Epiphany 6 Year A February 12, 2017

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Marcus Anthony
5 years ago
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1 During the last years of my corporate career I facilitated workshops to help people improve their work processes. These workshops brought together teams of people whose work was interrelated and addressed almost every process that you could associate with a financial services company. We used an adaptation of the Japanese technique called kaizen which means continuous improvement. Toyota owes its success to rigorous implementation of kaizen of every level of its production process. One of the theories behind kaizen is the pursuit of one piece flow, meaning that a piece of work in progress should never stop. This is in complete contrast to the American system of production which at one time was full of batch and queue processing, an approach that involves producing a big batch of something before moving it to the next step which leads to large inventories and delays. The mathematical principle behind kaizen is very simple and easily provable. Although almost no process ever achieves complete continuous flow many steps will and any step that is not is subject to repeated attempts to make it so. The standard is high and creates a perpetual continuous improvement loop. This analogy helps me to understand what Jesus is getting at as we hear the next part of his Sermon on the Mount. You may remember that our gospel lesson last week left off with these ominous words from Jesus...unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. This week we begin to find out what he means, I say begin because Jesus will continue to speak about the Law and its application for another 90 verses, so there is lots to listen for and much to learn. We hear expositions on three of the commandments: Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, and Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. His basic approach is to take what the Law says and extend and expand its application and meaning well beyond the letter of the Law. Elisabeth Tunney 1

2 Now why might he do this? Probably because the practice of defining the requirements for living as God had commanded had resulted in the 613 laws in Torah. And we all know that a law set down in black and white has its limits and as human beings we are very good at testing those limits. I myself admit that prevarication and keeping to the letter rather than the spirit of the Law come very easily when I find myself in uncomfortable situations. I certainly prefer to avoid lying outright but there are ways of dancing around truth that come mighty close. I think the example of former president Bill Clinton giving his testimony to a grand jury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky comes to mind. This quotation is from a footnote in the Starr report. the statement that there was "no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton," was an utterly false statement. Is that correct? "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if he--if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement...now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true." Clinton s response was a masterpiece of grammatical precision that ended up obscuring the intent of what the prosecutor was trying to ask. Truthful? To the letter of the law, yes, to its spirit? No! We all know that there was more to the story. I admit that there is one question to which it is never possible to tell the truth regardless of whether you are a friend, a lover or a spouse and that is the question Does this make me look fat? Right, there is no way to answer that question. Nevertheless I suspect that most of us could think of our own examples or prevarication that would further illustrate the point. Furthermore, once we become adept at dancing Elisabeth Tunney 2

3 around the letter of the Law it is a slippery slope that leads to downright disobedience. In effect Jesus is teaching us not that the Law is impossible to follow but that we have to use our heads and our hearts, the brains and the spirit with which God gifted us in creation in order to follow it. No human made law could ever be comprehensive enough to cover all circumstances and come out with a just and reasonable directive. Jesus is asking us to use our imaginations, our empathy in order to fully experience the life that God intends for us in the kingdom of heaven. When he speaks about the Law against murder he tells us to put ourselves in the shoes of someone else whether it is our brother or a business adversary. Our responsibility to God and to each other is always in the direction of reconciliation. Indulging misplaced anger can lead to hate, hate to demonization, and from demonization, as our history of lynching shows only too well, to murder, a far cry from love God and your neighbor as yourself. In addressing adultery Jesus affirms the bond we all hope to establish in marriage and seeks to proscribe the emotional conveniences with which we seek to wriggle out of our commitments. It may be shocking to hear divorce equated with adultery but some commentators suspect that one part of Jesus focus was the practice of divorcing a woman without providing for her well-being. Unless she had male relatives to look out for her she would be forced to remarry in order to survive, in which case the man who divorces his wife is shirking his responsibility. The scars of divorce, even when it is the best solution, run deep, and most who have been divorced would rather have had what they hoped for marriage become a reality than go through the pain of a divorce. And to dig a little deeper, while we all may enjoy a little lusting from time to time, former president Jimmy Carter knew what he was about when he confessed it as a sin. Obsessive lusting objectifies the other and as such it is dehumanizing who would have Elisabeth Tunney 3

4 ever imagined that there is such a widespread problem with becoming addicted to cyber-porn? Respecting the boundaries of our sexual relationships keeps society stable and when as a society we don t support these bonds we end up with 12-Step groups for Sex Addicts Anonymous. And yes, one night a week we have such a group meeting in our facility; the group is neither small nor made up of furtive little men in dirty trench coats. Slippery slopes are everywhere. When it comes to taking the Lord s name in vain Jesus reminds us that we are not to presume that God is on our side whether we are swearing to a truth or in these days to an alternative truth. To do so is to trivialize the God who is. The God who is beyond our comprehension and above our efforts to presume that we can coopt his powers in our affairs whether they are sports events, you Patriots fans notwithstanding, armies going to war, or nations. The Jews didn t tend to actually swear by God but by virtually everything else associated with God as Jesus makes clear which was how they got around the commandment against swearing. And as for the consequences of misusing the name of the Lord, who can forget the closing scene of part 1 of the movie Gone with the Wind when a bedraggled Scarlett O Hara, having returned to the ruins of Tara, kneels in the dirt and raises her fist to the sky saying With God as my witness, I ll never be hungry again! Scarlett swore an oath and in pursuit of her vow she lied, she cheated, she led men to their deaths, she rode roughshod over anyone who got in the way. Don t be like Scarlett. So yes, Jesus expanded commandments can be daunting. But think of our approach to fulfilling them as a spiral drawing us closer and closer to the heart and mind of God. Generosity increases our awareness of God s abundance. Forgiveness deepens our understanding of love. Faith gives us the courage to endure. Trust drives out fear and engenders hope. Happy are they who walk in the way of the Lord. Elisabeth Tunney 4

5 As God says to the Israelites in our reading form Deuteronomy if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live choose life Choose life indeed. Amen. Elisabeth Tunney 5

But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.

LET YOUR COMMUNICATION BE Text: Matthew 5:37 YEA OR NAY MATTHEW 5:33-37 Matthew 5:37 37 But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. Introduction: