"It's More Radical Than You Think"
To change the world requires a change of heart
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Text: Matthew 5:38-48
I've experienced over the last seven days a thoroughly modern experience. Let me explain what I mean. Last Sunday afternoon, I was privileged to attend the 150th anniversary of the founding of Holy Blossom Temple - a Jewish temple. As I sat with other clergy and distinguished guests and the Governor General, we rose and sang the Sheshehianu. We read the afternoon prayers (mincha) and I listened to a fiery sermon given by the head rabbi of the reformed Judaism in North America, Rabbi Yoffie.
The call in Yoffie's sermon applies to all people of faith, and as I looked at my colleagues I realized that any of us could have been speaking. He called the people of Israel back to a devotion to Torah. To not forget what constitutes the foundation of the people. The rituals are important and other events in the life of the community are important, but without Torah there is nothing. At the end of the service, after hearing “Hallelujah” sung by the children, there was barely a tear in the eyes of any one of us - there was a stream. We were so touched.
The very next evening, I went into my usual the coffee shop. I wanted a cup of tea and I hadn't read the paper that day, but I'd been visiting the sick that afternoon and was wearing my clerical shirt, which I do when I visit people in hospital. I walked in and there was a man to whom I often give my paper in the morning after I have finished reading it. We hardly ever exchange a word, but this time he wanted to speak. He said: “Father, I need to talk to you right now”
Now, I just wanted to read my paper and have my tea, but I could see from the agony on his face that he really needed to talk. Of course, what was on his mind were the pontiff's comments. He is a Muslim, a store owner with a young family. He expressed to me how deeply concerned he is about the atmosphere of tension in the community. He is worried for his young people. He's worried about the rise of radicalism. He's worried about the breakdown in relationships. He said, “What do you think, Father?”
Well, first of all I told him that I was a Protestant and not a Roman Catholic, but that didn't mean squat to him. I am a Christian and I represent the Christian Church in his eyes. I confessed I hardly knew what the Pope had said. Even now, I haven't seen the full text of his speech, but I gave my own views. I explained the things that I felt we had in common as people of faith: a devotion to God, a sense of justice and righteousness, core teachings of peace and righteousness and holiness. But there are divergent things. I explained that my view of the person of Christ is different. That the authority of Christ is different and the power of Christ's grace is the most important thing in my life. We had a respectful, kind and honest, attention-filled conversation - a defining moment in our modern culture.
I went home that evening and the next morning decided to pick up some works of the great philosophers. I started to read Plato's Republic. I went back hundreds of thousands of years. In Chapter 13, Plato deals with the three parts of the human soul: reason, spiritedness, appetite. I realized that Plato wanted to discern how to be a good person and how to create a good and just society.
I then read his student, Aristotle, and came upon his great word: arête, which means virtue, which translates socially into justice. I realized there was a common element in all the experiences I'd been having over the three days. All involved people struggling to discern how are we to be good. How are we to live with each other? I heard it in the synagogue, I heard it from the Muslim gentleman at the coffee shop, I saw it in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. How do we define the good and how do we live it with one another?
Yet, all week long, like a seamless thread, I've been reading the Sermon on the Mount, the words of Jesus in Matthew's Gospel. Some would argue that this is the absolute apex, the height of the teachings of Jesus, that this sermon is one of the most challenging of Jesus' teachings. It is certainly one of the most troubling and, as I read it, one of the most difficult. Yet Jesus, too, is trying to come to terms with what makes a person good and how we should live with each another. He's passionately involved in the lives of the disciples and he wants them to live the lives that God intends for them and for humanity as a whole.
As Christians, we have to come to terms with the Sermon on the Mount. There is a degree of urgency to this task. As I have been suggesting over the last three weeks, it is not simply a case of putting Jesus on the shelf and leaving him there, of paying lip service to him once a week. No. The life of discipleship is now, as it always really has been, a life of total commitment to what he says and to what he wants us to be.
Certainly, there is an urgency because of the religious conflict in the world. Like a great fault line that seems to arise in the cultures of the world, there is a growing rift between the peoples of faith. It seems as if God almost automatically falls into the hole of this rift and either gets blamed or gets used to justify people's attitudes, extreme positions, or violence. It seems to me that the more God that people pour into the gaps the more the rift spreads and the fault lines grow deeper.
I think that we are fundamentally, basically not understanding God, and we need to change our thinking. I also see that there is a certain separation between faith and reason. I think the Pope was trying to deal with this. But there is a belief that is often subscribed to that people of reason should have nothing to do with faith and people of faith should have jettison all sense of reason. Dangerous. It is a fault line.
All the while we are living in a world, particularly in the West, that is becoming more and more decadent. I love the line in P.D. James' book, The Murder Room. Commander Dalgliesh's assistant makes a fascinating comment: “This is the holy Trinity of today: Sex, money and celebrity.” Right on! P.D. James has it! These are the gods of our day. So, we juxtapose those gods with the God of religion. We think that those gods are the good gods and the God of religion is the dangerous god. In the midst of all of this, the Sermon on the Mount speaks with a passion and a clarity and a purpose today, even more acutely than any other day. Jesus understands that the will of God makes for a better world, and that if people will devote themselves to him, honestly and sincerely, the world and how we live with each other will change for the better.
Jesus moves beyond law and virtue. He understands that the law is necessary. He upholds it. He says that it reveals to us what God is like. It reveals to us our sinfulness and our brokenness. But he is concerned that it is being misinterpreted and that the essential purpose of the law is being usurped by ritual and ideology and that the great chasms between peoples are actually created by that misinterpretation. He wants the disciples to understand that they need to come back to the original purpose of the law. All the time of course, pointing to himself as the incarnate Son of God, as the gracious means whereby we can live up to that law.
Jesus was concerned that the concepts of law and virtue in his day were being warped and twisted and turned. He was more concerned with what goes one in the hearts of his followers than anything else. Jesus, just like the great prophet Jeremiah, believed that the law resided in the heart. Jesus therefore, wanted far more from his disciples because he wanted far more for his disciples. As radical and as difficult and as challenging as these words are, they are really the foundation of the good and the just.
Rather than just being a philosopher, rather than just talking about dikaiosune, which Plato did or arête, which Aristotle did, Jesus uses practical examples to show God's will and purpose for the world. I have picked out a couple, though there were many in the Sermon on the Mount. Take for example that one that is one of the most poignant right now in the minds of many people in our society, sexuality.
Let's look at this for a moment. Jesus is very concerned about sexuality. He is concerned about what it does to relationships and what constitutes the foundation of relationships. He sees it being a very positive force. Jesus is not against sexuality by any stretch of the imagination, but he is for a proper usage of it, a constructive usage of it. Take as a case in point the example that he uses of adultery. Now, I know people read these texts and they get all confused and miss the point. So often, religious people - I do it, we all do it - read a text of Jesus' and we miss the whole point. It's like two young men who decide to go to a confessional one day and one of them goes as the friend of the other. The one who goes to see the priest brings his friend along because, as he says, “I just might need you if things go wrong in there.”
He goes in and sits down and is greeted by the priest. He says, “Father, I have sinned. I have been with a woman.”
The priest says, “I'm terribly sorry to hear that. Was it Susan O'Reilly by any chance?”
The young man said, “I'm sorry, I have been sworn to secrecy. I'm just here to tell you that I've been with a woman.”
The priest says, “Was it Sinead O'Brien by any chance?”
The young man says, “I'm sorry, Father, I cannot tell you. I have been with a woman and I need forgiveness.”
The priest says, “Well, was it Mary Montgomery then?”
And the young man says, “No, no. I cannot tell you who it was. I have simply been with a woman and I have sinned. What am I to do?”
So, the priest gives him instructions and he comes out of the confessional. His friend is waiting for him and says, “Tell me, tell me. What's your penance?”
The young man responds, “I have to say 50 Our Fathers, and 30 Hail Mary's, but I've got three good leads.”
What is it with us? We miss the whole intention of things. Now, I make light of that, but we all do it. Jesus is abundantly clear: He believes in marriage. He is concerned about what adultery is doing to marriage, to the breakdown of this glorious thing that helps us live in the image of God. He sees marriage as an important thing. When we trivialize it and break it down with our abuse of the sexuality, he's worried about it.
I read a wonderful message by the great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to his friend Eberhard Bethge when he was getting married. He lifted marriage up into this glorious state, this wonderful position. This is a bit of what he said:
Marriage is more than your love for each other. It is a higher dignity and power, for it is God's holy ordinance for which God wills to perpetuate the human race until the end of time. In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but in marriage you are a link in the chain of the generations which God causes to come and pass away to God's glory and calls into the Kingdom.
In your love you see only the heaven of your happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and humanity. Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal, it's a status, an office. Just as it is the crown and not merely the will to rule that makes the king and queen, so, in marriage, it is not merely your love for each other that joins you together in the sight of God and humanity. As high as God is above humanity, so high are the sanctity, the rights and the promise of marriage above the sanctity, the rights and the promises of love. It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.
Wow. So, Jesus sees adultery then, if Bonhoeffer is correct in his interpretation, as something that destroys this beautiful thing that actually keeps love. That is why Jesus said it is a sin when, “You lust in your heart.” Even if you don't commit physical adultery, if you lust in your heart, you are broken and you are breaking that relationship. It can be restored, it can be brought back, but sometimes it is broken forever, in divorce. But nevertheless, the problem lies in the heart.
Jesus then goes beyond law and virtue, he goes right to the heart. God's will and intention is that our hearts support the love that gives the marriage the solidity and the joy. Take as an example, anger. Jesus says, “If you are angry with someone in your heart, then you have committed violence.”
P.D. James weaves a theme all the way through her books suggesting that murder is like taking on a form of divinity. When you murder someone it is as if you're playing God, you are taking a human life that God has given. It is, therefore, a terrible and heinous thing. Jesus said that it is not only when you take a life, but when you call someone, “raca,” you fool, when you say to someone that they are worthless, when you act out of fear toward someone in anger, you've sinned. I think my friends, that in a world filled with so much anger and vengeance, that Jesus' call to change our hearts is so important.
In a commentary of the Book of Romans, the great Michael Cassidy, who worked for peace and reconciliation in South Africa and in Rwanda and in other countries, wrote:
Reconciliation is costly. It cost Jesus his life to mend our relationship to God. Now Christ calls us to a similar ministry. True restoration with another will cost us our hoarded craving for vengeance. Said Pope Paul VI: ”˜A love of reconciliation is not weakness or cowardice. It demands courage, nobility, generosity, sometimes heroism, an overcoming of oneself, rather than one's adversary.'
Jesus understood that peace in the world begins with peace in the heart. It begins with the testing of oneself. You and I cannot change the world. We cannot usually alter the movement of armies or conflict or terrorists. Jesus wants his disciples to start where they can, and that is with a thorough examination of their own hearts and a reliance on His grace.
It was heartbreaking to go Holy Blossom and have to line up to go through a metal detector, to be searched before we entered the temple. It was awful. In fact, many of the people in the line-up with me, when they saw my clerical shirt, put me to the front of the line as a sign of respect. They laughed when I, too, was searched. One of them cried out, “What do you think he's going to do? He's a minister!” It didn't phase the search people one iota. I got the full degree, maybe even a little more.
It was sad going into a place of worship on its 150th anniversary and feeling the fear. It was also sad looking into the eyes of the man in that coffee shop and seeing fear. It is sad when there is vengeance and violence and hatred and animosity and fear.
Jesus knew that as human beings we need a change of heart. It's tough. And what he says is more radical than we think. But if we are going to follow him seriously, we must follow the way of the cross. May you walk it, because the world needs it. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.