Epiphany 6 - For Times like These

Deuteronomy 30:15-20; 1 Corinthians 3:1-9; Matthew 5:21-37

I am concerned. I have said it before, and I am saying it again, I am concerned that, as a society, even as just a city, we are entering a time of increased polarization and division. I am concerned that we are going to become more entrenched in our views, that we are going to stop listening to one another, that our diversity is going to turn into division. I am concerned that we are being moved into an us-versus-them mentality, where the guiding principle will become, “if you’re not with me, you’re against me.” I am concerned that we are moving, or being herded into, extremist positions that will pit us against one another.

And I’m concerned that, at first hearing, Jesus’ words to us in the Gospel reading seem to encourage that. He does, after all, seem to be radicalizing the Commandments given by God - don’t murder becomes don’t insult, don’t steal becomes chop off your hand first, don’t commit adultery becomes don’t even get a divorce. He takes the straightforward commandments given to Moses, meant to give the people of Israel a better life, and pushes them to the extreme. Yes, to give us a better life, to be sure, but has extremism ever gotten us that?

Did you know that just decades before Jesus was born, the people of Israel were immersed in a civil war? You see, before the Roman Empire and King Herod came into power, the people of Israel were ruled by the Greeks––the Hasmonean dynasty. But it wasn’t a peaceful time––some Jews sided with the Hasmonean rulers, and others didn’t. Some Jews were very comfortable with the Greek culture, while others felt that these Greek-ified Jews were betraying God, and so they began organizing rebellions. And, soon, hostilities and divisions got so bad that Jews began killing Jews. Families were divided, neighbours killed one another, the people were plunged into a civil war. These hostilities, this polarization, ended only when Rome took control over Israel, just a few years before Jesus was born. Jesus’ mother and father, his aunts and uncles, his neighbours, they all knew what conflict was.

It was the same situation for the writer of the Gospel of Matthew. Biblical scholars tell us that this Gospel was written between the years 80 and 90 C.E., which was only a few decades after another time of intense conflict. This time, the conflict was between those Jews who benefitted from Rome’s rule, and those who didn’t. Again, neighbours killed neighbours, riots took place regularly, and diversity became division. Our ancestors in faith, the first Christians, Jesus’ own disciples, knew what it was to be polarized.

This is the background of Jesus’ words to us in the Gospel today. This is what’s behind these extreme words that seem to push the letter of the law to its limit, that seem to leave no room for nuance, that seem to contribute to black-and-white thinking. The first conflict I mentioned, the Hasmonean revolt, was within the living memory of those whom Jesus knew. He would have heard stories from the elders in his community about how dangerous that conflict got, how terrible a thing it was when neighbour fought against neighbour. The second conflict I mentioned would have been in the living memory, possibly even being daily experienced, by the writer of the Gospel of Matthew who selected and arranged Jesus’ words for us. With this in their minds, Jesus utters, and Matthew arranges, the words that you should not murder, not even insult someone else, and, a few lines later, that we should pray for our enemies and those who persecute us. Jesus pushes us to take God’s commandments to us to the extreme, even as we face of impending conflict. Especially, I would say, as we face impending conflict.

But the extreme that Jesus pushes us to is not actually about chopping off hands or plucking out eyes or about escalating punishments for transgressions. The extreme that Jesus pushes us to is love. Extreme love. Radicalized love. You see, these commandments, all the commandments that God has given are meant for life, as we hear in our first reading. They are meant to give life to the whole community, they are meant to allow us to have diversity without division, to have disagreements without descending into civil war. They are about caring for one another, working for one another’s well-being, for the good of the entire community. They are about loving our enemies because they are part of our community––because they are part of God’s community.

Jesus’ words are about the extremist pursuit of love. Love above all else. And if we follow them, if we take them to heart, if put them into practice in our daily living, they will keep us together, even with our differences.

There are some here among us this morning who strongly support building the Coastal Gaslink liquid natural gas pipeline in BC. There are some here among us this morning who strongly support the protestors blockading the train lines in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and the right to indigenous self-determination. Jesus’ words do not clearly tell us which side to choose or whom to stand with. I wish they did, it would make things much easier. But they don’t. What they do tell us, though, is to love one another. To refuse to insult those who disagree with us. To pray for those on the other side. In this conflict, and in every one to come, whether about politics or the economy or the environment, Jesus’ words to us mean that we are to be radical in love: to listen to one another, to consider each others’ words carefully, to open our hearts to those who hold different opinions than we do. It doesn’t mean that we stop sharing our opinions; it means that we take the challenging and risky step of asking others for their opinions, aware that we might disagree, but trusting that even as we are loving and praying for that person, they are loving and praying for us.

This is what the church is. This is what the Christian community is called to be. It is, in this time, our gift to the world––to be a place where we have a diversity of opinions but do not descend into polarization. To be a community where we disagree, perhaps strongly, but do not break down into hostility and hatred. Last year, I was deeply struck by an American theologian who said that in the States, the church is the only remaining place where people can be together who strongly disagree. There are no more places like that in the States. The church is it.

I suspect, although I hope that I am wrong, that this is coming to be true in Canada, too. But even if there are still places in Canada where we can still disagree and be together, that does not lessen the call and the gift of the church, which is the call and the gift of extreme love, for the good of the world, as shown to us by Jesus. Remember, Jesus healed the daughter of a Roman soldier. Jesus ate with those who lived their faith differently than the priests. Jesus shared the last supper with Judas. Jesus asked for forgiveness for those who had put him on the cross. Jesus took love to the extreme.

We will not always be successful at this. Even from the time of Paul, as we hear in his first letter to the Corinthians, differences have threatened to divide the Christian community. We forget, or we fail, to be extreme in our love for one another. But over the course of two thousand years, through thousands of conflicts, the church is still here. The love of Christ continues to be with us, and it continues to manifest in our love for one another. God continues to use us, to build us up, to draw us, with all our diversity, into a “common purpose,” which is life for the world. And so we will continue to be extreme in love, guided by the love of Christ, which is the healing of the world. Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Presentation of our Lord - Why Jesus' Jewishness is Important for Christians

Today is a special Sunday called the Presentation of Our Lord. And if it’s not familiar to you, that’s okay, because it’s actually always February 2nd, which doesn’t fall very often on a Sunday.

It’s important because today is forty days after Christmas Eve. In other words, it’s forty days after Jesus’ birth, and in Jesus’ time, a Jewish mother would go to the Temple in Jerusalem forty days after her baby was born to be purified from birth and receive a blessing. And, as the Gospel reading tells us today, to present her baby, in this case her firstborn who was a male, to God in the Temple. Because Mary was a good Jewish mother, and Jesus was a little Jewish baby. He was circumcised according to the covenant God with Abraham, eight days after he was born, as a sign that he was one of God’s children of Israel.

The Gospel of Luke makes a big deal of this––that Jesus was Jewish. More so than the other Gospels. Luke is the only Gospel that tells the story of Jesus being brought to the Temple after forty days, and the only one that tells the story of Jesus going to the Temple when he was twelve years old, and having discussions with the leaders there about the nature of God. It’s also the only Gospel to tell of the birth of John the Baptist, which highlights that John’s father, Zechariah, was a priest in the Temple, to whom the angel Gabriel appeared and delivered a message that his not-yet-born son would prepare Israel for the coming of the Lord.

But why? Why should the original audience of Luke’s Gospel care? More to the point, why should we care, beyond historical interest? Shouldn’t Jesus’ Jewishness be the topic of a Bible study rather than a sermon? What does Jesus’ Jewishness have to do with our relationship with God? We know that his humanness is important, that, as our reading from Hebrews says, he became flesh and blood, “so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death ... and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.” We know that us being saved and redeemed is absolutely dependent on the Son of God being human, but what does being Jewish have to do with it?

Well, to understand why Jesus’ Jewishness is important to our relationship with God––or God’s relationship with us, if we’re going to be Lutheran about it, which of course, we want to be––we need to back up a bit. Actually, we need to back up about 4,000 years to when God made a covenant with Abraham and his descendants. God would be their God, and they would be God’s people, and the males would be circumcised as a sign of that relationship. And over the next 2,000 years, as the Old Testament tells us, God developed and deepened that relationship, through Abraham’s son, Isaac, through Isaac’s son Jacob, who was named Israel, through Jacob’s son Joseph, (are your Sunday School memories starting to come back to you?) And then God made a new covenant at Sinai, with Moses and the people of Israel (Christians weren’t the first to have a new covenant, as you see.) And in this covenant, God renewed God’s commitment to the children of Israel and gave them the Commandments to help them live together. And this would be for them, and their children, and their children’s children, and so on. To describe their relationship using familiar language, the Jews were and are saved and redeemed by God through these covenants and particularly through what we call the Mosaic covenant.

Now it’s important to know that that covenant, and that relationship with God, was for the people of Israel alone. Only them. Not us. And by that I mean, that relationship was not for Gentiles, which means non-Jews, which means us. We are not Jewish. We are not in that covenant, we are not in that relationship. Jesus was. And Paul, and all the apostles, and the first disciples, but not us.

Sounds a bit harsh, right? We’re outsiders. We’re Jenny-come-latelies. We are the stranger, the foreigner, the “Other.” God didn’t choose us first. It’s kind of uncomfortable to think about, because we’re not used to thinking that way. Centuries of being the Christian majority have led us to feel “special,” superior, on the religious world stage, to feel as if we are God’s firstborn, most beloved people. But that’s not what the Bible says.

Now, before you get too discouraged––or convert to Judaism––here’s what the Bible does say. There is a small but persistent voice throughout the Old Testament that proclaims that, while God made several covenants with the people of Israel, God also had plans for us. That is, God also had plans for the Gentiles, for what is described as “the nations.” We see those words from time-to-time, “the nations.” They mean the world that is not Jewish. A few weeks ago, we heard from Isaiah, that God says to him, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation will reach the end of the earth.” And we hear it again in our Gospel reading, when Simeon, whose name means God hears, proclaims that now he has seen the salvation, which God has “prepared in the presence of the nations (which is how the Greek is better translated), a light for revelation to the Gentiles.” Simeon has been waiting and waiting for God to bring the Gentiles, us, into a relationship, as he has heard in his Scriptures, and now he is so blessed as to actually see it happen.

You see, God’s love and mercy and goodness and care has always been for the entire world, for Jews and for non-Jews. It’s just that God had to start somewhere, and maybe the people of Israel were the first to accept God as their God. I don’t know. The point, though, is that God had, from the beginning, an intention to make us part of God’s own people.

Which is where Jesus comes in. Finally. Jesus was the Word of God who became flesh and blood, born of Jewish parents, circumcised on the eight day, a full member of God’s covenant with the chosen people of Israel, a Jew. As a Jew, he was part of that special, redemptive, saving relationship that God has with Israel. And, and this is the important part, as a Jew he knew that God intended for Gentiles, for all the nations, for us to have a relationship with God, too. And so he set about reminding his fellow Jews that God cares for the Samaritan, for the Roman soldier, for those on the margins, for the “Other.” He set about reminding them that God was calling them into relationship with non-Jews so that non-Jews would know that God was saving them, too.

And, to make sure that everybody, Jew and Gentile, knew that this was indeed God’s plan, Jesus put his own life on the line and died. This is why he sacrificed himself. Not for the Jews, but for the Gentiles. For us. To bring us into a saving and redeeming relationship with the great God of Israel. And he was raised as proof, if you will, that God had actually intended this for us, that the Scriptures that said that God would give Israel as “a light to the nations, that God’s salvation will reach the end of the earth,” were correct, and were fulfilled.

So, you see, Jesus being Jewish is more than just historically interesting. Jesus being Jewish is absolutely critical to our relationship with God. Because we come to the God of Israel through Christ. We come to God through someone who was and is a stranger to us. Jesus was human, yes, but Jesus was not like us. Jesus, as he lived on earth, did not have the same relationship with God that we do. And yet Jesus had the same love for us that God does. Jesus knew that God’s love and mercy and goodness were so abundant, so wide, so much the essence of God, that Jesus specifically reached out to those on the margins. To the non-Jews. To us. Through Jesus, God established another new covenant, new because this time, it was with people who were not the children of Israel.

Which is weird. It’s weird to think that we’re add-ons in God’s relationship with the world, rather than central to it. For one thing, it runs against almost two thousand years of Christian understanding. For another, nobody likes to think of themselves as an add-on. It’s weird.

But it’s also wonderful. It’s wonderful because it shows us the depth and breadth of God’s love. It shows us that God truly is an awesome God, who also cares for those who do not even know who God is. It shows us that God does not love us because we’ve somehow earned it or checked off all the right religious boxes, but because God is love––steadfast love. God is gracious, and merciful, and inclusive, and embracing. And God also wants us, and welcomes us.

This is why we gather, as Christians, to worship and give praise and thanks to God. Because we are living proof of God’s love for everyone. Because we are recipients of God’s grace and mercy. Because God became flesh-and-blood in Jesus Christ the Jew to live––and die––to show us that. And so we remember, and so we say, Thanks be to God. Amen.