I suspect that the final version was influenced by the General Conference of the United Methodist Church that is going on this weekend and into the coming week. I am Lutheran - very very Lutheran! - but people I love are Methodist and I attended a Methodist seminary (Duke Divinity School). It is not clear what the Methodists will decide, or what will happen when the decision is made, or how that will affect the people I love. But I have some pretty strong thoughts on the process and those thoughts are reflected below. In fact, the UMC meeting was the starting place for one of the discussions Amy (who is an Episcopalian priest) and I had.
So - here's to you Methodists. May you reveal yourself as children of the Most High and act in community, even as the organizational aspects of your meeting seem to take the focus off of community in Jesus. May you pray, act, and live forward in peace.
This sermon was not preached.
The lectionary texts for this week are:
Genesis 45:3-11, 15
Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40
1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50
Luke 6:27-38
Show us, Holy Spirit, the difference between love and law. Lead us to follow Jesus. Hold us close in your arms forever. Take these words and send them where they must go. Amen
And here we are again… Jesus standing on level ground, offering a set of activities that seem to point to a certain kind of behavior:
* Love your enemies
* do good to those who hate you,
* bless those who curse you,
* pray for those who abuse you.
* If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also;
* and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.
* Give to everyone who begs from you;
* and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.
Not to mention…
* Do not judge
* Do not condemn
* Forgive
* Give
And the biggie: Do to others as you would have them do to you.
NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE.
If Jesus came to fulfill the law (as he tells says in the Sermon on the Mount… Matthew’s version of this section of Luke) then why is he standing there giving a whole bunch of rules? Don’t those sound like behavioral commands? Like rules?
In the Roman culture of the day, doing anything with the left hand was nasty. Filthy. So if someone smacked you in any kind of remotely honorable way it was with the right hand. Furthermore, the sheer logistics of it require that if you are hitting someone on the right cheek with the right hand, it was a backhanded smack (go ahead, try it… but please don’t actually slap anyone!) Backhanded slaps are the kind of smack that a master gives a slave, to show disdain and hierarchy.
BUT if you then turn the other cheek, the hitter would have three choices: 1) hit with an open hand – as an equal; 2) hit with a fist – as an equal; or 3) hit with the left hand – something extremely shameful to the hitter. In any of those cases the hitter loses culturally.
Similarly, the Romans found it shameful to observe nakedness. So if all a person has left is a shirt or undergarment because their coat has been taken, offering them the only remaining garment means nakedness – and shame for the one who took the cloak.
For those two situations, at least, Jesus is advocating a kind of non-violent resistance. He is suggesting that declining to buy into or follow society’s rules is somehow a good thing.
In the next section, Jesus acknowledges that what he is suggesting is countercultural… that followers of Jesus aren’t like other people and the measure you give is what you will get back.
That sounds remarkably like the prosperity gospel that insists that living a good life will result in material blessing from God – and conversely, lack of material blessing is a sign of leading a wrong life. But this very passage contradicts prosperity gospel in verse 35:
35But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.
If Jesus was really advocating for quid pro quo, why would he then say that the ungrateful and wicked are blessed? And command that we expect nothing in return?
AUGGGHHHH… It just keeps getting more muddled up!!
So… WHAT IF these words are not a replacement version of the commandments?
WHAT IF the point is not that Jesus is giving a new set of instructions on how to behave?
WHAT IF something else is going on here?
If we look beyond the specific instructions, we see that everything Jesus mentions is something that can – no, that MUST – happen face to face, live in person, between actual people.
Even the bits about turning the other cheek and giving up your shirt are about using nonviolent resistance to confound the rules of culture – to keep the interactions on a personal level instead of allowing them to be controlled by external rules and norms that come not from human interaction, not directly from God. Jesus knew that human beings cannot help but make rules that are most likely to directly benefit the very people making the rules, in ways that are both subtle and obvious.
So while human cultural rules would say “do as they HAVE DONE to you”, Jesus is saying “do as you WOULD HAVE DONE to you.” Behave as you would like to be treated, not as you actually are treated. Behave as you have learned to behave from Jesus, not as you have learned from other human beings.
Be like Jesus.
The Jesus who is the One THROUGH WHOM ALL CREATION WAS MADE, the one who came to live on earth to demonstrate how it should be done. Because if we all managed to live the kind of life Jesus lived, it would be a perfect world. Just like in the beginning, when the world was being created through the Son… through Jesus.
Jesus is saying that people are meant to live in community.
We have a very hard time living in community these days. Our worlds are dominated by systems or rules, by corporations, by organizational principles. We say things like “We are firing you, but it’s not you, it’s just business” as if somehow the organization’s business purpose is more important than the devastation of a lost job.
Or we say “well, they broke the law” without questioning whether the law might be dehumanizing or unjust.
Or companies encourage meditation, offer comfy rooms, and generally try to increase the amount of time that people work as they encourage pseudo-communities that in the end benefit the company far more than the people who are missing out on time to relax, spend time with family, and live in the messy real communities that are based on people living in equitable circumstances, not guided by an organizational structure that dominates every interaction and that does not even pretend to offer equality to people in the company’s employ.
In real communities, people laugh together, and cry, and argue, and experience awe. But how does an organization laugh or cry or experience awe? How does an organization argue, other than go to court and show their own rules as evidence of their rightness? Real communities may develop among people working for the same organization, but the organization itself cannot be a part of that community because it is not a person (regardless of what the Supreme Court may say on that matter.)
Human beings were created by God, through the Son who came to earth as Jesus. Organizations were not. People can and do love. Organizations do not.
So what is Jesus saying to us as he stands on this level place and talks to the crowd of his followers gathered round?
Jesus is
Calling us to love people.
To love person to person.
To behave AS IF we were all actually in community.
Which might mean resisting all the ways that laws and organizations and culture try to keep us from being fully human as we were created to be.
Joseph demonstrated this countercultural humanity when he reacted to his brothers, to treat them as human beings, rather than using the power at his fingertips to punish them for the ways they trafficked his young body so many years before. Instead, he loved them, even when they were embarrassed and expecting vengeance.
Joseph gave his brothers – and all the people around him – a glimpse of how being human is more important than even-ing the score, and that the very existence of their family depended on that humanity.
Joseph showed his brothers – and us – that living humanly, humanely living like Jesus, paying attention to each other and responding out of love and compassion, will lead to more good things than following human rules and prioritizing organizations.
Jesus is telling us that being humane with each other, resisting the urge to put a single human perspective before God’s call to love as Jesus loved, doing what it takes to be who we were created to be, is the most important thing of all.
Paul tells the Corinthians that Adam was the first person and Jesus is the One who came to set right all that Adam had broken in the Fall.
Jesus showed us how to do that
Spoke clearly (especially in passages like today’s!)
Died a horrible, undeserved death,
And was Resurrected!
In that Resurrection we are freed from the power and control that we have come to expect of each other as we compete to control the largest number of people with our human organizations.
We are freed from wanting to know – and control – how things are NOW… to have everything wrapped up in a neat and tidy package (something that organizations do well – and communities do not.)
We are freed from checklists.
We are freed to love each other and honor humanity in others as we, live and work in community, carry one another’s burdens, respond to individual needs, and realize that IN OUR HUMANITY we will be showing that we are children of the Most High…. Knowing that, in God’s love,
WE ARE FREE to
* Love our enemies
* do good to those who hate us,
* bless those who curse us,
* pray for those who abuse us.
* offer the other cheek when struck;
* give our shirts when our jackets are taken;
* Give to everyone who begs from us;
* and if anyone takes away our goods, do not ask for them again.
We are freed to
* NOT judge
* NOT condemn
* Forgive
* Give
We are freed to live in community, to be able trust that we will recognize the humanity in one another and that in the end, God will offer us grace and mercy and love and peace and all good things… packed down, filling all of our containers, and overflowing the top.
We are free indeed.
Amen.
Hi Sharon. Good to find you here. I'll look forward to reading your thoughts about things!
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