This week a friend was telling me about a movie he’d seen recently. The film is Arrival, and let me caution that I haven’t actually it myself, so I can make no recommendations as to its quality and I don’t even know enough to know if I’m giving out spoilers in this sermon. So if you haven’t seen it and you want to, apologies in advance. But anyway, the basic premise is aliens arrive on earth, and the linguist tasked with the job of trying to communicate with them discovers that their language disrupts the passage of time. In their language there is no chronological past, present, or future, communication exists beyond the bounds of chronology. So for my friend, the central question of the film was not how do we communicate with aliens, but rather how would we act if we knew the future? Would we take risks, if we knew they would end in failure? Would we fall in love, if we knew it would break our hearts?
Because we were clergy at a pastors’ conference, we discussed these questions long into the night. My first impulse was, of course I would. Of course I would still take risks, still fall in love. Hindsight is a powerful tool; looking back from enough distance we can see the good moments that preceded the most painful heartbreaks, the learning that came only in the midst of failure. Of course, I thought, I wouldn’t give those things up. If I could know the future, I would know I would survive the hardest heartbreak, would know I could get up after the most painful fall. I wouldn’t have to be afraid of the worst thing that could happen, because I would know what it was and would know there was something on the other side of the end.
But the more I pondered the question, the more I wondered if I could really be that brave. Would I have the courage to go forward through the pain, for the fuzzy rewards along the way? Or would I instead give up joy in exchange for a life free of pain?
These are, of course, hypothetical questions, for we humans are a time-bound species. We have varying levels of persisting forward and delaying gratification, some of us are built for marathons, able to press on slowly for long periods of time in the hope of a future reward. Others of us are sprinters, moving quickly from thing to thing, burst of hard effort for faster pay-off. These seem, from our perspective, very different ways of living. But in the grand scale of time, the longest marathon is but a blip. C. S. Lewis described the flow of human history as a point along the edge of a ruler. All of us, sprinters or marathoners, are moving in the same direction at the same pace along the ruler. We can only know clearly the moment we are in. God, on the other hand, is the air around the ruler. God is, at the same time, our past, present, and future. God is the hope past every heartbreak, and the questions beyond every joy. And that really is too much knowledge for us. If we could comprehend every joy and fear, hope and heartbreak, we would become paralyzed with indecision by the fullness of it all. And we would, I think, miss out on the joy out of fear of the fear. So God does not give us all of it to know. Instead, God offers us a glimpse of that future. Not so much that we become overwhelmed by it, but just enough to keep us moving. Just enough to promise that the end is not the end, and there is life on the other side of this instant.
That is what the Transfiguration is. The Transfiguration is a moment in which all past, present, and future is condensed into one, so that we can see where we’re going and where we’ve been, and that promise can give us hope for the journey.
“Six days later,” the gospel reads, “Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John, and led them up a high mountain.” The mountain, like the mountain in the Sermon on the Mount, is not named, which should key us in that this mountain is more theological than it is geographical. The point is not the mountain; the point is that we are in a place of revelation. God is about to reveal something to us. And like the Ten Commandments to Moses, like the still small voice to Elijah, that revelation is an opportunity to get a peak behind the veil at the overwhelming glory of God.
At the Transfiguration, Jesus was transformed, and his face shone like the sun and his clothes became dazzling white. And with him were Moses and Elijah. Past, present and future, all rolled into one. Here, Peter, James, and John is where you’ve come from, and here’s where you’ve been. Here are the promises fulfilled in the journey, the Israelites out of Egypt, the greatness of David, the rise and fall and rise again of the nation of Israel. The heroes who led you, the prophets who challenged you, the times God has saved you, Moses and Elijah are proof of that history, a reminder of where you’ve been. And here, in the shining glory of Jesus, is where you’re going. God saved you before, as you saw in Moses and Elijah, and God indeed will deliver you again.
And Peter, good old Peter, demonstrates the risk of such knowledge, the reason we can see only a glimpse of the promise. Because, gazing at the fulfillment of our history, and the greatness yet to come, what is Peter’s response but, “Lord, it is good for us to be here… I will make three dwellings.” Peter cannot see the unfolding of the story; he can only see the moment he is in. And given his own option, Peter would rather stay frozen in the current moment, than run the risk of greater glories yet to be.
The gift we have, that Peter did not, is that we do not have to wait for Transfiguration moments. We are not bound by singular moments of remembrance. We have a gift that Peter did not; we have in Scripture a portable Transfiguration. It does not offer us the whole story, but it can remind us of where we’ve been, and show us where we are going. We can read our history and remember that no matter how desperate it looks, there is always something more. The Israelites thought Egypt was the end, until Moses led them across the Red Sea. The wilderness looked endless, until there was Canaan. Isaiah said Israel will fall, but God will lead you home again. What is scripture but a series of stories of heartbreak and hope, joy and despair, of God’s people wandering away, and God sending prophets to bring them back, again and again and again, as many times as it takes and more. From each individual point on the ruler, it seemed like the end. But to God who is the air before and after, it is nothing more than the breath in, breath out of life.
The disciples went from the mountain of Transfiguration into the long walk to Jerusalem, and we go from this Sunday into Lent. Lent gets a bit of a bad rap for being depressing, which its purple paraments, minor keys, and somber calls for repentance. The church has done Lent no favors, by making it a season of self-denial and sacrifice. But Lent is not harsh, it is honest. The point of Lent is not to make ourselves feel sufficiently bad about ourselves in order to earn God’s forgiveness. The point of Lent is remind us that when things are bad, God still loves us. All too often, we mistake faith for ease. If I am faithful, then God will bless me. If I am not feeling blessed, then it must be that I, or God, is not faithful. That is the perspective from a point on the ruler of time. But God, who is both before and beyond, does not think in moments but in presence. So Lent is not about feeling sufficiently bad about ourselves to bring us closer to God, rather Lent is about the unwavering promise that when things are bad, God too is there. If you’ve ever felt sad, Lent is for you. If you’ve ever felt scared, Lent is for you. If you’ve ever felt anxious, or hopeless, or alone, Lent is the promise that those feelings are not the absence of God, but that, like the Israelites in the wilderness, like the Babylonian exile, like Daniel in the lions den, God is every bit as present in our fears as in our joys. And Lent, with its set forty days followed by the glory of Easter, is the promise that darkness, that sadness, that despair does not last. That death has been defeated by hope, and life lives on beyond our darkest imaginings.
At the Transfiguration, we are given wisdom for the journey. Not so much that we become paralyzed, but just enough so that we can go forward in the confident promise of resurrection. Thanks be to God. Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Monday, February 27, 2017
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
Conversation Points for Matthew 17:1-9
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• The middle section of Matthew’s Gospel (13:53-17:27) forms a transition from the conflict of the old community to a new community being formed. The dialogue between Jesus and Peter/the disciples, where Peter declared Jesus to be the Messiah (16:13-20) was the turning point. The transfiguration is God’s affirmation of the transition. From here on out, the conflict between the old community (the Romans and the religious leaders who support/are supported by Rome) and the new community (the Jesus followers) will grow steadily in strength until the crucifixion.
• Matthew’s Gospel seeks to portray Jesus as the new/next/fulfilled Moses. The imagery portraying Moses is very clear in this scene. Jesus went up an unnamed mountain (see the Sermon on the Mount (5:1) and the commissioning of the disciples (28:16). Rather than a geographic location, this is a theological assertion.
• Jesus’ “inner circle” of Peter, James, and John (important in Mark) first appears here. “Son of David” is an important Christological title for Jesus in Matthew, so this inner circle of three could relation to King David’s inner circle, also of three (2 Sam 23:8, 18-23, “These are the names of the warriors whom David had: Josheb-basshebeth a Tahchemonite; he was chief of the Three; he wielded his spear against eight hundred whom he killed at one time.”) David’s three were known for their violence, whereas Jesus urged his disciples to give their lives for others.
• Transfigured is the Greek metamorphoomai, literally, to undergo a metamorphosis. Jesus face is described as shining, something that happened to Moses when he spoke to God, an anticipation of Jesus as belonging to the divine world. The divine passive (“he was transfigured”) implies this was an action of God.
• Moses, Elijah, and Jesus all talking together continues the view of Matthew of Jesus as the continuation and more importantly fulfillment of what God began in the Old Testament. Moses and Elijah were both prophets who were initially reject by people, who were advocates for the covenant God made with Israel, and who did not die but were taken up into heaven.
• The heavenly cloud, representing the presence of God, spoke the same words spoke at Jesus baptism.
• When the cloud departed only Jesus, without Moses and Elijah, remained, confirming Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophets.
• V. 9 connected the transfiguration to Easter; helping the post-resurrection community (us) connect with the disciples in the story.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• The middle section of Matthew’s Gospel (13:53-17:27) forms a transition from the conflict of the old community to a new community being formed. The dialogue between Jesus and Peter/the disciples, where Peter declared Jesus to be the Messiah (16:13-20) was the turning point. The transfiguration is God’s affirmation of the transition. From here on out, the conflict between the old community (the Romans and the religious leaders who support/are supported by Rome) and the new community (the Jesus followers) will grow steadily in strength until the crucifixion.
• Matthew’s Gospel seeks to portray Jesus as the new/next/fulfilled Moses. The imagery portraying Moses is very clear in this scene. Jesus went up an unnamed mountain (see the Sermon on the Mount (5:1) and the commissioning of the disciples (28:16). Rather than a geographic location, this is a theological assertion.
• Jesus’ “inner circle” of Peter, James, and John (important in Mark) first appears here. “Son of David” is an important Christological title for Jesus in Matthew, so this inner circle of three could relation to King David’s inner circle, also of three (2 Sam 23:8, 18-23, “These are the names of the warriors whom David had: Josheb-basshebeth a Tahchemonite; he was chief of the Three; he wielded his spear against eight hundred whom he killed at one time.”) David’s three were known for their violence, whereas Jesus urged his disciples to give their lives for others.
• Transfigured is the Greek metamorphoomai, literally, to undergo a metamorphosis. Jesus face is described as shining, something that happened to Moses when he spoke to God, an anticipation of Jesus as belonging to the divine world. The divine passive (“he was transfigured”) implies this was an action of God.
• Moses, Elijah, and Jesus all talking together continues the view of Matthew of Jesus as the continuation and more importantly fulfillment of what God began in the Old Testament. Moses and Elijah were both prophets who were initially reject by people, who were advocates for the covenant God made with Israel, and who did not die but were taken up into heaven.
• The heavenly cloud, representing the presence of God, spoke the same words spoke at Jesus baptism.
• When the cloud departed only Jesus, without Moses and Elijah, remained, confirming Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophets.
• V. 9 connected the transfiguration to Easter; helping the post-resurrection community (us) connect with the disciples in the story.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Sunday, February 19, 2017
Perfection, Dualism, and Stealing Someone's Shoes: A Sermon on Matthew 5:38-48
There’s a quip by comedian Steve Martin, “never criticize a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you’ll be a mile away and you’ll have his shoes.” It’s a funny line; that of course, totally misses the point of the “walk a mile in their shoes” line.
That’s the interesting, and challenging thing about language, it’s nuanced. Even a phrase as clichéd as “walk a mile in their shoes” can be interpreted in various ways, as the Steve Martin quip demonstrates. I mean, if you’re going to criticize someone, it’s not bad advice to first steal their shoes and get a mile away, but it maybe isn’t the best way to build empathy and understanding. The question then, is what is the intention behind the action.
Which has been the question we’ve been asking throughout all of the Sermon on the Mount, the lesson I think Jesus has been teaching his disciples to ponder. When the Law says something, what is the intention behind the statement, and how should that intention affect your action. Last week we talked about how Jesus used the pattern of reaffirmation, radicalization, situational application to show his disciples how to understand the law, and we’re going to do that again. But before we get into that, I want to talk about perfection.
The last verse of our reading is also the last verse of this section of the Sermon on the Mount. With that verse, Jesus finished talking about the Law and moved on to worship and religious practice. So verse forty-eight isn’t just the end of the section about loving your enemies, it is also the summation of the whole section about how the Law is fulfilled. “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The problem, of course, is that perfection is an impossibly high standard. Which, certainly Jesus wasn’t above setting impossibly high standards for his disciples, but this one seems a bit much even for Jesus. Obviously, if the goal is Godly perfection, we are going to fall short, so, one might ask, why even try?
The problem, I think, is a translation issue. And not an English translation issue. Actually, I think the writer of Matthew might have gotten it wrong. The Gospel of Matthew was written in Greek, we know that. And Greek culture had this very dualistic view of the world. There was the world we inhabit, which is broken and messy and flawed. And then there was a second world, a clean, pure, unadulterated inner level that could never be reached, but could only be glimpsed at. I’m doing a terrible job at explaining this, I took a lot of philosophy in college, thank you Jesuit education, but I never managed to grasp the Aristotelian idea of the inner chairness of a chair. But here’s the problem with the word perfection. Jesus wasn’t speaking in Greek; Matthew’s Gospel is itself a translation of Jesus teachings. Jesus spoke Hebrew and Aramaic, neither of which has the same dualistic notion of perfection that was found in Greek culture. The closest Hebrew word to perfection is tamim, which means complete, or whole, or mature. Jesus could not be urging his disciples to perfection, for the simple reason of Jesus was teaching them in a language where the concept of perfection didn’t exist.
So what was Jesus saying, when he taught his disciples to be like their heavenly Father? What might it mean, how might one live, if they were striving to be complete, to be whole, to be mature, like our heavenly Father is complete, whole, mature? The Hebrew culture, the culture in which Jesus was teaching, was a culture rich with the openness to complexity. Unlike the Greek culture, which was all about two distinct worlds; in the Hebrew tradition, the world is messy and fallen and broken, and yet is still the footstool of God, as Jesus said in the scripture from last week. Think about this, in the creation story, God made the world and all that was in it, and God called it good. And then God made humanity, and God called it, called us very good. Now, if we believe that God is all-knowing, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that God knew that we would screw this up and bring sin into the world? We talk about the fall of humanity as if it was some great surprise, but God had to have known it was going to happen. And yet, at our creation, even knowing the future that was to come for us, all of the wars and violence and hatred and greed that we would inflict on our world and each other, God also knew our tremendous capacity for grace and forgiveness and love and compassion, and God called us very good. We are complex creatures in a complicated world, and yet God looked at this strange little thing God had created, this little hairless being with nearly unlimited potential to do both harm and good, and God said, this thing here, this human thing is created in my image and is very good. To be complete, whole, mature, like God is to engage in the messiness of the world, to work toward wholeness, because God called creation good at its inception, and the power of the voice of God brings truth into being. The translation in the Message Bible seems much closer to the intent in the Hebrew. That translation reads: ““In a word, what I’m saying is, GROW UP. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”
The two examples we heard this morning have to do with retribution and love for ones enemies. The retribution law “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” sounds a bit draconian, of course if someone knocked out your eye, that does not then give you permission to gouge out theirs. But in the cultural context in which it was written, it would have set the Israelites apart from their neighbors because it set a limit on recourse. To be an Israelite, to be a follower of the one God, was to abide by a standard that treated even your assailant as a human being, deserving of a punishment that fit only the crime and no more. Jesus then radicalized it, saying it is not enough that retribution should be proportional. In the kingdom of God, there is no retribution at all, for it is God’s will for humanity that grace and mercy prevail.
Like Steve Martin’s shoe quip, there are a lot of ways to read this, and certainly there is temptation and possibility to see such grace and mercy as weakness. How could it be justice to let one’s abuser walk all over them, to turn to someone who has struck us and offer up the other cheek as well, to give to everyone who begs until we ourselves have nothing left.
It seems like weakness, but in fact, the unconditional love Jesus was teaching is the strongest force in the world. First off, because loving ones enemies, or even one’s neighbors, does not mean saying yes to everything they do. Think about this, does loving your kid mean giving them a cookie every single time they ask? No, right. Loving your kid means telling them no sometimes. Another reason this isn’t weakness is that it is super hard. Think about the kid example. Sometimes, when your kid asks for a cookie, even though you should say no, you might give them a cookie, because you’re in the middle of something and you know it will get them to go away. Or you might not give them the cookie, but you might snap at them, can they not see that you’re in the middle of making dinner, which they could have a whole lot faster if you weren’t continually having to engage the cookie conversation. Obviously, neither of these responses make you a bad parent, they make you human. But if it’s that hard with our kids, who we love, it is that much harder with people we don’t love. But, as is often true with hard things, the results can be that much greater.
One of the best modern examples of this is the Civil Rights movement. There’s a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. that I stumbled across recently, that I think captures it perfectly. King said: “We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.” King’s point here is that an unjust law must be opposed, because we have a moral obligation to work for justice. Loving your enemies does not me co-signing on their injustice. But King went on, the way to oppose such laws was not through violence, but through mercy. So then King said, “so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you… But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”
And our victory will be a double victory. That is the power of love. Friends, this is hard. This is super hard. It is hard, and it is incredibly dangerous. Jesus came to challenge the authority of the Roman government with this revolutionary love. And first off, he totally confused his disciples who fully expected the Messiah to be a conquering hero who would ride into town and vanquish the enemy. Then, eventually the Romans killed him for his troubles. But so powerful was this message of love that in dying Jesus destroyed death, and then even death could not hold him and he rose from the dead. Jesus act of unmitigated love so changed the world that two-thousand years later we’re still talking about it, two-thousand years later, we’re still being changed by it.
And with that, our master class on discipleship comes to a close for the season. Next week, we’ll move on to Transfiguration and then we’ll begin the long journey to Lent, where we will see Jesus live out these teachings, all the way to death and beyond. Love, it’s scary and it’s dangerous and it’s totally counter-intuitive. But it is, in the end, the only way to change the world. Thanks be to God, who loved us enough to send his Son, to change the world through his love, and to teach us how to do the same. Amen.
That’s the interesting, and challenging thing about language, it’s nuanced. Even a phrase as clichéd as “walk a mile in their shoes” can be interpreted in various ways, as the Steve Martin quip demonstrates. I mean, if you’re going to criticize someone, it’s not bad advice to first steal their shoes and get a mile away, but it maybe isn’t the best way to build empathy and understanding. The question then, is what is the intention behind the action.
Which has been the question we’ve been asking throughout all of the Sermon on the Mount, the lesson I think Jesus has been teaching his disciples to ponder. When the Law says something, what is the intention behind the statement, and how should that intention affect your action. Last week we talked about how Jesus used the pattern of reaffirmation, radicalization, situational application to show his disciples how to understand the law, and we’re going to do that again. But before we get into that, I want to talk about perfection.
The last verse of our reading is also the last verse of this section of the Sermon on the Mount. With that verse, Jesus finished talking about the Law and moved on to worship and religious practice. So verse forty-eight isn’t just the end of the section about loving your enemies, it is also the summation of the whole section about how the Law is fulfilled. “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The problem, of course, is that perfection is an impossibly high standard. Which, certainly Jesus wasn’t above setting impossibly high standards for his disciples, but this one seems a bit much even for Jesus. Obviously, if the goal is Godly perfection, we are going to fall short, so, one might ask, why even try?
The problem, I think, is a translation issue. And not an English translation issue. Actually, I think the writer of Matthew might have gotten it wrong. The Gospel of Matthew was written in Greek, we know that. And Greek culture had this very dualistic view of the world. There was the world we inhabit, which is broken and messy and flawed. And then there was a second world, a clean, pure, unadulterated inner level that could never be reached, but could only be glimpsed at. I’m doing a terrible job at explaining this, I took a lot of philosophy in college, thank you Jesuit education, but I never managed to grasp the Aristotelian idea of the inner chairness of a chair. But here’s the problem with the word perfection. Jesus wasn’t speaking in Greek; Matthew’s Gospel is itself a translation of Jesus teachings. Jesus spoke Hebrew and Aramaic, neither of which has the same dualistic notion of perfection that was found in Greek culture. The closest Hebrew word to perfection is tamim, which means complete, or whole, or mature. Jesus could not be urging his disciples to perfection, for the simple reason of Jesus was teaching them in a language where the concept of perfection didn’t exist.
So what was Jesus saying, when he taught his disciples to be like their heavenly Father? What might it mean, how might one live, if they were striving to be complete, to be whole, to be mature, like our heavenly Father is complete, whole, mature? The Hebrew culture, the culture in which Jesus was teaching, was a culture rich with the openness to complexity. Unlike the Greek culture, which was all about two distinct worlds; in the Hebrew tradition, the world is messy and fallen and broken, and yet is still the footstool of God, as Jesus said in the scripture from last week. Think about this, in the creation story, God made the world and all that was in it, and God called it good. And then God made humanity, and God called it, called us very good. Now, if we believe that God is all-knowing, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that God knew that we would screw this up and bring sin into the world? We talk about the fall of humanity as if it was some great surprise, but God had to have known it was going to happen. And yet, at our creation, even knowing the future that was to come for us, all of the wars and violence and hatred and greed that we would inflict on our world and each other, God also knew our tremendous capacity for grace and forgiveness and love and compassion, and God called us very good. We are complex creatures in a complicated world, and yet God looked at this strange little thing God had created, this little hairless being with nearly unlimited potential to do both harm and good, and God said, this thing here, this human thing is created in my image and is very good. To be complete, whole, mature, like God is to engage in the messiness of the world, to work toward wholeness, because God called creation good at its inception, and the power of the voice of God brings truth into being. The translation in the Message Bible seems much closer to the intent in the Hebrew. That translation reads: ““In a word, what I’m saying is, GROW UP. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”
The two examples we heard this morning have to do with retribution and love for ones enemies. The retribution law “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” sounds a bit draconian, of course if someone knocked out your eye, that does not then give you permission to gouge out theirs. But in the cultural context in which it was written, it would have set the Israelites apart from their neighbors because it set a limit on recourse. To be an Israelite, to be a follower of the one God, was to abide by a standard that treated even your assailant as a human being, deserving of a punishment that fit only the crime and no more. Jesus then radicalized it, saying it is not enough that retribution should be proportional. In the kingdom of God, there is no retribution at all, for it is God’s will for humanity that grace and mercy prevail.
Like Steve Martin’s shoe quip, there are a lot of ways to read this, and certainly there is temptation and possibility to see such grace and mercy as weakness. How could it be justice to let one’s abuser walk all over them, to turn to someone who has struck us and offer up the other cheek as well, to give to everyone who begs until we ourselves have nothing left.
It seems like weakness, but in fact, the unconditional love Jesus was teaching is the strongest force in the world. First off, because loving ones enemies, or even one’s neighbors, does not mean saying yes to everything they do. Think about this, does loving your kid mean giving them a cookie every single time they ask? No, right. Loving your kid means telling them no sometimes. Another reason this isn’t weakness is that it is super hard. Think about the kid example. Sometimes, when your kid asks for a cookie, even though you should say no, you might give them a cookie, because you’re in the middle of something and you know it will get them to go away. Or you might not give them the cookie, but you might snap at them, can they not see that you’re in the middle of making dinner, which they could have a whole lot faster if you weren’t continually having to engage the cookie conversation. Obviously, neither of these responses make you a bad parent, they make you human. But if it’s that hard with our kids, who we love, it is that much harder with people we don’t love. But, as is often true with hard things, the results can be that much greater.
One of the best modern examples of this is the Civil Rights movement. There’s a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. that I stumbled across recently, that I think captures it perfectly. King said: “We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.” King’s point here is that an unjust law must be opposed, because we have a moral obligation to work for justice. Loving your enemies does not me co-signing on their injustice. But King went on, the way to oppose such laws was not through violence, but through mercy. So then King said, “so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you… But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”
And our victory will be a double victory. That is the power of love. Friends, this is hard. This is super hard. It is hard, and it is incredibly dangerous. Jesus came to challenge the authority of the Roman government with this revolutionary love. And first off, he totally confused his disciples who fully expected the Messiah to be a conquering hero who would ride into town and vanquish the enemy. Then, eventually the Romans killed him for his troubles. But so powerful was this message of love that in dying Jesus destroyed death, and then even death could not hold him and he rose from the dead. Jesus act of unmitigated love so changed the world that two-thousand years later we’re still talking about it, two-thousand years later, we’re still being changed by it.
And with that, our master class on discipleship comes to a close for the season. Next week, we’ll move on to Transfiguration and then we’ll begin the long journey to Lent, where we will see Jesus live out these teachings, all the way to death and beyond. Love, it’s scary and it’s dangerous and it’s totally counter-intuitive. But it is, in the end, the only way to change the world. Thanks be to God, who loved us enough to send his Son, to change the world through his love, and to teach us how to do the same. Amen.
Conversation Points for Matthew 5:38-48
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• The last two examples, like the first four, can be broken down into three steps: reaffirmation, radicalization, situational application.
• V. 38-42: Love Does Not Retaliate
• Reaffirmation: V. 38: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye…’” This line from the Old Testament (Exodus 21:24; Leviticus 24:20; Deuteronomy 19:21) sounds overly harsh in a modern context. But it was not a command for revenge, but rather an attempt to curb the tendency to unlimited private revenge (Genesis 4:23-24: “Lamech said to his wives: ‘Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say: I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.’”).
• Radicalization (moving to the radix, the root, of the command): “Do not resist an evil doer.” Not only are the disciples of Jesus not to seek unlimited revenge, but they are to completely reject the principle of retaliatory violence. The command is unqualified, the “evil doer” is both an individual evil actor and evil itself. Because the kingdom of heaven is already near/here in the presence of Jesus, this perspective takes evil seriously but does not consider it ultimate. So the command to not resist evil is not a passive resistance but an active strategy of positive action in the interest of the aggressor.
• Situational application: v. 40-43. There is a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Christmas Sermon that goes: “We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because non-co-operation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is co-operation with good, and so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you. Send your propaganda agents around the country, and make it appear that we are not fit, culturally and otherwise, for integration, but we'll still love you. But be assured that we'll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.” This quote is a demonstration of what Jesus meant by not retaliating. Non-retaliation does not mean standing aside and letting others abuse you, but it is an active move toward justice. There is a subversive element that topples power through love.
• V. 39, “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek.” Striking someone on the right cheek indicates a backhand blow, meant more for insult than for injury. By turning and offering the left cheek, you are forcing the aggressor to make the decision to strike you with their forehand, and thus treat you as an equal.
• V. 39, “if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.” Someone could sue for a coat, but it was illegal to also take the person’s cloak as that would leave the person with nothing. So instead of resisting, the disciples are encouraged to hand over what could not be legally taken, thus exposing the injustice of the system. This would also leave the accused naked in the courtroom, indicating a security in God to be empowered to renounce ones rights in the interest of others.
• “If anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.” Soldiers had the right to force someone to carry their equipment a certain distance, but it was illegal to go beyond that distance. By continuing on, disciples were opening the soldier up to discipline and pointing out the injustice of any forced service.
• V. 43-48: Love Extends to the Enemy
• Reaffirmation: “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” The Old Testament is clear on the importance of love for one’s neighbor, though “neighbor” was defined as fellow Israelites. There actually isn’t a command to hate one’s enemy, though there are lines about how God “hates all evildoers” (Psalm 5:5; see also Deuteronomy 23:3-7; 30:7 (“The Lord your God will put all these curses on your enemies and on the adversaries who took advantage of you”); Psalm 26:5 (“I hate the company of evildoers, and will not sit with the wicked”); Psalm 139:21-22 (“Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies”).
• Radicalization: The legal question at stake is how to define “neighbor.”
• “Be perfect” (v. 48) seems a complicated request. The word choice here is complex. Neither should it be diluted for comfort, nor understood in the Greek sense of absolute, moral perfection, an impossible ideal. Perfection in the Sermon on the Mount is concrete involvement in the relativities and ambiguities of this world, which is God’s good creation despite its brokenness. The Hebrew word is tamim, which means wholeness. So, to be perfect, is to be single-minded.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• The last two examples, like the first four, can be broken down into three steps: reaffirmation, radicalization, situational application.
• V. 38-42: Love Does Not Retaliate
• Reaffirmation: V. 38: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye…’” This line from the Old Testament (Exodus 21:24; Leviticus 24:20; Deuteronomy 19:21) sounds overly harsh in a modern context. But it was not a command for revenge, but rather an attempt to curb the tendency to unlimited private revenge (Genesis 4:23-24: “Lamech said to his wives: ‘Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say: I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.’”).
• Radicalization (moving to the radix, the root, of the command): “Do not resist an evil doer.” Not only are the disciples of Jesus not to seek unlimited revenge, but they are to completely reject the principle of retaliatory violence. The command is unqualified, the “evil doer” is both an individual evil actor and evil itself. Because the kingdom of heaven is already near/here in the presence of Jesus, this perspective takes evil seriously but does not consider it ultimate. So the command to not resist evil is not a passive resistance but an active strategy of positive action in the interest of the aggressor.
• Situational application: v. 40-43. There is a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Christmas Sermon that goes: “We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because non-co-operation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is co-operation with good, and so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you. Send your propaganda agents around the country, and make it appear that we are not fit, culturally and otherwise, for integration, but we'll still love you. But be assured that we'll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.” This quote is a demonstration of what Jesus meant by not retaliating. Non-retaliation does not mean standing aside and letting others abuse you, but it is an active move toward justice. There is a subversive element that topples power through love.
• V. 39, “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek.” Striking someone on the right cheek indicates a backhand blow, meant more for insult than for injury. By turning and offering the left cheek, you are forcing the aggressor to make the decision to strike you with their forehand, and thus treat you as an equal.
• V. 39, “if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.” Someone could sue for a coat, but it was illegal to also take the person’s cloak as that would leave the person with nothing. So instead of resisting, the disciples are encouraged to hand over what could not be legally taken, thus exposing the injustice of the system. This would also leave the accused naked in the courtroom, indicating a security in God to be empowered to renounce ones rights in the interest of others.
• “If anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.” Soldiers had the right to force someone to carry their equipment a certain distance, but it was illegal to go beyond that distance. By continuing on, disciples were opening the soldier up to discipline and pointing out the injustice of any forced service.
• V. 43-48: Love Extends to the Enemy
• Reaffirmation: “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” The Old Testament is clear on the importance of love for one’s neighbor, though “neighbor” was defined as fellow Israelites. There actually isn’t a command to hate one’s enemy, though there are lines about how God “hates all evildoers” (Psalm 5:5; see also Deuteronomy 23:3-7; 30:7 (“The Lord your God will put all these curses on your enemies and on the adversaries who took advantage of you”); Psalm 26:5 (“I hate the company of evildoers, and will not sit with the wicked”); Psalm 139:21-22 (“Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies”).
• Radicalization: The legal question at stake is how to define “neighbor.”
• “Be perfect” (v. 48) seems a complicated request. The word choice here is complex. Neither should it be diluted for comfort, nor understood in the Greek sense of absolute, moral perfection, an impossible ideal. Perfection in the Sermon on the Mount is concrete involvement in the relativities and ambiguities of this world, which is God’s good creation despite its brokenness. The Hebrew word is tamim, which means wholeness. So, to be perfect, is to be single-minded.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Monday, February 13, 2017
Living from the Root of the Law: A Sermon on Deuteronomy 30:15-20 and Matthew 5:21-37
I found my brain on overdrive as I was pondering the readings for this week. The Matthew text I knew was going to be complicated, we are reading through the Sermon on the Mount after all. But the Deuteronomy text threw me for a loop. To set scene, the Deuteronomy text comes from the very end of the Israelites’ time wandering in the wilderness. They were just about to enter the Promised Land, which means Moses was just about to hand the leadership of the Israelites over to his successor. What we read today was from Moses’ final speech to the Israelites as their leader. He started by reviewing all of the laws, everything from the Ten Commandments to worship practices and festivals to rules of warfare to what to do if you got a leprous skin disease. It’s super thorough, like, way more than you may have thought. Then, at the end of this whole recitation of law, Moses urged them, “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity…Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” Choose life, as if it’s just that easy. The problem with this is, of course, it’s never that easy. Moses’ exhortation to just choose life makes it sound like every decision is a series of two clear-cut options, one clearly the right one and the other obviously the wrong one, and all we need to do is just pick the right one. And maybe it’s just my natural skepticism, but I have never found any decision to be that easy. On any topic from world peace to what I should have for lunch, I can give you a series of increasingly complicated opinions arguing both sides of the situation. You should have seen the pro-con list when I tried to buy a running watch earlier this year.
I like this passage from Deuteronomy, because it appeals to my desire for order and clear-cut answers. I wish life was so simple as “see I have set before you life and prosperity, death and adversity, choose life.” But I have just not experienced that to be the case. Honestly, when someone tells me that all the answers they need for life are in the Bible, I tend to wonder if they’ve actually read much of it.
Also honestly, the fact that the Bible is complicated and not clear-cut is what I love about it. Those complications and contradictions are what make scripture come alive for me, it is what makes this messy, convoluted story of God’s love for God’s people believable and real. I love that the Word of God invites me to engage with it, to wrestle with the complexities of life and humanity, to learn and to grow and to change. I love that God’s word is strong enough to handle my questions and my challenges, and I know that I am a better person, that I have grown, through of my study of it. The complexities of scripture have challenged me to grow in ways that a checklist of right living could not have accomplished. I’m grateful for a God who loves me enough to trust me with the freedom of complexity. What a gift and a leap of faith that feels like.
The beautiful and terrible complexity of scripture is what Jesus was addressing in the section of the Sermon on the Mount we read this morning. Remember the Sermon on the Mount is insider conversation; it is a master class on discipleship for those who are already part of the community of Jesus-followers. It is for those who have already experienced the unconditional grace and love of God that can never be earned or deserved and is totally and completely a gift God has given to us and now want to know how to live well in response to that gift. If I can quote Spiderman here, “with great power comes great responsibility.” This section is the “great responsibility” side of the equation. God has chosen life for you, how shall you live with this one precious life?
Last week, we heard Jesus tell the disciples “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law… I have not come to abolish but to fulfill.” Jesus then fleshed out what he meant by fulfilling the law by giving examples. We heard four of those examples today, anger, adultery, divorce, and oaths. We’ll hear the last two next week, retaliation and treatment of enemies. Any of the four could be a sermon series in and of itself. So instead of picking any one of them, I want to look at the form of all four of them, pick apart Jesus’ pedagogy a little bit, and see what Jesus’ overall purpose might have been.
All of these sections follow the same pattern. First, Jesus reaffirmed the law. “You have heard it said that: fill in the blank.” For example, anger. You have heard it said “You shall not murder.” One of the Ten Commandments. Pretty cut and dry, right. Don’t kill people. How complex can that be? Well, what about in self-defense? What if it was an accident? Or abuse that comes close but does not lead to death? What about war, what constitutes just war? It sounds easy until you hold it up to any actual situation, and then it is instantly more complicated. The Pharisees, and let’s face it, all religious and civil leaders throughout all of human history, past and present, tried to solve these questions by adding increasingly complicated levels of legislation around it. Which helps, but there are always gaps and cracks that screw up the question. We cannot, no matter how hard we try, legislate ourselves into right living. So check out what Jesus did next, he radicalized the law. And by radicalized, I don’t mean the way that the word radicalized gets used today, where “to be radicalized” means to move to the violent fringe of a system. This is the opposite of that. I mean radicalized like to move to the radix, to the root of the command. What was God’s will for God’s people behind the institution of this command. So in the anger example, “but I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council, and if you say “you fool” you will be liable to the hell of fire.” So the radix, the root of the command about murder is much deeper than don’t kill people. It gets to God’s desire for us; God’s will for us is a community where there is not hostility between God’s people. An evaluation of how to live out the law “you shall not murder” should not ask the limiting question of “is this or is this not murder,” but rather should ask the ever expanding question of “does this action help to bring about God’s will of a community without hostility, and if it does not, what would?” The difference is subtle, but it is profound. One closes ever-tightening walls around who belongs and who does not, and the other seeks to open the expanse of God’s kingdom to ever-widening reaches.
Understanding the law from the point of view of God’s intention behind it makes living within the law impossible. This anger one is especially interesting because taken to its furthest extreme, even Jesus seemed to fall short of it. In Matthew chapter twenty-three, Jesus will call the Pharisees “blind fools.” And if Jesus is sinless and the fulfillment of the law and yet Jesus cannot live up to the law, then clearly we are misinterpreting something here, as both of those things seemingly cannot be true. The misinterpretation, I think, is that same mistake of thinking there could be a clear-cut, right-wrong answer. Living perfectly within the intention is impossible, because the world is impossibly complicated. So after getting to the radix, to the root of the law, Jesus then went on to give his disciples a situational application for how to live from this root understanding. “So,” Jesus said, “when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.” Basically, Jesus was like, look, it is God’s will that there be no hostility in the world. But obviously, it is impossible to never be angry; the world is full of people, not mindless automatons. You’re going to get your feelings hurt; you’re going to hurt other people. It happens. So, when it happens, be about reconciliation. Be about finding ways to move past the hurt and the anger to rebuild relationships with one another. The law is fulfilled not by one clear-cut statement, don’t be angry, but by a thousand tiny outreaches of grace, a thousand small movements toward each other.
And the super cool thing about this reaffirmation, radicalization, application process Jesus taught the disciples, is it totally works for all of the law. To prove my point. I mentioned that Deuteronomy has a law about what to do about leprous diseases. There’s actually two whole chapters about it, Leviticus thirteen and fourteen, if you’re really bored sometime, you could check it out. But the basic premise is, if you have a leprous disease, show yourself to the priest and do what they tell you. Friends, this is obvious but, if you have a leprous disease, unless you know a priest who also happens to be a medical professional, do not show it to a priest, because we will not know what to do for you. I mean, by all means, show it to me if you want. I spend a lot of time in hospitals, I’m comfortable with whatever. And I will certainly pray with you and sympathize with you and provide pastoral care. But in terms of medical advice, I will not be helpful. So what do we do with this law? Do we ignore it? But Jesus said he came not to abolish, but to fulfill. So what’s the radix, the root intention of the whole priest/leprosy thing? Well, priests were the most well-educated members of a community. You showed yourself to a priest for the same reason you would go to a doctor today, because the priest was the person in your community who had the most training and knowledge, they were the person most qualified to help you. Leviticus says that if the leprosy looks deep, the priest should confine the person and then check it in seven days. Remember there aren’t like antibiotics or creams or anything, the only option is really wait and see. Confining a person was the only way to keep a potential illness from spreading to the rest of the community. So might the radix of this be that it is God’s will that people live in healthy and vibrant communities? That people have access to the care they need, and that the sick and vulnerable are protected? If that is the radix for the laws about leprosy, that God’s will for us is health, how then do we put that into practice? How do we create communities of health and well-being? How do we care for ourselves and for others to truly bring about God’s vision of a healthy community? These are much harder questions than simply do this, but they are also much richer and more life-giving ones.
This process of reaffirmation, radicalization, application is hard. Yes it would be much easier if Jesus had just been like, do this, not that. And yes, we’re totally going to screw it up all the time. And we’re going to royally disagree on how we do this and what conclusions we reach. But when I read this section of the Sermon on the Mount, I can’t help but feel honored that Jesus loved his disciples, loves us enough, and believes in us enough to teach us how to ask these questions and to help us grow into a fuller vision of who God has created us to be. And that belief and that love and that trust Jesus shows makes me want to try to live up to this expectation. Jesus said you are salt, you are light, and the fact that Jesus seems to feel that it is true makes me want to live up to that expectation, and gives me the confidence to try again even when I fall short. And I hope that the complexity, the challenge, and the objective reality that you are loved by God fills you with the confidence and the courage as well. Thanks be to God, who loves us and believes in us more than we could ever believe in ourselves. Amen.
I like this passage from Deuteronomy, because it appeals to my desire for order and clear-cut answers. I wish life was so simple as “see I have set before you life and prosperity, death and adversity, choose life.” But I have just not experienced that to be the case. Honestly, when someone tells me that all the answers they need for life are in the Bible, I tend to wonder if they’ve actually read much of it.
Also honestly, the fact that the Bible is complicated and not clear-cut is what I love about it. Those complications and contradictions are what make scripture come alive for me, it is what makes this messy, convoluted story of God’s love for God’s people believable and real. I love that the Word of God invites me to engage with it, to wrestle with the complexities of life and humanity, to learn and to grow and to change. I love that God’s word is strong enough to handle my questions and my challenges, and I know that I am a better person, that I have grown, through of my study of it. The complexities of scripture have challenged me to grow in ways that a checklist of right living could not have accomplished. I’m grateful for a God who loves me enough to trust me with the freedom of complexity. What a gift and a leap of faith that feels like.
The beautiful and terrible complexity of scripture is what Jesus was addressing in the section of the Sermon on the Mount we read this morning. Remember the Sermon on the Mount is insider conversation; it is a master class on discipleship for those who are already part of the community of Jesus-followers. It is for those who have already experienced the unconditional grace and love of God that can never be earned or deserved and is totally and completely a gift God has given to us and now want to know how to live well in response to that gift. If I can quote Spiderman here, “with great power comes great responsibility.” This section is the “great responsibility” side of the equation. God has chosen life for you, how shall you live with this one precious life?
Last week, we heard Jesus tell the disciples “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law… I have not come to abolish but to fulfill.” Jesus then fleshed out what he meant by fulfilling the law by giving examples. We heard four of those examples today, anger, adultery, divorce, and oaths. We’ll hear the last two next week, retaliation and treatment of enemies. Any of the four could be a sermon series in and of itself. So instead of picking any one of them, I want to look at the form of all four of them, pick apart Jesus’ pedagogy a little bit, and see what Jesus’ overall purpose might have been.
All of these sections follow the same pattern. First, Jesus reaffirmed the law. “You have heard it said that: fill in the blank.” For example, anger. You have heard it said “You shall not murder.” One of the Ten Commandments. Pretty cut and dry, right. Don’t kill people. How complex can that be? Well, what about in self-defense? What if it was an accident? Or abuse that comes close but does not lead to death? What about war, what constitutes just war? It sounds easy until you hold it up to any actual situation, and then it is instantly more complicated. The Pharisees, and let’s face it, all religious and civil leaders throughout all of human history, past and present, tried to solve these questions by adding increasingly complicated levels of legislation around it. Which helps, but there are always gaps and cracks that screw up the question. We cannot, no matter how hard we try, legislate ourselves into right living. So check out what Jesus did next, he radicalized the law. And by radicalized, I don’t mean the way that the word radicalized gets used today, where “to be radicalized” means to move to the violent fringe of a system. This is the opposite of that. I mean radicalized like to move to the radix, to the root of the command. What was God’s will for God’s people behind the institution of this command. So in the anger example, “but I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council, and if you say “you fool” you will be liable to the hell of fire.” So the radix, the root of the command about murder is much deeper than don’t kill people. It gets to God’s desire for us; God’s will for us is a community where there is not hostility between God’s people. An evaluation of how to live out the law “you shall not murder” should not ask the limiting question of “is this or is this not murder,” but rather should ask the ever expanding question of “does this action help to bring about God’s will of a community without hostility, and if it does not, what would?” The difference is subtle, but it is profound. One closes ever-tightening walls around who belongs and who does not, and the other seeks to open the expanse of God’s kingdom to ever-widening reaches.
Understanding the law from the point of view of God’s intention behind it makes living within the law impossible. This anger one is especially interesting because taken to its furthest extreme, even Jesus seemed to fall short of it. In Matthew chapter twenty-three, Jesus will call the Pharisees “blind fools.” And if Jesus is sinless and the fulfillment of the law and yet Jesus cannot live up to the law, then clearly we are misinterpreting something here, as both of those things seemingly cannot be true. The misinterpretation, I think, is that same mistake of thinking there could be a clear-cut, right-wrong answer. Living perfectly within the intention is impossible, because the world is impossibly complicated. So after getting to the radix, to the root of the law, Jesus then went on to give his disciples a situational application for how to live from this root understanding. “So,” Jesus said, “when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.” Basically, Jesus was like, look, it is God’s will that there be no hostility in the world. But obviously, it is impossible to never be angry; the world is full of people, not mindless automatons. You’re going to get your feelings hurt; you’re going to hurt other people. It happens. So, when it happens, be about reconciliation. Be about finding ways to move past the hurt and the anger to rebuild relationships with one another. The law is fulfilled not by one clear-cut statement, don’t be angry, but by a thousand tiny outreaches of grace, a thousand small movements toward each other.
And the super cool thing about this reaffirmation, radicalization, application process Jesus taught the disciples, is it totally works for all of the law. To prove my point. I mentioned that Deuteronomy has a law about what to do about leprous diseases. There’s actually two whole chapters about it, Leviticus thirteen and fourteen, if you’re really bored sometime, you could check it out. But the basic premise is, if you have a leprous disease, show yourself to the priest and do what they tell you. Friends, this is obvious but, if you have a leprous disease, unless you know a priest who also happens to be a medical professional, do not show it to a priest, because we will not know what to do for you. I mean, by all means, show it to me if you want. I spend a lot of time in hospitals, I’m comfortable with whatever. And I will certainly pray with you and sympathize with you and provide pastoral care. But in terms of medical advice, I will not be helpful. So what do we do with this law? Do we ignore it? But Jesus said he came not to abolish, but to fulfill. So what’s the radix, the root intention of the whole priest/leprosy thing? Well, priests were the most well-educated members of a community. You showed yourself to a priest for the same reason you would go to a doctor today, because the priest was the person in your community who had the most training and knowledge, they were the person most qualified to help you. Leviticus says that if the leprosy looks deep, the priest should confine the person and then check it in seven days. Remember there aren’t like antibiotics or creams or anything, the only option is really wait and see. Confining a person was the only way to keep a potential illness from spreading to the rest of the community. So might the radix of this be that it is God’s will that people live in healthy and vibrant communities? That people have access to the care they need, and that the sick and vulnerable are protected? If that is the radix for the laws about leprosy, that God’s will for us is health, how then do we put that into practice? How do we create communities of health and well-being? How do we care for ourselves and for others to truly bring about God’s vision of a healthy community? These are much harder questions than simply do this, but they are also much richer and more life-giving ones.
This process of reaffirmation, radicalization, application is hard. Yes it would be much easier if Jesus had just been like, do this, not that. And yes, we’re totally going to screw it up all the time. And we’re going to royally disagree on how we do this and what conclusions we reach. But when I read this section of the Sermon on the Mount, I can’t help but feel honored that Jesus loved his disciples, loves us enough, and believes in us enough to teach us how to ask these questions and to help us grow into a fuller vision of who God has created us to be. And that belief and that love and that trust Jesus shows makes me want to try to live up to this expectation. Jesus said you are salt, you are light, and the fact that Jesus seems to feel that it is true makes me want to live up to that expectation, and gives me the confidence to try again even when I fall short. And I hope that the complexity, the challenge, and the objective reality that you are loved by God fills you with the confidence and the courage as well. Thanks be to God, who loves us and believes in us more than we could ever believe in ourselves. Amen.
Thursday, February 9, 2017
Conversation Points for Matthew 5:21-37
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• Last week’s section ended with Jesus urging the disciples to righteous that exceeded that of the scribes and Pharisees. He goes on to offer six concrete examples of what it means to have greater righteousness. Each of these six examples follow the same pattern – what was said (divine passive, by God through Moses) and what is now being said (by Jesus to his disciples).
• “You have heard” refers to hearing the reading of scripture in a synagogue. Jesus is not just giving a better interpretation of the reading, as a rabbi might. Rather, he is relocating the authority of scripture from the written text to himself – i.e. to God’s presence in his life, teaching, death, and resurrection. [Pastor Kjersten’s note: my pastor at this point would talk about how the hermeneutic, the lens through which we read scripture, is Jesus. Then she would tap the frame of her glasses. Like glasses make our sight clearer, we read all of scripture through the lens of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, so we know how to live out the law of Moses.]
• The first three examples follow a set pattern: reaffirmation (statement of the law, reassuring those who feared Jesus was attempting to do away with the law that Jesus came “not to abolish but to fulfill”), radicalization (the fulfillment of the law is not simply a reaffirmation of what is already there, but a move to the radix, the root of the command), situational application (how the radicalized law is to be lived out in community, how to live as imperfect people in an imperfect world).
• V. 21 – 26: Love Shows No Hostility. Reaffirmation: “You shall not murder,” one of the Ten Commandments. “Whoever murders shall be judged is not directly quoted in scripture, but is a paraphrase that can be implied by several texts. Radicalization: the increasing bar is not about civil authorities, but the will of God. God does not want hostility of any kind between God’s people. Interestingly, this bar is set so high, that even Jesus seems to not be able to meet it (Matt 23:17, “You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the sanctuary that has made the gold sacred?”). Application: Since one cannot meet the level of never having hostility toward another, the way to live in this is to always work toward reconciliation. The description cannot be taken literally; a worshipper could not simply leave one’s gift before the altar and walk away in the middle of worship to make amends with someone who could be several days travel away. But the hyperbolic description leads one closer to God’s ideal.
• V. 27 – 30: Love Is Not Predatory. Reaffirmation: “You shall not commit adultery,” one of the Ten Commandments, where it refers specifically to a married woman having sexual relations with a man other than her husband, considered a violation of the husband’s exclusive right to his wife. It would not be considered adultery for a married man to have sexual relations with a woman not his wife. Radicalization: Jesus presupposes the patriarchal setting of both the Ten Commandments and his own time by addressing this to men. This is in itself radicalizing, because women were often considered the offending party. Application: Again the text recognized the will of God was greater than could be achieved. So it offered a remedy for failing, while still recognizing the severity of the action with a move to the hyperbolic.
• V. 31-32: Love in Marriage. Reaffirmation: This is a continuation on the comments about adultery. Earlier, Jesus addressed adultery as being more than a violation of a married man’s property rights, now Jesus challenges the legal understanding on divorce. Radicalization: Divorce is not what God wants for God’s people. Because of how this has been used in modern times as a club against people (frequently women), it is important to consider the tradition Matthew was coming from. 1) There is no Torah command against divorce. Divorce was considered legitimate, the question was with remarriage. Divorce was strictly the prerogative of the husband, so it had to be legal to protect the status of a divorced woman. 2) Deuteronomy permits a man to divorce his wife if he found “something objectionable” about her (Deuteronomy 24:1). At the time of Jesus, rabbinic schools were divided on how to define “something objectionable.” The stricter interpretation limited it to sexual sin or gross impropriety, whereas the looser interpretation was anything that displeased the husband. In either case, divorces were easy to obtain and led to a lax attitude toward marriage. 3) The traditional view was that if a divorced woman remarried, she would be committing adultery. Jesus expanded the guilt so that the one who had the ability to divorce (the man) also carried the guilt for the adultery.
• V. 33-37: Love Is Unconditionally Truthful. Reaffirmation: Oaths must be kept (Leviticus 19:12, “And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord”). Radicalization: Not just oaths, but ALL words must be truthful.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• Last week’s section ended with Jesus urging the disciples to righteous that exceeded that of the scribes and Pharisees. He goes on to offer six concrete examples of what it means to have greater righteousness. Each of these six examples follow the same pattern – what was said (divine passive, by God through Moses) and what is now being said (by Jesus to his disciples).
• “You have heard” refers to hearing the reading of scripture in a synagogue. Jesus is not just giving a better interpretation of the reading, as a rabbi might. Rather, he is relocating the authority of scripture from the written text to himself – i.e. to God’s presence in his life, teaching, death, and resurrection. [Pastor Kjersten’s note: my pastor at this point would talk about how the hermeneutic, the lens through which we read scripture, is Jesus. Then she would tap the frame of her glasses. Like glasses make our sight clearer, we read all of scripture through the lens of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, so we know how to live out the law of Moses.]
• The first three examples follow a set pattern: reaffirmation (statement of the law, reassuring those who feared Jesus was attempting to do away with the law that Jesus came “not to abolish but to fulfill”), radicalization (the fulfillment of the law is not simply a reaffirmation of what is already there, but a move to the radix, the root of the command), situational application (how the radicalized law is to be lived out in community, how to live as imperfect people in an imperfect world).
• V. 21 – 26: Love Shows No Hostility. Reaffirmation: “You shall not murder,” one of the Ten Commandments. “Whoever murders shall be judged is not directly quoted in scripture, but is a paraphrase that can be implied by several texts. Radicalization: the increasing bar is not about civil authorities, but the will of God. God does not want hostility of any kind between God’s people. Interestingly, this bar is set so high, that even Jesus seems to not be able to meet it (Matt 23:17, “You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the sanctuary that has made the gold sacred?”). Application: Since one cannot meet the level of never having hostility toward another, the way to live in this is to always work toward reconciliation. The description cannot be taken literally; a worshipper could not simply leave one’s gift before the altar and walk away in the middle of worship to make amends with someone who could be several days travel away. But the hyperbolic description leads one closer to God’s ideal.
• V. 27 – 30: Love Is Not Predatory. Reaffirmation: “You shall not commit adultery,” one of the Ten Commandments, where it refers specifically to a married woman having sexual relations with a man other than her husband, considered a violation of the husband’s exclusive right to his wife. It would not be considered adultery for a married man to have sexual relations with a woman not his wife. Radicalization: Jesus presupposes the patriarchal setting of both the Ten Commandments and his own time by addressing this to men. This is in itself radicalizing, because women were often considered the offending party. Application: Again the text recognized the will of God was greater than could be achieved. So it offered a remedy for failing, while still recognizing the severity of the action with a move to the hyperbolic.
• V. 31-32: Love in Marriage. Reaffirmation: This is a continuation on the comments about adultery. Earlier, Jesus addressed adultery as being more than a violation of a married man’s property rights, now Jesus challenges the legal understanding on divorce. Radicalization: Divorce is not what God wants for God’s people. Because of how this has been used in modern times as a club against people (frequently women), it is important to consider the tradition Matthew was coming from. 1) There is no Torah command against divorce. Divorce was considered legitimate, the question was with remarriage. Divorce was strictly the prerogative of the husband, so it had to be legal to protect the status of a divorced woman. 2) Deuteronomy permits a man to divorce his wife if he found “something objectionable” about her (Deuteronomy 24:1). At the time of Jesus, rabbinic schools were divided on how to define “something objectionable.” The stricter interpretation limited it to sexual sin or gross impropriety, whereas the looser interpretation was anything that displeased the husband. In either case, divorces were easy to obtain and led to a lax attitude toward marriage. 3) The traditional view was that if a divorced woman remarried, she would be committing adultery. Jesus expanded the guilt so that the one who had the ability to divorce (the man) also carried the guilt for the adultery.
• V. 33-37: Love Is Unconditionally Truthful. Reaffirmation: Oaths must be kept (Leviticus 19:12, “And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord”). Radicalization: Not just oaths, but ALL words must be truthful.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Monday, February 6, 2017
You (yes, you) are the Salt of the Earth: A Sermon on Matthew 5:13-20
Last week I mentioned how the location of the Sermon on the Mount tells us more about the theology of Matthew than it does about the geography of Jesus. This week we’ll start to see why that matters. Remember how the Gospel text started last week, “when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain. And after he had sat down, his disciples came to him, and he began to teach.” What this tells us is the Sermon on the Mount is insider talk. It is instruction for people who are already in the community of followers. The scene here basically is Jesus saw all these crowds forming, and he knew that as the movement got bigger, and especially after his resurrection and ascension, his disciples might be the only version of him some people ever saw. So before things got too far in, he pulled his disciples away to make sure everyone was running from the same playbook. We tend to think of the Sermon on the Mount as an introduction to discipleship, but it’s really a master class on discipleship. It’s for those who are already deeply enmeshed in the community of believers, so that when the crowds of newcomers start arriving, those closest to Jesus will know how best to share the movement.
Which means, the Sermon on the Mount sets some pretty high standards. Jesus wanted his disciples to know that the stakes were high. You know the expression, “you might be the only scripture someone ever reads.” Jesus knew that people would be watching his disciples and judging the success of the movement based on their actions, and he wanted them to be as prepared as they could be to be representatives of God.
But before Jesus got into how the disciples were to act, he grounded them yet again in who they were. “You, you are the salt of the earth… You, you are the light of the world.” That emphasis is not mine, it is in the text. If you’ve ever studied a language where you had to conjugate verbs, Greek is a language like that. The subject is implied in the verb itself, you don’t need to add one to tell the difference between you are, we are, or they are, like you do in English. But these statements have the extra you included to drive in the message, you, disciples, you and not someone else are the salt of the earth, you and not someone else are the light of the world. And like last week’s beatitudes, these are declarations of fact. Jesus wasn’t saying, be salt, be light, but rather you are salt, you are light. Salt is a preservative, it’s a cleansing agent, it’s a seasoning, it levens bread, it builds community. Light illuminates darkness, it reveals the things that are around it. But neither creates its own attribute. Salt does not generate saltiness; light does not create its own light. Salt is salty because that is what it means to be salt, light shines because that it what it means to be light. These are not expectations to strive toward; they are descriptions of characteristics inherent in members of the Jesus community. As followers of Jesus, salt and light is what you are. Just be that. Be the thing that you are.
Once that fact is established, then Jesus got into the teaching. One of the critiques leveled against Jesus was that he was trying to do away with the law. The Pharisees were always really concerned about this, like when Jesus went around healing on the Sabbath, and they were like, hey there, you’re not supposed to do any work on the Sabbath, there’s a law. Which, one hand, they’re right. There is a law, and it’s a good one. We need rest, and the law about resting on the Sabbath is to give us that rest. But, of course, there is also a law about caring for others, and that law supersedes the law about no work on the Sabbath. As he said in the text this morning, Jesus wasn’t about abolishing the law; he was simply about reorienting us to the purpose behind the law.
Now interestingly, because, again, nothing new under the sun, when Luther started preaching about grace as a gift from God, the church leveled actually an even more ridiculous critique against him. The church’s argument against grace in the time of Luther: if grace is free, and people can do anything they want and still get into heaven, then total anarchy will break out. The only thing keeping people in line is fear of eternal damnation. Which, fear of eternal damnation, certainly a good motivator, but here’s the question? If you’re only behaving a certain way because you’re afraid, are you really free? And, if you’re so convinced of your own freedom that you’re living without regard for anyone around you, are you really free? I’d argue in both cases, the answer is no. Fear isn’t freedom, but neither is isolated self-absorption. The only true freedom is in relationship with others.
And that, said Luther, is where the law comes in. Get ready friends, here’s your fun Lutheran theology lesson for the day. Luther described what he saw as three uses for the law. The first use of the law is to curb behavior. Law as club. Do this, don’t do that, or there will be punishment. Effective in keeping folk in line, but not really freedom.
The danger in using the law as a curb and a club is eventually, the area of right living becomes narrower and narrower, and it becomes increasingly impossible to always follow the law. When we read scripture, we see this in the Pharisees, who had a tendency to lift up some parts of the law and downplay others, so that, conveniently, they were always in the right and everyone else was always in the wrong. The first use of the law eventually draws the line around right living so tight that no one can get inside. This is the second use of the law, the law as mirror and judge. The law, God’s law, sets the bar so high for us that no matter how hard we try to live up to it, we fall short. The second use of the law shows us our failings and our frailties, shows us just how trapped we really are. Effective for inducing despair, but also, obviously, not freedom.
And this is where we would be, except, said Luther for Jesus. Because our freedom is not based on our ability to deserve it. Our freedom is based on God. The purpose of the second use of the law is not to trap us in despair; it is to open our eyes to just how amazing this gift of love and grace that God has given to us in the person of Jesus is. The law shows us just how much we need God so we can fully comprehend how vast is God’s love for us. You know how delicious a glass of ice cold water tastes on a really hot day. Or how great coming into a warm house is on a really cold day? The second use of the law is that heat that makes us appreciate cold water, that cold that makes us grateful for a heater. The second use of the law shows us our freedom.
And once we realize we are free. Once we feel the shackles lifted and we look around in the open expansiveness of this new relationship with God and with one another, then we get to the third use of the law. Then the law becomes not a burden, but a guide. It becomes instructions to the game, so we can have fun with our friends, or traffic lights, so we can get to where we’re going quickly and safely. And yes, we still mess up sometimes, we still fall short of how we should live. But because of the grace of God, our failures don’t hold us captive. Because we know we are forgiven, because we know we are loved, we can screw up, acknowledge our mistake, and try to do better next time. There are rules, but those rules are in place to show us how to live better, freer, fuller lives. That, my friends, is freedom.
I share this today because Luther didn’t just make this stuff up out of nowhere. He got this from scripture, he got this from Jesus. And what Jesus is doing in the Sermon on the Mount is he is teaching his disciples, teaching us, what Luther referred to as the third use of the law. Jesus doesn’t use those words, because, quite frankly, Jesus is a way better and less confusing teacher than Luther, but that’s where Luther got it from.
This section we heard today about Jesus coming to fulfill the law and the prophets, especially there at the end where he talked about how “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” sounds kind of hard to live up to. And I have to tell you, this is just the introduction to the section on the law. Once Jesus starts putting examples on this stuff, it’s going to get hard to see how we could ever live in the way God wants. Which is why I wanted to spend so much time this morning talking about the uses of the law. Because I want us to remember, as we’re hearing these things, that we are already forgiven, we are already loved, we are already free. That isn’t a license to do whatever we want because God has to love us, ha ha. Rather it’s confidence to try hard things, knowing we may fail, but taking a stab in the dark anyway.
And friends, this is the reminder, and the promise, that I have been clinging to recently. Because I don’t know about you, but I sure do feel powerless these days. The world feels big and ugly and scary, and it feels like it’s rolling away from me, and I don’t know how to do anything about it. Jesus said to his disciples you are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world. Those certainly seem like good things, but they also seem like big things, and I’m not sure how to begin. Jesus said you are salt, you are light, and I believe him, but I feel like maybe I am just one tiny grain of salt, one little candle of light, and those do not feel like enough to season the earth, to light up the world. But God made us into salty, light-bearing people. God created us in this way. We don’t have to be salt and give light for God, but rather because of God we are set free to be the glorious salty, light-giving people we are.
So here’s the challenge this week. One small thing you can do to be salt and light in the world. Have a conversation this week with someone who is different from you. If you’re younger, visit one of our members in assisted living, if you’re older, call a grandchild, or a neighbor, or the person who mows your lawn. Co-op has their mandatory meeting on Monday, come by and strike up a conversation with a Co-op member. Meet someone of a different ethnic background or religion or partisan affiliation, and just have a conversation with them. What are their hopes, their fears, what are your hopes, your fears. Will you say the wrong thing? Maybe? If you offend them, ask forgiveness, if they offend you, forgive them. Will you agree on everything? Not if you really found someone who’s different than you. But you know what will happen? The earth will be seasoned by your difference. And the world will be illuminated just a little more brightly by the things you learn from each other. Jesus says you are salt, you are light. So you are. So this week, just go out and do it, be it, let your light, the light that God lit within you to shine. You can’t help it, so you might as well embrace it. Amen.
Which means, the Sermon on the Mount sets some pretty high standards. Jesus wanted his disciples to know that the stakes were high. You know the expression, “you might be the only scripture someone ever reads.” Jesus knew that people would be watching his disciples and judging the success of the movement based on their actions, and he wanted them to be as prepared as they could be to be representatives of God.
But before Jesus got into how the disciples were to act, he grounded them yet again in who they were. “You, you are the salt of the earth… You, you are the light of the world.” That emphasis is not mine, it is in the text. If you’ve ever studied a language where you had to conjugate verbs, Greek is a language like that. The subject is implied in the verb itself, you don’t need to add one to tell the difference between you are, we are, or they are, like you do in English. But these statements have the extra you included to drive in the message, you, disciples, you and not someone else are the salt of the earth, you and not someone else are the light of the world. And like last week’s beatitudes, these are declarations of fact. Jesus wasn’t saying, be salt, be light, but rather you are salt, you are light. Salt is a preservative, it’s a cleansing agent, it’s a seasoning, it levens bread, it builds community. Light illuminates darkness, it reveals the things that are around it. But neither creates its own attribute. Salt does not generate saltiness; light does not create its own light. Salt is salty because that is what it means to be salt, light shines because that it what it means to be light. These are not expectations to strive toward; they are descriptions of characteristics inherent in members of the Jesus community. As followers of Jesus, salt and light is what you are. Just be that. Be the thing that you are.
Once that fact is established, then Jesus got into the teaching. One of the critiques leveled against Jesus was that he was trying to do away with the law. The Pharisees were always really concerned about this, like when Jesus went around healing on the Sabbath, and they were like, hey there, you’re not supposed to do any work on the Sabbath, there’s a law. Which, one hand, they’re right. There is a law, and it’s a good one. We need rest, and the law about resting on the Sabbath is to give us that rest. But, of course, there is also a law about caring for others, and that law supersedes the law about no work on the Sabbath. As he said in the text this morning, Jesus wasn’t about abolishing the law; he was simply about reorienting us to the purpose behind the law.
Now interestingly, because, again, nothing new under the sun, when Luther started preaching about grace as a gift from God, the church leveled actually an even more ridiculous critique against him. The church’s argument against grace in the time of Luther: if grace is free, and people can do anything they want and still get into heaven, then total anarchy will break out. The only thing keeping people in line is fear of eternal damnation. Which, fear of eternal damnation, certainly a good motivator, but here’s the question? If you’re only behaving a certain way because you’re afraid, are you really free? And, if you’re so convinced of your own freedom that you’re living without regard for anyone around you, are you really free? I’d argue in both cases, the answer is no. Fear isn’t freedom, but neither is isolated self-absorption. The only true freedom is in relationship with others.
And that, said Luther, is where the law comes in. Get ready friends, here’s your fun Lutheran theology lesson for the day. Luther described what he saw as three uses for the law. The first use of the law is to curb behavior. Law as club. Do this, don’t do that, or there will be punishment. Effective in keeping folk in line, but not really freedom.
The danger in using the law as a curb and a club is eventually, the area of right living becomes narrower and narrower, and it becomes increasingly impossible to always follow the law. When we read scripture, we see this in the Pharisees, who had a tendency to lift up some parts of the law and downplay others, so that, conveniently, they were always in the right and everyone else was always in the wrong. The first use of the law eventually draws the line around right living so tight that no one can get inside. This is the second use of the law, the law as mirror and judge. The law, God’s law, sets the bar so high for us that no matter how hard we try to live up to it, we fall short. The second use of the law shows us our failings and our frailties, shows us just how trapped we really are. Effective for inducing despair, but also, obviously, not freedom.
And this is where we would be, except, said Luther for Jesus. Because our freedom is not based on our ability to deserve it. Our freedom is based on God. The purpose of the second use of the law is not to trap us in despair; it is to open our eyes to just how amazing this gift of love and grace that God has given to us in the person of Jesus is. The law shows us just how much we need God so we can fully comprehend how vast is God’s love for us. You know how delicious a glass of ice cold water tastes on a really hot day. Or how great coming into a warm house is on a really cold day? The second use of the law is that heat that makes us appreciate cold water, that cold that makes us grateful for a heater. The second use of the law shows us our freedom.
And once we realize we are free. Once we feel the shackles lifted and we look around in the open expansiveness of this new relationship with God and with one another, then we get to the third use of the law. Then the law becomes not a burden, but a guide. It becomes instructions to the game, so we can have fun with our friends, or traffic lights, so we can get to where we’re going quickly and safely. And yes, we still mess up sometimes, we still fall short of how we should live. But because of the grace of God, our failures don’t hold us captive. Because we know we are forgiven, because we know we are loved, we can screw up, acknowledge our mistake, and try to do better next time. There are rules, but those rules are in place to show us how to live better, freer, fuller lives. That, my friends, is freedom.
I share this today because Luther didn’t just make this stuff up out of nowhere. He got this from scripture, he got this from Jesus. And what Jesus is doing in the Sermon on the Mount is he is teaching his disciples, teaching us, what Luther referred to as the third use of the law. Jesus doesn’t use those words, because, quite frankly, Jesus is a way better and less confusing teacher than Luther, but that’s where Luther got it from.
This section we heard today about Jesus coming to fulfill the law and the prophets, especially there at the end where he talked about how “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” sounds kind of hard to live up to. And I have to tell you, this is just the introduction to the section on the law. Once Jesus starts putting examples on this stuff, it’s going to get hard to see how we could ever live in the way God wants. Which is why I wanted to spend so much time this morning talking about the uses of the law. Because I want us to remember, as we’re hearing these things, that we are already forgiven, we are already loved, we are already free. That isn’t a license to do whatever we want because God has to love us, ha ha. Rather it’s confidence to try hard things, knowing we may fail, but taking a stab in the dark anyway.
And friends, this is the reminder, and the promise, that I have been clinging to recently. Because I don’t know about you, but I sure do feel powerless these days. The world feels big and ugly and scary, and it feels like it’s rolling away from me, and I don’t know how to do anything about it. Jesus said to his disciples you are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world. Those certainly seem like good things, but they also seem like big things, and I’m not sure how to begin. Jesus said you are salt, you are light, and I believe him, but I feel like maybe I am just one tiny grain of salt, one little candle of light, and those do not feel like enough to season the earth, to light up the world. But God made us into salty, light-bearing people. God created us in this way. We don’t have to be salt and give light for God, but rather because of God we are set free to be the glorious salty, light-giving people we are.
So here’s the challenge this week. One small thing you can do to be salt and light in the world. Have a conversation this week with someone who is different from you. If you’re younger, visit one of our members in assisted living, if you’re older, call a grandchild, or a neighbor, or the person who mows your lawn. Co-op has their mandatory meeting on Monday, come by and strike up a conversation with a Co-op member. Meet someone of a different ethnic background or religion or partisan affiliation, and just have a conversation with them. What are their hopes, their fears, what are your hopes, your fears. Will you say the wrong thing? Maybe? If you offend them, ask forgiveness, if they offend you, forgive them. Will you agree on everything? Not if you really found someone who’s different than you. But you know what will happen? The earth will be seasoned by your difference. And the world will be illuminated just a little more brightly by the things you learn from each other. Jesus says you are salt, you are light. So you are. So this week, just go out and do it, be it, let your light, the light that God lit within you to shine. You can’t help it, so you might as well embrace it. Amen.
Thursday, February 2, 2017
Conversation Points for Matthew 5:13-20
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• Salt has many connotations in the scriptural tradition. Salt was used in sacrifice (Lev 2:13 - “You shall not omit from your grain-offerings the salt of the covenant with your God; with all your offerings you shall offer salt.”, Ezek 43:24 – “You shall present them before the Lord, and the priests shall throw salt on them and offer them up as a burnt-offering to the Lord.”), to seal a covenant and ensure loyalty (Ezra 4:14 – “Now because we share the salt of the palace and it is not fitting for us to witness the king’s dishonor, therefore we send and inform the king,” Num 18:19 – “All the holy offerings that the Israelites present to the Lord I have given to you, together with your sons and daughters, as a perpetual due; it is a covenant of salt for ever before the Lord for you and your descendants as well,” eating together was called “sharing salt” and expressed a binding relationship), purification (2 Kgs 2:19-22 – “Now the people of the city said to Elisha, ‘The location of this city is good, as my lord sees; but the water is bad, and the land is unfruitful.’ He said, ‘Bring me a new bowl, and put salt in it.’ So they brought it to him. Then he went to the spring of water and threw the salt into it, and said, ‘Thus says the Lord, I have made this water wholesome; from now on neither death nor miscarriage shall come from it.’ So the water has been wholesome to this day, according to the word that Elisha spoke”), seasoning (Job 6:6 – “Can that which is tasteless be eaten without salt or is there any flavor in the juice of mallows?”), and preservation.
• The “You” in “You are the salt of the earth” is emphatic. Meaning there is a “you” in the Greek text, even though Greek is a language where the subject is implied by the verb and thus is not strictly necessary.
• Salt loses its saltiness through dilution with other elements. A nod to the “Blessed are the pure in heart” from v. 4. Remember “purity” does not mean clean or unblemished, rather it means undivided. Pure salt is salt that does not have other elements mixed into it.
• “The earth” in Matthew is not dualistic, meaning it is not divided from heaven. Sometimes we hear theology about how the earth is the property of Satan whereas heaven is the property of God. That is not the case in Matthew’s Gospel. For Matthew, the earth is just as much the property of God as heaven. God created the earth, it is where the disciples’ mission takes place, where God’s will is done.
• The primary function of light (v. 14) is not to be seen, but to illuminate other things. Though in contrast, by calling the disciples a city on a hill, it indicates that they will inevitably been seen, though that is not their primary purpose.
• Both “light” and “city on a hill” are images used in Isaiah to refer to Israel’s mission to the world. (Isaiah 42:6 – “I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,” Isaiah 2:2-3 – “In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob”). Matthew seems to be insinuating that since Israel failed to live up to the task, it now falls to the church to fulfill God’s mission. I mean this not in that Matthew had a judgment against Israel or Jews (remember, Matthew is writing to a Jewish community), but as a warning to the disciples about what it means to be a disciple. Just as saltiness is inherent to salt and shining is inherent to light, so is mission to the world essential to discipleship. The church is not to be a secret society set inside a room for private prayer and personal faith, rather the church is to be an authentic, unconcealable witness, like a city on a hill.
• Salt does not generate its own saltiness, nor light its own light. In the same ways, the disciples do not generate their own action, but their source is God. Jesus said, “you are salt, you are light,” like the beatitudes, the job for the disciples then is to be what they are.
• V. 17-20 serve as the introduction to the section in the Sermon about the Law. The next three weeks will offer specific examples.
• “Law” refers to the Torah, in our bible, the first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. “Prophets” are both the former prophets (Joshua-Kings) and the latter prophets (Isaiah-Malachi). This would be the core of the Hebrew scriptures.
• This is insider talk. It is primarily addressed to followers of Jesus who were making fundamental changes in the practice of Torah.
• “Fulfill” is the key word in this section. Fulfill does not mean merely do, but interpret and complete, and even in some ways move beyond.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• Salt has many connotations in the scriptural tradition. Salt was used in sacrifice (Lev 2:13 - “You shall not omit from your grain-offerings the salt of the covenant with your God; with all your offerings you shall offer salt.”, Ezek 43:24 – “You shall present them before the Lord, and the priests shall throw salt on them and offer them up as a burnt-offering to the Lord.”), to seal a covenant and ensure loyalty (Ezra 4:14 – “Now because we share the salt of the palace and it is not fitting for us to witness the king’s dishonor, therefore we send and inform the king,” Num 18:19 – “All the holy offerings that the Israelites present to the Lord I have given to you, together with your sons and daughters, as a perpetual due; it is a covenant of salt for ever before the Lord for you and your descendants as well,” eating together was called “sharing salt” and expressed a binding relationship), purification (2 Kgs 2:19-22 – “Now the people of the city said to Elisha, ‘The location of this city is good, as my lord sees; but the water is bad, and the land is unfruitful.’ He said, ‘Bring me a new bowl, and put salt in it.’ So they brought it to him. Then he went to the spring of water and threw the salt into it, and said, ‘Thus says the Lord, I have made this water wholesome; from now on neither death nor miscarriage shall come from it.’ So the water has been wholesome to this day, according to the word that Elisha spoke”), seasoning (Job 6:6 – “Can that which is tasteless be eaten without salt or is there any flavor in the juice of mallows?”), and preservation.
• The “You” in “You are the salt of the earth” is emphatic. Meaning there is a “you” in the Greek text, even though Greek is a language where the subject is implied by the verb and thus is not strictly necessary.
• Salt loses its saltiness through dilution with other elements. A nod to the “Blessed are the pure in heart” from v. 4. Remember “purity” does not mean clean or unblemished, rather it means undivided. Pure salt is salt that does not have other elements mixed into it.
• “The earth” in Matthew is not dualistic, meaning it is not divided from heaven. Sometimes we hear theology about how the earth is the property of Satan whereas heaven is the property of God. That is not the case in Matthew’s Gospel. For Matthew, the earth is just as much the property of God as heaven. God created the earth, it is where the disciples’ mission takes place, where God’s will is done.
• The primary function of light (v. 14) is not to be seen, but to illuminate other things. Though in contrast, by calling the disciples a city on a hill, it indicates that they will inevitably been seen, though that is not their primary purpose.
• Both “light” and “city on a hill” are images used in Isaiah to refer to Israel’s mission to the world. (Isaiah 42:6 – “I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations,” Isaiah 2:2-3 – “In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob”). Matthew seems to be insinuating that since Israel failed to live up to the task, it now falls to the church to fulfill God’s mission. I mean this not in that Matthew had a judgment against Israel or Jews (remember, Matthew is writing to a Jewish community), but as a warning to the disciples about what it means to be a disciple. Just as saltiness is inherent to salt and shining is inherent to light, so is mission to the world essential to discipleship. The church is not to be a secret society set inside a room for private prayer and personal faith, rather the church is to be an authentic, unconcealable witness, like a city on a hill.
• Salt does not generate its own saltiness, nor light its own light. In the same ways, the disciples do not generate their own action, but their source is God. Jesus said, “you are salt, you are light,” like the beatitudes, the job for the disciples then is to be what they are.
• V. 17-20 serve as the introduction to the section in the Sermon about the Law. The next three weeks will offer specific examples.
• “Law” refers to the Torah, in our bible, the first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. “Prophets” are both the former prophets (Joshua-Kings) and the latter prophets (Isaiah-Malachi). This would be the core of the Hebrew scriptures.
• This is insider talk. It is primarily addressed to followers of Jesus who were making fundamental changes in the practice of Torah.
• “Fulfill” is the key word in this section. Fulfill does not mean merely do, but interpret and complete, and even in some ways move beyond.
Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
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