20 February 2010

“Prism”
7th Sunday in Ordinary Time / Season of Epiphany
Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18 / Matthew 5:38-48
20 February 2010


So far, in this Epiphany season … this season when we talk about, read, take in these Scripture readings about Jesus living more and more into the title, “Light of the World” … we, here as Nativity, have given this season our own theme of “Let the Son … S-O-N … shine” … and each Sunday, we’ve been looking at different ways that the light of Jesus comes into our lives.
A couple of these ways have been rather complex … the example of parallax (the concept that things may not appear to us, to be as they really are) … and the yellow color of light, the color salt light – sodium light – is seen by us … well, you may have felt like you have been walking into a science lesson here every week …
… and you know, that’s OK. For too long, science and faith have been seen as enemies … with some scientists distrusting religion, religious people, as backward Neanderthals hanging onto ridiculous superstitions … but far greater … far more people of faith, people who most certainly use the products of science in their everyday lives … but who, when it comes to matters of faith, consider science “godless” and atheistic … recall, some of you, last week, Pastor Gretchen’s frustration, mentioned in her time of the Word last week, as she told of her friend who went to a more fundamentalist church because “he didn’t want to think on Sunday morning” …
… well, I believe science and faith, they can and do go together … Jesus most certainly does NOT ask us to leave our minds at the door when we gather for worship each week.
But maybe concepts such as “parallax” and “yellow light” … well, perhaps that was a little too much, too deep of science talk for so early on Sunday morning.
Well, this week, I’ve got something far easier.
The prism.
We know about prisms. We’ve all seen prisms in action because we’ve all seen rainbows. A rainbow is the result of light passing through raindrops and getting “bent” into its various wavelengths.
That is what a prism does. It bends light, so that the light is “shaped” if you will, and changed, and viewed differently, depending on the location of the light and the location of the prism.
So too … does Jesus, and the light in his Word for us, become “bent” and “shaped” for us, depending on the prism we or others place between it and us.

This week, the light of the Gospel continues to shine for us through the words of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, where we’ve been the past few weeks, and will be for one more Sunday.
This section before us today is continuous with last week’s verses … the theme of “you have heard that is was said” was the way Jesus started out each little subsection last week, the verses immediately prior to these today, in which he spoke of murder, adultery and divorce, and compared the “you have heard it said” of the “word on the street” with the “but I say to you” word he gives for those who follow him.
But … depending on where you hold the prism … the light shining forth from Jesus’ words can be observed, seen, received in very different ways.

Some people place the prism in such a way that the light of these words shines to show Jesus as the new Moses, the new lawgiver. The difference between “you have heard it said” and “but I say to you” is there, they say, to show that for those who follow Jesus, the bar is set high … very high … even higher than it had been for God’s people before Jesus … and that the rules for being a Christian are clear and straightforward.
So … coming through this prism … Jesus’ word is received to say that, for Christians … these activities put you “outside” – outside the community of faith:
Unreconciled conflict or strife with a brother or sister believer.
Lust.
Divorce.
Swearing.
Selfishness – holding back in giving to others.
Revenge.
And so Jesus’ words at the conclusion of this section of Matthew’s gospel – “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” are heard as a call to “perfect Christian behavior” … and a warning that, stepping outside that perfect behavior for Christians means stepping outside the community, the family of faith.
And we know churches that believe, and act, this way … where divorced people are excluded from full participation in the community of faith … no remarriage, no Holy Communion, no forgiveness … where one’s political stance on this issue or that, brings at the very least, criticism from the officials of the faith, and at worst, calls for excommunication … exclusion from the faith community.
That’s the prism setting for “Jesus the New Lawgiver.”

But there are other settings.
We Lutherans are quite familiar with one ourselves … and it goes like this:
The Law has its place … the Law is good because it comes from God. But the Law demands perfection. Rules demand to be followed perfectly. There is no “half-following” the Law that satisfies it. Lex semper accusat … the Law always accuses.
Bad news for us.
But wait … there’s good news! And it’s called … grace! Forgiveness! We all know we can’t possibly live up to God’s demands of us in the Old Testament, nor Jesus’ commands of us here. And you know … Jesus must know this too … why else would he utter such ridiculous words, requirements of us like “if your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away …” or “do not swear” … or “be perfect.” No one … not even Jesus … can expect that of us! Ha ha!
So it’s all grace! We can’t live up to the demands of the Law, but we’re always forgiven anyway, so what’s the big deal! Just try your best, do what you can, and when you screw up, hey, THERE’S ALWAYS GRACE.
Well … maybe that’s a bit extreme of a caricature of us Lutherans … but you get the point.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer did … he, Lutheran himself, seeing this kind of theology in action all around him … the Law done an “end run” around … he called this “Cheap Grace.” The “oh well” following human mess ups, screw ups, sins … falling short of the demands of the Law … whether it’s just an oops, excuse me kind of thing or a huge and flagrant fall … walking away with just a simple shrug of the shoulders and passing it off to “Oh well, I can never be perfect anyway, but there’s always grace, always grace …”
… that attitude cheapens God’s gift of grace, of forgiveness … as much as it cheapens, lessens, the Law, the rules.
Cheap Grace does not fulfill the Law, as Jesus says of himself … but in actuality it throws out the Law, its discussion, its demands.
And so what we’re left with is a morass, a mushy middle, the sinking sand of relativism and “well, that’s what YOU say is right.”
We don’t have to look very far to find this. We all know the elephant in the room in our ELCA is the continued fallout of our Churchwide Assembly 2009 vote on allowing partnered gays and lesbians to serve as ordained ministers in our denomination. The effects of that vote continue today … even in our own cluster, Shepherd of the Valley in Maple Valley had a vote last week, in which they decided to stay in the ELCA … while Zion, down the road, has had their first vote to leave … with the second, confirming vote to come, in the spring.
Pastors, leaders, lay people, theologians, bishops, gay people, straight people, all took, continue to take, their sides on this issue.
But some of us looked back … back to Jesus’ words here in the Sermon on the Mount … and other Scripture, other rules and laws, talking about proper behavior for leaders in the church … and we realized that … something changed … back in the 1970s … when we went from a church body in which pastors whose marriages ended in divorce were not allowed to continue in their calls as servant leaders … to today’s practice, where divorce among clergy is at least as common as it is in the general population … (perhaps more) and, whether or not a pastor has been divorced or remarried -- that has virtually no effect on their qualifying for service in the church.
Just this past week two of our friends and seminary classmates … another clergy couple, in fact … announced their divorce. Before the 1970s they would have had to resign their calls and move away. But today, other than a vaguely public announcement of what happened (I happened to see it on Facebook) things carry on for them professionally as if nothing happened.
Which, granted, is probably well and good for them … and for the churches they serve. Pastors are just like everyone else, with all the foibles, mistakes, sins committed as anyone. Putting us up on a pedestal is dangerous, both for the church as an institution, and for us personally. The higher we’re elevated, the harder it hurts when we fall.
The point is … we went from divorce being a serious matter for pastors and the church … to today’s deafening silence … without any public discussion of this matter whatsoever. No churchwide studies. No assembly votes. Quietly, Jesus’ words against divorce and remarriage, Paul’s words against divorce and remarriage of clergy … their authoritative word for us … just … went away.
And so … some of us said … where is our integrity? How can we as a church possibly prohibit gays and lesbians in committed relationships from serving as ordained pastors … a topic about which Jesus says absolutely nothing … when, on the other hand, we as a church have without study, without discussion… ignored, set aside, turned away … some might say, graced away, the weightiness of Jesus’ words about divorce?
That is the problem with cheap grace. Grace, poured out too fast, too soon … it’s like a bailout before you hit rock bottom … receiving the balm of the Gospel before you even know why you need it … before you even feel the sting of not being able to perfectly keep the Law ... it mocks Jesus’ death on the cross … really, why did he have to die at all, since God knows we’re all bound to fall short of the Law anyway, he’s just going to forgive us all anyway, anyhow.

But there is a third way. A third way which avoids perfectionism and legalism … and, on the other hand, feel-good, why can’t we all just get along Cheap Grace.
To find it, we need to look back a couple of weeks in our readings from the Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus bookends this section of Scripture in Matthew’s gospel with not just ONE call for perfection, but two …
Chapter 5, verse 20 … “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
And today, Chapter 5, verse 48 … “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
And in between … all that talk about being angry with a brother or sister, adultery, lust, divorce, swearing, revenge, loving your enemies.
Jesus is indeed paralleling the Word of God given to Moses, which we have before us in our Old Testament reading from Leviticus this morning … what we call the “Holiness Code” because of that Word given there to the Israelites, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”
And that’s because … what is given there in Leviticus and here in Matthew is covenant language … language about living in relationship, in God’s family … together with God, together with Jesus, together with one another.
It is talk, it is language, it is expectations of what living in relationship, in and with one another is all about.
It helps us recall the Ten Commandments … the original Holiness Code if you will … words which also start out with the words “I am the Lord your God” … words which we have interpreted as “thou shalt” and “thou shalt nots” … rules, laws, requirements for living … but these, too, are words given to be lived out in covenant relationship … family words, family talk … “I’m your God … you’re my children … in my family, here’s how we do things … we honor life … we value sexual relationships … we help protect other’s property … we live this life satisfied with what we have.”
We’ve all experienced this kind of talk in our own families … somewhere, someone along the way likely sat us down and said to us, “you’re a (insert your family name here) … and in this family, here’s how we do things …
And so the demand for perfection … isn’t letter perfect perfection, stepping outside that line meaning “you’re out of the family” … but neither is it an empty word, meaningless … a marker to a past way of things, or just there for no reason whatsoever, since it’s all grace and forgiveness and love love love anyway …
… no, even as we look at the Greek word Jesus uses … it’s telos … signifying wholeness, completeness, integrity …
… so here, Jesus is calling us, we who have heard his call to join him on the discipleship path, to follow him … he is calling us to live and to love in the same whole, fulfilling, complete way as God our Father lives and loves for us.
This is God’s peace, God’s shalom.
In our Gospel word today … this Shalom for us means not taking revenge … it means no retaliating violence. Period.
It means turning the other cheek to our enemies. Giving up our cloaks to them … exposing our nakedness, literally, figuratively, we are to be completely vulnerable before them.
Shalom means loving as God loves. God-love your enemies … agape love is the word here … which is far different from Cheap Grace love. God-love holds people accountable for their actions when they step outside the boundaries of right and wrong. We don’t lust after revenge but neither do we relativize or trivialize their violation of the rule of Law.
So we discipline them … in the true sense of the word … the root of discipline is disciple … we show them, through our words and our actions, what God is like, how Jesus loves … not by letting our enemies off the hook, but by loving and praying for them, that they would change.
But what happens when … they don’t change? When we don’t live up to the “family standards” … into the covenant … what happens when relationship is broken … broken, through adultery, through divorce, through violence or greed or selfishness?
The offense… the violence … the hurt … it leaves its mark. It doesn’t just “go away,” nor can it be washed over in a tide of cheap grace, cheap grace which cheapens the hurt, the offense, cheapens the one hurt … and yes, cheapens God.
The Word is clear. “I say to you.”
The Word is clear. “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
The Word is clear. “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
The Word is clear.
And so, then, must this word be clear.
“Let us confess our sin in the presence of God and one another.”
“We confess that we have fallen short of the life you desire for us.”
“Have mercy, O God.”
The Word is clear.
And so, then, must this word be clear.
“You belong to Christ, and through the power of the Cross – Jesus, dying for you and me to make us right with God – through the power of the Cross, +your sins are all forgiven.”
The Word is clear.
And Jesus puts down a Cross in the middle of it, a Cross on which he dies and from which he rises to new life, rises to acknowledge sickness and proclaim healing … acknowledge bondage and proclaim release, acknowledge condemnation and proclaim forgiveness.
To give us … righteousness exceeding that of the Scribes and Pharisees.
Perfection. Wholeness. Completeness. Shalom.
In Christ, all these are yours. You belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

So have peace and healing and wholeness in yourself, and peace, healing and wholeness in your relationships with others.

And so we rise in that forgiveness and peace, wholeness and shalom, rise to live another day, we who have literally been to hell and back, now we rise to bring others through it as well, not separating from or shunning, not avoiding or ignoring, not denying, but living, living as Jesus calls us …
In his name. Amen.