“Your lives are brimming with possibilities,” he declared. “Right now, as young adults, you have before you a much wider range of possibilities than you will have at any other time in your lives. Each choice that you make from now on, each decision, will take you down one road, and carry you away from other roads. Throughout our adult lives, the paths narrow, and it’s difficult, if not impossible, to force them back open again. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s just the way that it is. So decide wisely and carefully,” he advised, “and rejoice in the full range of choices now before you.”
His joy-filled words of possibility filled my young heart with worry, rather than with gratitude. I didn’t like the idea of my choices ever diminishing. I could imagine myself choosing the wrong path at some point, and watching doors slam around me to trap me in my mistake. I could imagine myself on the stage of one of those old TV game shows. Hidden behind Door Number One was fame and fortune. Behind Door Number Two was grief and failure. And behind Door Number Three was boredom and failed potential. I didn’t know which scenario was behind which door, and I had to choose! I only had one choice, one choice that I had better get right. The clock was ticking. The annoying music was playing. The buzzer was going to sound. What if I made the wrong decision!?
Perhaps some of our younger listeners today can identify with my anxiety? And those adults who attended the parish retreat yesterday can also perhaps feel the pain on a communal scale? We looked back yesterday on our past as a parish, and we could clearly see many diverging paths in our journey as a parish. We could see how choices made years ago played a role in who we are today. I don’t think that I was alone in being somewhat daunted by the looming choices that lie before us in our own time. Do any of you feel like you are standing right now, knees shaking, on the stage of “Let’s Make a Deal?” The ominous-sounding words of our lesson from Sirach today ring in my ears, “Before each person are life and death, and whichever one chooses will be given.”
Yikes! Jesus doesn’t console us in today’s Gospel, either. It sounds like Jesus is telling us that if we don’t do a bunch of totally impossible things, then we “will be liable to the hell of fire.” This Jesus doesn’t sound like the Jesus we Episcopalians know and love. He sounds more like a totally desperate parent, so upset with us that he blows his top and grounds us “until we’re 35?!” What’s going on? Does Jesus really threaten us with punishment if we do human things like “lust in our hearts,” or remarry after divorce, or go back on our word, or get angry? How can that be?
Before we can reflect on what Jesus might be saying to us today, we’re going to need to confront his scary and bizarre words. We’re going to need to take a moment to get past the image of Jimmy Carter lusting in his heart. To get past worry about our second marriages and our oath-taking. To get past any fear and indignation over all the talk of hell in these lessons!
First of all, we can’t weasel out of the difficulty of Jesus’ words by claiming that Jesus is telling us that God’s laws don’t matter.[1] Or that Christian laws are better than those picky old Jewish ones. Remember, Jesus said in last week’s reading that he has come not to abolish the law and the prophets of Israel, but to fulfill them. He has come to reflect the law of Moses in its fullness, to embody the heart of it.
What do the law and the prophets say? How do we sum them up? As a good Jewish teacher, Jesus knows: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. God’s law, as Jesus embodies it, is all about loving relationship in community—loving relationship with one another, intertwined with loving relationship with God. As our Presiding Bishop likes to put it: “If it’s not about Love, it’s not about God.”
Let’s look at some of Jesus’ unpleasant examples: Murder is bad. That seems like an easy one. But in a healthy community, is it OK for people to hate and abuse each other, if they stop short of murdering them? Of course not. When we vilify someone, when we disrespect someone with hateful words, we’re still harming them, still doing violence against them. Hatred and abuse don’t create the healthy community that God desires for us. Remember, Jesus says, if it’s not about Love, it’s not about God.
What about the one that always makes us sit up and pay attention ... Sex! Yes, adultery is a sin. It can injure or destroy important relationships. But what if we participate in a community in which we objectify and leer after one another all the time? Are we off the hook just because we don’t act on our pursuit? Isn’t it better to strive to eliminate the distorted ideas and habits that fail to respect the dignity of other human beings? Remember, Jesus says, if it’s not about Love, it’s not about God.
What about this divorce stuff, Jesus? These days, we can probably all agree that divorce is messy and painful and to be avoided when possible. I’m divorced, and I know firsthand the pain that it can cause. I know firsthand the pain that these verses can cause us, too. What I didn’t know until I studied this passage, though, is how the circumstances surrounding the pain of divorce have changed. In Jesus’ day, women couldn’t divorce their husbands. Only men could do the divorcing. And men could do it simply by saying, “My wife doesn’t please me anymore.” And poof, the husband could leave his wife in poverty and move on to the next wife. It was abandonment, pure and simple. So of course, in a healthy community, you’re not going to have the more powerful partner callously abandoning the most vulnerable on a whim. Today, thank goodness, we’ve made a little progress, at least. There are some economic and legal protections in place for both spouses. So I’m not sure that Jesus would have talked about divorce in his sermon if he had spoken at the Boulder Bandshell in 2023. I bet he would have picked something like racism or homophobia, instead. I can hear him now, full of his shocking exaggerations.
“It says in the baptismal covenant that you are to respect the dignity of every human being. But I say to you, “Rip out your tongue if you utter a racial or ethnic or homophobic slur. Cut off your leg if you walk away from defending the precious personhood of any of my children. It is better to be mute and lame than to fail to love your neighbor.”
Remember, says Jesus, if it’s not about Love, it’s not about God.
Jesus’ tough judgment-talk is meant not to condemn us, but to grab our attention. Jesus is actually trying to break our “if you do this, then God will do that” logic by totally exaggerating it. Jesus wants us to sit up and listen, so that we might be shaken up enough to change and grow. He wants all of our safe foundations, all of our logic about what is fair, to crumble before God’s crazy, abundant love for all of creation. What Jesus offers us at the heart of all rules is a love so great that it envelops all of our choices and transforms them.
Yes, Christian life is full of difficult choices, for us as individuals and as communities. As one preacher writes, “Jesus does not come to help us escape this world in its brokenness, sin, and suffering. He comes to help us live more fully in it. He comes to make us more fully human. [This passage in the] Sermon on the Mount is not just about keeping the Law; it’s about protecting the relationships that make us more fully human.”2
Looking back at my reaction to my college professor’s advice about choice, all those years ago, I can now recognize that my fear came from my desire to be perfect, to be right. I was afraid of “messing up” by choosing wrong. Perhaps that’s part of our fear about the future of St. Ambrose, too. We don’t want to “mess up” this wonderful community, to make the “wrong” choice. So we stand still. For Jesus, though, it’s not about avoiding error. It’s not about taking the easy way out. It’s about living as loving—and fallible—human beings. It’s about living in right relationship with God and with one another.
Can we at St. Ambrose help one another to choose the hard thing? To choose life. To choose love. To choose true humanity, in all of its vulnerability. To choose the Life that corrupt power cannot hold down. To choose the Love that prejudice and hatred cannot silence. To choose the Life that lifts up those who have been cast down. To choose the Love that builds community. And to rejoice with one another at growth and transformation. Being in community is oh-so-messy, but it is indeed the one true path to Life, with a capital “L.”
[1] In the exegesis of this entire passage, I am indebted to the work on the Epiphany 6 texts found at https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/2/9/heart-to-heart-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-epiphany-6.
[2] Randy Harris, "Fully Human." Found at https://day1.org/weekly-broadcast/63ced9bf6615fb4112000055/randy-harris-fully-human
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