Epiphany
6A 2017
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.
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