You Shall Be Holy For I the LORD Your God Am Holy

Epiphany 7A 2017

Leviticus19:1-2,9-18; Psalm 119:33-40; 1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23; Matthew 5:38-48

                                                           Rev. Adam T. Trambley                                  

February 19, 2017, St. John’s Sharon

This morning’s readings contain a lot of difficult instructions.  We have another installment of some of the Sermon on the Mount’s most challenging teachings and our Old Testament lesson from Leviticus lists a number of divine directives.  While we should all read them carefully and do what they say, I want to look at them through a particular perspective.  That perspective is holiness – the holiness of God and the holiness we are supposed to have that will move out into the world.

In Leviticus, God tells Moses to say to the entire people of Israel: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.  In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he says that we are God’s temple and God’s Spirit dwells in us.  For God’s temple is holy, and we are that temple.

To be holy means literally to be set apart.  God is holy because he is set apart from all the rest of creation.  He is in the God-zone, not in ho-hum everyday life zone.  Unlike his creation, he is the Creator, which is more than a separate role. God has a whole separate order of being.  During our Eucharistic prayer we sing or say “Holy, Holy, Holy” to God, just like we see the angels doing in the heavenly throne room in the books of Isaiah and Revelation.  This proclamation of God’s holiness is our acknowledgment that he is at another order of reality than we are and that we are grateful to be his creatures.

Now part of the amazing thing about being part of God’s people is that we also become set apart and are holy.  We aren’t ever quite at the level of God, but the Holy One designates us for his purposes, and in doing so we come to share in his holiness.  We can’t make ourselves holy, but when he chooses us, God makes us holy.  In Scripture, the people of Israel are set apart as holy because out of all the peoples of the earth they are God’s chosen people with a special relationship to him.  As such, they are supposed to show forth God’s way of life in the world.  They aren’t supposed to just exist and act like all the other nations that are out for their own advancement.  They are to be about God’s advancement.  Israel has a plan and a purpose, and that purpose is to help the rest of the world to recognize God and God’s holiness, and to help the world to come in line with God’s will for it.  In the New Testament and later, Christians become holy by sharing in the life of Christ and receiving the Holy Spirit.  We are set apart as the dwelling places of God, and we become holy as God’s Holy Spirit makes his home in us.

Starting in the Old Testament, and particularly in Leviticus, we see that one fundamental way that we live into the holiness of God is by living a moral and ethical way of life.  God acts out of love, and we are supposed to act the same way.  In Leviticus this morning, we find the basis for half of Jesus’ Great Commandment: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  We also receive a lot of concrete instructions about how that love works in practice.  Don’t steal.  Don’t lie. Pay your laborers on time.  Don’t take advantage of people.  Don’t exact vengeance or hold grudges.  Don’t take all of your harvest, that you would seem to be entitled to because it is yours, but instead leave some food along the edges for the poor and the immigrants and the refugees to pick and eat. These activities are what God’s life is about, and when we do them, we bring his life into this world and share in his holiness.

In Old Testament times, they also had a significant amount of respect for the danger that God’s holiness brought.  They knew that God was the all-powerful Creator of the universe, so they were afraid to get too close.  In their worship, they were afraid of bringing anything unholy into the places where they worshipped God, or to appear before God without living fully into his ethical and other instructions.  They had extensive rites for atonement and sacrifice to make sure that they didn’t come before God unprepared, and most people didn’t want to come close to God at all.  They didn’t do things like touch dead bodies or eat certain foods, lest they become unclean and no longer holy and end up being smote when they came into the Temple sanctuary.  This deep reverence and awe is an appropriate recognition that if God has set us apart, we need to be set apart.  Each commandment in the first reading ends, “I am the LORD” for a reason.  God is the Lord, not us.  But their fears of their holiness being contaminated by the profane stuff of the world was misplaced.  Certainly, situations existed in more primitive times that were important for health and safety, like washing thoroughly with water after handling dead bodies, but that didn’t actually stop you from doing God’s work in the broadest sense. 

Instead, by Jesus time we see that holiness is not in danger of being lost when encountering the profane stuff of everyday life, but instead can actually spread out and become contagious.  The holiness that God has given us in Jesus Christ is something that can move to other people and places as we interact with them.  We don’t lose that holiness by going into an unholy place.  We can only lose that holiness by refusing to do the work that God has set us apart for – and even in those instances we often find God using us in spite of ourselves. 

This talk of holiness matters, I think, when we look at the gospel reading with its commands to turn the other cheek and love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.  The commandments here, where Jesus is again drawing and expanding on the Old Testament commandments, are about being perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.  Another way to say that might be to say that we are to be holy like God, making God’s kingdom manifest where we are all the time.  Our goal is not to win, nor to get even, nor to get what is right for us, nor to have things be fair to us, nor even to survive.  Our goal is to act like God in a way that God’s holiness is exhibited in us and then passes through to the world around us. 

If someone hits us, and we hit back, we have just allowed the way of the world to continue.  Most people might see that as a justified response.  The Old Testament world of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” was in fact more fair than “kill someone for an eye” or “burn down his house and slaughter his family for a tooth”, which might have been how things were done in a more lawless society.  But the question for people who are set apart as holy for God, who are a temple of the Holy Spirit, is different.  The question is how will the person who has just hit us experience the presence of God?  The answer is by having the strength not to hit back, or by giving a shirt to someone who is stealing your coat, or by walking two miles with the Roman soldier who had the right to conscript a local to help carry their stuff for up to a mile at a time.  None of these are the acts of a weak person.  They are acts of incredibly strong people – people who have experienced the power and love and presence of God.  Raining down fury and vengeance on our enemies or those who have harmed us will not allow them to know the power and presence of God. But prayer can, and love can, and living in a way that confounds them can.  Even if nothing seems to happen immediately, the holiness of godly, loving actions sticks in the world and makes a difference.  That presence of God carried on holy love roots into people’s minds and hearts, and at the right time later might provoke the kind of reflection and introspection that allows them to recognize that there is a deeper and more powerful reality to the one they are stuck in. 

The holiness of loving enemies and refusing to return violence for violence and hate for hate is stronger than just an immediate witness, however.  That kind of holiness also stays in places and transforms peoples.  Two Wednesdays ago, we commemorated the Martyrs of Japan.  The first group was 26 people were killed for their faith in the late 1500’s.  Within a couple decades, hundreds of missionaries and Japanese Christians were killed, and for over a century Japan was shut down to outsiders.  Yet, when westerners and missionaries returned in the 1800’s, they found an underground church still meeting and worshipping and passing on the faith.  The holiness of the martyrs’ witness bore fruit.  On Friday, the church commemorated Janini Luwum, the Anglican Archbishop who was killed by Idi Amin.  He and many others were martyred in the 20^th Century for their willingness to stand up to a brutal dictator and murderer.  In the decades following, Uganda has seen an explosion of evangelism and church growth, while also seeing their government mature into one that could effectively deal with the AIDS epidemic and other significant social issues.              

The point is that being holy means doing what God would have us do in ways that create space for God to be at work in the world.  That work may include our suffering, or even death.  But ultimately that doesn’t matter, because we work for God and he is taking care of us.  At the end of the reading today, Paul has this great line: All things are yours, whether…the world or life or death or the present or the future – all things belong to you, and you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God.  If we are God’s, we actually will have whatever we need to do God’s work, whether the material things in this world, or our own holy lives, or even our own holy deaths in ways that advance the kingdom.  We are always tempted to think small – that all we have for God is a few hours here and there for church work, or a few dollars to contribute, or a few minutes to mutter some prayers.  Yet Paul says that as long as we understand ourselves as Christ’s, which means that we are living out our lives in holiness to glorify God, then everything belongs to us.  We can have whatever we need to accomplish the work that God wants us to do, and still know that we are in God’s hands.  We may not always understand how that will happen, and rarely does it happen the way we think it will, but we can be sure that God’s work done God’s way in God’s time will always have God’s provision. 

Of course, having this provision means doing what God would have us do, and confessing our sins when we fall and turning back to God’s life for us.  Some of what God commands, like these instructions from the Old Testament, are pretty straightforward, if sometimes difficult.  Some of what God commands, like Jesus commandments in the Sermon on the Mount, are pretty high level callings, and sometimes we’ll succeed in living into them and sometimes we won’t.  But when we do live them out, the beauty of God’s holiness in us draws people, and that power transforms lives and locations.  The more we practice living out all these commandments, even when it is tough and even when we sometimes fail, the more we will find we can be holy, for the Lord our God is holy, and we are his people and the temples of his Holy Spirit.  As we are holy, the life of the Kingdom of God with all its love, healing and liberation, spreads in the world. 

  

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.