Right Relationship

Matthew 5:21-37 (NRSV)

"You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' 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 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. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.

"It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

"Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.' But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be 'Yes, Yes' or 'No, No'; anything more than this comes from the evil one."

Okay, now that I’m preaching every other week, you’d think the lectionary texts would align themselves so I don’t have to deal with the tough passages, wouldn’t you.  But here we are, on this 6th Sunday after Epiphany dealing with all sorts of unpleasantness in the gospel reading.

People disagreeing…divorce…murder…adultery.  You name it, it’s probably in those 16 verses that Lisa and I read to you just moments ago.  It sounds more like the headlines from the magazines at the grocery store checkout line than words from scripture.  So here I am, all ready to bring the good news and I’m stymied by the Bible of all things.  Go figure.

These verses that we heard are part of Jesus’ sermon on the mount.  We’re in the midst of a lectionary run on the sermon on the mount that begins with the beatitudes.  And here we are facing some of the most difficult of Jesus’ sayings this morning.

I’d be willing to bet that the warnings about not murdering apply to none of us in this room this morning.  But how about anger?  Or insulting someone else?  Jesus pushes the edges here and throughout the reading.  He goes to extremes and forces us to reexamine who we are and how we behave.

When you look at these verses from a distance, without starting to beat up on yourself for being less than perfect, you’ll see that they are all about relationship; right relationship.  Through these five to seven admonitions that Jesus tags onto previous laws we see him go deeper into how we are supposed to behave with each other. 

Forget about murder and adultery and divorce; remember how you’re supposed to act with each other on a day-to-day basis.  That’s the crux of living the live that Jesus calls us to.  And that’s what Jesus is doing in this sermon on the mount:  he’s calling us to live a life that follows his example.  We would call it a Christian life, though of course, Jesus would never use that terminology: the term “Christian” is still years to come when he stood up and preached his sermon.

So we struggle and wrestle with this scripture, trying to coax out the good news.  Murder, to look at the first instance Jesus uses, is serious business.  Jesus isn’t denying that at all.  But he is saying that anger is serious too.  Both murder and anger are important enough to garner God’s attention in our lives.  Murder and anger may be two sides of the same coin. 

From these pronouncements that Jesus made that day on the hilltop, we can get an idea of what might have been going on in the first-century Near East.  In that crowded, bustling area, brutally controlled by Rome and trying to keep religious laws that originated centuries earlier that were for an agrarian, nomadic people, Jesus was trying to point out that you have to go beyond the law and create law that governs how you interact with those who are right around you.

Of course, for any society to survive, there have to be rules and laws.  Laws about murder, rules about divorce, and so on.  But Jesus was saying that we have to go deeper than the humanly-created rules and laws and think about reconciliation.  Yes, that’s right, reconciliation.  Because if God is going to go to the trouble of reconciling us to God, we have to make the effort to reconcile ourselves with each other.  And that means paying attention to things like anger.

Now, in this day and age of the 21st century in North America, I’m not about to stand up here and say that anger, in and of itself, is a bad thing.  Of course, we get angry and sometimes that’s actually a good thing.  If I don’t encounter injustice and get angry, there’s something wrong.  But what we do with our anger is what’s important.  If we allow it to fester and boil over and ruin a relationship that we have with someone, that’s when we’re no longer reconciled to our brother or sister.  If anger is all we feel in our relationship with someone though, we are missing something; something important.

We’re not that different from those who were struggling to survive some 2,000 years ago you know.  Yes, Rome isn’t such a big deal anymore; it’s no longer the seat of an empire.  And we no longer follow the religious laws that regulated life for the 1st century Jew.  We are bound however by laws that go beyond what our current empire demands of us.  Yes, we pay taxes and we don’t murder but nothing out of Washington is going to tell us how to be in right relationship with each other.  It isn’t illegal to be angry or to feel lust, thank heavens.  But it’s our Christian calling that keeps us in right relationship and tells us how to deal with the anger or lust or any other number of feelings that we might be having.

Because that’s the thing.  Jesus only scratches the surface here if you think about it.  There is a passel of ways that we can damage our relationships with each other.  And if we allow such things to get in the way, we need to reread that sermon on the mount and pay special attention to the passage we heard this morning.  We, being the inventive humans that we are, have found all sorts of ways to alienate ourselves from each other.  We seem almost limitless in our abilities to cause a rift in the fabric that binds us to each other. 

So when these rifts occur, we are called to mend them as best we can.  Whatever it is that comes between us and another needs to be addressed.  Through our ministrations to our relationships we can bring about true reconciliation with each other and therefore with our God.

Jesus’ words this morning may have been hard to hear but if we look behind them we find that there is an attempt to cause right relationship.  If we are indeed to answer our call to live the Christian life, we must begin with our relationships with each other and seek true reconciliation.  For through those relationships we find the glimmer of truth that is our relationship with God.

Sermon, Sunday, 15 March 2009

<--Image to the left is Christ Expelling the Moneychangers from the Temple, by Giovanni Bernardi. It is engraved rock crystal and was created c. 1540-1549. It is from the National Gallery of Art.


John 2:13-22

This passage from John is a real grabber, isn’t it? It’s a story that just jumps out at you, doesn’t it? It’s one almost anyone who’s even just glanced through the gospels remembers. It’s a real story, with excitement and passion.

Most of the stories of Jesus that we remember admittedly tend to be fairly passive. Most of the time the Jesus we encounter and remember is teaching...or discussing...or healing (which, I acknowledge, would be an important event to those healed, but you must confess there’s not a lot of pep or action in those accounts). The Jesus we remember is the cut-out, flannel board Jesus of the Sunday school rooms of decades past. We’d find that Jesus standing or sitting. Maybe even walking. But certainly never doing anything that might cause him to break a sweat.

This Jesus though...this Jesus we encounter in the Temple in Jerusalem is the action figure Jesus...in the league of G.I. Joe and any Rambo spin offs toys; not the cut-out, flat, uninspiring cut-out flannel-board Jesus. This Jesus wreaked havoc...in the Temple of all places. This Jesus--dare I say it?--got angry...teed off...hot under the collar! He was out and out indignant and infuriated and didn’t mind showing it.

I don’t know about you, but I seem to have the impression that white Protestants don’t do that. We generally don’t do the ‘A’ word. And if we do, we certainly don’t show it. We’re not supposed to, at least. It might offend someone. It might be upsetting. It might cause that other word we don’t say...conflict.

But there Jesus is...flailing about like a man gone mad with a bunch of cords he’s using as a whip, upsetting tables, causing everything to go helter-skelter, ruining a good day’s business for a bunch of people, and really frightening some livestock who were peaceably chewing their cuds just moments before.

The Gospel writer John places this account early in his record of Jesus’ life and ministry. We find it in the second half of chapter two only. John’s first chapter begins with the well-known hymn or poem which starts, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” He then introduces us to John the Baptist and gets Jesus all baptized and ready for his ministry. John ends the first chapter with Jesus calling his first disciples.

Then we find our way into chapter two. RIght off, Jesus performs his first miracle; a very public one, at a wedding feast in which he, goaded by his mother, turns water into wine. Immediately, John reminds us that Jesus is divine and can do things that mortals cannot do. After a respite with his family and disciples in Capernaum, Jesus then ventures to Jerusalem at the time of the Passover feast. And right away he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work upsetting not only tables, but local religious big-wigs too undoubtedly.

If you stop to think about John’s narration and location of this event where he placed it and know anything about Jesus’ life, something might sound just a little odd to you. There’s a good reason for that; the Synoptic Gospels, otherwise known as Matthew, Mark, & Luke, all locate Jesus in Jerusalem just one single time...the week at the end of his ministry and life when he is arrested and crucified. Those three all include this Temple clearing account but it is late in their accounts. John, however, has Jesus in Jerusalem four times throughout his gospel; three of those during the Passover festival, as today’s reading was. In our minds, being more familiar as most of us are with the synoptics‘ versions, we have Jesus wandering about the Judean countryside for a few years and finally showing up in Jerusalem in time for that final week that we know so well.

John’s gospel in all likelihood was the last of the four gospels written. It’s a latecomer to the whole story-of-Jesus’-life game. Compared to the other three, he has different emphases and reasons for putting his work together. By the time that John composed these words, the early Christian movement or community was probably very different than the others knew. There were those by this point who were claiming that Jesus was only spirit, not flesh. It was Jesus’ divinity that was important to these folks and they denied the fact that he was truly human. Among other aims, John seeks to dispel that notion.

Of course, having an anger-showing, table-heaving, whip-wielding Jesus certainly goes a long way to that end. Jesus was human, John says right off, leaving no doubts or questions. Even though John’s gospel is less gritty in some ways and is more poetic, it does not equivocate when it comes to putting forth both Jesus’ divine and human natures.

And so, here we are two thousand years or so later, facing this angry, very human Jesus and we’re not exactly sure what to do with him, are we? We can happily handle the Jesus who welcomes children, cures lepers, and even hangs out with prostitutes. That Jesus, that flat, flannel-board Jesus of Sunday schools across many miles and years is easy to take...though, you’ve got to concede, really rather bland.

If we are going to embrace Jesus; if we are really going to claim that we are a follower of the Nazarene born of Mary; if we are truly willing to confess that Jesus holds a claim on us and our lives; if we are going to do those things, then we have to accept the anger that Jesus exhibited in that Temple along with the niceties that are usually ascribed to him. If we don’t, we’re in the same camp as those early followers who wanted to mask Jesus’ humanity and make him purely spirit whom John was working hard to prove wrong.

The good news is that this human Jesus is much more interesting. This is a Jesus I can talk about with others. This is a Jesus who knows and understands my anger and my tears and my frustration with the powers I encounter in my world, in my country, in my state, in my church.

I can bring this Jesus to those who find themselves at the margins because this is a Jesus still angry that more and more people do not have access to clean drinking water. I can envision Jesus storming into denominational gatherings and demanding a place at the Table for all. Jesus, I know, would be at city halls, state capitals, and legislatures and palaces around the globe demanding that attention be paid to the least of these.

Because John took the care that he did as he composed and crafted his gospel account to place this account right at the start of Jesus’ ministry, having just established Jesus’ divine nature through the water-into-wine moment, John can carry that anger and humanity of Jesus through the rest of the teachings and sayings that he writes about. We can read the rest of John’s gospel through that lens and it leaves us a little on edge because we don’t know when and if this guy will go off again.

We who claim to be followers of Jesus cannot be reminded enough that we are Christ’s body; a living, breathing, and even sometimes angry body. Our anger is holy anger; modeled after the one who cleared the Temple because it had become something far from a place of worship. Unlike the calm, placid demeanor of those good Protestant forebears who taught us to never raise our voices, we need to claim and own our holy anger. Turn the tables in the places where you know Jesus would do the same, because you are Christ’s body.

9 November 2008

Matthew 25:1-13 (& 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18)

Some irony, huh? The Sunday after the election, in which not only did we elect the first African-American to the presidency of this nation, but we, at least those of us here in California and a couple of other states, voted, by a slim majority here, but a majority to be sure, to ban same-sex marriages…isn’t it ironic that this is the Sunday a parable arises out of the lectionary that makes us think about wedding customs—in another land and another time sure, but still the idea of a wedding, a marriage is there. And, like all parables, it’s not really about what it’s about. This parable isn’t a reminder about how to behave at a first-century, ancient Near-Eastern nuptial. Jesus tells this parable as a reminder of prudence. Be prudent, like the wise bridesmaids (or virgins as they were called in earlier translations of the Bible that many of us know); don’t be imprudent and forget to stock up on oil like those foolish bridesmaids.

But there it is. The week when I learn that millions of people in this state would deny my right to marry and probably, most assuredly, will go on to insist that Allen’s and my marriage this summer be annulled, I must think about the one thing I don’t want to think about—marriage. I’ve heard quite enough over the past several months about what a marriage is and isn’t, what constitutes a “biblical” marriage and what doesn’t. I don’t want to think about anything to do with marriage right now, thank you very much. I have to tell you that the passage of Proposition 8 dealt a body blow to me and to many others. And the thing is, I find that the “Yes on 8” folks are actually enjoying the body blow. They are exulting in their victory as they stomp on their fellow citizens’ rights.

Believe me, they are exulting. I’ve gotten caught up in a blog on the internet lately. For those without computer connections, a blog is sort of an online journal that someone, a blogger, writes publicly, for all to read. I happened upon one late this past week in which the person writing the blog commented on the protests and riots that were occurring in Los Angeles following the passage of Prop 8 and stating his opinion that Prop 8 is wrong and misguided. He’s gotten many comments in the past few days about his entry (on many blogs, anyone can respond and comment, usually anonymously). He was lambasted for supporting those unnatural and evil homosexuals. (I have no idea of the sexual orientation of the blogger who posted the original entry.) But here is a small taste of some of the responses that he got: [Note: I have not corrected the spelling, punctuation, grammatical errors of the following posts. But there are so many, that I can't add "sic" after each one.]

One person wrote: You must be gay or brain washed in to believeing that this moral degradation is “normal”. The drop in moral standards that have kept this country on it’s feet has degraded due to liberalism but the fact of the matter is homosexuality is a choice and therefore not subject to “Equal Rights”. It is not a race of people which are deserving of equal rights, it is a choice. The majority of people in Califormnia have spoken so it should be left as it is. let them go to Vermont or some other unholy state that allows it and quit trying to shove it down everyone else’s throat. Now, go ahead and claim that the other groups are the ones trying to ram there morality down the gays throat but I can promise you, the “normals” were here first and have made this country giving it stability. You won’t get that with gay marriages. I believe it was the first gay marriage in Vermont has already ended in divorce due to infidelity, etc. I could go on and on but it is a waste of breath since the people have spoken. The outrage is your support for it.

Another wrote: Well, I am glad to see that America didn’t lose everything, on election day!! I suppose we had to choose between who should we allow to riot, huh? 2500 homosexuals or 25 million blacks! You can tell a corrupt cause when the supporters are willing to behave like animals and destroy their own. THAT is the outrage, not Prop 8!!

[Racism mixed with homophobia; are any of us surprised?]

A third wrote: I think a “marriage” as defined by ancient law, the Bible, and by GOD, should be the union between one man and one woman. This is not about freedoms, or rights, or whatever the heck else the bleeding heart liberals want to call the funny business between two people of the same sex. It should have stayed in the closet where it belongs, instead of in our faces on every other TV program on the air today. We just banned same-sex unions in Florida to the point that it is now written into the State Constitution. Don’t get me wrong… I don’t condemn these people, and count some among my closest friends., I just think that it should NOT enjoy all the EXTRA molly-coddling these people enjoy just because they’re different. Where is this country going??

And on it went. I’ve read only three of many comments here. There were some, of course, that I agreed with; they weren’t all so vitriolic. But others, most in fact, were venomous, fear-based, and exhibited any lack of comprehension that this is an extremely complicated topic, relying, I felt, on tired arguments and spoon-fed thinking. Somewhere along the line, I, perhaps foolishly, entered the fray. But creating my own user name, I wrote:

Wow, if reading the responses to this blog is to be believed, there is a lot more ignorance and hatred in our society than I thought there was. The majority is not always in the right: the majority of Americans believed in slavery; the majority of Americans thought women should be second-class citizens. The majority is merely strength and power…not right not morally correct. The rights of the minority (be it an ethnic minority, sexual minority, cultural minority, economic minority, etc.) needs to be protected and that is why there are constitutions and laws, ineffective as they often are, which attempt to do just that. This vote to make discrimination a part of the CA state constitution subverts the ethical right and mandate to protect the few from the many.

I then went on to talk about how even if “Biblical marriage” existed, we probably wouldn’t want it. There are examples of polygamous, misogynistic, and lust-induced marriages throughout the Bible. Women had no rights, of course; they were merely property being exchanged in “Biblical marriages.”

Of course, after my post, I got attacked too. In fact, someone tried to turn my opening statement about ignorance on me and called me “ignorant.” Ah well. I just pointed out in my reply that I said that I had found that there was ignorance in our culture and the person who answered me felt a need to label me as ignorant and then asked him why he felt the need to denigrate. I’m sure I haven’t won many friends here; at least not among Ernie, ontheroc, Art and the man who answered my post.

And through it all, through all of this chatter about the fait-accompli that is Prop 8, there I was thinking about ancient marital practices; practices and traditions that Jesus obviously knew about and in fact was able to use in his parable, but that are lost to us today. Why were those bridesmaids, those virgins, waiting around for the groom? Why does the bridegroom show up all of a sudden at midnight? Why are the lamps so important? They’re so important, in fact, that the foolish ones felt they had to go and buy more oil? And then they’re locked out? Why is the door locked and no one is admitted? I just admit that I don’t get it and I don’t think this is a hetero vs homo-sexual thing. It’s clearly a cultural thing.

But the point is that Jesus was trying to make a point. And if I get caught up in the details about cultural traditions and nuptial mores in a place and time so foreign to me that I can even begin to imagine it, none-the-less understand it, then I’m missing the forest for the trees. Jesus, that radical, was telling his listeners that we don’t know when God is going to be around noticing what we’re doing so we’d just better be always prepared for any eventuality, even a bridegroom showing up late and taking everyone by surprise.

We have to remember the original audience of Matthew’s gospel as well as those new Christians in Thessalonica who received the letter from Paul, part of which we heard this morning. They believed with absolute conviction that Jesus was returning to earth…soon. He had said it prior to his ascension. Jesus would come back. 1st Thessalonians was written before Matthew’s gospel; anywhere from a decade to five decades earlier perhaps. But the concern on every early Christian’s mind was about when Jesus would return. Jesus had died, resurrected, and ascended at least 20 years prior to either of these books being put down in black and white. Time was marching on and people were starting to wonder when this return was going to happen.

Paul was busy quelling concerns about those good faithful people who had died in the interim—between the ascension and the promised return. “What would happen to them?” loved ones wondered and Paul assured them that Jesus would gather all the faithful together. Matthew’s hearers also were certainly anxious for Jesus to come back and FINALLY show that nasty old Roman empire just who was in charge. And who can blame them? I probably do not need to recount here the difficulty of living under Roman rule, especially if you were a follower of the Way.

But with upturned eyes, followers across the geography over which this young, struggling movement had spread scanned the heavens. With upturned eyes, hopes were lifted and prayers ascended. With upturned eyes, early Christians expected relief from misery and oppression by the appearance of the one who would do it.

In the context of these hopes and expectations and hearts that yearned for release, that wedding story makes some sense. Be prudent, plan ahead, don’t get caught off guard. The end times will come, but when you least expect them, Matthew reminded.

We, in the mainline tradition, don’t tend to focus on the end times much. We don’t worry much about Jesus’ coming again. That thought, eschatology is the big word for it, has been completely subsumed by those with a more conservative bent among the Christian faithful. There are books, extremely popular books and book series, and video games and movies devoted to the end times. There is a fascination among fundamentalists with Jesus’ second coming, that we don’t consider much.

But that’s the only way to understand today’s readings from the Christian Testament, with upturned eyes and a knowledge, no a certainty, that Jesus will come and care for us, relieving heart ache and misery and oppression. And you know, that’s almost exactly what I need right now.

Admittedly the constitutional amendment that Proposition 8 brings into being will not likely affect most of your lives much at all. Life will go on. In fact, on the surface, it’s not going to affect Allen’s and my lives a lot. No one is going to come in, as happened to gay men and lesbians throughout Nazi Germany, and drag us apart and force us into concentration camps, wearing pink triangles on our outfits to identify us as sexual deviants. (There are those in our culture, I’m sure, who would do exactly that though.) But no one is going to force us into marriages with women. The worst of it, really, is that things will go back to how they were; how they were for the 18 years that we have been together as a couple and even further back than that. And I will aver until my dying day that I am indeed married.

But, as I said, the vote on this proposition was a body blow to many of us. The fact is the state is at the mercy of a majority that seeks to impose its will and beliefs. The passage of Proposition 8 brought to the surface once again, at least for me, the fear that every lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered person has felt in their life; a fear for safety and not just emotional safety. I’m talking about the fear for physical safety that most in our culture take for granted.

So with upturned eyes, I seek comfort and security and affirmation, not just for myself but also for all my brothers and sisters who are harmed by this voice of the majority. With those same upturned eyes that searched the heavens for the first glimpse of a returning, triumphant Jesus centuries ago, I too hunt for signs of hope in the midst of shock and oppression. And in the sweeping election of someone whose skin color would have prevented him from even voting not that many decades ago, I find that hope. And in the fact that the vote on Proposition 8 was won by a slim majority, reducing the difference between the yeses and the nos from a 20% spread eight years ago to just a few percentage points this past Tuesday, I find that hope. And as I stand with upturned eyes, Jesus does appear; but not in the heavens and not descending on a cloud. No, Jesus appears in the faces of those who have faithfully fought the good fight. Jesus appears to me right here in the midst of a community that embraces and cares. Jesus appears to each of us, personally and lovingly appears to each person here in the midst of whatever is going on; in your life or in the world. Make sure you’re prepared; be certain you’re ready. Be wise.