The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Matthew 5:21-37
Psalm 119:1-8
O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Call
up elementary school children.
You all are going to help me explain our first lesson to the
older folks.
Offer
them a choice of a bag of candy in one hand and an old wilted carrot in the
other.
Tell
them that they can point to choose one to share.
Which one do you choose? (They will choose the candy.)
That’s easy, right? That is an easy choice!
Now
hide them both behind my back and switch hands back and forth. With hands
behind my back, ask them to choose one.
That’s harder, isn’t it? It’s hard to tell which one is the
good choice if you can’t see the whole thing, isn’t it? You might make a big
mistake.
Now, what if you made a mistake and chose the rotten carrot?
(Hand
them the carrot.)
You wouldn’t be happy about munching that old carrot for a
snack. You would be feeling bad about not having the candy. I imagine that you
might start blaming each other for making the wrong choice?
‘It’s her fault.’
‘It’s his fault.’
‘It’s my fault.’
‘This is impossible. I’m not going to
play with Rev. Anne anymore. I give up. This is too hard. This game isn’t fair
at all. Maybe we got the carrot because Rev. Anne doesn’t like us.’
No, no, no! That’s not true at all. I
do like you! As a matter of fact, I’m going to hold this all out here for you
to see it now, and I’m going to let you choose again.
They
get the candy and go sit back down.
When we look at Moses’ sermon in our
first reading, we might think that his message is pretty obvious, at least more
obvious than Jesus’ difficult sermon in today’s Gospel. On first hearing, it
might seem as if Moses is giving us an easy choice: if we obey God, we will be
blessed, and if we turn away from God, we will suffer. That’s an easy decision,
right? As easy as choosing candy over a rotten carrot! Who among us does not
choose life, blessing, and God?
Life, however,
is more complicated than this scenario. Almighty God can be pretty difficult to
hold fast to. Sometimes we want to do the right thing, but we end up doing
entirely the opposite. Sometimes death and its consequences can hide God and
Life completely from our view, and the choosing can seem impossible. Look at ancient
Israel, God’s chosen people, conquered and led away into generations of dreary exile.
Look at the Sudan, that we remember in prayer today, torn by civil war and
genocide. Look at our own lives, our own failed choices, day after day, rotten
carrot after rotten carrot.
The book of
Deuteronomy was written after the Exile. Its editors looked around at all the
years away from the Promised Land, and it was easy for them to see all of the
wrong choices that the people had made in light of the
bad place where they ended up. “We must have done something wrong,” they sighed
hopelessly. “If God is in control, our predicament must have been a punishment.”
“Don’t despair!” Moses’ sermon says
to them. “Repent, turn around and try again! It doesn’t have to be this way.
Hold fast to God. Choose Life, even in exile. Chose Life when you are back home
in Jerusalem. This bad situation is not the end!”
Read in the light of history, Moses’
sermon is not just a divine threat that hangs over clear and easy choices. It
is a promise that hangs over the messiness of life in this world.
Jesus, of
course, takes Moses’ sermon one step further into what seems to be the absurd.
It seems as if Jesus shows us the candy suspended way up high beyond our reach
and then shoves the rotten carrot in our hands when we jump for the good stuff:
It’s not enough to refrain from
expressing your anger; you’re not supposed to be angry at all.
It’s not enough to avoid cheating on
your spouse; you can’t even think about cheating.
If you get divorced, don't remarry.
If you get divorced, don't remarry.
It’s not enough to follow through on
what you swear to; but do not even dare to swear on anything at all.
It’s amazing
how the Church throughout the ages has tried to weasel out from under these
hard words of Jesus. As G.K. Chesterton has said, “The Christian ideal has not
been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”[1]
“These demands
are meant only for higher-level Christians like monks and priests,” medieval
scholars write. “You can’t expect ordinary folk to follow them.”
“Jesus only
means for individuals not to get angry. Governments are allowed to retaliate
against their enemies in order to stay in power and prevent chaos,” the
Reformers explain.
“Oh, Jesus
doesn’t really mean all that stuff about loving enemies and refusing to
retaliate and not swearing oaths. That's unrealistic! He is really just interested in us obeying his
commands against lust and divorce, anyway. Let’s really concentrate on the verses that have to do
with sex and forget all the rest!” the Church has often pontificated.
“Jesus just
cares about our hearts and souls,” others say to make themselves feel better.
“It’s not so much what we actually do, but what we want to do that counts.”
I believe that
Jesus means for us to take action in the Sermon on the Mount, but I believe
that his exaggerated language is like the language of the parables. No matter
how hard we try to turn his words into moral legislation, into a clear choice
between candy and carrots, Jesus’ words burst open all of our definitions of
right and wrong, giving reign to ambiguity through stiffening the rules beyond
all reason.
“You
mean that we need to go that far!” we gasp, as all of our safe
foundations, all of our logic about what is fair, are plucked out like an errant eye. We might
think that Jesus is offering us candy and rotten carrots, but what he is really
offering us is Love, a love so great that it envelopes all of our choices and
transforms them. We might think that we have figured out what God wants of us,
and especially what our neighbor should be doing. But what God wants, what Jesus wants, is for us to cling
to Life. He wants us to hold fast to the Love that even the Cross cannot kill, and to let it transform us from head to toe, in our
actions and in our thoughts. Don’t try to make a system out of it. Don’t try to
explain it away. Instead, in each tiny choice in our lives, in every moment of
our lives, Jesus asks us to take action that unveils a tiny corner of his
topsy-turvy, loving Kingdom.[2]
Now let me end with a quick story for
children and grown-ups alike. Once upon a time, there was a little boy who
liked to go over to his friend’s house and play in the afternoons after school.
Every afternoon, his mom would tell him to come home no later than 6:00 for
supper. But he would be having fun with his friend, and he would often forget.
When he would come home late, his mom would fuss at him because the dinner
would get cold. Sometimes his mom would even send him to his room for a
time-out. The little boy didn’t like that. He hated to get in trouble.
One day when he was over at his
friend’s house and they were cleaning up their toy trucks so that the little
boy could get home on time, his friend noticed that his very favorite truck,
the one that his grandparents had just given him for his birthday, had cracked,
and the back wheels had fallen off. His friend started to cry, and the little
boy stayed with him.
Arriving home late that evening, the
boy saw his mom and dad waiting impatiently in the kitchen.
“You’ve broken the rules again! What am
I going to do with you?!” cried his mom.
“I know,” stammered the boy, “but my
friend’s favorite truck was broken.”
“Did you stay to help him fix it?”
offered the dad, moved that his son was at least being helpful.
“No, I didn’t know how. I just stayed
to help him be sad.”
As the carrots got cold on the table,
the mom and the dad took their errant and compassionate son in their arms and
gave him a loving hug. Just for a moment, we could catch a glimpse of Jesus’
embracing arms on the Cross, even a glimpse of the Kingdom of God, peeking through the tangle
of complex choices that twist through our lives.
