Sunday Sermon text - Kingdom Ethics: Rules and More Rules

Matthew 5:21-37

Kingdom Ethics: Rules and More Rules

James Sledge                                                             February 13, 2011

It is fairly common for big sporting events to make the national news – things like the Super Bowl, championship games, or a major recruiting scandal – it is more unusual for everyday contests and games to be featured there.  But last summer, an exception to this was coverage of Derek Jeter, shortstop for the New York Yankees, pretending to be hit by a pitch so that he could get on base. 

In case you missed it, Jeter was at bat against the Tampa Bay Rays, and as the pitcher throws the ball, Jeter squares around to bunt.  But the pitch is way inside, and Jeter pulls back, sliding his left hand off the bat as the pitch strikes the bat right on the knob at its base.  Jeter throws the bat away and begins shaking his hand in pain.  The trainer runs out to examine his “injury.”  Then the umpire awards Jeter first base and he trots down the base path still shaking off the pain. 

Replays clearly showed that the baseball never came anywhere close to Jeter’s hand, and Jeter himself later admitted as much.  And from this episode a debate ensued about whether Jeter had pulled off a savvy play, or if he was a cheater.  And it was this debate that landed Jeter’s at-bat on the evening news.

In some ways, this debate hinges on what you think of rules.  What is their purpose?  What are they for?  Are they simply meant to define limits and boundaries, or are they meant to create an ethos, a way of understanding or viewing things?  Those who see Jeter as a consummate competitor understand winning as the ultimate goal which is to be pursued by whatever means not actually prohibited, while those who see him as a cheater understand 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.  Sometimes we obey them and sometimes not.  And questions about whether speeding is wrong or if it’s okay as long as you don’t get caught probably mirror questions about whether or not Derek Jeter was cheating.

And what about religious rules?  The Bible is full of rules.  There are well known rules such as the Ten Commandments. (Well, at least the fact of the Ten Commandments is well known; most people can’t name them.)  Then there are more obscure rules.  Flip through the pages of Leviticus or Deuteronomy some time.  Did you know that there’s a rule against eating shrimp?  It’s also forbidden for a woman to wear men’s clothing.  And speaking of clothing, you had better not be wearing anything made of a blended fabric.  If that label says “cotton/polyester,” you’re breaking the rules.

Of course most of us don’t get too worried about such rules.  We’re Christians, and so we don’t have to obey those Old Testament rules.  As long as we believe in Jesus, as long as we have faith, we’re okay.

But 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, the rules.  He says that he comes to fulfill the law, and not a single letter of the law will pass away.  And as he continues speaking to us today, far from calling off rules, he seems to be adding 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.

Now if we were to take Jesus seriously, it might be pretty troubling, which may explain why Christians have long opted for belief over any real attempt to do what Jesus says.  But what if Jesus is not talking about raising the entrance requirements for heaven to some nearly impossible level?  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 new life that is possible in Christ?

Most of us are probably used to thinking of rules in terms of constraints on our freedoms, as components of some sort of reward and punishment system.  But I’m not sure Jesus is using them this way.  I think Jesus is using his rules to describe a new world, 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?  And why does the attorney who has just asked a probing question add, “Now remember; you’re under oath?”

Our courts presume that people will lie, that without threats of punishment they will do whatever it takes to protect themselves or have the case go their way.  But Jesus imagines a completely different world, one where your “Yes” means yes and your “No,” no.  In this world Jesus imagines, there are no personal agendas or a desire to triumph over others, 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 dominion of God, people would stand up in the middle of the worship service and say, “Stop!  I need to reconcile with my neighbor.  Then we can go back to worshipping.”  Imagine that. 

In this new day Jesus imagines, relationship with others, the dignity and well-being of others matters far more than any want or desire I might experience.  But it is an imaginary world, isn’t it?  It could never exist.  People 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, isn’t it?  Richard Rohr, whose words have become a big influence in my spiritual life, wrote “We cannot see what we are never told to look for.”[1]  And rather than binding us with new rules, I think Jesus is trying to open our eyes and show us the shape of what we, in our innermost beings, are meant for, even hope for and long for. 

This new day Jesus envisions will not emerge because we work harder at keeping the rules, but it can begin 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 deepest longing.  And that begins to transform how we live 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 see.  And as our lives and our mission show forth that vision, we beckon the world to catch the dream, too.

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

Spiritual Hiccups - All Creatures Great and Small

There is a popular form of Christianity, one well known in the media, that has little use for the earth, its creatures, the environment, and so on.  This Christianity is so focused on the disposition of "souls" that it deems everything else superfluous.  Why care for the earth when it's just going to end some day soon?

This sort of arrogance deservedly gives the faith a bad name, and it clearly misses the wonder and awe the Bible has for Creation and its creatures.  In today's Psalm 104, God's glory is manifest in "your creatures... These all look to you to give them their food in due season."  Lions roar, asking God for food, and God tends to them.

Faith that presumes God is only concerned with me and those like me, strikes me as terribly arrogant, egocentric, and utilitarian.  It demands that God be focused on me, and that my needs are the business God should be concerned with.  Such faith cannot see far beyond itself.  It cannot deny itself as Jesus demands.  It cannot lose its life for the sake of the gospel.  Neither can it truly join with the psalmist in being awed by God's creation.  Creation matters only insomuch as it is of use to me.

Albert Einstein once said, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."  And I think that someone who has never looked at Creation and its creatures and found themselves feeling, "This is too wonderful; it must be preserved," knows the death of which Einstein speaks.


But this loss of awe and mystery has ramifications far beyond issues such as the environment.  Egocentric faith easily views other people as having less worth than me.  During the recent protests in Egypt, which have brought hope of freedom and new life to people in that country, many self professed Christians in America have viewed these events solely with reference to how it impacts our security or the "war on terror."  The Egyptians themselves seem not to matter.  And indeed, American foreign policy, regardless of the party in charge, is usually pragmatic and utilitarian, reflecting the same sort of arrogant, egocentrism that too often perverts Christian faith.


I could easily work myself into deep pessimism about the state of things, except that God is at work, reaching out in love despite our failing to see very far beyond our own interests.  Jesus continues to call people to follow him, to find their lives transformed and reshaped by the example of his life.  And even now, I see American Christianity being renewed and reborn into something a little less utilitarian, a little less arrogant and egocentric, as here and there, signs of God's coming reign continue to show forth.


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Spiritual Hiccups - Optimistic Sinners

The last time Psalm 51 caught my eye, I reflected on what it meant to be a "born sinner," to embrace that label in the manner recovering alcoholics routinely repeat, "Hi, my name is Joe, and I'm an alcoholic."  This repeated admission is a step in being freed from the grip of their addiction, which presupposes that that they have found a source of hope, a promise of something better.

Perhaps the reason so many church goers find confessing their sinfulness such a "downer" is because it feels like nothing more than self flagellation, and not as an opening oneself to divine grace and healing.  But the writer of Psalm 51, who writes of being born guilty, a sinner when his mother conceived him, also says, "Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow."

I had a theology professor in seminary who impressed upon me the necessity of always speaking of hope when asking a congregation to join in a prayer of confession.  Saying to God, "I'm a sinner," makes no sense unless one is certain that God receives such a statement in a loving manner.  If God were some sort of divine cop trying to catch us when we break the rules, then confessing would seem rather foolish.  

Jesus once spoke of sinners, prostitutes, and tax collectors entering the Kingdom ahead of the "religious folk."  I wonder if this isn't because, at some level, most of us would rather trust in our own efforts and merits over trusting God's love.  Having been conditioned by our culture to "pad our résumés," to advertise ourselves, and to deflect blame whenever possible, we find it terribly difficult to imagine that God works completely differently.  And so those "sinners" who know full well they are sinners, have an advantage over us.  They are able to come before God without pretension, open to the love and healing God offers.

My theology professor said that we confess our sin to God because in Jesus we have discovered a profound optimism.  The closer we come to Jesus the more we realize that God's greatest desire is to reconcile and embrace.  And this optimism allows us to let go of pretensions and the false images of ourselves that we project.  We can stand before God, bearing even those dark corners of our lives we try to keep hidden, knowing that God loves even that part of us.  And so we can be freed from our false selves, and discover the true children of God we are meant to be.

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Spiritual Hiccups - A Not Quite Good Messiah?

I've long been struck by a line from today's gospel.  As Jesus draws near to Jerusalem a rich man approaches him.  (The "rich young ruler" does not exist in the Bible.  He is a conflation of the accounts from Matthew, Mark, and Luke.)  He addresses Jesus with great respect, calling him "Good Teacher."  But Jesus responds to this address with, "Why do you call me good?  No one is good but God alone."

I've never quite known what to do with this line.  If read literally, Jesus would seem here to deny all sorts of deeply held Christian beliefs.  He must not be God in the flesh, and he must not be one person of the Trinity if he cannot be called "good" in the same way God can.

This might be a good place to reiterate that these "hiccups" are not pronouncements or well thought out biblical exegesis.  They are a part of my personal reflections, prayers, and meditations, and as such they are not meant to withstand great theological scrutiny.  Still, as a ponder this line, I find myself wondering about the nature of Jesus' incarnation, about what it means to be Son of God and yet reject the label good.

I'm sure there are many reasons why Jesus might say what he does, but I find myself wondering about what it means for Jesus to fully embrace our humanity.  I grew up thinking of God in Western terms of static perfection, with humans, by contrast, neither static or perfect.  We are forever changing.  We may be getting better or getting worse but we cannot simply stay the same.  But if Jesus is fully human, and considering that he rejects the label good, does that mean that Jesus is something quite different from that static perfection that defined divinity for me?

On the one hand such thoughts might seem to diminish Jesus in some way.  But from another point of view they might enhance a view of human capacity to bear in itself the divine.  I have heard from my earliest Sunday School days that humans were created in God's image.  I won't get into the possible meanings of this "image," but both this image and the presence of God in Jesus speaks to the possibility of a humanity not quite so other and separate from God. It raises the possibility of human life that truly reflects the image of God.

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Spiritual Hiccups - Seeing Others' Humanity

As a pastor I do my fair share of weddings.  Sometimes, when I am talking with a couple about the upcoming service, we go into the sanctuary and discuss wedding traditions.  I occasionally point out that many of these traditions are rooted in rather archaic understandings of men and women.  For example, in many weddings, the service pauses on the sanctuary floor, at the steps to the chancel area, where a father brings a women and gives her to her future husband, before the couple moves up the steps for the actual marrying.  This tradition harks back to women as chattel, property that could be owned by a man.  The pause at the chancel steps was to complete the property transfer.

Certainly most of us don't view a wedding this way, but clearly the notion of women as property persisted for much of the history of the Church.  And that only underscores the radical nature of Jesus' words on marriage and divorce in today's reading from Mark.  While this passage has often been used simply to condemn those who divorce, this misses the stunning way Jesus speaks about women.

"Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her

 husband and marries another, she commits adultery."  It is easy to miss the radical nature of Jesus' words if you don't regard women as commodities, but in ancient times, adultery was largely a property crime.  It robs a man of his property.  In the Old Testament law, a man cannot commit adultery against his wife.  The only person who is wronged by adultery is a husband or father.  But Jesus  speaks of a man committing adultery against his wife.

Here and in many other places, Jesus refuses to see women as less than fully human.  In Luke 10:38-42 Jesus praises Mary for taking the "male" pose of a disciple.  And his famous commandment against looking at a woman with lust says that women are not to be viewed as objects to be acquired, a lesson we have still not fully learned.

It seems that for Jesus, nothing about a person can keep him from seeing her full humanity.  People that others disparagingly label "them" are not so to Jesus.  And so he shocks the religious folk by hanging out with outcasts, lepers, prostitutes, Gentiles, tax collectors and sinners. 

I think most of us still struggle to see things as Jesus sees.  Most all of us use labels for other groups that diminish their humanity, that allow us to hate or dismiss or discriminate against them.  Maybe that is why Jesus insists that we love our enemy.  He wants us to remember that he sees every single person in the world as fully human, as deserving of God's grace as the next person, as someone he deeply loves.

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Spiritual Hiccups - True Religion

It is very easy to take pot shots at "organized religion" (although in my experience a great deal of it is terribly disorganized).  And while many of these pot shots are well deserved, I think they often miss the point.  Some critics seem to think the problem is religion itself, but the problem is more fundamental. 

I think that all people are "religious" in some sense.  By this I mean that even those outside of recognized religious groups are looking for things that give life meaning and purpose.  This applies not only of the "spiritual but not religious" crowd, but also to those who attach themselves to causes, ideologies, and even some activities and hobbies.  Most of us look for meaning in things bigger than ourselves, and yet our searches have a way of becoming self serving and egocentric.  We often measure faith, our work for a cause, or our time given to a charity by the benefits we receive from it.  I can't count the number of times I've heard people comment on what a downer it is to provide food for a needy family and the people not be appreciative.  They're anticipating a benefit, a warm feeling when the see a needy person's smile, but when that doesn't happen, they feel cheated.

To varying degrees, all  struggle with such egocentric tendencies, and so it should be no surprise that this impacts all faith traditions.  The central message and call of any faith can easily be bent away from its original trajectory and founding precepts.  A focus on the faith's "benefits" can skew things so that most of the faith's activities become about securing those benefits.  You sometimes see this in Christianity when the focus becomes almost solely about believe the right things so that you are "saved."  And in the process all the things Jesus said his followers must do get forgotten.

You can also see this at work in today's reading from Isaiah.  The prophet speaks to a people who seek God, who engage in spiritual practices and disciplines designed to draw them close to God.  But this activity is self centered, and so the prophet calls them to a new spiritual practice.  "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?  Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house?"  The prophet draws the people away from seeking faith benefits and calls them to embrace the purposes of God

True religion always draws us away from self.  This is why Jesus says that those who try to save their own lives will lose them while those who lose their lives for the gospel's sake find them.  Any religion, any spiritual quest, any search for meaning that cannot let go of the self will end up being skewed and distorted toward that which seems to pay dividends.  And at that point, the main good served is my good, and the only god served is the god of my feelings, my wants, my and desires.

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Spritual Hiccups - Suffering

In today's reading from Mark, Jesus explains to his disciples that he will be betrayed, executed, and then rise again.  "But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him."  Especially in Mark's gospel, the disciples can come off as incredibly obtuse.  What's so hard to understand?  But in truth, most of us struggle to makes sense of suffering.  We avoid it at all costs so why would the Messiah embrace it?

Over the centuries the Church has come up with a number of formulas and doctrines to neatly explain Jesus' suffering and death.  Some of us have become so used to these that we don't even notice how problematic it is to speak of a God who "needs" someone to suffer and die for our sin.  But I wonder if our doctrines of atonement don't also make Jesus' suffering such a special case that it has no connection to the suffering that is part of our lives.

Numerous times Jesus calls his followers to emulate him, to "take up the cross."  He speaks of finding one's life in the act of losing it.  And the Apostle Paul speaks of our need to be crucified with Christ, to die to the old self and become new.  Jesus and Paul both seem to think that suffering plays a key role in us becoming who we are called to be.

Now I want to be careful not to make light of another person's suffering by saying, "It's good for you."  I don't presume to know when suffering is or isn't good or redemptive.  But I do wonder if suffering of some sort isn't required to move us from where are to where God wants us to be.  

Not many of us would claim to be perfect as we are.  Most of us are acutely aware not only of certain faults but also of a darkness inside that we do our best to keep hidden from others.  But at the same time, most of us are averse to change.  The devil we know is better than the unknown, and real change is a step into the unknown.

Paul said that becoming a new creation in Christ requires the death of the old self.  But what could be more frightening than to lose your self?  I am happy for faith to improve my life, make me happier, or make me feel more fulfilled.  But when you start to talk about radically changing who I am, I can quickly become as obtuse as those disciples trying to figure out what Jesus was talking about when he described his own suffering and death.

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