Text: Matthew Matthew 5:21-37
This sermon preached by Abbie Engelstad, Vicar at Faith.
I have a confession to make, and it is now a public confession. The way we do liturgy in this church the person who reads the gospel ends the selection for that day by saying “this is the gospel of the Lord”—my confession is that the first time I read this gospel out loud, that part came out as a question. “This is the gospel of the Lord?”
I had to sit and puzzle over that spontaneous question mark for a while. What was this gospel triggering in me that I found unsavory? Jesus is being harsh in this passage, and not altogether likeable. Just a couple verses before where we picked up today Jesus has corrected any perceived nonsense about what he is here to do, he says to his listeners, “Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish but to fulfill.” He seems to be chiding with a finger waggle “Don’t think you’re getting off easy because I’m here changing the rules.” And then he goes on to say in our Gospel for today, in fact, I’m not abolishing the law I’m making it more severe. Jesus paints this picture for us dramatically. By the established law those who murder are liable to judgment, but in Jesus’ words those who are merely angry with a brother or a sister deserve the same punishment as those who murder, which is nothing compared to the seemingly even more mundane offense of calling someone a fool, which deserves eternal damnation. It is from this passage that we get Jesus’ famous words that have haunted many in Christendom about lust in the heart as equivalent to adultery and the near unacceptability of divorce. Jesus demands what generation after generation of Christians have proven to be impossibilities—if it’s not the anger, it’s the name calling, if it’s not the name calling it’s the lust, if it’s not the lust it’s the divorce, or the simple swearing of an oath. Contemplating our most assured failure in at least one of these categories is none too comforting.
When I picture Jesus in this scenario, chastising, throwing around imperatives, demanding more, I think of this club I was in in high school. It was a surprisingly liberal suburban high school, where everyone had a good cause and a nice car, and we had a club that was focused on this one social justice issue and the leader of this club was insufferable. For him every action item we suggested was an insult to the severity of the problem, and he let everyone know that no matter what we did we were complicit, already guilty of the atrocities. It was in the memory of this student with his nose in the air, that when I read this gospel aloud for the first time I ended with “this is the gospel of the lord?”
Then I read it again. For two reasons: 1) because I’m not about to stand up here in my second sermon ever and insult Jesus. And 2) because somewhere I knew that the figure Jesus became in my head in this Gospel wasn’t Jesus at all, it was me in all of my fallen self-righteousness. It was the president of that club. Jesus became Ralph Nadar. And that’s nothing against Ralph Nadar, god bless him, but that’s not Jesus.
They have things in common. Ralph Nadar, if you’re unfamiliar, has a vision for this world and he continues to fight tirelessly for that vision despite the constant barrage of doubt and slander thrown his way. He never married or had kids. Ralph Nadar, and we could name many activists here, dedicates his waking life to changing this world into a better world. That might sound familiar. That is a project many of us claim. We endeavor to hold ourselves and those around us to a higher standard. These are indeed the conditions for nobility, vocation, altruism—and self-importance, righteousness, and judgment. Christ is not Ralph Nadar.
So how do we make sense of the gospel for today? How do we conceive of Christ as a reformer, an activist, a visionary, without making him susceptible to the pettiness of the human ego? We could ask that question another way: how do we hear these exhortations differently, when we recognize that Christ is not susceptible to the pettiness of the human ego? When we do what we were born to do, and trust that God is God, what do we hear?
I’ll share with you what I hear. I hear a God who knows this world intimately. And not only that, I hear a God who knows the kingdom of heaven right now, in this world, in this life. Christ knows differently than we know. Christ sees differently than we see. He knows the plan for a better world not in predictive way, not in an intellectual, prescriptive way, Christ knows the plan for a better world in his body. He knows it from meditating in the wilderness for forty days, from having his feet touched with so much love, he knows it from having the privilege of touching someone no one else will, he knows it from wading into the Jordan river and feeling John the Baptist’s arms around him, supporting his body, and allowing himself to be submerged in the waters of baptism. Jesus knows the kingdom of heaven right now, in his flesh. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus calling us into this knowledge because if we only knew. When I remembered who Christ was, I heard a God who wants me to feel what God feels, to exist beyond the possibilities of legalism and to imagine what a world could look like and what a world could feel like, and perhaps what it already does.
We cannot know exactly what Jesus’ world feels like, and for us, unlike him, when we try re-create that world we stray into self-righteousness. But Jesus gives us some clues as to how we might imagine the world he knows. This is a world where not only do we not call each other fools, we don’t even have the urge to call each other fools, where we forgive our accusers spontaneously and immediately, where we not only refrain from swearing an oath, but where it doesn’t even make sense to swear an oath because we recognize that everything is God’s, we are entitled to nothing, and even the aging of our bodies is given to us through joyous grace.
We are bound to forget, to get caught up in self-righteousness, to believe we know what is best for this world, to fight for it and sacrifice for it, and then call our neighbor a fool. We are bound to turn piety into judgment. We are bound to fail. And for that we should try to forgive ourselves sometimes. And we should do our very best to remember, as often as we can, that Jesus will never stop communicating to us exactly what we need to hear. In your baptism, whatever that looked like in your life, God touched you and said you are already good, but we forget.
In the Epistle for today Paul addresses the Corinthians, not as spiritual people, but as infants, people of the flesh. He is trying to knock down egos and reign in hubris and fantasies of self-sufficiency and remind the leaders of the church in Corinth that they belong to God, and that the work of the church is not theirs to claim. Paul is calling them out. The world ‘we’ build, the world where we are constantly forgetting that we are already good, that we are baptized, needs Pauls, activists, visionaries, people who call each other out about not living as spiritual people.
But the beauty of this Gospel is that Christ is addressing us as spiritual people and as infants. Christ knows all of us, and says in the waters of baptism “you are enough” now listen for all the ways I try to remind you of that. He walks ahead, beckoning, welcoming, encouraging, sometimes harshly saying what he needs to say so that we might hear it again and again, trying to remember that God is God and this existence is already good. This is the gospel of the Lord.
No comments:
Post a Comment