship, we can easily fall into the realm of little white lies, or even big lies.  We can tell people that we will do things when we have no intention of doing them.  We know a lot of people say things, and in general, we don’t fault people for not following through on well-intended statements.  But I think Jesus is saying that if we say we’ll call next week, we should call.  If we promise to help, we show up and help.  If we don’t know whether we can or not, we say we have to check the schedule or see how we feel or whatever the determining factor is.  We can’t love each other if we don’t trust one another enough to be honest, or if we don’t respect each other enough to offer an accurate sense of what we will and won’t be able to do.  Certainly things happen, people get sick, or whatever, but that is all the more reason not to make oaths about things that we can’t control.  Instead, Jesus is telling us to be as honest as we possibly can and build our relationships from there.

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount lays out specific aspects in our lives that open a window for us into the condition of our hearts.  When we see things we don’t like, we have the opportunity refocus our hearts on the love of God and neighbor.  As we do that, little by little, we will find ourselves loving more and more deeply, until we have eliminated from our lives many of these behaviors that Jesus condemns.  Our hearts and our lives will be so focused on the love and the truth that unjustified anger, adulterous lust and facile dishonesties will no longer have a place in our lives.

You are the salt of the earth...You are the light of the world.

Epiphany 5A 2017

Isaiah58:1-12; Psalm 112; 1 Corinthians 5:13-20; Matthew 5:13-20

                                                           Rev. Adam T. Trambley                                  

February 5, 2017, St. John’s Sharon

You are the salt of the earth.  You are the light of the world.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives his people a pretty strong role to play in the life of the world around them.

Imagine a day with no salt.  The cardboard flavoring of the bland.  The unbalanced sweetness of the sweet.  The constant feeling after a long run that your body is just missing something, and no matter how much water you drink, it just can’t come back into balance.  I’m not talking here about no salt shaker, where you can’t send your sodium intake into stroke-inducing levels by adding a tablespoon or two to the pastrami with French fries from the local deli.  Jesus didn’t say, you are the table salt of the earth.  He said you are the salt.  You are the substance that was given as a key sign of hospitality in ancient days because people who worked and walked all day in the heat needed it for their health, food needed it as a preservative before the invention of the refrigerator so dinner didn’t become a breeding ground for every deadly bacteria imaginable, and it just tasted good.  We’re supposed to be that salt.

Imagine some time without light.  Unless we head down to a hunting camp in the woods without electricity, it is hard to even experience any extended time without light.  The clocks on the microwave and VCR/DVD player, the red lights on any number of appliances saying “Hi, I’m plugged in and working”, and the ambient rays that creep in through curtains and shades from streetlights and garage lights and other security lights all shine just enough to see our way past most nighttime obstacles in the house and let us go about our business.  And if not, we can always turn on our cell phones and use their light to get safely into bed.  But without any light, we stub our toes, trip over our shoes, and we are an easy late-night snack for panthers, tigers, and any variety of large nocturnal carnivores.  We are supposed to be the light that casts away that dangerous darkness. 

If we as Christians are salt and light, we should be the people that those around us flock to.  We should be the ones offering protection and health and inspiration and a life that illuminates the eyes and saturates our taste buds and provides meaning, purpose, passion, and joy.  People should want us around because of what we add to their lives just by being who we are.  If we do what Jesus tells us to do, we will be just those kinds of people. 

Jesus instructions to be salt and light are in the midst of his Sermon on the Mount where he lays out some pretty significant teachings on what it takes to become the salt of the earth and the light of the world.  We heard the beatitudes last week, where we are told either to be with or to become the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, those hungering and thirsting for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those persecuted for righteousness’s sake. Over the next few weeks, we will be told not to call people names, not to look at people with lust, not make oaths but to say “yes” or “no” and to keep our word, not to come to communion without being reconciled to our brothers and sisters, and not to resist evildoers but to turn the other cheek and to pray for our enemies and those who persecute us.  Jesus instructions are not easy.  They are the work of a lifetime as we struggle to live into them, each day offering us an opportunity to curb our pride, or check our tongue, or keep our promises, or look away from impurity, or say “I’m sorry”, or pray for people who have harmed us.  Each day, we can choose to become a little bit brighter and a little bit saltier, but only if we really want it and are paying close attention.

Of course, the person I need to be paying attention to, first and foremost, is myself.  We are constantly tempted to be derailed from our own work by the smorgasbord of tastes and bedazzling strobes that too often pass for salt and light.  Let’s face it, we live in a time when there is a whole lot happening in our community, in our church, in our nation, and in our world.  Many people have many thoughts, and many of them are written down or recorded and shared widely.  I myself have many thoughts and deeply-held convictions formed through decades of scripture reading, prayer, study, and participation in the greater life of the community, and I have been known to write and share ideas.  We should care, and we should be paying attention, and we should be part of the shaping of the life of our community and nation.    But we should never expect that either outrage or acclaim about what someone else is doing to somebody else is a substitute for the work we are called to be doing ourselves.  I’m not saying that sharing news articles on Facebook, or being in marches or protests, or vociferously solving the world’s problems over coffee, or showing up at City Council meetings, or calling senators and congressional representatives is bad – we may very well be called to do these very things.  But doing these things will not make us salt and light.  We become salt and light in the crucible of our own difficult spiritual work, where we pray and sacrifice and die to ourselves until our righteousness to exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees. And it is only through that work that we can expect to learn to love deeply enough to acquire the flavor and the brightness that will attract others, so that they may see the good that we do and give glory to our Father in heaven.

Isaiah is making a similar point.  He is talking to people either still in Babylon during the exile or right after it.  Their society and their lands are in a horrible state.  Ancient cities have been destroyed.  Food and water are not as plentiful as need be.  Their enemies are thriving.  Their problems are not insignificant, and when they pray it doesn’t seem to make any difference. Isaiah lays out for the people of Israel what they need to do if they want their light to break forth and their healing to spring up quickly; if they want their needs to be satisfied even in parched places and to become like springs of water that never fail; if they want to see the ruins of their broken-down cities rebuilt and their streets restored.  In short, Isaiah tells them how to accomplish the most important social and political transformations for their nation, and many of them sound like the same sorts of instructions Jesus gave in the Sermon on the Mount, adapted for a slightly different time and audience.  Once again, we hear the need for the people of God to do the difficult work of acting like they are the people of God, and trusting God to take care of the rest.

Isaiah tells the people that if they want their voices heard when they fast and pray, they should be doing what God wants while they are fasting.  Fast days, which Isaiah assumes are part of the life of the people of God, are meant to be times when we practice humility and self-denial.  They are not times to pick fights with others or to seek our own interests.  Even with low blood sugar, we are supposed to overcome our anger and not punch anybody.  This teaching shouldn’t be surprising, but we seem to keep needing to hear it.  Isaiah also says not to oppress workers.  They need to have a fair wage, paid on time, so that they can live good, healthy, full lives as part of God’s people, as well.

Isaiah says to break the yokes of bondage from people.  If they are enslaved by hunger, feed them.  If they are enslaved by homelessness, bring them into your own house.  If they are naked, clothe them.  If they are people in your own family who are needy, don’t hide from them or make them someone else’s responsibility when you can take care of them.

Do these instructions from Isaiah and Jesus and those in other parts of the Bible have policy implications for us today?  I think they probably do.  I find it hard to read today’s readings about breaking yokes without finding wisdom regarding just labor laws or refugee legislation or enforcement of human trafficking provisions, especially on Super Bowl Sunday when US sex trafficking reaches an annual peak.  Others Christians can, and do, disagree on the best ways to bring the Sermon on the Mount and the prophets and the law of Moses into the public sphere.  Yet, the disagreement does not absolve us from the requirement to live out these instructions in our own life, in the businesses we own, and in ways we make decisions with our time and our checkbooks.      

Beyond that, Isaiah goes on to say that we need to remove the pointing of the finger and the speaking of evil.  Disagreements should not become opportunities for personal attack. Note that Isaiah does not say, remove the pointing of the finger except when people deserve it, or remove the speaking of evil except when you talk about someone who clearly is evil and you want to make sure that everyone else knows it and likes you because you said it.  Isaiah says if you want to rebuild your cities, if you want to restore your streets, if you want to be a watered garden, if you want to be salt and light, then stop wasting your time with finger-pointing and criticism.  Just go do the work of removing the yoke from those around you.  We have so many yokes on so many people that actually focusing on that work is going to take all of our effort and more.  Doing that work will bring us into relationships with other Christians and men and women of goodwill, and we are going to have to figure out the best way to do that work, especially when we have different opinions of how to go about it.  But we know the difference between working out differences or offering constructive criticism to get something done versus pointing fingers and speaking evil. One lets us focus our various lights more effectively in a dark situation.  The other leads to the glorification of our own egos, the breaking down of community, and turning aside from God’s instructions.  We get to choose how we want to operate, and God will bless our efforts, or not, depending on whether we follow his instructions.

We live in some tough times, but so did the early disciples and so did the children of Israel.  We face real problems, socially, nationally, ethically, and locally.  If we are going to have any hope of solving them, we need God’s help.  God has promised that help if we live out his commandments. The world need us to do the hard work of becoming salt and light.  It has enough vinegar and darkness already.