Adultery of the Heart: Sexual Ethics in the Now but Not-Yet Matthew 5: Watch Honest Preacher video

Transcription

1 1 Adultery of the Heart: Sexual Ethics in the Now but Not-Yet Matthew 5:27-32 Watch Honest Preacher video If you arrived at church this morning knowing the assigned topic is lust, adultery, divorce, this is the sermon you might have expected to hear. Oh look it s Jesus and he says: Stop it! It is easy to hear these words of Jesus and to feel condemnation. To realize how short each of us have fallen. And then to stay there in shame and self-loathing. Equally easy to listen to the extreme, hyperbolic language Jesus uses and to assume these words don t apply for now they point to some idealized state in the future. Or maybe you hear these words and it reinforces for you the notion that Christians are moralistic, sexually uptight people. The words Jesus speaks are a diagnosis, not condemnation. They offer us a way to live in God s kingdom now, even as the Kingdom is not fully here yet. And Jesus understands the human condition and our sexuality--these words actually speak in open ways about some aspects of our sexuality that help us to live well. This is our 4 th message in our series on the four chapters in Matthew s gospel also known was the SOM, Way of the Kingdom: Passion for Christ, Compassion for Neighbour. We want to follow Jesus with passion and to embrace our neighbour with compassion, we could think of no better place to begin than with the transformational teaching of Jesus in Matt 5-7. And hopefully you know by now that if we want to understand Jesus words as He intended, we don t start with what we are supposed to do, or not do. We understand these chapters as describing first of all who God is and what God s kingdom is like. As important as our actions are, they must be a response to a loving, gracious God and to the nearness of God s kingdom. Beginning with Rod s message last week, we realize that living in God s kingdom is not just this nice idea that we can ascribe to on Sundays. It turns out Jesus wants us bring God s kingdom into every aspect of our lives last week we learned about what it looks like to reflect God s kingdom in our unreconciled relationships; in a few weeks time we will learn about bringing the kingdom into our finances, into our places of anxiety. This week: our sexuality. Before we jump into what these verses mean for us today, we have to understand the original context of these verses. First to reiterate the relationship between Jesus and the Law.

2 2 Our passage today begins the same way last week s passage began. You have heard it said but I say is the pattern. Remind you what Rod said last week. You have heard it said --Jesus is referring to the scribal oral tradition which developed in the 400 years between the end of the OT and beginning of the NT. In response to God s Law the 10 commandments as well as the first five books of the Bible religious leaders developed complex sub-rules and exceptions which, increasingly elevated the rules of God over relationship with God. As Rod told us last week, the problem with the Pharisees and their interpretation was that they thought following rules makes you righteous before God. They forgot that righteousness is more about who God is and what God does than what we do. They forgot that what we do flows out of a relationship with God. They forgot the heart of the law which was always meant to point us towards loving God and loving others. Here is an example of this movement from the heart of the law to creating rules and sub-rules. Relevant today because it is the law about divorce from Deuteronomy :1 If a man marries a woman and she does not please him because he has found something offensive in her, then he may draw up a divorce document, give it to her, and evict her from his house. 2 When she has left him she may go and become someone else s wife. 3 If the second husband rejects her and then divorces her, gives her the papers, and evicts her from his house, or if the second husband who married her dies, 4 her first husband who divorced her is not permitted to remarry her after she has become ritually impure, for that is offensive to the Lord. There is a lot to say about this, and we will come back to some of this next week. For now, I want to say this: women were incredibly vulnerable in this patriarchal society. They had no rights, could not own property, and did not themselves have the right to divorce their husbands. The original intention of this law was to offer a small measure of protection to women. Men couldn t just get rid of their wives on a whim, they had to have a valid reason, and to write up a certificate of divorce. Theoretically this would allow the woman to remarry although as damaged goods, that was unlikely to happen. A divorce could be a death sentence for a woman in this patriarchal society. The heart of this law was to protect the vulnerable a reflection of God s heart. Instead, in the hundreds of years after this law was given, the scribes (male, incidentally) spent considerable thought and energy defining all the conditions under which it would be acceptable to divorce your wife seeking to define the terms she does not please him, and something offensive in her. By the time of Jesus, some religious leaders considered that burning dinner was acceptable grounds for divorce, or simply if husbands no longer found their wives attractive.

3 3 This is an illustration of the way in which a law whose original intention was to reflect a loving God s care for the vulnerable-- became a bunch of rules that served to reinforce the privilege of those in power. I will say a bit more about divorce next week. But for now I will point out that whether we think these sayings of Jesus on divorce apply directly to us in the same way today, a modern-day divorce bears little resemblance to those in the ancient near east when it comes to the rights and safety of women. You have heard it said But I say In the face of all these rules that have become disconnected from a relationship with God, Jesus sets himself up as a new authority. And in doing so, he is not abolishing the law, he is fulfilling it. Jesus words here seek to reveal the original intent of the law the heart of the law. It s not a new rule, it s the heart of the already existing one summed up simply as loving God, loving neighbour. OK. Having set the foundation for understanding what Jesus is trying to do as He reinterprets the Law, let s look at the specific passage for today. You have heard it said, do not commit adultery. Jesus reaffirms the biblical command against having sex with someone who is not your husband or wife, the 7 th commandment. And then Jesus goes on to point out the path the human heart often takes on its way to violating that command. But I say to you anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. What we find here is what Glen Stassen says is the most damagingly misunderstood sentence in the entire scriptural record. It`s the understanding of the word lustfully. The word itself is a verb that means to desire intensely and can be used in Scripture in both positive and negative ways. It s the preposition that comes before it in the original passage pros that signals intent. The sentence literally translated means: to look for the purpose of desiring intensely ie lusting. It s not an appreciation for a good looking man or woman. Not the first spark of attraction that s the look. It s what happens after the initial glance, the initial involuntary response. The intent after that. Do you linger there? The sinful pattern of sexual sin, particularly adultery begins with our decision to not redirect that attraction. Glen Stassen. But let s be honest most of us are much farther along the road than simply seeing someone across a room and engaging in sexual fantasy with them in our minds. In our day, with the ready access to the internet we have in our pockets, with the availability of pornographic images at the click of a key, with snapchats and sexting, we have the ability to look with lustful intent anywhere, anytime. And if the statistics released by a survey conducted by the Barna Group in the U.S. in 2014 are an accurate reflection of the people in this room, a majority of the men here look at pornography at least once a month. And a third of the women here do as well. Surveys that have been done seem to find little difference between those who are

4 4 Christian, those who are not. The availability of pornography, the ease with which sexual images can be transmitted between people is a problem of epidemic proportions in our world that will only increase in the generations that follow mine. It`s not just religious people who are sounding the alarm increasingly, scientists, psychiatrists, addiction counsellors are all pointing out the devastating physiological, emotional, relational effects of pornography. These are not just statistics, not just something describing people out there --I have been with many of you, listened to you, cried with you, prayed with you, shared my own story with you. This is a live issue for us; this is real and we live with the consequences of this sin in our community. If I make this sermon solely about porn, then I misrepresent the intent of the passage. But this is part of what Jesus is speaking to. Jesus says looking at another person with lustful intent is the same as having sex with them. Quite aside from the spiritual truth of this, current research also sees a link between lust and having sex: porn use increases the likelihood of marital infidelity by 300%. Long before the days of pornography and sexting, the God who made us and who gave us the good gift of sex understood that sexual sin is not just something that takes place with our bodies. It takes place in our minds and hearts. I arrived at my favourite fruit stand Wednesday morning and got to chatting with the young man as he packed up my fruit. Him: What are you doing with the rest of your day? Me: Going home to work. Him: Oh yeah? What do you do? Me: I`m A pastor. Him: Really? So what are you working on today? Me: Going home to write a sermon. Him: What s your sermon on? Me (reluctantly): Uh. Lust, adultery and divorce. I ll be talking about porn. Him: Really? Whose idea was that?! Me: Mine. Him: Huh. You should tell them about Terry Crews. An American actor and former NFL. He says his porn addiction nearly ruined his life. Kind of like with anything else you know? Too much of anything is a bad thing. No one is going to stop looking at porn, but maybe they should look at it less. This interaction made me realize how counter-cultural Jesus words are. He doesn t say anything about how much looking with lustful intent we can do without having it affect us and the people around us. He says every time you do it, you are committing adultery. Now, to echo Rod s words to us last week if we stop reading here, we have two options: To see this standard Jesus sets as being completely unattainable in this life, an ideal that we can never live up to. So we congratulate ourselves that at least we haven t committed adultery and leave it at that. Or the other option is to be consumed with guilt, paralyzed by shame and to stay there. Like that video, we hear the words of Jesus simply to Stop it! and we feel powerless to do that. So we feel despair and selfloathing and feel sure God feels the same way about us. So we keep it secret.

5 5 What is the alternative to these two options? What do the Beatitudes say? Blessed are the people who have their lives together, who have fully conquered their addictions, who are fully healed, who no longer sin, who don t look at porn, who have never committed adultery, who have never been divorced. No. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn (ie grief and repentance) for they will be comforted. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Hunger and thirst for righteousness for God s righteousness and God s justice for they will be filled. This is the posture we are meant to take in response to our gracious compassionate God in the face of our own sin and that of our sinful world. The kingdom has people in it who are not yet perfect, who sin, who struggle. The kingdom has people in it who are grieved by their sin, and who are hungering and thirsting for God s righteousness. The kingdom is breaking in it s already here but not yet fully here. Instead of seeing these as difficult sayings and hearing Jesus simply saying: Stop It!, we would be better off imagining ourselves being looked on with love by Jesus, and as we experience him gazing upon us in the totality of who we are (including our sin) to hear him say: I know. I see all of you. I love you. And once we remember that we are held in the loving gaze of Jesus despite our sin, that we live in the now but not yet reality of the kingdom in this time, we ask ourselves the question how can we live as participants of God s kingdom in this area of our lives? Last week, the way to participate in God s kingdom is to go and be reconciled with our Christian brother or sister, to settle quickly with someone to whom we have a debt. This week, it s to cut off a hand or gouge out an eye?! There are people in history who have taken Jesus words literally and cut off a hand. Is this what Jesus wants us to do? Will cutting off a hand prevent us from sinning if the lustful intent is the sin? Will gouging out an eye? As in the previous passage, Jesus actually offers us tremendously practical advice. Notice the body parts that Jesus mentions here. Eyes--although sin begins in the heart, our hearts are affected by what our eyes see. So we take steps to cut off the visual cues that take us in the wrong direction. Hands--sexual self-touching is not inherently wrong but consider its role in your sexual fantasy life and what it may lead to. I might re-write the passage this way: does your Netflix account cause you to sin? Gouge it out, stop your subscription. Does your laptop or smartphone cause you to sin? Cast it away or get good filtering software like Covenant Eyes. For some of us, the speaker included, it might more painful for us to let go of our netflix accounts and phones than to cut off our hands. But Jesus ensures we know the stakes are high. Better for you to throw off these things than to go into hell. Literal hell perhaps but before that, a hell on earth death in all its forms.

6 6 We find in James 1:14-15 same word for lust, and that when we allow this to take root, it conceives and eventually leads to death. each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. 15 Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is fullgrown, gives birth to death. We have misunderstood and disregarded these words of Jesus to our detriment, and to the detriment of our relationships, and our families and our own well-being. To seek to live this way is not legalism, it s not uptight Christians being moralistic or pretending to be perfect this is a concrete way to participate in the abundant life in God s kingdom, to reflect the character of our good and holy God who knows us and loves us and forgives us when we fall short. There are so many things we didn t talk about that need to be said in this area the unique struggle for single people who seek to live in obedience to these words of Jesus. What it s like for someone who is addicted to pornography to take steps to wholeness. What happens when we fail to live up to what Jesus requires. We have opened up a big can of worms here. Please come and speak with me afterwards, or me this week to talk more about any of these things. As we prepare now to come to the communion table, I will end with this: What pleases God? Perfect rule keeping? Twice in the book of Matthew (9:13, 12:7) Jesus declares: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. May our community be defined by mercy God s mercy, first of all, and also mercy towards one another in the area of our sexuality. We need to combat the shame and isolation that comes with sexual sin with abundant compassion and mercy for one another. Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy. May our community be defined by hungering and thirsting after righteousness together seeking God s righteousness and God s justice, not our own. So come to this table, friends. The Jesus whose call to holy living we have just heard is the very one who died on the cross for our sins. This is the body of Christ, broken for you, for me. The blood of Christ, shed for you, for me. This is the table of God s mercy. This is the table of God s righteousness. Come aware of your need for God s mercy. Come hungering and thirsting for God s righteousness.