“Just a Little Bit More” – Sermon on Feb 13, 2011
February 13, 2011
Scripture
Deuteronomy 30: 15-20
See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18 I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.
This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Matthew 5: 21-37
Jesus said, “You’re familiar with the command to the ancients, ‘Do not murder.’ I’m telling you that anyone who is so much as angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder. Carelessly call a brother ‘idiot!’ and you just might find yourself hauled into court. Thoughtlessly yell ‘stupid!’ at a sister and you are on the brink of hellfire. The simple moral fact is that words kill.
“This is how I want you to conduct yourself in these matters. If you enter your place of worship and, about to make an offering, you suddenly remember a grudge a friend has against you, abandon your offering, leave immediately, go to this friend and make things right. Then and only then, come back and work things out with God.
“Or say you’re out on the street and an old enemy accosts you. Don’t lose a minute. Make the first move; make things right with him. After all, if you leave the first move to him, knowing his track record, you’re likely to end up in court, maybe even jail. If that happens, you won’t get out without a stiff fine.
“You know the next commandment pretty well, too: ‘Don’t go to bed with another’s spouse.’ But don’t think you’ve preserved your virtue simply by staying out of bed. Your heart can be corrupted by lust even quicker than your body. Those leering looks you think nobody notices—they also corrupt.
“Let’s not pretend this is easier than it really is. If you want to live a morally pure life, here’s what you have to do: You have to blind your right eye the moment you catch it in a lustful leer. You have to choose to live one-eyed or else be dumped on a moral trash pile. And you have to chop off your right hand the moment you notice it raised threateningly. Better a bloody stump than your entire being discarded for good in the dump.
“Remember the Scripture that says, ‘Whoever divorce his wife, let him do it legally, giving her divorce papers and her legal rights’? Too many of you are using that as a cover for selfishness and whim, pretending to be righteous just because you are ‘legal.’ Please, no more pretending. If you divorce your wife, you’re responsible for making her an adulteress (unless she has already made herself that by sexual promiscuity). And if you marry such a divorced adulteress, you’re automatically an adulterer yourself. You can’t use legal cover to mask a moral failure.
“And don’t say anything you don’t mean. This counsel is embedded deep in our traditions. You only make things worse when you lay down a smoke screen of pious talk, saying, ‘I’ll pray for you,’ and never doing it, or saying, ‘God be with you,’ and not meaning it. You don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. Just say ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ When you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong.
Sermon: Just a Little Bit More
by Rev. Doreen Oughton
So here we are again on the mountainside with crowds of people listening to Jesus preach. Some of us might be a little nervous about what’s to come, given what he’s said so far. He’s surely not preaching the same old thing the crowds are used to hearing. What he says is startling, incredible. He starts off talking about the commandments, which his listeners would have been quite familiar with, but then says basically that keeping the commandments is not enough, not nearly enough. The commandments say “thou shalt not kill,” but Jesus says thou shalt not even let anger fester, thou shalt not call people names. In doing those things, Jesus says, you violate the law against murder just as surely as if you have taken someone’s life. He takes the commandment against adultery and says that even lustful thoughts about another person’s spouse violate this commandment as much as if you’d had a steamy affair. Jesus talks about other rules and laws of their society and again raises the bar, making it even harder to obey them. He says you can’t make an offering to God, trying to get in right relationship there unless you are in right relationship with your friends. He says you are not to even try to avoid an enemy, but if you see her in passing by on the other side of the street, take it upon yourself to cross over to repair the rift. And then there is his advice about chopping off your arm and plucking out your eye. Wow! And yes, this is the same gospel that has Jesus proclaiming that his yoke is easy, and his burden light.
Doesn’t sound so easy and light to me. No, not at all. As a therapist I often worked with people to give themselves permission to have whatever feelings came up, took pains to separate feelings from actions, desires and fantasies from behaviors. I encouraged integration of one’s whole self, rather than lopping off, figuratively or otherwise, an offending part. Equating name-calling with murder, lustful thoughts with cheating? Really? I suspect if all Christians really took his words to heart there’d be an awful lot of eyeless, armless, but saved people walking around. Who could do it? Even if we don’t take the advice literally, leaving our own bodies intact, who could ever live so purely in heart and mind? Are we all destined for the moral trash pile? If so, then this certainly contrasts with his promise of a light yoke and easy burden.
I don’t believe that Jesus was a man who spoke out of both sides of his mouth, so to speak. I don’t think his messages, as varied and startling as they were, contradicted each other. I believe he came to save us, not to condemn us. I believe he came to bring God’s love to us in the flesh, and to teach us to show God’s love to each other. He was against legalism, but not against the law. He was all about the Spirit. Sometimes we think that when someone talks about sticking to the spirit of a law rather than to the letter of the law, they are relaxing the standard, lowering the bar a bit. The “rule” might be to drive at 55 miles per hour, but the spirit of the rule is to drive safely. So if I drive at 60 or even 65 where the road and clear and straight, I am staying within the spirit of the law, yes? Jesus seems to say this in some places also. When the religious leaders criticize him and his disciples for violating the Sabbath or doing unclean things, he challenges them, reminding them that the Sabbath is for people, not people for the Sabbath, and that it is not what goes into the body that is unclean, but what comes out.
But here, Jesus is saying that the Spirit of the law calls us to raise the bar, to do even better than what is required. The law says I can drive 55 on the highway, but in the spirit of driving safely I slow down to 45 or 40 because it has started to snow. Jesus is challenging all his listeners, including us, to get inside the laws and understand not just what they are but why they are. Jesus knows that the kindom is not within and among people who look to see how far they can go in their self-interest and avoid penalties. The kindom is not brought about by people who want to know what they can get away with. Jesus knows that the kindom is not a place where one can look down upon and judge another in their deeds without feeling self-judgment about what is in one’s own heart.
Remember that when Jesus says the kindom of heaven has come near, he is not promising a reward in the future for good behavior now, he is saying that we can start living in heaven right now. He is not saying that if you call your brother and sister names now you will be punished by being banned from heaven later. He is saying that if you are harboring anger, calling names, avoiding your enemies, ignoring the rifts with your friends, lusting after what you cannot have, using the law as an excuse to treat someone badly, then you are not living in the kindom now. You are far from it, and it is your own doing, not divine punishment. When I refuse to slow down in the snow because the law says I can drive at 55, it is not punishment from the police that is going to be the problem. My crashed car and God forbid damage to other cars or people, myself included, is the real problem I face.
I know it is very unlikely that anyone lives all the time in the kindom which is within and among us. I have a feeling that the borders are not straight lines, and that it is easy to step in and step out, even to have one foot in and one foot out. We are human, born into a flawed world with a range of emotions and needs, going through experiences that shape us. How can we help but struggle with the bar, no matter where it is set? Sometimes we’ll trip over the low bar, or bang our heads on the high bar. What will help us is knowing where the bar is set, and that’s not as easy as it sounds. Some people want it to be easy, and so look to the letter of the law. What does it say that I can or cannot do. But this is an illusion. This too easily leads to thinking you know where it is set all the time, and therefore causes you to stumble or bump. Looking to the spirit of the law is what it takes. Paying attention to what is in our own hearts – pulling out all the excuses and defensiveness and self-interest, turning them over to God so that we open ourselves to be transformed, to live more fully in the kindom, that is what is asked of us.
In the reading from Deuteronomy, God tells the people where the bar is set. God says that laid out before them is life and goodness, along with death and destruction, and the choice is theirs to make. Follow the law and there is life, turn from the law and there is death. Not promises verses threats, but encouragement, even urging, to see where true and full life lay – in taking the hard road of choosing goodness. That is what God wants for us, what Jesus wants for us. The more we choose goodness, the more blessed our lives will be. The burden is easy and the yoke is light only because we are not alone to figure things out. We are not ever, ever abandoned, even if we start down the road to destruction.
Our Monday evening book group just finished exploring the book, The Road Less Travelled, by M. Scott Peck. The book does a wonderful job in addressing the same paradox we face in Jesus’ sermon. We are human and imperfect, and yet are asked to help create and live in the kindom of heaven right here and now. He talks about laziness, how we are likely to hear Jesus’ call to us to be pure in heart and mind and say, “nah, that’s too hard.” But he points out the persistence of grace, the ways that God continually reaches out to us to offer wisdom and guidance and comfort and mercy and love. Grace pursues us through dreams, opportunities, the words of other people, messages in scripture and poems and novels and self-help books. We don’t have to work to find these things. Often they find us. But at the same time we are called upon to work to receive grace. We are asked, as in this passage, to examine our hearts, to acknowledge the truth about what is in there. We are bound to find things we are not proud of. We are bound to find angry or coveting thoughts, self-pity, resentment, phoniness and shallowness. I must say I am still not happy with the analogy of self-mutilation, of cutting off parts of ourselves. I prefer the idea of emptying them out, pouring them out to God so that there is room for grace. We get nowhere by searching our hearts and denying the parts we don’t like. We have to acknowledge them, but also be willing to let them go, let them be transformed. What makes that safer, maybe even easier, is knowing how very much we are loved by God no matter what. God will not abandon us no matter what we find in our hearts. Jesus knew what was in the hearts of humans and refused to abandon them. He sacrificed everything to get the message out about how very much we are loved. I heard a saying once that God loves you just the way you are, but too much to let you stay that way.
As I pondered the scripture passage this week, two things kept running through my mind. One was an interview I read once with a very wealthy man. He had used his money to do a lot of good in the world, and I felt a lot of respect for him as I read it. So I was surprised by his response to the question, “How much money is enough?” I thought he’d say he had more than enough, something like that. His response though, was, “Just a little bit more.” It was hard in the whole context of the article to think of him as greedy, and I was intrigued by this answer. He had a lot, gave away a lot, but still wanted more. I wonder if part of the grace God has given us is some sort of programming to want more. It may get steered in the direction of material accumulation, wanting more stuff or money or power, but maybe it was intended to get us to want more for and from ourselves. So we might ask God, or ourselves, how good is good enough? And the answer would be, “just a little bit more.” And it would always be that, no matter how good we got. Imagine?!
The second thing was that I heard on the radio a song from the mid-80’s called “You Saw the Whole of the Moon.” The singer says, “I saw the crescent and you saw the whole of the moon. ..You stretched for the stars and you know how it feels to reach too high, too far, too soon, and you saw the whole of the moon.” And I love that image. I want to be that person. I want to stretch for the stars, reach too high for goodness, go too far for love, and see the whole of the moon. I will never reach the stars, I know, but I want my vision to be more than a crescent, more than a sliver of the kindom. I want more. How about you?
