2-12-23 Sermon & Scripture

One of my favorite jobs I ever had was called “Community Coordinator.” It was basically like a Resident Assistant for a college dorm, but it was with seminary students in an apartment complex. This was in Los Angeles. People were coming to seminary from all over the world. I would pick them up from an airport, help them get moved in, get them situated in their apartments, and provide them with their first taste of community at Fuller Seminary. Literally they’d be from all over the world: – Japan, Korea, England, Ethiopia, India, New Jersey. Keila Rodriguez came in from New Jersey. I remember picking her up from Long Beach Airport one hot July day and moving her into Apartment 1. Her car was being shipped by truck from New Jersey, so while she was waiting for that I’d take her to the store or whatever. 

Well, I don’t remember what it was that occurred between Keila and the driver of the car carrier trailer, but I remember that she was mad and she was scared because he was really mad. Something to do with some bad directions she had given him and he was late and was going to charge her more but she didn’t think it was her fault and wanted to fight it. He was going to be on our street with her car in about 30 minutes, and it seemed like it was going to get ugly. Well, what would you do? I went back to my apartment, and made brownies. 

Sure enough, 3o minutes later, we see the truck pulling up to the street, and then he realizes he shouldn’t even be driving on this section of Oakland Ave. Branches were too low, too many cars parked on the side of the road, making it narrow. But he’s mad, so he just keeps driving to our complex, and stops the truck, just blocking urban traffic and making even more people mad. He doesn’t even get out of the truck and starts yelling at Keila, threatening to drive off with her car. But I was ready, with a plate of some of the most delicious brownies I ever made. And then I ran up to the driver’s window with that plate of brownies, and then the driver started to smile a little bit. He came out and enjoyed some brownies with Keila and some other residents of my community. Traffic can wait. They started to talk calmly and agreed to settle the matter later. Keila got her car. You want to solve a problem? Brownies. Brownies solve everything!

This sermon is going to be a mirror image, the other side of the coin if you will, from my last sermon. Last sermon was “Stop trying to do things to earn God’s blessing. You already have it by grace.” This week it’s, “You have a choice to make about what kind of life you want to have, and it’s really up to you.” Both are true and must be kept together. This shouldn’t be experienced as guilt or pressure, but as opportunities to be free agents partnering with God to build God’s beloved community on earth. 

We really are free. We can make different kinds of choices. God, most of the time, is not going to intervene to stop us from making bad choices, and God is not going to make us make good choices, especially when our mind is made up. And choices have consequences, not just for us, but for many others. Bad choices bring about suffering, even for people who had nothing to do with the bad choice. This is so very true. Each of us has suffered and is suffering because of a choice we or someone else has made, whether it be our family, our civic leaders, or just random people in the world. And we have caused others to suffer in ways we never intended. But the same goes for blessing and joy. We reap the benefits of good choices we or other people have made, whether our family, our civic leaders, or just random people in the world. And other people have benefitted from good choices we have made in ways we never dreamed.

We are free. Especially in Christ. Because Christ has freed us from self-centered, worldly thinking, and we are free to do things we were never able to do as self-centered, worldly people. We can, in Christ, authentically love God and love other people, which is something we could never quite do, turned inward as we have been without Christ.

We cannot control everything about our lives and circumstances. But we have the ultimate say in what kind of people we will become, what kind of moral character we have, and no one can take that away. Well, God has the ultimate say, but God lets us have that choice. And Jesus wants us together to build the beloved community of blessing. To take initiatives in the world that are surprising, creative, outside the box, that disrupt vicious cycles of sin and destruction. We are sent out by Christ and empowered by the Spirit to be, for the world, what Christ and the Spirit, sent from God the Father, have been for us. That’s how salvation works itself out practically. Not just saved from hell after death, but saved from hellish cycles of relating here and now. We get to be instruments of salvation in the world, in community together.

So, sign me up. What do I need to do? Here’s the tricky part. It would be easier if there was a list of rules to follow for every situation, and we would fulfill those rules, and we would be the people of God saving the world and being righteous and all that. It’s more difficult. It requires creativity, situational awareness, shrewdness, the element of surprise, a willingness to bend rules for the sake of love, a love of our enemy as a fellow human being, a willingness to use our own suffering as a tool for redemption and transformation. You know, like Jesus. We are his disciples. We do what he does.

This section of the Sermon on the Mount is fun, because you can easily see a pattern in Jesus’ teaching. Jesus says, “You have heard it said,” and he quotes the Bible, and then he says, “But I say to you.” What’s going on here? Is he getting rid of parts of the Bible, changing it, intensifying it? What is Jesus’ relationship with Biblical Law here, especially since he just said right before this that he hasn’t come to get rid of or alter any aspect of it?

There are different schools of thought here. I take the approach of my Christian Ethics professor in seminary, the late Glen Stassen, who was, for those of you old enough to remember, the son of the perennial presidential candidate Harold Stassen. Glen Stassen discovered a pattern in Jesus’ teaching that I think makes sense of it all. In these teachings, Stassen says, Jesus has three parts to each ethical teaching. 

First, Jesus quotes a piece of traditional wisdom, the vision for human flourishing laid out in Biblical Law. For instance, “Don’t murder.” The Law says that. We all know that’s a keeper. But it still happens. Why is that? And why is it that stopping short of murder is not necessarily solving all our problems? 

The second part of teaching is Jesus illustrating a vicious cycle we get into that leads to murder and that keeps the seeds of murder in our hearts. Groundhog Day. Samsara. The vicious cycle is our unresolved anger. It is our insulting, dehumanizing words. It keeps escalating and leads to murder, and basically is murder in our hearts, in seed form. Our anger and vicious language contributes to the murder that happens in the community. We keep at this vicious cycle and we can’t get out of it. 

The final part of the teaching is Jesus’ transforming initiative we should take to get out of the vicious cycle. In the case of anger, insult, and murder, the priority we should take to get out of this vicious cycle is reconciliation. When you realize that your brother or sister, someone important to you, has something against you – meaning you would be in the wrong about something – immediately stop what you are doing and go work it out with them. Jesus said even if you are at the altar about to offer your sacrifice, reconciliation with them takes precedence even over worship of God. So if I see some of you leave early today, I absolutely will take no offense. I will assume you need to get something right with someone. Seriously, go right now if you need to. Tap them on the shoulder here, go meet them at their church, step out and give them a call. 

This is if you realize you are in the wrong. If someone has wronged you, it’s probably not that same kind of urgency, unless they are about to hurt someone else. But you want to be careful about that. Jesus talks about that situation in Matthew 18. There are steps to dealing with that. But what a powerful choice that you can make right now, or as soon as you can! There could be a situation in your life that would be radically transformed if you were able to say that you were sorry, were able to make amends, and if you did so in such a way that was genuine, not manipulative, seeking healing for the injury you have caused rather than seeking to make yourself feel better. It takes wisdom. It takes community. These are transforming initiatives we get to practice together. It’s not all on you.

Our text today goes on to list other situations. We know adultery is wrong. The problem is that, in our hearts, we are constantly seeing someone else as an object for our own wants. Jesus says we need to take radical steps to get a different set of eyes, a different way of looking at another person. We know divorce is bad. And yet, trying to find loopholes and rationales just exacerbates the way we treat each other. Instead, be reconciled to each other. I wish I were able to have a whole sermon explaining that one in more depth, because it’s a painful topic, but that’s not for today. And we all know that when you make an oath, a promise, you should keep it. But we have all these clever ways of wording things to get out of keeping our word, and so our words may become meaningless and we stop trusting each other. “Not so among my community of disciples,” Jesus says. “Instead, this community is going to be known as people who simply mean yes when they say yes and mean no when they say no.”

And even though we won’t get there because Transfiguration and Lent will come after this week, Jesus goes on to talk about transformation of our relationship with our enemies through loving them. And Stassen breaks down the majority of Matthew 5-7 as 14 triadic teachings like this, taking transformative initiatives to escape vicious cycles. All these are eye-opening, outside the box ideas to disrupt what we would normally do and unleash the goodness of God that exists inside of us to affect the situations we find ourselves in. God’s grace to us is Jesus’ teaching that disrupts our sin. They each can be their own sermon, which I once did in another church that didn’t follow the lectionary.

The grace here is not law, following a list of rules, but the fact that we get to do something, something that is uniquely us, to participate in the building of beloved community here on this earth. This is the part of grace that can sometimes feel awkward. Life in God’s kingdom doesn’t necessarily come naturally to us, but we step into it, model it together in community, and we get used to the moving of the Spirit.

It's like the Soul Train Line, you know, on Soul Train everybody got the chance to do their own little dance in the middle and celebrate each other. It doesn’t matter what kind of dance you do, just dance how you wanna dance. But when it’s your turn, dance. Or why else are you on the show? One day, my dance was making brownies.

There is really nothing more liberating than saying, “Hey. You are empowered. You are beloved. You are authorized. The world is your oyster. You can make change. You can be you, the kind of you that is full of joy and is a blessing to the world.” God made you the way you are because God wants you to be unleashed and free. Don’t let anything else hold you back. At St. John’s we are called to be the kind of community celebrating that kind of freedom, helping each other dance the dance of freedom in the world, inviting more people into it. So let’s dance. Put on your green shoes and dance the blues. Go birds.