Sunday, February 16, 2020

Sermon: Catching the Dream

Matthew 5:21-37
Catching the Dream
James Sledge                                                                                                   February 16, 2020

As baseball fans are probably aware, Derek Jeter, longtime short stop for the New York Yankees, was voted into the Hall of Fame last month. In other recent news, Major League Baseball announced the results of its investigation into sign stealing by the Houston Astros, including some of the harshest penalties ever handed down by MLB. Many thought the penalties too lenient, and the scandal has raised larger questions about cheating in baseball.
These two, seemingly unrelated bits of baseball news reminded me of an episode from Derek Jeter’s playing days. He was batting and squared around to bunt, but the pitch was way inside. Jeter turned away as the pitch struck the bat right on the knob at its base. He threw the bat away and began shaking his hand in pain. The trainer ran out to examine his “injury,” and the umpire awarded him first base. Jeter trotted down the base path still shaking off the pain. 
But replays showed that the baseball never came anywhere near Jeter’s hand. Jeter himself later admitted as much. A debate ensued as to whether Jeter had pulled off a savvy play or if he was a cheater, a debate that landed Jeter’s at-bat on the evening news.
In some ways, this debate depends on your view of rules. What are they for? Are they simply meant to define limits and boundaries, or do they mean to create an ethos, a way of doing things? Those who saw Jeter as a consummate competitor understood winning as the ultimate goal which is to be pursued by whatever means not actually prohibited, while those who thought him a cheater understood the rules to create something bigger than winning.
All of us function in a world filled with various sorts of rules. I remember going into my daughters’ elementary school classrooms and seeing the “Class Rules” listed on a poster. Every day most of us see speed limit signs that we sometimes obey and sometimes don’t. And questions about whether speeding is wrong or if it’s okay as long as you don’t go too much over or get caught perhaps mirror questions about whether or not Derek Jeter cheated.
And what about religious rules? The Bible is full of rules. There are well known rules like the Ten Commandments. (At least their existence is well known; most people can’t actually name them.) Then there are more obscure rules. Flip through the pages of Leviticus or Deuteronomy some time. There’s a rule against eating shellfish. And you’d better not be wearing clothing made of a blended fabrics. If that label says “cotton/polyester” or “wool/cotton blend,” you’re breaking the rules.
Of course most of us don’t get too worried about those rules. We’re Christians, and so we don’t have to obey all those Old Testament rules. As long as we believe in Jesus, as long as we have faith, we’re okay.
Yet in the portion of the Sermon on the Mount we heard last week, Jesus said that he didn’t come to call off the Law but to fulfill it, that not a single letter of the Law would pass away. And today, far from calling off rules, we hear Jesus seeming to add to them. Don’t murder is doable for most of us, but Jesus stretches the rule to include not getting angry. And in Jesus’ new version of the rules a middle aged man going through a mid-life crisis needn’t have an affair. He can just think about it, and it’s pretty much the same thing.

If we take Jesus seriously, it’s a little disturbing, which may explain why Christians have long opted for belief over serious attempts to do what Jesus says. But what if Jesus is not talking about raising the entrance requirements for heaven? What if these expansions of the Law are instead meant to reveal what life in God’s Kingdom looks like? What if they are not frighteningly difficult demands but a description of the new life that is possible in Christ?
Most of us are probably used to thinking of rules in terms of constraints on our freedoms, components in some sort of reward and punishment system. But I’m not sure Jesus is thinking this way. I think Jesus is using his rules to describe a new way of being, a new relationship to God and one another, one rooted in love and reconciliation.
Take Jesus’ new rule, “Do not swear at all.” We could view this as simply another rule to implement, and indeed a few Christian groups do just that, forbidding their members from taking an oath in a court of law. But think for a moment about why oaths are necessary in the first place. Why is the witness sworn in before taking the stand? Why does the attorney who just asked a probing question add, “Now remember; you’re under oath?”
Our courts presume that people will lie, that without the threat of punishment they will do whatever it takes to protect themselves, win the case, help their friend. But Jesus imagines a completely different world, one where your “Yes” means yes and your “No” means no. In this new world, there is no agenda or desire to triumph over another, and so no need to lie, and so no need for oaths.
Rather than creating more demands on us, Jesus is describing something wonderful and new. He is describing the life we were created to live, life that rests so securely in God that we no longer need to impress people or be right all the time or win or have all the things other people have.
In this new day Jesus imagines, relationship with others, the dignity and well-being of others, and reconciling with others matter far more than any want or desire I might experience. But it is an imaginary world, isn’t it? It could never exist. Anyone who tried to live by such rules would be chewed up and spit out by the real world. 
But if the world thinks the day Jesus imagines impractical, foolish, and naïve, does that make it so? Being “in Christ,” is supposed to pull us out of the ways of the world. Richard Rohr, whose has become a huge influence in my spiritual life, says, “We cannot see what we are never told to look for; we cannot do what is never offered as doable.”[1] Rather than piling on more rules, Jesus is trying to open us to this new day, to the life we were created to live, the life that, deep in our inner most being, many of us hope for and long for. 
This new reality that Jesus envisions will not emerge because we get better at keeping rules, but it begins to emerge when we open ourselves to Jesus and the Spirit. When we allow God’s living presence to touch us deep inside, what Jesus envisions becomes our deep longing, and that can begin to transform us, as individuals and as a faith community.
New days never arrive without a vision of them, a dream. And Jesus casts a dream before us, and beckons us to become a part of it. Jesus doesn’t bring the Kingdom, God’s new day, by force or with an army. He does it by capturing our hearts and transforming our vision so that we see and long for and work for what the world cannot yet see. And as our lives and our ministry conform more and more to that vision, we beckon the world to catch the dream, too.



[1] Richard Rohr, The Naked Now (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co. 2009), 107.

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