A Doorway to Life (Sermon on the Mount part 3, Feb 16 2014)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 6, Feb 16 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Deut 30:15-20; Ps 119:1-8; 1 Cor 3:1-9; Mt 5:21-37

A Doorway to Life

Today I am setting before you life and death.  Which do you choose?  Now, like Moses in Deuteronomy, I’m not talking simply about biological life, about whether your heart continues to beat or not, or how many days you’ve got left.  No, I’m talking about really living.  Life lived to the fullest.  The life we were created to live.  Abundant life, life that demands more and promises more.  The new life that Jesus is calling us to in today’s gospel, in his sermon on the mount.  He calls it life in the kingdom of heaven.  We’ve had glimpses of it in the gospels these past few weeks.  A life which is based on compassion and mercy, peacemaking and justice.  Living as salt and light.  Life in right relationship with God and with others, life in the kingdom of heaven.

Two weeks ago, as we began this series of readings on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, we recognized Jesus words as a call to revolution, to a world in which the economy of exchange is replaced by the economy of grace.  Jesus begins by blessing people who have no claim on God’s blessing.  God offers us his grace, his blessing, his favour, his love, as pure gift.  Throughout history, and especially throughout the history of religion, many people have found this idea of grace to be disturbing.  Because if we don’t have to earn God’s favour, does it matter how we live?  What then is the point of all these ethical and religious rules and practices, what we usually refer to as “the Law”?  Is Jesus telling us to ignore the Law, that we can just get rid of it?

Not even close.  In last week’s gospel, Jesus told his disciples, “I have not come to abolish the law. I’ve come to fulfill it.”  In today’s gospel, he starts to show us what that means.  You see, the disciples that Jesus was talking to were concerned about the law, those rules and commandments that had been given to Moses and had been passed down to them by their ancestors.   The established teachers of Jesus’ day taught that the key to life was obeying the law.  And they had codified that law into a total of 613 rules which they followed, scrupulously. 

The problem is that living life by simply following the rules is not enough.  It may be good, but it’s not good enough.  It’s not life-giving, in fact if following the rules becomes a matter of simply going through the motions or taking pride in our ethical accomplishments, it can even become life-draining.  Rules are meant to be pointers, they’re meant to guide us.  They point us in the right direction, but they’re not meant to be ends in themselves.

Think about when you sent your children off to school for the first time.  Did you give them any rules?  Of course you did.  Stay on the school grounds, don’t fight, be quiet when the teacher is talking and so on and so on.  Now, think about why you gave those rules to your children.  Was the purpose so that they could learn to obey rules?  Not really.  Learning to obey rules might be a good thing, following the rules might be a good thing, but the real purpose was to teach them how to be in a good relationship with their classmates and their teachers.  You see, the primary function of rules is to act as pointers.  The rules are there to point to and guide us to the things that are really important, things beyond the rules themselves.

Jesus gives us some examples.  Let’s have a look at the first one.  “You have heard that it was said ‘You shall not murder.’  That’s one of the ten commandments, it’s one of the biggies.  Now, I’m pleased to tell you that I haven’t murdered anyone today.  So I’m in compliance with the rule.  But before I get too smug, Jesus says to us wait, there’s much more to it than that.  What’s the commandment pointing to?  Why is it that we shouldn’t murder? 

We shouldn’t murder another person because that other person is a human being created by God in God’s own image, someone who is loved by God and was brought into life for a reason, someone who is God’s own child and therefore my brother or sister.  And if that’s who the other is, not only should we not murder our brother or sister, but we shouldn’t diss him, and we shouldn’t bear grudges, and we shouldn’t be angry with her, or insult her or call him a fool or put him down in any way.  In fact if anything gets in the way of my relationship with another, my first priority should be reconciliation.  I need to go sort out whatever’s gone wrong and get our relationship back on track.

That’s what the commandment ‘you shall not murder’ is pointing towards.  It’s guiding us into a relationship with others, it’s pointing us towards a new way of living.  Sometimes we can make the mistake of thinking that all Jesus is doing here is extending the law by creating more rules.  It’s certainly true that Jesus is extending the law’s application.  But he’s not simply adding “you shall not insult your brother or sister” to the existing 613 rules.  He’s going way beyond this.  In Jesus’ teaching, the law becomes a doorway, a portal into something much bigger.  It becomes our entry point into a new life, to a way of living that’s not just focused on right behaviour but rather a life oriented toward love, to being in loving relationship with God and with others.

Let’s take Jesus’ second example.  “You have heard that it was said, ‘you shall not commit adultery.’”

Now every so often I get couples coming to me to talk about their marriage.  Imagine if you will that one day a couple comes in to see me, they sit down in my office, and the husband says to me, “You know, Rev. Mark, we have a wonderful marriage.”

“Oh, yes,” the wife agrees, “we’ve never committed adultery!”

Well I don’t know about you, but if I heard that, there would be red flags going up all over the place.  Because marriage is about a lot more than not committing adultery.  It’s about a relationship, about a relationship which was woven by God into the very fabric of creation when he created male and female and blessed their union.  It is about a life-long, committed, loving and faithful relationship which is much much bigger than not committing adultery, or filling out the right paperwork when you get divorced.  That’s what the law is pointing us to.  You see, the law is good, but the purpose of the law is to point towards the relationship, to guide us into a life which is oriented toward love.  

Jesus said, “I have come not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.”  And the fulfillment of the law is not more law, but something which is beyond law.  It’s life itself, it’s the life that God is calling us to, a life grounded in love, the life of the kingdom of heaven which is available for us right here, right now. 

Sometimes, like the people of Jesus own time, we get focused on the rules.  Sometimes we get focused on behaving the right way.  These aren’t bad things, they’re not to be abolished; but Jesus is calling us to much, much more than this.

This past week I had the opportunity to preach at the funeral of a friend.  He had been diagnosed with a terminal cancer a year before he died, and we had some really good conversations about what it means to choose life and not death in those difficult circumstances.  One of the things he learned was something I repeated in my homily:  to value relationships over accomplishments.  

That was a phrase that resonated with people.  So simple yet so easy to ignore. 

I’ve been watching the Olympics a lot this past week.  And I don’t know about you, but the Olympic moments that are going to stick with me are the ones that involve relationships:  a coach providing a ski to a competitor so that he could finish his race with dignity; two sisters holding hands while the third sister cheers; a speedskater giving up his spot so another could race in his place; Alex and Frederic Bilodeau arm in arm.

Some of you may have already heard the story of the Texan friend I met when I was on course preparing for an internship I did in the Seychelles seven years ago.  During that week long training program we would do bible studies and lecture sessions and site visits and group discussions and all sorts of things.  And after every session, no matter what it was about, or what was said, my Texan friend would lean back, look at the rest of us and say, “Well y’all know what?  It’s all about relationships”

Well y’all know what?  Today’s gospel is all about relationships.  It’s about choosing to live a life in relationship with God and with each other.  The law, all the rules that govern our behaviour, all our religious practices, even coming to church on a Sunday morning, all of this serves as a doorway that we can step through into the new life that Jesus models for us.

Later on in Mathew’s gospel, when Jesus is asked which of the 613 rules is the most important, he replies that it all comes down to this:  “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.”

It’s all about relationship.

Today I am setting before you life and death.  Jesus is not giving us more rules to follow.  He’s not urging us to behave better.  No, it’s way more important than that. Jesus is calling us today to new life. Life lived to its fullest, abundant life. 

The life of the kingdom of heaven.  Here, on earth.

Amen.