Matthew 5:38-48
Rev. Father Alan Heatherington, Grace Anglican Fellowship, February 19, 2017

​May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord my Rock & my Redeemer, Amen

Did you notice that there is one theme that runs through all 4 of today’s lectionary readings? It’s the theme of perfection as the standard for the believer:

Lev. 19:2 says: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”
Ps. 119:33 says: “Teach me, O Lord, the way of Your statutes, and I shall observe it to the end.”
I Cor. 3:16 says: “Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” And Mt. 5:48 says: “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”

Raise your hand if these verses perfectly describe your life as a believer. There is no way to lessen the standard that they set of holiness, of faithfulness to God’s commandments, of consciousness of the Holy Spirit’s presence within us and of practicing godly perfection in our daily walk. The last of these verses raises the bar completely out of reach, both by its comprehensiveness and by its placement at the end of Matthew 5 where the ethical requirements of the Sermon on the Mount transcend anything of which we find ourselves capable. 

Last Sunday we grappled with the lofty proscriptions against anger and lustful looks, where Jesus equates the former with murder and the latter with adultery. And then He threw in the suggestion that we pluck out an offending eye or cut off an offending right hand in order to escape hell, that we avoid calling anyone a fool lest we put ourselves in danger of hell fire, and that we work out any interpersonal issues before we go to God’s altar with our offerings.

Now we have another set of ways that Jesus re-interprets the Old Testament laws, making them seem ever more out of reach. Israel had lived by the lex talionis, the law of retaliation, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” And, as is the manner of humankind, the law was perverted from its divinely intended use to limit retaliation and came to be used instead as the excuse for exacting the last possible measure of revenge. Gilbert and Sullivan put a better spin on it in the Mikado when they memorialized the saying, “Let the punishment fit the crime.”

But even this was not the way of Jesus. In His characteristically countercultural way, He says,” do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.” His hearers were expecting, at the very least, “Slap him back.” But no, they got, “Turn the other cheek.” Really? This is so counterintuitive and countercultural.

As we were traveling to the Kansas City airport Friday, Gayle read aloud part of an article purportedly explaining in their own words why millennials who grew up in church have quit attending church altogether. Among the stated reasons was that the Church is always beating up on the culture rather than adapting to it. That may be true, but even if we profess to be followers of Jesus Christ, we are unlikely to come close to being as counter-cultural as He was. If we take Scripture as a whole rather than dipping in here and there for our favorite warm-fuzzy bits that affirm what good people we are, we will discover that Scripture is unusually consistent in what it teaches, through and through.
 
The 10 Commandments are given in Exodus, repeated in Deuteronomy, explicated and expanded in today’s passage from Leviticus, affirmed and endorsed by the Psalmist and reinterpreted without apology by Jesus. Then, in the New Testament epistles, they are rephrased in specifically Christian terminology that was every bit as countercultural in the context of the ancient Graeco-Roman world as they had been in the land of Canaan. God’s commandments and ethical standards are perpetually countercultural, and that’s the whole point: God never adapts His standards to those of the world around us, and neither should we. Obedience to His ethical demands always requires separation from the ways of the world, whether or not this pleases the millennials. And complete obedience to His commands would render us holy as He is holy and perfect as He is perfect.

You may be thinking that this is so altogether Polyanna-ish that it always will remain out of reach for real people in a real world. And you may be right. So what does this mean: that we should throw in the towel? No, it means we should return again and again to the words of the Psalmist that permeate all of Psalm 119 where, verse after verse for nearly the whole of the 176 verses we read variants on these thoughts:

35 Make me walk in the path of Your commandments, for I delight in it.
36 Incline my heart to Your testimonies and not to dishonest gain.
37 Turn away my eyes from looking at vanity, and revive me in Your ways.
54 Your statutes have been my songs in the house of my sojourning.
11 Your word I have hid in my heart, that I may not sin against You.

On the countercultural side of things the Psalmist writes, 19 “I am a stranger in the earth; do not hide Your commandments from me.” On a really good day, he writes, 24 “Your testimonies also are my delight; they are my counselors.” But on more brutally honest days, he writes such verses as this: 96 “I have seen an end of all perfection; Your commandment is exceedingly broad.” And on more needy days, he writes this: 29 “Remove the false way from me, and graciously grant me Your law;” and this: 88 “Revive me according to Your lovingkindness, so that I may keep the testimony of Your mouth.”

Returning to the Sermon on the Mount, we find Jesus adding some challenging words regarding generosity and love of one’s enemies. It’s these admonitions that immediately preface His words about being perfect, as our Heavenly Father is perfect. If we were allowed to choose between the two, it seems likely that every one of us would choose generosity over loving our enemies. But, as usual, Jesus raises the bar by throwing out a standard of generosity that few of us will ever attain. 40 “If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. 41 Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two. 42 Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you.” We definitely are willing to give up both a shirt and a coat, as long as we have a closet full of back-up shirts and coats. But the audience Jesus was addressing didn’t live in 21st century America. The principle is obvious: give more than is asked, even when it becomes absolutely sacrificial. The same applies to going the second mile, a concept that has found its way into common parlance without our even remembering that it comes from the mouth of Jesus. Then there’s the completely unqualified exhortation simply to “give to him who asks of you,” and the very specific one to loan to the person who wants to borrow from us. Who’s going to do that?

I imagine that some of you can recall specific instances when you or a family member or a friend loaned money to someone and never had it repaid. Perhaps it was not money, but some object, maybe even a treasured possession, and it was never returned. At the same time, some of us can recall other times when money was loaned to us with absolutely no expectation of repayment and things were loaned to us with explicit statements that we could keep them indefinitely. We’re inclined to think of the persons who did this as angels in disguise or persons already qualified for sainthood. But Jesus makes it sound like an expectation for all of us to do such things without thought of gain. Even the Old Testament contains exhortations not to loan money with interest. This is not in conflict with the parable of the talents where those who receive an unsolicited gift of money are expected to use it well. Rather Jesus is speaking here about our expectations when we are the lenders, not the recipients.

These things Jesus is saying are characteristically hard. He meant them that way. He was teaching the loftiest possible lessons regarding how we should live if we are to be in quest of God’s own perfections. But here in today’s excerpt He decidedly saves the hardest challenge for last: “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” He acknowledges that when it comes to loving those who love us in return, even the despised tax collectors and the Gentiles who have no covenant relationship with God will do that. But loving one’s enemies is decidedly not something that comes to us naturally. Our auto-pilot reaction to our enemies is to shun them, avoid them, one-up them if possible, pull out the lex talionis (eye for an eye), speak evil of them and, at the very least, shake the dust off our feet and go away from them. Loving them is another matter altogether, and we are likely to forget that loving them was a commandment of Jesus.

How does Jesus really expect us to love those who are our enemies? It’s one thing for Jesus Himself to look down from the Cross at the scoffing crowd that cried out “crucify Him” and say, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” This is well beyond human love and it veers sharply into the realm of divine love, the love of God’s only Son. But then the closer, the final line, comes back to haunt us: “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” And inevitably we think of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, who was as human as we, but while being stoned to death uttered as his last words, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”

And there’s the key: Stephen did exactly the thing that Jesus tells us to do: not just to love our enemies, but to “pray for those who persecute” us. You’ve heard me say this before, that the surest way to get over hating an enemy is to add that person to our daily prayer list and to pray for them without fail. It’s amazing how quickly that hatred will morph into forgiveness and love when we remember our enemies while on our spiritual knees. It becomes impossible to harbor that hatred any longer. We may redefine what we mean by “love,” but we will begin to find a warm place of acceptance.

Gayle and I were in O’Hare last Wednesday eating lunch along the C concourse when a woman came directly up to me, asked if I was a pastor, and asked me to pray for her that she would be able to forgive someone. It was the first time anything like that ever had happened to me, and I was blessed by the moment. I can’t know whether my praying with her effected any lasting change in her heart, but it was a powerful reminder to me of how hard it is for all of us to forgive others who have wronged us in some way and have become our enemies. Jesus does not make loving them optional. It’s His command that we love them and pray for them. And perhaps in that very specific way we at least will have felt for a moment what it means to practice the perfections of our Heavenly Father, to be perfect as He is perfect.

Remembering that we were created in His image, we see that we are held to that highest of all standards: to be like Him. Does that sound remarkably countercultural in an age when we are told that the highest goal of humankind is self-actualization? Yes, countercultural it is, because our culture is perfectly described by Paul in his second letter to Timothy when he writes “that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power.” Most if not all of that sounds remarkably and painfully familiar. Read the newspaper.

What reasons are given for the expectation that we should be both holy and perfect? Only one reason: because that’s what God Himself is like. In the former case, holiness, every demand that is made of us in Leviticus is followed by the simple words, “I am the Lord.” We are to be holy simply because He is holy; we are to care for the poor and hungry simply because God is the Lord; we are to be truthful because God is the Lord; we are to be fair in all our dealings with others, including the deaf and blind, simply because God is the Lord; and we are not to hate or take vengeance or bear any grudge, but to love our neighbor as ourselves, because God is the Lord. Paul writes that we are to repudiate the wisdom of this world because “all things belong to” us and we “belong to Christ” and “Christ belongs to God,” which brings us right back again to the One Who says, “I am the Lord.” And Jesus says that we are to turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, give generously to the needy, and love and pray for our enemies so that we “may be sons of our Father who is in heaven” and “be perfect,” just as our “Heavenly Father is perfect.”

How likely is it that everyone in this room this morning will achieve that perfect godliness in this life? When we ask that, we definitely are asking the wrong question. The only question that matters is whether that is in fact our goal: whether we are trying daily, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to measure our thoughts and our actions against what is expected of us as persons created in the image of God and redeemed by the blood of His only Son, who Himself challenged us to be perfect. Let’s renew that commitment, each one of us, and we will become difference-makers in our church and in our world as we grow in the grace of sanctification and dedicate ourselves to being all that God desires us to be.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord my Rock and my Redeemer, Amen.

This morning we are on our third of four passages from the Sermon on the Mount and here, as before, we encounter some challenging, fascinating and even somewhat startling statements from Jesus. The two that are most familiar to us are the ones where Jesus says that the evil intentions we try to keep to ourselves are just as culpable as though we had followed through on them. To be angry with someone is as bad as committing murder and to look lustfully at someone is as bad as committing adultery. The lust-to-adultery one is almost always left “as is,” with only men being the guilty parties. I seriously doubt that Jesus intended the exclusion of women from either statement; He simply was using the forms of expression universal in His day.

We were dealing with the anger issue last Sunday evening, where Paul in Ephesians 4 issues the commandment “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil” (verses 26, 27); then he adds that anger itself is among the sins that we are to “put away” (vs. 31). We asked whether it’s even possible to be angry without sinning. Jesus does not seem to be interested in softening any of His blows. Anger in our hearts towards another person renders us guilty. Is Jesus really equating anger with murder, or is this pure hyperbole? The same question applies to whether lustful looks are really to be equated with adultery. Suddenly a huge swatch of humanity that thought they could plead “not guilty” to breaking two of the most blatantly offensive among the 10 Commandments now may have to plead “guilty” to sins of the heart that Jesus says are just as bad.  

If you’re wishing to get off the hook on the list of mortal sins that imperil your soul, you won’t get any help from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, His next words  destroy the artificial hierarchies of sin that society and even the Church have devised, where Jesus says that simply calling someone a fool renders one “guilty enough to go into the fiery hell!” Later in Matthew He says, “on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (12:36-37). I don’t recall ever calling anyone a “fool” myself. But many of us address bad drivers of the “cutting off” variety as “idiots,” usually from the safety of our own cars. There’s no verse in Scripture that literally says, “Watch your mouth,” but there are plenty that come close. James says this about the tongue: “With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God” (3:9). Returning again to Paul in Ephesians, it’s almost as though he had the Sermon on the Mount in mind when he was writing that epistle. In Ephesians 5:4 he wrote, “Nor should there be any obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, but rather giving of thanks.” That’s seriously good advice, both in terms of what we should not say and in terms of what we should use as a substitute: thanksgiving! This was a practice that Paul employed with great regularity, and it accounts for why in his writings he seems so often to interrupt himself by blurting out a mini-doxology in the middle of his arguments. By contrast, our daily television talk shows decidedly fall into the categories of “obscenity, foolish talk and coarse joking,” relentlessly and virtually without exception! Are all those hosts under condemnation?

Anger issues plague many people in our culture, and the anger-management gurus are making a lot of money trying to help those for whom counseling is made mandatory. We only need to surf the internet or read the newspaper or watch television to see how thousands of Americans have reacted to the election of a new president with unprecedented fury. And this out-of-control anger is applauded by many others who feel that they are being well represented by the rioters and demonstrators and demagogues. Anger often morphs into hatred, and both anger and hatred have become the norm for internet bloggers, Facebook posters, media spokespersons and Tweeters. If we think that most of this is somehow justifiable and benign, then we’re listening to the culture and not to Jesus. Whatever Jesus really meant about anger, we need to be better guardians of our emotions and our tongues if we are persons who call ourselves by His holy Name. Anger is decidedly one of the strongest of all human emotions, and it’s only rarely a positive one.

What about the lustful looks? Today we are absolutely assaulted with images that stir up impure feelings. It’s no longer possible to be completely isolated from them. And whenever lustful looks are directed towards other individuals, whether they’re personal acquaintances or entertainment figures or anonymous subjects in magazines and on the internet or television, it’s easy for those looks to be translated into fantasies that are harmful to us. Yes, the words of Jesus here seem rather extreme. But sometimes extreme circumstances call for extreme language in order to safeguard ourselves against concupiscence of the eye, which St. Augustine identified as a consequence of original sin. We can sugarcoat it all we wish, and can do it with the approbation of our society, but Jesus will stick with His extreme position for our own spiritual safety. Internet pornography is absolutely rampant today, and Jesus is saying that it’s not a matter of harmless voyeurism. He’s willing to call it the sin of adultery.

What else do we find in this passage? One thing is very simple: avoid litigation whenever possible. Do an out-of-court settlement even if it’s the 11th hour and you already are on your way to the courthouse. Otherwise you may be a victim of the legal system and end up in jail. This sounds like sage and timeless advice with ample contemporary application.

There’s another thing that’s rather less obvious and significantly less comforting: the words about tearing out one’s eye or cutting off one’s right hand. While we assume that literal self-mutilation is not in Jesus’ mind here, there have been those down the centuries who have taken it that way. It seems safe to say that Jesus simply is admonishing us to take whatever drastic measures may be necessary to separate ourselves from any form of sin. What we never can do is to take these words lightly. Jesus is giving the sternest warning that whatever it is that causes us to stumble, that is, to commit sin, it must be identified and dealt with at once and firmly. He does nothing to soften the consequences of calling sin something else, refusing to acknowledge it or refusing to cast it aside. He says that “it’s better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell.” For most of us, we hear these words with gratitude that they surely must apply only to someone else. But given the context, where Jesus is talking about sins of anger, loose talk, lustful looks and bad interpersonal relationships, the punishment of hell suddenly seems nearer at hand than we’ve been willing to contemplate.

Inevitably we hide behind our assurances that our God is a just and loving God Who forgives all our sins and has a place prepared for us in heaven. But the point that Jesus is making here is that those who continually indulge in sinful behavior without remorse, repentance or remediation are in peril of hell and will need to put such sin away at any cost. It’s the sort of thing that Jesus is not at all reluctant to tuck into His preaching, even though the modern preacher would prefer to avoid the subject altogether. But we’re called to preach the whole Gospel, not just the warm-fuzzy parts. Jesus preached both, Peter and Paul preached both, and we should do no less.

There’s definitely a down side to this job.

Every Sunday we say the words of John, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (John 1:8). But he immediately adds that “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (verse 9). In other words, God has provided an option that stops well short of tearing out an eye or cutting off a hand. The spiritual mechanism is there but, once again, it requires naming our sins, confessing them, and meaning it when we say in our prayer of confession that “we are truly sorry and we humbly repent.”

Which brings me to the matter I saved for last. Jesus says, “Therefore if you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your offering there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering” (Matthew 5:23, 24). Paul wrote in more general terms, “Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup” (I Corinthians 11:28). Jesus, of course, is not speaking directly about the Eucharist, which had not yet been instituted. But His principle of making things right with our fellow-believers before coming to the altar is behind our practice of exchanging the Peace of Christ before we “eat of the bread and drink of the cup.” It’s not about saying “good morning” or “have a nice day;” we have ample opportunity in other moments to do that without completely disrupting the liturgy of the Sacrament.

By now you may be feeling grateful that there’s only one more Sunday on the Sermon on the Mount. It’s a sermon that starts out with a series of blessings that we call the Beatitudes, but it then moves immediately into some of the most challenging teaching in all of Holy Scripture. I have a book that I’ve treasured since its publication 35 years ago called The Hard Sayings of Jesus, by the great evangelical English scholar F. F. Bruce. My only regret is that it never became the first volume of a twelve volume series. The sayings of Jesus are hard, and there’s no softening of their blows. But they have been preserved for our instruction in righteousness. They set a standard of Christian ethics that few persons ever have imagined attaining in full. Some call it “Kingdom Ethics,” suggesting that Jesus never intended us to attain these lofty standards in this life.  For those who feel that they measure up pretty well, Jesus wraps us His sayings in Matthew 5 with this conclusion: “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” That seems to narrow the field to one Person: Jesus Himself.
 
I think it’s instructive that we offer our prayer of confession immediately before the Eucharist and then enter the Liturgy of the Eucharist first by offering each other the Peace of Christ. Behind those two actions lies the intention to safeguard ourselves against unworthy reception of Christ’s Body and Blood. No matter what we believe happens in the mystery of this holy Table, we all believe that here is a place of spiritual encounter with the risen Christ and that what we do here is done in the company of all the hosts who have gone on ahead of us. Never once should we come to the Lord’s Table casually or routinely or unworthily.

The very first chapter in F. F. Bruce’s book deals with our Savior’s words about eating His flesh and drinking His blood. This morning is the first time that I will stand here behind this table as a priest in Christ’s one holy catholic and apostolic Church, in the succession of millions who have gone before, doing the same things and saying the same words, being profoundly humbled by the awe-inspiring responsibility that we’ve assumed when accepting the call of Christ to serve Him in this particular way. Jesus is inviting you to His table to eat of His Body, broken for you, and drink His Blood shed for you. It’s He, not I, Who invites you here by His grace and love.

Please turn with me in your hymnals to #503, “Come, Risen Lord,” and follow along as I read this remarkable text that beautifully expresses what we are about to share together:

Come risen Lord and deign to be our guest. 
Nay let us be Thy guests: the feast is Thine. 
Thyself at Thine own board make manifest 
In Thine own sacrament of bread and wine.

We meet, as in that Upper Room they met,
Thou at the table, blessing, yet dost stand.
“This is My Body,” so Thou givest yet.
Faith still receives the cup as from Thy hand.

One body we, one body who partake,
One Church united in communion blest;
One Name we bear, one Bread of Life we break,
With all Thy saints on earth and saints at rest.

One with each other, Lord, for one in Thee,
Who art one Savior and one living Head.
Then open Thou our eyes that we may see:
Be known to us in breaking of the Bread.
 
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Matthew 5:13-20
​Rev. Alan Heatherington, Grace Anglican Fellowship - February 5, 2017

May the Words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer
 
Last Sunday was the first of four consecutive Sundays on which our Gospel readings are from Matthew chapter 5, the first of three chapters in Matthew that are devoted entirely to the Sermon on the Mount. In our Bible Study last Sunday evening the question was raised as to the addressees of this sermon. To whom was it given? Who actually heard it? Various answers have been given, none of which can be regarded as definitive.

At the end of Matthew 4, we find Jesus going through all of Galilee, teaching in the synagogues, healing those with various diseases, casting out demons and, in the process, attracting great crowds of followers from the entire region and well beyond. Then the first verse of chapter 5 tells us that, “Seeing the crowds, He went up on the mountain.” Why did He do that? Was it to get away from the crowds? That seems improbable; on similar occasions when Jesus clearly was trying to escape from the pressing crowds, He got into a boat and crossed the Sea of Galilee to the other side. Here, on the contrary, He simply left the seashore and went up the hillside, where the crowds easily could follow Him and where the natural acoustics would permit all of them to hear Him perfectly assuming, as seems to be the case, that Jesus was able to project His speaking voice exceptionally well. According to Benjamin Franklin, the great English evangelist George Whitefield was able to be heard distinctly by over 30,000 people at a time on a city street in an era when there was no such thing as amplification. Jesus found the ideal spot for preaching to a large crowd.

Verse 1 also says that His disciples came to Him. But it doesn’t say how many of them, and it’s not until the tenth chapter of Matthew that the number of disciples is pared down to 12. It also doesn’t say that only His disciples came to Him. It may mean that a smaller group identified as disciples were able to get pride of position closest to Jesus, or it may be that all those who went up the hillside to hear this sermon were then regarded as disciples, that is, as persons eager to be learners at Jesus’ feet, since the word “disciples” only means “learners.”

But more compelling is the final sentence of chapter 7, which states that “the crowds were astonished at His teaching, for He was teaching them as One Who had authority, and not as their scribes.” And while there’s some ambiguity in the very next verse, chapter 8, verse 1, that says, “When He came down from the mountain, great crowds followed Him,” it also could be read, “As He came down from the mountain, great crowds were following Him.” And so, it would appear that however many or few disciples were hearing the Beatitudes at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, the crowd had formed once again before He concluded it. At the end of the day, the question of how many persons heard the Sermon is somewhat academic, since it clearly has been preserved for the instruction of all those who follow Jesus in the subsequent centuries, including us.

We mentioned last week that most of the Sermon consists of sound bites, maxims, aphorisms, apophthegms, Ben Franklinisms, without the sort of doctrinal development that we find in the Johannine discourses. Today’s reading follows that same pattern, and we could condense this already brief passage into just these 5 pithy sayings of Jesus:

1. You are the salt of the earth
2. You are the light of the world
3. Let your light shine before others so that God gets the glory
4. I have come to fulfill the Law
5. Only those whose righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

But Jesus does add some commentary on these maxims that is more than worth reading. As far as salt is concerned, our iodized salt that lasts a lifetime makes us wonder what on earth Jesus could mean by salt that has lost its savor and is only worth being trampled. Whatever that may mean, it clearly was a first-century Middle-eastern possibility. It serves as a forewarning to us that while we might at one time be a source of welcome seasoning to the world, there can come a time when that positive influence may have run its course and we are “no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.” Most of us would opt in this case for being salty.

What this means is clear: we are to be a seasoning influence in our world, an influence that makes the mundane special, that brings flavor to what is merely pedestrian, that makes a definite difference to what otherwise might be unsatisfying. That’s to be the role and the influence of the Christ-follower in this world. And that applies to every one of us. We need to ask ourselves whether we are fulfilling this role: whether anyone’s experience of life in this world is being significantly enhanced spiritually by our presence, or whether we are far too busy looking out for ourselves to care. Whose salt are you? Think about it. It may be that the simple saying, “You are the salt of the earth,” is actually far more pejorative than you might have thought before. What if we are not the salt of the earth?

Frankly I find the next maxim to be even more challenging. “You are the light of the world.” That simple aphorism carries enormous weight: the weight of responsibility. Whose lives are we lighting up because we are followers of Jesus, His true disciples? We‘re supposed to be the light of the world and, on closer self-examination, we may wonder whether we’re anyone’s light! This doesn’t mean that we’re good friends to a few people. Jesus doesn’t put it in those terms. We’re supposed to light up our whole world. Imagine that! How are we doing at it? And what happens if we put this in a specifically Christian context? Are we revealing the light of Christ to those with whom we come in contact? If the light we’re shining is in reality only our own light, and even if that’s helpful to a few persons who cross our paths, this clearly is not what Jesus had in mind. We are to be the light at the top of the hill, the light on the lampstand that illumines everyone in the house.
 
Jesus says, quite pointedly, “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” That definitely puts a different spin on our light-shining activities. We can be a light to the degree that people give us praise and acclaim for the good things we have done for them, and they may even remember to thank us for them. But how often do people witness our good deeds and, instead of or at least in addition to thanking us for our acts of kindness, also glorify our Father in heaven? This will not ever happen if we ourselves remain the center of attention. Every good thing that we do for others needs to point them to God our heavenly Father as the source. As James wrote in his epistle, “Every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of lights, with Whom there is no variation or shadow of turning” (James 1:17). This means that our gifts to others should point them to the true Source: not to ourselves, but to God Himself. Anything else is an exercise in self-glory rather than in God-glory. Our light is to be our moon to God’s sun.

I warned you that this Sermon on the Mount is not necessarily a pack of warm-fuzzies that make us feel good about ourselves. Quite the contrary, most of these sound-bites do indeed bite; they’re mirrors revealing how far short we fall in doing what is expected of us in the spiritual realm. Neither being salt nor being light in our daily lives is a passive endeavor where we can let ourselves off the hook as long as we are not harming anyone in our way. Being salt and light mean fulfilling some demanding expectations as witnesses of Jesus Christ and as search-engines that direct people Godward.

Maybe the next maxim gives us a bit of a breather, since the subject of the sentence is not us but Jesus. He says, in essence, that He has come not to abrogate the Law but to fulfill it. This sounds really good because He is taking the responsibility on Himself to do something that we cannot possibly hope to do. But the minute Jesus begins to explain what He really means, we’re even more on the hook that we were before. In fact, this little aphorism of Jesus is the harshest one we have encountered so far. He states that “not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished,” and immediately adds that “whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.”

“One of the least commandments” is really tough. If we limit Jesus’ words to just the 10 Commandments, which I suspect is a much narrower focus than He intends here, we might agree that the least of them is not to covet. We read the other 9 and, while we certainly may not have committed murder or adultery, we would never suggest that these are the “least” of the commandments. Let’s stick with coveting for now. Raise your hand if you are certain that you’ve never in your lifetime coveted anything that belonged to someone else. Jesus is confident that He has captured every single one of us in a classic moment of “gotcha.”

Incidents when we have taught others to covet may not occur to us as quickly as those when we ourselves have had covetous thoughts. But if we probe deeply enough into our own consciences, we will come up with some examples rather quickly. As soon as we say to someone else, “you mean you’ve never eaten caviar?” or “you’ve never been to my favorite European destination?” or “you’ve never driven a Mercedes?” or “you’ve never had my favorite experience?” we’re teaching others to covet what is our own. We may do it more indirectly than that, but we do it all the same.
 
Well, what does Jesus say is the penalty for leading others into disobeying the “least” of the commandments? He says that we will be “least in the Kingdom of Heaven.” Mercifully, He does not suggest that we’ll not be there at all. But He does indicate that our reward will be scant, whereas those who keep and teach the commandments “will be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven.” Now He’s talking. If I can model godly living and encourage others to fall in line by following my example, all will be well and I will get that appellation “great” when I get to heaven.

But wait. Now we come to the last of this passages’ apophthegms, and it takes the wind out of our sails. Jesus says in scary plain English “that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” Not even enter, says He! Now when we read this statement in the 21st century, knowing how severely Jesus castigated the scribes and Pharisees for being Pharisaical, that is for being self-righteous and hypocritical, we need to realize that these same words would have been heard very differently by the crowd that had gathered on this Galilean hillside. To them, the scribes and Pharisees were paragons of virtue. They were the teachers of the law. They were the persons devoted to the study and interpretation of the Scriptures. They stood around under trees debating what the Scriptures meant and jotting things down on tablets that would be preserved as teaching tools for others. And Jesus is saying that you can’t even get into the heavenly Kingdom unless your own righteousness exceeds theirs. This could have been one of those points at which the crowd might have thinned out a bit.

What could Jesus possibly mean here? Will He maybe lighten up a bit in the next few verses to let real people off the hook? No, far from it. The next verses only serve to raise the bar even higher to a point where no one could contemplate pleading innocent, only “guilty as charged.” You can read ahead in the Sermon on the Mount to look for the point at which Jesus changes His tone, but you’d be looking in vain. There’s no point in the teaching of Jesus where He suggests that our righteousness will exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees and make us worthy of the heavenly Kingdom on our own merits. Instead, He says things like this: “You must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (5:48); or, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before others to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father Who is in heaven” (6:1); or, “The gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (7:14); or, “Many will say to Me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your Name, and cast out demons in Your Name, and do many mighty works in Your Name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you workers of lawlessness” (7:22, 23). And those are just a few more of the verses in this Sermon on the Mount.

In John’s Gospel we can switch to sayings that are more on the positive side of things, but they’re no less demanding: “Unless you are born of water and the Spirit, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God” (John 3:5); “Unless you eat My flesh and drink My blood, you cannot have life within you” (John 6:53); “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; no one comes to the Father but by Me” (John 14:6).
 
In other words, the route of pursuing righteousness on one’s own is a dead end that never will lead to the heavenly Kingdom. Citizenship in the heavenly Kingdom is dependent on a relationship, not an action: a relationship to God through Jesus Christ. And when that relationship is in place, righteousness is no longer something we acquire on our own; it’s something that’s imputed to us on the basis of the righteousness of the Son of God, the One Who “loved us and gave Himself for us, a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:2). When we come to the end of ourselves and recognize that going it on our own is certain to fail, once again, and again, and again, God simply takes over.

What we could not do, God did. What our own righteousness could not do, God did. What the law could not do, God did. As Paul wrote in Romans 8, “God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Romans 8:4, 5).

To Him be all honor and glory and praise and thanksgiving in Christ Jesus, now and forever. Amen.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to You, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.
 
Sometimes the juxtapositions of the Revised Common Lectionary people seem completely arbitrary and puzzling. Other times they may end up being quite thought-provoking, as is the case today. We have a passage from the prophecy of Micah that concludes with a verse I just happened to have quoted in last Sunday’s sermon, the second-most famous verse in the book after the verse in the previous chapter prophesying that the Messiah would come from Bethlehem. Here we read, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). Then we come to our psalm, where David asks a similar pair of questions and gives a somewhat similar threefold answer: “O Lord, who may abide in Your tent? Who may dwell on Your holy hill? He who walks with integrity, and works righteousness, and speaks truth in his heart” (Psalm 15:1, 2).

Next we come to our epistle reading from I Corinthians 1 where we find the apostle Paul asking his own questions: “Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?” And as usual Paul needs more words to answer his own questions. But the clincher in Paul comes at the end when he writes, “By His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

When it comes to practicing Biblical ethics, most of us find it much easier to quote verses than to do them. If we could find a society somewhere in the world where everyone did justice, loved kindness, walked humbly with God, walked with integrity, worked righteousness, spoke truth and exuded godly wisdom, we would be looking at once for an affordable piece of real estate and a means of supporting ourselves. Why would we ever want to leave such a place? But in our heart of hearts we would know that just as soon as we joined the community, there would be diminishment and we just might get chased out or, as with Jonah, reluctantly thrown overboard.

Paul is saying that we don’t need to go anywhere in particular other than to the feet of Jesus if we’re in quest of “wisdom from God, righteousness, sanctification and redemption.” He is acknowledging that whenever we try to go it alone, to find our moral and ethical principles and to live them out in our own wisdom and power, we can expect only to fail. The answer is that by God’s doing we are “in Christ Jesus,” a concept to which Paul clings again and again. Living “in Christ” is at the center of Paul’s gospel.

What we are “in Christ” is so much more than we ever could hope to be without Him. And when we are “in Christ” and find ourselves characterized by justice, kindness, humility, integrity, righteousness, truth and wisdom, we have something to boast about. But Paul, loosely quoting from Jeremiah, writes, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.” In other words, when we’re acting according to God’s Word, all the credit goes to the Lord. Therein lies the Christian’s true boasting: “I can do all things through Him Who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). The Name of Christ is not found in that verse, but the Person of Christ is; and the preposition is not “through” but “in.” Once again, our righteousness is played out only when we are found “in Christ,” where we are found only “by God’s doing.”

So how can we know more specifically what it means to be living out our spiritual residency “in Christ?” For starters we can turn to the words of Christ Himself, who gave more principles of ethical living than any of us could ever hope to follow on our own. If we’re inclined to say that we’re not wise enough to follow them, Paul answers that “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise;” and if we say that we’re not strong enough to live according the teachings of Jesus, Paul answers that “God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things that are strong” (I Cor. 1:27).

That brings us at last to today’s Gospel reading from what we know as “The Sermon on the Mount,” one of the earliest discourses of Jesus and, from a practical point of view, one of the most demanding. It’s typical of the teaching of Jesus in the synoptic Gospels in that it consists of many aphorisms or apophthegms strung together into a loosely organized and broad-sweeping set of teachings. Ben Franklin was a great student of Jesus when it came to this teaching methodology: “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man happy, healthy, and wise.” But often Franklin hedged his bets when it came to following Jesus very literally. Here’s a perfect example: Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but Ben Franklin wrote, “Love your neighbor; yet don’t pull down your hedge.” And the moral of Franklin’s maxims was often less serious than those of Jesus. Jesus said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44, 45); but Franklin wrote, “Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults.” 

The Beatitudes fall into this category of aphorisms or maxims. They seem so straightforward that hardly anyone ever tries to build a whole sermon around them. But, as is the case with most of what Jesus has to say in the Sermon on the Mount, a closer inspection of thrice-familiar words reveals that Jesus often is saying something completely contrary to the wisdom of this world. Sometimes it seems downright counterintuitive. Is it really “the meek” or “the gentle” who will inherit the earth? We absolutely do not look for meekness and gentleness in our earthly leaders. Quite the contrary, we want great strength, force of personality, forthright character, charisma, even chutzpah. The meek and gentle finish last in our books. They certainly don’t make political candidates, whom we seem to think are first in line for inheriting the earth.

Let’s look briefly at the other Beatitudes. What about the “poor in spirit?” Do we even know what that means? We’re not really big fans of poverty, whether it’s ours or someone else’s. But what is “poverty of spirit,” that it should merit gaining the kingdom of heaven? Once again we’re confronted with a trait that’s decidedly not part of our 21st century American success formula. It’s probably the exact opposite of chutzpah. It has to do with a self-assessment that leaves ample room to be emptied of self and re-filled with all the gifts of Spirit, the Holy Spirit gifts that God wishes each of us to have. It may be that some people have confused poverty of spirit with taking vows of material poverty, but Jesus’ words seem clear and well-chosen: He does not say “blessed are the poor,” but “blessed are the poor in spirit.” And for such persons, the blessings of the kingdom of heaven begin in the here and now and continue eternally. These persons are emptied in order to be filled. Their poverty of spirit becomes their spiritual wealth.

What about those who mourn? Comfort is promised. It always is available. There will be those who refuse God’s promises of comfort because they choose to wallow in their misery and perpetuate their mourning. But I can tell you from more than ample personal experience that when we turn ourselves over to God’s powerful healing, He will indeed give us “mornings of joy for our evenings of tearfulness,” to borrow a line from the amazing hymn, “Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness.” It’s the way God works. He stands ever ready to give comfort.

For those whose glass is perpetually half full, no comfort is able to be received. But for those who, like Johannes Brahms, turn to God’s promises in times of grief, there is abundant comfort. His Requiem was written in part to mourn the deaths of his beloved mother and of his advocate, friend and fellow composer, Robert Schumann. It both begins and ends with the word “blessed,” “selig,” and it begins with this very verse from the Beatitudes: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Brahms clearly was a recipient of that comfort, and his music flows out of that blessed place.

Some of these Beatitudes are altogether self-explanatory. It’s not hard to see how “those who hunger and thirst after righteousness” will be satisfied. We’re left only to wonder why so many more persons are hungering and thirsting after material gain or worldly pleasures and thereby forfeiting the satisfaction that’s promised only to those who are hungering and thirsting after righteousness. It’s also not hard to imagine that “the pure in heart shall see God,” or that “the peacemakers shall be called sons of God.”

But others of the Beatitudes are squarely in the counterintuitive category. What’s to guarantee that the merciful will in turn receive mercy? On the purely human level, we can think of many exceptions to such a maxim. But this is Jesus speaking, and when He says that the merciful will receive mercy, He’s using the language of heaven, what I like to call “God-speak.” It is God Who will show the ultimate mercy out of His unchangeable lovingkindness, whether or not humans have offered mercy to the merciful.

The last two Beatitudes are the ones we find the hardest. "Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Really? It’s the very same reward as the one for those who are poor in spirit. Most of us definitely would choose poverty of spirit over persecution for the sake of righteousness in order to gain the kingdom of heaven. For at least some of the persecuted, their experience of the kingdom of heaven comes rather sooner than they were expecting. For others there may be a protracted time of persecution on these shores before they find their way to the heavenly shores. All that Jesus is promising here is that the kingdom of heaven will be theirs at the God-ordained time. He seems quite sure of this, and He’s going to tell His disciples in the Upper Room that He is going to prepare a place for them. Most of the disciples had to endure a great deal of persecution first. But perhaps they were able to rest in their memory of this assurance from the lips of their Master.

The last Beatitude definitely is the hardest. In our day of self-first no matter what, we often hear verse 11 quoted without its last three words: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely.” Period. We wallow in self-pity because of those who abuse us in these ways, and we may even try to claim God’s blessing because of this very sort of abuse. But what Jesus adds is of greatest importance: “for My sake,” or “on My account,” or “because of Me.” That changes everything. It goes immediately from self-pity to the glorification of the Holy Name of Jesus Whom we are to serve with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. There’s no reward for self-pity: it is its own reward, which is short-lived and unsatisfying. But Jesus says that if we are reviled, persecuted and falsely accused for His sake, then we are able to “rejoice and be glad.” Why is that? It’s because our “reward is in heaven,” and because “our reward in heaven is great” and because we are following the example of those prophets who came before us, receiving the same persecution. By remaining steadfast they discovered God’s will for their lives and, in turn, we also may find His will for ours. This eternal perspective completely changes our perception of what persecution in this life really means.

Yes, there certainly is an unwelcome and counterintuitive ring to these final words of blessing! But, again, Jesus promises that our “reward in heaven is great.” And in the grand scheme of things, from God’s own eternal view, no amount of insulting, persecuting or false witness can compare with the heavenly reward. The apostle Paul, who was quite experienced in suffering, persecution, false witness and reviling, wrote this to the Christians at Rome, many of whom would lose their lives for the sake of Jesus Christ: he wrote, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18). Clearly he lived out this, the most challenging of the Beatitudes. There had to have been at least a few occasions when he wondered why this blessing had to be his. Yet for the most part his absolute confidence in the better things that had been promised to him carried him through. He endured because, with the author of Hebrews, he had his eyes fixed “on Jesus, the Author and Finisher” of his faith. He understood the formula that would lead to rejoicing and gladness, to his eternal reward, to his being received into the kingdom of heaven. And so, in his own words, he pressed on “toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14).

Here in the Beatitudes, as often, the words of Jesus are hard. Here, as often, they also are comforting. The blessing of comfort is the whole point of the Beatitudes. Jesus is speaking here about the reasons why believers, those persons whose faith leads to active obedience, will be blessed, both now and forever. We open all our services with our own beatitude: “Blessed be God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” And we respond, “Blessed be His Kingdom, now and forever, Amen.” Now this same Jesus, Who is seated at the right hand of the Father and receives our prayer, still offers us His blessing, His beatitude,
whenever we’re serving Him in poverty of spirit,
whenever we’re mourning,
whenever we’re gentle,
whenever we’re hungering and thirsting after righteousness,
whenever we show mercy,
whenever we’re pure in heart,
whenever we’re making peace,
and even whenever we’re suffering persecution.
For then are we truly blessed, and great is our reward in heaven.
 
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen