Sermon delivered on the 3rd Sunday before Lent, February 16, 2014, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.
If you would like to hear the audio podcast of this sermon, usually different from the text below, click here.
Lectionary texts: Deuteronomy 30.15-20; Psalm 119.1-8; 1 Corinthians 3.1-9; Matthew 5.21-37.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today’s texts are sure to trouble our 21st century ears and minds because they are so clear, straightforward, and blunt. And to sensitive hearts that are weighed down by the burden of past sins committed, our texts ostensibly offer little hope. What are folks like me, for example, who are twice divorced and remarried to do with Jesus’ teaching on divorce and remarriage? Is all lost? Is there no hope? This is what I want us to look at briefly this morning to see what we can learn from our texts to help us live out our faith with eyes wide open.
In our OT lesson, the Lord is devastatingly clear and blunt with his people. You’ve got a choice, he says. You can choose to worship me only and obey the Torah, my laws and teachings, completely or you can choose to whore around after other gods while giving me some (or even none) of your loyalty. If that happens, you will not possibly be able to love me in ways that honor the first commandment and you certainly won’t be able to obey my other commandments either. If you choose the first path (which is what the prayer in our Psalm lesson is all about), you will find life and blessings. If you choose the second path, you will find curses and death.
As we listen to God’s warnings, all kinds of things start bubbling up in our minds. Some of us hear this stark choice and become afraid because we know which of these paths we have chosen, and it isn’t the first path. Others will hear this choice and become angry. Who does God think he is to only give us two options? How dare God limit us like that? But our ranting will do us no good because at the end of the day, God is still sovereign and in charge, not us, and these are the only two paths God has put in front of us. Others of us will want to rationalize and/or sit on the fence. “Give us a little more time to consider what you say, God, and we’ll decide later.” But that won’t do because choosing not to decide is to choose curses and death. Or we might try to rationalize our disobedience by saying our religion will cover all our mistakes. But that makes a farce and mockery of religion, especially the Christian faith. How can we claim God’s benefits and remain inherently hostile toward God? How can we claim to follow Jesus and yet act consistently in ways that are contrary to his?
Still others will want to say in response to God’s stark choice confronting us that the way to find God is not a matter of faithful obedience but of following one’s heart. We hear this all the time and in a variety of ways. It doesn’t matter what we do as long as our heart is in the right spot. Or there are so many ways to find God or of being a human or good Christian that our decisions don’t really matter, especially if we follow our hearts. God will sort it all out in the end. And after all, if God is love, what’s the big fuss? This is just another example of a grouchy OT God vs. the real God of the NT who is all about love and grace, not punishment and condemnation. These ways of thinking, of course, make it possible to be a cafeteria Christian, where we get to pick and choose which of God’s laws we will obey and which we will ignore.
But as our gospel lesson attests, this kind of thinking is neither biblical or true. As the history of salvation unfolds in the Bible, starting with Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God in the garden, and as the history of humankind richly attests, following one’s heart is usually not a good thing to do because as the Lord makes clear to Jeremiah, the human heart is above all deceitful and desperately sick (Jeremiah 17.9). We are masters at deceiving ourselves so that many of us live our lives in a state of delusion and unreality.
We see this sadly reflected in our epistle and gospel lessons today. Jesus is reminding his followers that there really are only two choices that are before all humans, obedience or disobedience to God’s laws, and obeying them is a lot harder than we imagine. People get divorced or lie or commit adultery or murder precisely because our hearts are desperately sick. And we see that same heart-sickness at work in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Instead of giving their entire allegiance and loyalty to God and his work, people are too eager to give their loyalty to human agents like Paul and Apollos and as a result, conflict and strife occur.
I suspect that about now some of you are muttering to yourselves, “Wow, Fr. Kevin. What an uplifting sermon so far. We are so glad we braved another Sunday of cold and snow to come out and and hear this. You rock, dude—NOT!” And you are right, of course. So far this has been anything but a feel good sermon and I take no pleasure in preaching it. But you see, our discomfort with this stuff is a symptom of the problem. So I’ve got to dare love God and us all enough (myself included) to speak the truth, even if I risk raising your ire. We don’t like hearing hard truth because we would much prefer to deceive ourselves that we are the ones who have it all right and that God is the one mistaken here. But if we are interested at all in developing a real and life-giving relationship with the living God and believe in the least that the Bible is God’s authoritative word on how to live life that pleases God and be fully human, we cannot choose to ignore hard passages like today’s. To do so would be to pick and choose which gods we prefer to worship and obey and our choice would necessarily lead us down the path of curses and death.
No, we must be confronted with God’s hard truth so that we can begin to live our lives in ways that will free us from the deceits, lies, and delusions that plague us, both our own and Satan’s. And the first hard truth that we must acknowledge, contrary to what our culture wants us to believe, is that we must choose whether we will live in ways that bring God’s blessings and life or God’s curses and death. When we take this stark choice seriously, it will likely produce a reaction in us as it did for good King Josiah of Judah, who, when he heard the newly-discovered book of Torah read to him tore his clothes in anguish because he realized that he and the people of Israel had chosen the path that leads to death.
But neither would I be faithful to God’s word if I were to talk about the hopelessness of the human condition without offering real hope. Before I do, however, we must remember why God put this stark choice in front of his people. God did not do this because he is some kind of angry God who is terminally irritated with his human creatures. God put this choice before his people because he had called them to be his agents to bring his healing love to a world created good but despoiled by human sin and the evil it allowed to enter into it. The only way God’s people could do this is to live in ways that would restore God’s image in them completely and make them fully human beings. To run after false gods would make this impossible because we become what we worship. And Israel (and those of us who follow Jesus) had to learn that there was only one God to follow so that they could learn to fully trust him. This was no small task because humans from Adam and Eve onward have had the inclination to trust and follow any god other than the one true and living God. So the choice God laid out before his people was laid out in love for his people, not anger. Without fully obeying God’s laws, God’s called-out people could not possibly hope to be the people God called them to be to bring God’s healing love and justice to his broken world.
And like Josiah, if we are totally honest with ourselves, we know in our hearts and minds that we have already chosen death because who among us has lived in complete obedience to God’s laws? But we are Christians and so we have real relief and hope from our desperate human condition. The actual choice laid before us is therefore not life or death but resurrection and death. Because we have already chosen the path that leads to death, God became embodied as a human in Jesus of Nazareth, who went to the cross to bear God’s just judgment on our sins himself. All have sinned so all will die. That is a biblical axiom. But for those who are in Christ Jesus, resurrection is our ultimate destiny, not death. God himself has borne the brunt of his curses so that we who follow Jesus can share in a resurrection like his (cf. Romans 6.4-5) and here we are again confronted with a choice. The resurrection either happened or it didn’t. Which do we believe? I don’t have time to explore that issue here (I will do so during Easter), but if the resurrection didn’t happen we are still dead in our sins and there really is no sovereign God who has rescued his people from sin and death. But if the resurrection did happen, it effectively puts an end to our delusions of self-help in matters of faith and living, and our only appropriate response is to fall on our knees and cry out, “My Lord and my God!” (cf. John 20.24-28).
Freed then from our fears of death and with hearts full of wonder and love for God’s graciousness toward us, we are ready to allow the Holy Spirit to help us develop hearts that really do love God and want to obey his laws so that our faith is made manifest and God can use us as his salt and light to the world. This essentially involves replacing our first and broken nature with a healed and renewed second nature that sees all of life as the faithful outworking of our Lord’s Great Commandment to love God and love others as ourselves. And we will keep a constant eye on Jesus to help us apply the practical outworking of this command. So, for example, we will begin to see the value and truth of not harboring anger toward another and seeking reconciliation with those who offend us, even if we didn’t cause the problem. We will be willing to do the extremely hard things we need to do to break old destructive habits so that we can become more and more like Jesus in all we say and do. We will be willing to speak the truth in love to others and to confront the lies of this world that claim life is possible outside of Jesus.
This takes a lifetime and we will never get it completely right. But we remember always that we do all this in the power of the Spirit, not our own, and we can therefore have confidence that the Spirit does indeed do what Jesus promised he would do—to make Jesus present to his people as we live out our lives in faithful obedience to him.This is never easy and that is why we are called to do this together as Christ’s body, the Church. And when we stumble or when life seems overwhelming, we need to call to mind the fact that even though we initially chose the path that leads to death, we are now on the path that leads to life because One greater than us has made that possible. This will allow us not only to persevere but to actually find joy that transcends any circumstance because we are loved, healed, and forgiven. That, folks, really is Good News, now and for all eternity. Is it yours? To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.