Scripture Readings. Matthew 5:

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Rev. Chandler Stokes Matthew 5:43-48 & Luke 10:25-37 The Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time October 16, 2016 Scripture Introduction Today we begin a three-week series on Stewardship.

Remember that these chapters, Matthew 5 7, are demanding.

1 Rev. Chandler Stokes Matthew 5:43-48 & Luke 10:25-37 The Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time October 16, 2016 Scripture Introduction Today we begin a three-week series on Stewardship. The essential question is how do we steward God s greatest gift to us God s love? The series is called LEARNING LOVE. Our first reading will be from the Sermon on the Mount found in Matthew s Gospel. Remember that these chapters, Matthew 5 7, are demanding. In them Jesus tells us that our righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, that even if we are angry with a sister or brother, we are liable to judgment, that even to look at a woman with lust is to commit adultery, that if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; if anyone wants your coat, give your cloak as well; if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second. And that s just the warm up to today s passage. I once heard a preacher read the entire Sermon on the Mount and then say simply, Oh, thank God for grace. This is a text that humbles us. The second reading, from Luke 10, echoes these demands of the Sermon on the Mount. Scripture Readings Matthew 5: You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Luke 10: Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. Teacher, he said, what must I do to inherit eternal life? 26 He said to him, What is written in the law? What do you read there? 27 He answered, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself. 28 And he said to him, You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live. 29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, And who is my neighbor? 30 Jesus replied, A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34 He went to him and bandaged his Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.

2 wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend. 36 Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers? 37 He said, The one who showed him mercy. Jesus said to him, Go and do likewise. * * * I remember Prof. Chinnichi telling us about his Franciscan order. He was introducing himself to his students, who were from a variety of religious traditions, throughout the Graduate Theological Union. Tongue firmly in cheek, he said, When it comes to the Catholic orders, it s important to know that the Jesuits have made a great virtue of scholarship and study, that the Dominicans have made a fine virtue of service among them, but, when it comes to humility, we Franciscans have them all beat! Whenever we speak of humility, it s important to recognize that humility is not something that can be directly pursued; humility is a by-product of other virtues. We don t seek it directly; it s a collateral blessing. It is a major theme of Matthew s Gospel, and yet both texts today will eventually lead us to humility today. And we are going to approach it step-wise, the way Micah 6 moves step-wise and ends with humility. Micah says, What does the Lord require but to do justly, and to love kindly, and (consequently, as it were) to walk humbly with your God? 1 These two New Testament passages are really about the same thing and lead us to the same place. Let me show you how close they are, because it might not be obvious. The key is in that last difficult line of the text from Matthew: Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. This has always been a difficult text, and you may have heard a variety of takes on it. This is what I have come to understand about it and this was right in the heart of my graduate studies; I am quite convinced of this. The word translated perfect is what makes the text obtuse. The better translation would be consistent. Let me explain. Hebrew has a couple of words that mean consistent. One of them is tamim. And it means your words and your actions are the same. You say what you do, and you do what you say. In that sense it means having integrity : your words and actions are lined up. Now, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, called the Septuagint, was more commonly read among Jews in the first century than was the Hebrew. And in that important translation, everywhere that the word tamim was used in Hebrew, one word was used for it in Greek teleios. That is the word used right here, translated perfect. But in this context, it means consistent. 1 The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Micah 6:8. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 2 of 6 October 16, 2016

3 Be consistent as God is consistent. God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. God doesn t discriminate but is consistent, teleios. The musical Hamilton is full of sermons one makes this point I m making here: Love doesn t discriminate between the sinners and the saints. God is consistent; God doesn t discriminate. So, says the text, have integrity as God has integrity. That s what that last line means. Line up your actions with your words. If you love those who love you, what s that? You shall love your friends, your neighbors, and your enemies. Be consistent, have integrity, as God does. Love ought not discriminate. Can you see how the Parable of the Good Samaritan echoes this? Hear it again. The lawyer asks, What must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus asks, What s the law say? Love God and neighbor. Right! You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live. Then, the lawyer asks, Who is my neighbor? Jesus tells the parable and asks, Which one proved to be neighbor? The one showing compassion. Right! Go and do likewise. Line up your actions with your words. Have integrity. Both passages are about integrity. Integrity is important. It s Scripture. Without it, we are hypocrites, saying one thing and doing another. Hypocrite is a word that Matthew uses thirteen of the twenty-one times it appears in the New Testament. That s why he s so insistent on integrity. Matthew knows from hypocrisy. So does The Secret Life of Bees. That s the novel about a fourteen-year-old white girl, Lily, who finds a home with four wise and gracious older black women. Lily speaks in the first person here. She s addressing August, the matriarch. [Lily] I asked, How come, if your favorite color is blue, you painted your house so pink? August laughed. That was May s doing. She was with me the day I went to the paint store to pick out the color. I had a nice tan color in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. Said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish flamenco. I thought, Well, this is the tackiest color I ve ever seen, and we ll have half the town talking about us, but if it can lift May s heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it. All this time I just figured you liked pink, I said. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 3 of 6 October 16, 2016

4 She laughed again. You know, some things don t matter much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person s heart now, that matters. The whole problem with people is They don t know what matters and what doesn t, I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for doing so. I was gonna say, the problem is they know what matters, but they don t choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters. 2 Go and do this. It s called integrity. Closer to the bone is Wendell Berry s novel Jayber Crow. It s about a seminary dropout who becomes the town barber. During the early 1940s, Jayber is reflecting on World War II, and he says, I knew that this new war was not even new but was only the old one come again. And what caused it? It was caused, I thought, by people failing to love one another, failing to love their enemies. I was glad enough that I had not become a preacher, and so would not have to go through a war pretending that Jesus had not told us to love our enemies. 3 Go and do. It s called integrity, the opposite of hypocrisy. But there is a problem revealed here by Jayber: what if you just don t ascribe to the standard at all? My friend Michael Lindvall says that there are only three kinds of people who are not hypocrites: those who are perfect, those who have no moral standards at all, and those whose standards are low enough for them to always reach. Integrity is important, but it is not enough. A thief can have perfect integrity. I m going to steal from you. And then he steals you blind. Set the standards where we can reach them, and we ll have integrity every time. And we can feel very good about ourselves. We can, as the lawyer was attempting to do with Jesus, we can justify ourselves, by setting the standard where we can reach it. Who s my neighbor? he asks, hoping to set that bar where he can reach it. That s what makes the deterioration of public rhetoric so dangerous. If we don t even give lip service to love, kindness, compassion, or common decency, we might have integrity and never be hypocrites. But we also become inhuman. If integrity is our only goal, we are in trouble. Set our standards low enough, and we can do any cussed thing we want. Integrity is important, but it is not enough. The standard must be love: love of friends, love of neighbors, love of enemies. The only way to have integrity is to pretend Jesus didn t say it. 2 Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees (New York: Viking, 2002), Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, (Washington DC: Counterpoint, 2000), 142. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 4 of 6 October 16, 2016

5 We live as the recipients of God s amazing, unconditional, undiscriminating love, and that love sets the standard. And if that s the standard, thank God for grace! We are free to fail. We are not free to not try. G.K. Chesterton put a fine point on it, The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. 4 Integrity is not enough. The standard must be love. That s the other thing that binds these texts together: love. One calls us explicitly to love our enemies. The other calls us to love God and our neighbor, but it is also clear that the Samaritan going to extra mile to care for this wounded Jew is also loving his enemy. Go and do likewise. It is the only way to steward love: to try it and, as we can see, try it and fail plenty, and thanking God for grace. Love must be the goal of our failures at integrity. And so now the final step becomes clear. As I intimated at the start, one of Matthew s great themes is humility. If we accept God s standard for our lives: to love our enemies, we will be humbled. Along with Micah we say, Do justly, love kindly, and (by necessity) walk humbly with your God. If those first two are what we truly seek, the third will come. That s what it means to be stewards of love, stewards of the kind of unconditional love that God gives us, gives to the righteous and the unrighteous alike, to friend, neighbor, and enemy. Love doesn t discriminate between the sinners and the saints. To continue the Hamilton song: And we keep loving anyway. We laugh and we cry. And we break. And we make our mistakes. And we keep loving anyway. Jesus said, You got it: love God and neighbor. Right! You got it: the one who showed compassion for his enemy you got it. Right! Be consistent now. Go and do likewise. And Jesus knew full well that we would be humbled by that great work. That s why Paul taught us to have the mind that was in Christ Jesus, who humbled himself. It may be choosing the shocking pink house to help a sister dance. It may be reaching out in compassion to a sinner or a saint. It may be, it must be, in loving our enemies. We can t pretend he didn t say it. And by grace, whether we get it right or not, humility changes us as a by-product, a collateral blessing, of trying to love. None is perfect, and yet you ve seen it happen, how imperfect attempts at love both humble and change people. This last illustration is the finest story I know about such collateral blessing; it s called The Happy Hypocrite. There was an ugly, debauched man; he was wicked and corrupt a scoundrel. His personal corruption showed through his face. But he fell in love with a beautiful, saintly girl, who captivated him utterly. He was desperate to have her in his life, and so he found a witch who fashioned for him a mask that would hide his ugliness completely the mask bore the face of an angel. With this mask on, he courted the gracious, angelic girl. He put on a demeanor and attitude of caring and 4 G. K. Chesterton, What s Wrong with the World, (Pantianos Classics, 1910), 18. Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 5 of 6 October 16, 2016

6 love, successfully deceiving the girl with this mask until she agreed to marry him. But, of course, on the eve of their wedding, the corrupt, dishonest man was forced to reveal himself fully to the woman he loved. When, however, he removed the mask, underneath was the face of an angel. By wearing the mask in love, by giving himself to love, the scoundrel s face was transformed. 5 Maybe this is exactly how Westminster s face can be transformed, by our throwing ourselves at the high standard of love, by repeatedly seeking to love our friends, our neighbors and our enemies, failing along the way, but never failing to try. May God grant us the grace to try and collateral blessing of humbly walking with our gracious God. Let the people say, Amen. 5 This is the story as told by Max Beerbohm in Frederick Buechner s Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977). Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI Page 6 of 6 October 16, 2016

What is love? Randy Broberg, Maranatha Chapel, September 19, 2013

What is love? Randy Broberg, Maranatha Chapel, September 19, 2013 Happy Valentine s Day Darling! Is it an expression of love if you are doing it only because you have to? Love must be voluntary, Love Begins