Sermons: February 2011

Sixth Sunday after Epiphany (Year A, RCL)
February 13, 2011

Ecclesiasticus 15:15-20             Psalm 119:1-8
1 Corinthians 3:1-9                     Matthew 5:21-37

Poor Jimmy Carter.

When President Carter shuffles off this mortal coil, he will probably be remembered for three things—well, four: who could forget Billy Beer?

First: the debacle in Iran and the takeover by Ayatollah Khomeini.

Second: Habitat for Humanity. Carter’s tireless work after his presidency for the good of humankind makes him a modern saint.

Last—and least: the 1976 interview in Playboy.

With the advent of the Web, Playboy now seems quaint, like wearing a suit and hat to church. Or like when the Ed Sullivan Show showed Elvis only above the waist.
In his interview with Playboy, Jimmy, bless his naïve heart, had this to say:
I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I'm going to do it anyhow, because I'm human and I'm tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, “I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery.”
I've looked on a lot of women with lust. [I’m quoting here.] I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it.

You have to wonder what the readers of Playboy—those, that is, who actually read it—thought about this confession of lust and adultery.

It’s easy to laugh at Jimmy—that is, it’s easy until we get today’s Gospel reading. Then what do we do?

Last year at CSUB I gave a talk entitled “How Not to Read the Bible.” Well, today’s sermon is “How to Read the Bible.”

Any time I’m teaching the sacred scripture of any religion, the word I use the most is “context.” To understand scripture, you’ve got to understand its context: When was it written? By whom? To whom? Where was it written? What’s the historical setting? What was the society like then?

To paraphrase the real estate mantra: “Context, context, context.”

The second major tool to use when studying scripture is historical-critical scholarship. Reading critically doesn’t mean criticizing, finding fault with the text. Reading critically doesn’t even mean critiquing. It means using all the tools that scholarship, reason, and common sense give us in order to better understand what scripture is really telling us.

Today’s reading from Matthew offers a perfect example of why we need these tools.

The Gospel reading this morning follows the Sermon on the Mount. First, the Sermon on the Mount occurs only in Matthew. Right there, that tells us a lot. Mark and John have no “Sermon” like the one in Matthew.
Luke, though, does. Only his is much shorter. And in Luke, Jesus delivers his famous “sermon” on a plain, a flat space, not a mountain. I’ll get to that later.

The Sermon on the Mount is much longer in Matthew than in Luke. This, too, tells us something. Parts of the “Sermon” in Matthew occur in no other Gospel, and parts of the Sermon are scattered elsewhere in Mark and Luke.

Think of the Gospels as a jigsaw puzzle. But not an ordinary one. With an ordinary jigsaw puzzle each piece can fit in one, and only one, place. The Gospels aren’t like that. Jesus’ sayings are the individual pieces. The Gospels share an outside frame, a structure, that gives them a common shape. But given this structure, each Gospel writer places the pieces, what Jesus says, in different places. Thus each Gospel writer, using many of the same pieces, creates a different picture of Jesus.

To create the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew has gathered into one place individual pieces that Mark and Luke scatter throughout their Gospels.
I hope I haven’t made critical reading seem overly complicated. Critical reading can actually be fun. Using it, we learn stuff. Critical reading can give you lots of “Aha!” moments: “Wow. I didn’t know that.”

In today’s reading, we have Jesus commenting on four passages from Torah. Actually, in the Gospel there are six; we have four of them this morning: murder, adultery, divorce, and swearing falsely. The other two are retribution and love.

Today’s Gospel reading begins with Mt. 5:21. But the key to our passage today occurs four verses before this morning’s reading, in Mt 5:17. Mt. 5:17 follows shortly after the Beatitudes; here it is:

Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until everything is accomplished.

St. Paul was lucky he died before Matthew wrote his Gospel. If the author of Romans and Galatians had read Mt 5:17, he would’ve had a stroke.

In Matthew 5:17 Jesus isn’t just a rabbi; for Matthew, Jesus is Super Rabbi. Super Rabbi leaps over tall synagogues in a single bound. For Matthew, Jesus is a mensch; the other rabbis are schmucks.

Why would Matthew make Jesus Super Rabbi?

Here’s why: the Gospel of Matthew is “the Jewish” Gospel. Matthew’s audience is Jewish or Jewish-Christian.

Know your audience.

Think about it. If you’re trying to explain Jesus to Jews or Jewish-Christians, how do you do it? You explain Jesus in terms they can understand.
I said earlier that in Luke Jesus gives the “Sermon on the Mount” on a plain. By contrast, in Matthew Jesus gives the sermon on a mount, just as Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from a mountain.

For Matthew, Jesus is the new Moses (1).

And the new Moses gives us today’s Gospel reading.

I mentioned earlier that after the Sermon on the Mount Jesus comments on six passages from Torah; we have four of them in today’s reading.

Each of the six passages has Jesus begin the same way: “You have heard it was said to those of ancient times. . . . But I say to you    . . . .”

What’s Jesus doing here? As the new Moses, Jesus is redefining Torah. He’s even one-upping Moses! “Yeah, ol’ Moses told you this and that, but Moses was a wuss. Let me tell you, I’m the new guy in town. Here’s the realthink about it! Especially you, Jimmy.”

Matthew’s message is really rather simple: Jesus redefines everything: murder, adultery, divorce, swearing falsely, retribution, and love.

For Matthew, Jesus redefines Torah.

Context, context, context.

What’s the context for our Gospel reading today?

The Sermon on the Mount.

What’s the first thing Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount?

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

That’s the version in Matthew; Luke has “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Either way, we know—don’t we?—that the poor aren’t blessed.

Don’t we?

In today’s reading and in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus is saying that what we know—or what we think we know—fits on the fingernail of his little finger: “You have heard it said,” Jesus says to us, “that the poor really don’t want to work. You have heard it said that greed is good. You have heard it said that the Bible condemns homosexuality. You have heard it said that Muslims are evil. You have heard it said that only Christians are saved.

“Sit down. Let me tell you what God says. . . .”

Amen.

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NOTES
1. For example, if you compare the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke, you’ll see some similarities—and a lot of differences. Here are two:

 skinny. Did Moses tell you not to commit adultery? I’m telling you not to even
  1. Unlike Luke, Matthew has “fulfillment prophecies.” Everything about Jesus fulfills prophecies in the Hebrew Bible.
  2. Luke mentions King Herod only once in passing. For Matthew, however, Herod is the archenemy of Jesus. Why? Jesus is Moses and Herod is Pharaoh. Only in Matthew does Herod, like Pharaoh, slaughter the Jewish babies.


Sermon, February 20, 2011
Grace Episcopal Church
The Rev. Vernon Hill

Recently I have been thinking a lot about “fear” and the impact that fearful thinking has on our lives.

Now let me say at the very beginning that fear is a very useful instinct.  It leads to watchfulness and resourcefulness and even heroic action.  It is part of the mosaic of emotion of what we are as human beings.
But there is another way which fear leads which takes us into some pretty ugly and evil parts of the human character.  This is why one of the major underlying themes of Jesus’ teaching is dealing with this ugly kind of fear and what it does to us.

Nine-eleven was a horrific day for Americans, a day when time moved in the slowest of motions.  In the days that followed, the dead were remembered and heroic action was reverently recalled and celebrated.  But as time moved on, being human demanded understanding – how could this happen?  Why did this happen?  Who did this?  Who is responsible?  All legitimate questions which asked for explanation.
Within this desire for explanation something different began to take shape – the willful use of fear as a social-political tool of control.  A whole religious tradition was demonized for political gain.  An ethnic group was generalized as terrorists.  There was the growing of more fear – raw fear.

This past decade has seen an unloosing of the demons created by fear run amuck – a war propelled by these demons of fear, the election of a Black President and the subsequent “we need to take OUR country back” hysterical thinking;  the financial collapse of 2009 and the loss of homes, jobs and a sense of predictability and well-being.   Most unfortunately there are many who have profited by the feeding of fear, by creating fictional causes for each “headline” catastrophe.  Each new event is explained with simplicity - you need to fear anything which is not like you or not like the “group of us” in religion, culture, education, economic status, in race and gender orientation.  So the college educated are characterized as elitists; science is only opinion; the poor are lazy and expect handouts; aliens are a burden on our resources and threaten our safety, individual liberty is under attack, the people’s own government is evil, public employment is destroying the economy . . . and the horrific lies expand from there.  There has been a massive attempt to keep the wagons circled to use a term from the old west migrations, because people are controllable and able to be manipulated by fear.

Homogeneity, a more palatable term than social and economic segregation or apartheid, is offered as the only security and bulwark against the threats supposedly posed by pluralism and multi-culturalism in our national life.  Differences deserve no respect and offer nothing of value.  FDR’s warning that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” has been realized.

These expressions of fear are confronting us with a rather terrifying, critical question of core importance – what does it mean to be human?  Which leads to an interesting religious question – What does it mean to be human and holy?   

Recently I was watching the Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson.  Normally this show serves as mindless filtering as I get ready for bed.  But once in a while something rather spectacular is offered reminiscent of the Dick Cavett conversational-interview style.  Ferguson featured for a full hour Dr. Cornel West, professor at Princeton University and philosopher, writer, religious thinker, advocate for social justice, and lover of the “blues”.

Ferguson had invited Dr. West because February is Black History Month and having had him on once earlier, he thought the Dr. might offer some insight into race relations in America.  Two statements at the outset of the interview captured my attention – “Black people have never had the luxury of believing in the innocence of America.  Although we have experienced the worst of America we still believe that the best of America can emerge.”  And then he went on - “Black history forces us to ask What KIND of human are we going to be?”

Can you hear Jesus in that question?  That’s a Jesus question – What KIND of human are you going to be?

Continuing, Dr. West talked about cycles of domination, oppression, bigotry, and revenge and resentment, and hatred, all he claims are the end-products of fear, fear based completely on fiction.  Fergusson recalled his earlier interview with Bishop Desmond Tutu who in speaking of apartheid said “any hatred or resentment is poisonous to individuals and groups.”   Both men are describing a “chain of fear” that must be broken for a person to begin to embrace their true humanity.  That’s at the heart of what is perplexing America right now?

The question “what kind of human are you going to be” is a reminder that we are choice-makers.  Hatred is a form of cowardice born from the lazy confrontation of fear, the accepting of simple-minded fictions, fictions about others to explain the catastrophes weighing upon us.  Courage - courage is the real enabling virtue which overcomes this fear.  “The wonderful thing about being human is that we can make choices.  No matter who are parents are or who are grandparents are, we can love our parents and grandparents even when they made ugly choices.  We can make choices that don’t imitate them at their worst.”
We can “choose this day”, challenging words from Hebrew scriptures.  “Choice” is willful, directed, and empowering.  Choice takes life from “remembering” – the recalling who we truly are.  Today we have met one such reminder in Leviticus – it’s Torah.  According to Torah, we are created in the image of God, b'tzelem Elohim (Genesis 1:26). In Jewish tradition as in Christianity, being created in "the image of God" doesn't refer to a physical likeness, but rather a moral possibility.  Rabbinic Judaism subscribes to the doctrine of imitatio dei, that God is a role model for human behavior.  Christianity offers Jesus as the truly human one – “Torah become flesh”.  In Jesus as in the Hebrew scriptures, being holy, which is at the core of the true humanity of Jesus, is largely about how we treat other people.

Leviticus identifies human and divine holiness in terms of care for the poor and loving your neighbor as yourself.  Holiness consists of ordinary everyday godly acts, such as taking care of our families or looking after the rights of the poor and the welcoming of strangers.  Holiness takes its life in the ordinary,  ordinary economics as in Leviticus: “don’t strip your fields or gather up all the grapes from your vineyard.”  What would these passages and their implications mean today in the United States?  At the very least, they assert that we do not have full control or ownership of the proceeds of our jobs, our businesses or properties. This is bad news for the Chamber of Commerce, the stock exchange, and those who would downsize to increase profits. By definition, business practices creating poverty among some to increase incomes for others alienates you from God and yourself.  You lose love.  Biblical ethics assert that the primary criterion for business is social good not profit; the betterment of community.

Now – again, how is the chain of fear expressed in ugly behaviors, the denying others of their humanity, respect and dignity, the exploitation of the weakest – how is this chain broken?  How do we recover justice?  It takes touchstones, examples, others who stand by guiding those trapped in darkness into human holiness and the recovery of their love.  It takes the living witness of people of faith who truly understand what Jesus tells us about ourselves.  It’s about putting forth faces not words and slogans.   I look around this room and I see the faces that are needed, faces of courage that spill love over into a fearful world;  faces that “make real” a different way of coping with fearful times, in ways that transform fear and the climate of fear into better things.  Gay faces, Lesbian faces, Jewish and Islamic faces, the faces of the poor, the alien and illegal, black faces, red faces, yellow faces, white faces, aging faces, young faces – your faces.  You can provide a different solution, a different vision, a witness to something affirming and holy.  It’s all about courage.
Let me end with a short challenging story from the Gospel about being a guide in this darkness - Jesus said (and I have shortened this), "You have heard, `An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.”   In a practice copied from the Persians, a Roman soldier or government official might order a Palestinian to carry his gear for one mile. This Jesus teaching, this new ethic, says the one ordered should do a second mile voluntarily.  Why on earth?

For three possible reasons [2nd mile]:
1) to maintain one's dignity, to affirm one’s self-worth,  
2) [2nd mile] to make a supposed enemy sufficiently curious about what would have seemed an odd piece of conduct to consider the human worth of the person acting as such and
3) [2nd mile] to consider himself, his assault on his own value by his action in relationship to this other human life. 

Reasons, I suggest, which are likely to go to the core of what it means to be human and to begin to answer what kind of human shall we be?   Amen.
Dr. West’s best known books include Race Matters and Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud.

Eighth Sunday after Epiphany (Year A, RCL)

Isaiah 49:8-16a                                  Psalm 131
1 Corinthians 4:1-5                              Matthew 6:24-34

I saw a news item the other day where some conservative Roman Catholics were criticizing their Church because it was not denying Communion to Gov. Cuomo of New York. The Governor, you see, is “living in sin”: he’s living with a woman—and they’re not married (1).
When I read that article, my first reaction was “Are you serious? Get a life. Given all the crap that’s going on in this country and in the world, this is what you’re obsessing over? Get real.”
What is our reality today? Increasing poverty, increasing homelessness; the divide between the haves and have-nots in this country is now a chasm, an ever-widening abyss into whose insatiable maw we all-too-thoughtlessly hurl too many of God’s children.


But it wasn’t Governor Cuomo’s inquisitors who alarmed me more; it was the good Governor himself. Cuomo’s response was, “My religion is a private matter.”
No, I’m sorry, Governor, it’s not. Our faith is not just, merely, only, solely a private matter for any of us. That’s salvation as solipsism. Solipsism as salvation.
When people say “My religion is a private matter” or “My religion is between me and God,” they remind me of the “bubble boys” in the early ‘80s; because of severe autoimmune diseases, these boys had to live in sterile, hermetically sealed environments (2).
A hermetically sealed faith, private and sterile, is a dead faith; it has suffocated because of the lack of oxygen, oxygen that other people and community provide.
Who’s my authority for this?

Jesus.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus tells us four times not to worry. Not once. Four times. You think he’s got us figured out?
"So do not worry about tomorrow,” Jesus tells us, “for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today."
Who you gonna trust? Jesus, or Fleetwood Mac? (3)

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus tells us not to worry about money, what we will eat, what we will drink, what we will wear, or how long we’ll live.
How can Jesus possibly say these things? Jesus didn’t have a mortgage. He didn’t have kids to send to college. He didn’t face rising gas prices. Jesus didn’t have to watch Wall Street flush his 401(k) down the toilet.
But Jesus insists: “Strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

That’s it?

It helps to be a Jewish comedian here: “That’s it?! Whadd’ya mean? Are you kidding me, Lord? You’re killing me here.”
“No,” Jesus says, “I’m not kidding. And I’m offering you life”: “Strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
Jesus’ language here is highly compressed. It’s a zip file: we have to unzip it and then open the files inside. The two sub-files here are “kingdom of God” and “righteousness”: If we don’t understand what Jesus means by these, not only do we not understand Jesus, we don’t have a clue what the Gospel is about.

“Kingdom of God” may be the hardest-to-understand phrase in the New Testament. When we hear “kingdom,” we naturally think of kings. Let’s see    . . . what kings come to mind?
  • Well, good ol’ Henry VIII. No, too many dead wives.
  • Or King George III. Hmmmm. I don’t think so. The Madness of King George was a good film, though.
  • How about King Tut? No. Steve Martin killed off that possibility (4).
  • How about a modern king? Well, there’s King Abdullah II of Jordan. Oh, that’s right: he’s another of those Middle Eastern dictators like Mubarak and Kaddafi whose days are numbered.
You see the problem?

Well, what do the scholars say?

The article on “Kingdom of God” in one of my Bible dictionaries is twenty double-columned pages.

You see the problem.

The scholar Marcus Borg sees the “Kingdom of God” as one of five ways that Jesus makes known the sacred (5). The Kingdom of God stands in stark contrast with the kingdoms of Herod and Caesar: “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (6).

In his Gospel Matthew gets this: he has Herod try to kill Jesus.

Eventually, Caesar will kill Jesus.

Let’s not fool ourselves: Caesar is not safely in the dead and forgotten past, just some Roman despot who lived 2,000 years ago. “Caesar” is any time we make the state more powerful and more important than the gospel. Did you know our government continues to use “rendition”—shipping alleged terrorists to countries that don’t mind using “enhanced interrogation”? Rendition is a crime against humanity. A crime against humanity is a crime against God.

Channeling Jesus, Borg asks, “What would the world be like if God were king and not Herod or Caesar?” (7)
This is, inextricably, a social-political question, not merely a private, and privatized, one. As Borg concludes, “If we see Jesus as a disclosure of God, it follows that God cares passionately about what happens in human history” (8).

God cares passionately about what happens in human history. “Human history” is not some abstraction. Human history is right here, right now. Human history is us. It’s Bakersfield. It’s the world.

That’s good news. But the Good News of Jesus Christ embodies some tough news, too. As Borg reminds us, Jesus’
teaching and behavior reflect an alternative social vision. Jesus was not talking about how to be good and how to behave within the framework of a domination system . . . . [he was] a religious social prophet whose teaching, behavior, and social vision radically challenged the elites and the domination system of his day (9).

For Jesus the primary virtue—indeed, the bedrock and foundation—of the Kingdom of God is what our translation calls “righteousness”: “Strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness” (8). Our translation “righteousness,” however, captures what Jesus means as much as Facebook equals real friendship.

First, the opposite of the Greek word for righteousness is “badness,” “evil” (10).

Second, the root of the Greek word for “righteousness” is “justice,” “fairness.” But it’s not the justice we’re so fond of—retribution. It’s redemptive action. As Archbishop Tutu says, for God justice is not retributive; it’s restorative.

In other words, the word in our Bibles usually translated “righteousness” is not about the individual and his or her uprightness or rectitude. It’s about relationship. It’s about others, it’s about community.
Abraham was reckoned righteous because he welcomed strangers (11).

St. Teresa of Ávila affirms the Biblical understanding of righteousness:

Christ has no body on earth but yours;
no hands but yours, no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which Christ
looks with compassion on the world.
Yours, the feet with which Christ goes 
about doing good.
And yours, the hands with which Christ blesses us now.

“Righteousness,” as Jesus defines it, has nothing to do with living or not living with your girlfriend; righteousness has everything to do with living a life of redemptive and restorative justice.
Find righteousness, Jesus says, and you have found God.
Do righteousness and you are a daughter or son of God.

Amen. 

†   †   †

NOTES